The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from November 2007

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from November 2007

November-December 2007: "Eros and god".(Editorial)
November 1, 2007... This issue's dual theme--"religious encounters" and "erotic awakenings"--is an editorial accident, but the temptation to present them as bookends was irresistible. Ah, sex and religion, those two "non-overlapping magisteria," as they're called...

Happy Holidays! or the phoniest 'war' of all.(GUEST OPINION)(war on Christmas)
November 1, 2007... GET READY for the "war on Christmas," season four. It's already started in New Hyde Park, New York, a Long Island town where, in August 2007, some parents angrily denounced the school district's proposal to change the name of the annual...

Real gains or just a lower bar?(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... To the Editor: I appreciate Matt Foreman's optimism regarding the progress of GLBT rights over the last 25 years ("Guest Opinion," July-Aug. 2007), and it's tonic to see his chart. What this also illustrates, however, is that we too...

Marriage in Mass. has backfired.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... To the Editor: I was relieved, of course, when the Massachusetts legislature cast only 45 votes of the fifty (25 percent of the combined House and Senate) needed to put same-sex marriage (SSM) on the 2008 ballot. It would have been another...

Have the witch hunts really stopped?(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... To the Editor: Kevin Jennings' triumphalist "Guest Opinion" piece (Sept.-Oct. 2007) touched on the 1920 Harvard purge uncovered a few years ago by The Harvard Crimson and detailed in William Wright's Harvard's Secret Court. So far as I...

Are gays leaving Poland en Masse?(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2007... To the Editor: I am writing in response to your news item about the situation in Poland [BTW, Sept.-Oct. 2007]. I see the situation somewhat differently. In less than two decades of political freedom, Polish gays and lesbians created...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
November 1, 2007... In a piece by Natalie Hope McDonald, "AIDS Writing in Crisis Times and Today" (July-Aug. 07), Benoit Denizet-Lewis was described as "an African-American writer," which is inaccurate; he is white. In a poem by Esther Ross, "Mortar"...

Trevor Hailey, guide to the Castro, dies at 66.(IN MEMORIAM)(In memoriam)
November 1, 2007... Trevor Hailey, who created and led for sixteen years the internationally known "Cruisin' the Castro" walking tours, died of a stroke on June 13, 2007, at age 66. A woman of tremendous warmth and enthusiasm, she presented the gay and lesbian...

"Mervgate".(BTW)(Merv Griffin's sexuality)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... That's what people were calling a short-lived but intriguing incident that occurred after the death of talk-show host and game-show mogul Merv Griffin. To say that rumors about Merv's sexual orientation had been flying for years would be an...

Craig's list.(BTW)(Senator Larry Craig and other gay politicians involved in sex crimes)
November 1, 2007... All eyes were on Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, whose restroom footsy incident cost him his seat in the Senate, but every joke has already been taken. Here are two lesser-covered incidents that may have slid by some readers: 1. A story that...

Equal liability.(BTW)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... We all favor ENDA laws to stop workplace discrimination, and many states, including California, have such a law. But the principle cuts both ways, and now the former director of California's LifeCycle fund-raiser has sued two HIV/AIDS...

Chronicle this!(BTW)(openly gay college presidents)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... A recent "Guest Opinion" (May-June 2007) featured Hampshire College president Ralph Hexter discussing his position as an openly gay college president. Hexter was aware of only one other GLBT person in a similar position in the U.S. at the time....

By popular demand.(BTW)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Larry Craig it is. What really did him in was not the Minneapolis Airport but the Boise Statesman, which was sitting on years of research that struck the fear of GOP in him (i.e., his Republican colleagues, who ditched him in a DC nanosecond)....

'What ever happened to complexity?' David Bergman chats with the author of The Child.(CONVERSATION)(Sarah Schulman)(Interview)
November 1, 2007... LAST SPRING, Sarah Schulman came out with her eighth novel, The Child, published by Carroll & Graf, an imprint that almost immediately disappeared when the Avalon Publishing Group was bought in yet another corporate merger. The collapse of...

Hedonism bound: Isherwood in Berlin.(ESSAY)(Christopher Isherwood)(Essay)
November 1, 2007... IN MAY OF 1928, Christopher Isherwood made his first trip to Germany. He went as a tourist on a brief visit to the port city of Bremen. Though unremarkable in many respects, this trip would prove to be amazingly generative. For the reading...

