GLR January-February 2023

G LR k

January–February 2023

Larger Than Life

R ICHARD B URNS Urvashi Vaid, Creator of Change D AVID B ERGMAN Richard Howard, Threatening Poet W ES H ARTLEY The Capriccios of Jimmy Wright M ARTHA E. S TONE Stars That Dimmed Last Year Shakespeare Made It Okay to Be Gay BY J OHN S. G ARRISON Men Dress for Each Other BY S TEVEN F. D ANSKY Bloomsbury 2.0 Out-sexed the Original BY A NDREW H OLLERAN

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William Shakespeare, Nick Bottom, and RuPaul

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The Gay & Lesbian Review January–February 2023 • VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 1 WORLDWIDE

Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118

C ONTENTS

Larger Than Life

Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON J EREMY F OX M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER A NDREW L EAR D AVID M ASELLO

F EATURES

Bright Lights That Dimmed Last Year 10 M ARTHA E. S TONE

Our annual tribute to some LGBT people who made a difference

Urvashi Vaid, Creator of Change 15 R ICHARD B URNS

Farewell to a firebrand with a genius for organizing (and cooking)

Richard Howard’s Threatening Poetry 17 D AVID B ERGMAN

It can be difficult, it can be disorienting, but it’s always insatiable

The Capriccios of Jimmy Wright 20 W ES H ARTLEY

His paintings of the ’70s cruising scene now hang at the Whitney

Dora & Lytton & Ralph & Frances 25 A NDREW H OLLERAN

Bloomsbury 2.0 surpassed the sexual adventurism of the original

Men Dress for Each Other 28 S TEVEN F. D ANSKY

Homoerotic undercurrents in men’s fashion on display in London

R EVIEWS

Michael Rosenfeld, editor — The Italian Invert 33 P HILIP G AMBONE Leonard Barkan — Reading Shakespeare Reading Me 34 J OHN S. G ARRISON Michael Snyder — James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Wirter 36 L OOI VAN K ESSEL Anthony Christian Ocampo — Brown and Gay in LA 37 V ERNON R OSARIO Noël Valis — Lorca After Life 39 A LAN C ONTRERAS Jack Fritscher — Profiles in Gay Courage: Leatherfolk, Arts, and Ideas 40 H ANK T ROUT Lonneke Geerlings — I Lay This Body Down 41 A NNE C HARLES B RIEFS 42 Caio Fernando Abreu — Moldy Strawberries 44 G IANCARLO L ATTA Granand — Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights 45 M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Adam McOmber — Hound of the Baskervilles: An Erotic Tale 45 P ETER M UISE Taymour Soomro — Other Names for Love 46 D ALE B OYER

F ELICE P ICANO J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP Web Editor K ELSEY M YERS ____________________________________ Board of Directors

Marcel Proust; translated by Lucy Raitz — Swann in Love 47 R ICHARD M. B ERRONG Terry Guest, playwright — The Magnolia Ballet, Part I 49 B RIDGETTE M. R EDMAN Nicholas Stoller, director; Billy Eichner, writer — Bros 50 C OLIN C ARMAN

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS

A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) E DUARDO F EBLES D ONALD G ORTON ( CLERK )

G UEST O PINION — Coming to Terms with the “Gay Holocaust” 5 W. J AKE N EWSOME H ISTORY M EMO — Taking Stock as The G&LR Turns 30 6 J OHN R. K ILLACKY BTW 8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . P OEM — “Fixer Upper” 18 M ICHAEL M ONTLACK A UTHOR ’ S P ROFILE – Marshall Moore, Expat Writer with Southern Roots 24 T REBOR H EALEY H ISTORY M EMO — How Italy’s Anti-Mask Law Was Weaponized 32 A MANDA M ADIGAN P OEM — “His Eyes” 38 M ARK E VAN C HIMSKY P OEM — “Something Sweet” 41 A MY S PADE C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 48

R OBERT H ARDMAN D AVID L A F ONTAINE A NDREW L EAR R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) M ARTHA E. S TONE T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD (C HAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)

The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscriptions: Call 847-504-8893. Rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” © 2023 by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org

