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  What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell Farrar, Straus and Giroux 208 pages, $23.   GARTH GREENWELL is a poet and beginning novelist whose critically acclaimed novella Mitko came out in 2011. Psychologically penetrating and emotionally searing, Mitko is a taut portrait of the relationship between the book’s title character, a Bulgarian hustler, andMore
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The James Sister
Judith Hooper’s Alice in Bed is a fictionalized account of Alice James’ life, and much of the focus is her relationship with William and Henry James, as well as the brothers’ attitudes toward each other.
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  Love’s Refraction: Jealousy and Compersion in Queer Women’s Polyamorous Relationships by Jillian Deri University of Toronto Press. 168 pages, $21.95     JILLIAN DERI introduces this book by explaining that “for my research, I spoke with polyamorous queer, lesbian, and bisexual women in Vancouver, Canada, about how and why they practise polyamory.” Specifically, the interview subjectsMore
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Selected Letters has assembled a finely textured account of this beloved, productive writer who stayed connected with everyone but kept his own counsel and, in the face of daunting obstacles, endured.
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  The Obelisk and the Englishman: The Pioneering Discoveries of Egyptologist William Bankes by Dorothy U. Seyler Prometheus Books. 304 pages, $26.   BY THE TIME I finished this book I had come to the conclusion that the subtitle was somewhat misleading. The middle— and largest—section does describe William Bankes’ 1815–20 travels through Egypt and theMore
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As with most larger-than-life personalities, Vita lived her life to suit herself and, in the bargain, became something of a lesbian icon. Her affair with Violet Keppel, which is described by her son, Nigel Nicolson, in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), had a significant impact on her life. Violet too was larger than life—witty, flirtatious,More
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The most startling revelation in On the Moveis that Oliver Sacks was gay. … Nothing about this burly, bearded man, who appeared shy and reserved, hinted at his sexuality.
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John Money (1921-2006) is the subject of the two books under review here: Terry Goldie’s The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money and Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts.
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Cassandra Langer’s biography of Romaine Brooks ultimately builds on, rather than displaces, the 1974 biography of Brooks by Meryle Secrest, Between Me and Life, to which it rather frequently makes reference. 
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THE FIRST exhibition ever to consider Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe together—their careers overlapped from the late 1960s to the late ’80s—this show is filled with both lovely surprises and a few letdowns.
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  MARKING the 25th anniversary of the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s strange and difficult book The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) is a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Let me try in a rather personal way. My first encounter with Sedgwick’s magnum opus occurred when I began researching my honors thesis.More
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BTW
  Out Came Iceman A retronym is a word like “landline” that renames a familiar item when something new comes along. With the advent of the cellphone, we learned we’d been using landlines all along—who knew? Something similar happened in the realm of superhero comics, and the upshot is that Marvel’s Iceman is, and alwaysMore
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Letters to the Editor
  Time on the Runway To the Editor: I read with interest David Masello’s article on showroom models in your November-December issue. I was a successful model back in the homophobic 1950s. I was “discovered” on the corner of 48th Street and Lexington Avenue by Burke McHugh, owner of one of only two large agencies handling menMore
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Working Out
IN HIS NEW HISTORY of the gymnasium, Eric Chaline writes that one reason people go to gyms as adults is that they enjoyed physical activity when they were young, though I’ve always suspected that for gay male gym-goers the reverse is often the case.
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The Lure of the Gay Gene  Padlock Icon
  THE FOLLOWING WORDS were published anonymously ten years ago in a pamphlet titled “The Gay Gene Will Not Protect You,” by a group of queer activists in New York City under the name Pink Tank: “The question isn’t whether we are gay. It’s whether we are out. We don’t have to figure out whyMore
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  DAVID PLANTE is an Anglo-American writer who is perhaps best known for a trilogy of autobiographical novels—The Family, The Wood, and The Country—that were joined together in a 1983 edition under the title The Francoeur Novels. He has had stories published in The New Yorker, which is like having an Order of Merit conferredMore
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  Those People Directed by Joey Kuhn Little Big Horn Films   INDIE FILMS work as a rule because they probe a single theme: a slice of one person’s life; a snapshot of a relationship. They can’t get too complicated—budgetary restrictions see to that— but they’ll explore this central idea from all possible angles. ThoseMore
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GOP Leaders Flock to ‘Kill the Gays’ Preacher  Padlock Icon
  THERE USED TO BE a time when sane politicians ran away from endorsements from the insane. They would avoid embarrassing situations where they were photographed with loose cannons or people with loose morals. In today’s Republican Party the script has been flipped. The candidates now line up to fete the outrageous and the perpetuallyMore
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  AS IS OUR CUSTOM, we remember noteworthy individuals from the GLBT community who have died over the past year. All dates are in 2015 unless otherwise indicated.   Activists Sydney Abbott, lesbian feminist and activist who died in April, was memorialized in the November-December issue. Sam Ciccone, co-founder, in 1982, of GOAL (Gay OfficersMore
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DAN SAVAGE has been a fixture of LGBT culture and politics for over two decades—as journalist, author, media pundit, and founder of the sex advice column “Savage Love,” which is syndicated in several dozen U.S. newspapers. His media work includes recurring appearances on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, CNN’s Anderson CooperMore
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