E.B. Boatner
Books: 739
Inverse Cowgirl: A MemoirAlicia Roth WeigelHarperOne$18.99 Moving, powerful; a lived look at the least understood position on the GLBTQIA+ spectrum. An earlier amniocentesis had shown XY chromosomes, yet baby Wiegel appeared with a vagina (though no ovaries or uterus). Doctors diagnosed with “complete androgen insensitivity syndrome” (CAIS). The ”problem” was, and is still to a…
A Word In Edgewise: Because I’m Not You, Doesn’t Mean I’m Not Me
Reading Alicia Roth Weigel’s Inverse Cowboy (see the “Books” column in this issue) how little many of us not personally in the “I” category of “LGBTQUA+,” know about “Intersex,” not even how many in the general population are affected. Weigel says they’re statistically, “about as common as redheads–about 2% of the world’s population.” Online sources…
A Word In Edgewise: Settling For Second Needn’t Be Second-Rate
I’m fond of a Fall Get-Away. In more flush times, I take my getaways in the autumn. It’s still warm (with prospects of ever-warmer) the light is still languid and lengthy, the air, depending on your destination, still crisp and the leaves luxurious. Even short trips offer all these with-benefits of Mother Nature. Between COVID…
Books: 737
Dreaming HomeLucian ChildsBiblioasis$16.95 One chance instant can reverberate through decades, for good or ill. Cruel or kind may hinge on the flip of a coin. Here, 12-year-old Rachel and her pal find Kyle, Rachel’s 15-year-old brother, drawing from a gay porno magazine. Teasing might have done for some sibs, but Rachel and Kyle are being…
A Word In Edgewise: Shane! You’ve Come Back!
George Stevens’s Shane opened a week before my twelfth birthday, about the same age playwright Karen Zacarías read Jack Schaefer’s novel in a sixth-grade class. I read it, too–smitten by the hero, I picked up a 35-cent Ballantine paperback at Kottenhoff’s Pharmacy and sped through it. Print and images both thrilled, and though many of the subtler…
A Word In Edgewise: A Remembrance of Gardens Gone
A friend’s gift of surplus garden produce worked a bit of Proustian magic the other day. As I stir-fried the green beans and tender yellow squash, the scent of summer, garlic, and goodness whisked me back into time and reverie. First, into the sixties of the previous century, when Euell Gibbons’ best-seller, Stalking the Wild…
Books: 735
Light Come Out of the Closet: Memoir of a Gay SoulRoger Leslie, PhDParadise Publishing House$19.95 Leslie grew up in a close-knit, Polish-American family with parents committed to their children’s Catholic schooling. His firmly held three absolutes: “I love God; I love my family; I am gay.” He adroitly leads the reader through the fear and…
A Word In Edgewise: Be Sure To Make It A Round Trip
Many who label OceanGate’s Titan a Titanic Taxi for billionaires, who deny the doomed five were in any way explorers, may harbor in their own hearts yearnings for glory. To conquer Everest, for example, despite photos of long queues inching up the slopes, having paid tens of thousands for the privilege, sometimes using deceased humans,…
A Word In Edgewise: Kids Just Wanna Play – Will We Let Them?
I grew up on a 97-acre campus of the school of which my father was superintendent and had access to playgrounds and a gym where I spent hours running, dribbling and shooting baskets. A deceptively unfettered, free-ranging childhood. At school, I found the reality of “girls’ basketball” was a shrunken half-court, “zoned” into strips each…
Books: 733
Birnam WoodEleanor CattonFarrar, Straus and Giroux$28 A guerilla gardening group–or at least its leader, Mira, schemes to use of a farmland isolated by a landslide that has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island. Mira is ruthless in her usurpation of other folks’ land to grow renegade crops, but is she up to…
