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  ON DECEMBER 20, 2013, the Ugandan Parliament passed the long-debated Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Although it originally proposed the death penalty for a variety of homosexual acts, including the dissemination of pro-gay propaganda, international attention and the threat of sanctions from Western countries convinced Uganda’s parliament and President Yoweri Museveni to replace the death penalty withMore

THIS ROLLICKING STORY of the Lesbian Avengers, a “direct action group” that was founded by six organizers in New York in the early 1990s, shows why historical accounts are best told by eyewitnesses. Kelly Cogswell doesn’t attempt to supply the reader with a full set of organizational records, but she describes a defining moment inMore

GROWING UP in South Africa, journalist Mark Gevisser (b. 1964) was obsessed with maps: in particular, an archaic book of streets and neighborhoods that helped him play a pretend game with himself. It was only many years later that Gevisser realized that segments of his home town of Johannesburg—specifically the neighborhoods in which the city’sMore

Lasting City takes its impetus from one of the author’s strongest early childhood memories: the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Playing in the sand on a beach where he’s making a “sand castle” of the Flatiron Building, the author’s work is soon trampled by bullies.

In How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying, [Carol] Leifer shares stories from life at home and on the road, shaping them into a useful (and funny) collection of tips for up-and-comers in any field.

Film historian Matthew Kennedy’s scintillating new book, Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, is brimming with gossip and back stories about studio hubris and outrageous movie star tantrums that resulted in financial and artistic disasters, ending the lucrative roadshow tradition.

  License to Wed: What Legal Marriage Means to Same-Sex Couples by Kimberly D. Richman New York University Press.  271 pages, $39.   “License” can mean official permission to do something or the chance to go beyond normal constraints, and both meanings are implied in the title of License to Wed. The subtitle sums upMore

  Tiger Heron by Robin Becker University of Pittsburgh Press.  80 pages, $15.95   ROBIN BECKER is a well-established American poet and literary critic and professor at Penn State. Her eighth book, Tiger Heron, is a balanced collection of poems that tell stories and draw portraits with a clear eye and a steady hand. TheMore

  Queer Zines and Queer Zines 2 Edited by AA Bronson and Philip Aarons Printed Matter, Incorporated 271 pages, $25. (vol. 1) 264 pages, $25. (vol. 2)   ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED in 2008 to accompany an exhibit in New York, Queer Zines has been re-issued in an expanded edition. Updates and corrections have been made toMore

Daniel Schreiber, a Berlin-based journalist and critic, originally published this biography in Germany in 2007 as Susan Sontag: Geist und Glamour. Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer as Susan Sontag: A Biography, the book is for the most part an engaging and fascinating life story ...

THIS COMPREHENSIVE biography covers the life and writings of one of the best-known American novelists of the 20th century, from his birth and early life in St. Louis, Missouri, to his final years in Lawrence, Kansas.

  See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad Cleis Press. 403 pages, $16.95   See a Little Light, titled after one of Bob Mould’s best-known songs, is not only an account of a particular time in musical history and one man’s career; it’s a coming-out story asMore

The title Hold Tight Gently comes from the section of poems about AIDS from [Essex] Hemphill’s unpublished manuscript Domestic Life.

In Cinema of Sergei Parajanov Steffen makes great use of the documentation surrounding Parajanov’s work, which includes all sorts of scripts and literary treatments, original texts that served as the basis for his films, official Communist Party letters and memos, and Parajanov’s speeches and interviews.

  Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography By Richard Rodriguez Viking. 235 pages, $26.95   WHAT MANY LISTENERS remember about the commentaries that Richard Rodriguez delivered for years on the PBS Newshour is the sound of his voice: the measured, gentle, often sorrowful tone of a man seeking to understand some mystery at the heart of hisMore

  DAVID ROUSSEVE is artistic director and choreographer of Reality, a dance theater company that has toured extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, and South America. In addition, Roussève is professor of choreography at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he has taught since 1996.          Roussève is known for his highly original formMore

  NOWADAYS, when so many poets write about popular culture, it seems inconceivable that there was a time when they did not. But there was such a time. Up until the 1970s, only two poets had truly rushed in where other poets feared to tread: Frank O’Hara and Edward Field. O’Hara published his Meditations inMore

  Planet of the Gay Apes  The paranoid style of American politics is such that it’s a safe bet that eventually every conspiracy theory that can be conceived will be conceived—and then broadcast by some conehead with a talk radio show. But occasionally one of these conspiracies catches our eye. So there’s a right-wing radio hostMore

Readers thoughts

THERE WERE three of them. The one on the left was a macho boy, all muscles and cool hair. On the right, linking arms with him, was a petite, girly boy, camping it up and twirling a parasol. Trailing slightly behind them came a third, gender neutral. They were Cuba’s new gay liberation vanguard. I’dMore

  The Homoerotics of Orientalism by Joseph Allen Boone Columbia University Press 520 pages, $50.   ONCE EVERY DECADE or so, a book appears that revolutionizes the field of GLBT studies. For many critics, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality may have been that title in the 1970s. John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and HomosexualityMore

  CLAUDE FREDERICKS made the final entry in his lifelong journal on December 26, 2012, two weeks before his death. He died at his beloved homestead in Pawlet, Vermont, with his “sweet friend” and husband Marc Harrington at his side. They first met at Bennington College, where Claude taught classics and Marc was an undergraduate.More

  A PAIR of itinerant fishermen on a makeshift raft snag what looks like a drowned man floating face-down in the Bay of Havana. As they unhook the rotting corpse, their quarry rears up to take a bite out of one of the fishermen. The friends harpoon the cadaver and paddle to the waterfront, swearingMore

  “NO GOING BACK!” The message was clear after the Supreme Court of India’s decision to recriminalize homosexuality by reversing the judgment of the Delhi High Court that decriminalized adult consensual same sex acts in private. The complete reversal of the Delhi High Court’s progressive judgment came as a shock to the Indian LGBT community.More

  AS A GAY VIDEO HISTORIAN, I hate being late, because documenting the “before” is just as important as the actual event and the aftermath. So I was pissed off when Haji, my driver, arrived an hour late because he didn’t know how to set the wake-up alarm on his new phone. His old phoneMore

Love is Strange, starring John Lithow and George Molina, showed most recently at the Provincetown International Film Festival in June.

  MOST READERS of this magazine are fully aware of what’s going on now in Russia, and far be it from me to preach to the choir. That the law prohibiting “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors” is odious need scarcely be argued. Under the guise of protecting the young from being indoctrinated, theMore

  HE WAS the “Johnny Cash of New York rock,” said Mick Jagger. He was “pop’s truly great poker face,” said Bono. He was Lou Reed, co-founder of the avant-garde rock band the Velvet Underground and a prodigious solo artist whose career spanned a half-century. If the most famous question in rock ’n’ roll belongsMore

  SO, Fred Phelps is dead. But how to acknowledge the death of someone who was so notorious for the way in which he celebrated the deaths of gay people, among others? For those who don’t know, Phelps led the Westboro Baptist Church for decades. Most of its members were his own relatives. Strangely enough,More

NOW in his eighties, Charles Rowan Beye holds the title Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Beye is better known to the world as a translator of the ancient Greek classics and as a scholar whose books include Odysseus: A Life (2005)More

  Zanele Muholi Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass. February 1 to April 27, 2014.   “I  WANT to be counted in South African history. I have to write that part of history,” observes Zanele Muholi, a 42-year-old photographer who lives and works in Johannesburg. And so, she explains, “I embarked on a journeyMore