A stirringly combative and prescient collection from earlier days of gay journalism.
Benton (Extraordinary Hearts, 2013) collects his writings from the post-Stonewall, pre–Harvey Milk era of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
As a young gay man in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s, Benton became a passionate activist and writer in the gay rights movement. He published prolifically in such alternative outlets as the Berkeley Barb, the Berkeley Tribe, Gay Sunshine, and his own paper, the Effeminist. In this collection, he reveals how, by 1969, the gay movement had already split into two factions: “one which saw our liberation in the context of wider social currents and causes, and the other which insisted that activism be limited to striving to advance ‘our’ issues, solely.” Benton identified with the former, and the Effeminist sought to bring together the goals of the gay rights and feminist movements. His topics include the Stonewall riots, Vietnam, racism, sexism, and politics, and there are firsthand accounts of protests, demonstrations, incidents of harassment, and cultural trends and happenings. These pieces provide a record of a specific era in the counterculture and offer valuable perspective for activists in today’s LGBTQ+ and feminist struggles. Benton’s prose is analytical and hard-hitting even when writing about film: “It’s about a male supremacist society where sex is a power trip,” he writes in a 1971 review of the prison-set film Fortune and Men’s Eyes. “It’s about cultural homosexuality, turned into simulated heterosexual acts performed by men on each other due to the physical absence of women. It’s real.” The book is primarily composed of writings from the same period, but more recent pieces that look back on that time are included as well. Benton asserts that he’s been written out of some versions of the era’s history, and there’s a self-promotional quality to the book that isn’t always subtle; one essay, for instance, is titled “4 Things I Am Credited With Helping To Accomplish in That Era.” As a set of primary source documents, however, these essays will give readers a wonderful, provocative look into the Stonewall generation’s political coming-of-age.
A stirringly combative and prescient collection from earlier days of gay journalism.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64633-310-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: BCI Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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