GLR September-October 2025

Timid teenage poems are reconceived with empowerment and affirmation. Intergenerational trauma is examined, not to for give but to break the chain of “survivor turned perpetuator.” Clare’s writing is intentionally free of academic jargon and is further made accessible through visual format notes on poetry spacing, historical context, endnotes, and content warnings. These layers add to the flow of the book, inviting the reader into multiple ways of experiencing the writing. Community is im portant to the author; lost heroes are commemorated. “Justice dreamers” are acknowledged, emphasizing collective care and liberation. Also essential is his self-caring embrace of the natu ral world: “Sitting in the woods or at the ocean, I glimpse a world that relishes crookedness, wholeness and brokenness.” In his recombinant synthesis of mixed genre writing , Clare provides a road map to create joy and freedom in the face of formidable societal obstacles. His journey is testament to a path forward as he reminds us: “It is time/ to listen to our grief and soothe our jangled/ nerves—we must not relinquish imagina tion.” In an interview, the 62-year-old artist expressed his con cerns about the current storm of anti-trans hysteria: “They are going to fail. There’s no way that they in the long term will erase trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people.” He hopes the book will “strengthen people’s ability to disobey, resist, and rebel.” And he plans to be “available for as much street protest as my body can sustain.” _________________________________________________________________ John R. Killacky, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of because art: commentary, critique, and conversation .

Meditation I can’t sit still. Even my stomach wants bustle, flurry. To move, to drive, to dance— towards a picture, a voice. You, there. You. This is how desire sits breathing, plants itself in my body—no one looks askance— twists its trouble through every bone, tissue, muscle until it has what it wants. Shakes me awake in the middle of the night— no one sees the lack of idle repair— until submerged in the languish, makes me muse on the mystery, all that might be, all that, in my imaginings, I dare. Distraction both welcome and unwelcome, lift this fog, this descent: bring rapture, come. A MY S PADE

Wright (Audrey Hepburn), co-owners of a private boarding school for girls, are accused of a lesbian relationship by a con niving child. Near the end, MacLaine delivers a searing mono logue, confessing Martha’s true desires for Karen, saying she feels “so damn sick and dirty I can’t stand it anymore!” Even Martha’s shameful confession, coming as the Hays Code era waned, was an improvement over earlier films that eliminated all queer content. Wyler’s 1936 adaptation of Hell man’s play, retitled These Three, had bleached out any hint of unacceptable passion by adding a heteronormative love triangle. Other films of the era, like Crossfire (1947), adapted from the novel The Brick Foxhole , were sanitized to remove “unaccept able” hints of homosexuality. In Alfred Hitchcock’s single-take “aesthetics” experiment Rope (1948), “devious pursuits and bodiless longing” are concealed in plain sight by the distrac tions of technique. Rope underscores Koresky’s recurrent theme that there is a “chasm between what is said and what is shown,” that “what’s happening in a movie is often just off camera.” The chasm narrows after the “provocative ambiguity” of gayness in Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956) be comes unequivocal in the electrically charged climax of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), as a trauma tized Elizabeth Taylor recounts the death by cannibalism of her louche cousin Sebastian Venable. Koresky rightly contends that these films laid the foundations for William Friedkin’s TheBoys in the Band (1970), Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982), Gus VanSant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Milk (2008), Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), and countless others in New Queer Cinema. Koresky’s engaging, spirited discussions—supported by a thirteen-page index, a twelve-page bibliography, a six-page glos sary of films, and eight complementary photo pages—serve as a superb reference guide. Sick and Dirty deserves space on the shelf beside Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet and Chelsea McCracken and Matt Connolly’s 100 Queer Films Since Stonewall. _________________________________________________________________ Robert Allen Papinchak is a writer based in Valley Village, CA.

Subverting the Hays Code

R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK

SICK AND DIRTY Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky Bloomsbury. 320 pages. $29.99

L UCKY WERE THE STUDENTS enrolled in the course on queerness in American cinema taught by Michael Ko resky, film critic and editorial director of the Museum of the Moving Image at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Sickand Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness is the resultant comprehensive study of the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, covering the broad scope of cen sorship by the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the “Hays Code” after the man who adopted and en forced it. The book is both erudite and accessible, an uncom promising academic analysis of landmark films, writers, directors, and actors circumventing restrictions against any im plication of “sex perversion.” The title comes from William Wyler’s 1961 film version of Lillian Hellman’s groundbreaking 1934 Broadway play The Children’s Hour (one of three iterations). In the film, longtime friends Martha Dobie (played by Shirley MacLaine) and Karen

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