scene graffiti. Was someone out to destroy Mavis’ collection and ruin the museum’s reputation? The list of culprits is a lengthy one. Past personal secrets and present shady characters include an obsessive, homophobic acting chief of police, an inept architect, and a sketchy New Jersey physician and real estate developer. Tensions among townies, “washashores,” and “onion rings” (social climbers who don’t contribute) escalate along with thrilling boat races, chases, and getaways in nail-biting sequences. Helena’s colorful “chosen family” are secondary characters who support her investigative skills. All of this makes for an exuberant, entertaining read, with hopes for more perils of Provincetown to come. ROBERTALLENPAPINCHAK 300,000 KISSES Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World by Sean Hewitt and Luke Edward Hall Clarkson Potter. 207 pages, $22. 300,000 Kisses is a charming anthology of ancient literature showcasing queer desire in all its forms. Sean Hewitt presents new translations of excerpts from classical sources, along with brief introductions to each text, while Luke Edward Hall illustrates these excerpts to lovely effect. Many works may be familiar to readers, such as Plato’s SymposiumandPhaedrus, Sappho’s fragments, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The book’s title comes from a poem by Catullus, who remarked that “300,000 kisses/ is not close to enough.” Others are less well-known, such as graffiti from Pompeii in which a woman speaker laments her female lover, and a love spell from Egypt in which Sophia calls upon dark forces to make Gorgonia fall in love with her. In another, the early Christian Clement of Alexandria recounts a tale of the god Dionysus’ strange yet touching attempt to honor a deceased mortal who helped him. Hewitt’s translations give a contemporary feel to these old works. For instance, one of Martial’s Epigrams celebrates the lesbian Philaenis as “most powerful of the pussylovers.” Xenophon’s Symposiumhas Socrates respond to a guest’s flirty interruptions with “put your claws away. ... You only want me for my body, but I’m Socrates—I have a beautiful mind too!” Hewitt’s introductions to each work provide background information on the social context in which it was written, including the possibilities and limits on gender and sexual behavior. In Lucian’s Dialogue of the Courtesans, Leania shamefully describes her encounter with the masculine Megilla, who today might call herself trans. In Ovid, Iphis, a girl raised as a boy, laments her love for a girl named Ianthe. This collection reminds us that queer love has always existed. CHARLES GREEN THE LOOKBACK WINDOW: A Novel by Kyle Dillon Hertz Simon & Schuster. 273 pages, $26.99 At fourteen, Dylan meets Vincent, age nineteen, online. Excited by his first sexual contacts, which are heightened by a variety of drugs, Dylan is hooked. Vincent grooms him with charm and praise through a series of sexual encounters, promising to marry Dylan when he turns eighteen. Dylan is then sex-trafficked for money, which Vincent says is useful experience for him. Often locked in a room, bruised and battered by such nights, Dylan remains Vincent’s weekend captive for three years, until he finally flees from upstate to New York City. Moving through a variety of part-time jobs, some involving sex for pay, Dylan meets Moans, a kinder gay man who takes Dylan in. While more stable now, his life moves at a big-city pace—more drugs, more sex—with and without Moans, who cares for all of Dylan’s needs. After six years together, they decide to get married, inviting friends and family. For a time their marriage works, until it doesn’t. A stipend from a graduate school writing program, along with a police report and referrals to lawyers and a counselor, all make Dylan more sure of his path to finding and punishing his pedophile perpetrators. What they took from him would rain down on them with a vengeance. A new law—the Child Victims Act, passed in 2019—opens the way ahead. A one-year lookback window will allow him time to pursue his abusers, time to reap justice. Now the burden will be placed squarely on them, freeing Dylan to become his authentic self at last. JOE RYAN MOURNING LIGHT by Richard Goodkin Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 192 pages, $17.95 For men of a certain age, HIV has colored every aspect of our lives such that there seems to be no reckoning without it. We learned to love in threesomes—us, our partners, and the wretched disease. InMourning Light, Richard Goodkin offers an account of two relationships, separated by a decade and told through the gauzy, guilty horror of the AIDS crisis. While a novel about AIDS could easily become maudlin and dreary, Goodkin charms us with unique and vivid characters. The story unfurls mainly on two university campuses, bouncing between the rarefied atmosphere of Yale, where the narrator is a first-year literature professor, and the slightly less rarefied setting of the University of Wisconsin. In the latter, Madison and nearby Lake Monona are lovingly painted as a backdrop for both grief and renewal. The story moves crisply and keeps us involved. There is a twist at the end, which is signaled but not overly foreshadowed. The mystery of it keeps us guessing. Written in the first person, Mourning Light offers an intimate narrative that connects the reader with a credible and delicately flawed protagonist. You root for him to succeed, to survive, and to untangle the strange set of coincidences that have befallen him. If, by the end of the book, he can unlock the puzzle of the two lovers who come into his life (Eric and Anthony) and the gifts that each has brought to him, then perhaps he can find some greater purpose in the decades of dying that were such a part of his life. CARYALANJOHNSON QUEER NETWORKS Ray Johnson’s Correspondence Art by Miriam Kienle Univ. of Minnesota Press. 279 pages, $34.95 Ray Johnson was an enigmatic and reclusive artist who emerged as part of the New York art scene in the early 1960s. His work encompassed collage, mail art, performance, photography, and repurposed found objects. But Johnson is best known for his role in instigating the mail art movement. He meticulously (and obsessively) collaged together newspaper clippings and photos from gay physique magazines, pictures of dead celebrities, advertisements, and personal letters to create what he called “moticos.” He mailed them to friends, art world colleagues, and sometimes strangers. He encouraged “on-sending” by asking recipients to forward the card to someone else. Miriam Kienle’s Queer Networks analyzes this body of work through an academic lens. She argues that the artist’s mail art used camp and homoerotic imagery, along with insertions of innuendo, to create coded queer assemblages that were radical statements—andthey were being distributed by the postal service in pre-Stonewall times. While Kienle’s thesis is astute, she focuses on only one component of this artist’s œuvre, namely Johnson’s collages— which are extraordinary, but his performative acts, which the artist called “nothings,” were just as important. Johnson left behind a vast archive: Some of the 3,000+ photographs found in this cache were shown in the 2022 Morgan Library & Museum exhibitionPlease Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson Photographs. Kienle’s perceptive centering of queerness in Johnson’s artmaking would illuminate all this work as well. JOHNR. KILLACKY March–April 2024 39
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