David Leddick has produced a colourful art book of absurdly handsome men. E-readers will never be able to replace this sort of...
What do “The Man in the Arrow Shirt” and the original “Blue Haired Lady” have in common? As Rodger Streitmatter...
Acclaimed funny-guy and memoirist Augusten Burroughs' latest book, This is How: Help For the Self, Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude, and More, for Young and Old Alike (St. Martin's Press) is, as the title implies, an eclectic, entertaining, and refreshingly ill-tempered self-help book. Read More
“A happy childhood,” Colm Tóibín tells us, “may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page.” Withholding or meddlesome fathers, control-freak mothers, siblings whose sexual hijinks would make polite society shudder—these are the stimuli that fill blank pages with art. And Tóibín in New Ways to Kill Your Mother (Scribner) mines this potent field of twisted and troublesome literary families for all it’s worth.
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“The Closet” is an increasingly ill-fitting metaphor for queer men and women who wish to explore their sexuality outside of the two opposite states of either being “out” and having to confess their personal life aloud or being “closeted” and thus presumed to be living in shame or self-denial. It is this binary of being in or out of the closet that Nicholas De Villiers deconstructs in Opacity and the Closet... Read More
In a world increasingly dominated (pun intended) by 50 Shades of Grey and other arguably unrealistic representations of BDSM, Tristan...
Judged solely by its title, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press) could easily be dismissed by some as just another cynical...
The lingo heard in gay circles today (“the children,” for instance, as code for not-so-covertly gay members of the church) derived decades ago from the gospel underground, where drug and sexual abuse, promiscuity, and perhaps mental illness were prevalent. Lots of backstabbing and cut-throat showmanship went down, too, and Heilbut tells it all. Read More
It’s impossible for me to discuss this history of the gay rights movement without noting that on the day I...
Based on 2010 Census numbers, Chicago has the third largest urban LGBT population in the United States. The land that we know today as Chicago has had an LGBT presence since the seventeenth century. In spite of that, no one has published a history of LGBT life in Chicago until today. Chicago gay press writer St. Sukie de la Croix wrote Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall (University of Wisconsin Press) to fill that empty space on the shelf. Read More