January–February 2023

3

If Winter Comes... ‘Larger Than Life’ FROM THE EDITOR

“L ARGER THAN LIFE” seems to capture the com mon property of the people featured in this issue, who had the ability to do more in a day, or a life time, than seems possible for us mere mortals. Another common bond is that they’re all contemporary figures—some have re cently passed away—and their presence is still being felt. Indeed they are remembered here by people who knew them personally and can attest to their bigger-than-life personæ. Someone who embodies this theme is the late Urvashi Vaid, a blur of energy whose impact on the LGBT movement, which was profound, is detailed here by her longtime friend Richard Burns. Her passion for social justice and LGBT equality was matched by a genius for organizing, and it’s astonishing how many organizations she touched and in many cases transformed. As head of the Task Force, Burns points out, Vaid developed a vi sion of “intersectionality” before the word existed as a way to unify diverse communities by focusing on common goals. Another case in point is poet and translator Richard Howard, who also died last year. David Bergman, poetry editor for this magazine, was friends with Howard for decades and knows his poetry intimately, as you will see. In addition to his eighteen books of poems, Howard translated hundreds of books from the French. His poetry can be “threatening” because it’s grounded in a level of erudition—a sweeping grasp of Western literature and civilization—that few people can hope to match, least of all in

today’s oversaturated world. An artist who’s still with us, having lived a Zelig-like life in post-Stonewall America, is Jimmy Wright, whose career is cel ebrated here by his lifelong friend Wes Hartley. The fact that he grew up in rural Kentucky and ended up producing artwork that’s now at the Whitney speaks volumes. What Hartley calls Wright’s “yellow brick road” eventually led him to New York City, where he not only lived “the life” in the 1970s but captured it, prolifically, on canvas. This issue also includes Martha E. Stone’s annual roundup of notable LGBT people who passed away last year. There are over thirty brief obits, but let me comment on a few that I knew per sonally. Historian Bill Percy was a friend who lived nearby in Boston’s South End, whose Falstaffian extroversion must have been daunting to college freshmen but certainly livened up the many parties that he threw. I never met Stephen Hunt in person, but he was such a fan of the magazine, letting us know the minute his issue arrived and providing a thoughtful commen tary on its contents. The ever cheerful Chuck Colbert was an early contributor back when we were The Harvard Gay & Les bian Review , as was Arnie Kantrowitz, who wrote about Walt Whitman. Jeffrey Escoffier actually wrote a book titled Bigger Than Life , a history of gay porn cinema, a topic that he covered for us in an interview. Farewell to them all. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

New from the University Press of Mississippi

Available at your local bookseller.

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GUEST OPINION

Coming to Terms with the ‘Gay Holocaust’ W. J AKE N EWSOME O N JANUARY 27, 2023, the world observes Interna tional Holocaust Remembrance Day, an occasion to honor not only the six million Jewish victims but also

precedent by finally acknowledging the men persecuted under Paragraph 175 as victims. This meant they were at long last el igible for compensation. However, no gay survivors came for ward to claim the reparations. Thus not a single survivor has received any compensation from the German government. The Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism was dedicated in Berlin in 2008. In many ways, it sig naled a victory in the decades-long quest to officially honor the Nazis’ queer victims. Nevertheless, the national memorial highlighted a debate over whether lesbians and trans people should be honored alongside gay men, as they were not named in Paragraph 175 and were not arrested systematically or in large numbers. Only in April 2022 was a monument to the les bians imprisoned and murdered at Ravensbrück given a per manent placed on the memorial grounds. If we are to truly honor all of the Nazis’ LGBT victims, we must not only continue to bear witness to their suffering but also commit to combating the ideologies, policies, and laws that robbed them of their humanity and ultimately their lives. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a call to re member and also to act. ____________________________________________________ W. Jake Newsome, PhD, is a public scholar of German and American LGBTQ + history and author of Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust.

