The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide articles from September 2008

The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide archives from September 2008

Sept.-Oct 2008: "election 2008 issue".
September 1, 2008... No one knows who decided that the totemic colors of the two major political parties would be red for the Republicans and blue for the Democrats, but it seems to have stuck for now. I suspect someone assigned blue to the party of the left to...

A presidential election for the ages.(GUEST OPINION)(Essay)
September 1, 2008... THE MODERN American civil rights movement began at the 1948 Philadelphia Democratic convention when a hitherto unknown Minneapolis mayor, Hubert Humphrey, rose to defend the platform committee's minority report on civil rights. Humphrey knew...

Correction and tribute.(Correspondence)(Jonathan Williams )(Obituary)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Editor's Note: More than one reader wrote in to report that we ran the wrong picture with our tribute to the late Jonathan Williams in the May-June issue. They were kind enough to supply some correct photos, one of which is shown here. In...

Keynes' coded Diaries.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2008... To the Editor: When I read Evan Zimroth's comments on the Sex Diaries of John Maynard Keynes (July-August 2008), I couldn't help but believe he [she!] was making something complicated out of something that was quite simple. I doubt that...

Desiring Arabs author objects to review.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2008... To the Editor: It is surprising to me that a professor at a respectable institution would write an ad hominem and irresponsible review of another scholar's book like the one Vernon Rosario wrote of my book Desiring Arabs in the May-June...

An artist's right to privacy.(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2008... To the Editor: With regard to Cassandra Langer's Guest Opinion piece in the May-June 2008 issue, two points of fact were in error regarding the Jasper Johns: Gray exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art held earlier this year. First,...

Where was Pater during the Wilde trials?(Correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2008... To the Editor: "Tory Rebels in an Age of Prudery" by Martha Miller in the July-August 2008 issue, a review of Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and Politics of Queer History, contains a monstrous howler that brings disrepute on the...

BTW.(by the way)
September 1, 2008... What's Your Abomination? A Michigan man is seeking $70 million from two Christian publishers for emotional pain and suffering resulting from what he claims were mistranslations of certain biblical passages designed to exaggerate their anti-gay...

The outness of Rauschenberg's art.(Robert Rauschenberg)(Critical essay)
September 1, 2008... ONE OF THE GREATEST ARTISTS of the 20th century, Robert Rauschenberg, died on May 12, 2008, at the age of 82. Protean and prolific, Rauschenberg was arguably the most significant artist-inventor in the history of American art, celebrated not...

This critical moment.(Essay)
September 1, 2008... FROM THE STANDPOINT of GLBT rights, it now seems likely--although by no means certain--that 2008 will be the year in which the political system caught up to the country. I do not always subscribe to the view that the public is ahead of the...

Is Barack Obama the real deal?(Essay)
September 1, 2008... ONE OF THE MANY THINGS I admire about Barack Obama is his willingness to admit his imperfections. "I am not a perfect candidate," he is fond of saying, striking a chord of humility that makes him seem more human than most of our politicians....

Bar Gongora.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... for a single glass of manzanilla i step from the sun into the cool light of the bodega you turn from the casks wipe the metal bar-top brush away split husks of peanuts give me grave welcome...

HIV: the forgotten election issue.(human immunodeficiency virus )(Essay)
September 1, 2008... NINETY-SEVEN THOUSAND, five hundred seventy-seven gay men--that's how many "men who have sex with men" were newly diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. from 2001 to 2006. This just from 33 states, not including several with high incidence...

Why the Shepard murder was different.(Matthew Shepard)(Essay)
September 1, 2008... JUST BEFORE ONE A.M. on October 12, 2008, it will be ten years since the death of Matthew Shepard. There is little need to recount the details the brutal beating and death of the young man from Wyoming who became an international symbol of...

All eyes on California this November.(Essay)
September 1, 2008... "A VICTORY WON, but the battle has just begun." That was Sarah Reece's message to supporters of same-sex marriage who had gathered on an early summer evening at the East-West Lounge in West Hollywood for a Human Rights Campaign (HRC) meeting....

The emasculation of Henry James.(ESSAY)(House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family )(Critical essay)
September 1, 2008... THERE HAVE BEEN at least two major studies of the family that produced the novelist Henry James. One, by F. O. Matthiessen (the revered Harvard scholar), was published in 1941; the other, by R. W. B. Lewis (biographer of Edith Wharton), came...

Rosencrantz.(Poem)
September 1, 2008... I see now rehearsal for us was a process reversed, theater without direction me stumbling blocking scenes, you schooled in technique that sold out houses saving method classes for when I slept there. Memorial Day morning...

Taking the 'cure' at Harvard in the 50's.(ESSAY)(Speech)
September 1, 2008... On June 5, at its annual dinner, the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus presented its Founding Father Award to historian Martin Duberman, who was introduced by his former student Tim McCarthy, now a history lecturer at Harvard. What follows is a...

Lover.(Poem)
September 1, 2008... Say when, then a whisper and a sweet rush, black curtain of hair around your face as you reach for me. Say when. Say when, wet beneath my fingers and sighing, you rename me in the dark, now, your sky falls down, stars splitting open...

Lives in Art: Isherwood and Bachardy.(Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy)(Essay)
September 1, 2008... IT HAPPENED on a typical day in sun-drenched Southern California in the early 1950's. Two men met on the "queer" side of Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica. It was, despite the setup, all rather innocent. Within two months, they would begin a...

