You Will Be Humiliated
Camp Marmalade by Wayne Koestenbaum Nightboat Books. 409 pages, $18.95 Camp Marmalade sounds like a nice place to send gay boys for the summer, but since it…More
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What Might Have Been
As Lillian Faderman’s new biography, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, reveals, Milk was not the first openly gay politician elected to public office, or even the first politician of significance to be out about his sexuality.
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Settling for ‘Equality’
Has the Gay Movement Failed? by Martin Duberman Univ. of California Press 246 pages, $27.95 WHEN A WRITER puts a question mark at the end of a…More
Interpretations of a Sexual Assualt
IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE, and Eddy Bellegueule, the protagonist in Édouard Louis’ second novel, History of Violence, is walking back to his apartment after a night out with friends. …
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A Reader’s Own Story
White’s favorite 20th-century Japanese fiction writers are Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, and he praises both for showing that “there’s more to contemporary literature than American coffee-cup realism.”What he prizes in these writers, and many others, is strangeness, an idea that runs throughout The Unpunished Vice.
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Transformational Verse
[Lisa Dordal’s] poetic tales are plainly told, but they shed light on complex experience, including enduring loss, battling depression and grief, and coming to recognize and celebrate her lesbian self. Finding strength in her voice as a poet is a pivotal discovery.
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We Stayed in Maine
Lesbian subjects have been largely erased from history. Consequently, often in the past, and even today, the biographer’s task is made all the more difficult by the subjects themselves, their executors, and their gatekeepers. Tackling erasure requires a special kind of courage and dedication on the part of the biographer, as I discovered in restoring the life of Romaine Brooks. Joan Howard joins this distinguished sisterhood with We Met in Paris.
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Where Baldwin Landed
IN ME AND MY HOUSE, Magdalena Zaborowska reconstructs and analyzes the last decade of James Baldwin’s life when he lived in St. Paul-de-Vence, a small village in the south of France.
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If Seers Could Really See
[Chloe] Benjamin brings the reader full circle, to the very heart of life’s mysteries: What’s it all about? How should I live my life? In the end, The Immortalists becomes quite touching and unforgettable. It surprises you, as life itself often does.
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A Renaissance Man
THIS DETAILED BIOGRAPHY tells the life story of Alain Locke, one of the major forces behind the Harlem Renaissance. As a critic and public intellectual, he helped establish the careers of many black writers and artists.
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