The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August, 2025 (the text here includes a few additions) THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desires announces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988…
BORN THIS WAYScience, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movementby Joanna WuestUniv. of Chicago. 293 pages, $32.50 The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August 2024 LGBT activism has a longstanding relationship with the illiberal notion of being “Born This Way” (as gay, lesbian, etc.)—illiberal, because it argues that the sexualities behind the queer alphabet soup are…
The Gay and Lesbian Review, May-June, 2015 The bisexual’s dilemma Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow Houghton Mifflin. 240 pages, $27. The American Dream is not one but rather a kaleidoscope of dreams; this is the rural Southern version. Charles Blow’s life to date can be comfortably divided into two roughly equal…
Deus Sex Machina
Yanagihara’s best-seller defies expectations in a wholly expected way.
What the famous historian Saul Friedländer gets right (and wrong) about Kafka.
How Schulman unwittingly undermines her own argument.