Selected Publications

REVIEWS IN

THE NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

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For a number of years, I reviewed LGBT+ Nonfiction for The New York Journal of Books, an online source for book reviews. Unfortunately, the Journal is no longer in publication, and the site has gone offline. Below, however, is a list of books I reviewed for them, along with brief (or not-so-brief) excerpts from my review. 

 

I’ve compiled the list alphabetically, by author.

 

Allen, Samantha. Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States. New York: Little, Brown and

     Company, 2019.

 

     Allen’s book is a Whitmanesque catalogue of America’s queer population: male and female; cis and trans;

     young and old; gay, bi, lesbian, pan; white, black, Asian, and Hispanic.  Allen tells their stories—and hers—in

     a casual, intimate style, effortlessly comparing and contrasting their Red State experiences with the ways

     LGBT issues are playing out at the state and national levels

 

Baker, Gilbert. Rainbow Warrior: My life in Color. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.

 

     In this posthumously published autobiography, Gilbert Baker tells the story of how he, like Dorothy, made

     the transition from a sepia-toned life in Kansas to a sparkling city full of beautiful, colorful people. There is,

     however, a key difference: Dorothy’s odyssey ends with a return to Kansas, where she realizes her heart’s

     desire was always in her own back yard; once Baker gets to San Francisco, he never looks at Kansas again,

     except in a rear-view mirror.

 

     Baker gives obligatory attention to his tortured childhood as an obviously gay boy in Kansas, and his

     equally tortured time in the military, but he deftly sketches out both periods in quick, light, strokes. By page

     25, he is an adult, honorably discharged, and living in a queer Mecca he could never have imagined when

     growing up in Wichita. With more than two-hundred pages to go, he is ready to tell the story of how he

     created the Rainbow Flag and became the gay Betsy Ross.

 

Betke-Brunswick, Will. A Pros and Cons List For Strong Feelings. Portland, Oregon: Tin House,

     2022.

 

     This graphic memoir tells two stories at once. One involves the author coming out to their family as non-

     binary. The other is the story of the author’s mother dying of cancer. One of the interesting motifs in the

     story is that of inverse transformation. As Betke-Brunswick trades skirts for shorts, plays hockey, joins

     Frisbee teams, and becomes more masculine in their presentation, they are making plans to study abroad

     and enter life on an adult playing field. Meanwhile, their mother loses her hair, loses her strength, and

     spends increasing amounts of time in bed. The two characters are on conflicting trajectories, trying to hold

     to each other as life thrusts them in opposite directions. The result is often painful, occasionally
     funny, and always poignant.

 

Bourke, Greg. Gay Catholic and American. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,

     2021.

 

     Greg Bourke is the most prominent gay activist that you’ve probably never heard of. He and his husband,

     Michael De Leon, were one of the plaintiff couples in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court

     case that cleared the way for same-sex marriage equality in the United States. He was also instrumental in

     causing the Boy Scouts of America to soften their position on gay scouts and scout leaders. In addition, he

     has spent decades battling the Catholic Church in an effort to get them to be more inclusive of LGBT people

     in their policies. Gay, Catholic and American is a book about both past and ongoing struggles for LGBT

     equality, and reminds readers that these battles are important, even, and perhaps especially, when they

     are being waged at the most local level.

 

Dameron, William. The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing, and Coming Out. New York:

    Little A Books, 2019.

 

     In The Lie, William Dameron tells story of being a gay man who marries a woman in an attempt to live a

     conventional, socially acceptable life. Built on deception, his marriage was unsurprisingly unhappy. This

     was a once a common experience for gay men. It was perhaps, the dominant one. 

 

     In a scene farily late in the book, the now-out Dameron tells his young daughter that he had to be closeted

     earlier in life because being gay was not an option. It was, in fact, an option; it was just not one

     he was willing to choose. As an adolescent and a young adult, Dameron could not emulate a core of

     honesty and courage that he saw in other people. In at least one case, he turned against the potential lover,

     Ryan, punishing him for expressing desire that Dameron himself felt.

 

     Many portions of The Lie explain the multiple, self-imposed pressures to which Dameron succumbed,

     thereby locking himself in the closet for decades: internalized homophobia; fear of AIDS; a desire to be a

     better man than his philandering father; denial; self-deception. These are not things that can easily be

     explained by a man tucking his daughter into bed. Fortunately, he came out of the closet, and then wrote a

     book about the process.

 

Doty, Mark. What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.

 

     Mark Doty has written a remarkable book that defies easy classification. What Is the Grass is, at varying

     times, a memoir, a work of literary exegesis, and a love letter to Walt Whitman. 

