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THIS THOROUGH and harrowing book gives us the information we need to assess Oscar Wilde’s place in the creation of modern Western culture and in the history of gay rights. ...

... Shevelow’s book ... is carefully researched and informed by extensive knowledge of English social and cultural life of the period. ...

IN 1890, Weda Cook, a 23-year-old singer, posed for the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. Cook later reflected that the painter had inspired in her “love and fear.” The same emotions haunted Eakins. Eakins Revealed, easily the most provocative book ever written about Thomas Eakins, shows how thoroughly love and fear of the body shaped Eakins’More

AT ONE TURNING POINT in this moving and romantic book, author Jeffrey McGowan, at the time a U.S. Army artillery lieutenant, hits bottom as he goes to war in Operation Desert Storm, knowing that he must hide the fact that he’s gay and in love with a fellow officer. He asks himself: “Why could IMore

... The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky is a fully engaging, compulsively readable stroll-sometimes a race-through the mean streets of Depression-era Toronto with the Lapinsky brothers. ...

PAUL ROBINSON states at the beginning of Queer Wars that “the emergence of gay conservatism as a political and intellectual force is arguably the most important new development in the gay world.” It’s an ambitious claim, and one that would be hard to sustain with reference to today’s political organizations. ...

THIS IS a gripping memoir by a man who spent his early life trying to be “the best little boy in the world.” It’s a quest that seems to be common for many gay boys growing up; it’s just that the path taken by Rich Merritt to be the best was a bit more extremeMore

... Although quite enjoyable, the books are a product of their time, and the reader is transported to the early 1970’s with references to hippies, love-ins, the fuzz (the police), phonograph records, bellbottom dungarees, young people whose motto was “never trust anybody over thirty,” and electric typewriters. ...

... Despite the absence of relevant letters and notebooks, 1903 was actually a fertile writing period for [Gertrude] Stein, who appears to have coped with the grief following her breakup with Bookstaver. She either wrote or blocked out two novellas, Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, and also wrote extensive notes for what would eventually become her massive novel,More

FILM DIRECTOR Gregg Araki was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 17, 1959. The only child of Japanese parents, he grew up in Santa Barbara, eventually earning a masters degree in film production from the USC School of Cinema/TV. He currently lives in Los Angeles. ...

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Reader's Opinions

... That was the beginning of our friendship. Our conversations were few and never about poetry, but I was also reading his work and became intrigued by his use of meter and rhyme. In an era of beat poetry and language poetry and abstract poetry that I couldn’t grasp, Gunn both challenged and comforted meMore

WHEN EILEEN MYLES speaks of “unwriting” herself, she means letting go of socially imposed elements of her identity and behavior in order to clear a space where she can live in the world on her own terms. Her work not only joyfully and unapologetically proclaims her own authenticity, but also strives to claim a placeMore

... If poetry anthologies are any indication of what various segments of society are thinking about at a given moment in time, gay anthologies show not only the importance of rendering visible a love continually at risk. They also trace an arc of how our concept of gay love has changed over time. The firstMore

Three young poets who have published their first books of poetry in the last year participated in a “virtual panel,” moderated via e-mail, in early summer. In it, they tackled such slippery questions as whether there’s a “gay æsthetic” and the limits of sexual explicitness in contemporary poetry. The panelists included the following: Jason SchneidermanMore

THE MARTYRDOM of gay artists has become something of a cliché. Oscar Wilde, if not the first, is perhaps the most famous. But since then were Yukio Mishima, Reinaldo Arenas, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. To this list we could also add the name of the poet Jean Sénac, who’s widely believed to have been theMore

“The West thinks of itself as masculine-big guns, big industry, big money-so the East is feminine-weak, delicate, poor ... but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom-the feminine mystique ... I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.” - Song Linling in M Butterfly IN THE CRITICALLYMore

NEAR THE END of Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, Scott Favor, played by a young Keanu Reeves, looks out from a limousine window to see his friend Mike Waters, played by River Phoenix, asleep on a sidewalk. The scene represents a significant plot shift in the film: ...

Following is a statement issued by the Alternative Lifestyle Foundation (LGBT Humanitarian Project) of Nigeria. This unsolicited report describes a dire situation for gay men and lesbians in one of the world’s poorest countries, and announces the formation of an organization whose mission is to fight anti-gay persecution and to lobby for sexual equality. WeMore

RECENTLY, a first-of-its-kind book, Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets was published by the University of Michigan Press, a collection of interviews with some of the most prominent poets alive who also happen to be gay. On the occasion of the book’s release last June, The Gay & Lesbian Review asked interviewer ChristopherMore

“Caution: Extremely gross and disgusting.” Are these words of warning or enticement? When that’s the disclaimer on sexually explicit gay-related material posted on right-wing websites, it’s hard to know for sure.