REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | September 1, 2003 Film Moi: Narcissus in the Dark, by Robert Patrick. Robert Patrick, approx. 975 pages, $10 CD-ROM. It's unlikely any publisher could have taken on Film Moi, playwright Patrick's irresistible, undisciplined, and exhilarating blend of queer memoir and film memories. This is a massive work, nearly 1,000 pages with more than 800 movie stills and personal photos - a challenge to print, but affordable and accessible in its self-produced CD-ROM format. In 14 "autobiographical explorations of films, the culture that made them, and the world they made," Patrick - a founding father of gay drama in America - writes with intelligent perception about movies ranging from Fantasia and The Ten Commandments to La Dolce Vita and Aliens; his chapter on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a haunting assessment of the glorious tragedy that was Marilyn. And that's just half the delight: Patrick's candid commentary on his own precocious sexual and artistic life is equally absorbing. Reading a quarter million words on a computer screen isn't the most comfortable way to be entertained and enlightened, but Patrick's prose is so smart and fluid that it's hard to, well, put the book down. Order directly from the author: Rbrtptrck@aol.com War Against the Animals, by Paul Russell. St. Martin's, 368 pages, $24.95 hardcover. The savage sorrow of cultures in collision is the provocative core of this compassionate novel. On one side of a fearful divide: a nepotistic Catskills community, clinging to its conservative heritage and resentful of interlopers. On the other: a flowering community of liberal escape-from-Manhattan queers, gleefully gentrifying a decaying town. Jesse is a teenage redneck, adrift after his father's death, living in the shadow of his crude older brother, and both baffled by and attracted to the flamboyant men new to his world. Cameron is a wealthy transplant, adrift when his lover leaves him, in better health thanks to new meds after nearly dying of AIDS, and both wary of and drawn to the muscled, moody boy who comes to work for him. Russell's characters, gay and straight alike, are generously nuanced. His themes - coming out, coping with death, needing love, sex intersecting tragically with violence - are common enough in gay fiction. Propelled by masterful plotting, elegant writing, and a riveting climax, though, the predictable is made perfectly fresh in War Against the Animals. Buy from Kalahari.net A Day Too Long, by Pat Welch. Bella Books, 318 pages, $12.95 paper. Helen Black, the hero of A Day Too Long and eight other mysteries published since 1990, is a seriously flawed and therefore enormously appealing lesbian sleuth. In earlier books she drank too much, loved the wrong women, doubted herself, bungled investigations, and - in Moving Targets, the previous book in an increasingly accomplished series - landed in a steamy Mississippi prison, convicted of manslaughter in the slaying of a young woman. Now she's out on parole, trying to put her life back together in a small town where everyone knows she's an ex-con and no one trusts her. That includes the town sheriff, who is particularly curious about Helen's past after a child is abducted from the sordid boardinghouse where she is living. As with any series, it helps to have read the earlier books, particularly since Black is an unusually complex and conflicted character. Welch provides enough background information that A Day Too Long stands alone, but anyone new to Welch's authentic work will want to delve into Black's gritty past. Buy from Kalahari.net Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech, by Mark D. Jordan. Beacon Press, 121 pages, $24 hardcover. This preacherly book is both a love letter to the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and a stern scolding of it. Telling Truths in Church, drawn from a lecture series Jordan gave in Boston in 2002 as the pedophile-priest crisis accelerated, challenges the church to deal honestly with the realities of same-sex desire both within its clergy and in the contemporary world. More sermon than argument - and more sorrowful than angry - it lays bare the lies, secrets, and silence the church uses to deflect and deny institutional problems and theological hypocrisy, and suggests that the church must commit to becoming "a community of truth telling." The best audience for Jordan's intimate eloquence - from the Pope at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, to craven cardinals and cowed bishops and even disillusioned priests - may not want to hear what he has to say. But for gay women and men wrestling to reconcile their need for the Catholic Church with its denial of their lives, this slim, passionate call for transformation is an intellectual and spiritual tonic. Buy from Kalahari.net In a live-action film called Song of the South (1946), beautiful little rich boy Bobby Driscoll is teased by schoolmates with a razzing chorus of "Wearing a lace COL-lar, wearing a lace COL-lar," which is picked up by a strident orchestra and rises in pitch and volume until Bobby rips off the offending garment and the soundtrack falls suddenly silent, making every audience I ever saw it with gasp. Fell in love with Bobby. Pictured him butt-naked, like a cupid cut from bubblegum... that part of my heart died in the early middle sixties in New York when I met Bobby on the street in the East Village where he was hustling for drug money. I was an impoverished office worker and couldn't afford a night of bubblegum bliss with Bobby. -from Film Moi, by Robert Patrick Footnotes: Aspiring novelists, start typing - you have until December 31 to submit your work to Project: QueerLit, a literary synthesis of the likes of HBO's find-a-filmmaker Project Greenlight and Fox's musical free-for-all, American Idol. The first-novel contest is the brainchild of Greg Wharton and Ian Philips of Suspect Thoughts Press, who want to "celebrate and bring media attention to queer and outsider authors, hopefully opening doors for representation and publication." To this end, the press invites writers to submit the first 20 pages of a manuscript, along with a $25 fee. After review by a panel of three dozen readers (including Patricia Nell Warren, Felice Picano, Justin Chin, and Daphne Gottlieb), the entries will be narrowed down to a top 25. From those, six "winners" will be chosen by 10 additional judges - literary agents Ted Gideonse and Mitchell Waters; writers Patrick Califia, Michelle Tea, Brian Pera, D. Travers Scott, and Matt Bernstein Sycamore; The Gorilla Press publisher Jennifer Natalya Fink; and Philips and Wharton of Suspect Thoughts. One or more of the finalists may be published by Suspect Thoughts, or considered for representation by literary agents Gideonse and Waters. For more info: www.projectqueerlit.com. Book Marks [06/08/03] Book Marks [06/08/03] Book Marks [25/08/03] Book Marks [21/07/03] Book Marks [11/07/03] Gaze: Micheal Meyersfield