the five million others who were murdered by the Nazis, in cluding political opponents, Roma and Sinti peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities, and homosexuals. Those in the last group have sometimes been called the Nazis’ “for gotten victims,” a phrase that glosses over the extent to which LGBT survivors have been systematically ignored and actively silenced in the eight decades since Hitler’s defeat. From 1933 to 1945, the Nazis destroyed Germany’s vibrant queer community and arrested over 100,000 LGBT Germans. The concentration camp administration implemented a color coded badging system to label the alleged crime of each inmate. Queer women were labeled with a black triangle, the mark for “social deviants.” Queer men sent to concentration camps under Paragraph 175, Germany’s national law criminalizing “indecency between men,” were marked with a pink triangle. After the Allies defeated Germany in May 1945, they trans ferred pink triangle prisoners with time left on their sentences to local prisons, where they were forced to finish serving their terms. When East and West Germany were founded in 1949, both new countries wrote Paragraph 175 into their criminal codes. While East Germany reverted to the pre-Nazi version, West Germany opted to retain the harsher Nazi version. West Germany arrested 100,000 gay men from 1949 to 1969, when the law was amended but not fully repealed. In this atmosphere of continued persecution, in the 1950s fourteen gay men applied for compensation as victims of the Nazis. The government de nied all of their applications. In the early 1970s, advocating for the recognition of the Nazis’ homosexual victims became a central tenet in the nascent West German gay liberation movement. In 1972, members of RotZSchwul, a leftist gay group in Frankfurt, used the pink tri angle as a symbol of gay rights activism for the first time. Groups across Europe and NorthAmerica soon adopted the pink triangle, transforming the concentration camp badge into an in ternational icon of activism, community, and pride. In May 1985, an East Berlin group called Lesbians in the Church traveled to the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Me morial for the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat. They planned to lay a wreath in honor of the lesbians who had been imprisoned and killed there. When the women departed the train to make their way to the memorial site, East German State Security apprehended them, only releasing them after the official commemoration ceremony was finished. That same year, a coalition of gay groups in Munich applied to install a pink triangle monument at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial to honor the gay men who perished there. The ap plication was denied repeatedly over the next ten years. In 2002, the government of a newly unified Germany an nounced plans to fund a national memorial to the Nazis’ gay victims. At the same time, it broke with over fifty years of

January–February 2023

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HISTORY MEMO

Taking Stock as the The G&LR Turns 30

J OHN R. K ILLACKY E DITORS N OTE : This issue marks the start of The G&LR ’s thirtieth year of publication. Our thirtieth birthday is still a year off, but this seems a good time to take stock of where we’ve been and where we are now. As luck would have it, a frequent contribu tor to the magazine, John Killacky, recently wrote a piece for an on-line magazine, The Arts Fuse (artsfuse.org), which provides a general history and overview of The G&LR. While written for a “lay” audience, I think it contains some facts and figures that even veteran readers of this magazine may find interesting. (What follows has been adapted from the Arts Fuse piece.) D ESPITE THE DECLINE of print publications, The Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide ( G&LR ) has published 160 issues to date, all in “hard copy.” The magazine began in 1994 as The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review , a no-frills, black-and-white quarterly that gradually evolved into a glossy bimonthly magazine. Then and now, The G&LR has featured eru

dite essays from queer historians, scholars, writers, and political figures investigating relevant history, politics, and culture as well as artist interviews and reviews of books, exhibitions, movies, and plays. Driving the vision is editor-in-chief and founder Richard Schneider. He received a doctorate in sociology from Harvard in the early ’80s. After two careers (as a college prof and a research director), he launched the magazine in Winter 1994. But its origins go back to 1987, when Schneider was re cruited by the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Cau cus, an alumnœ organization, to produce its quarterly newsletter. This is where he learned how to be an editor and a desktop publisher. While the Review was at first an in-house publication, he soon realized that it could be a national magazine. It was incor porated as a nonprofit in the late 1990s and dropped the “Harvard” from its name start ing in 2000. In a 1998 feature in The New York Times , Schneider spoke about his initial aspira tions: “In 1993, there was nothing in the gay world corresponding to The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker that

featured intelligent essays. There was a huge niche or vacuum in gay and lesbian letters which I hope we somewhat filled.” From its inception, trenchant writing by such literati as Edmund White, Barney Frank, Jill Johnston, and Jewelle Gomez distinguished the magazine, with its focus on high culture. Remarked Larry Kramer in the 1998 Times piece: “It is our intellectual journal. ... If you want to deal with schol arly intelligent arguments, there’s really no place else we can publish.” As a nonprofit organization, The G&LR has around 750 annual donors, of which around 500 are “Friends of The Review .” The average print run is around 10,000 per issue, of which about 8,000 go to sub scribers, with most of the rest going to bookstores. Historically, subscriptions have been the most important source of revenue, though charitable donations have pulled even or even surpassed subscrip tions in recent years. Advertising makes up about fifteen percent of the total. The G&LR conducted a readers’ survey in 2022 and found that its readership is predomi nantly male and skews toward an older

