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
Opus Queen
Bennett’s omniscient narrator shows us the internal changes that give rise to the Queen’s newly broadened perspective. … And so we witness from an omniscient perspective the Queen’s transformation …
MoreHomosexual Revisited 35 Years Later
I WROTE Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation after six months of living in New York City over the winter of 1970-71, when I was lucky enough to become part of the emerging gay liberation movement, and to work for a time on the newspaper Come Out!
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The Remains of Al Capone
WHEN CHRIS KNIGHT was thirteen years old, his beloved father died. It appears there was no love lost between his parents: as soon as the funeral was safely over, his mother flew through the house, gathering all of her husband’s belongings. She put them in trash bags, hoping to wipe Bill Knight from her own memory and from that of her children.
More‘As a gay icon, Wilde is flawed’
MERLIN HOLLAND is Oscar Wilde’s only grandson and the executor of his literary estate, a position he has held since 1977. A journalist and lecturer, Holland started conducting research on Wilde in the mid-1980’s. His background in industry and commerce preceded a career in academic publishing. At age 63, he is an expert on the life and work of his grandfather. While Holland himself is heterosexual, he remains outspoken against homophobia.
MoreThe Family I Almost Had
“THERE IS no such thing,” Robert Leleux’s boisterous Texas mother, Jessica Wilson, once told him, “as a happy medium.” With a funny, hyper-campy yet rarely sentimental prose style, Leleux has written a tale about coming out in small-town America and his family’s made-for-TV foibles.
More“I’m Just Too Busy to Look Back.”
AMERICA’S leading playwright provocateur, now an octogenarian, Edward
Albee—whose plays include the scalding Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Woman, and the taboo-smashing The Goat,
or Who Is Sylvia?—is hardly resting on his accumulated laurels (three
Pulitzer prizes and three Tony awards). In fact, the playwright is now
directing new stagings of two of his one-acts, “The American Dream” and
“The Sandbox,” with the assistance of a hearing aid, and is proving as
durable as his work. …
MorePoet of the Cinéma
WHILE COCTEAU IS perhaps best known to Americans for two of the movies he wrote and directed- La belle et la bête (1946) and Orpheus (1949), which figure on most short lists of great French films-he started as a poet and always saw himself as such.
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Rambunctious Liaisons
A FROTHY COMEDY of parlor-room etiquette and sexual wish fulfillment, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander is the bizarro cousin of a Jane Austen novel, in which Regency manners and nuptial expectations are turned inside out. Ann Herendeen’s novel is a lively romp in which girl meets boy, boy meets boy, and everyone falls in love and lives happily ever after.
MoreThe Well at 80: Hasn’t Run Dry Yet
EIGHTY YEARS AGO, The Well of Loneliness was condemned by the English
courts as an obscene libel and “burned in the King’s furnace.” The book
was indicted and censored solely because of its lesbian theme, for its
prose has no spice or sleaze at all. Nothing very sexy goes on in it.
“She kissed her full on the lips” and “That night they were not
divided” are as hot as its descriptions of lesbian lovemaking get.
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