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WHILE family memoirs are often drenched in anguish, Kamal Al-Solaylee’s Intolerable takes the genre to a new level. The Toronto-based journalist and university professor reaches back to his parents’ history, from Yemen in the ’60s through Beirut, Cairo, and back to Yemen up to the Arab Spring, in agonizing, heart-wrenching detail.

  Perv: The Sexual Deviant in Us All by Jesse Bering Scientific American/Farrar Straus & Giroux. 268 pages, $26.   THIS BOOK by Jesse Bering follows closely upon the publication of his earlier book of essays, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human. Like its predecessor, Perv is aMore

It is Colin R. Johnson’s contention in Just Queer Folks that well into the early decades of the 20th century, “what looks from today’s perspective like decidedly queer behavior was anything but uncommon or unheard of in the hinterland.”

  To Eat: A Country Life by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 194 pages, $25.   IN EARLY 1970, when Joe Eck and his partner Wayne Winterrowd moved from Boston to Pepperell, Massachusetts, and into a 211-year-old farmhouse surrounded by wooded land and a vegetable garden, they saw myriad possibilities, andMore

  Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan Alfred A. Knopf. 200 pages, $16.99   IT HAS been just over ten years since David Levithan tossed a hot pink monkey wrench into the machinery of young adult fiction with the publiction of Boy Meets Boy, a full-on romantic comedy complete with a happy ending for itsMore

A LONGTIME CORRESPONDENT for National Public Radio, Frank Browning is the author of two widely discussed books in the field of gay studies: The Culture of Desire (1993) and A Queer Geography (1996). His explorations of gay history and gay identity have been praised as expansive and provocative, engaging and readable. His latest work, TheMore

THIS SEDUCTIVE NOVEL follows two couples in 1940 Lisbon as they await an ocean liner for America that will enable them to escape Nazi-occupied Europe with war closing in.

Becoming a Londoner deals with the physical world, social life, and David Plante’s relationship with Nikos.

It was in 1909 that [Amy] Lowell met Ada Russell through mutual friends. Russell, an actress, was in Boston appearing in a play, and the women were drawn to each other right away. It appears that after meeting again in 1912, they started the relationship that lasted until Lowell’s death in 1925 at age 51.

  The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love by Gilles Herrada SelectBooks. 366 pages, $19.95   HOMOSEXUALITY is almost always treated as a mystery and an issue of contention. Why isn’t it just a fact of human life, like red-headedness or left-handedness? Why do we even have to ask where it comes fromMore

Lasting City picks up from McCourt’s birth on July 4th, 1941, and (sort of) recounts his first five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, and in Northport, Long Island.

HISTORIAN Saul Friedländer ventures into Franz Kafka scholarship with panache. Sex, he declares, is the hitherto missing key to interpreting “the poet of shame and guilt.

Stravinsky was married and Craft is heterosexual, so it may seem that this book lacks interest for GLBT readers unless they happen to be fans of 20th-century concert music. However, at least one of its chapters ( “Amorous Augmentations”) touches on the question of Stravinsky’s sexual orientation.

AS MEDICAL SCIENCE presses forward to find a cure for HIV—and as we mark the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS—it’s useful in the compressed timeframe known as “AIDS time” to recall one of the most pivotal moments of the now-33-year-long AIDS epidemic

  RELEASED last fall and now available in home video formats, Four is a gripping and insightful exploration of the lives of four characters who are grappling with their fears and desires around connecting intimately with another person. Adapted from the play Dying City, by Christopher Shinn, Four is a film about loneliness and theMore

Reviews of the books What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, Jack Be Nimble:  The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director, Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter, Thoreau in Love, and The Invention of Heterosexual Culture; and the song Same Love by Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and Miranda Lambert and the album Ryan Amador.

  Rainbow Over Sochi  Russia’s growing hostility to gay rights has come to the world’s attention as we anticipate the Winter Olympics in Sochi. When the German team introduced its uniforms this fall, it was clear that the design referred to the familiar “gay flag” with its six rainbow stripes. And while fashion critics applaudedMore

  Aquarium Contests Cruelty Charge To the Editor: An opinion piece by Dan Mathews [senior VP of PETA, in the Nov.-Dec. 2013 issue] gave a distorted and inaccurate portrayal of a recent event at Georgia Aquarium and made inappropriate accusations based more on his detractor opinion than fact. In the article, “Party Out of Bounds,”More

  I HAD a routine procedure a year ago in a famous New York hospital, a heart catheterization (when a wire is inserted up a vein into your heart to see if you have any blockages). My heart turned out to be fine but the wire apparently knocked loose some plaque, which brought on threeMore

  EVERY AUGUST around the 25th I fall into a peculiar mood that puzzles me until I realize that it was the day on which I was conscripted by the U.S. Army. In the summer of 1966 the Vietnam War was on, and I did not want to go there. But turning eighteen, I’d beenMore

THE FRONT RUNNER would never have been written if I hadn’t started running myself. It started in summer of 1968

  IF “GAY THEATER” is defined as being by, for, and about uncloseted gay people, then 2014 arguably marks the 50th anniversary of the genre’s existence. In 1964, despite a social climate of homophobia that pervaded American life for the second third of the 20th century, two one-act plays presented Off-Off-Broadway at the Caffe CinoMore

JOHN RECHY’S City of Night was published fifty years ago. The novel is a frank account of the adventures of a male hustler who wanders restlessly around the country in the late 1950s

Williams extended to sexual behavior his own disgust with dishonesty, insisting that people have the courage to acknowledge the nature of their desires.

  Stranger by the Lake Directed by Alain Guiraudie Les Films du Worso, et al. Blue Is the Warmest Color Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche Quat’sous Films, et al.   IT MAY BE a coincidence that two French films with strong gay or lesbian content were featured in this fall’s New York Film Festival just aMore

  JOHN MITZEL, the proprietor of Calamus Bookstore—Boston’s GLBT bookstore—died on October 4 in his home in Arlington, Massachusetts. His death was the result of a long series of physical ailments, some related to alcohol and most recently a battle with oral cancer. Mitzel—as he was publicly known to everyone, though some friends, myself included,More

  AS IS OUR CUSTOM, we reflect on members and friends of the GLBT community who died during the last twelve months. All deaths were in 2013 unless otherwise indicated. Richard Adams, a gay activist in the fight for marriage equality, died in Hollywood after a brief illness on December 17, 2012, at age 65.More

  THE FOLLOWING is based upon my personal observations of Saudi Arabian society as an English language teacher over a four-year period. Throughout my time in Saudi I lived in four cities: Jubail, Dammam, Medina, and Riyadh. The first thing one notices in Saudi Arabia is the segregation of the sexes, which is virtually completeMore

OVER the last thirty years, Evan Wolfson has been everywhere fighting the good fight for GLBT equality.

  Closer To The Truth Cher Warner Bros. Records   WELL, our über-goddess is at it again. Defying all industry expectations, the Lazarus of pop has a new album, Closer To The Truth, and it debuted at number three on the Billboard charts, her highest-charting solo album ever, even beating the behemoth Believe that crestedMore

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