September-October 2011
COMING OUT and coming-of-age are certainly well-worn themes in gay literature, so it’s refreshing to see a young writer like Ryan Van Meter taking them in different directions. … If You Knew Then What I Know Now, a collection of fourteen interlocking and inventive personal essays, is the Missouri-born author’s first book, yet his writing shows a polish and finely tuned attention to the inner dynamics of family and gay experience that’s rare for a debut volume.
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AWARD-WINNING Scottish poet, playwright, educator, and novelist Jackie Kay may not yet have the name recognition in the U.S. that she deserves, but Queen Elizabeth appreciates her …
MoreCOULD what we call “camp” turn out to be, like aqueducts and concrete, an invention of the ancient Romans? Roman poets such as Catullus, Martial, and Juvenal are notorious for their ridicule of freeborn Roman males who submit to sexual penetration. These poets regularly label their male peers with Latin terms such as cinaedus, pathicus, impudicus, and mollis, none of which has a precise English equivalent, but all of which are pejorative words that mark men as effeminate and sexually submissive. I ask you to consider here the possibility that some Roman poems that use this kind of language are not earnest homophobic ridicule at all, but a very early instance of what we in the 20th century came to call “camp.”
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“CAMP” is a slippery term with an array of denotations ranging from generally humorous, corny, or sentimental to specifically effeminate or gay. Moe Meyer argues that the only genuine “Camp” (with a big C) is exclusively a gay phenomenon …
MoreTHE ACHIEVEMENTS of antiquarian and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the representative gay æsthete of his century, are not in dispute. Winckelmann, the son of a northern German cobbler, moved to Rome and became the librarian of Cardinal Albani and curator of Roman antiquities in the Vatican. He was the leading spirit behind the first wave of Neoclassicism, an international art movement centered in Rome. Arguably he created the discipline of art history as we now know it, transforming the traditional, dry archaeological description into fervent and poetic art criticism that expressed his love of Greco-Roman beauty.
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THE HUSTLERS in New York Hustlers are self-identified straight men who exchange sex for money with a homosexual clientele. Reay claims that through this lens he can examine a slice of heterosexuality as well, since these men cross over the great divide between homo- and heterosexual worlds.
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IN RECENT YEARS, biographers of Henry David Thoreau have begun to speculate more openly about the sexual orientation of “the patron saint of environmentalists,” a man who never married in an age when marriage was de rigueur. …
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THIS BOOK is the first in a Beacon Press series, “ReVisioning American History,” that’s dedicated to exploring our nation’s past from the perspective of those “who have been excluded from the canon.”
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IN THE HISTORY of homosexuality in Victorian England, Simeon Solomon has re-emerged as a significant figure. A Jewish painter among the Pre-Raphaelites, Solomon was arrested on February 11, 1873, in a public urinal with another man and charged with attempted sodomy. …
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In Is This the Real Life? Blake doesn’t seem to have missed a single event in the lives of the men who were Queen.
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