 

     Such slippage between genres is appropriate, given that Whitman and his work both defy easy

     classification. As someone who invented free verse, Whitman had simultaneously no literary forbears and

     many.  Inspiration for his experiments in form has been traced back to sources as varied as vernacular

     speech, the opera, and the bible. His poetry is, in turns, deeply personal, jingoistic, autobiographical,

     historical, or based in fantasy. In writing What Is the Grass, Doty follows his master’s lead by refusing to be

     bound by either genre or convention. If there is a prose equivalent to free verse, this book might be it.

 

Duberman, Martin. Has The Gay Movement Failed? University of California Press, 2020. 

 

     An apt subtitle to Duberman’s book occurs when he quotes the writer-activist, Mattilda Bernstein

     Sycamore, who asks, “When did our dreams get so small?”

 

     In the immediate Post-Stonewall years, gay activists sought freedom from stifling social mores regarding

     gender and sexual behavior. Gay activism then, “envisioned a polyamorous sexuality freed from all

     association with procreation,” a rejection of marriage (which subjected women and children to the rule of

     men), a breakdown of rigid gender roles, an accompanying rise in androgyny, a world dominated by peace

     rather than war, an end to systemic racism, and a challenge to the rigid class system that serves a wealthy

     few. For a few years gay activists attempted to partner with feminists, labor unions, The Black Panthers,

     and others, so they could work together toward common goals. 

 

     Duberman argues that, over time, the dreams and goals shrank. Instead of working for sweeping change

     Duberman argues that the major LGBT rights organizations are congratulating themselves on winning the

     right to marry, and are working on the passage of laws that will provide incremental improvement to the

     lives of middle-class, partnered, cisgender gays, while leaving people of color, the poor, the single, and the

     young to fend for themselves.

 

     Duberman’s book is deliberately uncomfortable. It raises difficult questions, and does not provide easy

     answers. One of his chapters is titled, “Equality or Liberation?” The LGBT left has been successful in

     achieving some degree of equality—at least as far as marriage and the military are concerned. Now,

     Duberman suggests, it is time to pursue liberation.

 

Elledge, Jim. The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Seekers, Pansies,

     Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018.

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     Jim Elledge has written a fascinating account of the various queer subcultures that existed in Chicago from

     its incorporation in 1837 through the World War II era. 

 

     The book is arranged topically rather than chronologically.  One chapter is about the queer journalist and

     diarist, John Wing, who arrived in Chicago in shortly after the close of the Civil War, at a time when Chicago

     was still a mostly-male frontier city—precisely the type of city in which a queer subculture

     thrives.  Another chapter treats Eugen Sandow, a pioneering body-builder who began his show business

     career with his male lover, and who brought frank homoeroticism to his stage performances.  Several

     chapters discuss female impersonation, either as it manifested on stage, or in the lives of people born

     male who chose to live life as female (today they would be classified as transgender, but that term did not

     exist during most of the period about which Elledge writes). 

 

     Other chapters are less focused on individual characters than they are on issues such as patterns of

     cruising and prostitution, homosexual activity among hobos, the periodic attempts of Chicago officials to

     clean up the city, and the various bars, clubs, and social institutions that provided meeting places for

     Chicago’s queer population. Some of these subjects demonstrate patterns of history and sociology

     common to other major cities with large queer populations. At other times, the unique mark of Chicago is

     unmistakable.  

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     The Boys of Fairy Town is an informative, entertaining, and often eye-opening book that examines the

     complexity of male queer culture in one of the nation’s most fascinating cities.

 

Ferguson, Roderick A. The One-Dimensional Queer. Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.

 

     Martin Duberman’s book, Has the Gay Movement Failed?, examines this shift in activism, and Roderick A.

     Ferguson’s new book, The One-Dimensional Queer, addresses similar issues. While Duberman attributes

     the change to a failure of vision, Ferguson argues that the emphasis on marriage served the needs of

     neoliberal society by channeling economic energy where it would serve capitalism best. Capitalism thrives

     on standardization and mass production, and by incorporating middle-class gays into existing social and

     business models, their economic energy could be tapped with a minimum of disruption to the system at

     large. 

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Griffin, Mark. All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson. New York: Harper, 2018.

 

     At its best, All That Heaven Allows is a rich and complex story of Hollywood’s biggest star in its most

     golden age. It’s the story of how a remarkable life and a remarkable talent merged in one man, and the

     story of how studios and publicists exerted so much control over both that nobody was ever quite sure

     what was real and what wasn’t. The truth of Hudson’s life—or at least some part of it—asserted itself at

     the end. Mark Griffin’s biography helps balance the record to ensure Rock Hudson is recognized as the

     talented actor he always was beneath the stardust.   