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demographic, with about two-thirds of its readers over sixty. Fully 66 percent hold an advanced degree. More than 1,400 writers have been fea tured in The G&LR ’s uninterrupted run over the last three decades. One steadfast presence has been Andrew Holleran, who’s having a critical resurgence with his latest novel, The Kingdom of Sand , a melancholy depiction of isolation, despair, and desire in older gay men. His first essay in the maga zine (Winter 1994) was taken from a speech he gave at Harvard about coming out and coming of age in Greenwich Vil lage in the 1970s. Since then, he has con tributed well over a hundred articles. Celebrating the magazine’s 25th anniver sary in 2019, Holleran wrote: “We’ve all seen many of our favorite mainstream maga zines shrink if not disappear, which makes me all the more grateful for The G&LR . A writer has one basic dream: to see his or her words in print. ... I’m always thrilled when someone mentions a piece I’ve written, be cause one forgets that one does reach people, people we may never hear from, but who are out there—in the dark. Quite literally, being published in The G&LR has been a reward in itself—it’s kept this writer from going into the horror vacui of the digital age.” I too am fortunate to be a frequent con

tributor to The G&LR . My published pieces include commentaries on John Cage, Keith Haring, Peter Hujar, and Sarah Schulman, along with interviews with Alison Bechdel, Janis Ian, Bill T. Jones, and Tim Miller. Most recently, I profiled trans filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax. As an editor, Schneider is always open to ideas and he wields an appreciated editing scalpel that cuts for focus and clarity. Drawing upon its treasure trove of queer writing, The G&LR has published two com pilations of past articles. The first, In Search of Stonewall (2019), which marked both the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the 25th anniversary of the magazine itself, delved into historical precedents, the events of June 1969, and their immediate and longer-term impact. The second book, pun nily titled Casual Outings (2021), cele brated the work of the G&LR ’s longtime artist Charles Hefling with 27 of his most memorable illustrations, including Marcel Proust, Vita Sackville-West, Frida Kahlo, Yukio Mishima, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, and Langston Hughes. Another book is in development: a collec tion of historian Martin Duberman’s many contributions to the magazine over the years, to be titled The Line of Dissent . Collaborating with Schneider on the oper

ational side of the publishing endeavor is his partner of 23 years, Stephen Hemrick, who is the magazine’s publisher. In light of re cent Supreme Court decisions, they finally tied the knot on October 26, 2022. John R. Killacky is the author of because art: commentary, critique, & conversa tion (Onion River Press). Editor Richard Schneider and publisher Stephen Hemrick at Arches National Park, August 2022.

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The extraordinary collection of letters between writer Lucia Berlin and her dear friend, the poet and Broadway lyricist Kenward Elmslie.

“Honest, open, and important.” — george takei , actor and activist

“A luscious and lyric counterargument to the dangers of a life lived in pursuit of beauty.” — pam houston , author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

Renowned Korean American modern-dance choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess shares his deeply personal hyphenated world.

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January–February 2023

7

BTW

What Just Happened? The facts are simple and few in this story out of Cincinnati, where a sophomore at Mariemont High School named Cass Steiner was recently voted Homecoming Princess by her classmates. But it soon divides into Rashomon like narratives according to one’s point of view. Cass was thrilled to be the school’s first transgender Homecoming Princess, and her entire family was celebrating—until they were informed by a guidance counselor that the vote was apparently a student prank. He suggested that Cass decline the title, but in the spirit of Putney Swope —perhaps a few readers will re member this 1969 film—she refused to step down, and em braced her new role. Then a number of students came forward and said that they knew about the plan to vote en masse for Cass, but they didn’t see it as a prank and genuinely liked the idea. Cass, for her part, has embraced that interpretation and become something of an activist for the cause. At the home coming event, a group of supporters showed up with signs that read “We love our warrior” and “You are more than a princess. You are a QUEEN !” A high compliment indeed. Managing the Ménage It’s time to revisit a trio we came to know a few years ago: Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becki, and for mer pool boy Giancarlo Granda. When last we met them, Jerry Jr. had just been forced to resign as president of Liberty Uni versity in Lynchburg, Virginia, not for his unusual ménage with wife and pool boy, but instead for financial malfeasance related to his need to buy Granda’s silence on the matter. But lest we skip over the juicy part, the sexual MO for this threesome ap parently involved Granda having intercourse with Becki while Jerry watched and did what men do. The new news is that the whole sordid affair is explained in a documentary titled God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty . The film confirms the role of Michael Cohen as the fixer who undid the deal between Falwell and Granda, which involved the trans fer of $1.8 million of university money to Granda’s hotel proj ect. Did we mention that Cohen was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer at that time? Soon after that, in January 2016, Falwell endorsed Trump for president, which was undoubtedly a factor in the 81 percent of Evangelicals who voted for him. In a final twist, Falwell has declared that the only reason his financial shenanigans in Lynchberg came to light is because he endorsed Trump for president, and he’s probably right. Call it karma. Here She Comes The Miss Universe pageant has been bought by Thai trans celebrity and businesswoman Jakapong Jakraju tatip. According to Reuters, Jakrajutatip is the third richest trans woman in the world. (Is there an official score card for this sort of thing?) But the fun part is that the Miss Universe pageant was once owned by none other than Donald Trump. This came up in one of his debates with Hilary Clinton, who accused him of buying the pageant so he could hang around the dressing rooms, which he did, and not without incident

