This tale, set in Paris, tells a sad story of an American man whose girlfriend is traveling on vacation in Spain. He meets an Italian bartender Giovanni and falls in love. At the time, such love is illegal in America, and while not illegal in France, it is culturally shunned. Renowned author James Baldwin captures what such social oppression can do to an innocent, loving relationship in that era. It ostensibly details a romantic tragedy…
I grew up as a Southern Baptist with a lot of structural homophobia around me. Homosexuality was viewed as an irrefutable sin, and nothing else in the Biblical narrative could say otherwise. Over the years, I’ve questioned much about the religious tradition I was handed. I am still a Christian, but my faith takes a much different form that values education, a lack of bias, and a role for history in religion. In fact, now,…
Larry Kramer was an outspoken advocate in the 1980s, the early days of the AIDS epidemic. While many in the gay community were caught up in celebrating hard-fought sexual freedoms, Kramer argued that these freedoms must be curtailed somehow to protect against biological disease. This position, unfortunately, won him scorn from many fellow gays. However, he wrote this award-winning play in 1985 to advocate for his position while shining the light on what it was…
“What am I going to do without him?”…“Write about him Paul… That’s what you have to do.” In a world before triple-drug therapy (HAART) was enacted and allowed individuals to live a normal lifespan with HIV, Monette and his lover Roger Horwitz contracted HIV, which ineluctably progressed into AIDS. Professionally, Horwitz was a lawyer and a lover of literature; Monette was a writer. Both were educated at Ivy League schools. This work is the first…
Ziyad is a black, queer male writer from Cleveland, who now lives in New York City and uses the pronouns they/them (which shall be used in this review). They write about his struggles forming an identity in a world that seems violent and hostile to his health. While such an environment exists in some part for most children, Ziyad seems to have a particularly difficult time given a multi-religious home, public schooling that seemed to…