The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from March 2009

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from March 2009

March-April 2009: "the arc of history".(Editorial)
March 1, 2009... The theme of this issue is inspired by the confluence of several events: the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the eerily timed release of the movie Milk, the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the first president who's not a...

The Obama inauguration: signals and prospects.(GUEST OPINION)(Barack Obama)(Essay)
March 1, 2009... THE January inauguration of President Barack Obama saw unprecedented levels of GLBT participation. With hope in the air, expectations for forward movement on civil rights ran high. But the Obama transition sent mixed signals, leading some to...

British sodomy laws linger in former colonies.(GUEST OPINION)
March 1, 2009... MORE THAN half of the world's remaining sodomy laws--laws that criminalize consensual homosexual conduct--are relics of British colonial rule. This is the conclusion of a major study by Human Rights Watch released late last year in a 66-page...

Another challenge to glaad's primacy.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2009... To the Editor: I think it worth letting your readers know that the history of glaad's involvement with educating The New York Times on GLBT issues predates by a decade Joan Garry's account of the 1997 campaign to get the Times to include...

The redemption of Holy Redeemer.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2009... To the Editor: Please accept my congratulations on the 15th anniversary issue of the G&LR [Jan.-Feb. 2009]. It was particularly appealing to me for two reasons. My first exposure to gay literature was on the bookrack of my father's...

When Martin and Lyon were wed.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2009... To the Editor: GLR's Del Martin obit [Jan.-Feb. 2009] erroneously claims that she and Lyon married legally in "early 2008." Actually, the timing was dramatically tighter. A long-awaited California Supreme Court decision was handed down in...

Time to shift to a national strategy!(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2009... To the Editor, This is in reply to the many laments about the passage of Proposition 8 in California last November (Jan.-Feb.09 issue). After 31 electoral defeats & 45 states banning same-sex marriage--and now that there's a Democrat in...

Bitter leavings.(BTW)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Bitter Leavings As the Bush administration was slouching toward the exit door, they were given one last chance to make good on that ancient promise of "compassionate conservatism"--a nonbinding human rights resolution in the United Nations that...

Military brass.(BTW)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Military Brass The U.S. Military Academy recently announced its nominees for the 2nd Annual Cadet Choice Award, which honors the movie character that best exemplifies West Point leadership. The selections are made by a vote of the 4,400 Corps...

A little Schadenfreude.(BTW)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... A Little Schadenfreude There's probably no connection, but just a month after the Radio Hall of Fame inducted the notoriously homophobic James Dobson as an honoree, the Hall of Fame's parent company, the Museum of Broadcast Communications...

British men are from Venus.(BTW)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... British Men Are from Venus New figures released in the UK show that after three years with civil unions, which give same-sex couples equivalent status with straight ones, some 60,000 Britons have entered into such a union--and 75 percent of...

Traditional sidewalk values.(BTW)(Princeton University's campaign to remove freshmen from sidewalks)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Traditional Sidewalk Values Soon after the passage of Proposition 8 in California, The Daily Princetonian announced: "Campaign to Remove Freshmen from Sidewalks in Second Successful Week." The tongue-in-cheek article reported on a plan to ban...

Dutch holiday.(BTW)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The most amazing thing about Amsterdam's living creche this year is not that it was mounted by an all-gay cast, not that all the principles were dressed in an opulent blue fabric with huge gold flowers, not that the Virgin Mary was a guy in...

Lebanon: at best a virtual gay community.(INTERNATIONAL SPECTRUM)
March 1, 2009... PRIOR TO moving to Lebanon, I'd joke with my friends, saying that I was traveling back in time to a world that resembles that of the late 1960's in North America: a country that lacks openly gay public spaces and where the vast majority of...

Tomb with a view.(ESSAY)(Letters between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature)(The Creator as Critic and Other Writings)(The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929-1960)(Critical essay)
March 1, 2009... WHEN the English novelist E. M. Forster--"Morgan"--died in 1970, at the age of 91, the novel which, above all else, had cemented his literary reputation among the first rank of twentieth-century writers, A Passage to India (1924), was almost a...