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deep and confirmed that Jagger had sexual relations with David Bowie, guitarist Mick Taylor, band member Keith Richards, Austrian actor Helmut Berger, and others. Which is reassuring and not surprising, but... Keith Richards?! No Turning Back All hell broke loose in the “detransition” movement when one of its biggest stars, Ky Schevers, an nounced her decision to leave the movement and to retransition to the status of “transmasculine” (though she uses “she/her” pro nouns). On her way out the door she denounced the “detrans” movement and apologized for having spoken out against transi tioning and advocating its reversal. So, the first thing to remark here is that there is such a thing as the detransition movement; who knew? Its core belief is that “gender dysphoria” is a myth with origins in misogyny and internalized sexism. It likens gen der dysphoria to an addiction such as alcoholism, the cure for which is of course total abstinence (with help from twelve-step programs, higher powers, etc.). Those like Ky who’ve opted to re -transition describe their irrepressible desire to go back: “My sense of being a woman unraveled, and I was feeling more like a dude [than ever].” How many people have actually undergone de- and re-transitioning is hard to say. A2015 survey by the Na tional Center for Transgender Equality found that eight percent of those who had transitioned later detransitioned. The Williams Institute reports that 1.3 million U.S. adults identify as trans gender, which would yield about 100,000 who have detransi tioned. Not a vast number, but possibly enough to qualify for a letter in the LGBTQQIP 2 SAA lineup as it now stands.

(Miss Venezuela’s accusation of sexual harassment in 1996). Lately Trump has been going on anti-trans rants in speeches, adding a new touch of irony to the purchase. And a curious de tail: in 2013, Trump traveled to Russia to check out Moscow as a possible Miss Universe site, and he finagled a meeting with Vladimir Putin. Just weeks after Moscow was announced as the winning site, Putin signed the infamous law criminalizing “gay propaganda.” Coincidence? Perhaps, but—as in the story above—it’s remarkable how often Trump is just one degree of separation from the sleaziest action in the room.

Good to Know For gay guys of a certain generation, rock stars like Mick Jagger and David Bowie and Lou Reed played an outsize role in liberating the li bido from the straitjacket of, well, straightness. Still, there was always that slightly uneasy feeling that they may not have come by their androgyny hon

estly, that it was all just an act to sell records. Jagger, after all, has had four female partners or wives and has eight children (it’s two and two for Bowie). It may be vulgar to wonder whether these godlike figures ever actually did the nasty with another dude, but hey, we’re only human. There have been various cor roborations over the years, but a new book titled The Stone Age: Sixty Years of the Rolling Stones, by Lesley-Ann Jones, has dug

