GAY SPIRIT: Myth and Meaning

by Mark Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 1987

From an editor of The Advocate, a group of foggily esoteric essays dealing with ""farranging"" thoughts on the gay condition. What is ""gay spirit?"" According to Thompson, it comes from ""the psychic and creative energies generated by people we now call gay"" that have lain suppressed beneath the body of Western civilization and are only now being ""released."" Judging from the 24 essays that comprise this book (nearly half published first in The Advocate), gay spirit is really just an editorial concept attached to the musings of a ragtag grouping of minor writers. There is, for instance, Geoff Mains' discussion of S/M in ""Urban Aboriglnals and the Celebration of Leather Magic"": ""Men pissing on each other are at once marking territory and taking possession of their friends. There is a wisdom and relaxing that grows out of such play."" Or Jim Kepner's deeply reverent (and unintentionally funny) appreciation of the dense gay philosopher Gerald Heard in ""I Should Have Been Listening: A Memory of Gerald Heard"": ""I first met British philosopher Gerald Heard. . .in 1950 when he gave an exciting but nearly impenetrable talk to a science-fiction convention in Los Angeles."" There are a few interesting articles--Thompson's ""Children of Paradise: A Brief History of Queens,"" which focuses on the drag queen Hibiscus, a central figure of the 60's who was one of the first to die of AIDS; and Malcolm Boyd's ""Telling a Lie for Christ?"" (Boyd movingly discusses a need for a gay theology, a church within a church). For the most part, however, these essays are eclectic, vague, and thin.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1987

ISBN: 1590210247

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION