Short Reviews
Reviews of About Canada: Queer Rights by Peter Knelt, and Queer by Sunil Gupta.
MoreBrowsing: Heroes and Martyrs
January – February, 2012
Cooked Down to Nothing
… 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. …
More
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.
More
Death Comes to a Ballet Impresario
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
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.
More
How ‘the Artist’ Became an Æsthete
“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.
MoreU.S. Census Reveals Rise of Same-Sex Unions
THE WILLIAMS INSTITUTE, a prestigious GLBT think tank located at the UCLA School of Law, recently released a report with some fascinating statistics. …
Some of the major general findings of the study* (“United States Census Snapshot: 2010”) are summarized as follows …
MorePunk Rock’s Pitcher of Spitballs
IF 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.
MoreReaders’ Thoughts
Feedback from our readers
More
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.