Antigone Books

I thoroughly enjoyed Elliot Tiber’s memoir, which, as they say, is now a Major Motion Picture.   The movie did a fine job portraying the second half of the book – the legendary festival that might never have happened if Tiber had not mentioned that his upstate neighbor Max had a big old dairy farm – but it was the early part of the book that captured my heart.

Tiber describes being a closeted young homosexual in an era when gays were beaten, jailed and fired with no support from any quarter.  He beautifully describes his sexual awakening, and his progression coming out in that era (affection coming much later than sex for young gay men.)  Once he was no longer living with his abusive parents - his mother belittled and manipulated him while his father merely punched him – he began to find himself. 

For a nice Jewish boy from Bensonhurst, he really did encounter a lot of major personalities of the day.  He ran into Marlon Brando and Wally Cox in a gay bar in Manhattan, and they all went to a private party together.  He got picked up by a kinky leather dude who turned out to be Robert Mapplethorpe.  The artist Mark Rothko sobbed on his shoulder because he couldn’t achieve the blackest black for one of his paintings.  And Tiber lived in the same apartment building as a dissipated Tennessee Williams, who introduced him to an equally washed out Truman Capote.

Tiber powerfully describes the crushing toll of the all-pervasive closet in that era, setting the importance of the events of June 28, 1969.  Tiber was at the Stonewall Inn when word came out the police were about to raid. This time the patrons fought back, and history was made.  Tiber describes it all (and debunks a long-held urban myth about the evening).

This well-written memoir, while a colorful trip back to the Sixties, is timeless in it’s humanity. 

Much like her earlier books Stiff and Spook, Mary Roach's Bonk is informative and outrageous. This time she broaches the history of research on the sexual behavior of humans (and some other species), which, for a variety of reasons, has long been the most stunted, thwarted and unscientific area of scientific endeavor. Roach's regard for the absurd and her loopy sense of humor make her a delectable guide through this ill-regarded intellectual outback.

You get mounds of information with Roach, some of it educational, some of it startling. Roach cheerfully describes the sexual fads, misinformation, quackery, gimmicks and gizmos that scientists and patients have embraced over the years.

Her delicious asides, quips and footnotes are what make her books such fun to read. For instance, there was more than plenty of information about artificial insemination of sows in Denmark, but I am truly glad to have learned the little tidbit that only male pigs and male humans fondle the breasts of the female during sex. Many observers have made the connection between men and pigs, but few with Mary Roach's credentials.

This will give you an example of the author's style and attitude. Writing about the 70-year history of relaxing pictures on the gynecological exam room ceiling, she states: "back in the early eighties, no women's health center was complete without the ceiling poster of a ring of redwood trees shot from below. So ubiquitous was this image that I cannot, to this day, look at a redwood and not feel as though I should scoot a little lower and relax."

Bonk is fun, informative reading.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. True statement, but, hey, but what would farce be without it?

The award-winning writer of the Frasier TV series has produced a hilarious send-up of Hollywood pretense and duplicity in his new novel. Philip Cavanaugh, a character from earlier Keenan novels and perhaps Keenan's alter-ego, knows he should not be pretending to be an accomplished screenwriter but his moral compass goes haywire when he gets near closeted Hollywood heart-throb Stephen Donato.

What a delicious mix. Stir in wanna-be writers of variable integrity, dueling star sisters of a certain age (think Blanche and Jane still working), pretty boys a little too willing to give some head to get ahead, a studio exec with an ego the size of an elephant and a brain the size of a peanut, a pushy publicist who looks like Ernest Borgnine in drag, as well as sex, lies and videotape and you have the plot in one very nutty shell.

In Joe Keenan's Hollywood all is sham. Cavanaugh finds himself working both sides of a rapidly vanishing fence as he writes a screenplay for one star of certain years and helps pen the memoirs of her bitter rival and sister. The screenplay of Casablanca is (incredibly) sold as original. A former child actor hires male hustlers and calls it "acting lessons". A screenwriter impersonates a policeman to disastrous end.

