GMax - Book Marks

There is abusive commercial pornography (Juggs), fluffy airbrushed erotica (Playboy), and buffed boy-toy titillation (Freshmen). And there is way too much pretentious nude photography, all oiled muscles and murky shadows. Photo Sex, quite wonderfully, is none of these. Steinberg's collection of the work of 31 photographers - women and men, straight and gay, but all transcendentally queer - is a sensuous, profoundly intelligent celebration of the body and its infinite sexual possibilities. Best of all, the bodies are real - fat women, skinny men, gray heads, smiling faces, firm flesh here and slack flesh there. Michael Rosen's portrait of the late sex radical Scott O'Hara's self-fellatio is startling and sweet; Jill Posener's snap of two women in a cafe bathroom is raw and campy; Mark I. Chester's serial images of playwright Robert Chesley - titled "ks portraits with harddick and superman spandex" - are defiant and delicate. Those are just three of the 115 photographs in this savory, subversive book. But every one expresses an equally compelling immediacy and draws as intimate a gaze.

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Random Acts of Hatred, by George K. Ilsley. Arsenal Pulp Press, 176 pages, $16.95 paper.

As they grapple with coming out, growing up, and getting a life, the boys of Random Acts of Hatred are scared, sad, sexy, and always intriguing. Canadian writer Ilsley's debut collection of 11 short stories is about desire and disintegration, fear and survival, self-loathing and learning to love: all the inevitable terrors of any young queer lad, delineated with a deliciously nervy voice. There are echoes throughout of Dennis Cooper's poetic depravity, A.M. Homes' ironic eroticism, and even Bernard Cooper's memoirish emotionalism - but Ilsley's lucid prose is infused with invigorating originality. The title story is a harsh, heart-stabbing vignette about a skinhead hustler - "too pretty to be a boy" - who accepts raw sex as a substitute for real love. It's bracketed by two quite different, subtler stories - "The Big Red Picture," about two men whose love survives the death of the wife of one of them; and "Acting Innocent," about two gay brothers and the family that abandons them. It's quite a range, evident in every one of these accomplished pieces.

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Edge, by Jeff Mann. Harrington Park Press, 182 pages, $16.95 paper.

Most memoirs celebrate celebrity. Mann's Edge is a noncelebrity triumph. The author has published a few poetry chapbooks, placed a handful of essays and short stories in low-circulation magazines, teaches regional history and creative writing at a small Virginia university - he's no "big name." But this wickedly erudite collection of writing is an exhilarating testament to the literary and emotional worth of a quiet life lived thoughtfully, elegantly, joyously, sexually - in short, fully. Several essays express Mann's passion for the South, where he was born, lives, and works. Several recount his travels - as an adult teacher leading college student excursions to Ireland and Scotland, and as a queer kid exploring Provincetown and Key West - and his own youthful and more mature eroticism. Some reveal more interior journeys, into the worlds of leather and bear communities; some discuss the thrill of imparting distilled wisdom to a willing student or two; and "Drambuie," a jewel among the gems, tracks with considerable delicacy the erotic (and chaste) attraction of a teacher to a student.

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10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives, by Joe Kort. Alyson Books, 232 pages, $14.95 paper.

Eat more vegetables; floss more often; read more books - these are just three of the many smart things gay men might well do to improve their lives. A more serious 10 are enumerated in psychotherapist Kort's stern yet sincere and accessible book of the near-same name. The buzzwords are familiar, a litany of self-help tropes and truisms: Affirm Yourself by Coming Out; Resolve Issues with Your Family; Avoid (or Overcome) Sexual Addiction; Maintain Rewarding Relationships; Commit to a Partner. Well, of course! But, surely, easier said than done. Kort's step-by-step suggestions are a bit heavy on the jargon, but he enlivens his queer life-instruction manual with plenty of entertaining enough anecdotal material drawn from 16 years of counseling hundreds of gay men. Not much new get-a-better-life ground is broken - common sense is really just common sense, after all. But 10 Smart Things is a complete, compact, and confident guide to identifying and overcoming self-defeating behavior. Read, learn, and floss your way to a better life.

Featured Excerpt:

How we think of sex, and how we think of ourselves as sexual people, is shaped in no small degree by the images of sex and sexual attractiveness we see around us. Images that trivialize sex encourage us to relate to sex in simplistic ways. Images that portray sex as naughty and forbidden encourage us to think of sexual desire as inherently suspect and dangerous. Images that portray sex as joyous, loving, intimate, and ecstatic encourage us to think of sex as a source of warmth, pleasure, and emotional satisfaction. Images that portray sex as complex, intimate, profound, and mysterious encourage us to open ourselves to sex in all its depth and power.

-from the introduction to Photo Sex, by David Steinberg

Footnotes:

There is scant glamour about the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Mo., where the old man of the Beat Generation, William Burroughs, was buried in 1997. And the original Beat Hotel in Paris, which sheltered Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other queer cohorts of the Beats, was demolished 40 years ago. But now there's a reincarnation of the original Beat Hotel for dead-Beat tourists eager to pay homage to a beatnik past. It's located in the small, queer-friendly town of Desert Hot Springs, Calif. (not far from Palm Springs), where porn writer Steve Lowe - a onetime intimate of the Naked Lunch author - has renovated (and renamed) the eight-room, two-story Monte Carlo Resort Hotel into a live-in study center and repository for his collection of Burroughs artifacts, including inscribed first editions, stained manuscript drafts, paintings by Burroughs, and assorted typewriters once tapped and firearms once discharged by the writer. Norse, meanwhile, is still living in San Francisco - his 1989 Memoirs of a Bastard Angel was reprinted by Thunder's Mouth last year.

Book Marks [01/09/03]
Book Marks [06/08/03]