The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from January 2007

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from January 2007

January-February 2007: "venerability".(same sex marriage)
January 1, 2007... This is the "aging" issue, and I'll get to that topic in a roundabout way, but let me start by remarking on a discussion that a piece in our last issue provoked. John D'Emilio's article, "The Marriage Fight Is Setting Us Back," drew more...

Challenging the marriage imperative.(GUEST OPINION)(Column)
January 1, 2007... Considering how the marriage issue has been framed by the mainstream media, it's no wonder most fair-minded straight people and even many gay people--notably those who've been colonized by news outlets that blindly uphold the status quo--think...

John D'Emilio's rap on marriage.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... To the Editor, In John D'Emilio's article, his strongest point is this: reaction against the campaign for marriage equality "has created a vast body of new antigay laws." Despite my own marriage on the steps of San Francisco's City Hall...

Gay rodeos not a sign of progress.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... To the Editor: This is in response to Patricia Nell Warren's article back in the July-August 06 issue, in which she discusses the phenomenon of gay rodeos without making any reference to the ethical implications of this "sport." I for one...

Semantics of liberation.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... To the Editor: Judith A. Peraino's "Song of the Sirens" [Sept.-Oct. 06 issue] is an excellent work, except, in my opinion, for a single part of a single sentence (in itals.): "Savagery, specifically the tearing and eating of raw flesh...

Robert Browning's metier.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... To the Editor: These days, when any historical figure who has looked askance at someone of the same sex is qualified anachronistically as "gay," I cannot let stand Richard Canning's statement (Nov.-Dec 2006 issue) that "Robert Browning was...

Correction.(Correction notice)
January 1, 2007... Due to an editing error in a review of Darwin Porter's Katharine the Great in the Nov.-Dec. 06 issue, it was incorrectly reported that Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were married. In fact, while their affair lasted for many years, they...

Gerry Studds, first out congressman, dies at 69.(In memoriam)
January 1, 2007... Gerry Studds led a remarkable life, one well worthy of a memoir. That he decided not to write one was characteristic of the man. Articulate, witty, and enormously smart, he captivated audiences large and small; he was, in short, charismatic....

Passages 2006.(IN MEMORIAM)(person supporting same sex marriage )(Obituary)
January 1, 2007... Perhaps I say this every year, but it seems we lost an extraordinary number of major figures who contributed significantly to the GLBT community in 2006--people who made a difference in the advancement of gay and lesbian rights, others who...

How to get seniors on our side.(BTW)(same sex marriage accepted at Arizona)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The bad news is that seven more states passed ballot measures in the recent election banning same-sex marriage--and in some cases civil unions--in their state constitutions. The good news is that one state, Arizona, became the first to vote...

Sloganeering.(BTW)(Gay & Lesbian Center launches campaign on HIV)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... It was bound to be controversial when L.A.'s Gay & Lesbian Center launched a $50,000 print ad campaign featuring the slogan, "HIV is a gay disease," though perhaps they didn't anticipate the ferocity of the outcry. Part of the slogan's shock...

Annals of unintended consequences.(BTW)(Wisconsin votes Democratic Party for supporting same sex marriage)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Another twist on the theme of anti-gay-marriage propositions occurred in Wisconsin, which passed the measure by a disturbingly healthy margin. There it was the state's Republican Party that orchestrated the initiative in the hope that its...

One hip secretary.(BTW)(Mark Dybul appointed as AIDS coordinator)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Even as the "Foleygate" scandal was playing itself out last October--right before the election, no less, and Republicans were lying low on the whole gay thing while stumping from town to town--a remarkable thing happened in the nation's capital...

The missing seven percent.(BTW)(10 percent of male are homosexual)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Kinsey just won't go away. He's famous for having said that ten percent of the male population is predominantly homosexual, but just about everyone today has conceded that the true figure is probably much lower, perhaps closer to three or four...

It takes a "Muscle Mary".(BTW)(gay bashers in Ireland are arrested )(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Police in Dublin, Ireland, have launched a program to arrest gay-bashers in city parks, and they're doing it by going undercover in gay cruising areas in the guise of "Muscle Marys" (as they're apparently called in Ireland). Dubbed the "Pink...

