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Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a fixture in the American imagination: a superhero of anthropology; intrepid explorer; a woman leaps and bounds ahead of her time. Mead’s bisexuality and her lifelong relationship with like-minded anthropologist and writer Ruth Benedict, which Lois W. Banner explores thoroughly in Intertwined Lives, is not an entirely new thesis.

Of all the famous people that Beaton wrote about, Hepburn received his most extreme wrath. He found her lacking in feminine grace and manners and accused her of being miserly and a bully.

  Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions Edited by Joseph Bristow Univ. of Toronto Press. 334 pages, $60.   Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire by Jeff Nunokawa Princeton Univ. Press 164 pages, $17.95 (paper)   Two new books about the first icon in Anglo-American gay culture set out to accomplish the same goal,More

Stephen Harold Riggins and Paul Bouissac have shared an interesting life, having traveled the world and crossed paths with such intellectual luminaries as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, A. J. Greimas, and John Cage. But in The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life, Riggins attempts to provide more than a romantic travelogue orMore

  Taliban Photographs by Thomas Dworzak Essays by Dworzak, John Lee Anderson, Thomas Rees Trolley Books (UK) 128 pages (illustrations), $24.95   Arriving in Kandahar in July 2001, photographer Thomas Dworzak intended to ask Afghans to sift through hidden collections of photographs from schools, studies, and families. The Taliban, who had banned photography since takingMore

The photos in Picturing Men are organized not chronologically but by photographic setting, be it a studio, the deck of a boat, an athletic stadium, or a swimming hole. Other settings include a meeting of lodge brothers, a raucous drag routine, and lumberjacks on break.

While it can serve nicely as a coffee-table book, sure to elicit laughs, sighs, and moans from browsers, Women in Pants is also a book of serious scholarship that will, as the authors suggest, “encourage more questions than it answers” and thus send at least some readers on a search for more information about theMore

WHILE the World Sleeps is a collection of previously published essays about AIDS from established writers as well as from individuals living with the disease. The range of essays that Chris Bull has assembled underscores the myriad cultural responses that the disease has generated over the last twenty years.

OF THE MANY women who figured in the lives of Gertrude Stein and her circle in the early 20th century, the Cone sisters—fabulously wealthy, single women from Baltimore—stand out as power brokers in the Paris art world in their own right. Their money came from the family’s denim mills, the largest in the world. AlthoughMore

  Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise Cleis Press, 355 pages, $16.95, paper   THIS AUGUST marked the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the historic civil rights March on Washington. King is rightly hailed as theMore

Reviews of Lost Gay Novels: Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the 20th Century; That’s Why They’re in Cages, People; and Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties.

When I wrote this, I was an active founder of the Lesbian Avengers, an international organization that trained thousands of lesbians in direct action techniques. It was at the 1993 March on Washington that the Avengers and act-up Women’s Network created the first Dyke March—with 20,000 women, marching together with no permit. These participants broughtMore

RECENTLY an Advocate.com commentary returned to an explosive issue of the last decade—the resurgence of unsafe sex among gay men. Theater producer and AIDS activist Jordan Roth urged: “We must Act Up again! We ... need to scream bloody murder, point the finger of shame, and demand action. But this time we’re not going toMore

Takes on news of the day

  H. Lawrence’s Ashes Were Not Eaten! To  the Editor: I would like to comment on the article by Alfred Corn, “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” [Nov.-Dec. ’03], specifically on his story about Witter Bynner eating D. H. Lawrence’s ashes. I believe I can say that the story is not true. It would be appropriateMore

  In 1993, two life-changing events tilted the see-saw of my life from the clouds (a spectacular love affair) to the Slough of Despond (surgery for a non-cancerous brain tumor, followed by the end of said romance). Late in the latter period I was poring over the magazines at the old Glad Day Bookstore onMore

  THE DAY AFTER I gave this talk to the Harvard gay and lesbian alumni/æ group, I was taken to lunch in Dunster House by some undergraduates. After filling our trays on the serving line, we all sat down together at what was evidently a “gay table.” As the older, visiting gay writer I feltMore

  TEN YEARS AGO, during the Christmas break from teaching, I read Bruce Bawer’s A Place at the Table, which had just come out, and it so angered me that I sat down and wrote an open letter to him. I had no idea who might publish it or whether it was publishable. It wasMore

  REREADING “My Life as a Christian,” which would later become a play that I last performed in the previous millennium under the title, The King of Kings and I: The Greatest Story Ever Kvetched, I was haunted by the arguments that I didn’t make. Times were so different then, both in 1993, when IMore

  HOW LONG  is ten years in the life of a black gay male? It’s the difference between 51 (when, because people were always telling me, “You don’t look fifty. I would have thought you were 39, or—maybe—42,” and, on good days, I believed them, I’d go to cruising sites with forty-year-olds, thirty-years-olds, or evenMore

  TEN YEARS AGO, the AIDS crisis dominated the discourse and the psyches of the gay male community in America. Friends and lovers had died or were dying. Ten years ago, sodomy was illegal in a large majority of the states. Although these laws were rarely enforced, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1986 thatMore

  Mambo Italiano Directed by Émile Gaudreault Cinémaginaire Inc. (Canada) Equinox Films (Canada)   Stereotypes never really go out of style, although the PC police may take the heat off one group or another for a time. Amos ’n’ Andy is taken off the market but returns decades later as the Friday films. The GodfatherMore

The past year saw an especially large number of deaths of notable lesbians and gay men, including many prominent artists and writers. The following list, while clearly not exhaustive, mentions some of people who passed away and highlights their accomplishments.

  Reading these excerpts from an interview done with me a decade ago, I was surprised at how much anger I felt over the state of our purported Gay Nation in 2004. Anger at the current political focus of our national organizations on the issues of marriage and military service, and ever further away fromMore

  “So we know at the very beginning how it’s going to end.” Ned Rorem said of his first opera, Miss Julie, which he composed in 1965 from the play by August Strindberg and which was revived in November by students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in the Kimmel Center for theMore