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Sam Biederman

Sam Biederman works as a publicist in New York

Good Old-Fashioned Sex: Gay Little Magazines

by Sam Biederman on August 10, 2010
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Indeed, the physicality of the magazines—that you can buy them, hold them, and keep them—creates a closer relationship between reader and content. When I was preparing to write this piece, I found myself walking out of St. Mark’s Bookstore holding a plain brown-paper bag full of gay rags. At that moment I felt connected to a gay past that I had never experienced: the formerly common experience of sliding a few bills across the cover of a dirty magazine and then scurrying home.

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Memories and Images: Art and Documentary in Two Photography Shows

by Sam Biederman on July 9, 2010
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But as the show goes on and the subjects age, it becomes clear that some essential insight is missing here. The snapshots have very little to say that’s not beneath the surface. There’s no comment in their compositions, and no deeper personalities betrayed in the candid shots. These are, in fact, the pictures Ginsburg would have taken with his iPhone, had he had one, and he seems to know it. Like a Facebook user, he supplements the early photos with exuberant, handwritten comments in the margins as if to provide meaning that’s not apparent in the image. Just because these photos were taken by an artist doesn’t make them art. These are documentary images of the lives of great artists, artifacts better suited for display at the Library of Congress than at the National Gallery.

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The Portrait of a Lawyer

by Sam Biederman on June 10, 2010
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It’s often said that artists think of their work as their children: the artist creates, and then the piece has a life of its own. But what is the link between subjects and the work in which they appear? Judging from my father’s response to Barefoot Attorney, I’d say that the subject-artwork relationship is the artist-artwork relationship played out in reverse: it’s child-to-parent.

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Show Queen: The Musical Sublimation of Gay Romance

by Sam Biederman on May 14, 2010
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The musicians and lyricists behind some of the greatest works of musical theater were often gay men who wrote their own repression into their work. Using heterosexual characters, they expressed an experience of love that was interrupted or destroyed by prejudice. Three cornerstones of the genre, Show Boat (1927), South Pacific (1949), and West Side Story (1957), all turn on interracial romances, which were still subject to public debate when the pieces were written. West Side Story’s climactic “Somewhere,” in which Bernstein’s star-crossed lovers imagine that “there’s a place for us” must have reverberated beyond the theater for the gay men in his audience.

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Easily Assimilated: Jann Wenner, David Geffen, and the Capitalism of the Closet

by Sam Biederman on March 19, 2010
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So, twenty years on, is there a significance to the shared sexuality of these captains of media, or is it just biography? I don’t know if gayness can ever just be background. In our overheated culture, sexual preference is central to personality—particularly when it’s so closely guarded. Successful people who choose to remain in the closet are necessarily excellent adapters. The closet is a hothouse specially designed to chameleons. It creates extreme extroversion, which allowed both men to be so flexible, and so eager to be a part of what was happening next. Wenner and Geffen had a choice between being in with the in crowd or being out of the closet.

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The Company Way

by Sam Biederman on February 20, 2010
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But those who work in glass towers shouldn’t throw stones. A little over a year ago, just down the block from us, Solomon Smith Barney disappeared in an afternoon. One day, the courtyard where we’d eat sandwiches from Pret-A-Manger was full of handsome young bankers; the next, they were all gone. It was like Brigadoon but with assholes. Those young investment bankers were as victimized by their own irresponsible behavior, their own reckless office culture as the characters of Mad Men are, or will surely be when the series turns the time machine up to 1969.

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