Keenan is one demented comic genius. No one else would dare come up with the idea of a screenplay based on Amelia Earhart's further adventures after her plunge into the Pacific, or a "male bordello where you could bring the wife and kids". The jacket promises (and the book delivers) "the single most ill-judged sex act a married megastar has ever committed" all on videotape, no less.

Have some fun! Read My Lucky Star.

Is there something peculiar about Argentina which engenders so little affection, trust or loyalty in its own citizenry? Here in Tucson, I knew a woman for ten years who always called herself Greek. Last year, while telling me her sister was coming for a visit, I learned that she and her sister were born and raised in Argentina to Greek parents: I find it astounding that she does not identify as an Argentinean.

Anyway, Colm Toibin's The Story of the Night is an exquisitely written novel about the arc of one gay man's life in Argentina during the time of the Generals and soon thereafter (the Seventies and Eighties.)

Argentina is seen as a country where the promises of the government are invariably lies: the country's stated wealth is poverty, strength is weakness and pride is humiliation. And the gay life in Argentina mirrors society as a whole: secretive and fearful. Unspoken boundaries restrain every life.

The book is told in the first person of one Richard Garay, born of an Argentine father and English mother. He is an outsider on so many levels: a gay man but closeted to almost everyone, including himself in his younger years. He has practically no sense of being an Argentine, but is bemused by his mother's pro-Thatcher Union Jack waving. He works as an English teacher and then a translator/liaison, never fully identifying with any group. (The author makes minimal use of quoted dialogue, which makes the story of Richard even more interior and isolated.)

Describing the central character, one line stands out. An American woman (CIA?) whom Richard has befriended, tells him that Argentina is a dreary backwater and he should get out, he declines, stating that he is happy and has no plans. She shakes her head. "You've always been like that, a mixture of such good sense and an amazing lack of something. I don't know what it is."

Though not directed or motivated, the Richard character does achieve a certain degree of connectedness, friendship, success and finally love.

A great character portrait of a man adrift and a great description of a dysfunctional society, Colm Toibin's Story of the Night deserves its place on the Lambda list of the best 100 gay novels of all time.

This novel was a strongly written study of the clash of two cultures in one little town in upstate New York. The main character, Cameron, is a gay man from Manhattan, cultured, traveled, middle-aged, and an AIDS survivor. He hires two brothers from an old down-on-its-luck local family to do repairs on his property. They are everything that Cameron is not -- healthy, crude, young, uneducated, muscular, and straight. The older brother is a redneck and proud, and Cameron is drawn to the moody younger brother Jesse.

Cameron is among the first generation of AIDS victims to recover a degree of health after new drugs were introduced in the late Nineties. Like most gay men at century's end, he enjoys his circle of friends, but his memories of friends lost in the plague are enmeshed in his every day. The author contrasts Cameron's achingly poignant memories of his perfect love with Toby, one of the first to die in the epidemic, and his hesitant stabs at dating as a middle-aged positive.

Paul Russell is keen observer of the differences between the weekender gays and the small town working folk, both sides baffled by the other. The gays relax with garden parties and cosmos, the locals with drag racing and whisky. The gays like to visit nature quietly with cameras and walking sticks, while the locals like to dominate with ATVs and guns. Locals complain that the city folk remove perfectly good aluminum siding when they buy old houses, and the Manhattanites are appalled that the locals would actually prefer to straighten out old winding country lanes.

The author is equally adept at finding the voice of Cameron, who has seen and lost too much but still wants love in his life, and young Jesse, who is torn between loyalty to his family and his undecided wants and desires.

War against the Animals is a well-crafted novel which should appeal to any lover of literature, gay or straight.

Amanda Eyre Ward's debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer.

In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In Austin, Texas, brassy Celia Mills, a once-vibrant librarian, mourns her murdered husband.