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IN MEMORIAM

Bright Lights That Dimmed Last Year M ARTHA E. S TONE

I N KEEPING WITH our annual tradition, we remem ber here some of the people who left us over the past year—the writers, artists, performers, and activists who made a significant contribution to LGBT culture and community. All dates are in 2022 unless otherwise in dicated. A CTIVISTS L ESLIE C OHEN , memoirist, activist, and entrepreneur, died on March 16th at age 76. Born in Manhattan, and a self-described tomboy, she met Beth Suskin on her first day of freshman year at Buffalo State College. She received a master’s degree in art history from Queens College and became a gallerist in the 1970s. She and three lesbian friends became the first women in Manhattan to own and manage their own lesbian club, the Sa hara, which was notable for its apparent lack of mob interfer ence. She and Suskin were the lesbian figures sculpted by George Segal for the Gay Liberation Monument in Greenwich Village, which was cast in 1980. In 1992, she received a law degree from NYU. Her 2021 memoir, The Audacity of a Kiss: Love, Art and Liberation , was reviewed in this magazine. She is survived by her wife, Beth Suskin. K ATHLEEN D E B OLD , activist and writer, died on October 9th at age 66. Brooklyn-born but raised in Maryland, she went to the University of Maryland and then joined the Peace Corps, where she taught beekeeping in the Central African Republic. After re turning to the U.S. in the late ’80s, she became an activist, work ing for the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and editing the book Out for Office: Campaigning in the Gay Nineties (1994). She was a frequent book reviewer, cartoonist, and crossword puzzle contributor to a number of LGBT publications. In 1999, she be came executive director of the Mautner Project, an organization for lesbians with cancer, where her leadership was seen as “transformative.” In 2015, she was cited as a “Community Pi oneer” by the Rainbow History Project in Washington. She is survived by her wife, Barbara Johnson. J OE T OM E ASLEY , activist and lawyer, died on February 13th at age 81. Born and raised in small Texas towns, he received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M and then taught Eng lish. After serving in the Navy, he went to law school at the Uni versity of Texas. Moving to New York, he became co-chair of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in the mid-’80s, and later president of the Human Rights Campaign Fund. In the 2000s, he served on the board of the Servicemembers Legal De fense Network, where he helped fight against the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. He is survived by his husband, Peter Freiberg.

Theirs was among the first same-sex marriages featured in the New York Times.

J OHN S TEPHEN H UNT , writer and human rights activist, died on March 17th at age 85. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he came out while in the Army, attended several uni versities in the U.S. and the U.K., and traveled extensively. He had a special interest in post-apartheid South Africa. He was active in the worldwide LGBT rights movement and was one of the founders of Lambda Resource Center for the

Blind in Chicago, where he lived. Amajor booster of this mag azine, he was a member of many professional LGBT organiza tions and was the U.S. correspondent for Out! New Zealand Magazine . His scholarly works include Religion and LGBTQ Sexualities: Critical Essays (2016) . R USTY M AE M OORE , educator and activist, died on February 23rd at age eighty. Assigned male at birth, she felt from early childhood that this was the wrong gender. She grew up near Pittsburgh and received a doctorate in law and diplomacy at Tufts University near Boston. She taught at a number of uni versities and was dean of the Hofstra Business School, where she launched the first transgender studies class. Her Brooklyn home, called “Transy House,” became a shelter for trans people and was large enough to shelter a dozen individuals who would otherwise have been homeless. It was modeled after a shelter she had run with Marsha P. Johnson in the 1970s. In 2019, Frameline made a short film about it titled Changing House . She is survived by her wife, Chelsea Goodwin. They had tran sitioned together in the early 1990s. U RVASHI V AID , activist, writer, attorney, and former executive director of the NGLTF , died on May 14th at age 63. She is re membered by Richard Burns in this issue. A RTISTS AND P ERFORMERS J AMES B IDGOOD , film director and photographer, died on Jan uary 31st at age 88. He arrived in New York at age eighteen, having fled his home state of Wisconsin. With visions of the Ziegfeld Follies in his mind, he worked as a drag performer in the East Village. When not onstage, he tended bar, and the tips he made allowed him to go to Parsons School of Design. In the 1960s, he began photographing for physique magazines with the aim of making the men as beautiful as Playboy bunnies, staging lavish photo shoots in his apartment. In 1971, his mo

Martha E. Stone is the literary editor of this magazine.

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tion picture directorial debut, Pink Narcissus , for which he also designed costumes and sets, was released, and it became an un derground classic. B LACKBERRI , singer-songwriter, died on December 13th, 2021, at age 76. Born in Buffalo, NY, he was raised in Baltimore, and loved all aspects of music from his earliest years. He always knew he was gay and was discharged from the Navy after being outed by another sailor. Later, he lived at a feminist collective inArizona, where he changed his name to Blackberri. His music mainly focused on the LGBT experience and civil rights. In 1975, his performance at the Two Songmakers concert was broadcast on KQED, marking the first time that music about being gay was aired on public TV in San Francisco. He was an AIDS activist and an HIV educator, working with the African American community. Several films have used his music, in cluding Tongues Untied (1989). L ESLIE J ORDAN , actor and writer, died in an auto accident on October 24th at age 67. Raised in a Southern Baptist household in Chattanooga, TN, he is best known for his portrayal of Bev

