Jack Holmes and His Friend: Edmund White’s Wisest and Funniest
Posted on January 17, 2012
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 2 Comments
Edmund White’s new novel, Jack Holmes and his Friend tells the stories of two men–one straight and one gay–in the nineteen sixties and seventies. It isn’t surprising that Mr. White brilliantly describes the story of Jack Holmes–the gay character. (He covered similar territory in his memoir City Boy.) The big surprise of this book is how well he renders the straight character. Mr. White inhabits this character–telling his story in the first person. At times Mr. White projects this character’s heterosexist attitudes so well that it can be maddening to the reader. But Mr. White has created something unique here. And at the root of it are two characters who are three-dimensional, fully realized–sometimes surprising, but never inconsistent.
The glue that binds these two characters together is friendship. But this friendship isn’t exactly the Aristotelean ideal. Indeed it can be argued that this isn’t the story of a friendship at all, but rather of one gay man’s unrequited love for a straight man. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that these two characters–so different on the surface–live parallel lives and in the end come to possess values that are surprisingly similar.
Of course it isn’t accidental that Mr. White chose to set this novel when he did. The sixties and the seventies were a time of sexual revolution for straights as well as gays. And make no mistake this is a very sexy novel. And sometimes this can be surprisingly humorous. Indeed while Jack Holmes and his Friend is Edmund White’s wisest novel it is also his funniest. Consider this paragraph:
Billy was naked, and his body looked much more childlike than Jack remembered. He had a shower-pink butt, very prominent and cherubic but unwobbling, and a kid’s little paunch with a tidy “inny” belly button and just a touch of blond pubic hair dusted around a small penis that curved snugly around his sac. His chest was hairless and flat and his arms slightly plump. Resting on top of so much childish inconsequence was a big, surprisingly adult head with horrible razor-cut hair, a geranium-red complexion, and a heavy smoker’s lines bracketing his mouth. Jack no longer found him attractive
I love the way Mr. White sums up the mounting humor of this paragraph with one short punchline.
I strongly recommend this novel.
Edmund White’s Jack Holmes and his Friend is published by Bloomsbury.
Five Good Queer-Friendly Coffee Table Books
Posted on December 21, 2011
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With the holidays upon us, it’s a good time to think about buying a high quality coffee table book as a gift. There are quite a lot of them to choose from this year. Here are five that are good:
1. Pilgrimage, Annie Leibovitz. There are no portraits in Annie Leibovitz’s new book. And yet it is fully inhabited with powerful personalities. Henry David Thoreau, Eleanor Roosevelt, Annie Oakley are all present here. Ms. Leibovitz achieves this effect by photographing places: Walden Pond, Val-Kill, the Annie Oakley Museum She also took photographs of the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and others, as well as of Niagara Falls and The Yosemite Valley. These photographs are deeply personal, beautiful and evocative. It’s nice to see that Ms. Leibovitz is at the height of her powers, exploring new territories–literally and figuratively.
2. Cecil Beaton The New York Years, Donald Albrecht. Quite simply this book is magnificent. Beautiful photos of Cecil Beaton’s duplex apartment at The Sherry Netherland, sketches and portraits of Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo, Elsa Maxwell, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Geldzahler, Martha Graham, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and many more. Donald Albrecht’s prose is lucid and intelligent. His exploration of Beaton’s complex relationship with Truman Capote is particularly thoughtful.
3. Gay in America, Scott Pasfield. It says something about the state of gay America that all of the subjects in this book look ordinary. These gay men are racially diverse, young and old and spread geographically across the country–in urban, suburban and rural locations. They are all attractive. And none of them looks particularly unusual. They don’t look like guys you’d see in a nightclub. They look like guys you’d bump into in the supermarket–if you were lucky. Even the super-sexy Dan Choi looks (almost) ordinary here. The photograph of him inside a bedroom of his boyhood home is beautiful, poignant. And yet he looks like the boy next door here. Which I guess he is. Now if only he’d just move next door to me.
4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: The Official 50th Anniversary Companion, Sarah Gristwood. Truman Capote was notoriously disdainful of the film version of his novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but in some ways the movie is actually better than the book. Blake Edwards dispensed with the gratuitous racism at the beginning of the book. And he added a new character: Patricia Neal’s Chanel-suited cougar. Her brief appearance is the second best thing about the movie. The first best thing is of course Audrey Hepburn. This book features photographs of on location shooting of the movie, plus pages from the script, background on how the story developed and of course, numerous photographs of Ms. Hepburn waiting for her takes–effortlessly lounging in Givenchy.
