Picano recalls an exciting time with insight, enthusiasm and justifiable satisfaction.
A writer who was there and did all that chronicles perhaps the most significant period in the history of gay literature.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969 sent gay writers, artists and actors from their closets to their desks, studios and theaters. There for the next 30 or so years they created a body of candid, forthright, often laudatory works about gay life. One of the most prolific of them, Picano (Fred in Love, 2005, etc.) here recalls what happened. The theme is sex: sex as politics, sex as literature, sex as just plain sex. When Picano spotted a tattoo of a seahorse (a male that reproduces) on the bod of a buff Italian man gleaming in the Key West sun, he got the name for the gay press he started in 1976. Five years later, he joined with two other publishers of gay works to form Gay Presses of New York. With six gay writers he formed the short-lived but influential Violet Quill Club. Picano’s history of all this is rich with anecdotes, profiles and background notes. He captures the excitement of a Violet Quill reading at Manhattan’s Three Lives & Company Bookstore. He traces the development of Harvey Fierstein’s Torchsong Trilogy, the play that propelled gay theater into the mainstream and, in book form, helped keep Gay Presses of New York solvent. And he describes authors famous (Gore Vidal) and unknown (the Rev. Boyd McDonald, who wrote scorching accounts of his sexual adventures). Picano’s own adventures feed into the story. After Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Picano’s genitals, the men had sex. The freedom to do that, then write and publish the story, is what his book is all about.
Picano recalls an exciting time with insight, enthusiasm and justifiable satisfaction.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78671-813-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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