time living and photographing in India. His work is collected in Out of the Shadows—Marcus Leatherdale: Photographs, New York City, 1980-1992 , published in 2019. He was predeceased by his partner, makeup artist Jorge Serio. T IM L EWIS , jazz pianist and graphic artist, died on September 12th at age 65. Born in Palo Alto and raised in Santa Barbara, he began playing the piano at the age of five. He left home on his eighteenth birthday and moved to San Francisco, where he attended Lone Mountain College and began his graphics career, working for underground papers and becoming art director of Drummer. He also designed posters and covers for books in the Straight to Hell and Meatmen series. He began performing in cabarets in the mid-1980s, playing jazz and show tunes, and was the musical director for a group of Sisters of Perpetual In dulgence, accompanying them at many of their performances. J AMES R ADO , actor and co-creator of the musical Hair , died on June 21st at age 90. Growing up in the Rochester, NY, and Wash ington, DC, areas, he graduated from the University of Mary land and studied drama there and in New York. Hair , written with Gerome Ragni (d. 1991) and Galt MacDermot (d. 2008), was the first rock musical on Broadway and the first Broadway show to feature both full nudity and a same-sex kiss. In 1967, it premiered at the Public Theater, moving to Broadway the fol lowing year, where it ran for more than 1,800 performances. Rado originated the role of Claude, who was about to be drafted and sent to war. In his private life, he identified as omnisexual

erley Leslie on Will & Grace (2001-06 and 2017-20). After working through his gayness, al coholism, his height (4’11”), and a move to L.A., he landed a part on the TV series The Fall Guy in 1986. Roles on numerous series would follow ( Murphy Brown , Lois & Clark , Star Trek: Voyager , Boston Legal , et al.), culminating in his recurring role on W&G as the sexually ambiguous Beverley,

W hat I L earned from J oseph C ampbell Toby Johnson tells how learning the real nature of religion from the famed mythologist allowed him to fi nd the spiritual, even mystical, qualities of gay consciousness.

a foil for Karen to spar with. His later career included numer ous TV and film roles and some theatrical work, including his autobiographical stage show Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies That Have Plagued My Life Thus Far , which ran Off-Broadway for a full season. R OBERT K ALFIN , theater founder, died on September 20th at age 89. Born in the Bronx, he received a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama and started working in local television in New York and New Jersey. In 1965 he started the Chelsea Theater Center, which changed locations frequently over its two decades of operation. Some of the plays it premiered were suf ficiently successful to move to Broadway, and it received ac claim as one of the country’s most innovative theaters. Kalfin was predeceased by his partner, George Bari, the original pro duction manager at the Chelsea Theater Center. M ARCUS L EATHERDALE , photographer, died on April 22nd at age 69. Born in Montréal, he traveled the world as a young man, arriving in New York in 1978 to attend the School of Visual Arts. He started his career as Robert Mapplethorpe’s office man ager (and lover) and quickly became a popular member of the downtown club scene, photographing a wide range of individ uals from the not-yet-famous Madonna to Andy Warhol. His work was published in many magazines, including The New Yorker and Art in America . By the 1990s, he spent most of his

By the author of Gay Spirituality: Gay Identity and the Transformation of Consciousness and Gay Perspective: Things our [homo]sexuality tells us about the nature of God and the Universe

Johnson’s adventures in a federally-funded study of teenage hustling in the 1970s Tenderloin District with nicknamesake Toby Marotta forced him to reevaluate traditional religious teaching and to fi nd spiritual meaning

in sex, pleasure, and embodiment in fl esh.

