An eye-opening guide to the American LGBTQ+ community and its history in some surprising places.
A sweeping reference volume about LGBTQ+ people, institutions, and lore from all over the country.
Stout, a Minneapolis employment attorney and community organizer, surveys the LGBTQ+ community in every state—and in U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and Guam—including red state heartlands as well as blue state urban enclaves. Each brief chapter features photos and lavish illustrations of people and places by artists Bye and Écija and contains paragraphlong entries on notable people, living or dead, who were born in each state; local cultural fixtures, such as bars and bookstores, pride parades, and advocacy organizations; and historical milestones, including ordinances and statutes. The book is, in part, a kind of Who’s Who in LGBTQ+ America, saluting luminaries such as Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, but there’s also plenty of less-sung writers, artists, activists, and businesspeople. For example, there’s a veritable roll call of pathbreakers, such as Anchorage, Alaska, assembly member Felix Rivera, “one of the first two gay men ever elected to the Alaskan government,” and Reed Erickson, “The first transgender person to earn an engineering degree from Louisiana State University.” Stout unearths some intriguing historical figures, as well, including Michael Wigglesworth, a 17th-century Puritan minister whose diary reveals his torment over his attraction to male Harvard students; Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a lesbian couple in early-19th-century Vermont; and Joe Monahan, a transgender miner and cowboy on the Idaho frontier. (The author’s self-described “speculation” about Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality is a bit of a stretch, however.) Stout unsurprisingly finds a rich trove of lore on the LGBTQ+ community in New York and California, but he also helpfully discovers stories in places such as Thurmond, West Virginia, “the smallest town in the U. S. to pass an LBGTQ+ anti-discrimination ordinance.” Overall, Stout’s encyclopedia-style prose is workmanlike and never lyrical, and his choice of entries feels somewhat haphazard. However, casual readers, students, tourists, or new U.S. residents trying to get their bearings will find this to be a useful sourcebook—one that demonstrates the LGBTQ+ community’s deep roots in American soil.
An eye-opening guide to the American LGBTQ+ community and its history in some surprising places.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63489-257-5
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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