Expatriate Days
PART MEMOIR, part travelog, and part journalistic inquiry, Gaar Adams’ Guest Privileges embraces multiple genres.
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When Broadway Called
THEATER KID is a touching memoir of Jeffrey Seller’s journey from poverty to success as the producer of award-winning but unconventional musicals, offering an entertaining, informative recounting of meetings with colorful investors and theater personalities and discussing lesser-known aspects of producing shows, including advertising and ticketing. He also describes his first gay relationship and, having been adopted as an infant, his search for his biological family.
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The Oedipal Woman
STEPPE OPENS with a description of the great Russian sea of grass as seen from the window of an airplane, but most of this short but haunting novel takes place on a highway—a highway the narrator, a young lesbian poet, shares with her father as he drives a load of pipe in his truck from Moscow to Volgograd.
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The Arc of Liberation
In his new memoir, Where the Pulse Lives, John Loughery has captured what it was like for him to come out just as the Stonewall riots cracked open the oppression of LGBT people.
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An Activist’s Advice for Activists
MUCH LIKE her four-decade careers in literature and activism, Sarah Schulman’s The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity is an act of radical compassion.
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Four Men and One James Baldwin
IN 2017, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired the papers of author and gay icon James Baldwin. Consisting of more than 81 boxes of material, much of it previously unavailable, this archive chronicles Baldwin’s life from the age of fourteen in 1938 to his death in 1987. Author Nicholas Boggs took full advantage of this vital material to write the first major biography of Baldwin since 1991’s Talking at the Gates. A monumental work of research and literary analysis, Baldwin: A Love Story significantly expands our knowledge of the legendary author.
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Prehistory of the War on Woke
The activity of the Johns Committee in Florida’s schools and universities is an important part of the state’s queer history and has produced a wide range of studies, both academic and popular. Robert W. Fieseler’s new account, American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, both draws upon this work and adds important new dimensions and facts.
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A Poet Who Made the Ordinary Pop
WHEN YOUNG Jimmy Schuyler told his mother that he was gay, she responded: “Just because you like Oscar Wilde, it doesn’t mean you have to do all those things.” He began doing “all those things” as soon as he could, starting at about age seventeen. While serving on a destroyer in World War II, he went AWOL and was then medically disqualified owing to his acknowledged homosexuality. With A Day Like Any Other, Nathan Kernan has produced a splendid biography of James Schuyler (1923–1991), a Pulitzer-prize-winning poet who occupied a prominent place in the New York School in the postwar era.
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Writers of a Generation Speak (Out)
Passionate Outlier is one of those rare books that is both great fun to read and historically significant. It will be an invaluable resource for anyone researching the LGBT authors who gave birth to and nurtured queer literature in the 20th century.
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The Fight for Inclusive Education
Author Don Romesburg’s Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School traces the fight to have LGBT materials taught in history and social science classes across several decades. Romesburg was a major actor in this effort in California, where significant inclusion first occurred.
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