A Quarterly of One’s Own
DECADENT WOMEN Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams Reaktion Books. 388 ages, $30. SET IN THE OFFICES of a Victorian magazine that he edited, many of Anthony Trollope’s later…More
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An Exhibit to Revisit
A new catalogue for About Face published by Monacelli Press includes elucidating essays and texts by Julian Carter, Anthony Cianciolo, Amelia Jones, Ava L. J. Kim, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Christopher Reed, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Dagmawi Woubshet. This lushly designed book with 300 illustrations is proof of concept for Katz’ curatorial vision.
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Of Bars and Bookstores
FOR LESBIANS of a certain age, reading June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own may bring on a wave of nostalgia, especially the parts about the 1970s and ’80s. Thomas has written a breezy yet substantial history of six types of spaces that have been important to our culture: lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, the softball diamond, lesbian land, feminist sex-toy stores, and vacation destinations. Each sort of space has its own unique vibe, but they all share a history of lesbians trying, and often failing, to make it in a heteronormative capitalistic society while prioritizing lesbian feminist ideals. The efforts were often heroic and the results transformative in the lives of the women who spent time in these spaces.
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Find Your Muse Here
In keeping with this mission, The Pagoda is just such a work. The book is a well-researched account of a women’s land community that flourished near St. Augustine, Florida, for 22 years. Surprisingly, information about The Pagoda rarely appears in academic literature about women’s communities, and many contemporary lesbian scholars haven’t heard of it. This circumstance is due in part to the intentional secrecy of the community itself.
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Postcards to Paris
Wojnarowicz’ importance to my thinking about art, life, and death in the age of AIDS has only deepened over the years. But when I went to see “Dear Jean Pierre,” an exhibition of letters and postcards sent mostly between 1979 and ’82 to his on-again, off-again French lover Jean Pierre Delage, I confess I was looking for a different, more intimate connection. The exhibition, curated by Anneliis Beadnell and Cynthia Carr for New York’s PPOW Gallery in spring 2022, didn’t entirely dash that hope. Most of the exhibited material is now available in Dear Jean Pierre, which reproduces the correspondence in full color and scale.
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The Liberation Spirit Comes to Newark
The accounts in Queer Newark were made possible in large part by the creation of the Queer Newark Oral History Project in 2011. Scores of interviews have been collected, some recounting events going back to the World War II era and the 1950s. They make the essays come alive with deeply personal accounts of individual lives across three-quarters of a century.
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A Life in Episodes (#1–35)
Another Word for Love unfolds in 35 loosely chronological episodes, but the title prompts an immediate question: What is that other word?
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No Time for Boring Poetry
A NEW COLLECTION titled The Selected Shepherd is a very welcome arrival that may encourage readers to rediscover an award-winning, fiercely intelligent poet, anthologist, and critic. Gone much too soon at the age of 45, Reginald Shepherd showed in his increasingly stronger collections that he was well on his way to becoming a major force in American poetry.
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Autofiction Meets Stream of Consciousness
Autofiction is alive and well in Nicolas Pages, a novel by Guillaume Dustan newly translated by James Horton and Peter Valante. In an earlier essay (“A Quite Natural Desire”), he wrote: “I was pleased that everything I wrote about had actually happened. I only changed the names.” Born William Barànes in France in 1965, Dustan adopted his penname in 1995 and released three novels in the following years: In My Room (1996), a story told almost entirely from the narrator’s bedroom; I’m Going Out Tonight (1997), a long night of sexual escapades in the Parisian club and bath scene; and Stronger Than Me (1998), a reflection on the narrator’s past during the height of the AIDS epidemic in Paris.
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Metafiction Meets Itself
On its surface, Serrano’s novel tells two interdependent stories told in separate, alternating chapters. In one narrative, which constitutes the framework of the novel, the narrator (let’s assume, for now, that the narrator is Serrano himself) records and comments on dialogues he has with his (unnamed) husband as they wander from one pueblo to another on a two-week summer holiday in the Basque region of Spain. They discuss sundry matters, primarily Serrano’s plan to write a novel about two heterosexual men, Edorta and Koldo, who share a deep, perplexing love for one another. The second story …
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