The Fight and Flight of Reinaldo Arenas
… One “social misfit” group expelled from their country were gays and lesbians. Among them was the renowned novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright Reinaldo Arenas (1943- 1990). …
MoreBrowsing: March-April 2008
March-April 2008
Blog Posts
Finding Whitman: ‘Not What You Supposed’
I was fifteen or sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and a full-flowered cretin in every subject but art and English, so it must have been my English teacher who had mentioned Leaves of Grass in passing.
MoreDesire Is Back in China
… Rofel sees China moving toward a cosmopolitan consumer culture that mixes various cultural elements both East and West. But along with the desire for goods, other desires begin to find expression in public spaces, including sexual ones. Thus there has been a general loosening of attitudes on sexual activity in general and homosexuality in particular. …
MoreThe World: Courtesy of Hanns Ebensten
FROM his first trip down the Nile at age six, when he sat on the knee of the famous Aga Khan, Hanns Ebensten was captured by a wanderlust that carried him through his long life. His love of adventure and intrepid spirit led him to remote islands, desert oases, mountaintop villages, and faraway lands that most people could barely imagine.
MoreSpain’s Prolonged Road to Freedom
… Strict followers of the tenets of Michel Foucault-if fewer and less adamant of late-argue that prior to the articulation of modern notions of homosexuality (one which used contemporary terms such as “the homosexual,” for instance), neither “homosexuality” nor “the [male] homosexual” can be said to have existed. …
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How Pulp Fiction Fueled Gay Rights
… what caught my attention was the cover illustration of a handsome young man, lean, muscular, arms akimbo, staring boldly at the viewer, and not just shirtless but naked, his golden torso daringly visible from his crotch upward. This cover is included in Ian Young’s wonderfully informative Out in Paperback: A Visual History of Gay Pulps. …
MoreThe Puzzling Return of a Vitriolic Rant
Since Lawrence R. Schehr, the author and editor of this first English translation of The Third Sex, a book published under that penname in 1927, assures us that “one is safe to assume that Willy did not write the book,” …
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