A brash and entertaining queer memoir, full of erotic and commercial energy.
A young gay man finds love and business success in this feisty remembrance.
Lauterstein recaps his salad days in Manhattan in the 1990s when, in his early 20s, he came out and eventually co-founded the fashion company Nasty Pig, for which he’s still CEO. Much of the book chronicles his romance with Fred Kearney, a clothing patternmaker and company co-founder. As the author recalls in these pages, theirs was a loving, committed, but not exclusive relationship that left room for Lauterstein’s explorations of New York’s sexual demimonde, including an orgy at a bathhouse, a paddling session with a dom, and immersion in the exuberant scene at gay clubs like the Roxy, Sound Factory, and leather bar The Lure. Entwined with the story of the author’s sexual awakening is the tale of Nasty Pig’s creation: Lauterstein and Kearney started by making diffraction goggles that split light into rainbow hues, selling them to ketamine-addled kids at dance clubs; from there they branched out into clothing with a “unique blend of streetwear and fetish,” with items like “a highlighter-yellow rubber tank top with electric green insets, and…matching booty shorts with a reverse applique NASTYPIG sewn straight across the ass.” It’s a classic start-up saga of wild dreams, moxie, and hard work, as the partners scrounged for financing, spent endless hours cutting and sewing, and forged ahead with seat-of-the-pants improvisations: “That’s not a fashion show…That’s just us getting people high and you walking around in three tank tops.” Lauterstein’s fizzy, atmospheric portrait of gay New York balances accounts of graphic sex with expressions of anxiety about the AIDS epidemic and plangent sorrow at the loss of friends. His punchy prose veers between out-loud-and-proud militance (“Being gay meant I loved dick—a lot—and I was going to wear my status as a faggot on my sleeve”) and hymns to the mystical significance of homosexuality (“My gayness was a ticket to freedom from the oppression of the binary that had been hoisted upon humanity”). The result is a giddy, openhearted love letter to gay life in the city.
A brash and entertaining queer memoir, full of erotic and commercial energy.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798989233380
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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