As a
reviewer, Jerry Flack does such a thorough job of
researching and enriching his reviews with context, it is sometimes
difficult to refer to them as mere reviews. They are more like
articles. But for now we'll say that Jerry has reviewed and commented
on no less than nine books in this issue of The Independent Gay
Writer.On this page, we include his reviews of
Jay Quinn's Back Where He Started and
Michelle Baker's & Stephen Tropiano's Queer Facts: The Greatest Gay & Lesbian Trivia Book Ever
On other pages in this issue, watch for a four-book review under the heading of "Eye Candy" and reviews on Boys in the Brownstone, Male Desire, and Physique.
| Jerry Flack, a few years and pounds
ago, enjoys living in the Rocky Mountains. He is shown here with his
partner of fifteen years, George Summers, at the very top of Mt. Evans,
one of Colorado's 54 mountain peaks that exceed 14,000+ feet. In
a nearly identical landscape, at the top of Pikes Peak, Katherine Lee
Bates wrote "America the Beautiful" in 1893. Contact. Jerry Flack
Denver, CO 80210 |
  Queer
Facts: The Greatest Gay & Lesbian Trivia Book Everby Michelle Baker & Stephen Tropiano Hardcover: $14.95 Publisher: Sanctuary Press ISBN: 1860746969 GLBT readers know they are in for a treat the minute they see the cover of Queer Facts: The Greatest Gay & Lesbian Trivia Book Ever. Matching the paper color used for printing the witty and informative text, the cover is bright pink and it reveals two “Ken”-like bridegrooms and two “Barbie”-like brides, each same-sex couple lovingly standing side by side. The fun carries on immediately with Graham Norton’s wickedly funny double entendre in the foreword to this winning and high-spirited book. "While all trivia interests us, we have of course a special fascination in facts and figures that relate to gay men and lesbians. I myself will be heading out to gay bars with an extra bit of conversational confidence now that I know which bisexual, gay men and lesbians have appeared on U.S. postage stamps. It is always a good thing to know when you are licking a gay head." (p.5) Queer Facts is a great coffee table or bed stand book that both entertains and enlightens. The topics Baker and Tropiano have assembled are not only great in the magnitude of trivia, they are quick and ready with humor. Still, neither do they ignore the people and places gays and lesbians would be wise to avoid. The collaborators are decent historians, too, reaching back through the centuries and millennia to present the true facts about homosexuality in Ancient Greece, Sapho, and Medieval persecutions of lesbians in Europe plus the earliest known legal code reference to lesbians, 1260 A.D. in France. But, they are very much at home with contemporary information from the latest reality TV shows with gay contestants or themes to “Global Chick Chat” that provides the best websites where lesbians can meet other lesbians. Readers can spend an entire evening with Queer Facts or just an occasional free ten minutes before heading off to work or before dinner. Book lovers can begin reading on any page and more often than not will have both a laugh and learn something new as well. Indeed, readers may well ask, “Is there anything the authors forgot to include? Here is just a random sampling of trivia from Queer Facts:
Queer Facts also offers excellent biographical profiles of the remarkable Marguerite Yourcenar, Rita Mae Brown, Martina Navratilova, Pedro Almodovar, Billy Jean King, plus added features such as the chronology of the “Divine Miss M on Tour, 1970-2003.” In another great passage, a number of great divas thank their gay fans. Paying such tributes are Britney Spears, Cher, Celine Dion, Donna Summers, and Patti LaBelle. Besides the laugh-out-loud reading Baker and Tropiano supply in their gay treasure trove of amazing historical facts (as well as conjecture and scandal), there are excellent histories of The Red Ribbon Project, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, PFLAG, and much gay and lesbian-related history that includes European monarchs who were gay or lesbian. Every page and every feature of Queer Facts is captivating. Helpful hints are also provided. Want to go online? Queer Facts tells readers how to create the perfect online profile, lists useful web sites, and provides valuable information about Internet sexual