Almost Famous
Guy Trebay captures the essential things about the sexual playground that was Manhattan during the transition from Doom to Glitter.
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Blog Posts
A Life in Episodes (#1–35)
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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Short Reviews
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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Briefs
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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Revisiting Past Selves
[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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The French Lieutenant-Colonel’s Men
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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Charles Busch Takes a Selfie
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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A Life in History
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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No Country for Odd Men
In this memoir, Shakur searches for emotional and political meaning in a country that can no longer hide from its racist past. We follow his political and personal journeys from Ohio, back to Jamaica, to the Philippines, to France, and to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His dramatic disappointment at the lies and compromises that ripple through the American Dream, particularly for immigrant families, is lamented in ways both poignant and painful.
MoreTry Hiding on a Prairie
OVER TWO DECADES AGO, Kathleen Norris published Dakota, a wonderfully poetic and ruminative memoir about life on the Great Plains from a spiritual point of view. Now comes Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, an equally contemplative book, this time attempting to capture the experience of growing up gay in that beautiful but bleak environment.
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