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Author Val Holley has brought Mike Connolly to life again in his recent biography, Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip (McFarland, 2003). In the following interview, Holley comments on Connolly’s complex, problematical legacy as a gay gossip columnist in whose life sexual orientation, Hollywood glamour, and politics intersected in an often disturbingMore
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Burn This
TO “LOOK BACK on the history of homosexuality in the West,” writes Louis Crompton in Homosexuality and Civilization, is to view a kaleidoscope of horrors: ...
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HOW YOU SEE a rainbow depends upon your vantage point. The author of Evolution’s Rainbow is a male-to-female transsexual and a highly respected evolutionary biologist at Stanford University. ...
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Short Reviews
Reviews of On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men who Sleep with Men, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, and Between The Palms: A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica.
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Lust in Action  Padlock Icon
FOR MANY of the characters in Richard C. Reinhart’s The Consequence of Sex, sex is an easy but ineffective salve for the twin pains of loneliness and despair. While its author doesn’t tend to moralize, The Consequence of Sex is aptly named. ...
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ACCORDING TO Richard Florida, there are three conditions that encourage economic growth in the postindustrial economy: technology, talent, and tolerance. These elements are embodied in a new configuration of workers that comprise what Florida calls the “creative class.” ...
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... Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor have trumped all the other researchers with Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, an in-depth look at a Duval Street institution in Key West. Scholarly, well-informed, and filled with fascinating people and their stories-the drag queens in their double lives as well as those who associate with them-theMore
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Look Away
GREG BEHRMAN’S new book offers a compelling look into the United States’ failure to respond to the global AIDS pandemic starting in the 1980’s. ...
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Graham Robb’s Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century stands out among recent books for its appreciation of an explicitly gay liberationist scholarly approach to our forgotten but precious past. ...
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Backward Glances is not a memoir but a scholar’s exploration of something gay men often do without a second thought. Cruising is an age-old activity, not necessarily the exclusive domain of gay men, but one that gay men have undoubtedly developed and refined in unique ways. ...
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One thing that comes through clearly in this new biography by Jeffrey Meyers is that W. Somerset Maugham was not an easy man to know. ...
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... Perhaps the most fascinating item in Time Capsule 21 is a hand-written, pen-and-ink illustrated letter from seventeen-year-old Lance Loud inviting Warhol to a party in late December 1968 at his family’s home in Santa Barbara. ...
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IN HER 1993 BOOK on Jared French (1905-1988), the first devoted entirely to this painter, Nancy Grimes remarks on the interpretive difficulties that spring from the painter’s private symbolism, difficulties compounded by our inadequate knowledge of his life: ...
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... Clifford Wright was such a retiring person, and living on such a remote island as he did, that writing letters was his chief means of connecting with people, especially his gay friends. And since he had known everyone in the arts, his correspondence in the Danish Archives of Arts and Letters Modern Collection isMore
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The G&LR recently sat down with Rice in her native home town of Los Angeles to discuss the trials and tribulations of a married mom making a lesbian-themed film for her debut feature.
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BTW
Takes on news of the day
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ANDRÉ GIDE lived for his art. Born to a wealthy family, as a young writer he had no financial worries and he could afford to be experimental in his writing. For a brief time he associated himself with poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the Symbolist School. Later, his affiliation with the Communist party and his briefMore
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WHEN I FIRST discovered the poetry of Amy Lowell, I was so taken with a group of her erotic poems that I suggested to my writer friend Judith that she do a one-woman show as Lowell reading her work. ... But when I started reading some of the poems aloud, I realized that the lesbianMore
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“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” THOSE WORDS, voiced by the narrator of the story Goodbye to Berlin (1939),More
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The following is excerpted from the introduction to Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex, which will be published by Cleis Press this July.
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... How dangerous is it to write fiction as if it is a mirror of one’s own life, a reflection of a whole era? White has said that what matters to a writer is truth-and truth, he knows, can sometimes be achieved by mischievous means. Even for a writer who draws his material from aMore
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C. A. TRIPP was born in Denton, Texas, a small town not far north of Dallas, on October 4, 1919. His father was an amiable cabinet-making teacher and hardware store proprietor. His mother, the descendant of early settlers, came from a family that owned much of Denton’s real estate and lived in its grandest residence.More
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Democrats Waffling on Marriage Amendment
You’ve got to hand it to the Bush administration- they take care of their own. From tax breaks for the wealthy to cheating New York City out of 9/11 security funds in favor of “red” states like Wyoming, key Bush constituencies have been rewarded. Perhaps nothing is more glaring, however, than what has been doneMore
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Is There a Downside to Same-Sex Marriage?
The fact that the gay and lesbian rights movement has put same-sex marriage at the top of its agenda is not hard to fathom: marriage is the hub from which so many of our cultural, legal, economic, and religious institutions extend. ... Then why do I think we’ve taken up the wrong battle in fightingMore
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... There has never been a presidential election where the gulf between the Democratic and Republican nominees on gay issues has been wider, when the stakes for our community have been higher, and when getting out the vote in November has been more important.
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THE ASSERTION that Hitler may have been homosexual was made by German historian Lothar Machtan in his 2001 book, The Hidden Hitler [reviewed and debated in the Jan.-Feb. and May-June 2002 issues]. Although dismissed by most experts as poor history based on hearsay and speculation, this book was used as the basis for a newMore
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The first line of dialogue in Big Bill is “Fifteen-love.” In A.R. Gurney’s bio-drama of the pre-World War II tennis phenomenon, Bill Tilden, it is no accident that the tennis term for zero is the adult emotion that, in Tilden’s life, is essentially absent. ...
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