The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from March 2004

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from March 2004

March-April 2004: Ambiguously Gay icons.
March 1, 2004... Fans of Saturday Night Live will recognize the reference to the recurring animated parody of Batman and Robin, "The Ambiguously Gay Duo." To SNL viewers, of course, there's nothing "ambiguous" about Ace and Gary, but creator Robert Smigel has...

Beauford Delaney's closet was real.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... To the Editor: In his letter to the G & LR [Jan.-Feb. 2004], Paul F. Lorch raises important questions about the painter Beauford Delaney, whose life and work I discussed in a recent article, "Beauford Delaney and the Art of Exile"...

Hungary more tolerant than claimed.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... To the Editor: Alan Brady Conrath's eagerness to contrast the Czech Republic and Hungary (Nov.-Dec. 2003) results in his exaggerating claims about both. I too have spent a good deal of time in both Prague and Budapest, before and after...

ILGA's role in international struggles.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... To the Editor: I greatly appreciated Mr. Joydeep Sengupta's article, "How the UN Can Advance Gay Rights" [Nov.-Dec. 03]. Since there is such a paucity of awareness of global issues in our community, it is always nice to see editorial...

The quest for diversity at conferences.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... To the Editor: As executive director of the Lambda Literary Foundation, which organized the Lambda Literary Festival held in Provincetown on October 10-12, I read with interest Samuel R. Delany's "Alphabet Soup in Provincetown" (Jan.-Feb.,...

Remembering Aldyn McKean.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... To the Editor: It occurs to me that the tenth anniversary of the G & LR coincides with the tenth anniversary of the death of a man who lived an extraordinary and pioneering life, one that (like so many others) has been insufficiently...

The camel's nose.(BTW)
March 1, 2004... The Camel's Nose Can there be divorce without marriage? That's a question that a number of states are wrestling with now that couples are going out-of-state to get hitched. Most recently, an Iowa judge granted a lesbian couple's request for a...

Setting the Journal of record, er, straight.(BTW)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Setting the Journal of Record, er, Straight Eyes popped one Sunday morning when The New York Times' ran as its top story the results of a Times survey purporting to show that Americans favor a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage by a 55-40...

Just spare us the Skivvies!(BTW)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Just Spare Us the Skivvies! Time was when a British sex scandal, especially one involving homosexuality, spelled instant doom for a politician. That such a time is past was clear last December when a prominent Labour MP was exposed--rather...

The conscience of a corporation.(BTW)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... The Conscience of a Corporation Lesbians and gay men tend to be a fairly liberal lot, casting a skeptical eye on giant corporations while favoring public solutions to discrimination and other social ills. It comes as something of a challenge to...

The pamphleteer.(BTW)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... The Pamphleteer A Catholic diocese in western Pennsylvania has ordered a priest to stop distributing an anti-gay pamphlet that it says "borders on the pornographic." The author, Paul Cameron, chair of the Family Research Institute in Colorado...

"Wo" is me.(BTW)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... "Wo" Is Me A man in Leeds, England, is suing the Leeds General Infirmary for a heart bypass operation that went terribly wrong. Actually, the man is doing fine, but it appears the doctors, when removing part of a large vein from his leg for the...

Will it be marriage or civil union?(Essay)
March 1, 2004... THIS FALL, while the Right was still staggering from the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, Massachusetts dealt conservatives another body blow when its highest court legalized same-sex marriage. In a 4-3 ruling authored by...

Scandal brewing in Lincoln country.(Essay)
March 1, 2004... The possibility that Abraham Lincoln had sexual relations with other men has been broached in the past, and new research is tending to corroborate the thesis that he did. As one might expect, many Lincoln scholars are bitterly opposed to this...

Whitman's sailors and other friends.(Essay)(Walt Whitman)
March 1, 2004... The following is offered as part of an effort to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass on July 4, 2005. Additional material can be found on a website maintained by the author...

When Nathaniel met Herman.(Essay)(Biography)
March 1, 2004... The following article first appeared in The Boston Phoenix, August 22-28, 2003 issue. AMERICANS LOVE happy endings. Yet in the world of great American literature, there are so very few. That's so not only in the novels--Moby-Dick, The...

Emily Dickinson's smoking poems.
March 1, 2004... Emily Dickinson is the perennially inscrutable 20th-century poet who lived in the 19th century, a woman whose poetry was as radical and eccentric as her personal life was cramped and ordinary. Her two nicknames--"the belle of Amherst" and "the...

The fairy tale of Edward II.(Essay)
March 1, 2004... IT HAS BEEN a strange life after death, that of Edward of Caernarfon, born in Wales on April 25, 1284, St. Mark's Day in the Catholic faith. This is the boy who grew up to be Edward II of England, who married in 1308, was deposed in 1327, and...

