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The Gay & Lesbian Review

A bimonthly magazine of history, culture, and politics.
Archive for "November-December 2010"

Browsing: November-December 2010

November-December 2010

Blog Posts

Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols
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COMPARED TO MOST musical genres, disco ascended, flourished, and fizzled in a remarkably brief period from roughly the mid-1970’s until the early 80’s. It’s fair to say that disco didn’t even enjoy a solid decade of widespread popularity. Of course, those dates are debatable, and it all depends on how you define disco. And while disco’s reign was quick and fleeting (not to mention conflicted) in the U.S., it fared much better overseas. Alice Echols’ Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture offers a history of the disco era, but as the book’s title indicates, it’s more an interpretive, cultural history than a “who-what-where-when” catalog of disco’s origins, performers, and songs.

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Reviews of The Promise of Happiness, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, and Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image.

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REGULAR visitors to Provincetown may know Larry Collins as the cordial and knowledgeable man behind the counter at Larry Collins Fine Art, the gallery that he’s directed at the West End of Commercial Street since 2004. Browsing through his collection of photographs, paintings, artifacts, and memorabilia—including works by such renowned artists as James Bidgood, Mike Disfarmer, Damien Hirst, and Wilhelm von Glöeden—it quickly becomes clear that Collins’ curatorial scrutiny is sharp, studied, and eclectic.

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A LONGTIME resident of Manhattan with a number of solo exhibitions and group shows from New York City to Provincetown, Gerald Mocarsky is a gay photographer whose work embodies a unique sense of queer urban living. Standing apart from a gay photographic world dominated by nude male Adonises, Mocarsky’s work urges the viewer not to salivate but to observe and think about what it means to be gay in the new millennium. Mocarsky works in series, not unlike Cindy Sherman and Jack Pierson: the images are individualistic, but connected by a universal arc of meaning. His two most recent series relate to dance and cosmetics.

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THOUGHTFUL, deadpan, prolific, and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of music, Stephin Merritt can be a tough nut to crack when he’s interviewed, whether by me or by filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, who spent a decade shooting the documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, which takes a long look at the creative processes behind one of America’s most versatile songwriters.

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AT A SMALL but select Walt Whitman exhibition mounted by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2006, a tender photograph of Whitman with his partner Peter Doyle was matter-of-factly labeled as such; and my jaw dropped. It was the first time I’d ever seen an American museum correctly name this relationship, announcing in effect that Whitman, arguably our greatest poet, was emotionally involved with another man.

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Perhaps what’s most striking about Flinsch’s work is its very existence. At a time when most gay artists were masking their sexuality and trying to fly under the radar, Flinsch was defiantly and brazenly homoerotic in his work.

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U.S. CITIZENS or permanent residents currently have the right to petition for their heterosexual spouse to immigrate legally into the country. Same-sex unions confer no such rights. As of January 2010, there were over 36,000 binational couples in the U.S. living in the fear that a partner might be deported. Provisions in our current immigration reform are especially important for glbt families as this is the only chance they have of being treated fairly and having the same rights and protections as heterosexual families.

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A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008 by Adrienne Rich
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THE ESSAYS in this collection cover a variety of subjects, from the difficulties of translating Iraqi poetry to a reflection on James Baldwin. Each topic, however, demonstrates Adrienne Rich’s remarkable intellect and critical faculty.

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Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carrby Robert Hofler
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Filled with big names and little scandals—Allan Carr was openly gay when gay was taboo to talk about in Hollywood—Party Animals is exhaustively researched, over-the-top snarky, gossipy, and sarcastically funny!

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