Features: Outwords

When I meet with Christopher Bram for an afternoon coffee near his Greenwich Village home, he’s just gotten off the phone with Armistead Maupin—author of the beloved Tales of the City series and one of the subjects of Bram’s new nonfiction book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve). continue reading »

It’s an old story. Lonely gay guy meets vaguely bi guy, falls hard and fast. The only thing standing between them and certain romantic bliss? continue reading »

Saeed Jones’ debut chapbook of poems, When the Only Light Is Fire, charts a lush, humid nightscape where objects are transformed by distance and danger always lurks. Here, night has a throat. Trees turn their backs. A boy wears “a negligee of gnats.” continue reading »

Fran Lebowitz, the chain-smoking conversationalist and social commentator of our urban times, maintains that very few people possess real artistic ability. continue reading »

Here’s a thought experiment: what would a mash-up of the films Babel, Six Degrees of Separation and a sprinkling of Boys in the Band look like? At the risk of making crude analogies, Jameson Currier’s third novel, The Third Buddha, reads as the lovechild of such a three-way union, resulting in a courageous tale that explores the effects of the World Trade Center attacks on a group of gay men. continue reading »

 
If a dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste, Wayne Koestenbaum proves to be a master of conservation with Humiliation, his seventh book of nonfiction out this month by Picador. continue reading »

 
With references to ’70s sex symbol Peter Berlin and Skynyrd-loving Jersey girls, Michael Montlack’s new book of poetry, Cool Limbo (NYQ Books), is as groovy as studying a lava lamp after a few hits of mescaline.
 
The editor of the Lambda Book Award-nominated essay collection My Diva, Montlack is keenly aware of the preoccupations of fey little boys coming of age during the Carter/Reagan years. The poem “Liz Taylor in Levittown,” for instance, finds a young speaker and his Kent III Ultra Lights-smoking mother watching Liz on national television as she delivers her searing condemnation of the country’s response to AIDS: “A tenser tone, more unsettling glare:/ I mean, for God’s Sake, where would Hollywood be?/ Where would I be?/ —So bitter she almost scoffed.” continue reading »