Melissa Etheridge: hitched, happy, and on tour.(Artist's Profile)(Interview)
March 1, 2004... Melissa Etheridge has been a lesbian rock icon since 1988, when audiences who had not heard her at clubs and women's music festivals grabbed her debut album on Island Records. Defying the odds by succeeding in the mainstream as a woman rocker...

The beloved's bright wings.(Essay)(Yannis Tsarouchis)
March 1, 2004... FROM ABOUT 1935 until his death in 1989, the Greek artist Yannis Tsarouchis painted and openly exhibited more studies of men in uniform and more male nudes than any artist outside what might now be called the world of erotica. He was a rough...

Questions for Queer Eye.(Essay)(Television Program Review)
March 1, 2004... THERE IS a certain specific risk involved in writing this essay. The current mood in journalism and popular culture welcomes the lighthearted, the upbeat, the optimistic--especially where gay politics is concerned. This discussion of Queer Eye...

Opening the book on tomorrow.(Poem)
March 1, 2004... John Finley died the week after our call, his mother said, as if he'd just been waiting for one last jangled hail from the land of the living, and then he began to fail, eyesight darkening to his childhood behind the lids, specks of...

What friends were for.(Books)(The Friend)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... The Friend by Alan Bray University of Chicago Press 380 pages, $40. THE FRIEND begins with the author's dramatic discovery two decades ago at Christ's College, Cambridge, of a monument marking a tomb in which two men are...

Darwin's dead ends.(Books)(The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia by Jay Hatheway Palgrave Macmillan 232 pages, $45. JAY HATHEWAY'S The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia traces the progression from the "invention"...

Everybody knows that the bird is the Word.(Books)(Language and Sexuality)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Language and Sexuality by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick Cambridge University Press 176 pages, $21. (paper) "WHAT IS SEX?" Language and Sexuality opens with a question that was prompted by President Clinton's denial that he...

Hope and fear in today's Poland.(International Spectrum)
March 1, 2004... On December 11, 2003, politicians and skinheads picketed the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland, where students were holding a meeting about a bill to legalize same-sex unions. Their target was the keynote speaker of the meeting, senator...

Not for every coffee table.(Art--A Sex Book)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Art--A Sex Book John Waters and Bruce Hainley Thames & Hudson 208 pages, $29.95 (paper) THE COMEDIES of John Waters are practical exercises in aesthetic philosophy. This theme is sometimes fairly explicit, as in Pecker, about a...

An HIV policy that saved lives.(Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS)(Positive)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS by Paul Sendziuk Univ. of New South Wales Press 262 pages, $29. Positive by David Menadue Allen and Unwin 243 pages, $22.95 (Australian) WHEN WE TALK about the history...

Cuddling.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 1, 2004... (You) would not let me finish the last dirty dish greased from last night's mole; instead, (you)-- naked, white, seraphim-skinned, tugging me away in retreat from morning-- beckoned me back, beneath the bedcovers. There...

Loving him madly.(The Concrete Sky: A Novel)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... The Concrete Sky: A Novel by Marshall Moore Southern Tier/Harrington Park Press. 274 pages, $17.95 THE TITLE of Marshall Moore's debut novel, The Concrete Sky, brings to mind the title of Paul Bowles's classic novel, The...

Did being gay matter?(The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers by Rick Whitaker Four Walls Eight Windows. 231 pages, $20. RICK WHITAKER introduces the essays in his new book, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay...

Hunks in the hollow.(War Against the Animals)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... War Against the Animals by Paul Russell St. Martin's Press. 358 pages, $24.95 THE PREMISE of Paul Russell's fifth novel, War Against the Animals, quickly unspools to reveal a storyline that's clearly intended to goose the reader's...

The Strange Case Of Edward Gorey.(Briefs)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... The Strange Case Of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux Fantagraphics Books. 68 pp., $8.95 Never before has there been a more felicitous outing than that of America's quirkiest illustrator and author, Edward Gorey. This is a loving...

The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial.(Briefs)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial by Casey Charles University Press of Kansas. 320 pp., $35. It was anyone's worst nightmare. On a fall day in 1983, after learning that her partner had been in a car...

Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians: Contemporary Dynamic Approaches.(Briefs)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Psychotherapy with Gay Men and Lesbians: Contemporary Dynamic Approaches Edited by Jack Drescher, M.D., Ann D'Ercole, Ph.D., and Erica Schoenberg, Ph.D. Haworth Press. 257 pp., $24.95 (paper) While this book seems to be written...

Natural Trouble.(Briefs)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Natural Trouble by Scott Hightower Fordham University Press, 82 pp., $10. Storyteller is not a sobriquet one often hears applied to contemporary poets, but the best poets can articulate the sense and semblance of a place or event...

Media year: 2003 in pictures.(Arts)
March 1, 2004... Last year was marked by a number of extraordinary breakthroughs in the political arena, but 2003 was also a year of cultural milestones, with many "firsts" for gay men and lesbians in the mainstream media. Here are a few of the ones most talked...