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NO ONE SPEAKS of A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) as a gay novel; it's a novel about fin-de-siecle Paris, about the rarefied world of [...]

A COMPELLING CASE can be made for E. M. Forster's Maurice as the first gay novel. Completed 100 years ago this year, Forster's boldness lay in his revolutionary decision to [...]

Personal literature may be written either as a life story such as an autobiography or memoir or as an autobiographical novel. Using the three volumes comprising the memoir of author Paul Monette and the three volumes comprising the autobiographical fiction trilogy of journalist and novelist Edmund White, this article explores the goal of each author for selecting a particular genre in which to write about lived experience. Each author enjoyed an elite education and came to adulthood in postwar America in the decade prior to the gay rights era beginning in the 1970s, and each writer participated in the sociosexual culture emerging over the succeeding decade. Each writer became HIV+ in the 1980s (Monette died of complications attending AIDS in 1995), and each writer experienced the loss of his lover to AIDS. While Monette and White each experienced the anti-gay prejudice of postwar American society, Monette's youth was less troubled than that of White who grew up in a complex family with a distant yet harsh father toward whom he was also sexually attracted. While Monette's goal in writing a memoir was that the suffering of his generation of gay men should be remembered, White's goal was more personal, choosing autobiographical fiction in his effort to overcome his feelings of shame about being gay founded on his desire for his father. KEYWORDS. Life-writing, memoir, autobiographical fiction, homosexuality, Paul Monette, Edmund White, gay lives, shame

IN HIS MEMOIR Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood describes his relationship with E. M. Forster, who was 25 years his senior. When they met in 1932, Isherwood felt that [...]

WHEN James Baldwin presented a manuscript of Giovanni's Room to his agent, Helen Strauss, she told him to burn it. It was his second novel. His first, Go Tell it [...]

BEST KNOWN for her historical novels set in ancient Greece, many with overtly homosexual themes and scenes, Mary Renault began her career with a novel set in modern times called [...]

GORE VIDAL died in 2012, at 86, and The New York Times obituary reluctantly conceded that his claim of having been blacklisted by the newspaper for writing The City and [...]

THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat salacious [...]

Homosexuals can always wonder whether the texts of Jean Genet adequately offer helpful knowledge to the text readers. The process of criticism destroys the texts. But in the case of his novel 'Querelle' the images of doubling in the characters reflect the processes of a gay persons' labor to understand themselves in society. Gays can see in the character of Querelle the act of loving and the beloved, the tormented and the tormentor. The inability to clearly see the doublings as a single self challenges the reader to form an accurate self-representation.

How might gay and lesbian literature be read not as a mimetic representation of homosexuality, but as an activity linked to problems of subjectivity and historiography? Reading Dale Peck's novel Martin and John alongside passages from Friedrich Nietzsche's 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life' and Sigmund Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia,' this essay argues for an understanding of Peck's text as an attempt to link two apparently different processes of import to contemporary gay male subjects in particular: the writing of what Nietzsche terms 'critical history,' and the mourning of those lost to HIV disease. It concludes by linking Martin and John to feminist critiques of identity and traditional historiography, as well as noting the connection between these two critiques.

This article argues that the 1976 novel (reprinted in 1993) Lover by Bertha Harris, though receiving little critical attention in the past, can be considered an exemplary novel within discussions of both postmodern fiction and lesbian (or queer) theory. The article analyzes in particular the novel's self-consciousness as manifested by characters who cross-dress and who are artists (including the writer of the novel we are reading). The article calls for Harris to be added to the group of writers such as Wittig, Anzaldua, Lorde, and Winterson, who are discussed within the context of a postmodern lesbian narrative.

This paper uses two teaching experiences with Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country to frame a discussion of the complicated critical history of this literary work and its relation to Baldwin's literary reputation. The contested relationship between the categories of race and sexuality in the novel is tracked and its political implications explored.

Reading Nancy Drew with no biases to her heterosexual icon status reveals the potential of popular literature to privilege both straight and lesbian readers. Using the subtext as text, what seems desirably feminine at first can turn out to be a non-traditional female attribute. Nancy Drew's ability to excel at anything, for example, and her independence from the dictates of men. Even by simply asking an unpopular question can enrich one's reading, making each adventure a metaphor for the lesbian child's many difficulties., 'She is as immaculate and self-possessed as a Miss America on tour. She is as cool as Mata Hari and as sweet as Betty Crocker,' says Bobbie Ann Mason of [...]