5. Judy: A Legendary Career, John Fricke. Just how important is Judy Garland to gays today? In her lifetime, Ms. Garland had a huge gay following. ”Somewhere over the Rainbow” became a gay anthem. And Judy Garland’s funeral was for many years thought to be one of the catalysts of the Stonewall riots. But more recently, Steven Carter’s book largely debunked the Judy Garland funeral-Stonewall Riots connection. And today gay youths sometimes only know of Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz(!) For those who wish to dig deeper, may I suggest: Judy: A Legendary Career. It is a beautifully-produced, richly illustrated book of all of Ms. Garland’s films. Even the minor ones get some coverage here including: gorgeous photographs of on set filming, plus backstories on the film, its opening, box office etc. If you’d like to read the negative and positive critical responses to (say) I Could Go On Singing (yes, it did get some good reviews) then this book is for you.
Edmund White’s Sacred Monsters is Richly Rewarding.
Posted on November 29, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
Edmund White’s latest book, Sacred Monsters, is a collection of short profiles of artistic figures. In many ways Sacred Monsters is reminiscent of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, but unlike Mr. Strachey, Mr. White has no hidden or unhidden agendas here. These profiles are on the whole appreciative. And they are also objective. So while Mr. White can sometimes be brutally honest, his humanity always seeps through. It also helps that he knew several of his subjects personally.
As defined by Mr. White, a sacred monster–the English translation of the French expression, monstre sacre–is “a venerable or popular celebrity so well known that he or she is above criticism, a legend who despite eccentricities or faults cannot be measured by normal standards.” That covers a lot of ground. And Mr. White does not pretend to put all of the sacred monsters into this book, but his selections for this volume are interesting in themselves. Fifteen of them are queer. The rest are just fabulous. Like Edith Wharton who “toward the end of her life had twenty-two servants in two houses,” and “wrote the first draft of her most American novel Ethan Frome, in French as an exercise.” Mr. White always has just the right fun facts, but these essays are also surprisingly passionate, because Mr. White always has a deep personal connection to his subjects–even when he is writing about historical figures.
The arrangement of these essays isn’t obviously logical. The reader is asked to leap from Edith Wharton to John Cheever; from Ford Madox Ford to Truman Capote. And so you will be tempted to skip around. I must advise against this. Because the connections between these profiles are visceral. And if you do skip around, you might miss a surprising pleasure,”The Loves of the Falcon,” Mr. White’s profile of Glenway Wescott–an author who Mr. White was personally acquainted with. That said, I must say that Mr. White’s profile of Truman Capote, “Sweating Windows,” is my personal favorite. In fact, if you read no other essay in this book, you will have gotten your money’s worth with this one alone.
In “Sweating Mirrors,” Mr. White describes a summertime visit to Truman Capote’s apartment. It’s ninety-nine degrees outside and Mr. White is looking forward to some serious air conditioning. But Mr. Capote informs him that the air conditioning is broken and leads him into his hot, steamy apartment. It seems weird that the air conditioning could be broken in the ultra-modern United Nations Plaza building. And it gets weirder. Mr. Capote’s Music for Chameleons has just been published and Mr. White congratulates him on it. The interview that follows is punctuated by Mr. Capote’s quick trips to another room from which he emerges relaxed, reinvigorated and finally: unchanged. Along the way Robert Mapplethorpe and Marcus Leatherdale arrive to photograph him and he is seemingly unaffected by this sexy duo. And the interview continues. Music for Chameleons is dedicated to Tennessee Williams. Was this amends for the unflattering portrait in the Answered Prayers Esquire Magazine chapters?
Ah, Answered Prayers. That potentially great American novel that never quite got finished. Why not? Mr. White has given this some thought:
The rich have the means to realize their whims and the effrontery to avow their desires. Sex, travel gambling and intrigue are their sports, while itineraries and adulteries provide them with conversation, just as loyalty to the clan, devotion to fashion and the display of perfect manners constitute their virtues. Above all, jet-setters love a good story. Too bad Capote didn’t stay sober long enough to betray his friends more thoroughly.