Over the course of the summer, fate pushes these eerily recognizable women together, culminating in a revelation of the possibility of faith, the responsibility of friendship, and the value of life. "Sleep Toward Heaven is a luminous story of murder and desire, solitude and grace -- a rare literary page-turner where redemption seems perpetually within arm's reach."

In recent years, there has been a rash of best-selling books by conservative social commentators (Bill Bennett, Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan, etc.) that tell Americans that they have allowed themselves to become awash in sin and are therefore going to Hell in a Handbasket. Too much indulgence, laziness, gambling, sex, drugs and rock & roll. Dan Savage, sex advisor and social commentator, has written a piercing, witty book in which tells he basically tells those busybodies, "Boys, (and Dr. Laura), get off our backs."

It is not that Savage is amoral. Quite to the contrary, he embraces the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Savage asserts that the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" is an important, purposeful passage in the Declaration of Independence: deciding what we want to do for enjoyment has always been part of who we are as Americans. Unlike Bennett or Bork passing judgement from an ivory tower, Savage hits the road a la de Tocqueville, seeking out "sin" throughout the land, in such dens of iniquity as Las Vegas, New York, Dubuque, Iowa and Plano, Texas.

Savage uses the Seven Deadly Sins as a framework for his investigation, but, really, most any leisure activity that one American enjoys another American will find immoral, useless, unhealthy, unwise, pointless, corrupt, politically incorrect, morally depraved, beneath comment, worthy of denunciation, or worse. The author really does his investigative roadwork. Inside of one week in New York, he purchases the escort services of a female prostitute ($500 an hour) and on a separate occasion her bodybuilder boyfriend (much less expensive). (No sex, exactly).

While some of the sins correlate perfectly to his reporting (Gluttony and the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance -- NAAFA) others are a stretch (Anger and handgun classes in Texas). As in all good travelogues, it is the unexpected which provides the reader with the most fun. Savage is not predisposed to enjoy guns, but finds to his surprise that he is a good natural marksman. While he is openly gay, he finds it silly that every year a big old street party is called a Pride event. A great part of Skipping Towards Gomorrah is the humanity that the author finds amongst the "sinners". He meets a couple of intelligent, well-spoken swingers from Buffalo Grove, Illinois, (Lust) and gets tips from crusty old casino dealers (Greed).

The chapter that had me laughing the hardest was on pot smoking (Sloth). Our professional scolds are aghast that so many Americans choose to smoke marijuana, citing statistics that pot costs $100 billion in lost productivity in the U. S. every year. Savage points out that Americans 1) are the most productive workers on the planet and 2) smoke more pot than any other workers, and concludes that the $100 billion figure is nothing more than smoke.

Savage skewers the social conservatives with skill and glee (all this in the year before Bill Bennett was found to have a problem just saying no at the gaming tables). I look forward to anything else the man writes.

I haven't read a young adult novel since, well, since I was a young adult (many moons ago), but I was attracted to this novel by it's unusual central premise. A small group of gay and lesbian high-schoolers purposefully devise a boring-sounding club which no one else will want to join so they will have a safe place all their own to go after school. Thus, the Geography Club.

The central character is a young man named Russel. He is a nice guy who wants to do the right thing and seems ready to explore his burgeoning gay sexuality, but is painfully aware of the social minefield that high school can be for any student deemed different. In a 21st century twist, Russel anonymously meets another gay boy online only to discover that the boy is a jock from his school he already knows and likes (a little too much).

Brent Hartinger nails the geography of high school cliques (the Land of the Popular to Outcast Island) with jocks, lefties, intellectual nerds, theater crowd and druggies unfixed between the two. And the author perfectly describes the geography of fear and secrecy for a young man just discovering himself (he describes the locker room as "enemy territory"). Hartinger details the competing pulls of old friends (from whom there are secrets) and new allies (with whom there is no past), and the conflicting wishes of a young man to fit in at school yet be true to himself.

My only quibble would be that adults and family are pretty much absent in this novel, but by setting all the action among the teens themselves it concentrates the feel of social pressure.