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Steve Finbow has written a brief biography of Allen Ginsberg as part of the Critical Lives series published in England.

... “How did Proust read?” it begins. “As a child, like all of us: for the plot and characters. But even at a very young age, reading was for him a very serious business, and he was outraged by the fact that it could be considered by grownups as something one did to amuse oneself.”More

Taylor was rarely given her due as an actor during her career, but she always saw herself as a serious actress: “The emotion has got to be there behind your eyes, behind your heart. You can never act superficially and get away with it.” Certainly her Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1967)More

A review of 9 poetry books; Slow Lightning, Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses, When We Become Weavers, Among the Leaves:  Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience, Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry, Skin Shift, Butcher’s Sugar, and Later Poems Selected and New: 1971-2012.

[Coal to Diamonds] is a first-person narrative in the straightforward language of a girl from rural Arkansas who escaped a traditional fate of lifelong poverty and oppression by following her dream. ...

THIS FASCINATING STUDY explores three places in Asia and the Pacific where gays have created and defended a community for themselves. Atkins, a communications professor at Seattle University, tells the stories of Bali, Bangkok, and Singapore on their separate journeys to becoming, respectively, the æsthetic capital, the pleasure capital, and the intellectual capital of theMore

In All We Know: Three Lives, Lisa Cohen rescues from history’s dustbin the lives of three extraordinary, glamorous, brilliant, independent lesbians. Cohen’s project is a welcome addition to the Herstory Project.

A new graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, by Nicole Georges, is an example of this genre. A Portland-based lesbian cartoonist and zinester, Georges has crafted an autobiography on secrets kept from her family, her lovers, and herself. With a sweet indie graphics sensibility and a light narrative tone, this is a tender look at familyMore

These anthologies (When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwestern Experience and Among the Leaves:  Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience) feel groundbreaking, because they provide a loving Midwestern home for queer people. Some of the poets write with nostalgia about the rural homes they left for the city. ...

Some of the most valuable chapters in My Friend Tom are the ones devoted to close readings of both Williams’ poetry and the poets who influenced him.

THE QUEEREST SHOW on Broadway in the summer of 2012 didn't feature drag queens, buff chorus boys, or lesbian love songs. Instead, audiences attuned to the codes of same-sex relationships may have been surprised to find the delightful zing of transgression in an old-fashioned chestnut about the love between an amiable alcoholic and a six-foot-tallMore

... Knowing Kearns, I knew to think twice. I first met him in 1999 as a colleague working to open USC’s ONE Institute & Archives. I interviewed him formally in the summer of 2005 as part of my research on the history of GLBT activism in Los Angeles. My second interview with Kearns, occasioned forMore

Reviews of the books Chicago Whispers:  A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall, Secrets and Strangers, and A Long Day’s Evening, the play My Big Gay Italian Wedding, and the album “The Beatles” by AG.

From the Sometimes-these-things-write-themselves File A 911 call came into the call center in Springfield, Illinois, from a man saying in a muffled voice: “I’m stuck in a pair of handcuffs and I’m going to need help getting out before it becomes a medical emergency.” Turns out it was Father Tom Donovan of the St. AloysiusMore

Reader's thoughts

The following article arrived as an unsolicited manuscript from the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where the author is incarcerated. Because I was unable to interact with him in preparing the piece for publication, I decided to run it almost verbatim, making only a few minor corrections. However, the piece was quite long andMore

UNTIL RECENTLY, it seemed that camp was and would remain a phenomenon of the 20th century—camp, in all its manifestations: as a theory of æsthetics and style; as coded communication and performativity; as a site of humor and parody; as provocative social commentary.

FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, same-sex marriage has dominated the American political landscape, but this is not the first time in history this issue has made front-page news. In 1971, The San Francisco Chronicle declared that a “gay marriage boom” was under way. ...

LAST AUTUMN, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York hosted the first-ever academic conference on Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries. It was an odd hybrid of a gathering, with many longtime Faeries rubbing shoulders with Marxist theorists and queer academics-a rubbing thatMore

TWO YEARS AGO [March-April 2011], I reviewed Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries: The Sixties in this publication, in an essay called “Too Much Information!” The title was mine; the exclamation point was not. While I found much of value in the book, as I had in the previous volume, which covers 1939 to 1960, I registered anMore

THE FIRST FAMOUS PERSON I wrote to when I moved to New York in 1980 was Howard Moss, the long-time poetry editor of The New Yorker. He was the one person, it seemed, that every literary figure—from W. H. Auden to Elizabeth Bishop, Lillian Hellman, or John Updike—knew and liked as a friend.

A RELATIONSHIP can work like an addiction, giving a taste of infinite satisfaction while keeping its members clinging to each other.  In Keep the Lights On, Ira Sachs (The Delta, Forty Shades of Blue) has brilliantly documented the arc of his own troubled nine-year relationship with literary agent, author, and addict Bill Clegg.

Michelangelo Signorile's radio program airs each weekday on SiriusXM OutQ. He is editor-at-large of Huffington Post Gay Voices, from which this piece has been adapted.

Editor’s Note: The sudden, shocking death by suicide of 26-year-old Aaron Swartz, programming genius and free speech activist, provoked a huge Internet backlash when it was learned that he was being aggressively pursued by a Massachusetts prosecutor for the alleged crime of downloading scholarly articles from the database GSTOR. The case raises all kinds ofMore

AUTHOR of thirteen books, a play, a libretto for a dance opera, and several cut-and-paste novels, Seattle-based Rebecca Brown has been dubbed “the greatest secret of American letters” by literary bad boy Dale Peck.

Madonna, still the patron saint of scandal, has lost none of her power to piss people off.

... Golden Age is a provocative meditation on the overlapping nature of sexual love and artistic creation. Both the artist and the lover strain to grasp what is ineffable, creating in one’s mind a beauty that can never be fully realized, much less tangibly enjoyed. ...