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According to the back cover of this oversize, illustrated book, author Jonathan Katz is tackling nothing less than “how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists, including Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley ... and many more.”

Where stories in Time Well Bent layer GLBT themes onto colonialism, the effect is a dreamlike array of possibilities.

ANYONE whose life was impacted in even a small way by the punk-feminist subculture known as Riot Grrrl will find it hard to read Sara Marcus’s thoroughly researched history of the movement and remain seated throughout. From its inception, traced here to 1989 and the creation of the band Bikini Kill, through the dissolution ofMore

STANLEY BARBER STARTS OFF by declaring that this work is “written as a libretto for a sung-through musical,” repeating this in the Epilogue.

ANXIETY, celebration and lust collide in Daniel Allen Cox’s second novel, Krakow Melt, an ode to youthful curiosity and sex drive.

YOUNG CARL BEAN never really knew his father, and he barely knew his birth mother. Born and raised in a poor area of Baltimore, Bean was basically raised by a village of “warm and wonderful women.” He says that he was a girly little boy, soft and feminine, and he was attracted to other boysMore

Dreamer’s Journey is a tremendous work of research, offering sympathetic insight into a gifted, complicated author who created in his work a world to match his odd temperament.

YOU CAN GET TO Hide/Seek, the groundbreaking exhibit of gay art at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., which runs through February 13, 2011, in one of two ways. The first is down a corridor lined with photographs of Elvis Presley. The second is through an exhibit called The Search for Justice displaying blackMore

THIS PAST HALLOWEEN WEEKEND, you couldn’t get a hotel room in Washington for love or money. I wish I could say that the hordes descending on the country’s symbolic heart were heading for the posh Friday night opening of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, the first-ever “gay show”More

BY NIGHTFALL, Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, begins with a quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies concerning the terrifying, unfathomable power of beauty—its ability to rattle our foundations and take us unawares. True to form, Cunningham explores here a region that’s outside the sexual mainstream, whether gay or straight, in this case the story of a straightMore

Letters to the Editor

  “PHOTOGRAPHY is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of tableau vivant,” Roland Barthes remarked, shifting attention away from the medium’s significance as an evolutionary event in the history of pictorial representation. Viewing photography in this way, as a dramatic art, enables us to think about the photograph as an arena in which toMore

NEARLY 200 YEARS AGO, the French novelist Honoré de Balzac created a remarkable character, Vautrin, a charming, hyper-masculine master criminal, and a man who loves men. In three of Balzac’s most popular novels, an important part of the plot turns on Vautrin’s love for an exceptionally handsome, much younger man ...

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788–1824) was the reigning male sex symbol of the early 19th century. His sporadic personal beauty (alternating between plumpness and emaciation), his flamboyant lifestyle, and his real and imagined affairs with women all fed the image. But Byron’s love life also included males. His bisexuality was known, not only within hisMore

THE “REVULSION LETTER” is on its way to the Supreme Court. Triggered by gay and lesbian Americans picketing the White House in 1965, and hidden away in the attic of pioneer gay civil rights activist Frank Kameny until he donated it to the Library of Congress in 2006, this single-spaced, three-page letter established a viciouslyMore

WHEN FUTURE GENERATIONS look back on gay liberation’s role in the greater creation of human consciousness, and what ideas helped shepherd civilization from its most primitive tendencies to more noble evolutionary possibilities, they will, in my opinion, have to spend substantial time studying the Radical Faerie movement, which was launched in 1979.

THE FALL OF 2010 saw a number of widely publicized teen suicides linked to anti-gay bullying across the country. The national GLBT community responded with candlelight vigils, “die-in’s,” and heartfelt homemade videos promising at-risk young people that “It Gets Better.” Kudos to Dan Savage for launching this project; still, it is difficult to lay healingMore

Guest Opinion - Where the hell’s the L? ...

In the 1960’s, Jill [Johnston] had achieved visibility and credibility among those in the know as a chronicler of the New York City avant-garde scene, particularly dance, through her regular column in The Village Voice. In the late 60’s Jill came out in her column, ...

As is our annual custom at year’s end, we bring to mind some of the prominent GLBT writers, artists, and activists that died over the past year.

IN AUGUST, 2010, I traveled from my home in Bangkok to Mandalay, finally to visit the Taungbyon Nat Pwe. Stories have circulated about this “gay” event, but nothing very coherent was available.

“MY PARTNER’S IDEA was we should move somewhere abroad and live there together,” said Dato Gabunia, a 28-year-old Georgian gay male who resides in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. “The thing is, I do not want to move anywhere. I want to live here.” Gabunia is a playwright who has been in a serious relationshipMore

Joan Schenkar is an award-winning wrier and dramatist (see her website at "http://www.joanschenkar.com/). In the following interview, conducted in person last October, she comments on the strange life and even stranger psychology of a novelist whose stories have enthralled millions of readers.

WHEN DID Camille Paglia become so old-fashioned? Last summer, the famed feminist and Sexual Personae author decried the death of rock music in a painfully unhip piece published in The New York Times (6/25/10): “Rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps,” she lamented, since “step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness andMore

Takes on news of the day.