etiquette. The book also contains summaries of hard scientific data that is difficult, if not impossible, for the straight family and foes of GLBT persons to ignore or refute: Daughters of lesbians have higher self-esteem than daughters of straight women. Sons are more caring and less aggressive. Daughters and sons of lesbian, gay, and bi-sexual parents have the same incidence of heterosexuality as the general population. (p. 180) Hey, guys. Need to prove to relatives that gay “marriages” last? Queer Facts provides a list of male relationships that have stood the test of time. Bruhs Mero and Gean Harwood have been a “married” couple for 66 years! Another great couple was Joseph C. Leyendecker and Charles Beach. After Norman Rockwell, Leyendecker was the most popular commercial artist in America. He was especially famous for his All-American Ivy League Arrow collar and shirt ads. The Arrow Shirt Man was a 20th century icon of the Ideal American Male! Beach, the ruggedly handsome Arrow Shirt model, was artist Leyendecker's lover for 49 years! A long list of other gay couples who have been together from 30 to 55 years are cited. It is a great record to show to a born-again Christian homophobic brother who divorced his wife after two years because he wanted to marry his sexy secretary (or boss!). Queer Facts provides an arsenal of useful and insightful data about gay and lesbian marriages, adoptions, and REAL family values. Despite the sense of fun and good will found in the pink pages of Queer Facts, homophobia is definitely not excluded and everything Baker and Tropiano present is not amusing or as sweet as wedding orange blossoms for Ken-Ken and Barbie-Barbie legally gay marriages. Readers learn that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are four times more likely to commit suicide than their straight peers and that 85% of teachers oppose integrating lesbian, gay, or bisexual themes in their curricula. Much of the most violent abuse to gay and lesbian youths occurs in public schools. Translation: Seek a fine, liberal Charter School where sexual diversity is honored and celebrated or give home schooling some second thoughts. Readers thumbing through the pages of this bright and mostly cheery tome may well want to ask themselves if they really want to continue giving money to their prime religious or secular charities if they provide aide to Uganda, Sudan, Nigeria, Mauritania, and Afghanistan. These nations have the death penalty for homosexuality. Wise and prudent readers will pay particular attention to the information the authors provide on dangerous countries to avoid when planning an international vacation. For example, readers are acquainted with a long list of countries where lesbian acts are illegal. The penalties for gay behavior are also given. How about a vacation in Jamaica where the penalty is not death, as in the Sudan, but ten years at hard labor? The sodomy laws of the most homophobic nations in the world are listed. Want to see Kenya? Know before you leave the protection of the USA, Canada, or Great Britain that the penalty for sodomy in Kenya is 14 years in prison. Western citizenship may provide some buffers for American, Canadian, and British gays and lesbians, but what reader wants to be responsible for a casual vacation sexual interlude that might cause a native citizen in one of these nations to forfeit his or her life for one night of pleasure? Perhaps a gay and lesbian and film festival in a more enlightened nation is the safest vacation ticket. Readers only have to turn to these pink pages to find the listing of all the world’s great GLBT cinema celebrations in such venues as Copenhagen, Sydney, Melbourne, Brussels, Helsinki, and Grenoble. On a far happier note, readers also learn all the places where gay and lesbian marriages are legal such as Belgium and Holland and in three Canadian Provinces (Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia). Queer Facts has a very complete and useful index to help every gay and lesbian reader locate the inane, the insane, and even sometimes mundane trivia of “Out” lives around the globe that are both very funny as well as remarkably eye-opening. —Jerry Flack, Denver, Colorado
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 Back
Where He Startedby Jay Quinn Alyson Books, 2005 A Writers’ Dilemma: When Is Enough Enough?
