‘The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America’ by Isaac...
Isaac Butler and Dan Kois have crafted an extensive oral history of the making of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America that is ingenious by design. Much like a play script itself, the book is structured in...
View Article‘Lowly’ by Alan Felsenthal
Alan Felsenthal in Lowly shows a strong affinity toward previous generations of Language poets, especially the work of Susan Howe. As the critic Stephen Paul Martin states in regards to Howe: “We are...
View Article‘Seed’ by David Eye
With Seed, the poet David Eye moves the reader back and forth from the rural to the urban, from the past to the present, from Virginia to New York, and affords us a hardscrabble look at growing up...
View Article‘Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay...
The June 24, 1973 arson of the gay bar the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans was apparently an act of revenge, allegedly perpetrated by a ne’er-do-well, small-time crook and alcoholic gay hustler named...
View Article‘The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke’ by Jeffrey C. Stewart
Jeffrey C. Stewart’s fine biography is a remarkable achievement in African-American studies as well as queer scholarship. It is also one of a scarce number of major biographies being written about...
View Article‘We Go Seasonal’ by Robert Siek
At first glance I heard in Siek a throwback to the 1980s East Village scene, a troubled son of New Jersey’s suburbia fleeing the “bridge and tunnel” life to become a “Second Avenue artist-rebel.” One...
View Article‘Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution’ by Stephen S. Mills
Stephen S. Mills’ Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution is an interesting exercise in historical contrasts. He approaches his poems as though they were chapters in two parallel and interwoven...
View Article‘When Brooklyn Was Queer’ by Hugh Ryan
When opening Hugh Ryan’s provocative and fascinating history, When Brooklyn Was Queer, I felt an air of excitement that I hadn’t felt since first reading George Chauncey’s groundbreaking Gay New York:...
View Article13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
At the start of Mark Bibbins’ poetry book 13th Balloon is an announcement from the Albany, New York, newspaper The Daily Gazette dated September 14, 1992. We are told of the “Lift for Life” project, an...
View ArticleCrashing Cathedrals Honors the Brilliance of Edmund White
Tom Cardamone’s Festschrift (a collection utilized to praise a scholar or writer) for Edmund White is an eclectic anthology of essays celebrating the esteemed gay homme de lettres. Some of these...
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