THREE NEW BOOKS, two novels and a memoir, help reveal the struggles and victories of LGBT Syrians. For all the beauty of the country, Syria is a land of horrific oppression, where gay men in particular, fearing exposure from the police and informers, must find secret places for sexual encounters or social interaction. They remind us of the promise of the Arab Spring and the crackdown and refugee crisis that followed, which affected so many people’s lives.
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AS A POET AGES, he’s often faced with several choices. He can keep doing what he has always done, or he can, by seriously confronting himself, seek another voice. Jason Schneiderman has done the latter brilliantly in his new book, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. He reflects humorously on his life as a poet, often poking fun at himself and his poses. He wrestles with his Jewish heritage by taking on Stalin and the Holocaust, and then delves into the angst of gay divorce.
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Guy Trebay captures the essential things about the sexual playground that was Manhattan during the transition from Doom to Glitter.
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Another Word for Love unfolds in 35 loosely chronological episodes, but the title prompts an immediate question: What is that other word?
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Reviews of Coachella Elegy, The City Aroused, Adam in the Garden, Born this Way Science: Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, American Poly: A History, Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II, and Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness & Homosexuality after World War II.
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Brief reviews of TEN BRIDGES I’VE BURNT: A Memoir in Verse; DEAD IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA; MATERIAL WEALTH: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg; BOUND: Poems; and IN THE SPIDER’S ROOM: A Novel.
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[McKenzie] Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, returns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships: “Changing sex edits your relation to a lot of things. Including history.”
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Maumort is not so much a novel as a fictionalized memoir—at least in its present state. Du Gard changed his mind several times while writing it regarding how exactly to tell the story; more on that later. What surprised me the most was a) how little known it is today, and b) how incredibly frank and nonjudgmental it is on sexual matters in general and on homosexuality in particular. Indeed, du Gard, who was a close friend of André Gide (in fact, the work is dedicated to him), spends a lot of time contemplating why the Lieutenant-Colonel did not turn out to be homosexual, despite the fact that many of his early sexual forays—one could even argue, his most significant ones—were with men.
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LEGENDARY DRAG PERFORMER and playwright Charles Busch lets it all hang out in his candid new memoir Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy (Smart Pop Books). It’s an intensive look back at his life encompassing early memories of yearning to be on stage as a boy and success with his own plays (among them The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom) and various celebrity encounters with people ranging from Milton Berle to Audra McDonald.
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Reaching Ninety, is a summing up of a long and remarkable life as [Martin Duberman] reaches his ninetieth birthday. In it, he covers some familiar ground, but more than in previous memoirs, he’s willing to speak out about matters that he was reluctant to speak of before. At ninety, one imagines, he doesn’t really care if he offends anyone or if someone disapproves.
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