The man who loved Frankenstein.(ESSAY)
November 1, 2007... The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein by John Lauritsen Pagan Press. 232 pages, $16.95 BACK IN THE EARLY 1980's, when I was an English literature grad student, Frankenstein was something of a controversial work. Many thumbed their nose...

Underexposed: Gerald Glaskin's fiction.(ESSAY)
November 1, 2007... WHEN BARRIE AND ROCKLIFF published Gerald Glaskin's No End To The Way in 1965, it must have raised many eyebrows, not least in the British Home Office. This frank portrayal of a gay relationship between an Australian advertising executive (Ray)...

Something unforgettable, forgotten.(ESSAY)(Coleman Dowell's books)
November 1, 2007... Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell by Eugene Hayworth Dalkey Archive Press. 264 pages, $24.95 Island People by Coleman Dowell Dalkey Archive Press. 309 pages, $12.95 Too Much Flesh and Jabez by...

Jesus, the centurion, and his lover.(ESSAY)(Essay)
November 1, 2007... FEW HETEROSEXUAL COUPLES rate a mention in the New Testament, so the fact that there's not much discussion of same-sex relationships is not unexpected. But maybe one gay relationship made it into the book, or rather the books, of the New...

God Is Warm in My Belly.(Poem)
November 1, 2007... God is warm in my belly like freshly-baked bread: a poppyseed, sesame, banana nut bagel God, a funny God, whose yeasty laughter rises the dough. Or a grand celestial loaf of which my body is a happy slice. Maybe a...

A strange fruit grows in Louisville.(ESSAY)(Essay)
November 1, 2007... "MARY, don't you weep. Oh Papa don't you moan," goes the old Negro spiritual's first few lines. For me, these hymns evoke spirituality and resistance simultaneous to the reality of slaves--the progenitors of American music. Like Mary's tears,...

One way to the Southern heart.(ESSAY)(Essay)
November 1, 2007... "Among other common lies, we have the silent lie--the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not...

My Mother's Suitors.(Poem)
November 1, 2007... The moment my mother tells me she'd fallen out of love with my father, the Santa Ana winds still for a wing-beat second and the lemon trees shudder in the backyard, their fruits falling in a singular hushed thud. It is a quiet shaking....

Power couple.(Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Letters of Marcus and Fronto)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Letters of Marcus and Fronto Edited and translated by Amy Richlin University of Chicago Press 168 pages, $35 IMAGINE WRITING a letter to your most brilliant teacher. Then imagine writing to your...

The South reverts to gothic.(Mississippi Sissy)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums St. Marin's Press 305 pages, $24.95 THERE IS a growing literature attesting to the terrors and gothic comedies of growing up gay in the American South. With his memoir Kevin Sessums has...

Setting the Seine on fire.(Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image by Bennetta Jules-Rosette Univ. of Illinois Press. 368 pages, $60. COQUETRY, debauchery, celebrity might be the most descriptive words to evoke the Paris that Josephine Baker...

Japan reclaims its tolerant past.(Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives from Japan's Sexual Minorities)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Queer Voices from Japan: First-Person Narratives from Japan's Sexual Minorities Edited by Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker Lexington Books 356 pages, $36.96 (paper) JAPANESE CULTURE has long accepted the...

Fighting Fire.(Poem)
November 1, 2007... I first felt it that afternoon in your family room when you offered me your toy chest's newest claim-- the red plastic bullhorn, a miniature of your fireman father's, a birthday gift for his only son: Ten years old and nearly half my...

Art critic + party boy + diarist =.(The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman Edited by Stephen Pascal Alfred A. Knopf. 654 pages, $37.50 ALTHOUGH HE DIED IN 1994, Leo Lerman is still, thanks to the diligent efforts of editor Stephen Pascal, sharing his stories...

Poetry briefs.(Book review)
November 1, 2007... So many books of poetry have come across my desk that are worthy of comment that it's hard to doubt we live in quite a remarkable time for poetry. Here are four books worth reading. Parthian Stations by John Ash Carcanet Press...

Song and dance men.(Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham by Carolyn Brown Alfred A. Knopf. 656 pages, $37.50 I WAS ON SCHOLARSHIP at Merce Cunningham's dance studio back in the late 1970's when dance was big in New York City...

