The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from July 2008

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from July 2008

July-August 2008: anniversaries.
July 1, 2008... WHY do we celebrate--or mourn, or speechify about, or otherwise mark--anniversaries that happen to end in zero? We know very well that there's nothing intrinsically meaningful about the fact, say, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

When a gay bar closes its doors forever.(GUEST OPINION)(Essay)
July 1, 2008... AS THE FINAL LINE of Whitney Houston's I Want to Dance With Somebody faded into the ether of disco lights and carcinogenic party fog, two men managed a furtive glance across the dance floor. A drag queen--some fantastic pastiche of Joan Rivers,...

Times passed with the late Allan Berube.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2008... To the Editor: John D'Emilio's tribute to Allan Berube in the May-June 2008 issue brings to mind a lasting memory of Allan's weekend visits to my home in Davis, California, to be with his lover Dr. Brian Keith, a post-doctoral student at...

No explanations necessary!(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2008... To the Editor: A breath of fresh air hit me in the face when I picked up the Jan.--Feb. 2008 issue and read Art Cohen's guest editorial, "Whether It's a Choice or Not Is Irrelevant." I was so relieved to know that there was another "queer...

Do homos have a role in evolution?(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2008... To the Editor: I would like to respond to the letter published in the March-April 2008 issue, written by David Williams, where he argues that homosexuality is part of the natural evolutionary order as a means of population control. He then...

Don't forget who else played the Baths!(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2008... To the Editor: In his article on Bette Midler's appearances at the Continental Baths in the early 1970's (May-June 2008 issue), Jeff Auer neglected to mention that Barry Manilow played the piano for Bette at the Baths and worked with her...

Roots.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2008... To the Editor: Your little item about Bulgaria's "race to the bottom" of the homophobic nation barrel missed a certain irony in it. The etymology of the words buggery and Bulgaria. They derive thus: bugger from the Middle English bougre or...

BTW.
July 1, 2008... Safe from Junk Science--But for How Long? As this issue has an "anniversary" theme, and this year being the 35th anniversary of the landmark decision by the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, let...

How CA trumped MA on same-sex marriage.(BREAKING NEWS)(California, Massachusetts)(Reprint)
July 1, 2008... ON THURSDAY, by a 4-3 vote of the state Supreme Court, California followed Massachusetts and became the second state in which same-sex couples can tie the knot as tightly as straight couples can. The Massachusetts opinion of 2003 will always...

It's late, I can't breathe.(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... Mario, a 35-year-old gay actor, knows that he is dying. For five years, the AIDS virus has schooled him in fear. He lies in the prison of his room and gives himself failing grades for his life--an F for his lack of success, an F for his...

The well at 80: hasn't run dry yet.(ESSAY)(The Well of Loneliness)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... EIGHTY YEARS AGO, The Well of Loneliness was condemned by the English courts as an obscene libel and "burned in the King's furnace." The book was indicted and censored solely because of its lesbian theme, for its prose has no spice or sleaze at...

'I'm just too busy to look back'; Michael Ehrhardt queries the playwright at eighty.(INTERVIEW)(Interview)
July 1, 2008... AMERICA'S leading playwright provocateur, now an octogenarian, Edward Albee--whose plays include the scalding Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Woman, and the taboo-smashing The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?--is hardly...

The night Pedro Gonzales came to my room.(Poem)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... It was the weekend after Sputnik circled the earth. We were nineteen-year-olds stationed at an air base in Nebraska. It was late at night. Most of the guys living in the dorm were in town looking for girls. I decided to shower, listen...

Anal bleaching is all the rage.(Poem)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... "Anal bleaching is all the rage." So says the latest magazine. How dearly the world loves a cage. The model's body's bald and beige-- his bottom's got a glossy sheen. Anal bleaching is all the rage. They're selling stuff on...

Tennessee Williams' women in a man's world.(ART MEMO)(Critical essay)
July 1, 2008... THE MAJOR PLAYS of Tennessee Williams--who died just 25 years ago, in 1983--feature women at their core. But for all their centrality as the emotional focal point of these plays, paradoxically enough, these women are without power in the...

