September-October 2009
… the news that [Kate Clinton] had a book coming out this summer piqued my curiosity. I am older now and more comfortable in my skin; Clinton has built a terrific career and fan base that keep her in constant demand. Clearly her material has evolved over the years…
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ANYONE who’s even casually acquainted with Tom of Finland’s work knows that, for Tom, size was everything. The frolicking gay men in his pictures are always well-muscled, often to absurd proportions. Invariably, they sport either impossibly large bulges in their pants or, better yet, titanic, tree-trunk-thick erections that defy the laws of physics. So it’s altogether fitting that the new Tom of Finland book just published by Taschen is as much a physical monument to the legendary gay artist as it is a study of his work.
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While these two books are very different, they do share at least one common theme: Indian families in search of their recent past.
MoreTHE YEAR 1969 was when the straight brother of my high school girlfriend introduced me to the two gay men who would change my life forever. Savannah, like New York, had its own gay counter-culture that gathered in a Stonewall-like club known as the Basement, which was located in the basement of the neglected Armory Building that later became the home of the Savannah College of Art and Design.
MoreI DO NOT UNDERSTAND why historians and academics, including many gay ones, refuse to believe that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, or had no name at all. Isn’t it time for us to put a stop to this nonsense …
MoreHAROLD NORSE, whose iconoclastic poetry explored gay sexuality and identity and earned both wide critical acclaim and a large, enduring popular following, died of natural causes on Monday, June 8, 2009, in San Francisco, just one month before his 93rd birthday.
MoreRELIGION, particularly Christianity, is often disparaged by contemporary gay authors, but passing attitudes are sometimes misread as eternal verities. Certainly history is filled with deeply religious gay people whose spirituality reinforced their same-sex affinities. Among gays, particularly gay men, marriage has undergone a massive shift in attitudes during the last forty years, moving from widespread scorn to passionate embrace. Is it possible that religion (including Christianity) will undergo a similar transition and become a more important part of gay lives in the near future?
MoreIN A BRAZEN EFFORT to pre-empt an American Psychological Association report on human sexuality before its scheduled release in August, an anti-gay organization unveiled its own report, which amounts to rubbish in the guise of research. The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality’s (narth) “new” study, “What the Research Shows: narth’s Response to the American Psychological Association’s Claims on Homosexuality,” is so embarrassingly slipshod that no scientist would take it seriously.
MoreDURING the Spring 2009 semester at Princeton University, my students in “Queer Theory and Politics” and I staged a demonstration on campus against the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a Princeton-based nonprofit organization whose self-described mission is “to protect marriage and the faith communities that sustain it.”
MoreAS THE SUN SET in Riverside, California, on Election Day 2008, Matthew Lawrence anxiously watched as the presidential election returns came in. Trying his best to relax, the 28-year-old Lawrence reclined on his second-story apartment balcony while numbing his nerves with cigarettes and screwdrivers. Time seemed to stand still until a reporter on his 52-inch TV panel delivered the news: the election had been called for Barack Obama, who would be the 44th president of the United States. “It was a beautiful and powerful moment,” he said.
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