Short Reviews
Short reviews of It’s Late, I Can’t Breathe, Drifting Toward Love, and The Boy with Black Eyes.
MoreBrowsing: Anniversaries
July – August, 2008
Blog Posts
Visits to Dens of Deceptive Iniquity
THIS SPRIGHTLY, informative book does a rare thing: it covers entirely new territory in gay literary studies. Queering the Underworld concentrates on the intersection of the fin de siècle phenomenon of “slumming”-that is, taking the bourgeois reader into the urban demimonde-and the emerging expression of gay and lesbian sexual identities.
MoreTennessee Williams’ Women in a Man’s World
THE MAJOR PLAYS of Tennessee Williams- who died just 25 years ago, in 1983-feature women at their core. But for all their centrality as the emotional focal point of these plays, paradoxically enough, these women are without power in the community they inhabit. It is the men who control events; the women are entirely dependent on the men and use them to achieve their goals.
MoreWhy Romney’s Candidacy Collapsed
Pandering to the religious Right has reached diminishing returns.
MoreManslaughter on the Oregon Express
IN AS MUCH AS the teenage boy at the heart of Gus Van Sant’s new film has nothing funny or articulate to say, Paranoid Park may become this year’s anti-Juno.
MoreComing Out Kinsey: Sexual Behavior at Sixty
WHEN ALFRED KINSEY’S Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published sixty years ago, in 1948, I was a very gay, extremely troubled, and nearly suicidal sixteen-year-old high school junior desperately seeking any available evidence that I was not the only queer in the visible universe. …
MoreThe Sex Diaries of John Maynard Keynes
This essay is adapted from a piece that first appeared in MoreIntelligentLife.com (Jan. 28, 2008), an on-line edition of The Economist. Published with permission.
MoreAre We Different Yet?
FOUR FROTHY VIGNETTES, perhaps more properly defined as character studies, are strung together in this new comedy by Paul Rudnick, which I saw in a preview performance in New York. While AIDS and 9/11 are sometimes hovering on the periphery, sometimes presented in startling parallels, the author of Jeffrey (1993) and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998) keeps the tone light and the jokes rapid-fire.
MoreBarcelona: A Magnet for Europe’s Gay Couples
[N]o place in Europe combines enlightened politics with a sunny Mediterranean climate the way Barcelona does, which is why Spain’s second city has become one of the top choices for GLBT people visiting or living in Europe.
MoreThe Briggs Initiative Goes National
NOVEMBER 1978 MARKS the thirtieth anniversary of the defeat of Proposition Six, the infamous Briggs Initiative, in California, which would have barred lesbians and gay men from teaching in state public schools. The victory for gay rights advocates came after a string of stunning defeats in referendum battles to repeal local gay rights laws that started in Miami in June 1977 and continued into the spring of 1978, reaching to St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon.
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