GLR March-April 2026

Farm in Bakersville, North Carolina; and Short Mountain Sanc tuary in Liberty, Tennessee. Short Mountain, which was founded in 1981, still exists today as an important Radical Faerie sanctuary. As the book’s title indicates, many Southern sissies prac ticed a progressive, feminist-influenced form of witchcraft. Their magical work was influenced primarily by the Feri tradi tion of witchcraft, developed in the Bay Area in the 1960s by Victor and Cora Anderson, and by Reclaiming, the politically focused witchcraft tradition started by Starhawk, a student of the Andersons who authored the well-known book The Spiral Dance . Similar to the GLF’s effort to reclaim the word “fag got,” Starhawk and the Andersons reclaimed the concept of witchcraft as something self-empowering, gender-inclusive, and aligned with politically oppressed people. For aSpell is filled with rich details. Although much of the book concerns political theories of the time, it also contains many interesting stories. A Mulberry House sissy attempts sui cide but changes his mind when he sees a vision of King Tu tankhamun’s funeral mask and relocates to New Orleans, where a museum is exhibiting the Boy King’s treasures. Anita Bryant and her New Right allies attempt to sow terror among the queer people of the Southeast. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture author Arthur Evans moves to Washington state, where he founds a small and short-lived rural collective named New

Sodom. Sissies and their allies try and fail to take over a food co-op from anti-gay hippies. For a Spell is a work of serious scholarship, yet also very readable and entertaining. The events it covers occurred fifty years ago, but they still hold lessons for people considering how to be authentically queer in a predominantly straight world. _________________________________________________________________ Peter Muise is the author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014) and Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts (2021). over and said: “Do it like I do it, dummy! Go with the grain.” It was an oddly tender moment for a prankster who liked to see me redden after hot-gluing my name in M&Ms to my headboard and turning all the furniture on my side of the dorm room upside down. He and his buddies never laughed so hard. This is what makes that brief exchange so affecting, because even in the most brutish of en vironments, a bond is forged as a perfect stranger treats Cam as a brother in arms. A second season of Boots would have shown how Cam, on the outside, survived the Persian Gulf War and, on the in side, learned to replace all that inner turmoil with inner peace. Would he have accessed his very own Eden, nameless or not? Un fortunately, we’ll never know, because, unlike Heated Rivalry , Boots was not renewed for a second season. Boots Continued from page 50

Patricia Cronin’s Army of Love ARTMEMO

C ASSANDRA L ANGER T to the present day, the meaning of the fe male body has remained a flashpoint in art and culture. Patricia Cronin’s first New York solo show in almost a decade took on this long and complicated history last fall at theC HART Gallery in Manhattan. The exhi bition, titled Army of Love , presented a striking new body of paintings, sculptures, and watercolors centered on Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Cronin reimagines the lost 4th-century BCE mas terpiece by Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Cnidus , believed to be the first full-standing female nude marble, using it as a springboard to re think classical ideals for our time. Walking through the gallery’s two floors felt like entering a contemporary temple of love, courage, and defiance. The exhibi tion’s title refers to the legendary Theban warriors united by affection and devotion who fought side by side. Cronin turns that idea on its head: instead of an army of con quest, her Army of Love is one of empathy, solidarity, and resistance through love. Cronin knows her Aphrodite well. After years of studying classical depictions of the goddess in Italy and beyond, she draws in HE FEMALE NUDE has been the subject of art for at least 30,000 years. Since the Venus of Willendorf

spiration from Harriet Hosmer, the 19th-cen tury neoclassical sculptor and pioneering les bian artist to whom Cronin once dedicated an artist’s book. This new series extends that feminist lineage, using materials as varied as polyresin, glass, Mediterranean-blue tarpau lins, watercolor, and sheer gauze scrims. The result is a luminous, immersive environment that reframes classical beauty through the turbulence of our current world—one

marked by dictatorship, war, misogyny, and chaos. In Cronin’s hands, love itself becomes an act of radical resistance. When I spoke with Cronin, she shared heartbreaking news: her bronze sculpture Memorial to a Marriage , a groundbreaking work familiar to G&LR readers and held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is at risk of being destroyed by the Trump regime in its crusade to erase our nation’s legacy of diversity and inclusion. In that light, Army of Love feels even more urgent. It’s Cronin’s passionate answer to the wave of homophobia, sexism, and racism sweep ing our country; a call to speak out, stand up, and defend equality, justice, and human rights. Through Aphrodite, she reminds us that love, in all its forms, remains the most powerful weapon we have. Standing before Cronin’s glowing sculp tures and shimmering canvases, one feels both heartbreak and hope. Army of Love in sists that tenderness is not weakness but strength; that beauty, compassion, and de sire can still light the way through dark ness. In an age of cruelty and division, Cronin’s art offers a rallying cry for the human heart: love as protest, love as power, love as survival. Cassandra Langer is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life (Wisconsin).

Patricia Cronin. Aphrodite (Capitoline) , 2021.

March–April 2026

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