lusionists” (who may or may not have been homosexuals) and cross-dressing “pansies” or “perverts.” An overlapping distinction might be made between cross-dressing as a public versus a completely private activity. Fetishistic transvestism, for example, is not covered in this book. A conflict that emerges more explicitly from the mid-20th century is between drag queens (cross-dressing gay men) and the “passing” of transsexual women. RuPaul stumbled into this controversy when he suggested in 2018 that transgender women should not be accepted as contestants on his Drag Race TV show. He was promptly attacked on social media, and apologized. This brings us to feminist critiques of drag: Is it a sexist parody of femininity, or does it simply highlight the performativity of normative gender? Goodman mentions these issues but doesn’t dwell on the more academic, theoretical interpretations of drag. Instead, she warmly conveys her own delight in drag and its spectators, gay and straight, over the past century. She doesn’t fully explore the drag queens’ or kings’ pleasure and empowerment in taking on a fierce drag persona. This is much better portrayed onRuPaul’s DragRace or We’reHere. I’m sure it is well known to readers who have swung a feather boa around their neck. My own venture into drag began under the guise of didactics. In the fall of 1990, I was teaching a junior seminar at Harvard on the medical history of sexuality. I had just spent the summer in Berlin and discovered the vibrant queer culture still sparkling there as if it were the Roaring Twenties. I chastised myself for never having tried drag myself, so throughout the semester I progressively took on more feminine clothes to teach my seminar. I got strange looks from the faculty, but I had perfect attendance! The last day of class, I dressed in a business suit. “I’m sorry, Vernon,” one young woman had to interrupt class, “but I’m having a hard time paying attention to you. You look like someone my parents would want me to marry!” Drag, both female and male, worked well as a pedagogical tool. It also forced me to confront my own insecurities as a gay man, as a young academic, and simply as an introvert. Well, the fabulousness of “Venus” had been unleashed at parties around campus, at LGBT conferences around the U.S., and at Wigstock on Pier 54. I even walked the whole of Boston Pride in my sixinch stiletto thigh-high boots and lace-up leather bustier. Grrrl, I kicked ass! Drag queens and queer people still need to be courageous, as we are now the target of the latest iteration of the Culture Wars. Bathroom battles, transgender affirmative health care, the teaching of LGBT history, and drag queen story hour seem to preoccupy many a GOP legislator. The current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is convinced that these queer issues are the “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Hopefully, readers can keep in mind the fun as well as the fierceness of drag as they take in the spectacle of New York drag culture inGlitter and Concrete. ABOUTED by Robert Glück New York Review Books. 269 pages, $18.95 Robert Glück’s latest novel, About Ed, is a virtuosic amalgam of discursive ruminations—part AIDS memorial, part meditation. At its center, the author recounts his relationship with the visual artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai. They were lovers in the 1970s and remained close friends until his death from AIDS in 1994. Shifting perspectives and time frames interrupt the narrative, which includes reminisces about the dead lover, childhood memories, portraits of elderly neighbors, and travelogues. At first, this fragmented structure is confusing, but stick with it—About Eddelivers an immersive, emotionally rich experience. Glück unabashedly celebrates sex, and lots of it. He also blurs various fictions and truths into a moving literary pastiche, incorporating text taken from taped recordings of his late friend as he slid into dementia and from his own dream journals. Philosophical asides abound, as well as his confessions of petty, unforgiven slights. He calls this book both “a novel and my version of an AIDS B R I E F S memoir.” As with other “new narrative” queer writers, such as Dale Peck, Kevin Killian, Brad Gooch, and Kathy Acker, the storytelling approach is nonlinear, intentionally self-conscious, and profoundly personal. Two chapters under the heading “Notes for a Novel” provide a meta-view of the two decades of struggle it took for Glück to decide on the book’s final form. Elegiac and introspective, the completed manuscript turns out to be less about portraying the deceased than about fending off intimations of mortality: “Do I write to remain in contact?—when I’m finished will he be truly buried?” The answer to these questions is that creatingAbout Ed“turned into a ritual to prepare for death, and an obsession to put between death and myself.” JOHNR. KILLACKY THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US: A Novel by A. C. Burch HomePort Press. 370 pages, $17.99 Feisty, effervescent self-described “fulltime female impersonator” and part-time amateur sleuth Helena Handbasket returns inThe Distance Between Us, a boisterous, rollicking follow-up toThe Home Port Journals. Provincetown and nearby Cape Cod communities Wellfleet and Truro combine to make an atmospheric setting for this insular yarn featuring murder, mayhem, several bold art heists, and enough suspects and motives to sink the yachts in the historic harbor. Burch hits the ground running with an electrifying opening. Wealthy, widowed aspiring socialite Bronx transplant C. J. Stronge, whose “idea of bliss was a night in bed with Edith Wharton,” has a fateful appointment with local legendary painter Mavis Chandry (her canvases sell in the millions), when a “deliberate electrocution” intervenes. Was Mavis the actual target? This is one of many questions Helena steps in to solve. As the inheritor and executive director of the Staunton sisters’ estate, Helena oversees the soon-to-be open Staunton Museum, with its outrageously valuable collection of forgotten Impressionists appraised at $400 million. Mavis has agreed to donate some of her work to enhance the museum’s gala opening. Before that happens, her paintings are vandalized with ob38 TheG&LR Detail of a 1903 postcard of William Dorsey Swann.
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