GAY BAR is a queer little book by a queer little woman who, yes, owned a gay bar on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in the 1950’s. The book is a rediscovery, having been published more than half a century ago (in 1957) by a company owned by the early gay rights activist Hal Call. Now, writer-historian Will Fellows has repackaged the book, with a new introduction and copious notes and commentary.
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A Life Like Other People’s, Bennett’s latest memoir, was first published in his autobiographical essay collection Untold Stories (2005). This detailed and moving account of his early memories of his family, with closest attention given to his mother …
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THIS BOOK is a kind of sequel to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, published in 1994. Gender Outlaw, which has become a staple in Queer Studies classrooms, questions the fundamental necessity of dividing the human race into only two genders assumed to be “natural” and mutually exclusive.
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GUILLERMO REYES’ Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives follows the parallel lives of María, a Chilean single mother, and her gay son Guillermo, who immigrate to the United States in the 1970’s.
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Filled with big names and little scandals—Allan Carr was openly gay when gay was taboo to talk about in Hollywood—Party Animals is exhaustively researched, over-the-top snarky, gossipy, and sarcastically funny!
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THE ESSAYS in this collection cover a variety of subjects, from the difficulties of translating Iraqi poetry to a reflection on James Baldwin. Each topic, however, demonstrates Adrienne Rich’s remarkable intellect and critical faculty.
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Reviews of The Promise of Happiness, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, and Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image.
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The Bad Life, a best-selling memoir by Frédéric Mitterrand, the openly gay minister of culture in the government of Nicholas Sarkozy (and nephew of a past president of France, François Mitterrand), …
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PATTI SMITH’S Just Kids is a memoir about the singer’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989). The book resonates with all the portentousness of the Fates spinning threads around inextricably entangled mortals. Just Kids isn’t a lurid exposé but a serious reflection upon creative vision, regeneration, and devotion.
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IN 1965 AT UCLA, I took a class from Christopher Isherwood, and I recall him saying, “All I can do is to tell stories about my life.” He noted that he found support for this idea in Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which had been translated recently into English. And he pointed to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” in which “every flower … dreamed its own fairy tale, or its story.” Victor Marsh begins Mr. Isherwood Changes Trains with a discussion of the postmodern concept that the self doesn’t really exist …
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