The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from May 2001

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from May 2001

May-June, 2001: "The Culture Wars".(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... The single best predictor of whether you voted for Gore or Bush in the 2000 election was whether or not you owned a gun. Nevertheless, the hot-button issue of gun control--along with abortion, the environment, affirmative action, and gay...

Correspondence.
May 1, 2001... EASTERN EUROPEAN ORIGINS To the Editor: The column titled "Eastern Europe Makes a Stand" in your January-February issue is very much appreciated. However, the phrase "once again" could have been added to the title. The very first...

Ex-Gays: Our Best Evidence?(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... With the latest defection of one of its leaders, the ex-gay movement is rapidly proving what we've been saying all along: that being gay is not something you can choose--or unchoose. The most recent casualty is the leader of Britain's ex-gay...

Calling Brussels' Bluff.(protest against Robert Mugabe)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... If Marks's departure from Exodus doesn't restore your faith in the Brits, perhaps the deeds of the ever courageous Peter Tatchell, the UK's gay conscience and tireless campaigner for human rights, will do the trick. The head of the gay activist...

Churches Will Be Churches.(anti-gay pamphlet distributed by Christians, paid for by Dept. of Health)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... George W. Bush's "faith-based initiative" has people speculating as to the effect of governmental subsidies for religious organizations that deliver social services. But why speculate? The potential effects are apparent from a booklet that...

End of an "Error".(closing anti-Laura Schlessinger Web site)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... The closing of a GLBT Website isn't usually good news, but it was with a flourish that StopDrLaura.com announced that it would shut down as of March, 2001. The Site was installed last spring after Paramount announced its intention to create a...

The Proposition that Kills.(legislation supporting homophobia)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... "Homosexual panic" is a defense that has been smuggled into court after a crime was committed, an argument that Matthew Shepard's murderers used to mitigate the severity of their crime. But the state of Kentucky is contemplating a law that...

Will Bush oppose the cultural wave?(President George W. Bush's policy on gay rights)(Interview)
May 1, 2001... Adam Feldman interviews a critic of political culture In a political culture where government is increasingly played out as public theatre, it's not enough to know the public; it helps to know a little something about theatre, too. Frank...

Eminem: Pied Piper of Hate.
May 1, 2001... PATRICIA Ireland, the president of NOW (the National Organization for Women), who spoke brilliantly at the "Rally Against Hate" in front of the Grammies, once told me that, in politics, truth doesn't count, only perception does. Spin is what...

Who's afraid of Marshall Mathers?(homophobia in Eminem's rap music)(Critical Essay)
May 1, 2001... "These 'black sounds' are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art." Federico Garcia Lorca, In Search of Duende (1998) Now that the Grammies...

Own up to your own words!
May 1, 2001... "Deconstruction is not inconsistent with civil liberties; indeed, freedom demands that we make moral judgments. To do otherwise is to risk a world where pleasure rules no matter how much pain it creates." Richard Goldstein, Village Voice...

Why Artists Defended Eminem.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2001... THE first time I heard songs from The Marshall Mathers LP by rapper Eminem was on MTV. The music didn't seem all that different from everything else the network played, and I didn't pay too much attention. It wasn't until the Gay and Lesbian...

The Supreme Court Stole the Show.(ruling on 2000 election)
May 1, 2001... PRIOR to the infamous case of Bush v. Gore, the last time the Supreme Court invalidated a state law or court ruling under what is known as the "rational basis" test of the equal protection clause was none other than Romer v. Evans. Romer was...

Rendezvous with W's Backup Plan.(George W. Bush, 2000 election)
May 1, 2001... IN addition to "2000" being the only election in which the judicial branch chose the head of the executive branch, thus allowing a completely unqualified moron to walk away with the prize, Gore v. Bush was also the first election in which I had...

Recitativo.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... After a friendship's year of stitching stories patiently, in itchy wool coats, in coffeehouses, on subway stairs, on nubbed couches I look up from changing a cd as you walk out to your living room from a muffle of...

The New Battle Lines Are Drawn.(gay political activity)
May 1, 2001... ELTON John took a lot of flak for singing a duet at the 2001 Grammy Awards with Eminem, rapper of numerous profusely homophobic and misogynistic songs. John and others defended the act as a blow for artistic expression and the First Amendment,...

Confederacies of Desire.
May 1, 2001... MY nipples were really inadequate to what he was trying to do to them. Nipple clamps are supposed to be a kind of sex toy, and being a gay man, I am supposed to be aware of ways the male body's erogenous zones have been remapped. But all I...

"Walk with the One You Love.".(parents of gays)
May 1, 2001... "What makes us different from other minorities is that often our parents are the first people to discriminate against us." Eliott Cherry, personal conversation "What we need is not defiant pride and self-consciousness, but social space...

