GOOD PICTURES ARE A STRONG WEAPON
Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty
by Louise Siddons
Univ. of Minnesota Press. 320 pages, $34.95
Louise Siddons’ new book on Laura Gilpin, the pioneering photographer who spent decades capturing the lives of the Navajo people in New Mexico, focuses on how lesbians and Native Americans found common ground in their shared struggles. Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon is an art historical monograph that applies intersectional methodology and ally politics to lesbian and Indigenous experiences. Siddons refutes the normative and reductive lenses through which Gilpin’s photography has been interpreted.
The introduction and first chapters establish the value of queer theory in looking at Gilpin’s legacy. Siddons takes pains to stress the crucial role that Gilpin’s friends and acquaintances played in documenting and preserving Navajo culture and sovereignty. She focuses on “commonality” in exploring how gays’ and Native Americans’ experiences evolved during the 1930s and ’40s. She argues their shared awareness of sexism and gender fluidity as marginalized groups led to them to develop strategies for empowering both. I think Native American poet Joy Harjo captured the spirit of Gilpin’s art: “She feels the sky/ tethered to the changing/ earth, and her skin/ responds, like a woman/ to her lover.”
Siddons study of Gilpin’s impressive accomplishments expose the ongoing sexism, homophobia, and racism that leads to so many outstanding female artists being so little known as compared with their male peers, such as Ansel Adams, with whom Gilpin was good friends. In examining Gilpin’s life and art from the vantage point of a professor of visual politics and queer theory, Siddons brings fresh insights into the complexities of the Navajo Nation’s attitudes and traditions on gender diversity. Her last chapter and notes provide extensive research and evidence of Native American queer pride as the most visible manifestation of gender diversity in the Navajo Nation.
Cassandra Langer
THE SUMMER BETWEEN: A Novel
by Robert Raasch
Greenleaf. 328 pages, $28.
Is vulnerable eighteen-year old Andrew Jackson Pollock of Maple Ridge, New Jersey, bi or gay? That’s what he wants to know as he comes out and comes of age in Robert Raasch’s stunning debut, The Summer Between. A recent high school graduate, he moves from innocence to experience as he explores his sexual identity, lusting, forming crushes, and cruising in gay bars in Greenwich Village in 1978 before starting classes in fine arts at NYU. Life-altering encounters with more than half a dozen men eventually lead him to discover his true self.
Classmate Elena Dolores Pesko is aware of his situation. After a brief physical connection they remain best friends and share secrets. He knows she’s involved with a married man, and she knows that he has been groomed by their thirty-year-old bisexual Spanish teacher, Ollie Stork, who insisted he didn’t want Andy to “have a bad first experience with a stranger.” When Ollie leaves for a vacation in Spain, Elena supports Andy’s forays into the city but cautions him against inherent dangers. Her warning proves all too prescient. During Andy’s first excursion in a Western shirt and Frye boots, he stumbles into Tug’s. After five Budweisers, a one-night pickup with a “lanky body and a Jesus beard” leaves him raped and bruised. The aftermath of the assault becomes the emotional template for the remainder of the novel.
Raasch suffuses the novel with combustible sex scenes. As summer winds down, Andy begins to separate heartbreaking differences between fleeting attraction and the possibility of love. The Summer Between ends on a high note at a disco with the promise of a new relationship. Readers might hope for a sequel that navigates Andy’s undergraduate life.
Robert Allen Papinchak
