BOOK REVIEWS
October 2010
by Richard Labonte
I Came Out for This? by Lisa Gitlin (Bywater Books, paperback)—Love comes late for Joanna Kane, who denied her sexual self well into her 40s. For a spell, newfound lesbian love is a luscious experience, after Joanna is introduced to Terri Rubin, a visitor to town.
And then it vanishes, when Ms. Right returns home—and moves on to other women. Devastated, Joanna does the non-sensible thing—she uproots herself from dowdy Cleveland and relocates to Washington, D.C., where the object of her denied desire lives, and where she knows not a single other soul. Oops. Multiple heartbreaks, moments of hilarity and a perceptive take on lesbian life ensue.
Joanna settles into a gay flophouse with a cast of kooky characters, receives mixed signals from the woman she yearns to love, and gradually forges new friendships—and, potentially, a new romance.
Debut novelist Gitlin’s breezy story is told through freelance writer Kane’s sometimes manic, sometimes maudlin and sometimes simply wonderful journal entries, a narrative point of view that propels the tale with enchanting wit.
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer (Archipelago Books, paperback)—Middle-aged Dutch farmer Helmer lives a life of unfilled loneliness. For companionship he has his invalid father, who he loathes and loves in equal measure; a neighbor and her young son, who chat with him on occasion; and two donkeys, bought in a fit of whimsy.
The hole at the center of his heart is Henk, his identical—but far more outgoing—twin brother, dead decades earlier in a car accident. As boys, Henk and Helmer slept together—whether sexually is never made clear—until Henk fell in love with a girl. That first separation pained Helmer; his brother’s death shattered him.
But when Henk’s former lover contacts him after many years to ask if he will house her wayward teenage son, also named Henk, the lonely farmer’s life takes on new dimension—particularly in one of many powerful connections between past and present—when teenage Henk slips into bed with Helmer one night.
Bakker’s brilliant novel—yes, brilliant, and sublime, and subtle, and seductive—is a triumphant balance of delicacy, complexity and simplicity.
Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox (Arsenal Pulp Press, paperback)—It’s quite likely that Cox’s second novel, after his stellar hustler-in-New York debut, Shuck, qualifies as the most original queer story of the year.
Take a deep breath: It’s about Radek Tomaszewski, a mostly-gay, sometimes-bisexual parkour-loving pyromaniac whose artistry consists of building scale models of the world’s major cities—London of 1666, Chicago of 1871, San Francisco of 1906—before setting them afire at his art openings.
Set in Krakow—where the author lived for a while—it’s also about Poland’s repressive homophobia, marked by the government banning a gay pride march. And it’s about a nation gripped by the looming death of Polish-born Pope John Paul II.
Even more, it’s about Tomaszewski’s romance with a young woman, fellow pyromaniac Dorta, who shares his passion for sexual insurrection, Pink Floyd and setting the world on fire with his art and their rage. Cox’s fiery mix of activist anger, sexual heat and transgressive humor is a tonic for a tired reader’s eyes. (And for another literary treat, search out the author’s outrageous 2006 novella, Tattoo This Madness In).
Cockeyed by Richard Stevenson (MLR Press, paperback)—There’s not much mystery in Stevenson’s 11th novel featuring Albany, N.Y., private investigator Don Strachey. But there are a lot of laughs. In something of a departure from a norm of addressing serious issues with dashes of humor—past books have handled forced outing, religious oppression and aversion therapy—this book is about the turmoil that descends on a campy gay household when one man wins a billion (as in B) dollar lottery.
Hunny Van Horne, a working-class queer who puts the “flame” in flamboyant, has led—along with his partner—a somewhat active, even salacious, sex life. As soon as his winnings are announced, a bevy of former beaus (and boys) threaten blackmail, and so Strachey is hired to modulate their demands. That’s pretty much the extent of his sleuthing, however.
Stevenson’s screwball comedy is mostly about how the world at large—straight-laced gay as much as simply straight—handles Hunny’s lurid, over-the-top lifestyle, in a story that scales cheerful height of hyperbole.