 

Jackson, Richie. Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to his Son. New York: Harper, 2020.

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     Richie Jackson, a gay man, had a son through surrogacy in the year 2000. When the son became a

     teenager, he came out to Jackson as also being gay. Gay Like Me is Jackson’s attempt to explain his own

     experience as a gay man in America and convey what he has learned in the process. The book seems

     conceived as having a double audience, as Gay Like Me is simultaneously a deeply personal letter from

     Jackson to his son and a guidebook to a rising queer generation.

 

 

O’Callaghan, Ryan. My Life On The Line: How The NFL Damn Near Killed Me And Ended Up Saving My

    Life. Brooklyn: Edge of Sports, 2019.

 

     It’s a shame that books like this are still necessary.

 

     David Kopay, a former NFL player, came out of the closet in 1975. In the nearly 45 years then, only six other

     NFL players or former players had come out as gay. Ryan O’Callaghan was one of them.

 

     In My Life on the Line, O’Callaghan tells his story, and though it ends on a hopeful note, much of it is bleak.

     It is a book full of painful ironies, one of them being that O’Callaghan rose to prominence and sacrificed his

     health in a sport he never really liked very much. His passion was not for the game, but for the cover it

     provided to a young boy frightened by his own sexuality and the reactions it might prompt in others. As he

     puts it, “If you were associated with the football team, you were straight. Period. No questions asked. Ever.” 

 

Rippon, Adam: Beautiful On The Outside: A Memoir. New York: Grand Centeral Publishing, 2019.

 

     Memoirs about growing up gay, living in the closet, and finally making a decision to come out tend to be

     painful and bleak. Two recent memoirs, My Life on the Line by Ryan O’Callaghan, and The Lie by William

     Dameron follow this formula. Though both books end on positive notes, the journeys toward those hopeful

     endings are full of loneliness, pain, and despair.

 

     Leave it to Adam Rippon, figure-skating Olympic medalist and self-professed America’s Sweetheart, to

     break the formula. In Beautiful on the Outside, Rippon reminds us that gay doesn’t just mean homosexual,

     but it can also mean cheerful, light-hearted, playful, and exuberant.

 

 

Rodgers, Julie. Outlove: A Queer Christian Survival Story. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021.

 

     There are many memoirs about LGBT people who have been victimized—even brutalized—through various

     courses of reparative therapy (see, for example, Garrard Conley’s Boy Erased, or Peter Gadjics’ The

     Inheritance of Shame). What makes Outlove so different is Rodgers’ double perspective; she was

     simultaneously a victim of the ex-gay movement and one of its chief spokespersons. Many of Outlove’s

     strengths come from the portrayal of Rodgers’ shifting back and forth between these positions. 

 

     Yet, despite her obvious intelligence and bravery, she never quite becomes heroic. In part, this is due to

     timing: her ultimate position—that it is possible to be both queer and Christian—is not terribly different

     from the one articulated nearly fifty years ago by Troy Perry in his memoir, The Lord is My Shepherd and

     He Knows I’m Gay. Admittedly, conservative Christians have been slow to accept the message, and Rodgers

     is addressing a generation that has probably never heard of Perry, but, spiritually speaking, she is not

     exactly treading new ground. 

 

     Additionally, while Outlove contains anguished portrayals of Rodgers’ attempts to reconcile her spirituality

     and sexuality, and while she is quick to point fingers at those more powerful people and forces who used

     her for their own ends, Rodgers does not seem to express a great deal of personal remorse for her own

     similar behaviors. If Exodus, Living Hope, and other such ministries ruined many lives (as she admits they

     did), surely, as one of movement’s former standard bearers, Rodgers bears some of the responsibility. She

     has surprisingly little to say on this point. 

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Schroeder, Stephanie, and Teresa Theophano, Editors. Headcase: LGBTQ Writers and Artists on

    Mental Health and Wellness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

 

There is no doubt that American’s healthcare system is, in many ways, inadequate to the needs of the

     population. Progressives and conservatives may have widely disparate views of what is needed to fix the

     system, but all agree that a fix is needed.  Policy proposals, perhaps by necessity, concentrate on the

     macroeconomic issues, dealing with how to achieve the maximum benefit for the minimum cost.

 

     Headcase travels a narrower, more inductive, and ultimately more illuminating path. Rather than confront

     the entire medical industry, Headcase concentrates on the field of mental health, and then narrows further

     to cover the LGBTQ population. Some of the contributions are by psychiatrists, therapists, or social

     workers. Others are from current or former patients. Rather than limit the selections to essays and

     articles, editors Stephanie Schroeder and Teresa Theophano have also accepted poetry, fiction, drama, and

     visual art.  

