Short Reviews
Reviews of Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor, and America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life.
MoreBrowsing: July-August 2009
July-August 2009
Blog Posts
After Many a Season Dies the Oscar Wilde
THE OSCAR WILDE Memorial Bookshop, founded in the pre-Stonewall year of 1967 and a fixture in New York’s Greenwich Village for 42 years, closed its doors for good on March 29, 2009. It was by most accounts the first bookstore in the United States to carry serious (non-pornographic) gay literature. Having survived the Stonewall Riots and the disco era, the AIDS epidemic and the GLBT publishing boom, in recent years the store’s survival had been threatened a number of times.
MoreThe Times of Rob Epstein, Filmmaker
YOU MAY not know Rob Epstein by name but you certainly know his films. A pioneer in the world of GLBT filmmaking, Epstein has been acknowledging and addressing the lives of gay people in his films for the past three decades. In the late 1970’s Epstein’s work burst onto the scene with his groundbreaking documentary, Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, which delved into the lives of ordinary gay and lesbian Americans. Six years later, he conceived and directed the Peabody-Award-winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk (1984).
MoreLarry Mitchell, Novelist of the Dispossessed
NOW seventy years old, Larry Mitchell has invited me into the labyrinthine apartment he and his lover Richard have shared for 25 years in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the faded gold living room, we sit down to talk over tea and the sounds of the neighborhood streets. Mitchell is the author of four beloved novels of the gay underground, a collaborative book on queer communal living, and a radical manifesto titled The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.
MoreThe Making of George Segal’s Gay Liberation
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, on June 23, 1992, sculptor George Segal (1924-2000) witnessed the installation of his first outdoor public sculpture in Manhattan, the city center that had inspired much of his work and had made him internationally famous. Titled Gay Liberation, the piece had taken twelve years to find its intended home within the triangle of Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, just across Christopher Street from what had been the Stonewall Inn.
MoreWhy Stonewall Matters after Forty Years
The movement that followed Stonewall represented a sharp break with the past; the impact over time would transform the world in ways unimaginable to earlier activists. What’s more, scale of change over the ensuing forty years has been breathtaking. What, then, was so special about Stonewall?
MoreFive Years Later, Marriage Equality Has Settled In
… In the aftermath of an unexpected death, the surviving spouse faces a jumble of legal responsibilities, emotional reactions, and practical considerations. At 42, I never expected to find myself planning a memorial service for the 39-year-old love of my life. …
MoreUp the Down Rock Star
… Moz (as he’s known by his legion of queer-friendly fans) has found a reason to believe. And yet, in his newly released album, Years of Refusal, he sings that “only stone and steel accept my love.”
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The Critical Davis
IN LIGHT OF the myriad books about Bette Davis that are out there, one might question the need for another look at the grande dame of the big screen and her body of work. But author Peter McNally would rightly disagree, having written an exhaustive and even original book about the legendary actress’s most memorable turns.
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Jamaica Agonistes
PERFORMER AND AUTHOR Staceyann Chin made her debut two months early, as she explains in this new memoir. Her mother, Hazel, who claimed that she didn’t know she was with child, gave birth on the floor of their small, rented house in Lottery, Jamaica, in her seventh month of pregnancy.
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