Provocative, curious, and noteworthy.
The heady history of a clandestine gay practice.
In this enthusiastic exploration of the “art” of gay cruising, Espinoza (The Five Acts of Diego León, 2013, etc.) provides a unique perspective on this furtive practice of coded signals and physical gestures geared toward spontaneous desire and availability. The author begins with the origins of cruising in early civilizations, when gay men began seeking each other out for covert dalliances unbeknownst to those around them. Its evolution continued as ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence embraced a sexual free-for-all atmosphere structured around the rules of dominant masculinity. Espinoza, a talented tour guide, describes the public toilets of 1700s London and frequently raided “Molly houses” as well as such 20th-century resources as Bob Damron’s Address Book, which served as “a gay yellow pages, a directory listing all the gay friendly bars and places strewn across the United States where men could meet and hook up.” The AIDS epidemic stifled some of the spirit of the defiant post-Stonewall brotherhood before online cruising, chat rooms, and mobile apps restored the passion and the practice. The author incorporates intriguing profiles of former cruisers into his research material, creating a narrative that puts human faces to a subject that may seem bizarre to some readers and captivating to others. Espinoza weaves into the historical material vivid recollections from his own coming-of-age as a closeted Mexican youth “navigating a culture that encouraged hypermasculinity and patriarchy.” Ultimately, cruising unleashed in the author a life-changing self-assurance. Espinoza’s research is richly referential, as he cites the Al Pacino film Cruising; the grisly agenda of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who cruised bars and alleyways to locate his male victims; and George Michael and former senator Larry Craig, both busted in men’s bathrooms. Espinoza candidly inserts himself into this striking examination with memories of his own cruising adventures and segments of stimulating commentary on gay liberation and the tenets of stealthy sexuality.
Provocative, curious, and noteworthy.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-82-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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