The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from November 2005

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from November 2005

Nov.-Dec. 2005: "Sweet Bird of Youth".(Editorial)
November 1, 2005... The "youth issue" comes as close as I like to cordoning off a demographic group for special attention. Over the years people have proposed that we do a women's issue, a race issue, a transgender issue, a bear issue, and so on, and I've always...

Not buying "bi" study.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2005... To the Editor: Your latest BTW [Sept.-Oct.] endorses a flawed study claiming that even self-identified bisexuals are really either gay or straight. Like the New York Times, you obviously didn't do much looking into the "research" that...

One more time: how tolerant was France?(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2005... To the Editor: Sorry to act the historical nit-picker, but Richard Berrong, in his letter to the editor in the July-August issue, commits two errors with respect to the French criminal code and its treatment of homosexuality. He states...

"Poland agonistes": reply to critic.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2005... To the Editor: I am sorry to notice that Chris Bell's critique of our text on Poland [May-June 2005 issue] is rather mean-spirited and neglects some facts as well. I understand the idea of the variety of views and support it, but the...

Gender imbalance in the poetry issue.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2005... To the Editor: Maybe it's time you renamed the magazine "The Gay Male Review," or perhaps "The Gay & Token Lesbian Review." I suppose I shouldn't be surprised--I've long chagrined at how underrepresented women are in your pages--but I...

Laud Humphreys: correction & reflection.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2005... To the Editor: In reviewing Laud Humphreys in the July-August issue, Thom Nickels mentions that critics considered him a "one-hit wonder" because Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Pubic Places was his only book. This is not correct. Two...

Everyone hates Phelps.(BTW)(Fred Phelps)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Why do we do it--continue to report on the high jinks of the mad preacher Fred Phelps? It's not just the sheer crudeness, the vulgarity of his attacks--his slogan is "God hates fags," after all--nor even the weird cruelty of his targets, such...

"The other man".(Eugene V. Clark)(BTW)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... If such a thing as a hypocritometer existed--and it is hereby proposed--Monsignor Eugene V. Clark would be up there around a "9." It was recently revealed that the 79-year-old rector and longtime grand inquisitor of St. Patrick's Cathedral in...

Church of the BSA.(Boy Scouts of America)(BTW)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... The purification of the Boy Scouts of America continued apace as the group fired the highest-ranking and longest-serving professional scout in its history, for being gay. The BSA won the right to discriminate based on sexual orientation in a...

They always said we recruit.(BTW)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... It's one thing for soldiers to march in a gay pride parade because they can, which is the case in the UK and all of western Europe. But when a group of ten British soldiers marched in Manchester's gay pride parade this year, they were men with...

Follow the bouncing bullet.(child prostitution in Iraq)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... Blame the law of unforeseen consequences (Donald Rumsfeld would), but who would have predicted, when George W. Bush announced his intention to invade Iraq in 2003, that one small offshoot would be the emergence of a commercial sex trade in...

Follow-up on the news.(BTW)(Fallwell.com's trademark infrigement of televangelist Jerry Falwell)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2005... As was reported in the last BTW, a website called "Fallwell.com" had been enjoined from operating because a New York court ruled that, despite the variant spelling, it infringed on the trademark of televangelist Jerry Falwell. The site's...

Listening to the civil rights movement.(ESSAY)(Civil Rights Act of 1964)
November 1, 2005... WHERE ARE WE in the struggle for gay rights in the United States? Are we in the early stages of what will become a successful mass movement for equal civil rights and respect? Or have we reached the highest point of advance for the time...

The New Gay Teen: shunning labels.(behavior of gays)(Critical Essay)
November 1, 2005... DERRICK, a twenty-year-old college student from rural Ohio, came to discuss his career. I just assumed he was being gender-sensitive when he referred to his "partner" because nothing about Derrick or his mannerisms set off my gaydar. During our...

Crossing the Arno.(Poem)
November 1, 2005... You bought me this ring on the Ponte Vecchio, remember? as we walked to the Inn of the White Boar. Ruby, the jeweler said but of course it's not. A clot of blood, it has lain coffined in the blue velvet year after year. Why now do I...

A literature of hope for GLBT youth.(gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender)
November 1, 2005... TO GROW UP gay or lesbian any time before the Internet came into wide use, in most of America, was to experience a profound isolation. There were few places where one could go to see the possibility of a normal life. Many of us wondered whether...

What becomes of at-risk gay youths?(ESSAY)
November 1, 2005... BY ALL ACCOUNTS gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youths comprise a disproportionate number of at-risk youths across the U.S. They are substantially more likely than are straight youths to experience homelessness, whether because they...

