November-December 2007
WHEN BARRIE AND ROCKLIFF published Gerald Glaskin’s No End To The Way in 1965, it must have raised many eyebrows, not least in the British Home Office. This frank portrayal of a gay relationship between an Australian advertising executive (Ray) and a Dutch barman (Cor) was noteworthy for its absence of the “obligatory” tragic ending by death of the protagonist.
MoreTrevor Hailey, who created and led for sixteen years the internationally known “Cruisin’ the Castro” walking tours, died of a stroke on June 13, 2007, at age 66. A woman of tremendous warmth and enthusiasm, she presented the gay and lesbian history of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in a way that was accessible, informative, and exciting to everyone: …
More… At a very early age I became aware of what I then considered my “deviant” sexuality. In my mind, it made sense that since people of such conflicting and deep ideological difference could seamlessly consider one another as kin, then wider acculturation of difference in sexuality should certainly follow. …
MoreTHE OWNER of Lai Lai’s, Shanghai’s only dance venue for low-income gays, was screaming over the five-piece band. She accused our small contingent of safer sex outreach workers of attracting police scrutiny, telling us to get out of her dancehall and never come back. Dr. Tong Chengliang, sex education specialist and director of HomoHeart, the city’s first specifically gay hotline and outreach organization, told his volunteers to grab their bags of condoms and gay sex literature and leave. Even in relatively open Shanghai in the summer of 2005, police harassment in China was so commonplace that Tong just shrugged his shoulders and said, “We’ll try again next week.”
In December of that year, …
More“Among other common lies, we have the silent lie-the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all … There is no art to a silent lie. It is timid and shabby.” Mark Twain (1882)
MoreREVERED as one of the greatest actors of our times, Sir Ian Murray McKellen never felt he was doing his best work until he came out publicly at the age of 49. A private man who considered it nobody’s business what his sexual orientation was, McKellen kept mum about it until 1988 …
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IMAGINE WRITING a letter to your most brilliant teacher. Then imagine writing to your emperor, a man with the power of life and death over his subjects. These intimidating circumstances form the background for the correspondence between Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, … and Marcus Cornelius Fronto …
MoreTHERE IS a growing literature attesting to the terrors and gothic comedies of growing up gay in the American South. With his memoir Kevin Sessums has produced a masterpiece that outshines all other contributions to this genre since Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and it will surely endure as one of the pre-eminent accounts.
More… The editors of Queer Voices from Japan assembled the book to allow Japan’s sexual minorities past and present to speak for themselves. …
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