Which Gay Books for the Next 6 Months?
Posted by: Nick DiMartino
As we tuck into our third book in the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club, we’re now halfway down the list of announced selections, and soon I’ll have to come up with the six titles for the second half of the year. And in the same way that you go into a book discussion feeling one way about the selection, and often come out with your feelings altered or completely changed by hearing other opinions, I notice that my vision of the book club has been going through a metamorphosis.
When I launched the book club, it was because I wanted to share my passionate love for gay literature. I imagined sinking my teeth into Andre Gide’s complex, ironic masterpiece, The Counterfeiters, with a fun gang of fellow readers, or Jean Genet’s mindblowing Our Lady of the Flowers, or E. M. Forster’s life-changing Maurice, or Thomas Mann’s mercurial, undefinable Death in Venice. I imagined sharing the very best gay literature ever written.
Now I’m not so sure. When we discussed Breakfast with Scot, what we ended up discussing were the issues: why we were embarrassed by a “girlie boy,” and what exactly made up good parenting. The good parenting theme carried into our next selection, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in our discussion of the tyrannical fundamentalist mother who dominates the book. Some argued that she really loved her adopted daughter, some argued against it. In other words, the psychological and social were topics more than the literary aspects of the books.
As we begin our four-conversation, month-long discussion of I Am Not Myself These Days, we’re focusing on the relationship between Josh and Jack – is it love, or not? – and on addiction, Josh to alcohol, Jack to crack, and how addiction operates in all of us. The book’s relevance to the reader’s life trumps the book’s literary merits. Maybe relevance to our lives and the difficult world we live in is a better qualification than literary excellence.
Beside my armchair, waiting to be investigated further, is a growing pile of nominees for the second half of the year: (1) Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I haven’t read Running with Scissors. The folks in recovery speak highly of this book. I’m disposed to think I’ll like it, with my deep-seated prejudice toward comedy. (2) Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. An autobiographical novel, a gay coming-of-age in Sri Lanka. We need a glimpse of gay life outside our American culture. (3) My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography and Prostitution by Aidan Shaw. Pornography plays a huge role in the lives of most gay men. Aidan Shaw is a literate porn star who might open the door into some very personal and profound conversations. (4) Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway. The two women in our reading group who previewed this one both loved it, and it takes on deafness in the gay community.
Three of the books in the pile deal with AIDS, I notice, but in very different ways: (5) The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown. This multiple award-winner is a chain of linked stories about a home-care worker who assists people with AIDS in the early 90’s. Super-stark, super-simple prose accounts of various clients. (6) Dog Years by Mark Doty. Not only deals with the human/animal interface, and the role of animals in our lives, but also with grieving and loss as Mark loses his dying partner. (7) My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid, the famous Caribbean author’s account of her brother Devon dying of AIDS at age 33 on the island of Antigua. Admittedly these last two look like tearjerkers, but they’re the kind of books that open people up and sometimes untie emotional knots that readers aren’t even aware they have.
The pile is still growing. I’m open to ideas.
March 7th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Nice blog… great suggestions. I just recently finished “My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy” by Andrea Askowitz. It was terrific. A great read for alternative lifestyle as well as any one interested in parenting, pregnancy, relationships and more.
A really terrific, real, raw and witty book. A quick read too!
March 11th, 2009 at 7:09 am
Adrienne, thank you so much! I’ll be at the bookstore in two hours, ordering one.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
There is a terrific book called “Wonderfully Fearfully Made” by Robert Arpin a Catholic priest who had aids. Very touching, account of his life and activism in California. He was originally a priest in the east. Check it out. He passed away years ago.