GAY PARENTING hasn’t received nearly as much attention as same-sex marriage in our recent cultural debates, which makes Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland – a memoir about growing up with her single gay father, the late poet Steve Abbott, in San Francisco, during the 1970s and ’80s.
MoreIN RECENT YEARS, Christopher Isherwood’s presence in popular culture has been on the rise …
In her introduction to the latter book, Harker observes that much Isherwood scholarship focuses on his place in the modernist canon and on his homosexuality.
Radel has clearly done his homework and deftly steers the reader through all of White’s fiction— from 1973’s Forgetting Elena, a debut which saw few sales but won critical ac- claim from Vladimir Nabokov, to last year’s Jack Holmes and His Friend.
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GROWING UP in a leftist family in the 1950s, my cultural education included lectures given by my mother on the connection between politics and the arts. She would tell me of her experiences as a young socialist during the 1930s attending politi- cal theater in New York City. Her favorite socially conscious composer was Marc Blitzstein. Howard Pollack, professor of music at the University of Houston, has written a comprehensive biography that opens a window onto the creative genius of Blitzstein while offering a thorough study of his innovative music.
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Boykin, an author, television commentator, and Harvard Law School graduate, is to be commended for assembling writers with the audacity to address issues normally shrouded in silence in communities of color in this stirring collection of personal essays by gay men of color.
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Jim Nawrocki reviews Michael Rumaker’s Robert Duncan in San Francisco and Hilary Holladay’s American Hipster: A Life of Herbert Huncke.
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A MAN who is never named – as if he’s invisible or not worthy of a name – is the protagonist of this somber, almost depressing novel by Will Davis, author of the award-winning novel, My Side of the Story (2007). …
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This book is a remarkable work of reconstruction. It begins with the “American dream” of Mereleh Luft, a teenage girl in Latvia: “She’d been sent out to be an apprentice, first to a milliner and then to a dressmaker, and with loathing she’d believed the needle would be her whole life.
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ONE MAGAZINE, America’s first openly gay publication, was launched in Los Angeles in January 1953. It continued going strong for almost a decade, until an internal split in the parent organization, One Inc., weakened the magazine. Still, it continued to publish in a diminished form up to 1967, only two years before Stonewall. …
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TREBOR HEALEY’S LATEST NOVEL, A Horse Named Sorrow, is a painfully beautiful book. It’s also gloriously sexy and, along with Michelle Tea’s Valencia (2000), it’s among the finest depictions of queer life in 1990s San Francisco. …
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