Look into it!(Cartoon)
March 1, 2009... "A hotbed of gay and lesbian ideas" --The New York Times [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When Arthur met Paul.(ESSAY)(Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel )(Book review)
March 1, 2009... IN 1873, when French poet Arthur Rimbaud was staying in London with his more famous lover Paul Verlaine, the spark-striking and strategically untruthful nineteen-year-old added two years to his age so that he could pass through a set of doors...

"If they know us ...".(ESSAY)(Harvey Milk)(Essay)
March 1, 2009... HARVEY MILK was working for an insurance company in New York City before he became the flamboyant politician portrayed in Gus Van Sant's recently released movie, Milk; he lived on the Upper West Side, voted for Gold-water, and loved to go to...

The idea of travel.(Poem)
March 1, 2009... Nestor rear-ended a phantom-- south on 14-- Now on the road-- he questions the idea of travel-- for a moment he remembers-- a sweetness no one owned-- the rules were dinner-- day and night-- cooked up with-- a brown man's wet...

How Harvey Milk recruited me.(ART MEMO)
March 1, 2009... I WAS SIXTEEN years old, already an inveterate Oscar fan, and Kathleen Turner was the glittering celebrity charged with presenting "Best Documentary" honors at the 57th Annual Academy Awards. I was paying close attention to the that category...

Tying the not: how they got Prop 8.(ESSAY)(Proposition 8)(Essay)
March 1, 2009... ON JUNE 26, 2008, 1,000 ministers, mostly from evangelical congregations, met by conference call to discuss tactics for passing Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same sex marriage in California by amending the state constitution. The...

Michigan womyn's music festival, 2007.(Poem)
March 1, 2009... Once we lay down in a forest, in a storm, housed only between thin layers of fabric. the same night a raccoon forced entry, decoding buried scent of nourishment within. My scream shattered the night and the women camping around us...

The 'netroots' revolution.(ESSAY)(Essay)
March 1, 2009... IN THE AFTERMATH of the passage of California's Proposition 8, a new generation of activists emerged to protest the loss of the right to marry one's same-sex partner. The GLBT media has dubbed this new wave of activism "Stonewall 2.0." This...

I tell my student.(Poem)
March 1, 2009... it's because you're closeted that your poems make no sense. For years you've obfuscated and avoided pronouns, and now your poems are paying with their lives. She says I make gay look cool and she is absolutely right. It's 2008....

The look of gay liberation.(PHOTO ESSAY)(Essay)
March 1, 2009... THE ASCENDANCY of photography during the 20th century produced an extraordinary historical record of society and culture. In an instant a photograph of the past can leap into the present with irrepressible vitality. Essayist Susan Sontag wrote...

How 'Gay' Were the Stars of the 30's?(Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... HOLLYWOOD BOHEMIANS is about homosexuals and, to a lesser extent, heterosexuals that Brett Abrams describes as "adulterous," who were in the movie industry during the years 1917 to 1941. Abrams argues that not only did they contribute...

Hello, South of France.(Goodbye, Wisconsin)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... "THE MIDDLE WEST is nowhere; an abstract nowhere. However earnestly writers proud of being natives of it may endeavor to give it form and character, it remains out of focus, amorphous, and a mystery," wrote Glenway Wescott in the introductory...

The Choice of Skin.(Skin Lane)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... IN HER REVIEW of Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, Ruth Rendell asked, in amazed admiration, "If he can do this with his first novel, what heights will his fourth or fifth reach?" There's no need to wait that long. Bartlett's...

Places in the Notebook.(Big Trips: More Good Gay Travel Writing)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Big Trips, Raphael Kadushin--a senior editor for the book's publisher, the University of Wisconsin Press--affirms his hope that the sixteen entries in this anthology will address two unfortunate tendencies in today's...

An artist who was outed by the reich.(Peter Flinsch: The Body in Question)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... BASED IN MONTREAL, painter Peter Flinsch, now 88, has been renowned among art critics and historians for decades, having had major shows in Berlin and New York, among other cultural centers. But he remains unknown to people in the queer...

