Among the surprises in Wild Visionary is the extent of Sendak’s devotion to Herman Melville, for whose Pierre, or The Ambiguities he produced a series of wonderfully homoerotic illustrations. And I was previously unaware of Sendak’s work for AIDS causes.
More
AT AGE 21, John Wieners (1934–2002) was high on poetry. The Black Mountain College student wrote to a friend in the spring of 1955, “I just know now that as long as I live I will be a poet, that my life, way of and function of, will be the writing of poetry, as long as it lasts.” …
More
In his new biography Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, Richard Bradford chronicles the life and work of Highsmith with an emphasis on what is not widely known about her.
More
A new biography by Leslie Brody, Sometimes You Have to Lie, is an exploration of Fitzhugh’s life in its social and historical context. One of Brody’s projects is to reveal the central conflicts in the life and fiction of her subject, who struggled with truth and falsehood, coming out versus staying in the closet, committing to work versus relationships, and other either/or dualities that arose in the course of her short life.
More
100 Boyfriends is the fourth book by [Brontez] Purnell, who is also a musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. Indeed, the book is as much a loud, hard-core performance piece as it is a collection of stories: part rant, part stand-up comic routine, part gross-out shtick, part bravura Gen-X aria.
More
While [Martin] Duberman ferrets out the private side of Andrea Dworkin, [in Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary,] with aplomb, the public Dworkin, “huge and hollering,” as Ariel Levy once put it, is ever-present too. The events of her political career, often inseparable from her private hurts, are examined: …
More
LEAVING Isn’t the Hardest Thing is a memoir that hasn’t got a tidy chronology or a crystal-clear resolution, and its language is often coarse. Yet Lauren Hough’s vivid, darkly humorous essays paint a fresh and powerful picture of two intertwined struggles.
More
IN CONFESS, Rob Halford discloses the trials he faced behind the scenes while fronting the heavy metal band Judas Priest. This memoir is that of a man who was torn between being a pioneer in the macho genre of heavy metal—which indeed fashioned a whole new style of masculinity—and his self-discovery as a gay man with all the (mis-)adventures that came with it, which had to be kept under the radar.
More
[O]ne can hope that future biographers will build on [Troy R.] Saxby’s exploration of the human side of Pauli Murray, so that she can take her place in the pantheon of LGBT thinkers and activists.
More
Reviews of Funeral Diva, Let’s Get Back to the Party, If I Had Two Wings: Stories, and Kink: Stories.
More
