All the King’s Men are Katie Allen, Julee Antonellis, Leighsa Burgin, Jill Gibson, Maria Kogan, and Karin Webb. I interviewed them in person late last year.

A TRANSGENDER musician, animator, and filmmaker working in Seattle, Clyde Petersen has released ten albums with the band Your Heart Breaks. He regularly tours with Kimya Dawson, whose childlike voice sweetens the movie Juno’s soundtrack. Despite Petersen’s gentle guitar riffs and soft-spoken lyrics, his musical influences include jarring artists from the feminist punk movement known as Riot Grrrl, which emerged out of Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990’s. He has animated and directed videos for bands like Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down and the Shaky Hands. In 2010, Petersen released a documentary film, The Unspeakable, which explores the work of fifteen Northwest artists.

BY NIGHTFALL, Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, begins with a quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies concerning the terrifying, unfathomable power of beauty—its ability to rattle our foundations and take us unawares. True to form, Cunningham explores here a region that’s outside the sexual mainstream, whether gay or straight, in this case the story of a straight man who’s an art dealer in a stable but staid marriage, whose world is rocked by the arrival of his wife’s much younger brother, the gorgeous, charming, and deceitful “Mizzy” (for “Mistake,” as his birth was unplanned).

REGULAR visitors to Provincetown may know Larry Collins as the cordial and knowledgeable man behind the counter at Larry Collins Fine Art, the gallery that he’s directed at the West End of Commercial Street since 2004. Browsing through his collection of photographs, paintings, artifacts, and memorabilia—including works by such renowned artists as James Bidgood, Mike Disfarmer, Damien Hirst, and Wilhelm von Glöeden—it quickly becomes clear that Collins’ curatorial scrutiny is sharp, studied, and eclectic.

THOUGHTFUL, deadpan, prolific, and possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of music, Stephin Merritt can be a tough nut to crack when he’s interviewed, whether by me or by filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, who spent a decade shooting the documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, which takes a long look at the creative processes behind one of America’s most versatile songwriters.

This interview was conducted in Jonathan Ned Katz’s art studio in New York City.

PHOTOGRAPHER, artist, and designer Andrew J. Epstein has had behind-the-scenes access to some of the most important and influential gay artists of the last forty years, and fortunately he has had his camera in hand to record much of it. In the 1970’s, living in New York City’s West Village, he met artist Tom of Finland and photographed many of the artist’s gallery shows. Epstein’s photos are featured in Taschen’s recent, massive tribute to the artist titled Tom of Finland XXL.

ONE of the freshest documentaries of 2009 was Kirby Dick’s Outrage, which brings to light how some of the most homophobic politicians in the U.S. are themselves deeply closeted gay men. Politicians such as Idaho senator Larry Craig, Florida governor Charlie Crist, former New York mayor Ed Koch, and others have done their damnedest to block GLBT equality while engaging in same-sex activities on the sly.

It is Dick’s contention that these politicians are able to remain in the closet thanks to the unwillingness of the mainstream media to talk about their sexuality.