John Betjeman: national treasure, gay icon.(ART MEMO)
March 1, 2009... LARGER THAN LIFE, the statue of John Betjeman (1906--1984) in the newly renovated St. Pancras International Station in London serves as a reminder of the late Poet Laureate's love of rail travel. But its proximity to the Victorian Midland Grand...

Reliable penpals.(Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... IN THE REALM of 20th-century American literature, the collected correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is among the most important sets of letters that we have between two poets. With style, humor, and candor, Words in Air charts...

No ordinary love.(Pilcrow)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... JOHN CROMER, the hero of Pilcrow, Adam Mars-Jones' new novel, is the son of a British Air Commander father and a snobby mother who's insecure about her class standing. Born after World War II, John attends British boarding schools, where he...

Nothing down.(Drawn from Life)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... JONATHAN STRONG is a Boston-based author with close to a dozen novels and short-story collections to his credit. At the age of 24, while a senior at Harvard, he made a name for himself with his first collection, Tike and Five Stories (1969),...

Out of Morocco.(Salvation Army)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... MOROCCAN EXPATRIATE Abdellah Taia has spent the last eight years in France, writing, acting in films, and living the dream of being an intellectual in Paris. The jacket copy for Salvation Army broadcasts that Taia is, or is reckoned by some to...

Tennessee's reach.(The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... THE ESSAYS collected by Philip Kolin in this volume expand upon historian David Bergman's observations concerning "the genealogy of transformation that occurs as successive generations of gay writers work through each others' material,...

The funeral of bucephalas.(Poem)
March 1, 2009... This horse was hard to burn. Alexander said: Stand him up on the pyre: saddle, gold stirrups, black leather reins from my wild oxen, bridle studded with embedded rubies I ripped from a bitch goddess in the Euphrates, his bit forged...

Out and Proud in Chicago.(BRIEFS)(Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... In 1961, Illinois became the first U.S. state to decriminalize consensual sodomy (in response to proposed changes in the Model Penal Code), owing largely to the efforts of a heterosexual lawyer whose law school roommate had committed suicide...

Queer Cinema in Europe.(BRIEFS)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... It wouldn't be surprising if a collection of scholarly essays about queer European cinema were much larger than this particular volume (at under 200 pages). But as editor Robin Griffiths points out in his introduction, Queer Cinema in Europe is...

Two parties, one tux, and a very short film about the grapes of wrath.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... Steven Goldman's book with its lengthy title speaks to the importance of friendship regardless of one's sexual orientation. Mitchell, the main character, remains faithful to his best friend David when the latter comes out to him. The breezy...

Sweet Tea: black gay men of the South.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
March 1, 2009... Thirteen years in the making, E. Patrick Johnson's new book Sweet Tea contains a wealth of information about Southern black gay men and makes a valuable addition to gay cultural history. Sweet Tea is an oral history, or rather a series of oral...

Art and instant gratification.(ART)(Polaroids: Mapplethorpe)
March 1, 2009... ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE'S Polaroid photographs are not a well-known part of his ceuvre, but they contain virtually all of the basic themes and elements that blossomed and matured in his later work. Beginning in 1970 and for roughly five years when...

Art and social criticism.(George Tooker Retrospective)
March 1, 2009... IT HAS BEEN a good year for GLBT artists. In these pages alone we have been able to celebrate the works of Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, Charles Demuth, and now George Tooker, whose work is being shown at The National Academy of Design in New...

Remembering 'Johnny Cakes' of the Sopranos.(ART MEMO)(John Costelloe)(Obituary)
March 1, 2009... WITH THE DEATH of John Costelloe, the actor who played Jim "Johnny Cakes" Witowski on The Sopranos, fans of the landmark TV series (1999-2007) lost an important player in the show's most gay-positive, and perhaps most crucial, story line. The...

Leslie Jordan: from small screen to big stage.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)
March 1, 2009... THERE WAS a full house in the Renberg Theater at Los Angeles's Gay and Lesbian Center. It was opening night of Leslie Jordan's one-person show, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet, and his body microphone kept cutting out. After about five minutes, he...