The best of The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review features 40 of
the liveliest and most controversial essays from the first
three years of the quarterly
that Library Journal has called "the journal of record" for
the discussion of gay and lesbian issues and ideas. Among the contributors
to this volume
are a large proportion of the most accomplished and influential gay
and lesbian writers at work today.
The Best of is available at bookstores for $27.95. Or you
can order direct from the publisher, Temple University Press. Call
1-800-447-1656.
OVERVIEW
When The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review started publishing in
early 1994, it stepped into a huge void in gay and lesbian literary culture,
which had always lacked a national venue for the general-interest essay,
a void that stretched all the way from Harpers to The New York
Review of Books. Right from the start, The Review began
featuring essays of the highest quality on topics in literature, politics,
science, and the arts from the most original thinkers of our time. The
Best of the HGLR distills this array of articles further to yield a
group of essays of exceptional brilliance and lasting importance.
For starters, this volume immortalizes some closely-watched debates
that took place in the pages of The Review, such as the one between
Barney Frank and Rich Tafel on political strategy, and that of David Bergman
and Bruce Bawer on cultural style and assimilation. It captures the
memories of key observers who lived through critical historical or literary
events, such as Holly Hughes, Edmund White, Karla Jay, and Andrew Holleran.
Other chapters cover the major sub-fields in gay and lesbian studies,
such as literary criticism, political and cultural history, and the science
of homosexuality. In each case, the chapter presents the leading
contributors to the field and offers a balanced range of perspectives.
Thus the science chapter includes "pro-biology" people like Camille Paglia,
Chandler Burr, and Richard Pillard, as well as skeptics such as Vernon
Rosario and Carla Golden. A chapter called "Out Comes American Literature"
features, among others, Richard Howard commenting on W. H. Auden, Renate
Stendhal on Gertrude Stein's use of language, and Tony Kushner on the writings
of Larry Kramer.
Brilliantly illustrated with caricatures by Charles
Hefling.
CONTENTS
1. BEING THERE: Literary Lives and Times
Andrew Holleran: My Harvard
Edmund White: Remembrances of a Gay Old Time
Patricia Nell Warren: A Tragedy of Bees
Yaroslav Mogutin: "Invitation to a Beheading"
Holly Hughes: Reverberations of "The NEA Four Affair"
2. ORIGINS: The Science of Homosexuality
Richard Pillard: The Genetic Theory of Sexual Orientation
William Byne & Ed Stein: Varieties of Biological Explanation
Chandler Burr: The "Gay Gene" Hits the Big Time
Camille Paglia: Where Gay Boys
Come From
Carla Golden: Do Women Choose Their Sexual Identity?
Vernon Rosario: Genes in the Service of Gay Pride
3. EARLY SIGHTINGS OF AN OLD DESIRE
Bernadette Brooten: Lesbians in Ancient Rome
Douglass Shand-Tucci: A Gay Civil War Novel Surfaces
Robert Dawidoff: On Being Out in the 90's - the 1890's (review
of George Chauncey's Gay New York)
Lester Strong: Hollywood Watering Holes
Lev Raphael: Deciphering the Gay Holocaust
4. THE LAVENDER DECADES
Michael Denneny: The Stonewall Riot as Event and Idea
Karla Jay: Lesbian New York
Ira Tattelman: The Rise and Fall of the Gay Bathhouse
Felice Picano: The Real Violet Quill Club
Gabrielle Glancy: Behind the Door at Red Dora's
Larry Kramer: "Life Is about Climbing Mountains" (interview)
5. OUT COMES AMERICAN LITERATURE
Martha Nell Smith: The Belle of the Belle of Amherst
Marilee Lindemann: Willa's Case
Renate Stendhal: Stein's Style: A Passion for Sentences
Richard Howard: Auden Agonistes [review of book]
Reed Woodhouse: Five Houses of Gay Fiction
Tony Kushner: Three Screeds from Key West
Cheryl Clarke: An Identity of One's Own (review of Sapphire's
Push)
6. ON LIBERATION STRATEGY: An Exchange
Barney Frank: Why Party Politics Matters
Rich Tafel: Why a One Party Strategy Fails
Barney Frank: Republicans Must Earn Our Vote
7. TO ASSIMILATE OR NOT TO ASSIMILATE?
David Bergman: An Open Letter to Bruce
Bawer
Bruce Bawer: What A Place at the Table Really Says
David Bergman: No Back-Pedaling, Please
Michael Schwartz: A Civil Libertarian States His Case (review
of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal)
Michael Schwartz: The Persistence of Liberalism (review of Urvashi
Vaid's Virtual Equality)
Edward Albee: "Aggressing Against the Status Quo" (interview)
8. POSTMODERNISM and Its Discontents
April Martin: The Politics of Sexual Identity
Richard Mohr: The Perils of Postmodernism
Denise Kimber Buell: Did They or Didn't They? (review of John
Boswell's Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance)
Andrew Holleran: Pearls of Jargon (review of David Halperin's
Saint=Foucault)
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4/23/98