REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | January 04, 2005 American Ghosts: A Memoir, by David Plante. Beacon Books, 244 pages, $24 hardcover. "Ghosts" is too pallid for the title of this lean, unflinching memoir. With bracing honesty – and not a whit of self-pity – Plante bares a life spent coming to terms with complex ancestral and familial legacies and with confusing spiritual and sexual impulses. On the surface, American Ghosts is yet another queer's coming-out account – the story of a man emerging first as a writer, then as a gay man. Deeper down, it's a stunning emotional journey in which Plante confronts mysteries and calms fears instilled by dueling forces that shaped his life: a mixed-raced Quebecois and Blackfoot heritage; a stoic and unemotional father; a stultifying Catholic education; his painful sexual emergence and self-destructive first love; and that horror of gay men, AIDS. Shards of the life revealed here with searing clarity shimmer in Plante's earlier novels, particularly the Francoeur Trilogy (The Family, The Woods, The Country) and The Catholic. Any serious gay reader ought to be aware of that canon; if not, this haunting, proud distillation of one life's realities is a moving introduction to the earlier fiction. Midnight at the Palace: My Life as a Fabulous Cockette, by Pam Tent. Alyson Books, 372 pages, $17.95 paper. It was a theatrical phenomenon that lived fast, burned bright, and died young, with plenty of glitter. That's the gist of Tent's colorful account of the short life of The Cockettes, the communal troupe of faeries, dreamers, drag queens, and radical gender-benders that exploded onto the hip scene in 1970 and imploded about three years later, with no surfeit of emotional recriminations. Tent doesn't shirk from painful memories, an honesty that ennobles her warmhearted mix of personal memoir and flamboyant history. The marvel of this inside story, by one of the few "real women" of the group, is how artfully it captures the unbridled exuberance, puckish intelligence, and anarchic bravado of the 20 or so pageants mounted by The Cockettes – mostly after midnight on the stage of the Palace Theater in San Francisco, with the likes of Truman Capote in the audience. A disastrous attempt to export West Coast magic to the New York stage triggered the troupe's collapse, but the undeniable influence of The Cockettes on queer culture is cheerfully and capably honored in Midnight at the Palace. Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the DuBek Collection, by Thomas Waugh with Willie Walker. Arsenal Pulp Press, 316 pages, $23.95 paper. Consider a collection of several hundred often amateurish and cartoonish erotic gay drawings: fun to flip through, sometimes stirring, but essentially ephemeral. Invest that collection with the personality of the man who collected those drawings, with an understanding of the closeted times through which they circulated, and with a thoughtful academic's historical perspective – and the result is Lust Unearthed, a paean to vintage gay porn. In an earlier book, Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics from Before Stonewall, Waugh gathered a scattered showcase of like artwork, spotlighting the work of a number of artists. The focus on classic hard-core and soft-core art in this comprehensively complementary tome is less on individual artists and – with generous contextual captions for the 200-plus drawings – more on what the artwork imparts to queers bombarded these days by a glut of Internet porn. Equally valuable context is further provided by Walker's minibiography of collector DuBek, a Hollywood set designer (George Cukor's The Women) who died in 2002 at age 87 – but not before donating his historic collection to an archive in San Francisco. The Shades of Time and Memory, by Storm Constantine. Tor Books, 444 pages, $27.95 hardcover. Imagine a world of erotically sexual hermaphrodites, a race beyond human that reproduces when the male-gendered bear the children of men. That's the time and space, and the fabulously imaginative place, of British fantasist Constantine's mythmaking Wraeththu series. So also imagine that, without some sort of introduction, _The Shades of Time and Memory_ might be a tad hard to get into - it's book two in the second of the Wraeththu trilogies, and much has gone before. Familiarity with the first trilogy isn't as vital, but newcomers are urged to read _Wraiths of Will and Pleasure_, this book's predecessor. That's where the story of the Wraeththu - people of unearthly beauty and earthy sexuality - takes flight, when they no longer need the bodies of human boys to reproduce, when they begin to build their own grand cities, and when a time of relative peace is threatened by those familiar bugaboos of every nascent civilization, greed and jealousy. Constantine's mythology isn't explicitly queer - characters are neither gay nor straight - but her embrace of all possible sexualities is engagingly depraved and lushly poetic. Featured Excerpt: People sat everywhere, packing the aisles, and virtually climbing the walls. The air was electric. Rex Reed would later write: "It was a Friday night at midnight, and in the street, bewildered police tried to control 2,000 screaming, romping, humping, grinding, flaunting, swishing, and staggering fans...." The Cockettes, a flamboyant group of radical hippies, were all cranked up and ready to go. In a dazzlingly varied display of sexuality, they took to the stage in shimmering concoctions of feathers and sequins, and blasted convention with glittered beards and thrift-store drag. They loved the freedom of flying without a net and regularly performed "live" on drugs, as did their fans. —from Midnight at the Palace, by Pam Tent Footnotes: Two more gay-interest bookstores have closed – Herland: The WanderGround, in Santa Cruz, and Creative Visions, in New York's Greenwich Village. Herland, which opened in 1993, was one of about 50 women-owned feminist stores left in the United States; its last day was Dec. 23. "I hope that Herland inspires seed thoughts of similar businesses sprouting up all over the place," said owner Kayla Rose (her other passion is gardening), whose attempts to woo a new buyer fell through. Creative Visions, the only locally owned gay bookstore in New York City, was one of about 20 gay and lesbian stores in the country; its last day was Dec. 31, though sales of vintage gay erotica - muscle magazines, still photos, erotic artwork, early porn videos – and some new books will continue online. The closing leaves New York's first gay bookstore, Oscar Wilde - itself saved last year when it was bought by Washington, D.C.-based Lambda Rising – as the only one still in business, following the 2001demise of A Different Light in Chelsea. "I am really sorry to see it go," said Charles Flowers, publisher of the queer arts journal Bloom. "People feel a personal connection with their local bookstore. When a bookstore is lost, something is lost in the community." Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks