SEEING THROUGH is composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s detailed, passionate recollection of his life and career. Discovering opera as a child, Gordon found it a means of escaping a tumultuous home life, which included sexual abuse as well as drug and alcohol addiction, even as he developed an appreciation for beautiful music. In a conversational style, he recounts his neuroses and obsessions, his triumphs and tragedies.
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Although these memoirs were written over six decades, they read as a seamless recollection of an age and speak to the dread, the joy, and the angst of coming out at a time when doing so could be life-threatening. In our own troubling times, her reflections become all the more germane, reminding us of the courage it once took for people to discover the truth about themselves, and to let the world know about it.
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RECENTLY SHORTLISTED for the 2024 Booker Prize, The Safekeep may seem at first to be a historical novel about a complicated lesbian relationship. But this debut novel soon evolves into a fraught tale about interpersonal attraction and layers of generational pain based upon deceit.
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Dual review of Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall and Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems
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WITH A WINK to Oscar Wilde, R. Tripp Evans’ The Importance of Being Furnished celebrates four influential Americans—Charles Leonard Pendleton (1846–1904), Ogden Codman Jr. (1863–1951), Charles Hammond Gibson Jr. (1874–1954), and Henry Davis Sleeper (1878–1934)—whose imaginative houses, now public museums, marked a pivotal shift toward personal expression in home design.
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KNOWN for her large-scale collage portraits of Black women, the critically acclaimed artist Mickalene Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971. Introduced to art as a child by her mother, fashion model Sandra Bush, she earned her BFA from New York’s Pratt Institute and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has accepted various artist residences and received numerous prizes. She now lives and works in Brooklyn with her partner and frequent model Racquel Chevremont.
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TRANS HIRSTORY in 99 Objects has been my most popular coffee table book this summer. It has beautiful typography and color plates. It has the heft of art books by Taschen, but it’s published by another German art publisher, Hirmer Verlag, in conjunction with the Museum of Trans Hirtory and Art (motha). And it’s the catalog for an exhibition that has yet to happen!
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Short reviews of BLOOD LOSS: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art by Keiko Lane and LONG LIVE QUEER NIGHTLIFE: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution by Amin Ghazian.
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McKinney does an admirable job of reframing much of the scandal and paying homage to the genius of Pee-wee Herman. The book celebrates that such a singular, queer, and transgressive character ever existed, and the author’s sadness at Reubens’ passing is palpable. It’s a fitting tribute, one that Reubens richly deserves.
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Written for lay readers, Straight Acting discusses complex issues in a readable style and includes an extensive bibliographical essay and footnotes. Each chapter begins with a fictional scene from a particular period in Shakespeare’s life.
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