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Of the forty-three books I
read this year, I finished and reviewed thirty.
They were a mix of older releases and new, LGBTQ themed and general
fiction, well-known authors and not-so-well-known. This year I was all over the
map with my reading. I also read several classics (Steinbeck, Hemingway,
Capote, etc) that I didn’t bother to review. Of the LGBTQ-Themed books I did review the following
I found the most enjoyable.
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham
Peter and Rebecca Harris seem
to have it all. Midforties, denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, and within reach of
the pinnacle of their careers in the arts—he’s a dealer at a second-tier
gallery, she’s an editor at an art magazine. They own a fashionable loft, have
a daughter in college who’s living with an older woman, enjoy influential
friends, and Peter has an opportunity to take on a hot artist who will catapult
his gallery into that sought-after first tier. Could life be any sweeter?
Then Rebecca’s younger
brother comes for an extended visit. Ethan (given the pet name Mizzy, “the
mistake”) is a handsome, beguiling, mid-twenties drifter with a history of drug
problems. He is looking for direction, and Rebecca and the rest of her family
is determined to help him “straighten out his life.” But rather than helping
Mizzy find himself, Peter begins questioning his own career, his marriage, even
his sexuality. Suddenly, Peter’s carefully constructed world doesn’t seem so
appealing.
Wolverine
Cirque by Joseph Olshan
Sam and Mike are hikers and skiers.
They don’t just ski, the hike to the top of mountains with their skis strapped
to their shoulders, so they can experience the thrill of skiing the most
dangerous, almost vertical runs, in the world. Wolverine Cirque is such a
mountain, set in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah.
Sam is forty-five years old; Mike
is forty. They’ve skied some of the scariest terrain on the planet.
Wolverine Cirque will be a stretch, even for their advanced level of
experience. It will challenge their skill, courage, and their ability to
survive.
Enmeshed within their struggle with
the mountain is Sam’s reminiscence of his doomed relationship with Luc, a
professional soccer player. Though the flashbacks of their love affair, the
reader realizes that Sam’s battle with the mountain is really a futile effort
to hold back the course of his declining youth.
Call Me
By Your Name by Andre Aciman
Call Me By Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful
romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy, Elio, and a summer guest at
his parents’ mansion on the Italian Riviera. It is a story of one boy’s coming
out, about a slow and simmering desire, and about how love develops.
This
is a simple story, beautifully told. Andre Aciman shows significant talent in
his characterizations, plot development and attention to detail. This novel is
an excellent coming-of-age story with which many gays and lesbians can likely
relate. Every phase of adolescent love unfolds in striking detail—each fear,
each ache, each lurch of the heart, every giddy rush of sensation.
The
Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin
Set in Ireland during the early
1990s, Declan is dying of AIDS. With the help of two gay companions, he leaves
the hospital to spend a few days at the seaside home of his grandmother. There,
at the crumbling place of his youth, his sister Helen, his mother Lily, and his
grandmother Dora gather after a decade of estrangement. The three women
had no idea Declan was gay, let alone terminally ill with AIDS. Once they
recover from the shock, their primary goal becomes caring for Declan, who had
always been the binding force in this dysfunctional family.
Time On
Two Crosses – The Collected Writings Of Bayard Rustin Edited by Devon W.
Carbado and Donald Weise
Bayard Rustin was a key civil
rights strategist and humanitarian whose staunch advocacy of nonviolent
resistance shaped the course of social protests from the 1950’s through the
close of the twentieth century.
Many people today see him only as
an African American working with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other power
brokers in organized Labor and the Democratic Party for civil rights for
African Americans. Yet, he was both a black man and an openly gay man, fighting
for the civil rights of all oppressed people. Few African Americans engaged in
as broad a protest agenda as did Rustin; fewer still enjoyed his breadth of
influence in virtually every political sector, working with world leaders like
Kwame Nkrumah, President Lyndon Johnson, and Golda Meir.
Yet, for all his influence and all
his tireless efforts, Rustin remained an outsider in black civil rights circles
because they refused to accept his homosexuality. The very people who he was
fighting for shunned him. Yet even though the civil rights powers that often
dismissed him, perhaps no other figure contributed so much to the civil rights
movement.
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