The New York Times, in an obituary published last week, Joseph Lovett, TV Producer Who Shed an Early Light on AIDS, Dies at 80, writes:
As an openly gay producer, Mr. Lovett was a rarity in the broadcast news world of the 1970s and ’80s. Working at CBS and ABC, he pursued news segments aimed at destigmatizing gay life in the United States and drawing attention to the AIDS crisis at a time when that subject was largely overlooked by mainstream news organizations.
From Zone de mort, Stock, 2017 (not translated) :
This book of correspondence ends with an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s Notebook 24. In it, he noted down a conversation he had just had with André Gide, in 1925. Gide, who was fifty-six years old, confessed everything to him. “I had been ignorant of his life and his habits until quite recently, which shows how blind I was,” Valéry remarks, before continuing: “He then told me—that all the feeling he had ever had was for his wife. He had never mixed the slightest bit of intellect with his senses. Any intervention of the mind cooled him. But as for the senses—complete debauchery. He had tried everything and still continued. He insisted on that word.”
Here Gide laid out his so-called thesis of “uranism,” based on the separation and rupture between love and sexual need. Love is platonic; sexual need is of the flesh, devoid of feeling. He lies. He knows he is lying to himself. His affair with the young Marc Allégret in 1917 was both love and sex, sentimental and carnal. Discovered by his wife when the “couple” left for England, the idyll led to the destruction—in tears and by fire—of thousands of letters Gide had written to Madeleine, which he regarded as the best part of his work. Madeleine, the writer’s first cousin, virgin and martyr, then sank into sorrow. She could be seen, in Cuverville, advancing with the small, shuffling step of life’s defeated, distributing food to stray cats.
The brilliant mathematician and computer scientist, an alumnus of the École Polytechnique, died of cancer in Paris on July 21, 2025, at the age of 58. In 2007, he published a fascinating short book on the history of mathematics: The Metamorphoses of Calculation (Le Pommier):
Despite the ridiculous name change (Painting His World) – to make it more “inclusive” according to the Chicago curator Gloria Groom, I enjoyed the Caillebotte exhibition at the Art Institute (Painting Men). The focus and commentary beside the works remain true to the original intent, and the catalogue is the same as the one printed when the show was first presented in Los Angeles:
All of Caillebotte’s greatest paintings are there, in a setting much less crowded than that of the Musée d’Orsay, which I visited in December:
The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity (1869–1939) at Wrightwood 659 is not as strong as its catalogue. The welcome is charming, though. Of course, the most impressive work from the late 19th century – L’Homme au bain (1884) – while referenced in the catalogue, is not on display, as it is at the Art Institute. The show does, however, offer the opportunity to discover Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), whose life spans the period under examination:
Although, according to Wikipedia, Jacques-Émile Blanche’s homosexuality was well known in Parisian society during his lifetime, I only became aware of it when I discovered his Self-Portrait with the Spanish Painter Rafael de Ochoa (1890), painted two years before his famous portrait of the 21-year-old Marcel Proust:
How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art: Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. (New York Times)
How a Times Reporter Eluded a Ban on the Word ‘Gay’ (New York Times)
Hegseth announces new name of US navy ship that honored gay rights icon Harvey Milk (The Guardian)
How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way by Andrew Sullivan (New York Times)
Is Donald Trump an Antagonist or a Champion of the Gay Community? (New York Times)
St Sebastian, Guido Reni, c. 1615, Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa
D’où la possibilité qui t’est donnée de te constituer dans chaque musée que tu visites ton cabinet secret personnel, accessible à tous, mais où nul à part toi et quelques privilégiés ne sait qu’il est entré.
Un savoir gai, William Marx, Minuit, 2018
La marche des fiertés 2025 par Willam Marx (Le Monde).
He’s Here, He’s Queer, He’s the Future King of England, a new Off Broadway play (New York Times).
From the introduction (Prologue) of Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, Will Tosh, Seal Press, 2024, the best book I have read on this topic:
I don’t see the need to look for incontrovertible signs that Shakespeare the person was gay or bi, because I don’t see anything wrong in taking it for granted that he was a queer artist, working in a culture that both enabled and frustrated his imaginative exploration of same-sex desire. For far too long, the burden of proof has been on scholars and biographers to provide ‘evidence´ beyond reasonable doubt that esteemed men like Shakespeare were anything other than robustly, swaggeringly heterosexual. Well, I don’t accept the terms of a methodology that has homophobic distaste baked into its requirements. Why prove something that is manifestly evident to anyone with the wit to see it? As the poet Don Paterson put it, with just the right degree of irritation, in his commentary on the sonnets: ‘The question “was Shakespeare gay?” is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was? I’m going to take Paterson’s briskness as my guiding principle in this study of William Shakespeare, a queer artist who drew on his society’s complex understanding of same-sex desire to create some of the richest relationships in literature. (…) My book finds most to say about the obscure, poorly documented, much-fought-over period of Shakespeare’s life known as the ´lost years’: the era before his establishment in 1594 as a key member of the theatre company in which he’d make his name as a dramatist, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And along the way, this queer quasi-biography gives stage time to the work of other Elizabethan writers who profoundly influenced the way Shakespeare thought about desire, sexuality and homo-eroticism: John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe and the pathbreaking queer sonneteer, Richard Barnfield.
A friendship of voracious readers:
https://yalereview.org/article/yiyun-li-edmund-white-tribute:
According to the Guardian, Edmund White, an acclaimed novelist of gay life, « died on Tuesday evening while waiting for an ambulance after experiencing symptoms of a stomach illness. His death was confirmed to the Guardian by his agent, Bill Clegg, on Wednesday. » He died on June 3, only months after the death of Felice Picano, leaving Andrew Holleran as the only surviving member of the so-called Violet Quill Club.
