RAVING: Practices by McKenzie Wark Duke University Press. 136 pages, $15.95 Feelings of collective belonging and bodily bliss on the dance floor have been central to queer and trans culture in the U.S. from the beginning. InRaving, McKenzie Wark pries open a dance continuumwhere ostensibly distinct parties across time and space fold into each otherand presents raving as a collaborative practice that many of us find a necessary escape from an increasingly unbearable world. A self-described middle-aged, middleclass, white transsexual dance freak, Wark shares insights gained through queer and trans-oriented parties in Brooklyn (and, in a brief passage, in Berlin). Part autofiction, part ethnography, Ravingmirrors the complex and collective aspects of rave experiences. Like a practiced deejay, Wark blends genres to take us on a larger journey. Some critics who shared their thoughts with Wark when she was dancing and researching appear momentarily and nudge us gently toward something new. If youve ever really needed to give yourself fully to the dance floor, youll recognize the profound importance of the practices Wark analyzes in this book. If youve never raved before, Ravingis a fruitful introduction to the scene, its limitations, and its promise, whichto the pounding beat of technowe might underB R I E F S stand as a sense of freedom from compulsory social norms. Wark is a speaker demon, offering in one passage a concise description of what one can experience on the dance floor: I want the situation, the entire situation, to fuck me. I want to be penetrated by light, fog, the floor, the walls, the anonymous swaying bodies. I want to be railed by pounding sound. CRAIGJENNEX QUEER PRINT IN EUROPE Edited by Glyn Davis and Laura Guy Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 266 pages. $34.95. As well as being informative and entirely pleasurable, Queer Print in Europe is a book we need. The shift from print to digital has meant that so much of the print press has been discarded, a great deal of it forgotten within a subculture already dangerously prone to amnesia. The authors featured in this anthology have gathered a number of images of alternative queer publications, everything from the post-Franco SpanishLa Pluma to the French lesbian press to the radical Dutch queer newspaper Mietje.Most of the media examined were influenced by the radical left, while some papers have clearly been founded out of exasperation with the lefts cold shoulder toward the LGBT rights movement. Essays in the collection range from the academic to the informal. Benny Nemer provides a firsthand account of spending a summers day with Gert Hekma and Mattias Duyves as the two archivists and writers pore over their extensive collection of copies of Mietje, reflecting on gay activism in Holland and its legacy. Fiona Andersons chapter explores where you could actually buy such alternative publications in their time, including an interview with members of the group who ran Edinburghs queer bookshop Lavender Menace. Its a fitting ending to an eclectic tribute to the creators of images and ideas once deemed threatening by mainstream society. MATTHEWHAYS AMERICAN CLASSICIST The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman Princeton Univ. Press. 536 pages, $39.95 This is an extensive biography of writer Edith Hamilton (1867-1963), whose Mythology andThe Greek Way were standard texts that introduced the Classical world to generations of students. This book deeply explores many facets of Hamiltons long life, including her decades-long relationship with Doris Reid. Born in Dresden, Germany, the first of five children, Hamilton spent her childhood in Indiana, at her fathers estate. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, one of the first womens colleges in the U.S., and returned to Germany for graduate work. She became the headdressing, and vagrancy presented the opportunity for unscrupulous crooked cops to extort the owners of gay bars and shak[e] down the homos, hustlers, hookers, and dealers.The queer street kids who live and operate in these districts have mostly fled unbearable home environments. They are often teenagers (or even younger) who rebelled against physical violence and sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or uncles. (Plaster interviewed one young man who recounted the horrifying experience of being sexualized by his father and then passed around among his uncles from the time that he was only three years old until he escaped to San Francisco.) Generally uneducated and unemployable, they have exchanged one hellish environment for another, where day-to-day survival is their primary concern. In San Francisco in the late 1950s and 60s, as white flight to the suburbs depleted the citys population of white blue-collar workers and gentrification efforts to clean up and beautifythe Tenderloin closed the once flourishing bars, pool halls, and theaters, the queer street kids and other Tenderloin denizens moved to the nearby Polk Street area. There they found low-income housing options, cheap diners, and coffee shops. As many straight bars welcomed the change and became gay bars, Polk Street became the center of LGBT life before the Castro Street area developed in the 1970s. The first Gay Pride march traversed Polk Street in 1970, as did the first Gay Shame march years later. The thriving gay scene lured the hustlers who had operated almost exclusively in the Tenderloin. Nearly all of the men and transgender women that Plaster interviewed had hustled on the Polkstrasse,the ten-block area from Sacramento Street at the northern end to Civic Center at the southern. Indeed, the gay businesses along Polk Street (at one point some twenty-plus bars, porn theaters, and SROs) thrivedbecauseof the street hustling. Several bars (such as the Q.T. and the Rendezvous) operated as places where hustlers hung out searching for customers. The Motherlode and Divas were known for their transgender clientele and johns who sought them out. Often, the bartenders and bouncers of these places served as procurers for the hustlers or as unofficial employment agents, finding work for them in the bars and diners along the streets. This reciprocal arrangement benefitted both the hustlers and the bars. The johns seeking companionship for the night spent a lot of money buying drinks in the bars and in the streets cheap hotels, and the hustlers made more money in the bars than cruising the streets. Life for these young people was extremely difficult, full of violence at the hands of johns, thievery by other hustlers, and 36 TheG&LR
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