Paul’s Cases
… Author Wesley Gibson follows eight characters through great personal transitions, which are staged in the deep South in 1969. …
MoreBrowsing: January-February 2012
January-February 2012
Blog Posts
The Multifarious Family
… Author Judith Stacey, professor of sociology at NYU, has studied families extensively for decades. This book is a wrap-up of her previous studies, and she uses it to debunk received wisdom about marriage and the family. …
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How the Militant Movement Began
FRANKLIN KAMENY was widely regarded as the major architect of the militant phase of the gay rights movement in the mid-1960’s …
I interviewed Kameny in Washington in the fall of 2003. At the time, I was conducting research for my doctoral dissertation on the four GLBT marches on Washington (1979, 1987, 1993, and 2000), and I was interested in his thoughts on these mass events.
To Accept Is Divine
THERE IS no inherent conflict between religious and gay identities and agendas, suggests gay-rights activist and writer Jay Michaelson in a new book titled God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. Focusing largely on Christianity and Judaism, Michaelson argues that, far from being hostile to homosexuality, religious doctrines can be taken to justify the claims for full inclusion and equality of GLBT people.
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Love Songs of Gandhi and Malcolm X
TWO MAJOR BIOGRAPHIES about larger-than-life 20th-century political figures were published this year, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, by Joseph Lelyveld, and Malcolm X, by Manning Marable. The subjects of the books share a common destiny, although not contemporaneously, as victims of assassination, and both became global legends dedicated to the struggle for human rights on different continents …
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Short Reviews
Reviews of About Canada: Queer Rights by Peter Knelt, and Queer by Sunil Gupta.
MoreChildren of a Lesser Holocaust
ON AUGUST THIRD, 2011, Rudolf Brazda passed away at age 98 in a nursing home in the northeast of France. In December of 2008, the French gay magazine Têtu heralded Brazda, who survived three years at Buchenwald concentration camp, as “Le dernier ‘triangle rose.’”* After the passing of Pierre Seel, a survivor of the camp Schirmeck-Vorbrück, Brazda became the last documented survivor of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. …
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Prose Poems with Grit
IF YOU’VE EVER SPENT an afternoon lost in a museum, taking in new and unfamiliar works, then at dinner mistaken your fork for sculpture or the sound of cab tires on wet pavement for angel song, you are well prepared for the enchantments of Darling Endangered.
MoreLincoln vs. Douglas: Who Was Gayer?
THE POLITICS OF ILLINOIS from the 1830’s to 1850’s can provide a good case study of attitudes toward gays-partly because the region was then a part of the American West, where political discussion was almost unrestrained, and partly because participants included some of the most famous characters in American history.
Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s famous political adversary and debating opponent, could be quite uninhibited in public in his physical contact with men. …
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The Start of the Affair
THERE’S A SCENE at around twenty minutes into the movie Weekend when the protagonist, a British lifeguard named Russell, stands at the edge of a swimming pool, just below a sign reading ‘Deep End’ that foreshadows where he’s headed. At that point in the film, Russell has gone to a gay bar and picked up a man named Glen, who defies the usual expectation of fleeing the scene the next morning and instead curls up beside Russell with a tape recorder, demanding that he relive the pickup from beginning to end.
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