Don Bachardy on Living with Chris Isherwood.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)(Interview)
September 1, 2008... Long before it was hip, way before it was tolerated in Tinseltown, author Christopher Isherwood and portrait artist Don Bachardy lived as an openly gay couple in Hollywood. In many ways, it was an odd match. Thirty-one years Bachardy's senior,...

Ireland Honors Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi.(INTERNATIONAL SPECTRUM)
September 1, 2008... "YOU'RE AN AMERICAN!" the young fellow sings out, his broad, freckled face three inches from my own, his brogue competing with the lesbian jazz band whose music fills this Temple Bar pub called The George. When I've heard these words in Turkey...

Mad about the boys.(Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D.W. Winnicott)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... THIS BOOK is a curiosity, that's for sure. Sprightly, witty, distinctly unlabored, at times willfully unacademic, Reading Boyishly plots its course as: "Ancient boys, aged children, adolescent gentlemen: I dish them up as boyish cuisine... My...

Shifting sands.(The Ground under My Feet)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... EVA KOLLISCH'S The Ground Under My Feet is a collection of essays and stories tied together by the themes of exclusion and the search for community. Kollisch's primary focus is on her experiences as a Jewish child in Austria on the eve of World...

Back story to a life we've read all about.(About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... THE AUTHOR of the groundbreaking novel City of Night (1963) and numerous other innovative novels, John Rechy became a writer when, in his mother's bedroom in El Paso, while using a rented typewriter, he wrote a long letter to a stranger...

I've a feeling we're not in New York any more.(This Show Girl Must Go On)(Concert review)
September 1, 2008... THE AUDIENCE of aging Boomers arrives at the Colosseum at Caesar's Palace night after night to catch the Divine Miss M in her new Las Vegas act. Through the blare of the casino floor with its electronic cascade of beeps and bell sounds and its...

Janis Ian gets an encore.(Society's Child: My Autobiography)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... WHEN you're fifteen years old, when Leonard Bernstein features you on national television, when your first single charts in the top ten, garnering a Grammy nomination, and The New York Times anoints you a "radiant new talent," what do you do...

It's late, i can't breathe.(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... Mario, a 35-year-old gay actor, knows that he is dying. For five years, the AIDS virus has schooled him in fear. He lies in the prison of his room and gives himself failing grades for his life--an F for his lack of success, an F for his...

The shape-shifting self.(I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, A Memoir)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... THE MEMOIR has become such a crowded genre these days that one has the right to ask if each addition to its growing shelf warrants the lost trees. Jennifer Finney Boylan's book, I'm happy to report, passes this test. Boylan is a...

Southie burning.(Map of Ireland)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... IF YOU LIKED the film Juno and its wise-cracking teen heroine, you'll enjoy Ann Ahern, the teen protagonist in Stephanie Grant's new novel. Map of Ireland is a story about a lesbian teen from South Boston and the things she learns about...

Gonads in history.(Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex )(Book review)
September 1, 2008... IN HER NEW BOOK Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Mary Roach reveals that the road to the birds and the bees wasn't just paved with racy feathers and erotically-dripped honey. Over the years, many erroneous beliefs about erogenous...

Aphrodite unbound.(Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire )(Book review)
September 1, 2008... LISA M. DIAMOND has written a book dealing with women's sexuality that raises important questions and challenges prevailing theories put forth by both conservative and radical formulations. Divided into eight information-packed chapters with...

The men at the metro.(Poem)
September 1, 2008... Along the edge of fornication, I stagger, absorb the hint of nearer misses. Every man at once self-conscious, elbow-deep, embracing his efforts. Men in handfuls, cluttered, shirtless, shifting men and me among...

The beautiful tendons: uncollected queer poems, 1969-2007.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... by Jeffrey Beam White Crane Books. 143 pages, $ 14.95 This book gathers the homoerotic poems written by Jeffrey Beam over the past thirty years. Included are about 75 poems which have appeared in widely scattered small press magazines...

Chronicle of a plague, revisited.(BRIEFS)(Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... Andrew Holleran DaCapo Press. 304 pages, $16. Several months ago, Andrew Holleran was in a library browsing books about AIDS, and he came upon his own book, 1989's Ground Zero, collecting dust. It's never easy for an author to know...

Swish: my quest to become the gayest person ever.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... Joel Derfner Broadway.272 pages, $23.95 The title and subtitle of Joel Derfner's new book would lead one to believe that Swish is a frivolous and juvenile collection of writings chronicling, say, the stereotypical misadventures of a...

On Brokeback Mountain: meditations about masculinity, fear, and love in the story and the film.(BRIEFS)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... Eric Patterson Lexington Books. 386 pages, $39.95 (paper) With his ode to Brokeback Mountain, Eric Patterson has created an exhaustive but reader-friendly examination of the short story and the film adaptation. Particularly intriguing...

Jane Lynch, blending her life and movie roles.(ARTIST'S PROFILE)(Interview)
September 1, 2008... JANE LYNCH studied acting at Cornell University and then went on to act in comedy theatre, TV, and film. Her role in The Fugitive introduced her to a wider audience, which led to appearances in major movies and TV sitcoms. However, Jane has...

Sibling revelry.(In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story)(Book review)
September 1, 2008... THE TWO oldest children of Thomas Mann, both born in the earliest years of the 20th century, were possessed of enormous intellect, charm, and charisma. They were openly gay in the case of Klaus, bisexual in the case of Erika; and they were...