REVIEWS Book Marks Richard Labonte | June 06, 2005 Mother of Sorrows, by Richard McCann. Pantheon, 192 pages, $20 hardcover. The 10 interconnected short stories in this book add up, with exquisite intricacy, to a compact novel of harrowing honesty and lyric tenderness. The first story was published in The Atlantic in 1986; the last was written 18 years later. But as they flit across adolescent and adult years and through triumphant and tragic lives, these tales come together with brilliant coherence. Their unnamed narrator, the good son and a mama's boy, is gay, sober, self-contained, and accomplished; his brother, the bad son and his father's favorite, is gay, rebellious, a failure – and, too soon, dead of a drug overdose. The book arcs from the 1950s, where the narrator, effeminate as a boy, dons his mother's dresses and designs ballroom gowns for his favorite movie stars, into the decades of AIDS, when friends and sons of friends are dying, and the storyteller is himself infected. That's not an uncommon story for a gay man to tell, especially one who came of intellectual and sexual age in the 1970s and 1980s. But Mother of Sorrows tells it with spare prose of rare power. The Beautifully Worthless, by Ali Liebegott. Suspect Thoughts Press, 152 pages, $12.95 paper. Going on the road with Liebegott is a breathtaking experience. This hybrid work – half prose, half verse – is about a queer girl who, accompanied by her cranky Dalmatian, Rorschach, flees troubled love in Brooklyn. Her destination: existential release, and perhaps emotional solace, in Camus, Idaho. There is in fact no Camus (she misread the atlas: it's Camas) – but it's the journey that matters, not the destination. Seedy motels, spooky caves, endless miles of desert, vast halls of slot machines, a crush on a sweet-natured teenage boy, a spell in a mental institution, a strained few days with her family, profound sadness and giddy wit: the physical and emotional landscape of Liebegott's odd odyssey, crisscrossing America in an earnest search for self, is truly exhilarating. The prose parts – letters written to her female lover back in Brooklyn – are the narrative backbone of The Beautifully Worthless. But it's the poetry – vivid, haunting, and visceral – that elevates this debut from innovative to original, from imaginative to memorable. The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace, by Martin Moran. Beacon Press, 285 pages, $23.95 hardcover. This transcendent memoir – about childhood sexual abuse, adult sexual confusion, and the consequent emotional turbulence – is, generously, both healing and cleansing. Moran, seduced at age 12 by a Catholic camp counselor 20 years his senior, and sexually active with him until age 15, confronts "the tricky part" head on – the then-insecure adolescent relished attention from an older man, and there were times, recalls the author three decades later, when he enjoyed and felt empowered by the sex. That unabashed honesty about his young needs finds its parallel in Moran's thoughts on how those teen years scarred his adult life: he often sought anonymous sex outside his long-term and loving gay relationship. Moran's path to admitting his troubling childhood and the troubled adult it created includes physically confronting his molester, an encounter recounted with uncommon dignity, surprising humor, and a notable lack of self-pity. With his remarkable story, Moran renders radiant art out of a damaged life, bravely – and humanely – reclaiming his erotic self. Noble Lives: Biographical Portraits of Three Remarkable Gay Men, by Marc E. Vargo. Harrington Park Press, 158 pages, $17.95 paper. Writer Glenway Wescott, composer Aaron Copland, and peacekeeper Dag Hammarskjöld – the "three remarkable gay men" of this biography-lite book – are a disparate trio. Wescott loved the same man for five decades. Copland flitted from affair to affair, often focusing his attention on young men in need of a mentor with money. And Hammarskjöld – well, it seems he never had sex with anyone. The gayness of both Wescott and Copland has been explored at length in recent full-length bios; Vargo's nimble hop, scholarly skip, and entertaining jump through their personal and artistic lives is nonetheless an effectively concise primer. But the most recent full-length biography of Hammarskjöld – the United Nations Secretary General who died in a 1960 plane crash on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo – is more than 30 years old and never touched on his sexuality. Sketchy as it is, Vargo's solid essay, sympathetic to the Swedish diplomat's lifelong suppression of his homoerotic drive, brings a neglected queer forefather into the fold. Featured Excerpt: Dear Lamby, Last night I dreamt of a place where sadness could be ripped in half, and sickness tied idly in knots all day. There were signs everywhere that said Camus, Idaho. When I woke up I wanted to see if Camus was a real town, so I looked it up in the atlas, and there it was. I know this sounds crazy, but I have to go and find if there’s anything there that can help me make sense of this world. xoxox – from The Beautifully Worthless, by Ali Liebegott Footnotes: GAY PUBLISHING PIONEER Winston Leyland, who started Gay Sunshine Press more than 30 years ago, abruptly shut down operations in April, for health reasons. Instead of looking for a buyer, Leyland – essentially a one-person operation þ gave away most of his book stock, though Suspect Thoughts Press was approached in May about distributing some titles. Leyland's press grew out of Gay Sunshine Journal, an early-'70s newsprint magazine blending literary arts and interviews with radical post-Stonewall politics. Gay Sunshine and its offshoot imprint, Leyland Publications, published more than 200 books over the years, from serious titles like Gay Sunshine Interviews, Out of the Blue: Russia's Hidden Gay Literature, Queer Dharma, and Out in the Castro, to more than 20 Meatmen collections of erotic art and cartoons... ADAM BERLIN'S Belmondo Style and Stacey D'Erasmo's A Seahorse Year are the 2005 winners of the Publishing Triangle's Ferro-Grumley Awards for gay and lesbian fiction; other winners, announced May 10 in Manhattan, are David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction); Alison Smith's Name All the Animals (Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction); Carl Phillips' The Rest of Love (Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry); and Maureen Seaton's Venus Examines Her Breast (Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry). Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-'70s. Previous edition Book Marks