In this thoughtful double character study, and in the film’s examination of the personal costs of a draconian penal system, Great Freedom delivers not a neat Hollywood ending but a painful reflection on how an unyielding social order thwarts the human spirit.
Learning Your Own Name
Hello world! My name is Ren. I use they/them/their pronouns. These are not my “preferred” pronouns; these are my pronouns.
A Metanovel Set in the Future
As a prose stylist, White is a master. What he says about Ruggero’s conversational style-“full of radical shifts in register from hieratic to demotic, serious to frivolous, flipping lightly from a big subject (the Czech baroque) to a small one (the best way to cook perfectly round potatoes fondant in the oven)”-very much describes his own literary mode. It’s a style I’d call Classical High Gay. It will delight some readers and probably turn others off.
A Poet Knocking on the Closet Door
THOM GUNN (1929–2004), though widely recognized as a major British poet of the later 20th century, has often been marginalized by a literary establishment that has never been able to deal fully with his evocative, and explicitly gay, poetry. The publication of Gunn’s letters represents the start of what the poet Andrew McMillan has called “a welcome rebalancing.” As well as providing an intimate portrait of Gunn, the letters also give an insight into the origins of this imbalance. An unmistakable thread running through his letters is the extent to which he was forced to negotiate with a hostile culture as a poet who was a gay man.
The Grand Story of Gran Fury
It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful makes a compelling case for the significance of Gran Fury’s imagery to the efficacy of ACT UP. Lowery also sees a larger significance: “Maybe the most important lessons from Grand Fury aren’t about AIDS explicitly, or even about Single Muslim pandemics, but rather the ability for this kind of work to sway public opinion, to shape our attitudes, and to change our worldviews.”
Woolf’s World
Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about a woman giving a party. In that spirit, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway is not a book to be read and then hidden away on a shelf in your study. It belongs on your coffee table so that your friends and even casual acquaintances can enjoy the visuals while you’re in the kitchen making the coffee.
Short Reviews
Reviews of The Damage: A Novel; A Long Way from Douala; Because Art: Commentary, Critique & Conversation; Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, God’s Waiting Room; and A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah.
Can Serious Art Be Hot?
Although Lynes is usually mentioned in studies of queer Modernism, he is rarely placed in the same category as Paul Cadmus, Christopher Isherwood, or Tennessee Williams-all of whom Lynes knew and photographed. This may change with the publication of Allen Ellenzweig’s George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye, a sumptuous biography that makes a compelling case for Lynes as an important actor in the history of queer representation.
Features From Current Issue
Fernando Pessoa began inventing alternate selves: fictional beings who peopled his imaginary universe and manifested their identities by producing letters, stories, and poems.
By Andrew Holleran: Noel Coward was a Renaissance man who wrote songs and plays, acted, and directed in a career that stretched from the heyday of George Bernard Shaw to that of the Angry Young Men like John Osborne (Look Back in Anger).
By Christina Schlesinger with Erica Rose: Lesbian bars were magical places where you could finally be yourself, openly desire and be desired, and do what you wanted without guilt or shame.
By Ignacio Darnaude: Days before the unveiling of his history-changing sculpture of David (1504), the 29-year-old Michelangelo was chosen to paint an image of The Battle of Cascina on a wall of the Palazzo de la Signoria in Florence. This battle was fought between Florence and Pisa on a scorching July day in 1364.