The gay Republican conundrum.(ESSAY)
January 1, 2007... EVEN AS the perimeters of GLBT freedom have widened in the 21st century, the once vibrant community of activist gay Republicans finds itself in a crisis threatening its future viability in American political life. The shift in control of...

'Beauty will save the world'.(ESSAY)(Karl Stuecklen )(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... This article first appeared on Jill Johnston's website (www.jilljohnston.com) as her "Johnston Letter" for September 2006 (volume 2, number 3). I WAS AT STANLEY'S, my dentist, talking to Gail, his hygienist, while she cleaned my teeth. We...

Italy: politics under the Vatican's glare.(INTERNATIONAL SPECTRUM)
January 1, 2007... On June 6, 2006, in a document titled "Family and human procreation," the Pontifical Council for the Family asserted its strong commitment to the traditional family and its opposition to gay couples, whose attempts to obtain legal recognition...

The coming GLBT senior boom.(ESSAY)(gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered)
January 1, 2007... GLBT ELDERS experience a number of particular concerns as they age. In a recent study (Shippy, et al., 2001), three in four gay elders reported not being completely open about their sexual orientation to healthcare workers. Discrimination...

Fifty.(ESSAY)(physical appearance)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... FIFTY. I stretch all I've got around it, but barely grasp its half. I thought that cresting at the half-century mark might spark a wrenching essay or clever poem but, so far, the whole thing leaves me flat. Another Monday. Another Monday at the...

The Wages of Meaning.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... How everything makes us human-- desire, curiosity, decay, thistles, sunlight a patchwork through leaves, hunger for wide skies that strum fields of foxtail and buffalo grass-- the men whose bodies I've renewed and stretched into...

Terrence McNally: dramaturgist of a gay century.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... Terrence McNally doesn't consider himself an activist playwright, but he does believe that in the scheme of things "All theatre is political." The winner of four Tony Awards, McNally, at 67, is still a man of the theater in his time, on the...

Ain't over yet.(Perspectives on Intergenerational Love)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... DAYS BECOME more imaginary the older you get; that is, more clotted by images of what might have been but wasn't, of impossible love affairs, valises stuffed with money, at least one Nobel Prize, embroidered antimacassars of one's youth, that...

Needed: a new word for 'gerontophil'.(Perspectives on Intergenerational Love)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... THE HAPPIEST COINAGE of the late 20th century is the word "chubby chaser." It's descriptive, alliterative, and it rolls off the tongue. It has immense charm and it satisfies H. L. Mencken's demand that a new coinage be "ingenious and amusing."...

Five couples.(Perspectives on Intergenerational Love)(Viewpoint essay)
January 1, 2007... INTERGENER ATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS--those in which the two partners are at least twenty years apart--seem to thrive in the gay male world, greatly surpassing the corresponding rate of occurrence in the straight world. It's a phenomenon that many...

Day of the Dead.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... San Francisco I step into the city with your breath in my hair. When fog nests in the strands I give up your traces to the streets strung tight across hills. Winter's blear settles. Cold comes steady across the Bay. How have we...

'Openhouse' takes root by the Bay.(Marcy Adelman)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... Marcy Adelman, Ph.D., founded Rainbow Adult Community Housing back in 1998 as a community group dedicated to serving older GLBT people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Changing its name to "openhouse" in 2004, the project has morphed into a...

Memory at 53.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... Why am I here when I was there, the inner voice stutters. How bewildering, familiarity. Yesterday's question mark. That face on the opposite side of the room, the one consuming breakfast was someone I had sex with in 1978....

Fifty years of Tea and Sympathy.(ESSAY)(Movie review)
January 1, 2007... IN 1950, playwright Andre Gide wrote that "in the theater, homosexuality is always a false accusation, never a fact of life." Vincente Minnelli's film Tea and Sympathy, which opened on movie screens fifty years ago last fall, revolves around...

The gay Gaze in Ancient Rome.(The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire by Shadi Bartsch University of Chicago Press. 325 pages, $45. SHADI BARTSCH traces the development of Platonic theories about "boy-love"...

While New York slept.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons Basic Books. 431 pages, $27.50 CO-AUTHORS Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons have written an ambitious and...

