Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Writing Desire: 60 Years of Gay Autobiography
by Bartram J. Cohler
University of Wisconsin Press
How to order The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a 20th Century Medical Re
by Pagan Kennedy
Bloomsbury
How to order Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual
by Robert Reid-Pharr
New York University Press
How to order Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic
Mark Padilla
University of Chicago Press
How to order Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
Sharon Marcus
Princeton University Press
How to order

Everyone agrees now that the queer publishing moment is over. Sure, there may be books with some gay or lesbian content, but the queer book boom of the 1990s is done. But as Saki, that queer genius-of-the-epigram noted, when there's general agreement about something, it's never true. This year's Lambda Literary Awards have well over 100 titles that are finalists in a wide variety of categories. All are interesting, some are great. Each is a distinct contribution to a still quite vibrant world of gay and lesbian letters.

H

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ere are five titles voted as finalists in the category "GLBT studies." It seems churlish to choose just one (which is a problem, since I'm on the panel of judges!).

Gay history comes in many forms. With memoirs, the history pours right from horses' mouths. Bartram J. Cohler's Writing Desire: 60 Years of Gay Autobiography (University of Wisconsin Press, 254 pages, $24.95) takes a vivid look back at two generations of gay men's memoirs. A psychoanalyst and social scientist, Cohler reconsiders books such as Arnie Kantrowitz's Under the Rainbow, Andrew Tobias's The Best Little Boy in the World, and Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast. Cohler's history is selective and idiosyncratic, like the lives on which it's based. Writing Desire ends up as a fascinating look at how some men lived, and how their lives reflect on us all.

Pagan Kennedy's The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a 20th Century Medical Revolution (Bloomsbury, 224 pages, $23.95, cloth) considers a little-known historical milestone. In 1939 British-born Laura Maude Dillon, then 28, began taking testosterone (newly discovered) to help her eventually become Laurence Michael Dillon, who then underwent the first phalloplasty and trained as a physician at Trinity College in Dublin (where he also became a noted rower). Later in life he met and romanced Ro- berta Cowell (born Robert Cowell), who was the first British male-to-female transsexual. (Talk about meeting cute!) Kennedy has a breezy, magazine-prose style, and Dillon's story takes many surprising twists -- he later becomes a Tibetan monk. But however Oprah-esque its material, this is a serious book that uncovers a history now little known.

On the more academic side is Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic (University of Chicago Press, 294 pages, $21). The Caribbean economy has long relied on tourism, with an active sex trade increasingly centered on male-male sexual exchanges. Most male Dominican sex-workers define themselves as heterosexual and have ongoing relationships with their wives and girlfriends. While "gay for pay" is nothing new, Padilla breaks new ground, giving a real voice to sex workers rarely heard in the gay press. As well, he takes the discussion of HIV transmission beyond stereotypes of blaming hustlers for transmitting AIDS to the "general population," or blaming North American or European gay men for "bringing HIV" to the Caribbean. Along the way, Padilla raises important questions about how we conceptualize sexual identities and balance health against sex's risks and rewards.

Sharon Marcus's Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 368 pages, $19.95) is a cornucopia that overflows with research, anecdote, and analysis. A Victorian scholar, Marcus brings to light some incredible facts: dominance and submission fantasies in the era's women's literature, the acceptability of lesbian "marriages," and sex fantasies about dolls in female pop culture. The material here comes from certain narrow slices of late 19th-century British society, but it forces a rethink about the range of possibilities open for Victorian women. Between Women escapes its scholarly pigeonhole, and is sure to delight anyone with a taste for queer history or Victoriana.

Robert Reid-Pharr has long been one of the most provocative writers about gay sex and race. His new collection of essays Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire and the Black American Intellectual (New York University Press, 183 pages, $20) takes a long look back on such seminal figures as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. These American thinkers, Reid-Pharr contends, paved the way for how we talk about race and sex now. He's particularly good when writing about the erotics of the Black Panthers -- how portraits of Huey Newton that gained so much media attention shaped that organization and its cultural impact. Once You Go Black is intellectually exciting and emotionally charged in a ways few books about big ideas are.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com