I thought I would have something ready for this morning, but it seems that, after the semester I just had, I'll need at least two weeks off before I can write anything like a critical review. So, at year's end, this seems like it should be a good time to take stock, to review what we've covered so far, and what we have yet to cover!
Below the Great Orange Bookplate for some lists and for a link farm in case you'd like to catch up.
We've covered quite a few books since the series began informally in May 2012 and formally in June (for Pride Season):
2012: May 24: Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
June 12: Changing Pitches by Steve Kluger and The Dreyfus Affair by Peter Lefcourt
June 26: Tales of the City and More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
July 24:The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts
August 7: Christopher and His Kind (and the Isherwood Diaries) by Christopher Isherwood
August 21: The Lavender Locker Room: 3000 years of great athletes whose sexual orientation was different by Patricia Nell Warren
September 4: States of Desire by Edmund White
September 18:Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution by Linda Hirschman
October 30: A Hallowe'en Edition (books abut vampires)
December 11: My Blue Heaven by Joe Keenan (I still marvel at the fact I was able to write that one)
2013:
February 19: Quatrefoil by James Barr
April 16: How to be Gay by David Halperin
May 14: Flagrant Conduct (The Story of Lawrence v. Texas) by Dale Carpenter
May 28: An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis
July 23: Man About Town by Mark Merlis
August 6: American Savage by Dan Savage
September 10: Oddly Normal by John Schwartz (Incidentally, this is why you tweet things. The author THANKED me for writing about the book on Twitter. That was SO cool!)
October 8: Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants by Phil Tiemeyer
October 22: Eminent Outlaws by Christopher Bram
November 19: Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
A lot of good work (and Texdude50 and I want to thank our contributors: Chrislove, City Lights Lover, commonmass, gizmo59, micsimov, scaboni, and sfbob). But there's STILL a lot to write about.
So, once agan, the list that I last published September 24, only this time I've deleted the books we've already written about:
As you'd expect, there's a LOT of variety in this list, given the fact that there were thirty-one LGBT writers involved in creating it. Several books were mentioned more than once, and one, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, was mentioned by seven writers. Baldwin's Another Country, the late John Boswell's magisterial Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers and William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf were each mentioned three times. The following books:
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
City of Night by John Rechy
Grief by Andrew Holleran
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
Was by Geoff Ryman
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
were each mentioned twice.
The remaining books?
A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym
à Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans
A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch
All: A James Broughton Reader edited by Jack Foley
Angels in America by Tony Kushner
Any poem by W.H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop
Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw
Baker Street by Guy Davis
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette,
Bertram Cope's Year by Henry Blake Fuller
Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life by Marjorie Garber
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men edited by Essex Hemphill
Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry by Essex Hemphill
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz
Collected Poems by Arthur Rimbaud
Collected Stories by Truman Capote
Complete Poems by Constantine Cavafy
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
Conundrum by Jan Morris
Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism by Daniel Harris
Dar: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary by Erika Moen
Divine Comedies by James Merrill
Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee
Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley
Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me by Jaime Manrique
Falconer by John Cheever
Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. by Jonathan Katz
Gay Spirit, Gay Body, and Gay Soul by Mark Thompson
Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop
Good Times, Bad Times by James Kirkwood
Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal by J.R. Ackerley
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology edited by Barbara Smith
I Remember by Joe Brainard
I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall
In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch
Inferno (A Poet's Novel) by Eileen Myles
Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine
La Batarde by Violette Leduc
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution by Jill Johnston
Life Mask by Emma Donoghue
Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez
Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia
Maurice by E.M. Forster
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley
My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White
Olivia by Olivia (pseudonym of Dorothy Strachey)
On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual by Merle Miller
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood by Arthur Laurents
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Picasso and Dora: A Memoir by James Lord
Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet
Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story about Growing Up Gay by Aaron Fricke
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Saul's Book by Paul T. Rogers
Selected Poems by James Schuyler
Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph: The Complete 1922 Text by T.E. Lawrence
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality by Anne Fausto-Sterling
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo
The Confusions of Young Torlesss by Robert Musil
The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst
The Gay Militants by Donn Teal
The Greeks and Greek Love by James N. Davidson
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault
The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Wieners
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
The Man of the House by Stephen McCauley
The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon by Tom Spanbauer
The Marketplace by Laura Antoniou
The Master by Colm Toibin
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965 by Samuel Delany
The New York Diary by Ned Rorem
The Night Listener by Armistead Maupin
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948â1985 by James Baldwin
The Professor's House by Willa Cather
The Pure and the Impure (New York Review Books Classics) by Colette
The Rain God by Arturo Islas
The Satyricon by Petronius
The Symposium by Plato
The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall From Trespass Into Grace by Martin Moran,
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Manâs World by Alan Downs
The Way We Live Now by Susan Sontag
The Wild Boys by William Burroughs
Transparent by Cris Beam
Travels With Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets by Lars Eighner
Undoing Gender by Judith Butler
Valencia by Michelle Tea
We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm
What the Body Told by Rafael Campo
What's for Dinner? by James Schuyler
White People by Allan Gurganus
I'm reserving one book from that list,
The Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, which I suspect will mean quite a lot to me now, and I'm also reserving Choire Sicha's
Very Recent History because my review of that was what I couldn't finish tonight.
I continue to think this is a very appealing list, so if any of these books say "diary me" to you, let us know in the comments, and if you just want to comment, we'll welcome that as well. We'd ESPECIALLY like more contributions in the "L" section from our lesbian friends; in Eminent Outlaws, Christopher Bram demurred on the grounds that lesbian literature has its own history, and I'm demurring with him. If you want to write about a book that isn't on these lists, that's fine too.
Gee, I feel better now that I realize how sporadic this series has been. I'll try to do better in 2014 with your able help.