This impressively researched biography, based on in-depth interviews with intimates and drawn from Russo’s exhaustive archives, is both a thrilling history of early gay liberation days – Vito witnessed the Stonewall riots – and an overdue reminder of one man’s outsize impact on gay culture and AIDS politics. Thirty years after its first edition (it was revised in 1987) and two decades after Russo died, “The Celluloid Closet” remains in print, chronicling how lesbians and gay men were for so long rendered invisible – or demonized – by Hollywood. Last year erotic pioneer Samuel Steward, this year film enthusiast and AIDS activist Vito Russo – the queer biographies get better and better. University of Wisconsin Press, 366 pages, $29.95 hardcover. “Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo,” by Michael Schiavi.
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