by Richard Labonte
"Annabel," by Kathleen Winter. Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, 472 pages, $14.95 paper.
A baby is born in 1968, in far-from-everywhere northern Labrador, Canada. He is a hermaphrodite – a word unfamiliar to the midwife present at his birth, and to his stoic father and his fanciful mother – with both penis and vagina. His is a masculine world of men who trap for a living. After some days, then, his unsettled parents settle on Wayne as his name. He will be raised a boy, but his shadow self, Annabel, the name his mother whispers when they are alone, will live within him for two decades. Wayne heads into the bush with his father, but at home he dreams of synchronized swimming and begs for a sequined bathing suit. He is she, and they are a fluid, pastel contradiction in a rigid, black and white world. Puberty sets in and there is a medical emergency – Wayne's abdomen floods with menstrual blood. And, once adult, Wayne will transform himself into who he wants to be. Winter's dazzling debut addresses the riddle of gender and the tragedy of conformity with astonishing insight and eloquence.
"The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse," by Lonely Christopher. Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Books, 200 pages, $15.95 paper.
Odd academic book title. Odd pseudonymous author name. Odd character names: Dumb and Orange, Vowel Shift and Burning Church; even one story, "Game Belly," in which the nocturnal characters have no names – "the girl with a pale face," "the kid with long hair." And odd story structure: the first, "That Which," is composed entirely (and, improbably, engagingly) of one-syllable words. "Milk," at four pages the shortest, is a deadpan study in how a family copes with a brown horse named Black Beauty in their kitchen; "Nobody Understands Thorny When," the longest, recounts the abduction of young Thorny by an older man, Normal Chapter, and of their unexpected, unsettling physical and emotional relationship. The nine stories in this exuberantly nontraditional collection will challenge traditionalists who prefer their queer fiction be written by the formal likes of Edmund White or Colm Toibin. One hopes those readers will accept that challenge – homo fiction can always use more young writers who are queer in every sense of the word.
"It's All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs, 34 Holidays, and 50 Boxes of Wine (A Memoir)," by Wade Rouse. Crown Books, 304 pages, $23.99 hardcover.
With his fourth memoir, Rouse is venturing into the my-ha-ha-life territory trod for many years by queer predecessors David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs (from both of whom he sought pre-publication blurbs, to no avail). He's fresher than Sedaris and less sour than Burroughs, thank goodness – both of those writers have drained the well of comic family anecdotes quite dry. Not so Rouse, whose previous memoirs focused on his Missouri Ozarks upbringing, his stint as a prep school publicist, and his move back to rural roots – witty writing about more than family dysfunction. His eccentric family inhabits this book, true, but its fiercely funny focus is on how his parents, his relatives, and his partner handle holidays – not always with great grace, but always with engaging style. Chinese New Year, St. Patrick's Day, Mother's Day, his anniversary (a gift card to Trader Joe's isn't romantic), Election Day and of course Thanksgiving (awkward) and Christmas (stressful) are featured – along with, in a bit of a thematic stretch, one of this fun book's weirdest celebrations: the Pez Collector's National Convention.
"Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South," by Jeff Mann. Bear Bones Books/Lethe Press, 236 pages, $15 paper.
Mann, a prolific writer, is a complex fellow with many audiences. The prose in this fiercely personal collection is drawn from annual best gay erotica collections, from a journal of West Virginia folk culture, from a magazine of gay spirituality, from literary magazines, even from daily newspapers. Despite that range of readership, however, Mann returns often – but always with a fresh perspective – to the passions by which he defines himself: for Bear culture, for bondage and leather, and the muscle of men (and, in several essays, for the unattainable body of country singer Tim McGraw); for the pleasure he finds in travel and cooking; for the queer honesty he brings to his teaching; and for his roots in Appalachia, as the descendant of hill-folk and as a gentlemanly Southerner. That passion extends, intellectually and emotionally, to Mann's un-conflicted affection for the Confederate flag, which has been redefined by the righteous, he laments, "as an emblem not of homeland but of hatred." And if there's a single thread running through Mann's collection, it's how much he cherishes home.
Featured Excerpt
I woke with a start last New Year's Eve after my head had fallen into the giant red enamelware popcorn bowl I was holding in my lap. Homemade caramel corn was stuck to my chin. I jerked upright and looked over at my partner, Gary, whose head was painfully tilted sideways – like a broken jack-in-the-box. "Get up!" I shouted, staring at the clock. "Just look at ourselves! We're pathetic." "It's New Year's Eve," Gary said sleepily. "It's what we do on New Year's Eve. It's called relaxing." "It's 8 p.m.," I said. "We're not relaxing. We're comatose." It seemed shocking to me that we had become our parents some time between dinner and "The Wheel of Fortune."
– from "It's All Relative," by Wade Rouse
Footnotes
BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR: The University of Wisconsin Press features four strong titles in its current catalogue, starting in April with Michael Schiavi's "Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo"; Russo, who died in 1990, was the author of "Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies," considered "the foundational text" of queer cinema studies – but merely one facet of a pioneering gay liberation and AIDS activist's life… JUNE SEES PUBLICATION of Bob Smith's second novel (after "Selfish and Perverse"), "Remembrance of Things I Forgot," a wickedly funny blend of science fictional time travel and sassy domestic drama; of Bronson Lemer's "The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq," a poignantly personal distillation of what it was like to conceal one's sexuality in the era of Don't Ask, Don't Tell; and, edited by Lazaro Lima and Felice Picano, of "Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing," an anthology featuring Arturo Aria, Achy Obejas, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Susana Chavez-Silvermand and Emanuel Xavier, among others… "IT GETS BETTER: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living," edited by Dan Savage and Terry Miller, will be published March 22 by Dutton Books; it's a compilation both of essays drawn from the It Gets Better Project's YouTube channel and of original contributions by celebrities, everyday people and LGBT teens.
