March-April 2012
THE YOUNG FRENCH writer/director Céline Sciamma makes films that are empathetic and honest about the confusion that attends children’s sexual awakenings. Her first feature, 2007’s Water Lilies, dealt tenderly with the terrors and indignities of adolescent sexuality among a group of fifteen-year-old girls. Her latest film, Tomboy, explores an earlier and even more bewildering stage of life.
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THERE’S NOTHING really wrong with J. Edgar, a film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Dustin Lance Black (who wrote the screenplay for Milk, another recent gay biopic). It’s atmospheric, it’s well acted, it covers an interesting sweep of American history, and it effectively dramatizes the relationship Hoover had with his lifelong companion Clyde Tolson-and, more important, the one he had with his mother. …
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Reviews of The Third Buddha, Money Boy, and The Two Krishnas.
MoreTHIS FASCINATING, deeply personal memoir recounts the author’s experience of transitioning from a female to a male identity, and learning through the process that gender is a much more fluid and varied idea than might appear at first glance. …
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Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing died in 1902, but a year later his ideas about sexual inversion would inform the professional discourse about human sexuality that arose in the wake of the highly publicized trial of child-murderer Andreas Dippold. This scandal, which rocked Germany for months and years, has recently been retold by Michael Hagner in Der Hauslehrer:
More… As retold multiple times in The Fire in Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, a new anthology edited by Mark Thompson, the Radical Faeries officially began in 1979, with the ‘spiritual conference for radical fairies’ convened by three main organizers: …
More… Córdova describes herself as a “centrist” in the context of the New Left, gay rights, and the lesbian-feminist politics of the 70’s. Like many of her contemporaries, she left home in her late teens when she could no longer hide her sexual identity …
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… Our Time compiles more than fifty first-person narratives, and the most compelling coming-out story is the book’s own. …
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THIS INFORMATIVE STUDY explores the research and writings of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century German and British scholars on the classical Greek student-teacher relationship. …
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DURING WORLD WAR TWO, Gertrude Stein translated a collection of speeches by Marshall Pétain, the head of the Vichy government in France. Among them were diatribes that, as Barbara Will shows in Unlikely Collaboration, “announced Vichy policy barring Jews and other ‘foreign elements’ from positions of power in the public sphere and those that called for a ‘hopeful’ reconciliation with Nazi forces.”
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