by Richard Labonte
"Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America," edited by Mitchell Gold with Mindy Drucker. Greenleaf Press, 298 pages, $23.95 hardcover.
Most of the contributors to this inspirational collection of intensely personal coming-out essays were teens many years ago. Among them: Congressman Barney Frank and Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, Right Rev. Gene Robinson, actor Richard Chamberlain, and professional athletes Billy Bean and John Amaechi. Some of them are close to – or still in – their teens: 26-year-old Jared Horsford, who survived an ex-gay experience, but not before cutting FAG across his own chest; 22-year-old Matt Comer, shunned by his Southern Baptist church community; and 19-year-old Julia Brindisi, who almost became "another suicidal gay teenager statistic." But the emotional pain and sometimes physical suffering revisited by the writers are almost always rooted in their adolescence. These are stories about hate endured: about rejection by parents, renunciation by churches, ridicule and worse by peers, accounts linked across generations and between genders by the heroism of survival – and by a willingness to offer testimony for the next queer generation that life can be good outside the closet. In a perfect world, every library in America would stock this invaluable anthology.
"The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second," by Drew Ferguson. Kensington Books, 272 pages, $15 paper.
He's a gawky geek with big ears and decent grades, desperately in love with his hopelessly heterosexual best friend Bink Binkmeyer – and, at 17, one horny and frustrated queer boy. His soccer teammates ignore him on the field, he's harassed by homophobes in the school halls, his maritally troubled parents disapprove of him in so many ways, and he's failed his driver's license test time and again. No wonder young Charles James Stewart II is a screwed-up kid – until he comes to know hot soccer hunk Rob Hunt, a new kid in town, with a secretive home life, who recognizes and reciprocates Charlie's emotional and physical needs. Ferguson's account of high school horrors and hijinks, and of his acerbic narrator's troubled senior year, is drawn from a familiar coming-of-age playbook. But this high-spirited and frequently hilarious debut novel, crafted in the first-person form of an exuberant daily journal, captures with comic wisdom the nerve-wracking anxiety of romantic angst and the awkwardness attendant on learning how to be in love.
"Put Away Wet," by Susan Smith. Bold Strokes, 224 pages, $15.95 paper.
Her heart broken by the antics of a psychotically narcissistic ex, Jocelyn Fellows – friends call her Joey, as befits her butch persona – doesn't want a relationship. The 22-year-old tomboy waiter just wants sex. And she finds it, abetted by gorgeous fellow waiter Steve, her attitude-endowed best gay friend since childhood, who posts a sassy online personal for her – "would-be ethical slut seeks experience" – that draws two very different responses. The icky one is from a seriously closeted self-loathing Christian who exudes shame after an hour of hotel-room passion with Joey. The response that transforms Joey from sex- and love-shy wallflower to a young queer celebrating her sexual powers comes from dominatrix Naomi, whose matronly appearance belies a lusciously lusty persona. And then Joey meets Leela, and it's love – and rowdy sex – happily ever after. Smith's genially erotic prose, certainly predictable, nevertheless imbues a formulaic romance with jolts of good humor and scenes of steamy sex.
"Finlater," by Shawn Stewart Ruff. Quote "Editions," 298 pages, $13.50 paper.
Please. Don't judge this otherwise smart book by its disastrous cover: matte black with the nondescriptive title centered in a shaky white font. Or by its design: printed on heavy, slick stock, it looks and feels like a forbidding art catalog. Get past the intimidating exterior, though, and you'll find a charming yet unsentimental coming-of-age story about the unlikely relationship between two kids dubbed "Jew-Nigger" by schoolmates. Cliffy is a precocious 13-year-old black boy with a deadbeat dad and a warmhearted mom living in a Cincinnati housing project in the 1970s, and Noah is a smart-aleck 13-year-old Jewish boy with a mentally unstable dad and a warmhearted mom living in upper-middle class comfort in a better part of town. Black Cliffy wants to be a Jew, white Noah yearns to be a soul brother, and they embark on an adventure of unlikely companionship, teen lust, and first love. Ruff's astounding debut, about gay adolescents navigating an era when skin color and class differences were cruelly polarizing – and coming-out was a cultural taboo on both sides of the racial and religious divide – resonates with authenticity.
Featured Excerpt
At our usual break-off point, we held hands, and then we kissed. I knew I would see him again and again and then never again, but somehow right now seemed so final, so ultimate, like neither of us would ever be the same the second we parted. He pointed up at the sky. "Maybe that's where we should've run away to – the moon. Huh, Cliffy, the moon, the Milky Way, huh, Cliffy?" Just then, I could see the flow of the constellation clearly. But as suddenly I didn't know what I was looking at. It might as well have been Noah's name in the sky of my heart, now shattered into fine sparkly dust that didn't mean anything.
-from "Finlater" by Shawn Stewart Ruff
Footnotes
POET REGINALD SHEPHERD, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship just last year, died of colon cancer on Sept. 10 at age 45 in Pensacola. He published five books of poetry: "Some Are Drowning"; "Angel, Interrupted"; "Wrong"; "Otherhood"; "Fata Morgana "; and a book of essays, "Orpheus in the Bronx." He also edited two poetry anthologies, "The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries" and "Lyric Postmodernisms." He recently completed a sixth book of poetry and a second volume of essays that will be published posthumously by University of Pittsburgh Press. His surviving partner, Robert Philen, plans to write about Shepherd, and to post some of his writing, on the poet's blog, http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com… BRITISH EROTIC AUTHOR James Lear was named Writer of the Year in September at the Erotic Awards in London – an annual event that honors all branches and orientations of the sex industry, from filmmakers and politicians to photographers and pole dancers. Other recipients this year included the late performance artist Bob Flanagan, who received the Tribute Award; director Ang Lee, for his film "Lust, Caution"; and the gay sex blog www.menatplay.com. Lear won for his novel "The Palace of Varieties" (Cleis Press), lauded by "Time Out London" for its literary appeal: "This isn't porn accompanied by a wah-wah guitar; this is porn to the strains of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," each vividly realized ejaculation accompanied by a fanfare and the crashing of cymbals." Lear's other novels are "The Back Passage" and "Hot Valley"; he is also the judge for "Best Gay Erotica 2009," forthcoming from Cleis in November.
