Steve Susoyev

This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists. But, as with pornography itself, first impressions can be misleading. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography, at $28 for the eBook, is enlightening and even affordable. Its author, Jeffrey Escoffier, a founder of OutLook and director of Out/Write, a professor who has taught at Berkeley, Rutgers, and The New School and is […]

Many of us have sighed, shrugged, and explained to a well-meaning friend, “Oh, thanks for the recommendation, but I’m kind of done with fiction. I’ve gotten into reading [aviation history / comparative religion / cookbooks / insert nonfiction genre of interest].” “But,” the friend insists, “it’s a debut LGBT coming-of-age novel!” That’s when we excuse ourselves to use the restroom, and climb out the window. I’ll confess that I probably would not have chosen to read Some Hell, much less embraced this opportunity to review it, if I had not been familiar with the author’s nonfiction. Patrick Nathan is a […]

Beijing Comrades is a beautifully written love story that features characters who are fully developed, complex, and believably human. (A reviewer must sometimes be forgiven for coming straight to the point.) The book is remarkable for this realistically rendered romance, its explicit sexual encounters, and the elaborate, heartbreaking power-plays between the characters. Handong Chen, a powerful businessman in late-1980s China, and Lan Yu, the bright but naïve architecture student whom Handong tries to control like a concubine, remind us of people we have known. We feast on a rich slice of Chinese culture while watching these men grow over a […]