Short Reviews
Reviews of the books: Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide
to the Beat Generation in America, The Fish Child, and I Was Born This Way: How About You?and Animal Prufrock’s album: “congratulations; thank you + i’m sorry”.
Browsing: The Body Modified
July – August, 2011
Blog Posts
Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time Revisited
[Author’s Note: About a decade ago, I started work on a book about Paul Monette. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred of his friends and associates, and I’ve been given access to his as yet unpublished diaries. Finally, all these years later, the project is beginning to come to life. This essay uses his diaries and a couple of the interviews to revisit one of Monette’s most important books.]
MoreYou Are Where You Urinate
PUBLIC TOILET SIGNS are changing, and the gendering of elimination is now subject to discussion and debate. This became obvious to me when an older male professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, stared nervously at the new gender neutral sign on the bathroom door in the student center. …
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Minnesota Burning
Queer Twin Cities bills itself as an “oral history project” and contains a number of accounts from Minnesotans who have led interesting lives as openly GLBT individuals.
MoreJonathan Caouette, Maker of Tarnation
After all those years of experience and personal filmmaking, the thirty-year-old Caouette put his tragic story out there with Tarnation, and the rest is his story. Now a father living in New York City with his boyfriend, Caouette sat down with me during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
MoreYoga and Body Consciousness
IT WASN’T until my fifties, after trying out the whole supermarket of therapies out there-psychoanalysis, group therapy, Reichian therapy, the Alexander Technique, Rolfing, bio-energetics, primal therapy-that I finally clicked with yoga.
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A Cause for Living
IN A SAVING REMNANT, historian Martin Duberman offers a fascinating dual biography of two left-wing activists and writers, Barbara Deming and David McReynolds.
MoreJohn Benjamin Hickey in/on The Normal Heart
Soon after The Normal Heart opened at the Golden Theater in late April, and just before he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor, I discussed the challenges of his role, and of being an out actor in homophobic Hollywood.
MoreEating Disorders: The Gay Connection
Understanding eating disorders within the gay community requires examination on multiple fronts. Personal stories need to be told. Research needs to be put into perspective. The facts need to be absorbed into the larger context of gay identity.
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Sex as Work
THE TITLE of this haunting first novel by Amber Dawn literally means “beneath the rose,” usually applied to a secret meeting. In this case, Sub Rosa is an actual neighborhood that exists in its own dimension in a city that resembles Vancouver, Canada.
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