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That LGBT people in film are disproportionately represented as killers or as killed (or both) is not breaking news. … Here my focus—and grievance—is with Oscar-winning films and roles after 1985 in which LGBT people perish or come to a bad end.

The Hollywood star, the museum exhibit, and the book are huge honors for John Waters. It’s been a long, strange trip to mainstream acceptance for Waters, an auteur who specializes in what he calls “art-exploitation” films and who was dubbed the “Pope of Trash” by William S. Burroughs in 1986.

  IN THE LATE 1980s, getting a motion picture made about LGBT people that didn’t cast them as villains, psychos, or freaks was a momentous challenge. A mainstream feature film about a group of gay men dealing—and dying—in the midst of the AIDS epidemic was nearly impossible. While there had been a TV movie thatMore

The loneliness in All of Us Strangers is established at the start. The high-rise in which Adam lives seems to have no other residents but him.

Jack Worby was one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who took to the roads and rails of America in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. They called themselves tramps or hoboes or ’boes.

  SET IN 1953 and published ten years later, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a female coming-of-age story like J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye. Told in the first person, it’s about Esther Greenwood, a young Massachusetts college student who, along with eleven others, wins an award toMore

Butler begins Who’s Afraid of Gender? with an overview of global “anti-gender” efforts by conservative religious figures and groups from Evangelical pastor Scott Lively’s work in Africa and Spain’s CitizenGo to authoritarian-minded politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has called “gender ideology” a threat to the nation itself.

  WILD GEESE by Soula Emmanuel Footnote Press. 240 pages, $17.95 THE TITLE of Soula Emmanuel’s debut novel conjures images of migratory birds in flight. And yet, the author informs us that the name derives from a time in Irish history when men left Ireland to serve as mercenary soldiers in continental Europe during thoseMore

BRAD GOOCH is an accomplished memoirist, novelist, and biographer of such literary figures as Rumi, Flannery O’Connor, and Frank O’Hara. His latest book is a compelling analysis of the remarkable legacy of artist Keith Haring.

DURING HIS LIFETIME, Terrence McNally saw seventeen of his plays and musicals premiere on Broadway, and along the way he developed a tenacity and maintained a relevance that has eluded most American playwrights in their later years. Conversations with Terrence McNally, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain, helps to   illuminate a writer whose work has not alwaysMore

     The Future Was Color opens in 1956, the year of the failed Hungarian uprising. George Curtis, as Gyorgy is now known, is in Los Angeles writing screenplays for science fiction movies. One of his screenplays, about giant spiders that shoot flames from their eyes, is a box office success, terrifying audiences with scenes ofMore

Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein focuses on two influential, life-changing summers in Mary Shelley’s life. Separate narrative lines move back and forth between 1816 and 1812.

Edward Cahill’s novel Disorderly Men begins with just such a police raid on the fictional Caesar’s bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. In the midst of the raid, we meet the sundry patrons whose lives Cahill portrays in the novel. Roger Moorhouse is a 39-year-old closeted gay man, an ex-fighter pilotMore

THIS LATEST COMPILATION from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (clags), one of the LGBTQ community’s most august academic bodies, presents seventeen lectures by the organization’s annual recipients of the David R. Kessler Award, a prestigious honor bestowed on a person whose work has significantly contributed to the field of LGBT studies.

Stephen McCauley excels in writing about the everyday, believing that people reveal themselves when they’re dealing with the small details and inconsistencies of their daily lives. In one sense, not much happens in his narratives, yet in a deeper way, everything changes. Affection, commitment, self-interest, and contentment are perennial themes, with characters trying to findMore

Brief reviews of TEN BRIDGES I’VE BURNT: A Memoir in Verse; DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA; MATERIAL WEALTH: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg; BOUND: Poems; and IN THE SPIDER’S ROOM: A Novel.

Reviews of Fellow Travelers, Lie with Me, and NYAD.

And this is what Saltburn is really about: the seductions and pursuit of wealth and respect. The Cattons are depicted as pretty despicable people, emotionally attenuated, blithely unaware of the world, and often vicious to those around them. And yet, their lives of leisure and those fantastic parties are apparently too attractive to resist.

DIRK BOGARDE (1921–1999) was a British film actor of the postwar era who was a major star in Europe and even made inroads into the American dream machine. His first Hollywood film was the underwhelming Song without End: The Story of Franz Liszt (1960).

LORD BYRON died 200 years ago, in 1824, at the age of 36. He succumbed to a fever in Greece, where he was helping to fund the Greek war of independence from Turkey. Today he’s more famous as a poet and a lover than as a fighter. One estimate puts Byron’s renown as a poetMore

Monica Majoli’s portraits are of centerfold models who were photographed between 1976 and 1979. Her artist statement reveals that “these images showcase a tragedy that had yet to unfold, as they were photographed on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic.”

Interview with poet, Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.

Interview with writer Patrick E. Horrigan.

Takes on news of the day.

Readers' Thoughts.

  THIS ISSUE’S THEME is of course a reference to Vito Russo’s 1981 book, The Celluloid Closet, which documented the many films in pre-Stonewall America that hinted at an LGBT message or possibility, whether through subtle gestures or ambiguous language. Everything changed after the 1960s. Suddenly there were out gay people whose lives could beMore

FLORIDA’S LEGISLATURE adjourned its session in March with 21 out of 22 anti-LGBT bills effectively killed, handing Governor Ron DeSantis a humiliating defeat and leading the Human Rights Campaign to conclude that “the tide has turned” on such legislation in Florida.