The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from May 2002

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from May 2002

May-June, 2002: "places in the 'gay' heart".(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Here I go again, using the word "gay" when of course I really mean "gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered," and so on. Alas, there's only so much space on the cover of a magazine. So why don't I just use the word "queer" and be done with it?...

Correspondence.
May 1, 2002... On Islam and the West: Two Replies To the Editor: Two articles in the January-February 2002 issue--those by Raja Halwani and Michael Hattersley--relating to homosexuality in the Arab World struck me as very important and timely, but...

Iran's gay emigres and the persistence of the closet. (International Spectrum).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... As a gay person from Iran, I have been struggling for many years to lift homophobic oppression from within me and open myself up to my gay soul. Growing up in homophobic and sex-phobic Iran, I was brainwashed that heterosexuality was my only...

CNN Fodder II. (BTW).(anti-gay messages on bombs)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... As reported in an earlier edition of this column (Jan.-Feb. 2002), a bomb dropped on Afghanistan with the words "High Jack this Fags" got a lot of media attention late last year, prompting gay organizations to demand an apology, whereupon the...

The passions of Paslituns. (BTW).(male homosexuality in Afghanistan)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... While doing everything in its power to demonize the Taliban (not without justice), the Administration has tried to put a positive face on the rest of the Afghani people, those liberated by us from the grip of religious fanatics. Thus it must...

Return of eugenics? (BTM).(gay sperm donors prohibited)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is poised to issue guidelines that would prevent gay men from being sperm donors (according to the San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 11, 2002). Such a move would effectively take gay men out of the gene pool,...

The "Peter Meter". (BTW).(penile plethysmography)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... That "the dick doesn't lie." is a cliche among gay men, and now this instrument of truth appears ready to go on trial to determine its reliability as legal evidence. What's actually being judged is a device known as a penile plethysmograph or...

"God's plan": A sweatshirt. (BTW).(homophobia and freedom of speech)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... A U.S. District Judge has ruled that a Woodbury (NJ) student's constitutional rights were violated when his high school principal ordered him not to wear a sweatshirt bearing the words "Straight Pride." Judge Donovan Frank cited the...

Joe Orton's London, today. (Essay).
May 1, 2002... "ABSURD" is how my undergraduate English professor described the works of Joe Orton in a literary comedy class I once took. Orton produced ridiculous farces like Loot (1964) and What the Butler Saw (1969), which made fun of upper-class British...

San Francisco: Still mighty real. (Essay).(Excerpt)
May 1, 2002... The following essay appears, in slightly different form, in the recently published anthology, Out in the Castro: Desire, Promise, Activism, edited by Winston Leyland (Leyland Publications, 2002). 1988 A GIRLFRIEND and I were walking...

Provincetown in transition. (Essay).
May 1, 2002... PROVINCETOWN, Massachusetts, is a small coastal town at the tip of Cape Cod, inhabited by some 3,800 year-round residents, a population that swells to over 20,000--or is it 50,000, as some contend?--during the high season (basically July and...

Everybody's Alexandria. (Essay).(intolerance of homosexuality in Egypt)
May 1, 2002... WHILE the Egyptian pyramids may be spectacular, Alexandria is not. The odor and claustrophobia are as strong as the brine that seeps across the Corniche into the cafes and bedrooms. And yet, Alexandria has incubated more than its share of...

Class and gender at Cherry Grove: Beth Mauldin talks with an anthropologist of place. (Interview).(Interview)
May 1, 2002... Esther Newton is an anthropologist whose book, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972) is widely credited as the first full-length ethnography of a gay or lesbian subculture. Her acclaimed 1993 ethnography, Cherry Grove, Fire...

Savannah after midnight. (Essay).
May 1, 2002... I BEGAN my regular travel to Savannah, Georgia, nearly twenty years ago. Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago and lived in the Midwest for my entire life, my first trip to the South was full of assumptions, hesitation, and expectation....

South Beach: "Paradise" and reality. (Essay).
May 1, 2002... A LONG with its rapid redevelopment over the past ten years, South Beach has become a culturally significant place for gay men from all over the U.S. and Europe, a "gay paradise" where beautiful bodies and overt sexuality are as significant a...

What if Hitler was gay? (Essay).(examination of evidence in the book 'The Hidden Hitler')
May 1, 2002... The Hidden Hitler (Hitlers Geheimnis: Das Doppelleben eines Diktators) by Lothar Machtan Basic Books. 321 pages, $26. (German ed: Alexander Fest Verlag) The Hidden Hitler, by Lothar Machtan, was first taken up in a short...

Riddle.(Poem)
May 1, 2002... Riddle I am the oddity that is un-strange. I'm the silver that rhymes with orange. I am the obstinate, slow- metabolic plant that grows in the night at the rate of sediments and infloresces extravagantly about once a...

"I miss you oh so much".('The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf')
May 1, 2002... The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia woolf Edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell Leaska Cleis Press. 480 pages, $29.95 (orig. published by Morrow, 1985) VITA Sackville-West, the British author of All Passion Spent (1931)...

When ex-lovers keep in touch.('Addictions')
May 1, 2002... Addictions by Laurence Brown Gay Men's Press 351 pages, $14.95 (paper) THE importance of friendship in the lives of gay men is the theme of Addictions, a witty epistolary novel from Laurence Brown. Francis is a...

