BE NOT AFRAID of My Body is a poetic recounting of a gay Black man’s life. In beautifully moving language, poet Darius Stewart explores his race, sexuality, class, and addictions, revealing both his gift for self-reflection and his penchant for self-destructive behavior.
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The Bars Are Ours is a remarkable achievement and essential reading for any serious student of contemporary queer history.
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Interest in Rustin’s life and work has been growing. Previous works of note include John D’Emilio’s 2003 biography, which probed the impact of Rustin’s work and his struggles to maintain a public leadership role, and a collection of Rustin’s impassioned correspondence titled I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters, edited by Michael G. Long and published in 2012. Long has now edited a collection of essays by a range of Rustin scholars titled Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics.
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Since Strayhorn’s death, a handful of writers have worked to rescue him from Duke Ellington’s shadow. David Hajdu’s 1997 biography Lush Life and Walter van de Leur’s Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn have solidified Strayhorn’s position as a major force in American jazz. To those titles we can add Lisa Barg’s new Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration, a scholarly examination of Strayhorn’s work and life as a queer Black artist working in a time of overt racism and homophobia.
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Maurice is placed by media professor David Greven in a tradition of melancholy and lyrical gay films exemplified by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, and later Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Will & Grace’s pedigree is more I Love Lucy.
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Christopher Byrne’s biography, “A Man of Much Importance,” is welcome on several counts. First, despite the choppy way that it consigns McNally’s plays, operas, and work for television to separate chapters, the book does offer an accurate overview of McNally’s life that’s surprising in some of its details. For example, while McNally had spoken publicly about his parents’ alcoholism and his father’s beating him for his artsy behaviors and sassy comebacks as he grew up in Corpus Christi, Byrne is the first to report that McNally’s mother “interfered” (Byrne’s word) with him during his teenage years, which perhaps explains the sexually troubled relationship between mothers and sons in his plays.
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AS A WRITER and commentator for Rolling Stone and NPR, Will Hermes has zestfully illuminated the zeitgeist of various musical movements, placing them within their historical and cultural settings. His latest book is an examination of the complicated genius of Lou Reed, the drug-taking, gender-bending avatar of the leather, goth, glam, and punk music scenes. Many books have been written about the legend, but Lou Reed: The King of New York may well be the definitive biography.
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The project, “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” is now recapped in a book by the same name, which includes essays about the works on display and interviews with the living artists. Much of it wrestles with questions of inclusion: Whose pictures deserve to hang on a museum’s walls? Is there an institutional responsibility to represent different kinds of art and artists outside its established purview? What types of people are encouraged to walk through a museum’s front door?
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A HOST of accolades marks Sean DeLear’s posthumous reputation: “the Queen Mother of alternative music,” “a punk rock fairy godmother,” “a walking work of art,” “a person who single-handedly made counterculture feel viable,” AND “a fierce, fully formed faggot.” To use an expression DeLear often applied to others, he was a “bitchin’ babe.”
“He was so many things,” writes Michael Bullock, co-editor of DeLear’s teenage diary I Could Not Believe It, recently issued by Semiotext(e): “punk musician, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, dance-track vocalist, party host, heavy-metal groupie, marijuana farmer, and even Frances Bean Cobain’s babysitter.”
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Impressive for its careful, comprehensive portrait of memory, love, grief, and community, The Road to Dalton encourages acceptance of its flawed characters. They are doing the best they know how in a place where the only expectations are of birth and marriage and death.
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