May-June 2008
IN 1929 Egyptian journalist Karim Thabet toured Berlin’s decadent nightlife. He sent back a report to a magazine in Cairo about the famous Eldorado nightclub with its nightly performances that we might today describe as drag. Thabet found the performers, in their high heels and low-cut dresses, strange but impressive; he even republished the souvenir photo he had taken home from the club of a dancer sitting with a small black dog.
MoreTHIS NEW BOOK of readings assembles eight autobiographical narratives written by late 19th- and early 20th-century Frenchmen (and one Italian) who were attracted to men, providing readable translations and just enough footnotes to answer obvious questions without slowing down the reading.
MoreTOBY JOHNSON is co-author, with Walter L. Williams, of Two Spirits: A Story of Life with the Navajo (2005), a historical novel that creatively recounts the brutal history of how Union soldiers mistreated the Navajo people in New Mexico just after the Civil War. It turns into a tender love story between the two-spirit “berdache” shaman of the tribe and the protagonist, a young government Indian agent with a conscience.
MoreON THE AFTERNOON of January 22, 2008, actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his Manhattan apartment, having taken, it was later learned, an overdose of prescription medications. …
MoreJonathan Williams, who died on March 16 at age 79, was known for many things, but dullness was never one of them. Photographer, poet, essayist, folk art aficionado, and founder of the Jargon Society-an enterprise devoted to publishing “maverick poets, stray photographers, oligarchs, and characters,” and …
More… While there were noticeably fewer GLBT films at this year’s Sundance than in recent years, the festival never fails to recognize filmmakers whose work projects the lives of gay people into the cultural landscape. …
More“MORE AND MORE I dread futility,” confesses one of Adrienne Rich’s speakers in Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. “Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon,” Rich muses in another poem, as if her message might be better understood by future generations.
More… The action of Sundowner Ubuntu, the fifth in the Russell Quant series, is set in motion when Russell is hired by a middle-aged woman named Clara Ridge to locate her, son whose juvenile delinquency caused her husband to disown the boy when he was only sixteen. The recent death of her flint-hearted husband has freed her to search for Matthew, whom she hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years. Russell’s search eventually takes him to a slum in South Africa and a game preserve in Botswana, where …
More… In The Humble Little Condom, author Aine Collier writes about the history of something that millions of people use but don’t discuss in polite company. …
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RICHARD BRUCE NUGENT, one of the youngest members of the Harlem Renaissance, and the only openly gay one, seems poised for his own literary renaissance. More than twenty years after his death, Gentleman Jigger, which Nugent wrote in the waning days of the Roaring Twenties and the early years of the Great Depression, has finally been published …
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