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WHILE ostensibly telling the story of the great fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mary Blume offers a wider view of the French fashion scene and larger social significance—wider, perhaps, than some might think it deserves.

THIS COMPENDIUM of Martin Duberman’s published writings has funneled into a single volume samples from an œuvre that includes some twenty books and numerous essays written over a period of some fifty years. The result of this distillation is a volume of 26 essays described in the book’s subtitle as “the essential historical, biographical, andMore

Rich’s anthology is undoubtedly essential reading for GLBT cinephiles. For younger film students (straight, gay, or questioning) it sets the historical scene impeccably. For those of us who were there—and I was working as a film critic and graduate student through much of the period Rich writes about—this book creates a bizarre sense of nostalgia.

IGOR STRAVINSKY’S Perséphone is one of the least understood works in the history of contemporary dance, music, and theater. Tamara Levitz’ Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone presents a hot, bubbling stew of Uranism, naked boys, golden torches, pédérastie, and Sapphist resistance.

One cannot help but be impressed by the number of Will Cather's letters that survived despite such a determined effort to secure their destruction. But the 564 letters published here represent only about twenty percent of the entire body of rescued letters.

IRRESISTIBLE REVOLUTION collects nine essays, each an expanded and updated version of a lecture given by author Urvashi Vaid.

IF IT’S TRUE what they say about everybody “having a book in them,” there’s a good chance that the book is a personal memoir. In what seems lately to be a large subset of a genre—the gay-coming-of-age literary memoir—comes Melanie Hoffert, a surprisingly Zen breath of fresh air.

LAURA ANTONIOU, legendary author of the “Marketplace” novels about an imaginary international corporation that trains and leases out voluntary slaves, has written her first murder mystery. The author’s inside knowledge of the real-life BD/SM scene has enabled her to catalogue every shade of kink without including any explicit sex. This novel is not of theMore

THIS INTRIGUING and unusual new novel is really a collection of interconnected short stories tied together by an unnamed male narrator who spends much of his life searching for a lifetime lover, each quest ending in disappointment and regret.

GAY PARENTING hasn’t received nearly as much attention as same-sex marriage in our recent cultural debates, which makes Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland - a memoir about growing up with her single gay father, the late poet Steve Abbott, in San Francisco, during the 1970s and ’80s.

IN RECENT YEARS, Christopher Isherwood’s presence in popular culture has been on the rise ... In her introduction to the latter book, Harker observes that much Isherwood scholarship focuses on his place in the modernist canon and on his homosexuality.

Radel has clearly done his homework and deftly steers the reader through all of White’s fiction— from 1973’s Forgetting Elena, a debut which saw few sales but won critical ac- claim from Vladimir Nabokov, to last year’s Jack Holmes and His Friend.

GROWING UP in a leftist family in the 1950s, my cultural education included lectures given by my mother on the connection between politics and the arts. She would tell me of her experiences as a young socialist during the 1930s attending politi- cal theater in New York City. Her favorite socially conscious composer was MarcMore

Boykin, an author, television commentator, and Harvard Law School graduate, is to be commended for assembling writers with the audacity to address issues normally shrouded in silence in communities of color in this stirring collection of personal essays by gay men of color.

Vaughan is known as much for his journals as for his paintings. The journals span nearly four decades from his experiences of World War II, to his successful career in the 1950s and 1960s, through to his bouts with colon cancer and ultimately suicide in 1977.

This is what has become the stuff of legend for many gay men. While the queerness of Davis’ stardom has been deconstructed post-structurally for ages, what has been neglected are the subliminal subtexts of some of her pictures pertaining to the closet. In the case of Edmund Goulding’s 1939 Dark Victory, we can see DavisMore

Reviews of Lies about My Family:  A Memoir; Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary American Culture; Last Gleamings; and Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants

Reviews of the play Hit the Wall, and the albums OUTlaw and One True Thing.

Takes on news of the day

  In Defense of Harry Hay’s Essentialism To the Editor: What struck me first about Jay Michaelson’s article on gay essentialism (“The Non-essential(ist) Harry Hay”) in the March-April issue was its mean-spiritedness. Michaelson portrays essentialism as an outmoded refuge of well-meaning but callous, aging bigots. He does this with an oily civility—the noblesse oblige ofMore

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL TENSIONS surrounding issues of masculinity, race, violence, sexuality, and miscegenation commingle in both all-black and interracial pornography. Black men in gay porn customarily inhabit a position of power that has roots in racialized fetishism.

Love, it seems, is for straight people. Take two examples from books that came out in just the past year: Pascal Bruckner’s The Paradox of Love (2012) has many virtues, but they do not stretch to examining same-sex relationships. Turn to the copyright page and you find brutal confirmation. The anonymous provider of Library ofMore

The reunion would also prove a personal moment of truth. At 68, Walters would not be returning to his alma mater as Robert but rather as Robyn Marie Walters, a transsexual woman.

LIKE MOST SPIDER WEBS, the bar called The Web, which existed on East 58th Street for decades until it closed the other month, would snare you unprepared. It was as discreet on its glamorous block of Midtown (between Madison and Park) as a cobweb strung in the corner of a room, whose strands glistened onlyMore

For whatever the reason, it’s useful to learn, in a new biography of Lorenz Hart, that a century ago the Broadway musical—which, before rock ’n roll, epitomized American popular music—was equally stuck in the clichés of the European operetta.

WHY did James Franco, rich and famous Hollywood actor/dilettante, want to make a graphic film about the gay leather subculture? That’s what everyone on screen is asking in the resulting sixty-minute film, Interior. Leather Bar., co-directed, written, and edited by gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. A lot of viewers will ask the same question, but nothingMore