Browsing: September-October 2006

September-October 2006

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THE UNNAMED NARRATOR of this remarkable novel arrives in Washington, D.C., on Martin Luther King Day to try to reboot his life after a long period of paralytic mourning for his mother, for friends lost to AIDS, and for his own lost youth, as well. He is somewhere in his fifties and single. His mother has been dead for more than five years, his father far longer than that. If he has had any history of romantic fulfillment, he does not cherish it. This man feels terribly alone.

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Before Night Falls, the memoir by Reinaldo Arenas, gay Cuban novelist and poet, political dissident and prisoner, foe of Castro’s repressive regime, was published posthumously in 1993 to immediate acclaim. … Several of my gay friends were reading the book and enthusiastically recommended it to me. One of them finally put a copy in my hands and I read it; instantly drawn in, I too fell in love with Arenas and his story, so engagingly told, so full of adventure, vivid personalities, sex, escapes, suicides, betrayals. I was gushing about it to a friend who said, “Why don’t you turn it into an opera?” Reflexively, I said that was impossible: far too episodic, with way too many characters. How could Before Night Falls possibly be staged?

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ANDREW JACKSON captured the White House in 1828 by turning himself into a symbol of American manhood, a tough backwoodsman who dressed, spoke, and acted the part. David Greven believes that Jackson’s construction of manhood-white male power rejecting any hint of weakness and willing to use violence-has prevailed in American culture to this day.

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Max, the first-person narrator, is a likable character. Readers might find themselves comparing him to the “stone butch” character they met thirteen years ago in Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. But Drag King Dreams is not a sequel-not exactly.

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… Rogers’ new book is much more than a rehash of old arguments that have come down to us from John Boswell and the more popular Daniel Helminiak, author of What the Bible Really Teaches About Homosexuality.

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Behind the Mask of the Mattachine makes the case for linking Hal Call’s political and erotic activism. This is no typical biography, but a “chronicle,” marked by extensive quotations from oral history interviews conducted before Call’s death in 2000 …

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SAN FRANCISCO brings to mind many images, such as cable cars, steep hills, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Castro Theater. Add one more image to the mix: the rainbow flag, the symbol of gay pride. Gilbert Baker, a self-described “drag queen from way back who knew how to sew very well,” created it there. Baker’s flag, and its impact on gay culture, is the subject of Rainbow Pride, an hour-long documentary, which was filmed for the most part in San Francisco rainbowand Key West, Florida …

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The rat story has been part of Proust’s legend for years, although—in the recent biography by Jean Yves Tadie, and here, in Proust in Love—there is no proof that it is true.

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There’s another argument to be made when we fight state and federal marriage amendments. It has the potential to take back the debate because it’s about the Constitution and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom.

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