The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from March 2001

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from March 2001

March-April, 2001: "Out of the Celluloid Closet".(history of homosexuality in television and cinema)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... The heading for this issue is of course a reference to the book (and later documentary film) by the great film historian Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, which documented the hidden presence--or conspicuous absence--of gay and lesbian images...

Consolidation Bodes Ill for National Gay Media.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... The planned merger of the leading national gay "media products"--magazines, Web services, even a book publisher--is doubtless a good business move from their owners' point of view. But it forces to the surface questions that have needed asking...

Ricky's Ass Award Excised.
March 1, 2001... Following vehement protests from Ricky Martin's representatives, VH1 edited out of its "My VH1 Music Awards" program a spoof award called "Best Booty Shake" earmarked for the Latin heartthrob. In the original telecast, which aired live on...

Vatican Rage.(gay priests and Christian ethics)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... The Pope had been hoping for a flawless celebration of the Church's Millennial Year 2000, but his hopes were dashed when "World Pride Roma" came to town, a celebration of gay and lesbian freedom that John Paul II promptly denounced as...

It's Official: Gay Is Cool.
March 1, 2001... No one would be surprised to learn that the size of a city's gay population correlated with, say, the number of musical theatres in town--but with the rate of high-tech growth? And yet, a recent study showed that the size of a city's gay...

Love, Latino Style.(homosexuality in spanish television program)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... The Latino community in the U.S. is not usually viewed as the most progressive when it comes to gay and lesbian issues, but a popular TV Telemundo sitcom, Los Beltran, features Fernandito and Kevin, a gay couple who rent the second half of the...

Strange Sects.
March 1, 2001... If you're someone who thinks "gay Republican" is an oxymoron, consider a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that there's a thriving sub-subculture of gay white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and assorted "Aryan Nation" types. According to the...

The Boys in the Band, 30 years later.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2001... WHEN the play was first staged in New York in 1968, The Boys in the Band was a watershed event, the first "commercial" play not only to deal with homosexuality but in which all but one of the characters were self-identified homosexuals--and the...

Brief History of a Media Taboo.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2001... THE American version of Queer as Folk broadcast on Showtime--the same network that picked up Tales of the City when PBS declined to film more episodes--is just that: an American remake of a successful gay melodrama created for Britain's Channel...

Breaking "The Code".(Review)
March 1, 2001... FOR 35 years, the Motion Picture Production Code barred lesbians from the silver screen: "Sex perversion, or an inference of it, will not be allowed." As it turned out, making inferences is what the cinema of The Code era was all about. This...

Fassbinder's Not-so-pretty Picture.
March 1, 2001... IN July of 1924, a homosexual named Fritz Haarmann was sentenced to death by a Hanover court for the brutal murder of young boy he picked up in a train station. Haarmann, who spent time in insane asylums and made his living by selling...

Can a woman be a man on-screen?(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2001... CINEMATIC female-to-male impersonations have usually been meant to fool the characters onscreen but not the audience, which is typically in on the ruse. Critics have often raised the question whether a woman can play a mature man with enough...

Lesbian Sex at the (straight) Cineplex.
March 1, 2001... BEFORE there were gay and lesbian film festivals in every major U.S. city, before the arrival of gay-themed movies everywhere, before Queer As Folk appeared on Showtime, our Outings into mainstream movies were often a test of our pride versus...

The Birds as a Pre-Stonewall Parable.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2001... IN one of the coming attraction trailers for Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds, Tippi Hedren screams, "They're coming! They're coming!" She's warning that a bird attack is imminent, but after seeing the film again recently--an interim of...

Is the rating system homophobic?
March 1, 2001... The following piece has been adapted from an article that first appeared in Southern Voice (Atlanta) on December 14, 2000. SOME time last year, somewhere in Los Angeles, a dozen anonymous people--all of them parents--shut themselves in a...

Gay cinema: Still a world unto itself.(Interview)
March 1, 2001... Stephen Holden began his professional writing career as a music critic for Rolling Stone magazine during that publication's hip heyday in the 1970's. Since then, he's written extensively about music for the Village Voice and numerous other...

The Writer Behind the Woman.(George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large)(Review)
March 1, 2001... George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large Belinda Jack Alfred A. Knopf. 448 pages, $30. GEORGE Sand was among the most famous women of the mid-19th century and for decades the most popular writer in France, but a quarter of a century...

Liberation Anthropology.(Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas)(Review)
March 1, 2001... Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas by Esther Newton Duke University Press 360 pages, $54.95 ($18.95 paper) SINCE high school," Esther Newton tells us, "I had cultivated what was called a 'bad attitude' and...

Traps of Life.(The Complete Short Stories)(Review)
March 1, 2001... The Complete Short Stories Evelyn Waugh Little, Brown. 535 pages, $29.95 THERE are very few tender moments in the short stories of Evelyn Waugh. Arguably there is only one, a dialogue between a soldier and a priest at the end of a...

No Shield for the Endangered.(Whose Song? And Other Stories )(Review)
March 1, 2001... Whose Song? And Other Stories by Thomas Glave City Lights Books 204 pages, $12.95 THE nine stories of Thomas Glave's debut story collection Whose Song? And Other Stories, set mainly in the Bronx and the Caribbean, explore human desire and...

No Time for Poets.(Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art)(Review)
March 1, 2001... Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art By John E. Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov Harvard University Press 512 pages, $52. AMID the turmoil and carnage that followed the Russian Revolution, a young gay poet called Leonid Kannegiser had a...

