November-December 2011
Ambientes is a timely contribution at this point in history during which demographic shifts are literally changing the face of America. The stories in Ambientes provide a significant model for GLBT Latinos in the U.S.
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I CONFESS to having been somewhat surprised upon learning about another book on that doomed cowboy-on-cowboy love story, Brokeback Mountain. But as editor William R. Handley shows in this new anthology about Jack and Ennis’ tortured, unrealized, lifelong love affair, there is still more to be said about the movie that elicited such a wide range of responses, so many of them extreme and at odds with one another, since the movie’s 2005 release.
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Reviews of Victory Deferred, Andy Warhol’s New York City, and Tiny Terror.
MoreTHIS OCTOBER marked the fiftieth anniversary of artist Don Bachardy’s one-man debut at the prestigious Redfern Gallery in London in 1961. It was in the cramped, closely hung confines of a basement gallery that the 27-year-old Bachardy exhibited much of the work he had completed that year, notably a series of celebrity portraits.
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THE RESTROOMS at Bulgaria’s National Palace of Culture had just one use—and it wasn’t to relieve oneself. So when the American teacher descended the stairs and was captured by a hushed voice, he knew full well what was going to happen. The young man was tall and thin with a “close-cropped military cut of hair so popular among young men … a hyper-masculine style” and he seemed a little bad-boy dangerous. He couldn’t speak English well and the American could only grasp a few words of Bulgarian …
Mitko was the man’s name …
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NEVER PUBLISHED during her lifetime, To Do is an abecedarian book with as much child appeal as an Edward Gorey ‘A is for …’ book. This was actually [Gertrude] Stein’s second book written for children.
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FEW AUTHORS have been more intent on making a reputation for themselves than Gertrude Stein. The fact that her name is known today by many people who have never read a word she wrote testifies to the success-but also somewhat to the failure-of her endeavor. As depicted most recently by Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which examined the continuing American fascination with an image of Paris in the 1920’s that Stein did a great deal to create, Stein is better known for the artistic careers she fostered than for her own creative output.
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A TWENTY-YEAR retrospective of Donald Moffett’s work titled The Extravagant Vein has been mounted by the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, where it will remain on view until January 8, 2012. After that, the exhibit will travel to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery of Skidmore College in Sara-toga Springs, New York, and then (next June) to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Accompanying the exhibit is a handsome, full-color catalog, published by the Houston museum and Skira/Rizzoli, which includes essays by Bill Arning and Russell Ferguson, an interview with Douglas Crimp, and an overview by exhibit curator Valerie Cassel Oliver.
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SIR EDMUND BACKHOUSE (1873-1944) has long been considered one of the prime homosexual self-fantasists of the last century-as delusional and self-created as “Baron Corvo,” the pederastic social climber who appointed his fictionalized self as Pope in the novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904) and inspired A. J. A. Symons’s classic sleuth biography The Quest for Corvo (1934).
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THIS FASCINATING COLLECtion of essays explores the queer elements within all of Shakespeare’s works. With contributions from scholars of both queer studies and Shakespeare, the volume represents a joining of the two fields rarely attempted before.
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