Another personal favorite of mine is “The Strange Charms of John Cheever.” In it, Mr. White argues that it was Mr. Cheever’s sobriety and his acceptance of his homosexuality that lay at the root of his claim to literary greatness. On Falconer he writes:
What was remarkable was that Cheever had the sobriety to think through a novel and sustain its unified design. No longer were his pages inspired riffs held together with paper clips and chewing gum; now he’d turned out a shapely novel. Moreover there was a calm wisdom in this Falconer his masterpiece, and in it he had quietly come to terms with his homosexuality.
Mr. White is as comfortable writing about visual artists as he is about writers. Indeed some of his best writing can be found in his essays on Auguste Rodin and David Hockney. But in his Robert Mapplethorpe profile he really opens up. He begins by describing Mr. Mapplethorpe–who he knew personally in the late seventies and early eighties. ”Mapplethorpe…imposed his personal visual style on every element of his environment, from his simple, sturdy, virile Stickley furniture to his collections of glass and pottery to his own clothes, his saturnine leathers… rather supple, form-fitting Dutch black leathers elegantly seamed in blue.” And then Mr. White takes great pains to describe the historical context of Mr. Mapplethorpe’s work:
The exact historical and cultural moment of the late 1970’s in gay New York is hard to recreate partly because it was overshadowed after 1981 by the dark and ever growing anxiety generated by AIDS, which not only cast a pall over an earlier exuberance but also changed values so radically that one can scarcely understand that vanished era.
Mr. White spends much of this essay defending Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. Mr. Mapplethorpe’s photographs have been attacked from so many angles–left right and in between–that Mr. White’s responses to them can be dizzying. I’ve never been a huge fan of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, but reading the various attacks on him, it occurred to me that they all have one thing in common: sex. And this is where the historical context comes in. Because while there was once a time when sexuality was celebrated in our culture, that time has passed. As Mr. White puts it: ”Today…gay assimilationists play down the troubling question of sexuality altogether.” All the more reason for this queer reader to give Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs another look.
In all there are twenty-one profiles in this book. They include E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, James Merrill, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust and Henry James. The Paul Bowles profile, “The Desert of Solitude,” is particularly interesting, because Mr. White contrasts the plot of The Sheltering Sky with a remarkably similar trip he took with a friend who was dying of AIDS.
Sacred Monsters is another magnificent achievement from one of America’s great authors. I strongly recommend this book.
Edmund White’s Sacred Monsters is published by Magnus Books.
More Good News for Queer Readers: Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is Now Available in Paperback.
Posted on October 4, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Queer Lit News, Strong Recommendation | Leave a Comment
Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn–the latest Tales of the City installment–is available in paperback today.
As queer readers will recall, I loved this book. I was particularly impressed by how Mr. Maupin managed to pull together a reunion of the (surviving) characters in a way that feels natural and organic. San Francisco isn’t the same today as it was in the seventies and eighties and neither are these characters.They are older and in some cases wiser. But the joy for this queer reader is the realization that they are alive and (for the most part) well.
This is my favorite Tales of the City book because, quite simply, it is the most poignant. I strongly recommend this book.
Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is published by Harper Perennial.
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Happy Birthday Alison Bechdel!
Posted on September 10, 2011
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Until a few years ago Alison Bechdel was best known for “Dykes to Watch Out For.” This iconic comic strip provided regularly updated, humorous insights into the multi-faceted LGBT world.
And then In 2006 something dramatic happened to Ms. Bechdel: her memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was published. As queer readers will recall, I loved this book. It would however be somewhat more difficult to recall just how many awards and honors this graphic novel has received. My own count is thirteen–and you can click here for the list–but I probably missed a few.
Proving Tolstoy’s statement that “every family is unhappy in its own way,” Ms. Bechdel presents us with a uniquely unhappy family. The fact that this family is her own makes this book all the more powerful. Reading it for the second time, it occurred to me that the graphic novel format is perfectly suited for the personal memoir. We remember our lives visually as well as verbally. And these memories are often in single frame with a short line of description and perhaps a sentence or two of contemporary understanding. As an example of this, Ms Bechdel draws a detailed panel of a family at church–the kids visibly bored, the mother deadpan and the father eyeing an altar boy in a slightly lecherous fashion. The caption above the image:
HE APPEARED TO BE AN IDEAL HUSBAND AND FATHER, FOR EXAMPLE.
