January-February 2012
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.
More… 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. …
More… Author Wesley Gibson follows eight characters through great personal transitions, which are staged in the deep South in 1969. …
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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.
EARLY in Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar is a scene that gay men who have read the book remember vividly. Two close friends, Bob and Jim, have gone camping. Bob graduated from high school the day before; Jim is a year behind him. As night falls, the two boys, both athletes, remove their shirts and wrestle. Their contact suddenly turns sexual, and Vidal, in ‘poetic’ language, implies that both reach orgasm. Afterwards, embarrassed, they repudiate the ‘kid stuff” that just happened, but through the rest of the novel Jim, who is gay, will search for Bob, who is not. Much of Recruiting Young Love, Mark Jordan’s seventh book on religion and homosexuality, is encapsulated in this scene.
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… Lomas dives deeply into interpretations of the Narcissus myth, examining the story’s inherent identity politics and its importance in helping early sexologists and psychologists articulate their theories about the origins and nature of homosexuality. …
MoreIF YOU’RE LIKE ME and are occasionally presented with lists of the most influential gays and lesbians in popular music, you may have found yourself wondering: what about Bob? Best known as the lead singer of Hüsker Dü in the 80’s and Sugar in the 90’s, Bob Mould is a founding but often forgotten father of American punk rock.
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“CALLING SOMEONE ‘arty’ or ‘artistic’ has often been a euphemism for homosexuality, and political debates about homosexuality have often played out as arguments about images.” So begins Christopher Reed’s inquiry into why these relationships between art and homosexuality have persisted and flourished in the modern era.
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BIOGRAPHER Judith Chazin-Bennahum, former ballet dancer and distinguished professor emerita of theatre and dance at the University of New Mexico, has taken on the task of recovering from obscurity the extraordinary life of René Blum (1878-1942). Youngest brother of Leon Blum, the first Jewish prime minister of France (1936-37), René devoted his life to the arts and ballet, and to the Ballets Russes above all.
More… Schanke (whose previous subjects include Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne) has used Cal’s plays, journals, and letters, plus the interviews he conducted with Cal’s friends, and put them together in unobtrusive, readable prose-and got it right. This book is not just about gay theatre and gay liberation, but also about gay childhood in the small-town South and gay adulthood in cities at a time when liberation turned to horror. …
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