The ineffable being of light.('Source')
May 1, 2002... Source by Mark Doty HarperCollins. 76 pages, $22. MARK Doty is one of the few poets who is both central to gay poetry as a movement and an important figure in mainstream poetry. I don't mean to suggest that gay poets aren't part...

A chaste take on those naughty Victorians.('Fingersmith')
May 1, 2002... KARLA JAY Fingersmith Sarah Waters Riverhead. 503 pages, $24.95 SARAH Waters is the brightest light to shine on lesbian fiction since her sister Brit Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene in 1985 with Oranges Are...

Integration.(gay couple's experiences moving into a new neighborhood)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Integration A week after we moved in. One man whispered AC/DC. Another saw us coming, took out his Johnny-jump-up and peed in the street. We mounted a defense. We pruned and planted. We kept our yard neat. I watched a young boy...

No banjo on this knee.('Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet')
May 1, 2002... Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet by Eugene Walter, as told to Katherine Clark Crown. 295 pages, $25. "THE most famous man you've never heard of' announces the dust cover of this book. Well, now you've heard...

The whiteness of cool blue.('Your Loving Arms')
May 1, 2002... Your Loving Arms by Gwendolyn Bikis Alice Street Editions, Harrington Park Press. $19.95 IN the preface to Your Loving Arms, Gwendolyn Bikis poses a question that haunts her: "What if black women and white women could find or make...

Trickle-down McCarthyism.('Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950's')
May 1, 2002... Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950's by Neil Miller Alyson Books. 313 pages, $14.95 IT began in Sioux City, Iowa, in the summer of 1954, with the abduction and murder of an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy...

Before Jane Goodall. (Books).(On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West)
May 1, 2002... On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West Barbara R. Stein University of California Press. 435 pages, $35. BORN in 1867, Annie Montague Alexander came into a world in which women could...

Field of poppies.(Poem)
May 1, 2002... Field of Poppies At midday a field of poppies caught our eyes like flames from the side of the road and we stopped amid the flatness of the Grecian plain that grew dense with white at the horizon like the inner dome of a psychic's...

At sea in the big easy. (Books).(Boulevard)
May 1, 2002... Boulevard Jim Grimsley Algonquin Books. 292 pages, $23.95 JIM Grimsley's five previous novels, which are marked by the stark power of their prose and their unflinching willingness to probe the dark recesses of our psyches, have...

The horror, the horror show! (Books).(The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan)
May 1, 2002... The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan Jimmy McDonough A Cappella Books-Chicago Review Press. 376 pages, $26.95 RARELY have life and art mirrored each other as closely as in the case of...

A queen quandrangle. (Books).(The Snow Garden)
May 1, 2002... The Snow Garden by Christopher Rice Talk Miramax Books. 416 pages, $23.95 IT was perhaps inevitable that Christopher Rice, after exploring the travails of high school in his first novel, A Density of Souls, would turn to a college...

Remembering the magic. (Books).(Calling the Fish and Other Stories)
May 1, 2002... Calling the Fish and Other Stories by David Lyndon Brown University of Otago Press. 182 pages, $29.95 A BLURB on the back cover of this collection of short stories states that the author, David Lyndon Brown, was a champion...

Going to her window. (Books).(Melissa Etheridge: The Truth Is... My Life in Love and Music)
May 1, 2002... Melissa Etheridge: The Truth Is... My Life in Love and Music by Melissa Etheridge with Laura Morton Villard. 229 pages, $24.95 ONE of the most passionate voices in rock music is that of Melissa Etheridge, whose stirring ballads of...

The brilliant career and violence-prone life of Michelangelo Merisi, otherwise known as Caravaggio, has received a stunning treatment in John T. Spike's new art book, Caravaggio (Abbeville press publishers). (Briefs).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... The brilliant career and violence-prone life of Michelangelo Merisi, otherwise known as Caravaggio, has received a stunning treatment in John T. Spike's new art book, Caravaggio (Abbeville Press Publishers). The bisexual Caravaggio (1571-1610)...

Everyday mutinies: Funding Lesbian activism. (Briefs).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... Everyday Mutinies: Funding Lesbian Activism (Haworth Press, originally published as issue 5.3 of Journal of Lesbian Studies) is a collection of interviews with, and autobiographical sketches by, two dozen lesbian writers, photographers,...

Grey spider press has printed a beautiful limited edition of Rebecca Brown's equally beautiful excerpts from a family medical dictionary. (Briefs).
May 1, 2002... Grey Spider Press has printed a beautiful limited edition of Rebecca Brown's equally beautiful Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary. Like her book The Gifts of the Body, this collection of short chapters focuses on the art of caregiving....

Robert Peters, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria and other short plays. (Briefs).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2002... A collection of works by Robert Peters, Mad Ludwig of Bavaria and Other Short Plays, has just been brought out by Alysium Arts. Peters is well-known as a teacher in California and as a writer in contemporary literature, being a poet as well as...

New players in old York. (Theatre).
May 1, 2002... The York Realist Written and directed by Peter Gill The English Touring Company The Royal Court Theater, London THE York Mystery Plays are a cycle of biblical dramas that have been performed in that northern English city since the...