And then, inlaid into the image, another caption:
BUT WOULD AN IDEAL HUSBAND HAVE SEX WITH TEENAGE BOYS?
The title of the book refers to Ms Bechdel’s childhood home. ”Fun home” is the kids’ ironic name for their house–which was also a funeral parlor. But this is doubly ironic, because this funeral parlor/house is something of a fun house. And Ms. Bechdel’s memoir is a hall of mirrors–in which her coming out represents a mirror image of her father’s (apparent) decision to remain in the closet.
Above all Fun Home is a deeply personal journey of discovery–a sincere, intelligent quest for human understanding.
If for some reason you have not yet experienced it, I strongly recommend this book.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is published by Mariner Books.
Bob Smith’s New Novel, Remembrance of Things I Forgot, is Superb.
Posted on June 9, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
What is it about time travel that is so attractive to us? Is it nostalgia? Or is it the existential desire to free ourselves from time–the one element that defines our life experience as finite? For Bob Smith, author of the just published novel, Remembrance of Things I Forgot, the answer seems to be, quite simply: the desire to fix things. When the main character, John Sherktson, accidentally finds himself inside a time machine wittily labelled the Finney Room he makes the decision to transport himself back to the mid-nineteen-eighties, in order to stop George W. Bush from being president and to prevent his sister from committing suicide. It says something about the quality of Mr. Smith’s writing that he manages to somehow balance these two: historic political satire and compelling family drama. Because while there is no denying this is all a lot of fun–the plot to entrap a young George W. Bush in a photographed sex act is delightful–the primary motivation of John is serious. For this queer reader, the net result is a novel that is frequently humorous, a genuine page-turner and surprisingly moving.
As queer readers will recall, Mr. Smith is the author of the humorous novel, Selfish and Perverse. He was also the first openly gay comic to appear on the Tonight Show. And he wrote for MadTV for a few years. In short, he is a very funny man. And he has fun with the idea of time travel. As when he explores the idea of flirting with his twenty years younger self. Yes it’s easy to crack up someone who you know will definitely get all the jokes. But that doesn’t make it any less fun.
This is is a rare novel in that it gets better as it goes along. As the novel progresses, more characters are introduced and they are all well-rounded, complex and yes, frequently funny. I particularly enjoyed John’s mother, whose sense of humor is skeptical, even cynical. Her aversion to politicians is summed-up succinctly:
Politicians. Sometimes I think we need freedom from speeches.
His conspiracy theory-believing father is also very interesting. And Mr. Smith renders John’s Republican boyfriend as a multi-faceted character. He may be a Republican, but he’s also a mensch. And there’s always the possibility that something might happen in the book that will actually prevent him from becoming a Republican. We can always hope. And that’s what this novel is all about: hope.
I strongly recommend this book.
Bob Smith’s new novel Remembrance of Things I Forgot is published today.
University of Wisconsin Press.
UPDATE July 18, 2011: Check out the new promotional video for this book. One of the many highlights: Lea Delaria reading the Dick Cheney part.
UPDATE January 23,2012: QueerReader.com has declared this to be the best novel of 2011.
The Best Novel of 2010 is in Paperback Today: Stephen McCauley’s Insignificant Others.
Posted on June 7, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
As queer readers will recall, I loved Stephen McCauley’s most recent novel, Insignificant Others.It is, in my opinion, the best novel of 2010. The characters are multi-dimensional, the Boston setting is lovingly rendered and the plot is both natural and surprising. And while I have a problem with defining this as a “comic novel,” there is no doubt that it is laugh-out loud funny. Click here for my complete review.
Stephen McCauley’s novel, Insignificant Others, is published by Simon and Schuster.
Available today in paperback.
Also: Nook and Kindle.
Celluloid Activist: Finally the Biography Worthy of Vito Russo.
