Stephen Hemrick – Gay & Lesbian Review

by Scott Remer
I FIRST QUESTIONED my sexuality in tenth grade. I found myself liking a friend more than straight people tend to like their same-sex friends. It came as an unpleasant surprise. Adolescence is […]

by Jack Calvin Hanna
As a child my mother loved my gay friends. She always asked about them and encouraged me to play with them, stay overnight at their homes, and bring them to ours…
The post Mamma Loved the […]

by Charlene Bryant
East New York, Brooklyn, didn’t really give you a lot of opportunities to explore your sexuality. The East conditioned you to explore methods to stay safe, to stay alive…
The post The Luxury o […]

by Robert Hamilton
After several months of not seeing each other, I thought I would just be happy to see my friend, and he would be just as happy to see me…
The post Friendship in the Time of AIDS appeared first […]

by Justin Estoque
In the church, I was surrounded by an abundance of male erotica in the form of paintings and statues of half-naked saints and the crucified Christ.
The post Coming Out Catholic, Without the […]

By John R. Killacky
IN 1981, I was with friends celebrating the Fourth of July weekend at New York’s Fire Island Pines gay enclave when life changed. Buried on page A20 of The New York Times (July 3,1981) was a r […]

By Aila Boyd
I’m only 25, but I’ve been a high school theater and chorus teacher, a general assignment reporter, a college English instructor, and an editor of a small weekly newspaper. Luckily I have done qui […]

By Brad Graber
Am I having trouble breathing? Is that cough an allergy or something more serious? These are the thoughts racing through my mind as I socially distance from everyone except my husband, Jeff. Am I […]

By Julia Wendell
His name was Stefan. No one called him my older brother’s lover. John hadn’t come out yet, even to me. The two men could have just been friends. I was twenty. It was 1977. I hadn’t been in love […]

By Bruce Skeaff
RON CHARLES, book critic for the Washington Post, took a few minutes on this past CBS Sunday Morning program to remind us that, while it’s important to keep up on our current terrible global p […]

By E.M. Birmingham
My lesbian twin sister died in May of 2019 from Stage IV bone cancer, having delayed going to a doctor for almost a year as she limped around from the pain in her left hip. By the time Eleanor […]

The last time the Boy Scouts of America made headlines was when their policy of excluding gay youths was being challenged in court by LGBT organizations. This time it’s because the national BSA has filed for C […]

By George DeStefano
In July 2000, my partner Rob and I spent several weeks in Italy, beginning in Rome. We came to the Eternal City for World Pride Roma, a week of gay cultural and political activities culminating […]

By Janet Lea
his is embarrassing. I have fallen in love with a woman who died nearly 200 years ago.
I blame my newfound love on the new and enthralling period drama Gentleman Jack. The eight-episode prime time […]

By Tobias Maxwell
I’ve always wondered about bisexuality. Mine, primarily.
Navigating any orientation as a prepubescent is not easy. When I was growing up in the sixties, being gay was generally more c […]

By Jason Armstrong
I came of age at the advent of the AIDS crisis. To me, sex and death were intertwined, even as HIV medications turned a terminal illness into a chronic condition. Sex felt like playing a game of […]

By Natascha Graham
A few months ago, someone in a Facebook group for highly sensitive people wrote a post asking for movie suggestions. I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve commented on group p […]

By Peter Kupfer
It was a gold Seiko. It wasn’t a particularly expensive watch, but it was priceless to me because it had belonged to my father. It was a part of him, something he’d worn every day.
The post The […]

By Ruth Marner
They called it Rock Creek, but really, it was a lake. And on a hot summer’s day in 1984, we drove out to it. We only had several days together before I needed to return home to St. Louis, so we w […]

By Jeffrey Round
Of the handful of books that informed my adolescent understanding of what it meant to be gay, E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice was the most revelatory. The reasons are numerous, b […]