Current Issue

  Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS by Paul Sendziuk University of New South Wales Press, 262 pages   Positive by David Menadue Allen and Unwin, 243 pages   WHEN WE TALK about the history and future of AIDS, we tend to do so through narratives of tragedy and disaster and despair. The reasonsMore

  The Friend by Alan Bray University of Chicago Press 380 pages, $40.     THE FRIEND begins with the author’s dramatic discovery two decades ago at Christ’s College, Cambridge, of a monument marking a tomb in which two men are buried. Placed there in 1684, the monument, as Alan Bray describes it, “is likelyMore

  The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia by Jay Hatheway Palgrave  Macmillan 232 pages, $45.   Jay Hatheway’s The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia traces the progression from the “invention” of the homosexual to the “construction” of a new kind of beast that threatens the very foundation of the civilized world.More

  Language and Sexuality by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick Cambridge University Press 176 pages, $21. (paper)   “WHAT IS SEX?” Language and Sexuality opens with a question that was prompted by President Clinton’s denial that he had “had sex” with Monica Lewinsky. Authors Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, a lesbian and a gay man,More

  Art—A Sex Book John Waters and Bruce Hainley Thames & Hudson 208 pages, $29.95 (paper)   The comedies of John Waters are practical exercises in æsthetic philosophy. This theme is sometimes fairly explicit, as in Pecker, about a young photographer who “sees art when it isn’t there,” and in Cecil B. Demented, in whichMore

The Concrete Sky is a bona fide page-turner, one of those stories that could go in just about any direction and ultimately does. Despite the sometimes implausible plot turns, Moore makes you care about his boys on the run and offers satisfaction that two mismatched people can find each other despite the chaos in theirMore

Rick Whitaker introduces the essays in his new book, The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara: Reading Gay American Writers, by suggesting that a writer’s sexuality may influence not only what he writes, but also how he writes. While this is nothing new in the realm of literary inquiries, it’s a worthy question and willMore

Reviews of The Strange Case Of Edward Gorey, The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial, Contemporary Dynamic Approaches, and Natural Trouble.

  War Against the Animals by Paul Russell St. Martin’s Press. 358 pages, $24.95   THE PREMISE of Paul Russell’s fifth novel, War Against the Animals, quickly unspools to reveal a storyline that’s clearly intended to goose the reader’s sex drive. Cameron, a wealthy, middle-aged gay man, hires a pair of chiseled, blue-collar men—brothers, inMore

Melissa Etheridge has been a lesbian rock icon since 1988, when audiences who had not heard her at clubs and women’s music festivals grabbed her debut album on Island Records. Defying the odds by succeeding in the mainstream as a woman rocker whose work won coverage on VH1 and MTV, as well as in lesbianMore

Readers' thoughts

  THIS FALL, while the Right was still staggering from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, Massachusetts dealt conservatives another body blow when its highest court legalized same-sex marriage. In a 4–3 ruling authored by Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) held that denying marriage to homosexuals violates theMore

The possibility that Abraham Lincoln had sexual relations with other men has been broached in the past, and new research is tending to corroborate the thesis that he did. As one might expect, many Lincoln scholars are bitterly opposed to this view, so it is perhaps not surprising that there’s been a recent flurry ofMore

The following article first appeared in The Boston Phoenix, August 22-28, 2003 issue.

  IT HAS BEEN a strange life after death, that of Edward of Caernarfon, born in Wales on April 25, 1284, St. Mark’s Day in the Catholic faith. This is the boy who grew up to be Edward II of England, who married in 1308, was deposed in 1327, and was murdered at age 43More

  FROM ABOUT 1935 until his death in 1989, the Greek artist Yannis Tsarouchis painted and openly exhibited more studies of men in uniform and more male nudes than any artist outside what might now be called the world of erotica. He was a rough contemporary of two great artists of the male figure, PaulMore

  THERE IS a certain specific risk involved in writing this essay. The current mood in journalism and popular culture welcomes the lighthearted, the upbeat, the optimistic—especially where gay politics is concerned. This discussion of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy will seem quite dismal compared to the recent enthusiasm over the gayification of popularMore

This piece follows up on a feature article by Pawel Leszkowicz on gay art and politics in Poland in the G&LR’s May-June 2003 issue.

  Last year was marked by a number of extraordinary breakthroughs in the political arena, but 2003 was also a year of cultural milestones, with many “firsts” for gay men and lesbians in the mainstream media. Here are a few of the ones most talked about: