REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | March 02, 2005 Luncheonette: A Memoir, by Steven Sorrentino. ReganBooks, 294 pages, $24.95 hardcover. At 19, Steven Sorrentino was living out a young gay's dreams, sweating over Broadway auditions and boffing actor boys. Four years later, on a traumatic Christmas Eve, he was back in the closet in the small, conservative New Jersey town of his youth, mastering the intricacies of the "porkroll-egg-and-cheese" – a specialty of his ailing father's luncheonette. For four years, as his indomitably optimistic dad overcame paralysis, a stroke, and a heart attack – and from his wheelchair was elected to the first of four terms as mayor – Sorrentino ran the family business, Clint's Corner, refuge for a comically eccentric crew of caustic regulars. Outwardly, he was a good Italian-American boy, the dutiful son. Inwardly, he grew increasingly miserable – he missed Manhattan's glitter, sex with men, the actor's life – to the point of contemplating suicide. Sorrentino is both harrowingly and humorously forthright about his own queer emotional ups and downs, but the heart of this compassionate story is the complex, poignant relationship between an astoundingly resilient father and a remarkably loyal son. Son of a Gun, by Randye Lordon. St. Martin's Minotaur, 288 pages, $23.95 hardcover. Like all good mystery-series writers, Lordon has a hook: the offbeat criminality and dodgy gruesomeness in her books (Brotherly Love, East of Niece, and Father Forgive Me among them) always revolve around family and friends who are remarkably prone to intersecting with bad guys. In the Lambda Award winner's seventh novel – Son of a Gun (get it?) – PI Sydney Sloane's lover is nervously atwitter about her elderly mother's new elderly beau, whose five previous wives died mysteriously soon after marrying him. Meanwhile, Sloane's former NYPD colleague – the husband of her good friend Peggy – is critically wounded in a shooting that is soon followed by a threatening phone call from the son Peggy gave up for adoption after she was raped as a teenager. Is the aged beau a love-struck gent or truly a killer? Is the young caller a long-lost son hell-bent on revenge? Sloane, a hard-bitten ex-cop lesbian sleuth, sorts everything out pretty predictably; more interesting than the whodunit is how Lordon, balancing dark observations with comic writing, explores the psychology of family values. The Blood of Kings, by John Michael Curlovich. Alyson Books, 254 pages, $14.95 paper. For months, nobody much seems to care that buff male college athletes are disappearing in droves. Certainly not sophomore Jamie, both a hunky swim-team star and an amazing piano prodigy, who's more concerned about hooking up again with a skittish high school boyfriend. Those irksomely irrational deaths – eventually taken seriously – are the backdrop to this otherwise zippy bit of guilty-pleasure reading, wherein a charismatic Egyptology prof is draining young men of their blood in a vampiric quest for eternal life, and has a suave case of the hots for lovelorn Jamie. Curlovich has crafted an odd but entertaining synthesis of genres in Blood of Kings. It's part teenage coming-out story, with one lad comfortably queer and another so conflicted that he marries a girl to avoid the boy he wants. It's part horror novel, complete with mysterious moans, groans, and ethereal music drifting up from out-of-bounds sub-sub-sub-basements of the on-campus museum. And – with some fanciful liberties acknowledged by the author – it's an interesting mini-history of Egyptian pharaohs and the same-sex kinks in their bloodlines. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, by Judith Halberstam. NYU Press, 213 pages, $19 paper. Slightly flamboyant gay men and slightly butch lesbians were the first queer types whose attitudes were incorporated into – and sanitized by – elements of mainstream American culture. Then drag queens, their bravura inevitably diluted, became fodder for Broadway and Hollywood. Halberstam's astute essays focus on the relatively sudden visibility of the transgender body in film, fiction, art, and music – a prominence, she notes, that tragically owes much to the small-town Nebraska slaying of Brandon Teena, and the award-winning documentary and feature films his death inspired. Using popular touchstones and commonsense prose uncommon from academics, Halberstam also connects the dots (quite amusingly) between drag kings and the first Austin Powers film; explores the queer subcultures that inspired musicians from Cris Williamson and Ferron to The Butchies and The Backstreet Boys; and – with 16 pages of color plates – celebrates the gender ambiguity of trans artists Del LaGrace Volcano and others. Straight culture is threatened by "queer" in all its fluidity, says In a Queer Time and Place – but nevertheless is always ready to draw on it. Featured Excerpt: The only thing I loved more than going home for Christmas was turning around a day or two later and getting back to New York City. It wasn't that I didn't love my liberal little family, or my little conservative hometown down the shore. But moving to the big city at the age of nineteen had offered greater hope for love and splendor, and artistic success – everything that had seemed elusive in West Long Beach, New Jersey. And I had a much better chance of getting laid. — from Luncheonette, by Steven Sorrentino Footnotes: ONE LESBIAN BOOK – and five gay ones – are in the running for the 2004 Violet Quill Award, funded and selected by InsightOut Book Club to encourage new writers. The winner will be feted at the Saints & Sinners gay literary festival in New Orleans, May 13-15. The finalists – five novels and one short-story collection – are Naughty Little Secrets, by Mary Wilbon; Half-Life, by Aaron Krach; Through It Came Bright Colors, by Trebor Healey; Van Allen's Ecstasy, by Jim Tushinski; Father's Day, by Philip Galanes; and The View from Stalin's Head, short stories by Aaron Hamburger. The award is named in honor of the legendary New York City writing group that included Edmund White, Felice Picano, and Andrew Holleran. For Saints & Sinners info: www.sasfest.com... ALISON SMITH'S MEMOIR, Name All the Animals, a finalist this year for a Lambda Literary Award, is also one of three nonfiction finalists – and the only queer one – in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards program. The winner, to be announced in March, receives $10,000 and a year of promotion in B&N bookstores. Smith's book explores her family's devout Catholicism – and her own lesbianism – in the years after her teenage brother’s tragic death. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks