I sat down with Radclyffe to discuss the relationship between writing a memoir and living an authentic life, how he sees the relationship between Adult Human Male and Frighten the Horses, and his fascinating assertion that we’re thinking about gender “transition” completely wrong
Read More
The Apocalypse of Adulthood - Black Wave, by Michelle Tea
Openly weaving fact with fiction, this postmodern account asks how a 1990s archetype — the slacker freak, the queer slam poet, the confessional zine-writing third-wave feminist — becomes an adult, and how an adult who believes in honesty, but not objective truth, writes a memoir that doesn’t exploit or expose the people around her. Yet Black Wave is also a dystopian (anti)fantasy novel that explores what people do when they know the end is nigh-as-fuck.
Read More
My Year of Sarah Schulman
While no one book can contain the revelations of an entire career, The Cosmopolitans is a novel that has deep roots in Schulman’s nonfiction, which I would broadly classify as an attempt to explore, catalog, and explain the queer experience in America today through the specific lens of her own life. A close reading of The Cosmopolitans can reveal the fruits of many of her earlier scholarly endeavors, from the profound commitment to urbanity she espoused in Gentrification of the Mind, to the powerful reflections on trauma at the heart of Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.
Read More
Mapping the Family Possible
But if same-sex marriage is the first step on this journey, where are we headed, and how do we go the rest of the way? Two books published this summer — Love’s Promises: How Formal and Informal Contracts Shape All Kinds of Families, by Martha Ertman, and How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, by Bella DePaulo — come at these questions from cockeyed angles, addressing love and life through law and contracts, real estate and urban planning. Though very different in style, tone, and subject, both seek to expand the landscape of accepted family–life configurations available to us.
Read MoreAIDS Without Its Metaphors
"The result is less an explanatory guide to the gay early ’90s than an experiential re-visitation. The nonlinear structure ambushes the reader with visceral recollections, replicating the uncertainty and confusion that swirled around those years when death was everywhere (and especially in our heads), when “the sick” were often indistinguishable from “the healthy,” and when our own status could be unknown and unknowable for weeks at a time."
Read More