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Necessary Errors is an extensive and detailed first novel follows a young American who’s spending a year in Czechoslovakia during 1990, the year after the fall of Communism in that country. Jacob Putnam is an unusual expatriate: gay but not fully out, he spends his days teaching English and his nights slowly, awkwardly getting toMore
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“I’VE NEVER UNDERSTOOD why more people don’t love poetry.” These are the very first words in Christopher Hennessy’s collection of interviews with gay male writers, Our Deep Gossip, and they belong to novelist Christopher Bram, who provided the book’s foreword.
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This autobiography comes off rather like the one published in 2010 by France’s gay minister of culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life). It left embarrassed readers wondering why Mitterrand would have wanted to present the public with such an unflattering depiction of himself.
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  Who Will Die Last?  Stories of Life in Israel by David Ehrlich Syracuse Univ. Press.  154 pages, $19.95   STAND IN LINE to enter a movie theater in Israel, and it’s a good bet the stranger behind you will enter your conversation to offer an opinion about whatever you’re discussing with your date. IsraelMore
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  Frog Music:  A Novel by Emma Donoghue Little, Brown and Company 416 pages, $27.   IT CAN BE SOBERING to think that throughout history millions of life stories have been lost to time. Every small bit of every insignificant life is gone—unless the deceased is fortunate enough to have Emma Donoghue get ahold of it.More
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One of the most admirable features of Maupin’s writing is his ability to lead the reader anywhere and make what happens there believable and poignant. Even though strained coincidences and chance encounters permeate The Days of Anna Madrigal and the others in the series, … we willingly surrender to plot and character.
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IN THE EARLY 1950s, the New York publishing company Greenberg was convicted of sending obscene materials through the mail. The publishers were fined and the books were effectively banned. The offending texts were three gay novels (none with explicit sexual content): Quatrefoil (1950), by James Barr; The Invisible Glass (1950), by Loren Wahl; and TheMore
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MAINE IS the home of choice of young poet Richard Blanco and was the family home of recently deceased gay rights pioneer Sturgis Haskins. Blanco and his partner, Mark, a research scientist, live in the upscale ski resort town of Bethel, in the western part of the state; Haskins, who died in 2012, lived inMore
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Short Reviews
Reviews of the novel Exception to the Rule, and Lady Gaga’s album Artpop.
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  Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America by Kevin Cook W. W. Norton.  288 pages, $25.95   CATHERINE “Kitty” Genovese was a petite, 28-year-old bartender who lived in Kew Gardens, a genteel section of Queens in New York City. At around 3 a.m. on March 13, 1964, Kitty was stabbedMore
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White recounts [his] experience with candor and insight in his new memoir.
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The title of Linda Leavell’s expansive and eye-opening biography, Holding On Upside Down, suggests a life that, like Marianne Moore’s poetry, involved the unusual.
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[Ethan Mordden’s] latest book, Anything Goes, far from being merely a rehash of his earlier works, offers the surest description to date of the roots and evolution of the musical, and represents Mordden’s own revised conclusions after almost forty years of considering these issues.
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‘Always a Godfather, Never a God’
THERE’S A REASON why Henry James burned his papers in the garden of Lamb House: when a famous writer dies, he’s vulnerable. People swoop in and write up his life, often in a way that Joyce Carol Oates would later call “pathobiography.”
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PETER HUJAR (1934­–1987) began as commercial photographer’s assistant, then shifted to the world of fashion before turning exclusively to fine art photography.
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  “FRIENDS and acquaintances were going to the hospital in droves,” recalled Robert Gray in a recent interview, reflecting upon the situation for gay men in 1984. “I remember men walking around the Castro with canes—that’s how you knew they were sick—the lesions on the bottoms of their feet were painful, and so they usedMore
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  SENDING a book out into the world is an act of bravery. The author, hoping for a positive reaction, must be prepared for a less enthusiastic response. For an author married to a highly respected and prolific man of letters, presenting his own efforts to the public for the first time requires that muchMore
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IN THE TV SERIES Queer as Folk, Emmett Honeycutt was everyone’s favorite Southern queen a decade ago. He was portrayed by Peter Paige, a multi-talented actor, writer, and producer. In a more recent incarnation, Paige is co-creator of the groundbreaking drama The Fosters, which has aired on ABC Family on Monday nights since June 2013.More
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BTW
  You Might Be a Rednik  Now that the Putin regime in Russia is officially in bed with the U.S. evangelical movement, it’s time for a new coinage: the Rednik. It combines two meanings of the word “red”: the association with Communism and the USSR, which reminds us that Putin was a KGB guy whoMore
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Reader’s Thoughts
Equal Partners in Ancient Times To the Editor: It’s a bit difficult to identify whether certain statements in Toby Johnson’s review (Jan.-Feb. 2014) of Gilles Herrada’s The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love reflect Herrada’s views, which Johnson is perhaps just credulously passing on, or instead Johnson’s own. One suspects perhaps both, givenMore
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I’VE REWOUND, fast-forwarded and paused but I still can’t find him. At one point I thought I’d spotted him in the closing circus scene of 8½. Or was that him, the man with the slicked-back hair and the hanky in the top pocket, sitting at a café table in Nights of Cabiria? I’m just notMore
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SAY THE NAME “Glenway Wescott” at a cocktail party or gay studies conference and most people will draw a blank (“Glenway Who?”). But every so often someone may dimly recollect this 1920s expatriate American writer ...
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THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is certainly not a “gay” play; nor does its author, Eve Ensler, market it as such. It is considered primarily a “feminist” play, but ever since its première in the late 1990s, a number of lesbian and trans-identified scholars and activists have criticized Ensler and the V-Day organization—a worldwide movement inspired byMore
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  ON AUGUST THIRD, 1916, Roger Casement, a retired British consul and renowned humanitarian, was executed by the British government for treason. This was a death penalty offense, but he might well have been sent to prison or even pardoned (as some were before him) if his “Black Diaries” had not been discovered by BritishMore
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Dallas Buyers Club is about a homophobic redneck electrician and part-time rodeo cowboy—based on a real guy named Ron Woodroof, brilliantly played by Matthew McConaughey—a drug addict who’s also a sex addict with a taste for orgies. 
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The following is adapted from a piece that appeared on the website of The Guardian of London, UK, on March 20, 2014 (theguardian.com). GROWING UP in Uganda, homosexuality was not something we talked much about. I knew I was gay from a young age, and I came out to those close to me when IMore
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If Looking tells us anything about “the Zeitgeist,” it’s that Patrick and company freely resist the walking clichés that one has come to expect from prime-time TV.
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