Browsing: September-October 2011

September-October 2011

Blog Posts

Sex Panic and the Punitive State by Roger N. Lancaster
0

SEX PANIC and the Punitive State is part polemic, part social history, and part personal story about the policing of sexual behavior in the United States.

More
Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen by Mark Blake
0

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. 

More
A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski
0

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.”

More
New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America by Barry Reay
0

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.

More
An Archaeology of Posing: Essays on Camp, Drag, and Sexuality by Moe Meyer
0

“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 …

More
0

COULD 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.”

More
If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter
0

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.

More
The Venetian Boy by Michael Willhoite
0

“THOUGH THERE ARE some disagreeable things in Venice,” Henry James once wrote, “there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.” In the rank and twisted world of The Venetian Boy, however, author Michael Willhoite populates this coming-of-age novel set in the 1970’s entirely with unsavory characters, both visitors to the City of Canals and residents alike.

More
Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick S. Cheng
0

Reviews of Great Speeches on Gay Rights, Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, and Shades of Love.

More
0

GAY MEN have larger penises on average than do straight men … This is just one of numerous findings brought to light by co-authors Ogi Ogas, a computational neuroscientist, and Sai Gaddam …

More