I'm very grateful to Michael North for sharing these photos related to John Rechy's City of Night, which we'll be discussing next Wednesday, May 1. Michael comments: "At the Library of Congress, I looked up our first edition of City of Night, which has its original dust jacket. I thought the portrait of the 'youngman' John Rechy on the back and some of the descriptions might be of interest. ... They add some interesting color and context to its publication." That they do, Michael--thanks!   ..read more

In the latest installment in the New York Times' "Close Read" series, critic A.O. Scott explores Frank O'Hara's poem, "Having a Coke with You." As he point out, it is one of some 50 poems inspired by Vincent Warren, a dancer O'Hara met in 1959, during their nearly two-year love affair. Scott works into his commentary comparisons to Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and Rembrandt, to name just a few writers and artists, but my favorite part comes at the very end: O'Hara "was just 40 when he died, in July 1966, after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island. You can't really have a Coke with him. Except that ..read more

Washington Post reporter and analyst Philip Bump recently put together an article illustrating the post-2020 surge in calls for banning books throughout the United States. Most BookMen are already familiar with this disturbing phenomenon, and I have posted other items about it on this blog. But Bump's graphic depiction of the trend, using data from the American Library Association,  has even more impact ..read more

 News Is Out reports on the Queer Liberation Library, which it rightly calls "a new chapter in literary LGBTQ+ access and representation." Established last fall, the QLL is a free digital collection, which currently contains about 850 ebooks and audiobooks. Amber Dierking, one of its co-founders, notes: "We emphasize purchasing books from living authors and addressing demographic imbalances inherent in publishing. Our goal is broad representation, reflecting our community's diversity."  To borrow items from the QLL, one must first apply for free membership. Members can download ..read more

I can still recall when nearly every newspaper and magazine would periodically publish a  list of "Great American Novels." Indeed, if you go back through the years of this blog, you'll find many such compilations. But such roundups seem rarer and rarer these days, so I was interested in The Atlantic's list, totaling 136 novels. I'm pleased to say that I've heard of nearly all of them, though I've read fewer than a quarter of them. But I was surprised that only 12 of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and/or have prominent gay/queer themes (under 10%). That said, James Baldwin is one of ..read more

A decade ago, Edouard Louis published his first memoir, The End of Eddy, which we discussed in 2017. (We discussed his fourth book, Who Killed My Father, last year.) His latest book, Change: A Novel, has just been published in a translation by John Lambert. Here are reviews from the Washington Post, New York Times and The Guardian, along with an interview of the author in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It sure sounds like a contender for our next reading list ..read more

I want to thank Lee Levine very warmly for alerting me to an informative, inspiring Feb. 21 New York Times article titled "The Needle Has Been Moved." It explores the state of queer literature in Africa which, despite persecution of the LGBTQ community in many countries, is booming--especially in Nigeria. I must confess that I only knew one of the authors cited: Chiké Frankie Edozien, a 53-year-old Nigerian, whose 2017 memoir, Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man, I read and nominated for our reading list a few years ago. (I may renominate it this fall.) Here are a ..read more

The 10 of us who attended last night's BookMen meeting enjoyed a very lively discussion of Matthew Sturgis' Oscar Wilde: A Life (the original title; the paperback edition goes by a much jauntier handle that somehow makes me think of the "Just Jack" running joke from "Will and Grace": Oscar). The Sturgis bio, published in 2019, has many strengths: clear prose, and skillful use of insights gained from Wilde's correspondence and other primary sources that only recently became available to researchers. (To take just one example, Sturgis cites a grandson of Wilde who has evidence that Constanc ..read more

Many of you have probably heard that RuPaul Charles just published a new book, The House of Hidden Meanings. But did you know this is actually his fourth book and third memoir? (I had no idea.) His previous books were Lettin' It All Hang Out (1995), Workin' It: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Style (2010), and GuRu (2018).  Here are reviews of the new autobiography in the Washington Post, New York Times and The Daily Beast. A portrait of RuPaul taken in an Atlanta photo studio in 1979. About half of the memoir is set there.Credit...Tom Hill/WireImage, via ..read more

Although he never won any major literary prizes, James Baldwin (who would be turning 100 on Aug. 2 were he still with us) has become and more influential since his death in 1987. His appearance in the most recent episode of Ryan Murphy's "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans" on FX, as portrayed by Chris Chalk, shows us why. If watching that piques your curiosity about his books, check out this New York Times article, "The Best of James Baldwin." As it happens, our merry band has read two of his novels (Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head), but not the other selections the article recommends. Perhaps ..read more