Vice Patrol is a compelling and important book. It shows us how the diverse interests and competing claims about the policing of gay lives in the postwar years played out in the courts. It reminds us how the criminal justice system was deeply enmeshed in, and transformed by, the larger cultural struggles over the meaning of same-sex desire.
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Although King would have you believe she is a great champion for social justice, she’s closer to Booker T. Washington than to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Like Washington, a master fundraiser and consummate people pleaser, King has always played to the crowd and kept an eye on the bottom line.
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The idea that Hansberry came out of nowhere to become an overnight success with A Raisin in the Sun is one of the misperceptions that’s dispelled by two new books on Hansberry, which show her to be a passionate and dedicated writer, artist, thinker, and activist.
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WHY DOES Eve Adams, born Chava Zloczewer, in Mlawa, Russian Poland, in 1891, matter to us today? The answers to this and a host of other mysteries can be found in Jonathan Ned Katz’ new biography, The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams.
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It is unclear exactly where Tiff stands in any canon. But if you love big, well-researched, and more-or-less objectively written biographies—including 112 pages of bibliography, indexes, and family trees—this book could be just what you’re looking for.
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STORIES ABOUT GAY history often begin with a bar: the Black Cat in Los Angeles, Stonewall in New York. Equally important, our personal gay stories often begin with the gay bars of our youth. Yet these establishments are vanishing across the country for a variety of reasons, most prominently the rise of hookup apps like Grindr and skyrocketing rents for brick-and-mortar venues.
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Throughout Sex with Strangers, Lowenthal brings together characters and plotlines with a particular knack for plumbing the depths of his characters’ memories to paint rich back stories. Taken together, these smartly crafted stories explore the tensions between desire and restraint—the grand, enthralling fearsomeness of deep intimacy, of fully knowing another person.
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Not quite a coming out story, Antiman is an illuminating “hybrid memoir,” a record of Mohabir’s coming to terms with himself, discovering who he is, and his embrace of multiple communities and cultures. As he writes: “Diaspora is a queer country/ How can you be at once two species from two places?”
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In the end, Medeiros’ story lands on a paradox. We know ourselves to be both unique individuals and utterly interconnected. Who better than identical twins to embody this? Who better than a poet to offer us this truth, and a gay poet at that? Affection and tenderness plunge Self, Divided into the realm of spiritual memoir, where love is the source of meaning.
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All the Rage is a memoir for a wide range of readers. Every young person who aspires to be an artist should read it. Anyone who wants to better understand how potentially self-destructive anger can be transformed into art should too. It ought to be required reading for critics and scholars who want to understand the arc of Fraser’s career up to 1999.
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