Rather than signalling Rochester's agreement with the presumptive biblical imprecation against sodomy and consequent divine vengeance, the apocalyptic denouement of The Farce of Sodom bespeaks defiance of divine judgment and a willingness to persevere in the pleasure of homosexual anal sex despite what might seem certain divine retribution. A Bakhtinian reading of the play's carnivalesque features concludes that it is the failure of all sexual endeavor, rather than of sodomy per se, that is dramatized in the farce's concluding scene. Sodom anticipates both the modem attitude towards the open male body that has come to dominate contemporary gay discourse, and the transgressive uses to which modem writers have put the Bible by which they undercut its authority and the presumptive morality that it is otherwise used to sanction.

E. M. Forster's short story 'The Life to Come' intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.

This essay examines L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a seventeenth-century text written in Venice. L'Alcibiade is a sort of Platonic dialogue between a sodomite teacher and his young and attractive pupil. The teacher tries to convince his student to let him penetrate him. The discourse of the sodomite teacher is similar to Lacan's 'discourse of the master.' Maggi brings to the fore the intrinsic ambiguities of the sodomite discourse. On the one hand, since he posits himself outside society, the sodomite is able to manipulate and distort any sort of discourse. The sodomite teacher believes that women embody the religious/political power that oppresses sodomites. The master knows that any discourse exclusively aims to acquire a certain power. On the other hand, the sodomite discourse is nothing but another form of power/oppression. The master subjugates the other through his 'sodomite rhetoric,' based on lies and puns.

Gay and lesbian activists as well as sexually orthodox individuals use the Bible to justify their respective positions on the issue of homosexuality and its moral and ethical dimension. Gays point to the proliferation of homoerotic themes such as the friendship between David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi. Homophobic heterosexuals, on the other hand, focus on the many injunctions against sodomy in the Old Testament.

Traditional scholarship deliberately avoids homosexism, a scholarly approach offering the opportunity for a homosexual reading, in Frank O'Hara's poetry. As a member of the New York City Movement, O'Hara breaks with conventional poetic and social conventions, discussing homosexuality as a natural form of social interaction. This essay, by way of an intrinsic approach, closely examines homosexual subtexts in his poetry in general, and in the poem 'A Step Away From Them' in particular.

LITERARY HISTORY is full of the rediscovered. Some authors, indeed, don't ever 'make it' so much as they move from one period of rediscovery--or attempted rediscovery--to the next. But British [...]

Jeffrey Weeks is a renowned author and activist who has expressed open support to the gay movement. Starting out as a political theorist, Weeks became a widely respected and influential writer whose main contribution was in exploring 19th century sexual identity and sexual culture. Weeks is famous for writing three books on homosexuality, namely, 'Coming Out', 'Sex, Politics and Society', and 'Sexuality and Its Discontents.'

This article is concerned with the way the mythical figure of Sappho was constructed by writers and painters at the end of the 19th century. At the turn of the century Sappho's work was translated anew, while Sappho herself was turned into a personnage romanesque. She then became the object of various 'metamorphoses' best conceived in terms of an infinite reproduction of the poetess under different guises - she is given new faces, new destinies and even new names - that nevertheless affect a singular 'metamorphosis'; Sappho is sexualized, transformed from the poetess into a lesbian, symbol of all that is contre-nature and thus the original aberrant woman (e.g., 'viragos,' bluestockings, feminists and later garconnes) as it was then being constructed by literary and medical discourse. But if no longer an untouchable myth, this actualized Sappho can be considered as a keyfigure to the understanding of fin de siecle fantasies and fears about lesbianism and female sexuality in general.

Since reading is an interaction or confrontation between the reader and the text - an interaction that depends upon the background and perspectives of the reader as well as on the text being read - we can assume that the dynamics of sexuality and sexual object choice will influence how readers ascribe meaning to literary texts. In fact, although other aspects of our identities come into play when we read, sexual identity is unique and central because of the role that it plays in the creation of subjectivity. Specifically, male homosexuality informs and structures the reading of texts. But what does it mean to be a homosexual reader or to effectuate a homosexual reading of a particular text?

Photographs have become a major form of illustration in college level health and sexuality textbooks and may be more memorable than the text itself. Unlike other forms of illustration, photographs are often viewed as objective and unable to 'lie.' Photographs of individuals from nondominant groups, in addition to being seen as objective representations of reality, are often seen as representing the group to which they belong. To study the representation of nondominant groups in textbooks, it is, therefore, as important to analyze the photographs as the text itself. This paper examines photographs of gay men and lesbians in 14 health and 16 human sexuality college level textbooks. The photographs of individuals present an inaccurate portrait of lesbians and gay men as white, young, and physically-abled. Individual and large group photographs of activism (31% of the total photographs of gay men and lesbians) were positive images that emphasized issues of civil rights. The paper discusses various interpretations of the photographs of gay men and lesbians, subtle homophobia or heterosexism in the texts, and progress that has been made.