Drag Queens and Beauty Queens is an ethnographic study that analyzes the symbiotic relationship between a “pair of spectacles”: the 100-year-old Miss America pageant (which Greene calls a “performance of gender” that’s “understood by gays as essentially a camp performance”) and its “drag counterpart,” the Miss’d America pageant.
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Deep Song, a title borrowed from Lorca’s own work, starts with Lorca’s “García” roots in the countryside of southern Spain, a blended zone with many Arabic influences. It is also a place of interconnected family and business relationships. Some of these were helpful to the young writer and some ultimately fatal, Roberts argues with evidence gathered from multiple sources and laid together like the mosaics of Andalusia.
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“Beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching,” Mendelsohn observed in An Odyssey. “For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too.” Mendelsohn’s latest book achieves just that. Three Rings is not a book for everyone. But for readers who can’t help pondering how we make meaning of the motley mosaic of life, it is a delightful odyssey.
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Outrageous Misfits is also the story of Toronto’s gay scene from the 1970s to the present day. Brian Bradley, a Canadian journalist and writer for The Toronto Star, carried out extensive archival research, had access to journals and other primary sources, and inter- viewed key family members, friends, and associates. This leads to some repetition, but for the most part the narrative presses on relentlessly, from the highest highs to the lowest lows.
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Short reviews of Fiebre Tropical, Original Kink, and Tell Me about It 3: LGBTQ Secrets, Confessions, and Life Stories
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[T]he Adrienne Rich who became a force in arts and letters before her emergent lesbian political identity was unknown to us. That circle has been completed by Hilary Holladay’s new biography, The Power of Adrienne Rich. Holladay reminds us to look beyond the familiar persona.
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Brief reviews of Stories to Sing in the Dark, and You Will Love What you Have Killed.
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Myles has been called “the rock star of modern poetry.” For their many fans, this book will readily confirm that badge. Others may find For Now bewildering, a labyrinthine ramble with no real payoff. Myles is aware of the risks they’re taking. Literature, they say, “is not a moral project except in this profound aspect of wasting time.” Those who choose to “waste time” with this book should be ready for some surprising, even profound, literary adventures.
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When Rhein shows Brown his portraits—sinewy young men, sometimes with pierced ears, nipples, and penises—he calls them by name: “William, Jeffery, John, Andrew, Joe, Russell.” Some were lovers, some friends. Some are living, some are dead. Self-portraits show Rhein sitting or lying nude on a primitive wooden bench. At other times, he appears next to his subjects, kissing them in a rumpled bed, or helping to insert an IV.
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Repackaged conference papers tend to make for dreadful books, readable only by specialists with magnifying glasses. Happily, Isherwood in Transit is much better than many collections and contains a number of chapters that will be of interest not only to gay readers but also to those interested in the milieux through which Isherwood passed, notably Germany and Japan.
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