GMax - Book Marks

Well, what a surprise! Death isn't imminent, after all. That's the challenging, yet comforting, conundrum at the heart of this lightly philosophical comic novel about living beyond AIDS, thanks to the apparent miracle of new and better drugs. For hedonistic Dennis Bacchus (get it?), this means the end of a decade of acting as if each day were his last, and the beginning of the rest of his life. Inspired by a visit to the French monastery of St. Roque (a patron saint of the sick), he enters a Jesuit seminary to prepare for the priesthood, ready to embrace celibacy after years of gleeful promiscuity. The chaste life chafes, of course - and that's just one of the hurdles confronting Dennis as he tries to change the direction of his life. The Boom Economy is infused with Bouldrey's ability to address with gentle satire such serious matters as disease, desire, and the fragile overlap of friendship and love; it's is an impish, intelligent account of queer lives in flux.

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Keeping You a Secret, by Julie Anne Peters. Little, Brown, 250 pages, $16.95 hardcover.

The two teens at the heart of Keeping You a Secret, a feisty young adult novel, are preternaturally perky and plucky. Holland, the perky one, is a swim-team star, president of her student council, and dating a dreamboat. Cece, the plucky one, is a moody transfer student who works nights at a doughnut shop and stalks school hallways in her IMRU? T-shirt. They move in different worlds - until worlds, and hearts, collide. Cece's cool queer pride attracts Holland, and Holland awakens to a newfound sexuality. Then Holland's homophobic mother throws her out of the house, Cece's tolerant mother takes her in, and the girls head hand-in-hand - one in a tux, the other in a gown - to their senior prom. Peters addresses the reality of fluid gender identity with care: Holland's transition from straight babe to baby dyke is both forceful and unforced; the disgust of a few friends is sadly believable; and the two young girls confront messy questions of fidelity, trust, lust, and their future with nicely nuanced confusion.

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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 1918-1967, by Jean Moorcraft Wilson. Routledge, 526 pages, $45 hardcover.

Poet Siegfried Sassoon once said most people thought he died in 1919. In a literary sense, he did. The radically antiwar poet faded from view soon after the armistice that ended World War I, though he lived another 50 years. In The Making of a War Poet, published in 1999, British biographer Wilson chronicled Sassoon's dilettantish youth, his wartime heroism, and the first stirrings of his tortured homosexual longings. The Journey from the Trenches, the second volume in her occasionally plodding biography, explores the sad contradictions of the 50 years following the eclipse of Sassoon's fame. He matured into a dutiful husband and a doting father, and wrote of his love for fox hunting and the quiet country life in a modest series of autobiographical novels and memoirs. But those books never discussed his conflicted love affairs with the flamboyant actor Ivor Novello, the exotic dandy Stephen Tennant, and even a great grandson of Queen Victoria. Wilson's diligent, sympathetic scholarship pays honor to another historical homosexual who had to wait until after death to be brought fully to life.

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Essays on Queer Desire and Sexuality, ed. by Greg Wharton. Boheme Press, 154 pages, $16.95 paper.

It can't be said of many books that they ought to be twice as long as they are. Wharton's invitation-only collection - 13 essays sparkling with kaleidoscopic sexual honesty - should be. There isn't a dull piece in the book. Emanuel Xavier's "Confessions" considers the lifelong impact of boyhood abuse; Matt Bernstein Sycamore's "Seals" tracks a love affair's melancholy arc; Michael Rowe's "My Life as a Girl" - the riveting best of a very good lot - explores gender with perfect poignancy. Serious, yes; never dull. Nor are Felice Picano's boisterously boastful essay about quickies, Justin Chin's poetic paean to kissing, or Royston Tester's hilariously graphic take on the trials of monogamy. In "Why I'm," Andy Quan tells why he's attracted to redheads, muscles, white men, and not to rimming; in "There is No Because," Marshall Moore tells why he's attracted to skin that's "black and brown and Asian porcelain-olive." That's eight diverse, thoughtful essays - and there are, sadly, only five more, just as eclectic and smart.

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Featured Excerpt:

Mom threw the knife into the bowl and whirled on me. Shoving me backward, almost making me fall, she said, "Is it true? Are you seeing that girl?" I could lie to Mom. No, I couldn't. "Yes," I said. Mom's eyes blazed. "Are you sleeping with her?" Oh, God. Did we have to do this here? Now? "Well, actually," I smirked, "we don't get a lot of sleep." A burning sensation exploded in my head before I realized Mom had slapped me. Tears sprang to my eyes - more from shock than pain … Mom yelled at me, "I didn't raise you to be a lesbian!" She made it sound like the filthiest word in the English language. "It's sick. Perverted. You're perverted."

-from Keeping You a Secret, by Julie Anne Peters

Footnotes:

Four of the eight soap-operatic novels by E. Lynn Harris have been New York Times top-10 fiction bestsellers, a record matched only by the later novels in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. With What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, a candid autobiographical account of drugs, despair, and painful coming out, Harris made it onto the nonfiction list as well, following in the footsteps of the likes of AIDS activist Paul Monette (for his 1988 memoir, Borrowed Time), and Olympic diver Greg Louganis (for his 1995 autobiography Breaking the Surface).

Three months after publication, Harris' life story was still a bestseller, though by mid-September it was number 34 on the extended Web-only list of 35 titles. In a recent interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, Harris revealed that his memoir was originally titled For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When Being Gay Was Too Tough echoing the title of Ntozake Shange's famous play, and his own rough early years. But he reconsidered, thinking the title might be "too bleak."… A BOOK TO WATCH OUT FOR: San Francisco photographer Laurie Toby Edison's Familiar Men, due in October, collects nude images of more than 30 people, including writers Samuel R. Delany and Justin Chin, and Jonathan D. Katz, executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University; in form and intention, it's a companion to her 1994 book, Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes.

Book Marks [16/09/03]
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