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January–February 2023

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and confirmed in 2009 that Hair was based in part upon his re lationship with Gerome Ragni, whom he’d met in 1964 when they were working in an off-Broadway show. A NTONY S HER , actor, died on December 3, 2021 at age 72. Born in South Africa, he moved to London in the late 1960s to study drama, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. Win ner of several Olivier awards, he was knighted in 2000. He acted in an enormous variety of roles, from Richard III to Willy Loman to Arnold Beckoff in the London debut of Torch Song Trilogy. He wrote novels, plays, and memoirs, including Beside Myself: An Actor’s Life (2015) and Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries (2018). When he died, Helen Mirren was quoted as saying that “the theater has lost a brilliant light.” He is sur vived by Gregory Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shake speare Company. They were one of the first gay couples in the U.K. to enter into a civil partnership and were married in 2015. S TEPHEN S ONDHEIM , composer and lyricist and winner of eight TonyAwards, died on November 26, 2021, at age 91. He was re membered by Jackson Cooper in the May-June 2022 issue. J EFF W EISS , playwright and actor, died on September 18th at age 82. Born in Reading, PA, he grew up in Allentown and wrote his first play when still a child. He dropped out of high school at age sixteen and made his way to NewYork City, where he cofounded the ten-seat theater Good Medicine and Company in the Lower East Side. The other cofounder was his life part ner Carlos Ricardo Martinez, who predeceased him. Weiss’ plays were produced at Caffe Cino and LaMaMa and were highly unconventional in structure and content. Some plays would last for eight hours; others would contain many scenes presented in no particular order (actors learned the sequence each night an hour before show time). He also appeared on and off Broadway beginning in the late ’80s, joining all-star casts in plays ranging from Macbeth to Present Laughter . J OURNALISTS , E DITORS , P UBLISHERS C HUCK C OLBERT , journalist, died on June 30th at age 67. Orig inally from Pennsylvania, he received an MBA from George town and divinity degrees from Boston College. A freelance writer based in Cambridge, MA, he wrote for many publications, ranging from LGBT newsweeklies to the National Catholic Re porter, for which he reported on the sexual abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese. He eventually abandoned Catholicism and became a convert to Judaism. He was a member of the board of the NLGJA (National Association of LGBTQ Journalists) and president of the Boston chapter in the 1990s. K IM C ORSARO , publisher, died on January 29th at age 68. Her career at the San Francisco Bay Times began in 1981, when she turned the paper from a bar rag called Coming Up into a robust LGBT newspaper devoted to local politics and in-depth report ing. She made sure that the AIDS crisis was a central focus of the paper and was an unwavering supporter of ACT UP. In 1992, the Bay Times rose to prominence because of a cover story fea turing San Francisco’s police chief, which resulted in his firing. In 2011, Corsaro sold the paper and was hired to work on Obama’s re-election campaign. In this pursuit she suffered life

changing injuries in an accident in Cincinnati. She spent years recuperating and was finally able to return to San Francisco be fore her death. R EBECCA J URO , journalist, Internet radio host, and activist, died on December 17th, 2021, at age 59. Born in New York and raised as a male, she felt “like a girl” from the time she was a teen, though was not able to give a name to her feelings. In 1996, seriously contemplating suicide, she came across Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors , and believed that the book saved her life. Juro came out as trans the following year at the age of 35. She wrote for a wide range of publications, including The Advocate , Huffington Pos t, and LGBTQ nation.com. She started her own Internet radio show in 2006, which is credited as an early example of how the web could be used to promote a diversity of voices. She was known for her mantra: “The ‘T’ [in LGBT] is not silent.” R ICHARD L ABONTÉ , editor and writer, died on March 20th at age 72. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, he went to Carleton Uni versity in Ottawa, where he was editor of the student newspa per. He then worked at The Ottawa Citizen , where he became one of the first journalists in Canada to come out as gay. Soon thereafter, he and his lover moved to San Francisco, where he helped found and later managed A Different Light Bookstore. He edited over two dozen anthologies for Cleis Press, edited the gay version of the magazine Books to Watch Out For , and re viewed books for a range of publications. He was, in the words one colleague, “a sweet presence [who] exuded a calming em inence.” In his last years, he lived in British Columbia with his husband, Asa Liles, who survives. T HOMAS (T HOM ) S ENZEE , editor, died on March 22nd at age 54. ACalifornia native, he was a graduate of Los Angeles Pierce Col lege with degrees in journalism and English. Editor-in-chief of the San Diego LGBT Weekly , he was also a contributor to many publications, including The Advocate, Out, and The Washington Blade. He was founder and moderator of the national series LGBTs in the News , a live panel discussion. Best known for his investigative reporting, he was described by one colleague as “a talented journalist who respected the truth, a caring and insight ful friend and perhaps the most decent guy I’ve ever met.” A NDRÉ L EON T ALLEY , fashion editor and memoirist, died on January 18th at age 73. Raised by his grandmother in Durham, NC, he began reading the fashion magazines that he found in the public library, attended North Carolina Central University, and

earned a master’s degree in French at Brown. Moving to New York, he held numerous jobs before be coming the Paris bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily and the edi tor-at-large of Vogue . His memoirs A.L.T. (2003) and The Chiffon Trenches (2020), which was re viewed in these pages, detail vari ous aspects of his life, including his struggles with being a Black man in a very white world. He was

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