The sex diaries of John Maynard Keynes.(Essay)
July 1, 2008... This essay is adapted from a piece that first appeared in MorelntelligentLife.com (Jan. 28, 2008), an on-line edition of The Economist. Published with permission. NOT LONG AGO, at a drinks event at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on Pall...

The Briggs initiative goes national.(Essay)
July 1, 2008... NOVEMBER 1978 MARKS the thirtieth anniversary of the defeat of Proposition Six, the infamous Briggs Initiative, in California, which would have barred lesbians and gay men from teaching in state public schools. The victory for gay rights...

Gaze.(Poem)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... And oh the amazonian old girl, her polo collar straight up, and her eyes averted from the inner-outer whirl of actions indisputably unwise. Administration, I believe? So clean, her clothes, so crisp. An early seventies collegiate...

A brief history of domestic partnerships.(Essay)
July 1, 2008... IT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO, in 1978, that the city of Berkeley passed a sexual orientation non-discrimination ordinance whereby the city promised to provide equal treatment regardless of sexual orientation. When Tom Brougham began working for the...

Homosexual revisited 35 years later.(Essay)
July 1, 2008... I WROTE Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation after six months of living in New York City over the winter of 1970-71, when I was lucky enough to become part of the emerging gay liberation movement, and to work for a time on the newspaper Come...

Coming out Kinsey: sexual behavior at sixty.(ART MEMO)(Alfred Kinsey)(Essay)
July 1, 2008... WHEN ALFRED KINSEY'S Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published sixty years ago, in 1948, I was a very gay, extremely troubled, and nearly suicidal sixteen-year-old high school junior desperately seeking any available evidence that I was...

'As a gay icon, Wilde is flawed': Julia Ann Charpentier converses with Oscar Wilde's Grandson.(INTERVIEW)(Merlin Holland)(Interview)
July 1, 2008... MERLIN HOLLAND is Oscar Wilde's only grandson and the executor of his literary estate, a position he has held since 1977. A journalist and lecturer, Holland started conducting research on Wilde in the mid-1980's. His background in industry and...

Why Romney's candidacy collapsed.(Mitt Romney)(Essay)
July 1, 2008... ONE OF THE MOST remarkable stories of the 2008 presidential campaign was the rise and fall of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in his bid for the Republican nomination. Romney carefully crafted a campaign strategy designed to rally the...

Mango and ailanthus.(Poem)(Brief article)
July 1, 2008... Subtropic winter gets mango to bloom, to stink in that acrid ailanthus way. In both, the odor's hard to mind. Spring's when slim A. unfurls emerald Flags in no-man's-land. Summer yawns, and big M.'s sunset satellites dangle. I...

Poet of the Cinema.(Jean Cocteau)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... WHILE COCTEAU IS perhaps best known to Americans for two of the movies he wrote and directed--La belle et la bete (1946) and Orpheus (1949), which figure on most short lists of great French films --he started as a poet and always saw himself as...

AIDS tales from the terrified years.(Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... WHEN DID WE STOP thinking about AIDS? was it when the combination drug therapies started to keep people alive? Or when the epidemic shifted to the third world with a magntude difficult to graps in any personal way? Or when we became engaged in...

A story of brotherly love.(The Carnivorous Lamb)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... I MUST CONFESS that I had never heard of Agustfn Gomez-Arcos' The Carnivorous Lamb before learning of this new translation of the book, which was originally published in 1975, but now I want to read all of his works. The author's life...

Tory Rebels in an age of prudery.(Feeling Backward: Loss and Politics of Queer History)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... Feeling Backward is a scholarly treatment of queer theory that assumes some knowledge of conventional literary theory. In it, Heather Love makes the argument that we have feelings in common with those who came before us, but early practitioners...

It's late, I can't breathe: a nocturnal narrative.(BRIEFS)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... by Mario Wirz G. Meyer Books. 131 pages, $12.95 (paper) Anglophone readers have a wide spectrum of AIDS memoirs available to them, including such acclaimed titles as Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, Paul Monette's Borrowed Time, and Harold...