Posted on May 10, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Strong Recommendation | 1 Comment
I knew Vito Russo. And I suppose that’s part of the reason I shed a a few tears at the end of reading Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo. I’m not going to say that I was actually friends with Mr. Russo or that I was particularly close to him, but I distinctly remember his presence at ACT-UP meetings in the nineteen-eighties. He was, I thought at the time, the definition of the fierce gay. His almost-constant smile was laced with a thread of anger: a determination to fight for his happiness. Behind this I sensed a hint of melancholia–a sadness that he had to fight at all. And in his eyes, there was a sweetness that was indescribable. Michael Schiavi accurately renders these almost-anarchic Monday night ACT-UP meetings. They were a free-for-all. And it wasn’t always pretty. We were angry. And sometimes we took it out on each other. There was yelling and screaming and whistling. But when Vito talked we all listened. And everybody loved him. I honestly had no idea just how ill he was at the time. There were so many things I didn’t know about him until I read Celluloid Activist. By the end of it, I felt as though I had gotten to know Vito personally–that I had made a friend. And lost him.
The hospital room where Vito Russo died was not entirely devoid of joy. Near the end, then-Mayor David Dinkins paid a surprise visit. Common Threads producer Rob Epstein arrived from San Francisco and promptly parked his Oscar on Vito’s bedside table. The private room was filled with visitors. And Vito responded to it all with his characteristic sense of humor. But this was not what he wanted. Not by a long shot. A short time before, he ironically remarked:
I wish I could just stop worrying about it all the time. After all, it’s such a little thing. Horrible painful death in the prime of life. What’s the big deal?
Before AIDS defined both his body and his activism, before his participation in the Gay Activist’s Alliance re-defined Queer Identity, Vito Russo was a passionate lover of film. He owned a movie projector as a child and spent most of the rest of his life accumulating films. But more than anything else, he loved screening them. Perhaps nothing gave him more satisfaction than showing movies to other people. It was of course a natural for him to screen the movies for the GAA’s post-Stonewall Firehouse Flicks series. After the success of the first screening: Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, Vito Russo became convinced that there was value to gays watching movies together. Years before these films–and more–would be re-defined and deconstructed in his classic book The Celluloid Closet, Vito was doing what he was always doing: showing movies to his friends and laughing along with them.
And yet it is impossible to think of him as a film historian who was way ahead of his time without thinking of him as an activist. The Firehouse Flicks screenings were, after all, an indirect effect of the Stonewall Riots. And while Mr. Russo did not participate in these riots, witnessing them in person had a profound effect on him. From then on, he was an activist. He would remain an aficionado of New York’s cabaret scene. And he, of course, continued to love film more than almost anything else. But whenever a major queer political event arose, he more often than not was there. Like the time a New York City Gay Rights Ordinance didn’t make it out of committee–one of numerous disappointments, which never seemed to discourage Vito. When someone on the other side taunted the gay men by saying, “Goodbye girls!” Vito’s response was instantaneous:
We’re not girls. We’re men who fuck men and you’d better get used to it!
The message was clear: We might have lost this round, but we’re not going back to the old days. Stonewall changed all that.
The portrait that Mr. Schiavi paints isn’t always flattering. He reveals that Vito Russo could be abusive to his lovers–in at least one instance, physically abusive. He also illustrates how he used his position at The Advocate to help closeted stars–like Peter Allen and Lily Tomlin–stay in the closet. Sometimes he was star-struck and allowed this to prevent him from being the activist he always aspired to be.
But a hagiography wouldn’t have done Vito Russo justice. Instead Mr. Schiavi presents us with a real human being. Three-dimensional and imperfect. And a much-beloved person.
I strongly recommend this book.
Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo by Michael Schiavi is published by The University Of Wisconsin Press.
UPDATE May 17, 2011: Check out Band of Thebes’ take on this book. Along with a link to this review, it also features an excellent (and much longer) review by veteran journalist Doug Ireland.
The End of Queer Reading as We Knew it: On the closing of A Different Light Bookstore.
Posted on April 30, 2011
Filed Under Deep Thoughts, Queer Lit News | 1 Comment
I’m old enough to remember a time when literally everyone I knew regularly visited a bookstore named A Different Light. I am actually referring to the first New York location–on Hudson Street. That store functioned as something of a drop-in center. I, myself, would go there several times a week to pick up a copy of The Native or OutWeek or maybe even Christopher Street. I would also regularly thumb through the pages of The Gay Times, which was flown in from London and which I couldn’t actually afford to buy. I’d usually check to see if the books I wanted to read had made it to paperback yet. But mostly I would go to chat up whoever was there including one of the employees who I happened to have something of a one-sided crush on.