Turning.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... You are forced into icy corsets of virtue by the crafty generosities of younger friends; they grant you the pure and the true-- out of the way of their quick ends. Best to keep apart then, their old crag, a fixed and-baked clay face...

An authority on the mockeries of age.(Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings by Ned Rorem Shoemaker & Hoard. 240 pages, $25. THERE IS no elegant design to Facing the Night. Ned Rorem's new book is divided simply into three parts: diary entries made...

Orlando as a woman.(Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West by Karyn Z. Sproles University of Toronto Press. 166 pages, $29.95 (paper) WITH DESIRING WOMEN, Karyn Z. Sproles adds to the large volume of criticism and...

A friend of Dorothy.(Dorothy Parker)(Under the Rainbow: An Intimate Memoir of Judy Garland, Rock Hudson and My Life in Old Hollywood)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Under the Rainbow: An Intimate Memoir of Judy Garland, Rock Hudson and My Life in Old Hollywood by John Carlyle Carol & Graf. 325 pages, $26.95 "I HAVE, I admit, the old-fashioned yen to go happily to my grave with one foot in the...

War and love.(The Night Watch)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... The Night Watch by Sarah Waters Riverhead Books. 544 pages, $15 (paper) IN HER LATEST NOVEL, The Night Watch, Man Booker Prize nominee Sarah Waters explores the experience of same-sex and other "deviant" forms of love in World War...

A filmmaker's progress.(Pedro Almodovar)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Pedro Almodovar by Marvin D'Lugo University of Illinois Press, 176 pages, $19.95 FOR NEARLY A QUARTER of a century, Pedro Almodovar has been crafting films of increasing beauty and complexity. They are films that explore the...

Postcolonial Kamasutra.(Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West Ruth Vanita Palgrave Macmillan. 288 pages, $65. IN LOVE'S RITE, Ruth Vanita takes us through a memory hole of Asian history to a world where the forgotten (sometimes suppressed)...

Stoned on Stonewall.(Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade, 1974-1983)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade, 1974-1983 Photographs by Hank O'Neal; captions by Allen Ginsberg; preface by William S. Burroughs; essay by Neil Miller Abrams Image. 160 pages, $24.95 IN THE OLD DAYS of...

'Holy hustlers' of the Levant.(Jacob's Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Jacob's Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel by Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. Continuum. 288 pages, $26.95 (paper) TO PROPOSE, on the one hand, that "the narratives of the Hebrew Bible lend themselves to a...

Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity by Afsaneh Najmabadi Univ. of California Press. 363 pages, $24.95 This provocative piece of scholarship does not merely tell a history...

Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews.(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews by Gary M. Kramer Southern Tier Editions (Haworth). 225 pages, $16.95 (paper) This snappy, readable overview of recent queer movies, broadly defined, is divided into short articles...

Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology by George Prochnik Other Press. 480 pages, $29.95 I cannot overstate how important I believe this book to be. It is a book about a short stay...

Conferences/events.(Bulletin Board)
January 1, 2007... National Multicultural Conf. & Summit will explore the psychology of multiple identities, and will take place in Seattle, Jan. 24-26, 2007. For more info, visit: www.multiculturalsummit.org. FORGE Forward 2007 Conf. for transgendered people...

Burnout revisited: women's cultural spaces.(ART MEMO)
January 1, 2007... Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, women's bookstores and concert events carved out important spaces for cultural expressions of lesbian feminism in North America. During the latter part of that era I belonged to a private lesbian club called...

The sex film project (USA).(Shortbus)(Movie review)
January 1, 2007... Shortbus Written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL has discovered a secret and he wants to share it with you. It is this: sex is good for what ails you. Whatever your problem--loneliness, a failed marriage,...

Homoerotic art of the Third Reich.(The Art of Arno Breker Zur Diskussion gestellt )(Book review)
January 1, 2007... The Art of Arno Breker Zur Diskussion gestellt ("Put Up for Discussion") Schleswig-Holstein-Haus, Schwerin, July 22-Oct. 22, 2006 NORTHERN GERMAN market towns don't get much more idyllic and sleepy than Schwerin. All that changed this...