Gayest book ever
The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a robust meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every free piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.
Around lunchtime, dense into this who-cares sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a new Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an outstanding writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our country has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a country but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is dead. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”
And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become brief more than farcical theater, our towns and capital councils and neighborhoods are where real change can be enacted. There, he says, we have a voice. And while Nathan’s talking
This is the gayest love story ever told
When Jeremy Atherton Lin was writing his second book, Deep House, about his relationship with his long-term British partner (whom he simply calls “Famous”), the California-born, East Sussex-based writer knew that it couldn’t just be about their love story.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt like any courteous of memoir that I write can possibly be isolated,” he explains over Zoom from Brussels, where he is currently on a writing residency. “The notion that our story is not just our own, but is connected to those who came before us, comes really naturally to me.”
This is an approach Atherton Lin took with his first manual, the award-winning and brilliant Gay Bar: Why We Went Out. A daring, lubricious amalgam of meticulously researched cultural history, social geography and intimate memoir, that book was a love letter to queer spaces – one resisting the narrative that gay bars are always rainbow-tinted, fan-thwacking protected spaces. Gay Bar was a reminder that these spots can be sleazy and dirty, as well as sites of oppression, disappointment and exclusion.
Deep House follows a similar form, although th
(A time capsule of gender non-conforming opinion, from the belated s)
The Publishing Triangle complied a selection of the best lesbian and same-sex attracted novels in the slow s. Its purpose was to broaden the appreciation of lesbian and same-sex attracted literature and to promote discussion among all readers same-sex attracted and straight.
The Triangle&#;s Best
The judges who compiled this list were the writers Dorothy Allison, David Bergman, Christopher Bram, Michael Bronski, Samuel Delany, Lillian Faderman, Anthony Heilbut, M.E. Kerr, Jenifer Levin, John Loughery, Jaime Manrique, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Sarah Schulman, and Barbara Smith.
1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
2. Giovanni&#;s Room by James Baldwin
3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
4. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
5. The Immoralist by Andre Gide
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
7. The Adv of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
8. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
9. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Zami by Audré Lorde
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
A Boy&#;s Own Story by Edmund White
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
Maurice by E. M. Forster
The Town a
Deep House: The Gayest Care Story Ever Told (Hardcover)
Praise For…
“Deep House&#;goes from the pensoroso of the leading history of marriage equality we have to the allegro of a very hot gay love story told in the funniest, most tender way.”—Edmund White
“Deep House&#;is that rare and beautiful book—equally illuminating and pleasurable. I loved its luminous transcription of gender non-conforming life, its incisive and intimate legal history of gay marriage in the U.S., its transcendently sexy and propulsive love story, and its portrait of social change that promises not the fantasy of permanent liberty, but that more ephemeral reward: bliss. It is exactly the book we need right now.”—Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season and Girlhood
“I love this book’s honesty and originality; the intricacy and intimacy with which it studies the politics of love and desire; its huge intellect and dirty, beautiful heart.”
—Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man and Mothers“Jeremy Atherton Lin artfully combines easily forgotten social history with vivid, intimate accounts of his own adore life to show us how, for queer people, the often-im
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