by Jerry Flack The Happy Halloween edition of the Independent Gay Writer included Greg Herren’s Upon A Midnight Clear: Queer Christmas Tales (NY: Haworth/Southern Tier Editions, 2004) as its featured title. Having authored that review, this writer now returns to it for two excerpts in an attempt to answer the designated question posed. The very gifted Southern writer Jim Grimsley excerpted a painful chapter from his exquisite novel of the same name, Comfort and Joy (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1999) as his gift to Herren’s Christmas anthology. The particular passage represents a gay doctor trying to come out of the closet but finding it ever so difficult. Each family Christmas grows more oppressive as his parents increase the pressure on him to marry. Even brief trips home for Christmas are smothering him. Worse, he has cowardly cancelled a date and wounded the one man on earth with whom he would really like to be with at Christmas, Dan Crell, the hospital administrator with the beatific singing voice of an angel. Plagued by exhaustion from work, the great lie in his personal life, and with nowhere else to turn, Ford McKinney finally blurts out to his sister that he is gay. Ironically, Christmas is anything but “Comfort and Joy” for the good doctor. To be completely fair as well as guide readers to another great book, Comfort and Joy is in part a sequel to the fearsome novel Winter Birds (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1984) that reveals the tragic early life of Dan Crell. In the same review, this author wrote a review of the most wonderful story to be found in Herren’s collection:
These two excerpts have been repeated here to provoke a discussion among writers or a self-dialogue for the single writer as to which of the approaches described above is the better choice, if one decision may be judged superior. Jim Grimsley excerpted a good although not great short story (left with many unanswered questions) from a truly remarkable novel without a single wasted moment nor an untapped emotion and that is written in prose every bit as lovely as poetry. Comfort and Joy is without question this reviewer’s favorite novel. Jay Quinn has reversed the process. He wrote this reviewer’s concept of an absolutely perfect and luminous short story and has now extended the same story into a full-length novel, Back Where He Started. Quinn now shares the pre-Zack Chris Thayer, the now forty-eight-year-old abandoned “mom” in his very earliest years spent as a bastard child in a poor housing project plus verbal snapshots as well of what the wealthy Zack Ronan Family looked like prior to the wife and mother’s suicide and Chris’ brand new in-residence role as wife and mother while still young, floundering, and trying to find his own place in life. Diapers and responsibility came first. Chris never could find the time to figure out his life; he just accepted being a “mom” and all the hard work and joy that came with the package. More importantly, Quinn deftly moves his characters forward in their own respective life stories. Trey and Andrea have settled into more or less conventional married lives, and in his final year of college Schooner, forever Chris’ baby, brings home his boyfriend with whom he makes a whirlwind trip to Massachusetts to legally exchange gay marriage vows. But the bulk of Back Where He Started is about Chris Thayer’s second shot at life. He is both witty and generous, and filled with a real joy for life, but he is no longer twenty-two-years-old, Abercrombie & Fitch cute, or wealthy. He needs a job and his only job experience is raising another man’s three children. Chris’ life shifts to a beach house in a small community on Emerald Isle on North Carolina’s outer banks. There he toys with a handsome but footloose veterinarian, Heath, who is ever the matchmaker and steers Chris to Steve Willis, a rough and tumble fisherman and jack-of-all-trades who raises and trains Chesapeake Bay retrievers for a hobby and piece-meal income. He has Italian good looks and is a good ten years younger than Chris, but almost immediately falls in love with him. (Never, ever, let it be said Quinn cannot write exciting depictions of exhilarating gay sexual encounters!) What Quinn has succeeded in doing is fashioning a novel that takes a panoramic look at what happens when the template for a traditional family is used to describe the lives of three generations of a family where “mom” is a man, “dad” has decamped for seemingly greener (or at least more youthful) pastures, and where the end results are hardly facsimile editions of “Ozzie & Harriet” or Rock Hudson–Doris Day Hollywood marriages and families. Quinn has been criticized by other reviewers who claim he pushes the envelope of Roman Catholicism too much, ignores significant problems that impact his larger gay brotherhood such as A.I.D.S., and pretends that gay couples are lovingly accepted into communities that have continually sent Jesse Helms to the United States Senate. Although some of the criticisms may well have validity, the complete interview with Quinn about these issues at the Alyson Books site http://www.alyson.com/ is well worth reading. This is especially true for beginning writers; Quinn’s comments constitute a first-rate short course on writing fiction. Personally, this writer knows many gay Catholic men, especially between the ages of forty and sixty, who face life and faith head-on, exactly as Chris does. They simply get past or through the dissonance somehow. They remain true to the religion they grew up in even if occasionally they have to turn a deaf ear to the anti-gay hostility of the church’s hierarchy. They simply cannot give up the beloved faith and all its traditions they have acquired as a part of an entire lifetime. The writing dilemma still exists. There surely is no perfect answer. Comfort and Joy is a much more brilliant novel than a short story, and Back Where He Started was better as a miracle of a short story than it is as a fully-developed novel. It is true: Sometimes less is more! Even so, Quinn is such a fine writer, and Chris Thayer is equally a wonderful invention of a character (Has there ever been a man chosen as America’s “Mother of the Year”?) and an incisive narrator that Back Where He Started should not be missed. It is a joyful and particularly heart-warming read. One of the best things about Back Where He Started is its seeming honesty. Chris’ kids still come to him for advice and sometimes he dispenses it gently, and at other times (especially with Schooner) roughly, but just as often he tells them they will have to do what their hearts tell them is the right thing to do. The hearts within the family unit, whether beating in gay, bi-sexual, or straight members are forever essential to the true meaning of FAMILY. —Jerry Flack, University of
Colorado
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