Hollywood Babylon Strikes Again! by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince—Superman Christopher Reeve had a fling with gay porn star Cal Culver. Kirk Douglas, Humphrey Bogart, Tony Curtis and of course Rock Hudson frequented Hollywood’s Finlandia Baths. Walt Disney (Walt Disney!) hired hustlers for $100 blowjobs, but asked them to keep their clothes on.
These and hundreds of other snippets of “hot, unauthorized, and unapologetic” titillations pepper the tabloid pages of this second volume of the contemporary Hollywood Babylon series—no connection to Kenneth Anger’s two dirt-digging tomes of 1965 and 1984.
The kink here isn’t all queer—pinup queen Bettie Page’s “tragic” life is profiled, and Mario Lanza is depicted as “a mess addicted to food, wine, and women.”
Two of the rowdiest chapters focus on body parts: “Hollywood Bazooms” is a 34-page pictorial showcasing the upfront charms of actresses from Ann-Marget to Raquel Welch; “Hollywood Shortcomings” is about actors, including Fred Astaire, Clark Gable and Liberace, who were reportedly “losers in the battle of the bulge.”
Veracity? Hardly relevant. Half the fun of this book is its authors’ snap, girlfriend style.
The More I Owe You by Michael Sledge (Counterpoint Press, paperback)—Fascinating fact is transformed into sumptuous fiction in Sledge’s debut novel, based primarily on a slice of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s life—the 15 years she lived in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, tumultuously in love with the aristocratic architect and activist Lota de Macedo Soares.
Drawing on Bishop’s letters and journals—though not her correspondence with Soares, which was destroyed by Soares’ ex-lover Mary (who lived for a time with the two women)—Sledge re-imagines the poet’s South American years with extraordinarily atmospheric prose and unflinchingly emotional intimacy.
Both women were beset by demons: Soares, manipulative and controlling, was prone to tantrums; Bishop struggled with alcohol and bouts of deep, paralyzing depression. Brazil itself is depicted as intensely as the central characters, as Sledge infuses the story with the country’s political turmoil of the time while evoking both the urban bustle of Rio de Janeiro and the lush landscape of the remote mountain retreat where Soares designed an eccentric glass-walled house.
Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles (O/R Books, paperback)—A young girl, dazzled by English professor Eva Nelson’s ass, relocates from sedate, Catholic Boston to the mad mix of creative genius and sexual exploration that is Manhattan as the era of punk dawns. She works in a bar, sleeps with men, drinks in taverns, smokes dope, meets women, discovers Patti Smith, segues from “female” to “hunk” to “dyke” and over the years evolves into the poet-as-rock star.
That is, she grows up to be Eileen Myles, narrator of this gruff and graceful work of artistic self-examination. “The place I found was carved out from sadness and sex and to write a poem there you merely needed to gather,” she writes.
The result is this comic and melancholy collection of gathered memories, a lusty, vivid chronicle of a rowdier time and place.
The book will be hard to find in bookstores (the publisher even eschews amazon.com) but can be ordered directly from www.orbooks.com—and there’s even a choice of two different covers, one literarily sedate, the other quite fiery.
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman (Seal Press, paperback)—Transpeople. Genderqueers. Trannies. Sex/gender radicals. Transsexuals. They’re all represented, in many forms and flavors, in this prose-and-poetry collection of intense, painful memoirs and breezy, joyous mini-biographies addressing the fluidity—sometimes hard-won and often wholly fabulous—of the sexual self.
Back in 1994, Bormstein published Gender Outlaw, a frank critique of society’s attitudes toward the transgendered, based on her own sexual and artistic life. In this eclectic collection of almost 50 essays, older generation meets newer as younger writers address the same landscape—or, more appropriately, genderscape.
Every contributor illuminates an aspect of identity: Kyle Lukoff writes about gender confusion contributing to an eating disorder; Joy Ladin writes about the “Daddy voice” coming from the woman she has become; Mercedes Allen honors the “aesthetic beauty of the transfemale body”; Cory Schmanke Parrish wonders, wittily, “what does my wiener do on the days I don’t wear it?” This anthology of many voices mulling a singular theme brings today’s gender outlaws into the queer literary mainstream.
Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling and writing about queer literature since the mid-’70s. He can be reached in care of this publication or at BookMarks@qsyndicate.com.