Time Regained.(Christopher Isherwood memoir)(Review)
May 1, 2001... Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945-1951 by Christopher Isherwood HarperCollins. 388 pages, $30. PEOPLE who dislike name-dropping, obsessive cataloguing of sexual encounters, endless rehashing of love gone sour, and fretting over trouble...

Supporting Players of the Fin de siecle.(books about 19th-century gay men)(Review)
May 1, 2001... The Man Who Was Dorian Gray by Jerusha Hull McCormack St. Martin's Press. 353 pages, $24.95 Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson by James G. Nelson Pennsylvania State...

Where 'Gay' and 'Straight' Don't Suffice.
May 1, 2001... Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvesties, Queens, and Machos by Annick Prieur University of Chicago Press 293 pages, $50. ($17. paper) FIFI, one of Annick Prieur's informants in her fascinating ethnography of Mexican sexuality,...

From Jefferson to The Jeffersons.(book on intellectual history)(Review)
May 1, 2001... Making History Matter by Robert Dawidoff Temple University Press. 245 pages, $22.95 (paper) IN his preface to this collection of essays, Robert Dawidoff, professor of history at Claremont Graduate University, expresses his concern...

Final.(Poem)
May 1, 2001... When I die, I want to be cremated and buried in the Cimetiere des Chiens on the outskirts of Paris. On my grave, I want a statue of a dog, viciously digging into the mound, and pulling a stone hand out with its mouth. ...

Charlotte's Worldwide Web.(Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time)(Review)
May 1, 2001... Across an Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time by Julia Markus Knopf. 331 pages, $27.95 IN her day, Charlotte Cushman was probably bigger than Madonna or Britney Spears is today. She was an...

Teeth.
May 1, 2001... When the new year arrives wrapped in snow, I think nothing of the phone call or her voice or how it will change when she's pressing my back, her tongue knocking at my ear. I am not thinking of the alphabet's wonders, the shy way she stacks...

Michael Nava is ending the "Henry Rios" series.(Review)
May 1, 2001... After seven novels in fourteen years, Michael Nava is ending the "Henry Rios" series. Over the years, Nava has been compared to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett; his darkly brilliant mysteries have explored the gay psyche and various...

Suzanne Jill Levine's biography, Manuel Puig and The Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions.(Review)
May 1, 2001... "Maybe I shouldn't have taken him to the movies so much," Manuel Puig's mother would reflect some year's after her son's death in 1990. And yet, if it hadn't been for those early, indelible screenings of Blood and Sand and other 35-millimeter...

In his afterward to this first translation into English of Reinaldo Arenas's The Color of Summer (Viking), Andrew Hurley writes.(The Color of Summer )(Review)
May 1, 2001... In his afterward to this first translation into English of Reinaldo Arenas's The Color of Summer (Viking), Andrew Hurley writes: "Arenas writes about the buried life of Possibility, the life that is portrayed to us in dreams of imaginings..."...

Epitaph to a Genre.
May 1, 2001... Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS Edited by Edmund White University of Wisconsin Press. 303 pages, $29.95. Many people, including many gay people, have cozied up to the idea that AIDS is over. We want to be "over" AIDS,...

Aging Out.
May 1, 2001... Golden Men: The Power of Gay Midlife by Harold Kooden, with Charles Flowers Avon Books (HarperCollins). 348 pages, $14.00 (paper) Aging is famously tough on gay men. Earlier in our lives, many of us were denied the support of...

Private Eye with a Public.(murder mystery)(Review)
May 1, 2001... Nine Nights on the Windy Tree Martha Miller New Victoria Publishers. 239 pages, $10.95 (paper) Flame is leaping out of the roof of Latch's store, threatening to set fire to Bertha's grandmother's modest bungalow. Grandma sits in...

If we could see ourselves.
May 1, 2001... Quill by Neal Drinnan St. Martin's Press. 240 pages, $23.95 At a party recently in New York, I overheard the following: "I was at that dinner party. He had to have had a tape recorder hidden somewhere, because the scene in the...

Greek Pederasty Revisited.
May 1, 2001... Sexual Culture in Ancient Greece by Daniel H. Garrison University of Oklahoma Press. 358 pages, $26.95 Greek Love Reconsidered Edited by Thomas K. Hubbard Wallace Hamilton Press. 64 pages, $4.95 Daniel H. Garrison...

Castro's Crimes.(motion picture about Cuba under Fidel Castro)(Review)
May 1, 2001... Before Night Falls Directed by Julian Schnabel Fine Line Features Before Night Falls gives film viewers a unique opportunity to get an inside look at Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Director Julian Schnabel exposes the...