Walter Holland

Shoreditch, the title of Miguel Murphy’s newest collection of poetry, is a brilliant if not challenging intellectual tour de force. Named after an area of London that became the center of Elizabethan theater, Shoreditch flourished as a fertile creative neighborhood while the puritanical city authorities of London proper banned the building of raunchy and low-class playhouses. With its breeding ground for minds unlawful and disorderly, and, with Shakespeare, that most sexually ambivalent young genius who introduced a new kind of theater peopled with dramatic historical personas, Murphy has found his objective correlative for his own historical identity. In Shoreditch, Murphy freely […]

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: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, or Robert Beachy’s subsequent Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. (Full disclosure, I am a sucker when it comes to gay or queer history, and I’m madly in love with both New York City and Berlin.) It is also interesting to see a shift from the early gay and lesbian scholarship to a new generation of vibrant queer historical writing. […]

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 Roger Dale Nunez. Nunez had tried to hustle one of the clients at the bar, breaking a time-honored rule. When requested to leave, Nunez became enraged, an altercation ensued, and Nunez was punched in the face and then physically ejected. Two patrons reportedly overheard Nunez shout: “I’m going to burn you all out,” or “I’m going to burn this place to the ground.” Nunez almost certainly […]

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 a series of “Acts” with chapters more like titled scenes and a cast of characters listed at the end, and documents through diverse interviews–edited in such a way as to create an on-going dialogue–the genesis, history, themes and reception of this queer masterwork. The “cast” for this metanarrative includes Kushner, the actors, directors, producers, and production team, as well as the scholars, historians, critics, and fellow […]

 C. W. Gortner’s novelization of the life of Marlene Dietrich, the German stage and film actress who became a legend in American cinema, is a rollicking good read filled with intimate details of her tempestuous sex life (her bisexuality was well-known) and the mythic rags to riches story of her ascent from the decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic to the sound stages of Hollywood’s studio system. Her cross-dressing, her specialization in portraying strong fallen women who rule by the powers of seduction and charm, and her flirtation with androgyny and lesbian desire, established her as a queer glamour goddess […]

Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, author of Mephisto, was one of the first in Germany to write gay novels and plays. Not since reading Judith Thurman’s excellent biography of Colette some years back, have I been so captivated by a piece of writing and scholarship and the creative life and historical period it captures. The reverberations with our own contemporary times are uncanny and raise provocative questions about the role of the queer artist in society, especially a society faced with the lure of fascism and anti-liberal conservatism. Klaus was an early foe of Nazism, writing against the wave […]

As with the recent interest in Samuel Steward, the Midwestern sex chronicler and tattoo artist, gay scholarship has begun to recover the legacy of gay men from the pre-Stonewall generation, who were part of a thriving homosexual underground. These were the sexual outlaws and renegades who found their homosexuality as an alternative to the conformity of heterosexual America, which Boyd McDonald characterized as a “sexual dictatorship” McDonald was one of the literate stars of this underground. Known for his homoerotic series of chapbooks, Straight to Hell, beginning in 1973, he published the true stories of men who had sex with […]