Jennifer Waelti-Walters.(Review)
March 1, 2001... Canadian scholar Jennifer Waelti-Walters wears her academic mantle lightly, and the result is an incisive, readable history of 200 years of lesbians' appearances in novels by French authors. Taken in chronological order, Waelti-Walters's Damned...

The World of Normal Boys.(Review)
March 1, 2001... The World of Normal Boys is a book that both excites and frustrates at once. K. M. Soehnlein's "coming of age" novel about Robin, a 14-year-old suburban New Jersey boy who's beginning to apprehend his burgeoning homosexuality, breaks the...

In The Arms Of Africa: The Life Of Colin M. Turnbull.(Review)
March 1, 2001... In The Arms Of Africa: The Life Of Colin M. Turnbull, by Roy Richard Grinker (St. Martin's Press), documents the life of one of the best-known anthropologists of the 20th century. Turnbull's dedication to the study of the lives of the African...

Before Night Falls, directed by the painter Julian Schnabel.(Review)
March 1, 2001... After the recent right-wing coup d'etat and the nomination of an attorney general who yearns for the good old days of chattel slavery, it was a special thrill to see an intelligent, well-crafted movie that clearly illustrates the way in which...

Case to the Contrary.(Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community)(Review)
March 1, 2001... Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam Simon & Schuster. 544 pages, $26. While this journal focuses mostly on books with ostensibly gay and lesbian content, it is an increasingly important task to...

Lost in the Cultural Revolution.(Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies)(Review)
March 1, 2001... Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies by Chou Wah-shan Harrington Park Press. 343 pages, $69.95 ($27.95 paper) Late in 1979 I was leading a group of American college students on a tour of China. We were in a bus...

Friends of Dorothy.(The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson )(Review)
March 1, 2001... The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson by Joanne Winning Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 288 pages, $57.95 ($22.95 paper) The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson, whose author, Joanne Winning, is a lecturer on 20th-century literature at Middlesex...

One of the Hero's Faces.(Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness)(Review)
March 1, 2001... Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness Toby Johnson Alyson Books. 296 pages, $13.95 This is the book that Walt Whitman might have written if he'd studied with Joseph Campbell. It...

On Valentine's Day.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... We're not a married couple, though today we let ourselves pretend we are. We walk together holding hands outside, afraid of nothing. Lost in recipes, I cook a dinner too outlandish, while you plot to buy me something I...

The Mother of the Woman.(Review)
March 1, 2001... The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth by Carole Maso Counterpoint Press. 240 pages, $24. The Room Lit by Roses is a lyrical tribute to the connection between life and art. The author's desire for a child, the...

Writers' Sites are all on show.(Critical Essay)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... Back in 995, when Aldo Alvarez and Barbara Bennett founded Verb Compote, the first organized gay and lesbian writers' chat on America Online, the World Wide Web was new and uncharted territory, and AOL was as much a "strange democracy" as was...

The Clerk.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... It isn't that he's just stepped out of the pages of Details. He's a kind of better looking Nicolas Cage, which is perfect, and he hasn't exactly looked away when I've picked up my Voice at the rack to his left, and I haven't...

Best-Selling Gay & Lesbian Books.(Bibliography)
March 1, 2001... As compiled by InsightOutBooks.com for January, 2001 1. The Night Listener, by Armistead Maupin 2. The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, by Alice Walker 3. The Biograph Girl, by William J. Mann 4. Kate Milltt 2-in-1 (Sita and...

Hitching Home from College.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... Route 50 went west to my parents in Cincinnati. And I had to pretend to be taking the bus. Good thing rides were easy to get: bus fare saved bought lots of smokes and 3.2 beer, hitching home was my only sure...

Films with one inescapable theme: politics.(Critical Essay)
March 1, 2001... When Jang Jung II published Tell Me a Lie, a novel dealing with sadomasochistic sex, he was imprisoned by the South Korean authorities, his book was banned, and copies were destroyed by the government. Now director Jang Sun Woo has brought the...

When Heterosexuals Go Bad.
March 1, 2001... Quills Directed by Doug Wright and Philip Kaufman Fox Searchlight THE Marquis de Sade, whose name generally calls up images of sexual depravity, was indeed a sexual profligate. He was also a brilliant and uncompromising social...

In the Ghetto.(The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy)(Review)
March 1, 2001... The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy Written and Directed by Greg Berlanti Sony Pictures Classics Films about gay life have become more frequent and more professionally produced in recent years, the latest being The Broken Hearts...

A Gay Everyman.(The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me)(Review)
March 1, 2001... The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me Written and performed by David Drake Film Next / Montrose Pictures David Drake's highly successful one-man play, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, comprised of seven vignettes drawn from the artist's...

The Only Thing.(Poem)
March 1, 2001... L.B., San Francisco One a.m., and from the center of the bed I watched her watching me. I was cross-legged on the tossed sheets; I was dogged, comfortable, pleased. The Cointreau and a small glass she'd placed on my...

More Than 1,000 Words.(Sailor: Vintage Photos of a Masculine Icon)(Review)
March 1, 2001... Sailor: Vintage Photos of a Masculine Icon Edited by Kevin Bentley Council Oak Books. 110 pages, $24.95 "There's somethin' happenin' here," went the words of a Buffalo Springfield song during the Vietnam War protest era, but "what...