The recent announcement that the last A Different Light Bookstore–in San Francisco–will soon close has me struggling to make sense of the history of it. Re-reading Edmund White’s excellent memoir, City Boy, I was reminded of the fact that A Different Light was part of a coast-to-coast phenomenon.
In the seventies some fifty gay bookstores opened up across the country. This was the era before the big chains such as Barnes and Noble. Suddenly, in the bars in every small town lots of small, free gay publications we’re being handed out that would reprint syndicated book reviews. It was all pretty tacky, but undeniably grassroots.
By the nineteen-eighties gay bookstores had matured–as had queer lit. Titles by Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, Armistead Maupin and Patrick Gale were selling briskly. Perhaps the AIDS crisis had made the community more serious. Or maybe we were just hungry for exposure to well-rounded gay characters–characters which were almost entirely absent from popular media.
But as Mr. White reminds us, the term “gay literature,” also had a downside:
It’s true that as a movement it did isolate us–to our advantage initially, though ultimately to our disadvantage. At first it drew the attention of critics to our writing, but in the end (after our books didn’t sell) it served to quarantine us into a small confined space. Before the category of “gay writing” was invented, books with gay content (Vidal’s City and Pillar, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Isherwood’s The Single Man) were widely reviewed and often became bestsellers. After a label was applied to them they were dismissed as being of special interest only to gay people. They could only preach to the converted. The truth however was that gay literature was every bit as varied as straight literature.
For a variety of reasons American cityscapes now find themselves almost completely devoid of gay bookstores. There are a few notable, fabulous exceptions–Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia comes to mind–but the gay bookstore phenomenon seems to be a thing of the past. It is, however a huge mistake to say that queer lit is dead. Mr. White himself is an amazingly prolific author of quality literature–both fiction and non-fiction. He recently informed me that he has completed yet another novel: Jack Holmes and his Friend. And I understand a memoir of his Paris years is forthcoming. Andrew Holleran continues to write–his last novel Grief, was excellent. Armistead Maupin’s latest Tales of the City book was my favorite–so far. I loved Stephen McCauley’s latest novel, Insignificant Others. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a must-read. And Sebastian Stuart’s The Hour Between is sublime.
The closure of yet another gay bookstore saddens me. But it would be a mistake to think that the disappearance of gay bookstores necessarily signals the end of gay lit. I have written before about the long-term effects of the digitization of books. But it is perhaps social media which will in the long run have the most impact. Mr. White wrote of distributing reprinted book reviews in bars in the seventies. Today we have the power to distribute thousands of reviews all over the world through the internet–including social media.
Edmund White’s City Boy is now available in paperback and Kindle.
Bloomsbury.
Read Gemini Bites.
Posted on March 1, 2011
Filed Under Book Review, Queer Lit News | Leave a Comment
One of the few bright spots in the book world–aside from cookbooks–is youth fiction. Youth fiction–or YAF–hasn’t always gotten the respect that it deserves. But the publishing world’s attitude has changed significantly with the phenomenal success of the Stephenie Meyer books, Hunger Games and others. The good news here is, of course: the kids are reading. What sometimes gets lost in the story is the number of youth novels which include well-adjusted, three dimensional, teen-aged gay characters. Perhaps the best example of this is Patrick Ryan’s Gemini Bites which is published today.
As the title suggests, Gemini Bites is about a set of twins who find themselves involved with someone who just might be a vampire. These teenaged twins are fraternal–one is a straight female, the other is a gay male. They are part of a large family. The potential vampire is a goth sixteen year-old who finds himself staying in their attic for a while. Mortal or not, this houseguest is irresistible to both of the twins. The genius of this book, is its voice –or rather its voices. The novel is written in the voices of the two twins–alternating from chapter to chapter. And Mr. Ryan brilliantly captures the voices of these two alike–but not at all alike–characters. He even manages to humorously weave in the two characters’ misconceptions of each other. I should add that there is also a hilarious subplot throughout the book: one of the twins becomes so obsessed with a boy at school who is a born-again Christian, that she pretends to be born-again herself.
If all this sounds just a little bit light, it is. Light and sweet. Like a perfect pastry. I recommend this book to queer readers of all ages.
Gemini Bites is published by Scholastic,
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