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Review of Isherwood on Writing

Review of Sex Variant Woman

THE COVER of Terence Kissack’s book depicts a rainbow flag overlaid with the portraits of Benjamin Tucker, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, John William Lloyd, and Leonard Abbott-five important figures within the American anarchist movement during the early years of the 20th century.

THE HEART of this little book is a 72-page essay, Poulenc’s Priest, by the British novelist Paul Bailey. The title stems from an anecdote about the gay composer Francis Poulenc that appeals to Bailey’s “sense of what is right and wrong”: “[Poulenc] confessed to his priest that he’d had a sexual encounter in a parkMore

IN A POEM called “The Dump,” one of the last published by the late Thom Gunn, he describes a dream in which he wanders around a lifetime’s worth of ephemera left behind by a departed friend and fellow author. He sees vast mounds of paper, collections of every note and draft and manuscript the writerMore

FOR SOME TIME NOW, familiarity with the works of Klaus Mann (1906-1949) in the English-speaking world has been limited to a small but devoted cadre of readers. Understandably, Klaus Mann, a noteworthy literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, will forever be obscured by his much more famousMore

DANCE HALL ROAD opens with a teenager, Jimmy Drake, handing Adrian Drury a picture of an electric chair. What young Adrian has done isn’t clear, but one girl is dead and another is injured.

AIDEN SHAW’S 1996 novel Brutal was, with apologies to Thomas Hobbes, a nasty, brutish, and short book about Paul, an HIV-positive male prostitute. It was a memorable effort by a writer who made his name in gay porn.

FOR TEN YEARS, Bob Morris’ mother, Ethel, suffered from a blood disease that made her weak and frail. She was a beauty in her day, and she loved to sing and dance, but the disease slowly stole these pleasures away. Although Morris missed her, he admits in Assisted Loving that her death was a bitMore

THIS IS a timely book, with three reasons for existing. Images of Ancient Pederasty offers: first, the series of intelligent and resourceful essays by Lear and Cantarella on various aspects of the representation of pederasty in Athenian vase-painting; second, more than 110 illustrations of the most significant examples of the different typologies; and third, anMore

IN 1983, when Torch Song Trilogy won the Tony Award for Best Play, John Glines, who produced Harvey Fierstein’s epic gay play from its humble beginnings way off Broadway, thanked his lover. It was the first time a gay man ever publicly thanked his partner on national television (and it would not be the last).More

This exclusive, face-to-face interview was conducted in early September.

Reviews of Hiding in Plain Sight, The Nancy Book, and Troubled by RM Vaughan.

Commentary on current events

Letters to the Editor

LESS THAN FIVE PERCENT of Allen Ginsberg’s extant correspondence makes it into a recently published volume of his letters, yet it is more than enough. The Letters will doubtless serve a purpose for the many scholars and students of the Beat generation.

AS A BIOLOGIST, I have found the arguments against same-sex marriage misguided—not because the evidence hints at homosexuality being based, at least in part, on biological roots, but because the same arguments that are used to keep same-sex marriage illegal could also be applied to some ostensibly opposite-sex marriages. It may be shocking for someMore

THE FRAUGHT legal and social history of same-sex male relations in Britain over the last thousand years should naturally be of interest to us. Much of American law and cultural practice derive from the mother country. The Puritanism that crossed the sea from England remains a deeply embedded strain in the American psyche.

AMID THE TURMOIL of the French Revolution, one of the little-noticed legal transformations was the axing of ancien régime laws criminalizing “crimes against nature.” The Constituent Assembly of 1789-1791 dropped longstanding (albeit rarely enforced) laws against “sodomy” and “pederasty” in the course of its broad modernization of the penal code in 1791.

IN PURELY VISUAL TERMS, they appeared to be an odd couple. With his exceptionally handsome face etched deeply with a desirable masculine divinity, and held gracefully atop a tall, impeccably dressed build, Sam Wagstaff exuded sophistication, taste, education, old money, and confidence, while his slim younger partner, dressed rebelliously in denim and silver-studded black leather,More

What has changed during glaad’s history is not its strategy but its tactics. The group has not abandoned the tactics of the late 1980’s and early 90’s but instead has added tools to its activist arsenal.

ON A HOT NIGHT in April 2005, I walked with Kasim Mehedi, a worker for an AIDS outreach organization, through a rusty iron gate into the darkness of Hazrat Begum Park in the center of the city of Lucknow, India. During the day, the park is a popular tourist destination where visitors view two ornateMore

THE PASSING of Larry Townsend on July 29th at the age of 77 has robbed the gay, lesbian, and leather communities of one of their pioneering writers, editors, and publishers. Larry Townsend-which was a pseudonym, as it turns out-is perhaps best known as the author of the erotic novel Run Little Leather Boy and ofMore

DEL MARTIN, whose name was inextricably tied to that of her life partner, Phyllis Lyon, for 55 years, died on August 27 in San Francisco at the age of 87, after several years of declining health. The couple was married in San Francisco in early 2008, the first couple to be hitched officially after the CaliforniaMore

... Divas, by design, don’t play well with others, and when it comes to temporality, this diva is downright confrontational. ...

Michael may have lost a small part of his audience after the arrest, but gay and straight fans alike turned out to see him perform on his recent tour celebrating the 25th year of his recording career.

THE RECENT DEATH of Heath Ledger, who made his way into gay cultural history by playing a cowboy with homosexual tendencies in Brokeback Mountain, brings to mind the odd but ongoing presence of the cowboy in gay imagery for more than half a century. The image of the cowboy is a powerful one in AmericanMore