book review
Golnoosh Nour: The Ministry of Guidance & other stories ‘queer in the truest & most profound sense’
As this book’s dedication asserts, these stories are “for all the queers”, and a queerer collection of short stories you’re unlikely to encounter this year. These tales are queer in the truest and most profound sense, existing at the dangerous and fertile intersection of gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. In the first story, set in…
Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront reviewed by Stephen Coy
The West Side piers on the Hudson River achieved a level of infamy in the 1970s and early 1980s as a gathering place for gay men in pursuit of public, yet anonymous, sex. Its reputation included the danger inherent in public exposure, libidinous activity and the dilapidated state of the structures. The area is now…
The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy : reviewed by Jonathan Kemp
Like many others, I discovered the Cockettes through David Weismann and Bill Weber’s wonderful eponymous 2002 documentary (frockumentary?), and like that film, this book is an essential monument to the countercultural force of nature that was the Cockettes, the late 60s/early 70s San Francisco queer drag troupe who took on the tedious establishment of mainstream…
David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music
Every year when our little hamlet of Provincetown empties out, I am reminded of the wonderful song from the musical Grey Gardens, “Another Winter in a Summer Town.” This year those melancholy feelings seem quaint. When the town is so quiet, empty and cold, I find comfort in cracking open another book, never knowing precisely…
