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Book Marks

by Richard Labonte

"Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love," by Sheila Rowbotham.
Verso Books, 548 pages, $40 hardcover.

Rowbotham's gripping biography of British socialist Carpenter resurrects the very queer life of an overlooked and under-honored pioneer of what blossomed, many decades after his death in 1929, into gay liberation. Carpenter lived for 40 years with a working-class lover, balancing a very public homosexual and activist persona and a quite private domestic life. Late in the 19th century, he advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality; he was also a keen champion of woman's suffrage, prison reform and worker's rights, and rejected capitalism, British imperialism and "cant in religion." He identified happily as a homosexual, but embraced society overall with an exuberant enthusiasm for broad alliances. He counted novelist E.M Forster, British Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald and Walt Whitman among his friends – though Rowbotham is skeptical that the poet and the homosexualist had sex when Carpenter visited America in 1877. This is by no means an uncritical study: Carpenter's anti-Semitism, not uncommon in Britain of the time, is exposed. But it is an exquisitely readable – and indispensable – combination of passionate prose and rigorous research.

"Shuck," by Daniel Allen Cox. Arsenal Pulp Press, 152 pages, $14.95 paper.

Hustler novels aren't as ubiquitous as coming out novels in the canon of young queer writers, but they are often just as indistinguishable one from another. Not so with Cox's compact and bracingly original depiction of Jaeven Marshall, a charismatic boy for hire who can pirouette on a dime, or preferably a few hundred dollars, from pretty naif with a pout to jaded, do-it-all sex toy. He's drawn from the author's own New York experiences in the '90s, which gives this peepshow snapshot of Manhattan's gay sexual whirl a glimmering, gritty authenticity. Young Jaeven has literary ambitions – when not Dumpster diving, getting high, peddling his bod and, for a spell, cohabitating with a quirky painter, he's obsessively peddling his prose. This urge to tell tales parallels Cox's own – the author once did porn; now he has crafted an exhilarating tale of the sex trade. Readers tantalized by Cox's accomplishment here ought to seek out his first, terse book, the novella "Tattoo This Madness In," about the travails of a queer Jehovah's Witness boy; it's a smart harbinger.

"One Last Kiss," by Mary Wilbon. Kensington Books, 304 pages, $15 paper.

Former cop Cassandra Slick made her first riotous appearance in "Naughty Little Secrets," Wilbon's slapstick mash-up of the mystery and romance genres. Her offbeat ways continue in this second silly (in a good way) novel. Slick has cemented her lusty relationship with blonde heiress Laura Charles, who has convinced her to leave the perilous police world for the relatively less dangerous profession of private investigator. But it's all for naught when Slick is cajoled by her former precinct captain into clearing a cop colleague – a homophobe she detested – of accusations that he murdered a black prostitute, an old friend of Slick's. Dynamic drag queens, towering transvestites, corrupt New Jersey politicians and a secret cabal of heinous male movers and shakers ensue – but not before Slick and Charles are pressed into service to entrap a domestic terrorist with twisted religious tendencies. Wilbon's kitchen-sink approach to plotting makes for a busy book, and the prose could use some polishing, but pell-mell dialogue tinged with sharp wit makes for satisfying entertainment fluff.

"Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction," edited by Timothy J. Lambert and R.D. Cochrane. Cleis Press, 268 pages, $14.95 paper.

In its first incarnation, before the collapse of original publisher Harrington Park Press orphaned this anthology, it was to have been marketed mainly as another collection of gay love stories (title: "Moonlight & Roses"). It's still a spiffy collection about men wooing and winning men. But in an anthology field bursting with overtly erotic writing, and thanks to the editors' high standards – both are also accomplished members of the "Timothy James Beck" writing collaborative – it also lives up to its new publisher's claim: This is indeed new gay fiction, prose of meritorious quality. Fiction pioneers like Felice Picano and Andrew Holleran provide solid stories, and Paul Lisicky, Greg Herren, Trebor Healey, Joel Derfner and Rob Byrnes represent later generations of queer writers with panache. But it's the newcomers that give this fine book its the-future-of-queer-lit-is-good edge. Among them: Josh Helmin on high school attraction, 'Nathan Burgoine on literary liaisons, Jeffrey Ricker on dog-lovers and loving and Mark Harris on men making time for each other – fresh fiction from a new generation of queer writers.

Featured Excerpt

Carpenter's personal life became ineradicably connected to his politics. This had problematic and burdensome implications for a free spirit. Being a homosexual man and a left-wing sexual rebel in a period of moral panic, he had limited space in which to manoeuvre. Yet manoeuvre he did… Carpenter oscillated between congenital approaches and appeals to culture, nor could he decide for a case for explicit difference and theories of a shared bisexuality. While being emotionally sure of his own congenital attraction to men rather than women, his politics led him to believe that very particular experience of oppression carried an alternative possibility for universal enfranchisement, and intellectually he inclined to a dynamism without boundaries.

-from "Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love," by Sheila Rowbotham

Footnotes

THE QUEER LITERARY awards season has started, with announcement of the
American Library Association's lesbian and gay caucus Stonewall Awards for 2009. The Barbara Gittings Literature Award went to Evan Fallenberg's "Light Fell," about a middle-aged gay Jewish man's reconciliation with his adult sons; honors awards went to "The Conversion," by Joseph Olshan; "A Perfect Waiter," by Alain Claude Sulzer; and "The Sealed Letter," by Emma Donoghue. The Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award went to William K. Eskridge's "Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003 "; honors awards went to Bob Morris's "Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad"; Joanne Ellen Passet's "Sex-Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster"; E. Patrick Johnson's "Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South"; and Joel Derfner's "Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever." Coming next: the Publishing Triangle's literary awards in April and the Lambda Literary Awards, in May; both events are in New York this year… MEANWHILE, ONE QUEER book cracked the nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, in the criticism category: "Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics and the Freedom of Poetry," by the poet Reginald Shepherd, who died in 2008.

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