A nurturing and inspiring portrait of queer paternity and modern family.
A gay dad chronicles his journey into fatherhood at middle age.
When novelist and biographer Gooch was in his 30s, living in New York City, he lost his first husband to the “dark waves” of the AIDS epidemic and, later, suffered years of instability and alcohol abuse. Decades later, he met a man named Paul, an editor who stole his heart. The couple married soon after, and, in this resonant memoir, Gooch recounts his rich and romantic history charting the years leading up to his life with Paul and their momentous decision to have children, despite their initial hesitation, their middle-aged status, and the more technical hurdles they’d have to surmount in order to become same-sex parents. After navigating the “medical and legal puzzle” of the surrogacy process, Gooch and his partner connected with a gestational surrogate, and, in 2015, Walter was born. A second son, Glenn, was born in 2018. With smooth, conversational prose, Gooch depicts the “harrowing times” of parenting an infant amid various illnesses, nighttime terrors (his child’s and his own), “daymares,” financial woes, pandemic panic, and unexpected genetic revelations that would challenge his prior notions of paternity and personal identity. His poetic descriptions of parenting are thoughtful, memorable, and will highly resonate with readers who have raised children. Time just seems to speed up, writes Gooch, and even after short business trips away, that little boy at home has been “replaced by someone older, with more of an edge, taller, or a vessel for a new kind of emotion that wasn’t there before—sarcasm, or wisdom.” The author gets more intimately personal in sections describing his own family experience in rural Pennsylvania: the stranger he’d always felt his father was to him growing up and the “somber free fall” of his parents’ geriatric descent into mental frailty. Gooch writes about all of these trials with humanity and pride, admitting that the most surprising revelation of his journey into parenting was the extreme happiness he and his spouse experienced in embracing the joys and pains of the process, the increasing acceptance and normalcy of gay childrearing, and reveling in the wonders of fatherhood.
A nurturing and inspiring portrait of queer paternity and modern family.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063466937
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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