Residents Alienated
GUILLERMO REYES’ Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives follows the parallel lives of María, a Chilean single mother, and her gay son Guillermo, who immigrate to the United States in the 1970’s.
MoreBrowsing: November-December 2010
November-December 2010
Blog Posts
Trans Trends
THIS BOOK is a kind of sequel to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, published in 1994. Gender Outlaw, which has become a staple in Queer Studies classrooms, questions the fundamental necessity of dividing the human race into only two genders assumed to be “natural” and mutually exclusive.
More
A Playwright’s Education
A Life Like Other People’s, Bennett’s latest memoir, was first published in his autobiographical essay collection Untold Stories (2005). This detailed and moving account of his early memories of his family, with closest attention given to his mother …
More
A Not-Too-Distant Mirror
GAY BAR is a queer little book by a queer little woman who, yes, owned a gay bar on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in the 1950’s. The book is a rediscovery, having been published more than half a century ago (in 1957) by a company owned by the early gay rights activist Hal Call. Now, writer-historian Will Fellows has repackaged the book, with a new introduction and copious notes and commentary.
More
Ethics and the Ick Factor
In From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law, Martha Nussbaum argues that homosexuals in particular have borne the brunt of disgust used as a political weapon.
MoreUp at the Villa
THE PROBLEM with biographies of Somerset Maugham is that the last ten years of his life have always overwhelmed what went before them. Indeed, the man Maugham chose as his literary executor allowed Ted Morgan to write his excellent biography in 1980 in order to dispel the myths that had built up over Maugham’s “final tragic years” in his villa in the south of France.
MoreRevenge of the Gleeks
EVERYONE’S ACCOUNT of high school is different. For the jocks, it’s a time of tiny triumphs, of touchdowns, and cheerleaders. For punks and goths, it’s the age of rebellion, while for nerds and other pariahs, high school is a penitentiary of social embarrassment. “High school is a caste system,” declares cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (played by Emmy-winner Jane Lynch) on Glee, the hit television series now in its second season on Fox.
MoreLetters to the Editor
Letters to the editor
More
A ‘New Life’ in More Ways Than One
WAS E. M. FORSTER a coward? A case could be made. He was deferential to a domineering mother, fearing her censure of his gay-themed writing as well as the men he loved, regretting he was unable to become the “authoritative male” who might have lessened her depression after the early death of his father. Short of falsely declaring himself to be a conscientious objector, he did everything he could to avoid conscription into the British Army during World War I until …
More