July-August 2012
Shakespeare defied the constraints of the Elizabethan era in numerous plays, such as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Twelfth Night, which feature characters who violate the norms of gender or sexual behavior in their romantic relationships or their individual personae. In his cross-dressing comedies, such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It, gender rebellion and same-sex love are joyously intertwined.
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ABOUT TWENTY PAGES into Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? you realize that this isn’t a memoir so much as a suspense story, the question being, “Is Bechdel going to be able to pull this off?”
MoreSarah Schulman’s latest book, The Gentrification of the Mind, is in large part a set of provocative arguments about what gets preserved and promoted in American culture and why. …
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IT HAS BEEN nearly fifty years since the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, but interest in both the book and in the way he wrote it remains so high …
MoreMY UNCLE WILL (1885-1941) is introduced as “queer” in a blurb for this fascinating book about him. He was indeed as odd and self-contradictory as that word implies …
MoreScholars are divided over whether it’s appropriate to use the term “lesbian” to refer to 18th-century relationships between two women, since the word was not used at the time. But despite the absence of the word, people were aware that such relationships and such women existed.
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Hanne Blank is an engaging writer, and her personal stake in the subject makes her analysis both interesting and immediate. This book is a useful addition to a general opening up of binary conceptions of sex and gender that seems to be happening in our society.
More… British readers will soon have a chance to read an extraordinary piece of autobiographical fiction by the undeniably long-forgotten author G. F. (George Frederick) Green. In the Making had such a negligible impact on its first publication in 1952, moreover, that in any true sense, its republication sixty years later allows us to discover, rather than rediscover, a major writing talent.
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GORDON BALL’S memoir is a beautiful, poignantly sad time capsule by a participant in Allen Ginsberg’s East Hill Farm in upstate New York. …
MoreCHRISTOPHER BRAM is well known for his novels, especially the one that became the acclaimed film Gods and Monsters (originally published in 1995 as Father of Frankenstein). His new book, Eminent Outlaws, is a history of gay literature in the U.S. beginning soon after World War II with Gore Vidal and The City and the Pillar (1948). … This interview with Christopher Bram was conducted by telephone last February.
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