Exhaling in Verse
JUDY GRAHN was born in Chicago in 1940. This is just about the only ordinary thing that can be said about the self-identified working-class lesbian poet.
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Back on the Farm
IF IT’S TRUE what they say about everybody “having a book in them,” there’s a good chance that the book is a personal memoir. In what seems lately to be a large subset of a genre—the gay-coming-of-age literary memoir—comes Melanie Hoffert, a surprisingly Zen breath of fresh air.
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Single Gay Father, Seeking
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.
MoreYou’ve Got to Hide It from the Kids
… Stories for Boys is ostensibly about Martin’s father, who in his early sixties attempts suicide. This comes as a surprise, since the father had always seemed the rock of the family while the mother, who suffers from bipolar disease, has occasionally been hospitalized. What triggers the father’s attempted suicide is his wife’s discovery of gay pornography on their computer. …
MoreA Man in Full
CHARLES BEYE’S MEMOIR begins like a l9th-century novel: the narrator’s second wife, to whom he has not spoken in years, is dying, and his children are begging him to visit her. Not only does he refuse, but when she dies he suspects that she willed herself to expire just to avoid his visit. …
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Queering Melancholia
Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich Duke University Press. 296 pages, $23.95 IN Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich attempts to find different ways of writing and…More
Coming Out as Bi(polar)
Ellen Forney is both bisexual and bipolar; she’s had to “come out” twice. In her new graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me, she shares the experience of coming to terms with her diagnosis and informing friends and family.
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Seasons of Interest
This memoir is, in a way, the antidote to the much more written-about “fast lane” in which gay men seem to be confined to the urban meat market.
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What a Long, Strange Trip to Glee
IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to think of actor Jane Lynch without picturing her in a tracksuit. Even if you’ve never seen the show, the role of Sue Sylvester on Glee made Lynch a household name and an overnight sensation as much for her scenery-chewing hilarity as for that iconic sportswear. …
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The Politics of Experience
AN ACTIVIST since the early 1970’s, Charles Silverstein was one of the key petitioners at the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 “Nomenclature Committee.” He argued successfully for the removal of homosexuality as a category of mental illness in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—a critical development which, as Silverstein argues in his new memoir …
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