Books

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Michelle Visage’s ‘The Diva Rules’ Serves Up Advice From a Queerly Tinted Career

It could be argued that this book doesn’t count as an “LGBTQI book,” so to speak, and part of me agrees—I, too, get frustrated when LBGTQI-oriented spaces feature icons, allies and vaguely hot men over folks in the community. I do have few arguments in favor of me writing about it. The first is that Michelle came up through the New York ball scene of the 1980s and 90’s and she knows she owes her career to her fellow voguers. The second is that this site does queer looks on cis/het literature and features those considered icons/major figures from time […]

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Book Review: ‘Husky’ by Justin Sayre

In 1969, queer children’s/YA librarian John Donovan had his ground-breaking novel, I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip published by Harper. It was the first book I, as a twelve-year-old, had read that in any way raised the issue of homosexuality, though it never did so with that word or any of its synonyms. But its story of Davy Ross, living with his single mother, who forms a strong friendship with another boy that culminates in a drunken kiss (and the requisite subsequent death of his beloved dog in a car accident) broke barriers for what was called […]

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Book Review: ‘Juliet Takes a Breath’ by Gabby Rivera

Do you remember the first book that changed the way you looked at the world? The one that made you question the status quo and your place in it? For Juliet, a chubby 19-year-old Puerto Rican queer girl from the Bronx, it’s Raging Flower: Empowering your Pussy by Empowering your Mind by Harlowe Brisbane. Juliet comes out to her family just before leaving to intern with Harlowe in Portland. She’s excited to learn more about radical feminism, women’s bodies, and the actual practice of being a badass queer lady, even if it means spending the summer all the way across the country […]

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Book Review: ‘Black Deutschland’ by Darryl Pinckney

The distinctive voice narrating Black Deutschland compels an audience to listen. Coupled with the foregrounded erudition and the seen-it-all, felt-it-all, tried-it-all, and lost-it-all world-weariness, there’s a nocturnal theatricality in ample evidence, a stylized posture that would not seem out of place in a cabaret performance. “Guten abend, meine Damen und Herren,” the well-past-youthful performer might begin, spotlit on a bar stool but otherwise unaccompanied on a tiny curtained stage. “Let me tell you of my former days, of my not untroubled stay in a grey and wintry German city, of fleeting love and enduring loss, of the night the Wall […]

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Jack Fritscher: On Editing ‘Drummer’ Magazine in the 1970s

In the 1970s, editor and writer Jack Fritscher offered solace to masculine identified gay men around the country within the pages of the San Francisco based magazine, Drummer. His aim was to inform and empower the closeted readers to exit the solitude of their leather fantasies and seek real life encounters with other men. It was a publication that liberated generations to come by offering an image that they could finally identify with. “There was leather culture in San Francisco for years and years,” says Fritscher, “but it really grew exponentially as leather folk from around the country sought sexual refugee […]

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Book Review: ‘Immaculate Blue’ by Paul Russell

There’s a postcard I sent to a friend once, which reads: “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.” If karma is a boomerang, nostalgia is a noose. The urge to look back, revisit the past, to try to relive or unravel it, is often the dangerous realm of unfinished business. Paul Russell’s startling and incisive new novel, Immaculate Blue, brings back Anatole, Lydia, Chris, and Leigh–the four characters he introduced in his first novel, The Salt Point, as they come together almost 30 years later to exhume remnants of their past with each […]

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Garth Greenwell: On His New Novel and the Universality of the Gay Experience

It’s not easy to have a tête-à-tête with writer Garth Greenwell. Not because his growing list of successes—articles in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and a short story in The Paris Review—have gone to head. On the contrary, he’s as warm and lighthearted as he is pensive. No, the only reason it’s hard to have a sit down with Garth is because, at the time of this interview, he is living far away in Bulgaria. He was, however, in New York City during November 2015, and we took advantage of the situation to discuss his much anticipated debut novel, […]

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Remembering SF Poet Justin Chin

In his poem “Grave,” Justin Chin wrote: I used to have this theory about how much life a human body could hold. It all had to do with the number of heartbeats. Each human is assigned a number determined by an unknown power cascading over the dark waters of the unformed Earth. For some, it was a magnificently high number, seen only in Richie Rich comics, and for others, it was frightfully low, like twenty-six. No bargaining, no coupons, no White Flower Day sale, no specials. Once you hit your number, you croak. On Christmas Eve Day, Chin’s family disconnected […]

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Gay Jamaican’s Epic Tale of Violence & Sex in His Homeland

When Marlon James won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction in October, it came as a surprise to many — including the 44-year-old, out gay Jamaican author. James won for “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a long, violent, sexually explicit, and altogether brilliant novel that takes off from the 1976 attempted assassination of reggae icon Bob Marley to encompass the CIA-backed destabilization of Jamaica during the latter years of the Cold War; political warfare in the ghettos of Kingston, the island’s capital; the crack cocaine scourge of the ‘80s and early ‘90s; and sexuality — and particularly homosexuality.Of recent […]

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Book Review: ‘Backcast’ by Ann McMan

Sculptor Barb Davis has a vision. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she plans to bring together a group of authors to write essays which Barb will use as inspiration to create an art piece to convey a cohesive artistic expression. When the women Barb has chosen gather for the project’s writing retreat, drama and hijinks abound and it starts to look as if the venture will never be successful. First, there’s the constant bickering between Viv and Towanda. Then there’s Quinn, who’s very distracted because of her focus on winning a Pro-Am bass fishing tournament […]

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