Drifting toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... by Kai Wright Beacon Press. 240 pages, $24.95 Journalist-editor Kai Wright sets for himself an ambitious project in this new book of nonfiction. Wright records the stories of Manny, Julius, Carlos, and their friends, gay male teenagers...

The Boy with Black Eyes.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... Brian Lucas Panic Press. 120 pages, $9.95 (paper) Brian Lucas' new novella deserves to be read in one sitting for maximum impact. The story chronicles a teenager named Brian through his first relationship and all that loss of...

Charles Demuth's tectonic passions.(Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... PRIOR TO HIS DEATH from diabetes in 1935, Charles Demuth (1883-1935) completed an extraordinary series of paintings of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which today are ranked among the notable achievements of 20th-century American art. Last fall, Fort...

Visits to dens of deceptive iniquity.(Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... THIS SPRIGHTLY, informative book does a rare thing: it covers entirely new territory in gay literary studies. Queering the Underworld concentrates on the intersection of the fin de siecle phenomenon of "slumming"--that is, taking the bourgeois...

Manslaughter on the Oregon express.(Paranoid Park)(Movie review)
July 1, 2008... INASMUCH AS the teenage boy at the heart of Gus Van Sant's new film has nothing funny or articulate to say, Paranoid Park may become this year's anti-Juno. Lacking the sharp tongue of Juno MacGuff (America's favorite teenage mom), Van Sant's...

Are we different yet?(THEATRE)(The New Century)(Theater review)
July 1, 2008... FOUR FROTHY VIGNETTES, perhaps more properly defined as character studies, are strung together in this new comedy by Paul Rudnick, which I saw in a preview performance in New York. While AIDS and 9/11 are sometimes hovering on the periphery,...

Barcelona: a magnet for Europe's gay couples.(INTERNATIONAL SPECTRUM)(Barcelona, Spain)
July 1, 2008... EUROPE'S CAPITALS and resorts are engaged in what almost seems a contest to see which will become the gayest city or the hottest gay mecca. Berlin is currently touting a new survey suggesting that one in ten residents is gay or bisexual....

Frame of Reference.(The End of the World Book)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... The End of the World Book by Alistair McCartney University of Wisconsin Press. 320 pages, $26.95 AS A KID, I got lost in the 1976 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. Like me and, I assume, many other boys like us, Alistair...

Opus Queen.(The Uncommon Reader)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 120 pages, $15. SHORTLY AFTER FINISHING Alan Bennett's novella, The Uncommon Reader, I began reading Terry Eagleton's After Theory (2004) and came upon the following...

The Remains of A1 Capone.(Son of Scarface)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... WHEN CHRIS KNIGHT was thirteen years old, his beloved father died. It appears there was no love lost between his parents: as soon as the funeral was safely over, his mother flew through the house, gathering all of her husband's belongings. She...

The Family I Almost Had.(The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux St,Martin's Press. 288 pages, $23.95 "THERE IS no such thing," Robert Leleux's boisterous Texas mother, Jessica Wilson, once told him, "as a happy medium." With a funny, hyper-campy yet...

Rambunctious Liaisons.(Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander by Ann Herendeen HarperCollins. 536 pages, $14.95 AFROTHY COMEDY of parlor-room etiquette and sexual wish fulfillment, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander is the bizarro cousin of a...

Doom Is in the Air.(The Stone Gods)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson Harcourt. 224 pages, $24. To SAY that the British novelist Jeanette Winterson takes on the sci-fi genre in her new novel, The Stone Gods--in which, with an air of ironic fatalism, she relates an...

Conferences/Events.(Brief article)(Calendar)
July 1, 2008... A Place At The Table conference for progressive, inclusive Christians will be held June 27-29 in Indianapolis. For more info, visit: aplaceatthetable2008 .com. Equal Opportunities Int'I Conf. will be held July 1-3 at the University of East...

Epitaph to a photographer.(Our World)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... Our World Photographs by Molly Malone Cook Text by Mary Oliver Beacon Press. 90 pages, $24,95 INOUR WORLD, Mary Oliver writes of her longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook: "M. had will and wit and probably too much...