November-December 2021
As happens in so many memoirs by gay men, Sharif was bullied as a child. His parents were divorced and he was shuttled from home to home when he was young, from Canada to the Middle East, wherever his family members lived. Still, he came of age in what most would consider a comfortable life.
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The world of The Membranes is familiar to us in 2021 but was quite prescient in 1996. In this version of Earth, the planet has been ravaged by climate change, humans have retreated to domes under the ocean, cyborgs have become cheap labor, and giant media conglomerates control what information we have access to in our day-to-day lives.
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THE CALM, beautifully aged face of the poet Adrienne Rich gazes at the reader from the new book by her friend, Ed Pavlic, who explains that his relationship with Rich began when she (as a contest judge) chose his first book of poems for a prize, and they began exchanging letters in 2001.
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Reviews of Of Solids and Surds, Occasional Views, Volume 1 “More about Writing” and Other Essays by Samuel R. Delany; Home Stretch by Graham Norton; and Take Down Portraits: Drawings and Portraits by Larry Stanton by Winthrop Smith
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The overall message in ¡Hola Papi! is that each of us is in charge of the narrative we tell ourselves about our lives. Indeed, each story is a variation on the idea that it’s important to unlearn a tendency to be overly critical of oneself, or, as he puts it, to marshal “the courage to express myself in ways I hadn’t allowed myself to before.”
MoreONE THEME of this extraordinary exploration of a hidden gay story concerns the lessons parents teach their children—two sons, in this case, coming from vastly different circumstances.
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For many people, these paintings seemed to expose the true, animal nature of humanity, which, after the devastation of two world wars, could no longer be viewed as civilized or a force for good.
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Vice Patrol is a compelling and important book. It shows us how the diverse interests and competing claims about the policing of gay lives in the postwar years played out in the courts. It reminds us how the criminal justice system was deeply enmeshed in, and transformed by, the larger cultural struggles over the meaning of same-sex desire.
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Although King would have you believe she is a great champion for social justice, she’s closer to Booker T. Washington than to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Like Washington, a master fundraiser and consummate people pleaser, King has always played to the crowd and kept an eye on the bottom line.
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The idea that Hansberry came out of nowhere to become an overnight success with A Raisin in the Sun is one of the misperceptions that’s dispelled by two new books on Hansberry, which show her to be a passionate and dedicated writer, artist, thinker, and activist.
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