The 'ex-gay' agenda.(ESSAY)(Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays' fight against sex education curriculum)
November 1, 2005... LAST MONTH, the Montgomery County Board of Education in suburban Maryland settled a lawsuit over sex education in the county's public schools, brought in part by PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays). The group is a branch of a...

The truest notions.(Poem)
November 1, 2005... The world has always its new reasons for beauty, or it could not look back and find us. When the mirror tells its dirty little joke, the windows of the soul will have already burned out. Midnight and its promise affirm the...

Meet the 'queerspawn'.(ESSAY)
November 1, 2005... THROUGHOUT my adolescence, I assumed that my siblings and I were the only children of gay, lesbian, or bisexual (GLB) parents. In 1979, we were removed by court order from my mother's house and allowed to visit her only two weekends a month....

The 'down low' in life and legend.(Keith Boykin's works)(Interview)
November 1, 2005... AUTHOR-ACTIVIST Keith Boykin's latest book, Beyond the Down Low, published early this year by Carroll & Graf, explores an underground subculture of men who engage in same-sex sexual activity in secret while projecting a heterosexual public...

When Vidal spoke, people taped.(Conversations with Gore Vidal)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Conversations with Gore Vidal Edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole University Press of Mississippi 196 pages, $20. LOVABLE, unlovable, wicked, vain, altruistic, egomaniacal, funny--all of these describe Vidal in the...

Of filth and fame.(Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste by John Waters Thunder's Mouth Press 244 pages, $16.95 JOHN WATERS describes Shock Value as "just about my final position paper on the shock/underground period of my career."...

The Christ of the early Christians.(Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love by Will Roscoe Suspect Thoughts Press 232 pages, $16.95 (paper) THE RELIGIOUS-SOUNDING title of gay liberation scholar Will Roscoe's important new book, Jesus and the Shamanic...

Cooking.(Poem)
November 1, 2005... From a certain distance everything's be-bopping, it's cooking, it's swell. Venus has moved to supra- from yesterday's sub-moon position, with Jupiter just above. They go on over-ing and under-ing, the local planets; and elsewhere,...

The tiger within.(The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957)(Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Drama)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957 Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler New Directions. 662 pages, $39.95 Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century...

Men in black and white.(Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Chris Packard Palgrave. 144 pages, $55. COWBOYS are queer--or at least they were in frontier tales of the 19th century. Such is the...

Stardust Confessions.(The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace by Martin Moran Beacon Press. 285 pages, $23.95 "AFRYING-PAN of shameful loves sizzled loudly all around me," writes a brilliant, sensitive man in his early forties,...

Marriage: theory & advice.(Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage by Mark D. Jordan University of Chicago Press. 256 pages, $29. RICK SANTORUM, who could some day be packaged as a Republican candidate...

The woman in my life.(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann Pantheon. 192 pages, $20. "CREATIVE NON-POETRY" is how Richard McCann half-jokingly described his unassumingly moving new book, Mother of Sorrows, at a reading. In a fusion of poetic memoir and...

A greener Whitman.(Walt Whitman and the Earth)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... Walt Whitman and the Earth by M. Jimmie Killingsworth University of Iowa Press. 225 pages, $39.95 THIS BOOK had to happen at some point. Someone had to embrace Whitman as an environmentalist, and thus we have Killingsworth's Walt...

In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot by Barbara Adair Jacana Media, 164 pages, $19. This novel from a South African publisher is a hybrid consisting of excerpts from six works of fiction and poetry by Paul Bowles and two works of...

School of the Arts: Poems.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
November 1, 2005... School of the Arts: Poems by Mark Doty HarperCollins. 109 pages, $22.95 Provincetown-based poet Mark Doty launches his latest book with a kind of apology, perhaps to his readers, perhaps to himself: "I have devoted myself to...

Craig Lucas: playwright with a movie in him.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)(Interview)
November 1, 2005... PLAYWRIGHT Craig Lucas, who has written his share of screenplays, makes his film directorial debut in The Dying Gaul, a contemporary tale reminiscent of those past films about tragic figures bought and sold in Hollywood. Adapted by Lucas from...

Conferences/events.(Bulletin Board)(Calendar)
November 1, 2005... "Creating Change," the country's pre-eminent LGBT political organizing conference, sponsored by the Gay & Lesbian Task Force, will take place Nov. 9-13 in Oakland, CA. For more info, visit: www.creatingchange.org. Or phone: 202-639-6333. ...

The life and work of Paul Monette on show.(ART MEMO)
November 1, 2005... "I don't know if I will live to finish this.... I've watched too many sicken in a month and die by Christmas, so that a fatal sort of realism comforts me more than magic. All I know is this: The virus ticks in me." WITH these...