January-February 2011
WHEN DID Camille Paglia become so old-fashioned? Last summer, the famed feminist and Sexual Personae author decried the death of rock music in a painfully unhip piece published in The New York Times (6/25/10): “Rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps,” she lamented, since “step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness and seductive sensuality.”
MoreIN AUGUST, 2010, I traveled from my home in Bangkok to Mandalay, finally to visit the Taungbyon Nat Pwe. Stories have circulated about this “gay” event, but nothing very coherent was available.
MoreBY NIGHTFALL, Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, begins with a quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies concerning the terrifying, unfathomable power of beauty—its ability to rattle our foundations and take us unawares. True to form, Cunningham explores here a region that’s outside the sexual mainstream, whether gay or straight, in this case the story of a straight man who’s an art dealer in a stable but staid marriage, whose world is rocked by the arrival of his wife’s much younger brother, the gorgeous, charming, and deceitful “Mizzy” (for “Mistake,” as his birth was unplanned).
MoreNEARLY 200 YEARS AGO, the French novelist Honoré de Balzac created a remarkable character, Vautrin, a charming, hyper-masculine master criminal, and a man who loves men. In three of Balzac’s most popular novels, an important part of the plot turns on Vautrin’s love for an exceptionally handsome, much younger man …
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YOUNG CARL BEAN never really knew his father, and he barely knew his birth mother. Born and raised in a poor area of Baltimore, Bean was basically raised by a village of “warm and wonderful women.” He says that he was a girly little boy, soft and feminine, and he was attracted to other boys at an early age. He believes that those who raised him must have known about those feelings, but nothing was ever said. Bean was loved, and that’s what he knew.
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ANXIETY, celebration and lust collide in Daniel Allen Cox’s second novel, Krakow Melt, an ode to youthful curiosity and sex drive.
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STANLEY BARBER STARTS OFF by declaring that this work is “written as a libretto for a sung-through musical,” repeating this in the Epilogue.
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ANYONE whose life was impacted in even a small way by the punk-feminist subculture known as Riot Grrrl will find it hard to read Sara Marcus’s thoroughly researched history of the movement and remain seated throughout. From its inception, traced here to 1989 and the creation of the band Bikini Kill, through the dissolution of most of its organizational hubs by 1996, Riot Grrrl existed in an emotionally amplified space. The fierce unity of the first small tribes that sprung up in Olympia, Washington, and Washington D.C. contrasts with the fire and fury at male privilege that inspired some of the movement’s finest work
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Where stories in Time Well Bent layer GLBT themes onto colonialism, the effect is a dreamlike array of possibilities.
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According to the back cover of this oversize, illustrated book, author Jonathan Katz is tackling nothing less than “how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists, including Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley … and many more.”
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