Quite possibly Spencer Reece is the only poet who, a year apart, was ordained as an Episcopal priest and saw one of his poems, The Clerk's Tale, made into a seven-minute film by James Franco. Indiewire named the short one of Franco's "10 Very Gay Career Highlights."
Ten years and many awards later -- a Guggenheim, a Whiting, an NEA, a Witter Bynner from the Library of Congress -- Reece follows that debut with yesterday's release from FSG, The Road to Emmaus.
All I know now / is the more he loved me the more I loved the world.
Reece holds four degrees from Wesleyan, the University of York, Harvard Divinity, and Yale Divinity.
Readers of smart gay poetry should also bear in mind last week's Plundered Hearts by J.D. McClatchy and last month's The Earth Avails
by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.
, growing up gay under Thatcher
for a film reteaming Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro for the fourth time. Today he's 61.
and 
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even though decades later Knut Hamsun became an unrepentent Hitler supporter. Bad people can make great art. But we don't have to pay them royalties while they kick us in the face. Nor should we sit in silence while they spew lies about us.
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. He reads for seven minutes then discusses the novel with the host and answers audience questions for the remainder of the half hour. Straight away he reveals the two unnamed men in the story are John and (impossibly) Paul (who is "mean"). Listen 
and 
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last year and Christopher Fowler's Paperboy in 2010.
rocked critics and readers in 2001. Now comes 
pens a 7,568 word essay called 
gives a queasy sense of a progressive society suddenly grinding in reverse: it seems as though the public-spiritedness of the Depression and the Second World War era required certain individuals to be expelled as scapegoats. New York passed laws against cross-dressing, onstage representations of homosexuals, and gatherings of gays in clubs. Police could close a bar if they heard men talking in high-pitched voices. In the thirties, the Motion Picture Production Code banned any hint of homosexuality. Leading psychiatrists, abandoning Freud’s relatively nonjudgmental position, described homosexuals as “sexual psychopaths.” There were experiments in electric and pharmacological shock treatment, hormone injection, castration, and lobotomy. One site of such remedies, Atascadero State Hospital, in California, later became known as “Dachau for queers.”
, 
, and Gene Robinson's 
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