Browsing: Book Review

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For Powell, even hardcore porn movies helped show viewers the emotional truth of gay male life. He argues that these films, with their improbable plots that always lead to sex and quite often to group orgies, reflect on some level the coming-out experience.

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Carved in Bone begins as eighteen-year-old Bill Ryan is dumped at a Midwestern bus station, cruelly discarded by homophobic parents. Naïve and bewildered, Ryan becomes part of the 1970s tidal wave of gay immigrants to San Francisco.

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Rocking the Closet takes us back to pre-liberation days in the same way that Guy Davidson’s Categorically Famous (reviewed in the November-December issue) reprised the careers of Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin to show how celebrities in the ’60s danced around the subject of their homosexuality while paradoxically opening the closet door.

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During the 1980s, the piers buildings below 14th Street along the Hudson were demolished, one by one. With this destruction, a fertile ground for creativity vanished, not to mention wall paintings by the likes of Wojnarowicz and Tava, preserved now only in photographs. Pier Groups itself is a marvelous work of preservation, revealing this world and the artists who found those spaces so crucial to their artistic expression.

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The novel’s title comes from the title of one of Vuong’s poems. In that poem, he writes: “Say yes. Say yes/ anyway.” Likewise here, in his astonishing love letter to life, Vuong affirms again and again that “the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes.” Anyway. No matter what.

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IN WORLD CITIZEN, author David S. Wills conservatively estimates that Ginsberg visited as many as 66 countries in his lifetime. Using the poets letters, poems, travel diaries, and journals, Wills concludes that travel played a crucial role in Ginsberg’s discovery of his creativity and poetic voice.

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Short reviews of the books: Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989; In the Valley of Tears, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement; and Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.

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Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones, is the most recent entry in the University of Illinois Press’s “Modern Masters of Science Fiction” series.

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Kahan examines four broad areas of what he calls “minor perversions” (or simply sexualities beyond the stable binaries of “homo-” and “heterosexual”): situational homosexuality (specifically lesbianism); atavistic sexuality in hot climates; the sexuality of the “fairy”; and the standardization of sexuality under capitalist industrialization.

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BOTH author-impresario Marc Huestis and dancer Jeff McMahon used Super-8 movie cameras in their work in the 1970s and ’80s. Each has written about his artistic career, and, although they worked in very different fields, both incorporated their burgeoning gay identity into their films and performances.

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