REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | May 11, 2005 Babyji, by Abha Dawesar. Anchor Books, 356 pages, $13 paper. Animaka, just 16 years old, is head prefect at her school in Delhi, India, fascinated by quantum physics, and preternaturally sexually precocious – she's sleeping with her family's maidservant, sneaking out for sex with an older divorcee, and flirting with the most popular girl in her class. She respects the rigid caste strictures of her Brahman-born family, but yearns for the kind of personal autonomy promised by America – emigration is her goal after graduation. She's a spirited blend of nerdy student and oversexed adolescent – "I want to collapse my wave function into you" is one of her more unusual declarations of love. In short, she's a most distinctive young dyke. Dawesar's first novel, Miniplanner (Cleis Press), was a saucy page-turner set in Manhattan, about a gay man sleeping his way up the corporate ladder. Babyji is no less racy but much more complex – and, steeped as it is in the mores of Indian life, offers a fascinating window into that powerhouse nation's contemporary youth culture. All American Boy, by William J. Mann. Kensington Books, 352 pages, $24 hardcover. When you're 14, what's the boundary between sex and abuse? Where does love end and betrayal begin? And why does an all-American boy become a man adrift? It all has to do with buried family secrets and deep emotional denial, the searing themes of Mann's beautifully bleak novel – darker, haunting, and more accomplished than his previous entertainments, The Men from the Boys and Where the Boys Are. Wally, his acting career stalled, reluctantly returns to his rural hometown, where his mother thinks she's going mad; where painful memories of his abusive Navy captain father haunt him; where the gay man who seduced him as a boy is dying of AIDS; and where he finds comfort with his only real childhood friend – motherly transsexual Miss Althea, still sheltering queer teenage runaways 20 years after she took Wally in. This harsh story of a man coming to terms with the damaged boy within isn't without humor – Mann's got a light touch even with heavy subject matter. But fans of his fluffier fare are in for something decidedly different. Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress's Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London's Wild and Wicked Theatrical World, by Kathryn Shevelow. Henry Holt, 440 pages, $27.50 hardcover. She married young and had a daughter, but by her early 20s Charlotte Cibber Charke (1713-1760), abandoned by a philandering husband and estranged from her famous Drury Lane-performer father, was supporting herself by acting – mostly in male parts – and dressing as a man offstage. Living as "Charles Brown," she fended off women suitors attracted to her "easy manners" and air of melancholy. And eventually, speculates biographer Shevelow in this vivid, entertaining, and remarkably learned excavation of theatrical history and gender ambiguity, she did take a woman lover – "a female husband." In her later years, as acting opportunities dried up, Charlotte and the woman identified only as "Mrs. Brown" sold lantern oil, baked pies, and generally depended on the generosity of wealthier friends. She also wrote an autobiography thought quite scandalous at the time – Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke – a high-spirited account of an eccentric and unconventional life, one that has been the focus of studies by scholar Terry Castle and novelist Emma Donoghue. In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity, by Eric Anderson. SUNY Press, 208 pages, $18.95 paper. Anderson knows gays and sports: He made news a decade ago as an openly gay high school track coach, an experience recounted with passion in his memoir, Trailblazing. In the Game, a sociological study of gay athletes in amateur and professional sports, is less personal – some chapters are dissertation-dense, and the text is peppered with academic jargon. But there is emotion in this book as well, particularly when Anderson quotes the boys and men – including members of a male cheerleading squad – who opened up to him about both the homophobic bullying and the homosocial bonding they've experienced. The pro athletes interviewed include two football players and one hockey player, and though they preferred to stay in the closet, their sense is that times are changing – slowly – for the better. That positive attitude is borne out by Anderson's astute, instructive interviews with high school and collegiate athletes, a majority of whom – probably because they tend to be the stars on their teams, he writes – have found more acceptance than the author did when he was coaching. Featured Excerpt: We ate a quick dinner and retired to the bedroom. After the servant had cleaned up and turned off all the lights, we heard him leave from the back entrance. The house was ours. The translucent whiteness of India's cotton clothing and the smell of sandalwood soap on her skin filled my senses. The dhoti unraveled quicker than a sari. It took me to the universe of sensations and spontaneous living, driving out my doubts, at least for the moment. – from Babyji, by Abha Dawesar Footnotes: PLAYWRIGHT EVE ENSLER, biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, science fiction author Samuel R. Delany, and gay-author interlocutor Richard Canning were recently named the recipients of assorted Lambda Literary Foundation awards, to be presented June 2 in New York. Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and, more recently, The Good Body, receives the Bridgebuilder Award for her work connecting the gay and straight communities. Cook, best-selling biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Delany, the author of more than 20 science fiction novels, several essay collections, and the memoir Motion of Light in Water, receive the Foundation's 2005 Pioneer Award for their years of literary activism. And Richard Canning – author of two collections of interviews (Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists and Gay Voices Speak: Conversations with Gay Novelists), with a third book of interviews in the works – receives the Editor's Choice Award, selected by the Lambda Book Report, for his championing of gay lit. Lea DeLaria emcees the 17th annual awards ceremony, where Lammy winners in 20 literary categories will also be announced. For info: www.lambdalit.org. Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks