Desert Salon
… a fast-moving novel about the artists and writers who flocked to Luhan’s salon in New Mexico in the 1930’s. …
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2006
July-August 2006
Blog Posts
Still Coming of Age
THE CHALLENGE for any writer of a memoir is to make the story interesting to someone else who, unlike a psychotherapist, isn’t being paid to hear it. A writer’s fame can guarantee an audience, but those lacking fame often resort to hyperbole and sensational drama. This is not true of Wade Rouse in his coming-of-age memoir, America’s Boy. …
MorePoland: Gay Pride Parade Is Attacked in Kraków
ON APRIL 28, 2006, “March of Toleration,” a gay parade, was attacked in Kraków. Youth activists of the parliamentary party League of Polish Families threw stones, eggs, bottles, and slurs at peaceful GLBT marchers. …
MoreThe Art Was Young and Gay
GAVIN BUTT’S BACKSTAGE exposé of the New York art world of the 1950’s careens between artsy jargon and artsy gossip. He rather defensively lays out his thesis in a lengthy introduction peppered with breathless 55-word sentences stating his themes. Doubtless the author is on his guard because he incorporates hearsay, rumor, and urban legend into dissection of this pivotal post-World War II Manhattan subculture.
MoreWhat Ode to Billy Joe (the Movie) Disclosed in ’76
Can three decades have passed since I sat in a darkened Manhattan cinema transfixed by the cherubic-faced Robby Benson giving the performance of a lifetime as the innocent and emotionally troubled Billy Joe in the movie Ode to Billy Joe? Any gay person watching that landmark flick could immediately identify with the conflicted protagonist and both sympathize and empathize with his plight.
MoreCarbohydrate Loading
A “RICE QUEEN” is generally defined as a white man who’s attracted to Asian men, while a “potato queen” is an Asian man who’s attracted to white men. The terms are often used disparagingly, with rice queens seen as sexual imperialists and potato queens as self-hating race traitors. For this reason, it takes some nerve for an author to come out as either on the cover of a book. But the authors of the two books under review have done just that …
MoreSexual Ambiguity in the Life of Disraeli
WIDESPREAD INDIGNATION at the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln might have enjoyed sharing his bed with other men, that he delayed marriage to make it last as long as he could, and that he occasionally returned to the practice even in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away, suggests the fragility of tolerance for homosexuality.
MoreLoves Relived
A GATHERING OF ANGELS, by gay Texas poet Larry Dean Hamilton, relates a remarkable life story through a lyrical, sometimes dreamlike prose style. …
MoreReal Cowboys, Real Rodeos
THE POLITICAL DUST STORM kicked up by the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain, however predictable, found right-wingers railing that yet another symbol of American “family values,” the cowboy, was being desecrated. A typical Christian blogger screamed: “Now they’re out to destroy the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!”
MoreA Time for Speed
“YES, ABSOLUTELY, this was the greatest day of my life,” declares Trisha Driscoll, the fourteen-year-old outer suburbanite narrator of Michelle Tea’s latest whirlwind street-girl adventure, Rose of No Man’s Land. …
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