Books

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Book Review: “Chain Reactions” by Lynn Ames

At the age of 100, Nora Lindstrom is nearing the end of her life thanks to advanced small cell lung cancer. She has a lot to be proud of after a decades-long career as a physicist who worked tirelessly to end childhood leukemia. A few things are haunting Nora’s last days, however, including how she had to walk away from her grand-niece Diana without explanation when Diana was a young child. Nora is still living in her own home, but her rapid decline in health signals that it’s time for her to get some help and put a power of […]

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Book Review: “Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall”

James Polchin’s Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, excavates garish true crime headlines to reveal the forgotten murders of gay men. In pursuing these trails and trials of blood and ink, Polchin exposes American society’s exploitative misunderstanding of gay men, as well as the initial cultural shifts that fueled the revolution that was Stonewall.  One tragic story after another charts reportage of a shocking crime transmogrified into sympathy if not outright support for the perpetrators -once the victim’s sexuality becomes decoded. Killers are “cherubic cowboys” provoked by the supposed shock of a homosexual advance. Unasked […]

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Book Review: “Patsy” by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Patsy, the title character in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s exemplary second novel, yearns for one thing in the book’s opening pages: an American visa. Her best friend and lover, Cicely, long ago disappeared there, resurfacing in letters that promise a new life, a fresh start, and freedom. And though Patsy is a mother to a little girl, Tru, she desires nothing more than to escape the stifling life of Pennyfield, Jamaica, alone. But the American dream that Cicely speaks of is far from the reality Patsy finds when she arrives in New York City on a temporary visa. Cicely has not exactly […]

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Book Review: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter to a mother from her son, beginning from the riddles of distance: “Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” The son goes by Little Dog, a moniker his grandmother gave him as an act of protection. Evil spirits—the thinking went in her Vietnamese village—would skip over the weakest, easiest prey if they were named something hideous. “To love something,” Little Dog ruminates in his letter, “is to name it something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.” […]

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New Children’s Book Tells Story of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising

Jamey Christoph has illustrated many children’s books in his 15-year career as an illustrator, but it is perhaps his most recent work illustrating a new children’s book on the history of the Stonewall Inn that has become his most personal. “As a gay artist and as someone who had my own struggles coming to terms with my identity, and valuing these type of stories that show adversity but give hope, it was personal,” Christoph said. “I really gave it my all.” “Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution,” illustrated by Christoph and written by Rob Sanders, tells the story of […]

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Poetry Review: ‘Company’ by San Ross

In his debut collection Company, Sam Ross focuses on what lingers, exploring the idiosyncratic and at times seemingly indiscriminate nature of memory. When suffering takes many shapes and sizes yet appears as persistent fact, how may we forge memories that shimmer, so that love matches the loss? The answer often appears in the company we keep. Ross captures how delicate and dangerous connection can be—especially sexual connections and the truths they reveal—yet Company offers testimony for not turning one’s back on those intimate ties that bind. Ross’s poetry is refreshingly crisp and unaffected, taking the quotidian and the extraordinary as part and parcel. His tone […]

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Book Review: ‘Our Wretched Town Hall’ by Eric Kostiuk Williams

If Act Up politics of the 1980s were somehow jettisoned into the present, blended with psychedelic pastel salt water taffy, and scored with a soundtrack of Incense and Peppermints, you might end up with something close to Eric Kostiuk Williams’ new book, Our Wretched Town Hall (a finalist  for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award). Don’t underestimate this slim compilation of comics, posters, and commentary: it’s easily one of the best comic books of the year. The flow of these short tales, both true and imaginary, all merge to become Williams’ commentary on the state of the world around him. That includes the title, which Williams explains, […]

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Book Review: ‘Zero Sum Game’ byStefani Deoul

After helping the police catch a serial killer in On a LARP, Sidonie “Sid” Rubin and her best friends are on lockdown. Despite how impressive the group’s actions were, their parents were not pleased, and all but one of the five teens have been grounded for their senior year of high school. Yes, the whole year, and yes, that even includes stepping off school property to pick up lunch. That means the fearless friends have to suffer the ignominy of cafeteria lunches with the rest of the student body. Sid’s friend Vikram finds a loophole for our loveable “geek lesbionic brainiac” […]

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Book Review: ‘When Brooklyn Was Queer’ by Hugh Ryan

When opening Hugh Ryan’s provocative and fascinating history, When Brooklyn Was Queer, I felt an air of excitement that I hadn’t felt since first reading George Chauncey’s groundbreaking Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, or Robert Beachy’s subsequent Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. (Full disclosure, I am a sucker when it comes to gay or queer history, and I’m madly in love with both New York City and Berlin.) It is also interesting to see a shift from the early gay and lesbian scholarship to a new generation of vibrant queer historical writing. […]

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Book Review: ‘Lot’ by Bryan Washington

Introspective and understated, Lot gives voice to the silenced pain of Houston’s Black and Latinx working class. The collection of thirteen linked short stories alternates between tracking an unnamed narrator’s coming of age and exploring the diverse experiences of the boy’s fellow Houstonians. In terse prose, author Bryan Washington fully renders the inner lives of gay men struggling to endure the hardships of poverty and racism, while also sketching a nuanced portrait of a rapidly gentrifying city. The collection opens with the compelling “Lockwood,” a short tale recounting the Afro-Latino narrator’s sexual awakening. “Too dark for the blancos, too Latin for the […]

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