SINCE THE TIME of Stonewall, the LGBT+ community has changed in ways that our queer antecedents could not have imagined. We now have multiple resources at our fingertips for figuring out our queer identities and for connecting with a network of people, or even a community, with whom we share a sexual identity. One group that has come out and come together in the age of the Internet is the asexual community.
More“BLACK LIVES MATTER” started as a slogan, a response to a spate of police killings of unarmed black men in 2014, a rebuttal to the message that Black lives were expendable. The slogan turned into a movement, re-awakened last year by the murder of George Floyd, and the phrase “BLM” came to mean more than “Please don’t kill us.” It’s a reminder of the vast contributions that African-Americans have made to every field of endeavor.
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ALTHOUGH David Wojnarowicz has been the subject of many essays, studies, and an excellent biography by Cynthia Carr, Chris McKim’s film is the first feature-length documentary to examine his life and work. The film does not have a narrator but makes extensive and effective use of the many tape journals that the artist recorded starting in 1976. The result is an audio collage that tells his story along with images of his work, and of the artist himself, that fade in and out in kaleidoscopic fashion.
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TWO ARTIFACTS of LGBT popular culture in 2021 feel like déjà vu all over again, particularly evoking the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Each in its way has been a stake through the hypocritical heart of America’s religious Right. …
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Jaime Cortez’s new collection of short stories, Gordo, is set in this region’s agricultural worker camps in the 1970s. These are not fictionalized narratives of hardscrabble destitution but ebullient tales about the chubby, effeminate Gordo and his friends.
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THE PRICE OF DREAMS is a fictionalized autobiography of Patricia Highsmith, a translation from the Italian novel by Margherita Giacobino, structured with point-of-view changes in vignettes that move the narrative forward. The title is an allusion to Highsmith’s first novel, The Price of Salt …
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“WHO WOULD ever want to become a parent, if he knew every trouble ahead?” asks a character toward the end of Chinese-American writer Yang Huang’s new novel, My Good Son. The year is 1990, a year after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. …
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FIRST LOVE swirls at the center of Christopher Zyda’s memoir, The Storm, followed in short order by illness and death. The book recounts the fifteen-year period from 1983 to 1998, during which the promising UCLA English literature major who had “set my career sights on writing in Hollywood” meets and falls in love with 33-year-old Stephen, “a muscular man with brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a beautiful smile.” …
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WHAT HAPPENS when a gay American man and the heir to the British throne meet and fall in love? In Playing the Palace, Paul Rudnick makes full use of his comedic skills—evident in such screenplays as Jeffrey, Sister Act, and In and Out—to bring this improbable romance to life. …
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FIRST NOVELS, especially coming-out novels, arrive with a certain amount of baggage. I tend to open them with trepidation, prepared to be assaulted by clichés about the closet and bad sex. That’s why Justin Deabler’s first novel, Lone Stars, comes as a welcome surprise. Deabler avoids the traditional landmines of coming-out stories by working on a broader canvas. …
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