Short Reviews
Short reviews of History’s Queer Stories, A Wild and Precious Life, and The Householders.
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The Art of Living in the Past
Peter McGough’s memoir I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going captures the silly, desperate decade they lived through and the peculiar ménage which is their major work of art.
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I Remember Mama
FROM the opening pages of this heart-felt memoir, Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas, by Dustin Lance Black, we learn that it is not only a story about his life’s journey but also of his mother Anne and her remarkable life story.
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What Became of Elio and Oliver?
Gorgeously lyrical, unabashedly fanciful, Find Me is one of those delicious literary confections that turns out to be more than just a mess of empty calories. Witty, wise, breathtakingly elegant, Aciman’s novel ultimately tweaks the nose of Henry James and his arch, ironic tragedies, opting instead to embrace and celebrate the brave new world of Shakespearean romance.
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Before Auden and Isherwood
The manuscript of Poems Written Abroad was unearthed not long ago in a Midwestern university library and is printed here for the first time. It dates from the summer of 1927, when Spender was a mere eighteen years old.
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He Believed in the Power of Art
Beautiful Aliens is a selection of Abbott’s essays, fiction, poems, and poetry cartoons, illustrating Abbott’s creative range and versatility. The book was compiled by Jamie Townsend, a Bay Area genderqueer poet who first encountered Abbott’s work when she was browsing in a bookstore in the Berkshires and picked up a copy of Stretching the Agape Bra, a collection of his poetry that includes “Elegy.”
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The Sociology of Soft-Core
For Powell, even hardcore porn movies helped show viewers the emotional truth of gay male life. He argues that these films, with their improbable plots that always lead to sex and quite often to group orgies, reflect on some level the coming-out experience.
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A Mystery Calls, and Rios Answers
Carved in Bone begins as eighteen-year-old Bill Ryan is dumped at a Midwestern bus station, cruelly discarded by homophobic parents. Naïve and bewildered, Ryan becomes part of the 1970s tidal wave of gay immigrants to San Francisco.
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For Ray Johnson, Art and Life Were One
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995) left the Barron’s Cove motel on Long Island, drove 100 feet to the 7-Eleven at the foot of the Sag Harbor–North Haven bridge, parked, walked out on the bridge, and jumped. Two kids heard a splash and saw a bald man, fully clothed, doing a casual backstroke—no cries for help, no struggle, just a slow steady progress out into the bay. His body washed up the next day.
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The Two Eds: A 50-Year Love Story
Inseparable since adolescence, both men [Ed Wormley and Ed Crouse] came out to their families at eighteen, and without any notable wringing of hands—perhaps in part because as announced atheists and aspiring æsthetes they’d already come to be regarded as creatures outside community norms. Both men came from financially modest and emotionally cramped backgrounds.
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