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ANYONE whose life was impacted in even a small way by the punk-feminist subculture known as Riot Grrrl will find it hard to read Sara Marcus’s thoroughly researched history of the movement and remain seated throughout. From its inception, traced here to 1989 and the creation of the band Bikini Kill, through the dissolution of most of its organizational hubs by 1996, Riot Grrrl existed in an emotionally amplified space. The fierce unity of the first small tribes that sprung up in Olympia, Washington, and Washington D.C. contrasts with the fire and fury at male privilege that inspired some of the movement’s finest work

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STANLEY BARBER STARTS OFF by declaring that this work is “written as a libretto for a sung-through musical,” repeating this in the Epilogue.

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ANXIETY, celebration and lust collide in Daniel Allen Cox’s second novel, Krakow Melt, an ode to youthful curiosity and sex drive.

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YOUNG CARL BEAN never really knew his father, and he barely knew his birth mother. Born and raised in a poor area of Baltimore, Bean was basically raised by a village of “warm and wonderful women.” He says that he was a girly little boy, soft and feminine, and he was attracted to other boys at an early age. He believes that those who raised him must have known about those feelings, but nothing was ever said. Bean was loved, and that’s what he knew.

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Dreamer’s Journey is a tremendous work of research, offering sympathetic insight into a gifted, complicated author who created in his work a world to match his odd temperament.

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IN SECRET HISTORIAN, Justin Spring offers a compelling, well-written account of Samuel Steward’s many lives as an accomplished professor and teacher, a respected novelist writing as Phil Andros, and a skilled tattoo artist and pornographer. Steward knew many of the noted artists and personalities of his era—André Gide, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Mann, George Platt Lynes, and Alfred Kinsey, among others—but Steward himself has remained a footnote in the cultural and sexual history of the mid-20th century.

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“THE MOMENTS when notoriety began to transform” the lives of Allen Ginsberg’s friends were the moments—among many others—that Ginsberg chose to capture in this fascinating new addition to our knowledge of the Beat Generation. Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, wrote the foreword to Beat Memories, the catalog for an exhibit at the National Gallery earlier this year (May 2 to Sept. 6). But they’re much more than just images: each is captioned by what in many cases is a miniature diary entry.

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WAS E. M. FORSTER a coward? A case could be made. He was deferential to a domineering mother, fearing her censure of his gay-themed writing as well as the men he loved, regretting he was unable to become the “authoritative male” who might have lessened her depression after the early death of his father. Short of falsely declaring himself to be a conscientious objector, he did everything he could to avoid conscription into the British Army during World War I until …

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Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols
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COMPARED TO MOST musical genres, disco ascended, flourished, and fizzled in a remarkably brief period from roughly the mid-1970’s until the early 80’s. It’s fair to say that disco didn’t even enjoy a solid decade of widespread popularity. Of course, those dates are debatable, and it all depends on how you define disco. And while disco’s reign was quick and fleeting (not to mention conflicted) in the U.S., it fared much better overseas. Alice Echols’ Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture offers a history of the disco era, but as the book’s title indicates, it’s more an interpretive, cultural history than a “who-what-where-when” catalog of disco’s origins, performers, and songs.

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From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law by Martha C. Nussbaum
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In From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law, Martha Nussbaum argues that homosexuals in particular have borne the brunt of disgust used as a political weapon.

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