Book Marks
The Kind of Girl I Am
by Julia Watts. Spinsters Ink
346 pages
$14.95 paper
Watts brings fresh zest to a timeworn plot about an ambitious girl, born into gritty poverty, who draws on plucky intelligence and blazing beauty to escape her wretched family. Her climb to the top—and the terrible tumble that follows—is built on the willing backs of women whose sexual favors she sells to men: the lady is a madam. Vestal Jenkins fled her dreary Kentucky coal-mining town for an ill-fated marriage with the son of a wealthy shopkeeper, a union that ended badly when her husband’s father tried to seduce her. Penniless again, Vestal heads for Knoxville, where her success is abetted by the financial backing of a childhood friend. As the Eisenhower era dawns, Vestal is running the classiest whorehouse in Knoxville, and is the very closeted lover of a freespirited young black girl working as her handyman. In a novel that spans from WWII to the early days of gay liberation, Watts captures America’s social and cultural shifts—and the spirit of the South—with stylish storytelling.
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage
by Nancy D. Polikoff
Beacon Books
256 pages
$24.95 hardcover
In this persuasive analysis, professor of law Polikoff argues that marriage rights ought not be the endpoint of the struggle for same-sex rights. She suggests, rather radically, that the institution of marriage should have nothing to do with economic, medical, inheritance, immigration, or other legal rights—and that straight people as much as gay people are oppressed by the fact that most benefits are bestowed only on married couples. Polikoff peppers her provocative thesis with dozens of vignettes about how current law penalizes unwed couples: a gay man whose partner dies in the collapse of the World Trade Center is denied survivor benefits; a straight woman and man pool their resources to buy a house together, but when one of them dies, the property is reassessed and taxes become prohibitive for the survivor. Her exhaustively detailed state-by-state and country-by-country overview makes the case that a mishmash of marriage-anchored law devalues the reality of vibrant families who have chosen to build relationships and families without saying “I do.”
After the Fall
by Edward Field
University of Pittsburgh Press
214 pages
$14 paper
Field, a vibrant writer now into his 80s, is blessed with mischievous wit and spry whimsy: one of several cheeky poems in this collection is “In Memory of My Foreskin” (its “loss the price to pay of being a Jew”). He has his serious side, too, most notably in the long title poem, “After the Fall.” It’s a vivid emotional and political piece about the fall of the World Trade Center and “…of the fragility/ of everything we depend on:/ our political institutions,/ which were already shaken by evidence/ of how elections are stolen.” He’s also a romantic, an unabashed emotion apparent in “Taking My Breath Away,” a lovely paean to Field’s partner of more than 40 years: “Yes, around other people he can look drawn and old/ but in private he sheds his clothes and his age/ to become the charming boy I met…” Quoting from these poems is irresistible, and reading them is a tonic. Field is a significant gay poet whose easygoing love of language renders deep feeling and wise thought utterly conversational.
Forbidden Fruit: Psalms of a Black Master
by Will Kane
Kensington Books
292 pages
$15
It’s no mean feat to assemble a collection of single-author SM stories in which whips, hoods, gags, razors, and shackles—along with lashed butts, stretched scrotums, pierced foreskins, pinched nipples, and un-lubed anuses—can constitute a breezy read. An imaginatively kinky and fiercely filthy (and usually condomless) read, of course. But Kane pulls off “breezy” with these 19 stories, too, because his characters—most of them accomplished professionals, bankers and brokers and the like, with an infectious yen for the sleazy side of life—always have fun, no matter how intense the action. The raunchy tales are connected thematically by rough, raw sex—involving mostly black, Latino, or Asian men—yet are masterfully varied in setting and style. The most creative is “Mastery,” a faux oral history in which a doorman, a waiter, a bartender, and a DJ marvel at the torrid encounter between a spiffy Puerto Rican lawyer and a leather-clad black man. But singling out one piece is not to slight the rest: this is classy erotica, as literary as it is incendiary.
Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-’70s. He can be reached in care of this publication or at [email protected].
