Gay & Lesbian Review

This essay is bonus content for The G&LR’s September-October 2026 issue, “Cruising.” To see the full issue, click here. On a crisp, early November Sunday afternoon in 1976, during my first semester of grad school, I found myself walking down Hennepin Avenue in a mostly deserted downtown neighborhood of Minneapolis. I was looking for a particular side street, driven by a desire I’d worked hard to relegate to the back of my consciousness for many years. I wanted to be with men in a sexual way.

(Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash) Since 2020, LGBTQ+ youth in the U.S. have been targeted by a wave of laws, policies, and discourse aimed at pushing them further to the social and educational margins.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. DOG’S DAY The True Story of a Bank Robbery, Gay Liberation, and Toxic Love That Inspired a Hollywood Classic by Matthew J. Prigge Counterpoint Press. 304 pages, $29. BORN TO LOSE The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon by Rachel Walther Headpress Books 152 pages, $24.95 IT’S A BALMY October afternoon in 1975. John Wojtowicz sweats through his prison jumpsuit as he sits in the large room used as a movie theater at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. CAFÉ LAFITTE IN EXILE Queer New Orleans and the Story of America’s Oldest Gay Bar by Frank Perez & Jeffrey Palmquist LSU Press. 208 pages, $32.95 A BAR IS THE STAR of this deliciously entertaining history of gay New Orleans. Shortly after the end of Prohibition in 1933, Tom Caplinger, Harold Bartell, and Mary Collins leased 941 Bourbon St. and opened Café Lafitte. The building—with its ancient bricks, exposed wood, and a slight lean—dated to 1772.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. SEX BETWEEN MEN was illegal in Great Britain for more than four centuries, from Parliament’s passage of the Buggery Act of 1533 until the enactment of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which legalized same-sex activities between men aged 21 and older, and then only in private. Sex between women was never criminalized, probably because it simply was not recognized as a possibility.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. HAPPINESS RUINED EVERYTHING Essays by Michael Klein Galileo Press. 224 pages, $23. IN THE SPRING OF 1991, I met the poet Michael Klein in Provincetown, where he was wrapping up a winter residency at the Fine Arts Work Center. Klein had just finished writing his first book of poems, titled 1990, which was published two years later by Provincetown Arts Press.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. STEPHEN SONDHEIM Art Isn’t Easy by Daniel Okrent Yale Univ. Press. 320 pages, $35. DANIEL OKRENT’S new biography of Stephen Sondheim is part of the Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series—short biographies whose subjects run the gamut from Jesus to Mel Brooks—though it doesn’t really have a lot to say about Sondheim’s religiosity.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. WOMEN-LOVING WOMEN have been around at least since Sappho put stylus to papyrus in the 6th century BCE, but it took until the early 21st century CE for a seminal work on lesbian cruising to be published.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. BONE HORN: A Novel by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain Soft Skull. 320 pages, $17.95 I’VE READ A LOT of crime fiction, but never have I heard of a mystery with a premise like that of Bone Horn, by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain. Here it is in a nutshell: An independent scholar sets up a private investigation agency because she wants flexibility. She has no experience as an investigator other than what she’s gleaned from her beloved TV crime shows.

Published in: September-October 2026 issue. EDMONIA LEWIS: Said in Stone Edited by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll and Shawnya L. Harris Univ. of Chicago Press. 272 pages, $60. Edmonia Wildfire Lewis, a Black Indigenous (Mississauga) sculptor, born in 1844 and working in Rome from 1866, has been a figure of interest to queer artists and historians since the 1990s.