July-August 2009
VANESSA & VIRGINIA is a short, imaginative novel of two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, better known as the artist Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf. Written from Vanessa’s perspective, it follows the two from childhood, depicting the tightly knit yet complex relationship between them through Virginia’s suicide in 1941 and into Vanessa’s old age.
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THE ACTRESSES Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis, comedian Gracie Allen, Julia Childs, Queen Elizabeth I, and even two fictional characters, Endora (Agnus Moorehead) of Bewitched and Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) are among the women who make it into My Diva, an anthology of short essays, each a few pages long, by writers and poets on the famous women who affected their lives.
MoreTHIS VOLUME is actually a compilation of two previously published collections of short stories and a set of new ones by Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff, who has taught at various universities in the United States. These stories occupy an impressive range of settings and genres, from contemporary realism to historical and fantasy fiction.
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SHE HATED the work of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and CarsonMcCullers (Clock Without Hands was “the worst book I’ve ever read”).The sort of book she gave close friends was Romano Guardini’s The Lord,or Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, or Teilhard de Chardin’sThe Phenomenon of Man.
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In tandem with its publication of Black’s script, Newmarket Press has also published Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk. The book includes a foreword by Armistead Maupin in which he relates the poignant story of Steve Beery, who was Milk’s lover at the time of his death, and an introduction by Black that provides an eloquent personal and political context for the film.
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AN EXCEPTIONALLY BEAUTIFUL volume to grace the coffee table of any art lover, J. C. Leyendecker is the second major study of perhaps the most successful illustrator, or imagist, as he’s referred to by the authors, of the first half of the 20th century.
More… Henry James was a gay man, albeit a rather closeted one, and in this respect he is not alone in showing an uncanny insight into the subjectivities of women … Many of his novels and short stories have been studied by GLBT scholars for their gay subtext, including strong lesbian undertones in his novel The Bostonians …
MoreTHE 1960’S IN AMERICA, when I was an adolescent, was a dark time for gay men. A man’s life could be ruined if it were known that he harbored homoerotic desires, even if just in the head. In the political hysteria fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, gay men people were purged from government jobs and driven to suicide. Men who loved other men were incarcerated in mental asylums, castrated and given electric shock treatment.
MoreVIEWED THROUGH THE PRISM of the eight issues of the newspaper Come Out! that were published by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in New York from 1969 to 1972, the Stonewall Riots ignited a decisive and twofold political trajectory that has endured for forty years. Two political models, distinct and dissimilar but not mutually exclusive, developed simultaneously. The first approach sustained and refined the paradigm of identity politics rooted in the homophile movement. The second introduced a critical reformulation of gender and sexuality that evolved from feminism into the matrix of academia as lesbian and gay studies and subsequently queer theory.
MoreNote from the author: The first half of this article originally appeared in the December-January 1970 issue of ComeOut! The second half was to have been published in a 1972 issue of ComeOut! Some time before production, the print shop that housed the galleys was raided (perpetrators unknown-at least to me) and the galleys were destroyed. The latter half of this article, tracing the rise and fall of Radicalesbians, never made it to press.
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