GLR January-February 2026

F ELICE P ICANO , author, activist, and frequent contributor to TheG&LR , died at age 81. He was remembered by Walter Hol land in the May-June 2025 issue. E DMUND W HITE , groundbreaking gay novelist and memoirist, died at age 85. He was remembered by Dimitris Yeros, David Bergman, and Leo Racicot in the September-October 2025 issue. R OBERT W ILSON was an iconoclastic theatrical director, play wright, choreographer, and visual artist whose collaborators ranged from Philip Glass to Lady Gaga. Perhaps his most fa mous work, sometimes called his masterpiece, is 1976’s Ein stein on the Beach , an abstract, plotless five-hour opera with music composed by Glass. Wilson and Glass later collaborated Correspondence

on The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down (1984) and on White Raven and Monsters of Grace (both 1998). Described by The New York Times in 1992 as “[Amer ica]’s—or even the world’s—foremost vanguard ‘theater artist,’” Wilson was less interested in the traditional theatrical fixations of dialogue and plot than with movement, space, and lighting effects. He famously said: “Light is the most important actor on stage.” His extensive credits include two fully silent productions, Deafman Glance (1971) and Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), and productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1990) , Wagner’s Parsifal (2005), Brecht’s The Three penny Opera (2007), and Beckett’s HappyDays (2008) . Wilson died at age 83 at his home in Water Mill, New York, after a brief illness.

uality played an important role in the Wanja’s beliefs regarding procreation. Today, homosexuality remains illegal in PNG per the laws implemented by its British colonizers via the Queensland Criminal Code of Australia. Although I was not by any means “out” while I was living among the Wanja people, I never expressed any negative judgments regarding their homosexual prac tices. Indeed, in my deeply held admiration for the life of Christ as I saw he had lived it in the Bible, my abiding goal was to present the love of God in all of my interactions. As it happened, I failed to learn the Wanja language well enough preach the Gospel to them. Thanks to a very long dark night of the soul, I gave up on Christianity and my work in the ministry. Now I am happily married to a man of Canadian First Nation and Filipino descent. Today, I do maintenance work in as sisted living facilities. To those who ask about my previous line of work, I tell them I’ve gone from saving souls to saving bowls, i.e., toilet bowls! Mike Cordle, Bremerton, WA

More on the Origins of “Gay” To the Editor:

My Ethnographic Journey with the Wanja To the Editor: Thank you for your excellent “Ethno graphic Journeys” issue [Nov.-Dec. 2025]. Many years ago, decades before I came out, I worked as a fundamentalist missionary in Papua New Guinea (PNG). For more than five years I lived among the Wanja people, who are part of a language group known as the Anga. It was my assignment to learn their unwritten language well enough to preach the Gospel to them. As with some of the other Anga groups, the Wanja practiced “ritualized homosexuality.” As has been documented by multiple anthro pologists regarding the Simbari and the Baruya people, both being language groups bordering the Wanja territory, the Wanja believed adoles cent boys were infertile. To remedy this, they were required to fellate and ingest the ejacula tion of men who had successfully impregnated their wives. So, in a very real sense, homosex

I enjoyed Hugh Hagius’ essay on the lexi con of homosexuality [Nov.-Dec. 2025]. Per haps I can add a bit of history to “gay.” As Mr. Hagius noted, the word had been adopted by the community by the 1930s. But it was still something of a “secret code” through the 1940s, at times slyly inserted into news copy by hip journalists. (A 1948 item in a Long Beach paper described a scandalous same-sex “mock wedding” as “a gay afternoon soiree.”) Its alternative meaning appears to have first been exposed to the general public on December 2, 1950, by The New York Age , a Harlem-based paper serving the Black com munity, in a shock piece titled “New York’s ‘Gay’ Men: Society’s Strays Are All Alone.” The word reached a much broader audi ence the following year via “The Homosex ual in America,” written by sociologist Edward Sagarin under the penname Donald Webster Cory. (One book reviewer lamented: “What they have done to the word ‘gay’ just shouldn’t happen to the language!”). But the Miami Herald wasn’t paying attention: in 1952, they erroneously reported that “gay” was a code word for drag shows, a source of much angst in Florida at the time. In 1954, San Francisco papers began using the word, in quotes, in their coverage of the police raid on Tommy’s Place, a popular lesbian bar. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios and film crit ics (who surely knew the score) were attach ing it to virtually every lavish musical of the era—though in that case maybe both defini tions were equally valid! In 1958, in the case of ONE, Inc. v. Olesen , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that material presenting a positive view of homosexuality is not in and of itself obscene. As openly gay media proliferated and found space above the counters of mainstream newsstands over the following decade, the meaning of the word be came clear to all. Denny Nivens, Hermosa Beach, CA

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