 

     The points of view are as varied as the genres.  Some contributors clearly see their therapy and their

     psychoactive medications as lifelines. Others view them as snares. Health insurance, in all its

     inconsistencies and vagaries, receives a great deal of attention, much of it negative. The role of the

     therapist is repeatedly questioned—sometimes by the therapists themselves—as conventional therapy

     regimens are often designed to help a patient establish normalcy, whereas many of these avowedly queer

     clients don’t see normal behavior as a goal.  Similarly, notions of race, class, and gender are frequently

     challenged, particularly when they serve, unchallenged, to prescribe both personal behaviors and

     therapeutic outcomes.

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Sweat, Margaret J.M. Ethel’s Love Life. Edited and with an Introduction by Christopher Looby.

    Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

 

     Ethel’s Love-Life, the sole novel published by Margaret J.M. Sweat, had a certain fame in its day, but soon

     went out of print and was largely forgotten. Christopher Looby has rediscovered the novel, edited it, added

     an assortment of Sweat’s other writings, and contextualized the works through a critical introduction.

     Originally published in 1859, Ethel’s Love-Life is thought to be the earliest lesbian novel published in the

     United States, and is a surprisingly frank meditation on the nature of sex and attraction.

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Thomson, Rupert. Never Anyone But You: A Novel. New York: Other Press, 2020. 

 

     Rupert Thomson has written a novel based on the lives of two real women whose lives spanned much of

     the twentieth century: Suzanne Malherbe, who serves as the novel’s narrator, and her lifelong companion,

     stepsister, and lover, Lucie Schwob, who adopted the male name, Claude Cahun. Their fascinating lives

     included being in Paris in the years between the wars, mingling with the members of the Surrealist

     movement, and then retreating to Jersey, where they spread anti-Nazi propaganda during World War II.

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     Though the material is interesting, the novel is a disappointment. Some of this may be attributable to

     Thomson’s choice of Suzanne as narrator. As envisioned by Thomson, Suzanne lists events, but doesn’t

     seem to have any sense of what is and isn’t significant. Consequently, we know about an exotic outfit

     someone wore to a party, but we are constantly learning after-the-fact about more substantive incidents

     that were not portrayed in real time, and the rear-view descriptions leave much to be desired. Suzanne’s

     brother tells the family that a man has been writing love poetry to her, but we never see the poetry, and

     wouldn’t know of it, except for her brother’s remark. Claude’s father divorces his wife in order to marry

     Suzanne’s mother, but neither Suzanne nor Claude know this is happening—even though all of the

     principal parties live in the same apartment building—until Suzanne’s mother tells her the divorce has

     already happened. Claude performs in plays by Pierre Albert-Birot, but we never see her doing so, and only

     hear about it after she has decided to stop. When the second world war breaks out, Claude comments that

     her father had written editorials many years earlier warning about the dangers posed by the Nazis, but we

     had never seen him writing, nor did we read excerpts, nor did we hear him discuss his fears. 

 

     In the lives of Suzanne Malherbe and Claude Cahun, Rupert Thomson has powerful raw material, and he is

     capable of stunningly beautiful prose. Unfortunately, in trying to cover every famous person these women

     ever met (or almost met), and every interesting or potentially interesting thing they ever did, Never Anyone

     But You has become less of a narrative than it is a lengthy, sparsely detailed catalog. It’s a shame that

     Thomson’s gifts and these women’s lives were not put to better use.

 

Wolf, Naomi. Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. Boston and New York:

    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

 

     Few people have probably ever given thought to the correlation between homophobia and the development

     of a sewer system in nineteenth century London, but Naomi Wolf convincingly argues that the relationship

     between the two was far from casual. At a time when diseases like cholera were wiping out entire

     neighborhoods, government officials intervened to insure each and every house in the city was connected

     to the newly developed waste disposal system. The recent epidemiological knowledge that filth in one

     home had the power to infect people in the next was soon extended from a medical to a moral principle.

     The result was a spate of laws that increasingly focused, not just on public sanitation, but on art, literature,

     and private sexual behavior.

 

     This is the era portrayed in Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. Naomi Wolf’s book

     covers the second half of the nineteenth century, discussing how the British state, in its quest for both

     physical and moral purity, became increasingly intrusive, condemnatory, and punitive.

 

     Note: In my published review, I talked about the excellence of Wolf’s research. The thoroughness and

     accuracy of that research was later called into question. You can read my reaction to that in a blog

     post titled "Facts Are Such Inconvenient Things," which you will find here.