Blog Posts View all
Keeping Queer Culture Alive in Wartime Kyiv
By Finbarr Toesland
Members of Kyiv’s queer community are working to keep creativity alive as their city undergoes seismic changes. Queer nightlife and connection are still possible.
Let’s Choose Each Other Again
By Randal C. Smith
No relationship is perfect. No love is untouched by disappointment. No bond survives without negotiation, humility, and repair. What matters isn’t whether love lasts forever.
Was Achilles Gay? Wrong Question.
By Asa Williams
Before we call Achilles and Patroklos “gay lovers,” we must examine both the Greek language of love and the dangers of retroactively imposing modern categories.
Here's My Story View all
A Higher Calling for Felipe
By Michael Varga
I met him at a Paris disco in 1986 when I was on leave from my assignment in Dubai. Over the next seven years we didn’t see each other often, but we got together whenever we could.
A Decade of Fellow Travelers
By Kevin Newbury
The Fellow Travelers opera is based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, a powerful gay love story set against the backdrop of the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare.
Finding Hope in Minneapolis
By Jamie Valentino
Perhaps I was naïve to think the risk of a natural disaster could make the federal government pretend it still held any regard for human life.
Book Reviews
While Isherwood Was Off Writing…
DON BACHARDY’S prolific sixty-year career as an artist—his body of work encompasses about 17,000 portraits—would be reason enough for a 400-page book about him.
Life After Bowers
In The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS, author Martin Padgett pays tribute to Hardwick, the plaintiff in the 1986 case. In doing so, …
Short Reviews
Brief reviews of the books: The CBGB Conspiracy; Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950; Maryville; and Caravaggio: 1571-1610; and the film, Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Florence in the Time of Leonardo
Phil Melanson keeps Florenzer engaging by setting this novel about Leonardo da Vinci amid a power struggle between the Pope and the Medici family of Florence.
Friends of Society
Brian T. Blackmore begins To Hear and to Respond, his history of Quaker support of homosexuals, in the years following World War II, when the U.S. was engulfed in a wave of homophobia. Police entrapment of men seeking sex with men filled prisons with convicted sex offenders.
The Music Set Us Free
IN THE WORDS of queer musicologist Philip Brett, “all musicians, we must remember, are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room.” Author Jon Savage seeks to demonstrate this point across almost 800 pages of The Secret Public, tracing the connection between music and queerness from the 1950s to about 1980, but he also goes well beyond.