Pocker of mysteries.(Scott Free: A Crime Novel)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Scott Free: A Crime Novel by Marijane Meaker writing as Vin Packer Caroll & Graf. 298 pages, $24.95 SCOTTI HOUSE, the heroine of Vin Packer's new novel, is a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual, a pre-op whose metamorphosis is...

Dreaming Stephen Crane.(Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel by Edmund White Ecco. 240 pages, $23.95 AUTHOR STEPHEN CRANE is nearing the end of his short life, and his wife Cora is on a fruitless mission to save him by consulting different medical...

Those 1.3 billion consumers.(Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture by Lisa Rofel Duke University Press. 252 pages, $21.95 CHINA'S VERTIGINOUS RISE as a global economic player is being watched with fascination by those who...

Long before Foucault.(Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America Edited by Thomas A. Foster New York University Press. 405 pages, $25. IN 1976, Jonathan Katz published one of the first comprehensive histories of same-sex...

That trip did her good.(Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen by Richard F. Docter, PhD Harrington Park Press. 355 pages, $49.95 ($19.95 paper) WHEN GEORGE JORGENSEN became a woman and renamed herself Christine some fifty years ago, she...

Jewish American royalty.(Baroness of Hobcaw: The Life of Belle W. Baruch)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Baroness of Hobcaw: The Life of Belle W. Baruch by Mary E. Miller Univ. of South Carolina Press. 212 pages, $29.95 THE PRIVILEGED and charmed life of Belle W. Baruch (1899-1964), daughter of Wall Street financier and presidential...

A Queer History of the Ballet.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... A Queer History of the Ballet by Peter Stoneley Routledge. 206 pages, $29.95 Just when one had lost hope in queer theory and its future, this book clearly points toward its utility when applied with skill and insight. Making his...

Valentino: A Dream of Desire.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Valentino: A Dream of Desire by David Bret Carroll & Graf. 224 pages, $25.95 This new book on Rudolph Valentino has the appeal of a silent film, with all the histrionics, scenery changes, and implausible plotlines that this...

Dog Years.(Brief article)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Dog Years by Mark Doty HarperCollins. 224 pages, $23.95 The third memoir by poet and essayist Mark Doty is undoubtedly the one that has the greatest potential to reach a mainstream audience. While the enduring subject of "man's...

Come Out and Win: Organizing Yourself, Your Community and Your World.(Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know about Their Legal Rights)(Brief article)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Come Out and Win: Organizing Yourself, Your Community and Your World by Sue Hyde Beacon Press. 168 pages, $13. (paper) Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know about Their Legal Rights by Lisa Keen Beacon Press. 158 pages,...

In defense of pecs.(Muscle Boys: Gay Gym Culture)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Muscle Boys: Gay Gym Culture by Erick Alvarez Harrington Park Press. 304 pages, $19.95 PLANTED MODESTLY in the middle of this new study is its pithiest assertion: "Simply put, in urban America, being gay comes with a gym...

The lure of the library.(Sex by the Book: Gay Men's Tales of Lit and Lust)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Sex by the Book: Gay Men's Tales of Lit and Lust Edited by Kevin Bentley Green Candy Press. 213 pages, $15. EDITOR KEVIN BENTLEY, wielding the laid-back wisdom of some bohemian writing instructor, assigned the contributors to his...

The silent death of Shanhai's first gay hotline.(INTERNATIONAL SPECTRUM)(HomoHeart)
November 1, 2007... THE OWNER of Lai Lai's, Shanghai's only dance venue for low-income gays, was screaming over the five-piece band. She accused our small contingent of safer sex outreach workers of attracting police scrutiny, telling us to get out of her...

Conferencs/events.(Bulletin Board)(Brief article)(Calendar)
November 1, 2007... Queer Studies Twenty Years Out: 1987-2007. Conf. will be held at Yale University, Oct 26-27, to commemorate the events that staked out the academic field of queer studies twenty years ago. For more info, visit: www.yale.edu/lesbiangay. The...

Sir Ian McKellen on acting, truth, and being out.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)(Interview)
November 1, 2007... REVERED as one of the greatest actors of our times, Sir Ian Murray McKellen never felt he was doing his best work until he came out publicly at the age of 49. A private man who considered it nobody's business what his sexual orientation was,...