Of Monsters and Mad Love
Michael Ehrhardt talks with Edmund White, the author of two new books
MoreBrowsing: January-February 2012
January-February 2012
Blog Posts
J’accuse: The Heath Erases Gay Writers
… ON BALANCE, the Heath presents quite an impressive array of homophobic practices: the closeting of several GLBT authors; the racist construction of queerness as a white phenomenon; the refusal to grant gay or queer identities, communities, and aesthetics the respect and attention afforded to other identities; and the failure to consider sexuality a necessary valence of literary consideration. …
More
Saint Sebastian in South Carolina
… Saint Sebastian: From Martyr to Gay Starlet was on display last fall at Friday Cottage Art Space, a gallery in one of Columbia’s historic downtown homes. Scheduled to open as part of a week of events leading up to the South Carolina Pride Festival in early September, the show featured the work of García-Lemos and Pierce, as well as work by media and performance artist Santiago Echeverry (from Tampa, Florida), filmmaker Betsy Newman, and a poet, to wit this writer. Other local artists contributed work as the project gained momentum. …
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. …
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. …
More
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 …
More