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The Book Nook
2. Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction, edited by Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride and Donald Weise (Cleis Press) is a comprehensive and long-overdue collection of writings by African-Americans authors who happened to be Les, Bi or Gay. The essays that introduce the book and each section are as worth reading as are the literary selections themselves. 3. Burden of Ashes by Justin Chin (Alyson Books) is one of several gay literary memoirs that made 2002 so memorable. Chin, who is of Chinese descent, was born and grew up in Singapore's thriving Chinese community. Now living in the USA, Chin has won fame and notoriety as a poet and a performance artist. His talents are evident in this collection of autobiographical essays, which take its reader from Asia to America and to a world of the author's imagination.
6. Outlines: Gay Underground Gay Graphics from Before Stonewall by Thomas Waugh (Arsenal Pulp) is the latest exploration of our gay erotic past by the author of Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginning to Stonewall. As Waugh put it, "among the photos, magazines, and movies from the one hundred years or so before 1969 that I was gathering for this earlier book, an entirely different set of illustrations, drawings, and paintings kept materializing, and I didn't know exactly what to do with them. It gradually became clear that hundreds of illicit erotic graphic works, ranging from crude pencil drawings to paintings and prints of considerable sophistication, circulated clandestinely throughout North America and Europe during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. . . . I finally came to realize that I had to produce this book, to give the graphic fantasies of our ancestors, mostly anonymous, the space, the forum, and the audience they were demanding." Reading Out/Lines is like finding a time machine that was buried in the bad old days, when we were a "furtive fraternity". 7. Queer Jews, edited by David Shneer and Caryn Aviv (Routledge) is a "state of the union" report on the status of GLBT Jews in North America, Europe and Israel today. It also chronicles the rise of a "post-Stonewall generation" of openly queer Jews "who have come of age in a visible, empowered, unapologetically queer culture." The first book of its kind since the classic Twice Blessed, Queer Jews features, among others, Orthodox rabbis coming out of the closet; FTM transsexuals davening at the Western Wall; the "First Jewish Street Protest" in New York City and a "Queer Naked Seder" in San Francisco. 8. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's Press) is the most talked-about, amazing, disturbing, shocking, humorous and delightful queer memoir of this year or, perhaps, any other year. A child of the most dysfunctional family since the early Caesars, young Augusten goes from the frying pan to the fire when he is given away by his alcoholic, abusive father and neurotic, poetry-writing mother to be raised by her psychiatrist and his even more disturbed family. Burroughs's childhood experiences are, to say the least, shocking, but we close this book reassured that the author survived all of his ordeals and has become a great writer in the process. 9. The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men by David Nimmons (St. Martin's Press) is a comprehensive and controversial study of gay men's lives and behavior. Unlike some apologists for the gay community, Nimmons does not pretend that gay men are just like everyone else. Rather, he argues that gay men have created our own distinctive cultures; that we are less violent and more caring than our straight brothers; and that we have forged new trails in matters of sex, friendships and relationships. He even puts our notorious bareback orgies and circuit parties in their proper place and sees half-full glasses where others view half-empty vessels. 10. Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After by Kevin Bentley (Green Candy Press) is a personal account of gay life in San Francisco, before and after AIDS, as experienced by a surviving veteran. Based on his personal diaries, Bentley chronicles the "golden age" of the 1970's; when thousands of young gay men flocked to San Francisco in search of sexual freedom. Unlike some other writers, Bentley is not ashamed of his sexual past, and Wild Animals I Have Known is full of the erotic exploits that made San Francisco famous. In Bentley's memoirs the sex is at the heart of the narrative, as it was during that place and time in our collective history. All ten books are great reads, and all are recommended. But only one book is
Activist Jack Nichols (who wrote the Foreword) was not the only subject who "[u]pon meeting [Cain], I found myself speaking uninhibitedly, knowing intuitively that he would honorably utilize whatever it was I might say." That Cain was able to put cautious activists at ease deserves an award in itself. Hopefully, the Scarecrow Press will see fit to publish a cheaper, paperback edition of this essential Book of the Year. Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance author who lives in South Florida with his domestic partner. During 2002, Monteagudo contributed essays to the non-fiction anthologies BEFORE STONEWALL (edited by Vern L. Bullough; Harrington Park Press) and FOUND TRIBE (edited by Lawrence Schimel; Sherman Asher); and stories to the fiction anthologies SEDUCED 2 and WILD AND WILLING (both edited by John Patrick and John Butler; STARbooks). Monteagudo can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com. |
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At Swim, Two Boys is one of Jesse Monteagudo's Top Ten Books of the Year, but did it earn Book of the Year honors? Read on to find out ... 
Letters to Montgomery Clift moved GayToday book reviewer Jesse Monteagudo in 2002 
Leading the Parade is the Book of the Year