Friend and sometimes co-author Tae-ho Kim (catch us in conversation with Ben Shields here; read us on Arendt, Foucault and Michael Denneny here) has a post at the Gay and Lesbian Review blog about gay Korean author Sang Young Park and the adaptation of his novel Love in the Big City into a tv-series (I haven’t watched the show, but the novel is entertaining in a Sex in the City-meets-Violet Quill way).
Now, not to bite the hand that feeds, but GL&R (for whose blog I’ve also written) is a venerable, tragic institution in need of a serious overhaul. Since its founding in the 90s, originally as the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, it’s featured uniquely hideous fairground caricature type cover illustrations, as if to disprove the stereotype that gays are tasteful. Here’s the most recent:
Like, wasn’t Wilde persecuted enough?
The GLR started with, and continues to feature, a number of the old time gay greats, like Andrew Holleran… which is part of the problem. The average age of the contributors seems to be 70+, and while the editors allow, I assume for reasons of seniority, Holleran himself to sometimes be bitchy and cranky in his essays (going off about how Call Me By Your Name is actually homophobic, making occasional passing complaints about the LGBTQ+++blob, political correctness, etc), none of the younger people they have taken on as regulars have either unexpected opinions or writing chops.
The GLR has over the years provided, and continues to provide, the valuable service of reviewing gay and gay-adjacent books. If the reviews themselves aren’t usually competent, they at least make one aware of what’s new in print. That’s anyway what the few gay guys I know who subscribe to it say… yes, it’s ugly; yes, it’s mostly boring; but, what else is there? Of course on the other extreme there’s stuff like Gayletter or Wussy —here, glossy d-list queer celebrity press-release piffle (can you read Gayletter’s interview of Michael Chang without laughing?); there, aesthetically botched book report coverage from the oldsters.
No reason to be depressed that there isn’t currently a best of both worlds (a publication that could be pretty and smart), though, or consign hope for a decent gay men’s magazine to the category of useless nostalgia. The great wheel of history, and all the lesser wheels of cultural criticism, seem to be turning backward, whether it’s making MAGA great again or giving art for art’s sake another stupid try. Perhaps as they keep spinning, all the way back to premodern ‘chaos and old night,’ we’ll get a brief, heady retread of 1979… at which point I’d like to get off.