A Last Good Place to Live

By Chip Brown Harper’s February 1992 From the outset the deaths had come in flurries, often at night when the house was hushed, and so it was no surprise last May that when Bill died Hector followed on his heels, and then Harvey, and then Jack. The news was posted in...

Cocktail Hour

By Stephen Fried The Washington Post Magazine May 18, 1997 “You want to see it?” Emilio Emini offers to show me the enzyme on which he bet 10 years of his virology career and a billion dollars of his company’s money. Rising from his desk, Emini, who is tall, dark and...

Getting it Straight

By Sue Woodman New York Woman January/February 1987 Last year, 1,806 women in America had AIDS, 794 of them were from New York City. Most of us may not yet be aware of this grim new reality, but it is becoming increasingly pervasive. Today, AIDS sufferers are no...

Sober Virgins of the ’80s

By Eve Babitz Smart Fall 1988 < Not that I like the eighties, but the sixties, if you ask me, weren’t that great, either. I mean, in the fifties, for men to get girls into bed, they had to be good lovers, to persist, to be sensual and seductive and inevitable and...

Truth and Consequence

By Sue Woodman New York Woman February 1990 Almost no one knows that twenty-eight-year-old Melanie Oakley* is gay—not her family, not her colleagues at the law firm where she works as a legal secretary, not her friends in the Queens neighborhood where she grew up and...

The Magic Act

By Charles P. Pierce GQ February 1993 At the corner of Washington and Ionia streets, in the city of Lansing, Michigan, there was a grand old movie house called the Gladmer Theater. Growing up on Middle Street, in a small auto-boom frame house, temple of the tiny...

Comedy is Not Pretty

By Ivan Solotaroff The Stacks Reader November 11, 2013 Charlie Barnett was pivotal in getting started as a full-time journalist. I spent close to six months—a late fall, entire winter, and early spring—watching him and getting to know his story—not only his crack...

Tangled Up in Blue

By Peter Richmond GQ October 1992 Nighttime in Los Angeles, on a quiet street off Melrose Avenue. An otherwise normal evening is marked by an oddly whimsical celestial disturbance: Baseballs are falling out of the sky. They are coming from the roof of a gray apartment...

Love in the Time of Magic

By E. Jean Carroll Esquire April 1992 Thus spoke the whole of womankind. —Honoré de Balzac “I mean, this guy, I walked in his hotel room one day, and he had on a towel…. Am I lying?” says Miss Boyd. “This man, his body. He played for the Bulls. Oh! This man had...