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The Queer Movie Poster Book is definitely a coffee-table book, suitable for flipping through at random or as a cocktail-party conversation piece, but it’s more than mere eye candy, providing a valuable visual history of gay and lesbian culture in the movies.
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The Music Man  Padlock Icon
[Lou] Harrison came out as gay during the McCarthy era and immediately began attending the early meetings of SIR, the Society for Individual Rights, in San Francisco. He took poetry workshops from the poet Robert Duncan and, at SIR meetings, taught Ned Rorem how to do the Charleston. Duncan’s 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society”More
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Ellis Amburn’s 1998 book Subterranean Kerouac, for example, delved deeply into the writer’s ambiguous sexuality. Regina Marler’s new anthology, Queer Beats, breaks new ground in chronicling Beat sexuality.
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White-iana
ARTS AND LETTERS is a collection of previously published articles, essays, and book reviews, some of which were rewritten, reworked, or updated for this compilation.
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  Alexandria:  City of Memory by Michael Haag Yale University Press. 367 pages, $35.   IT IS with considerable authority that Michael Haag offers his latest book, Alexandria: City of Memory. Haag has written several guides to Egypt, is the author and photographer of Alexandria Illustrated, and contributed both the afterword and the notes toMore
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FOR THE ONLY TIME in history the known world was ruled by one man: Alexander the Great. Considered one of the greatest military generals ever, he conquered the world by leading his vast army through 22,000 miles of battles—on foot, no less. But, hey, you can learn that from any history book. What you won’tMore
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In postwar Baltimore, where he was born in 1946 and went to Catholic school, John Waters was an unusual child. The Wizard of Oz may have been his favorite movie, but he rooted for the Wicked Witch. “I even tried dressing up like the Witch to terrify my neighborhood friends,” he wrote in his autobiographicalMore
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BTW
Take on news of the day.
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Letters to the Editor
Reader's thoughts
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    POLITICS AND POP CULTURE have always played off each other in advertising, and nowhere has that link been more clear than in gay-targeted ads. Over the past four decades, while gay men and lesbians emerged from invisible to marginal to actively courted as a consumer market, advertising has come along for the ride,More
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  THE ISSUE OF THE CLOSET comes and goes in gay life. After lying dormant for at least a decade, it had a brief revival this summer when two Washington activists threatened to out people on the staff of Congressmen who supported the Federal Marriage Amendment. Not much came of that. But then Governor McGreeveyMore
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  IN THE 2004 presidential election, sixty percent of the voters said that they supported same-sex marriage or civil unions and 37 percent opposed any form of legal recognition for same-sex relationships. Under normal circumstances in American politics, a sixty to 37 percent margin would be considered to be a stunning victory. Instead, the notionMore
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  SOCIAL RESEARCH on GLBT people has begun to provide the kind of detailed knowledge base that’s been available for other minorities for many decades, so at last we can start to answer some of the basic questions that define this group as  minority. Just how many GLBT people are there as a proportion of theMore
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  The following excerpt is the Conclusion to a new book entitled The Lives of Lesbian Elders: Looking Back, Looking Forward (Haworth Press), which describes the four authors’ research on older lesbians in the U.S. They interviewed a total of 62 women living in California, Oregon, and Washington and ranging in age from 56 toMore
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  ANTI-GAY ACTIVISTS frequently claim that equal rights for gay and lesbian people are a threat to the civil rights of groups they deem “legitimate minorities,” including African-Americans. For example, one flier distributed by a coalition of anti-gay organizations claimed that Martin Luther King, Jr. “would be outraged if he knew that homosexualist extremists wereMore
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  LAST JUNE, a special issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) focused on suicide with the stated goal “to provide insights that might lead to successful prevention programs.” The issue included articles on trends in suicide by young people, suicide attempts and physical fighting among high school students, school-associated suicides, suicide among Hispanics,More
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  THE QUESTION of whether sex “is worth dying for” was posed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality and speaks directly to why, in the third decade of the AIDS epidemic, gay men are still taking sexual risks. Beginning in the mid-1980’s, a combination of factors influenced sexually active gay men around theMore
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SEX IS RARELY DISCUSSED in Bolivia because of the country’s extremely macho Roman Catholic culture, and sexual minorities have a history of being viewed as undesirables who live outside of society’s moral code. But perhaps this part of Bolivia’s homophobic culture is beginning to change, due in small part, perhaps, to director Rodrigo Bellott’s successMore
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  Callas Forever Directed by Franco Zeffirelli Scenario by Martin Sherman   FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI, the director who brought TV audiences the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and movie audiences Mel Gibson as the Sweet Prince in Hamlet and last year’s Tea with Mussolini, has rocketed to new depths with this butchering of singer Maria Callas inMore
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The Election: Theories and Lamentations
  November 3, 2004 Oh dear God please not again. Oh dear God please don’t let it be all convoluted and depressing and messy and stupid and please don’t let it all embarrass us on an international level all over again even more than it already has and even more than it already is andMore
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Passages 2004
  We remember here some of the notable GLBT people—and one non-gay person—who contributed importantly to literature, the arts, and the sciences during their lives, and who died during the past year. Gloria Anzaldúa was 61 when she died on May 16 of complications related to diabetes. She was perhaps best known as co-editor, withMore
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  EDMUND WHITE’S latest book, Arts and Letters, brings together 39 essays spanning nearly twenty years in the career of one of America’s most accomplished men of letters. In addition to his autobiographical trilogy—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony—White has written several other novels as well as anMore
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