Featured Articles
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Culture
In the fall of 1939, a Portuguese speaking woman with the exotic name of Carmen Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha took Manhattan by storm.
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Media
Gay magazines reach a vast and loyal readership which, were gay newspapers capable of emulating that service, would have publishers salivating for months on end.
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Society
Sex is a commodity here. If you don't have a sex life, you're almost regarded as abnormal. Everyone has a mistress, a boyfriend, an erotic paramour.
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Sex
"I am considered to be the Lou Reed of gay porn." So claims J. D. Slater, a resident San Francisco pornographer extraordinaire.
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Politics
Rist's writing during the eighties was polemical if not shrill: his manner made the dyspeptic Larry Kramer seem like Connie Chung.
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Health
California state prison officials, like their counterparts in other states, will not permit the distribution of condoms through the prison system.
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Fiction
She almost believes what she says.. Hers is the voice of an announcer for a space shot intermixed with a Donna Reed Show simplicity. "So much to do here."
About Me
In 1976, I began writing a regular book column for the Philadelphia Gay News called "Between the Covers."
Through that work, I gained invaluable insights in all aspects of managing a gay newspaper: eventually, as its Features, and later, its Senior Editor (1981-85), I got to see it grow beyond my wildest dreams. I remain indebted to PGN's then and current Publisher, Mark A. Segal, a man who pioneered the art of the gay "zap" so widely used during the early years of gay liberation (Segal chained himself to a CBS TV camera during a telecast of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in the seventies—Cronkite today speaks highly of him, and even mentioned him in his recent special for CBS).
Through my many contacts in the gay press, I got to meet or interview virtually every important gay writer of the 1980's: Felice Picano, Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Merle Miller, Arthur Bell, John Preston, Robert Ferro, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, Ian Young, Allen Young (among many others)—and along the way I got to encounter less famous scribes and artists who also contributed to the development of the counter-culture in those days. (My work in editing features for PGN won the Gay & Lesbian Press Association's "Wallace Hamilton Award" for highest achievement in cultural writing in the gay press in 1984).
As my life continued to change, so did the outlets available for my journalism. In 1985, I began a long and very productive association with the late Frank Broderick, editor of Philadelphia's newsmagazine, Au Courant.
And thanks to the goodness of the Gods, I also was allowed to provide regular feature length interviews for L.A.'s Edge Magazine from 1987 through 1992—due to a wonderful man, my editor there, Michael Jones.
I hope you sense the many and glorious aspects of the culture which embraces us here.