May-June 2010
THERE’S A LOT that’s improbable in Owen Hill’s mystery novel, The Incredible Double. For starters, there’s the protagonist, Clay Blackburn, who makes his living buying and reselling used books in Berkeley, California, and moonlighting as an unlicensed private detective. Even with rent control, it seems like an untenable arrangement.
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Other than its girl-meets-girl twist, Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory has all the ingredients of an old-time Western: …
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Ashbery’s latest collection, Planisphere (2009), is dedicated to David Kermani, his partner of 35 years. They met in 1970, when Ashbery was 42 and Kermani was 23. The new book demonstrates that the poet is still hot to trot …
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The Professor and Other Writings, a collection of previously published essays and a new, jaw-dropping autobiographical piece about a lesbian affair in academia, is as inconsistent as such collections usually are. But the author’s ability to blend her scholarly interests (in the First World War, for instance) with moving details from her personal life and even her ancestry (a British great uncle killed in 1918) offer insights into both her ideas and her life from various angles.
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Historical and sociological work on GLBT people has also focused on cities, not just because of the demographic concentration but also because queer scholars prefer to live in urban centers with their intellectual, political, and archival wealth. Even anthropologist Mary Gray chose to live in Louisville, Kentucky, while doing research for Out in the Country and to have an academic home in the Women’s Studies Department.
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“SEX HAS ALWAYS BEEN the favorite topic of every intellectually cultured person I’ve known. The favorite topic for every unintellectually cultured person I’ve known is Books, or, what is worse, Music.” I’m thinking of these words, from a 1952 entry in his Paris Diary, as I ring the bell to Ned Rorem’s Upper West Side apartment on a late, gray winter’s afternoon.
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IMAGINE a magazine arriving in the mail every month, over 300 pages filled with news, photos, and information that you never talked about with anyone. In the days before the Internet, that’s how gay life was organized in Japan.
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Rieko Matsuura’s 1993 novel, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, tells the story of a young woman, Mano Kazumi, who wakes up one morning to discover that the big toe of her right foot has transformed into a penis.
MoreTO COMBAT HOMOPHOBIA, it is crucial that we first understand it. We often talk about homophobia as if it were a monolith, requiring just one set of solutions. In truth, this phenomenon comes in several varieties that are linked by a web of overlapping motivations, theories, religious doctrines, political calculations, and psychological issues. Its roots are as complex and diverse as homophobia is itself multifarious. The reality of this social disease necessitates that we carefully diagnose it so we can calibrate our responses and tailor our educational campaigns.
MoreHISTORIAN JONATHAN NED KATZ first published his essay “The Invention of Heterosexuality” in 1990, which he later expanded into an award-winning 1995 book of the same title. The beauty of Katz’s approach was its inversion, so to speak, of popular constructionist arguments about homosexuality. Recall Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that the homosexual as a “species” was “born” in 1870.
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