REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | April 12, 2005 The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco, by Joshua Gamson. Henry Holt, 306 pages, $26 hardcover. Sylvester was a pint-sized gospel singer (nickname: Dooni), a teenage drag queen, a fierce young black singer with a fabulous falsetto – signed to the same record company as Creedence Clearwater Revival – and, for a few years, a dazzling disco diva. By the time he died of AIDS in 1988, the fey performer had transformed himself into a galvanizing gay icon, counting the Pointer Sisters, Patti LaBelle, David Bowie, and Bette Midler among his collaborators and admirers. It's an arc of stardom that Gamson – who admits upfront he "was never a serious fan" – captures in The Fabulous Sylvester with warts-and-all thoroughness and spirited tenderness. Dozens of people intimate with the singer's career were interviewed for the book. Among the most eloquent is poet Aaron Shurin, whose energetic recall of the psychedelic highs of '70s San Francisco brings alive a most particular time and place, celebrated in this fine slice of musical and political history with delicious detail. (For example, who knew that American Idol judge Randy Jackson played guitar on Sylvester's 1984 album M-1015?) With or Without You, by Lauren Sanders. Akashic Books, 317 pages, $14.95 paper. There is a murder – a rather gruesome one – at the core of With or Without You. But this heart-stopping, heartbreaking novel is more "whydunit" than whodunit. From the first pages, we know that brittle 18-year-old Lillian Speck, crazed by love and seized with obsession, has stalked and slain beautiful TV soap star Brooke Harrison. The question asked – and answered with a fearless, ferocious lack of pity – is why. In alternating chapters (with different typefaces – an irritating and distracting design element), Sanders probes both the tormented mind of a teenage killer neglected by her flower-power parents, and the narcissistic soul of a young starlet forced into too-early B-list celebrity by an overbearing stage-door mother. Predatory young Lillian, intelligent and artistic, is painfully confused about emotional boundaries and her own sexual needs. She is obviously not blameless in Brooke's demise, a cold-blooded murder committed by a hot-blooded character. But Sanders' poetically relentless imagining of Lillian's sorry life renders her a tragically sympathetic character. The German Officer's Boy, by Harlan Greene. Terrace Books, 206 pages, $26.95 hardcover. It's a fact that Herschel Grynszpan, a distraught Jewish teenager, fired five shots into Ernst vom Rath, a third-level diplomat in Germany's Paris embassy, in November 1938. It's a fact that Hitler used the shooting, and vom Rath's death several days later, as an excuse to trigger Kristallnacht, "the night of broken glass," recognized as the beginning of the Holocaust. It's a fact that Grynszpan, though detained for years in prisons in both Paris and Berlin, was never tried for the shooting, and if he died, his death was never documented. The German Officer's Boy is riveting fiction based on those facts – with a few twists. In Greene's version, 17-year-old Herschel, an adolescent with haunting dark eyes, and 29-year-old Ernst, a fine-featured Aryan blond, were passionate lovers (a dangerous erotic relationship discussed on several Holocaust-history websites); the shooting was perhaps unintentional; and vom Rath died from poison injected by two Nazi doctors, setting the boy up as a scapegoat for the horrors to follow. The facts are tragic; this fictive retelling is tender and terrific. Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics, by Paul Robinson. University of Chicago Press, 170 pages, $24 hardcover. Humanities professor Robinson doesn't deny his biases – he's more comfortable writing from the left than from the right; he's more prone to celebrate gay sexual practice than pen jeremiads against it; and he's a child of gay lib and proud of it. But when it comes to assessing the politics and prose of the likes of queer conservatives Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer and sexual conservatives Michelangelo Signorile and Gabriel Rotello, Robinson is engagingly lucid and even-handed in his disparaging dissection of contradictory thought and condescending rhetoric. And he's just as likely – in a most measured and philosophical manner – to bitch-slap Sullivan critic Richard Goldstein, an unrepentant lefty, and Rotello-basher Michael Warner, a Sex Panic militant, for what he perceives as their own sloppy thinking and overwrought writing. Queer Wars, well-argued and clearly reasoned, is both a jaunty analysis of emergent gay conservatism and of contemporary gay politics, and a cogent and nifty primer for queers from across the political spectrum. Featured Excerpt: The gay conservatives I examine in this book can fairly claim to represent the more principled and philosophical impulse in the conservative heritage. I don't see them, as some of their critics do, as abject self-promoters who attack their fellow gays with a view to ingratiating themselves with the straight powers that be. There is, in fact, an almost innocent quality about their polemics. They genuinely believe that in rejecting the teachings of Gay Liberation they are promoting a more enlightened and humane version of homosexuality than that embraced by the generation of gay radicals. If they are guilty of any sin, it is not grubby materialism but a perhaps understandable historical shortsightedness and ingratitude toward the achievements of the men and women of the Stonewall generation who made their very existence possible. — from Queer Wars, by Paul Robinson Footnotes: Spinsters Ink, a pioneering lesbian-feminist press founded in upstate New York by Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel in 1978, and later run in San Francisco by Sherry Thomas, was shuttered by its most recent owners in December – but now has a new lease on life, as an imprint of Bella Books, a Florida-based lesbian publisher. Spinsters, which passed from Thomas to author and philanthropist Joan Drury in 1992, was most recently owned by Colorado gay-directory publishers Katherine Hovis and Sharon Silvas, who bought Spinsters – and its 80,000-book inventory – in 1999. But their business relationship dissolved a couple of years later, there have been no new Spinsters Ink books in more than two years, and sales of backlist titles – including mysteries by Val McDermid, nonfiction titles by JoAnn Loulan, and novels by Sally Gearhart and Susan Stinson – dried up when Words Distributing, which handled sales to bookstores, closed. Bella Books – which itself absorbed many Naiad Press authors when Naiad founders Barbara Grier and Donna McBride phased themselves out of publishing – is also adding the titles of Bold Strokes Books (home of the prolific romance and erotica author Radclyffe) and BeanPole Books (lesbian mysteries, women's studies, and gardening and pet titles) to its distribution catalogue. Like Spinsters Ink, Bold Strokes and BeanPole will retain their own identities, and Bella plans to publish several new Spinsters titles this year. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. 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