A treasure trove of new books to read during Pride Month

Washington Post

a day ago

The dazzling variety of current and upcoming books on LGBTQ themes is a reassuring reminder of how far we've come.
This year, fans of queer romance can read books set in the worlds of Formula 1 ('Crash Test'), clandestine Victorian clubs ('To Sketch a Scandal') and Italian restaurants ('Pasta Girls'). In July, Phaidon is publishing a lavish survey of global queer art as a companion piece to Jonathan D. Katz's Chicago exhibition 'The First Homosexuals,' while the queer Korean vampire murder mystery 'The Midnight Shift,' by Cheon Seon-Ran, will draw first blood in August. Joe Westmoreland's autofiction classic 'Tramps Like Us,' a sort of gay(er) 'On the Road' first published in 2001, is being reissued. Alison Bechdel is back. There are two new studies, one by Daniel Brook and another by Brandy Schillace, of the groundbreaking LGBTQ advocate and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose books were burned by the Nazis. Phil Melanson's entertaining historical fiction debut, 'Florenzer,' imagines the early life and same-sex longings of Leonardo da Vinci against the backdrop of a conflict between the Medici family and the Vatican. The novel, which owes a debt to Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' trilogy in the detail and immediacy of its telling, feels freshly contemporary in its papal intrigue and plutocratic power battles.
These books — and those I discuss at greater length below — are variously warm, comic, sad, jubilant, curious, violent and erotic. Each has insights of its own to offer, but they're united by their awareness of the continuing vulnerability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people.
'Gaysians,' which is 'Flamer' author Mike Curato's first graphic novel for adults, doesn't shy away from violence, racism and transphobia, outside the community or within it. The colors of the trans flag give the book its dominant palette, working especially well for its many nightclub scenes. The story, about a group of young Asian Americans living in Seattle in 2003, is most powerful when Curato unleashes his more expressionistic side to capture different characters' traumatic flashbacks and glimpses of historical tragedy. But this darkness is offset by the story's cozy, reassuring focus on friendship and found family. Some may find Curato leaning too heavily on sentimentality — his 'gaysians' give themselves the cutesy name 'The Boy Luck Club,' riffing on Amy Tan's novel 'The Joy Luck Club,' and speak mostly in catty clichés, as if auditioning for 'Drag Race.' For me, this mawkish tendency stunted the book's emotional range.
One of the most curious books of the season comes from 'the emerging field of queer ecology.' In 'Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature,' Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian makes a powerful case for trying to understand nature without the artificial binaries and hierarchies of human societies. Though she is, by training, a mycologist — a fungi specialist — she embraces all life forms, a disposition derived from her understanding of diversity being nature's 'very premise.' Sometimes this embrace borders on the erotic; one might well blush reading how, 'turgid with spring rains, mushrooms carefully arrange themselves into fruiting bodies, poking up through the soil to disperse their spores.'
True to its nonbinary ethos, the book is really many things: an account of growing up in New York's Hudson Valley surrounded by snakes and slugs; a survivor's memoir about the path to healing following a childhood sexual assault; a story about growing to love one's own 'ambiguous,' 'amorphous,' 'amphibious' nature. It can sometimes feel a bit more like a manifesto than a work of science — 'How we treat swamps is an indicator of our societal health' is a typical assertion — but the radical-green politics are all part of the book's charm. And while Kaishian's inclination to romanticism occasionally threatens to undermine her mission as a scientist, as it does when she claims she'd prefer the mysteries of eel reproduction to remain outside human knowledge, it's nevertheless a fascinating book that celebrates difference in unexpected ways. I certainly know more about snail sexuality than I did before I opened it.
One of the summer's most hotly anticipated titles is 'Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told.' Jeremy Atherton Lin's follow-up to 'Gay Bar,' for which he won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is a strong cocktail of memoir, legal history and sociology. He proceeds along parallel tracks to tell the romantic (and very horny) story of his relationship with a British man he met in 1996 and the jagged path taken by American and British legislatures and courts to eventually grant basic rights to people in same-sex relationships. 'We were aliens in each other's countries,' he writes, 'because in our own we remained second-class citizens.'
Lin beautifully captures the Bay Area at the turn of the millennium: the creeping gentrification, the tech bros, the video shops, the aging hippies. He's also not shy in his descriptions of sex of many kinds and configurations, with all the attendant sensations. (At times you can almost smell it.) The liberated familiarity of these scenes in our less-prudish age makes it a little jarring when Lin reminds us of the difference a couple of decades make. 'By the year 2000,' he writes, 'when we rented our first weird, damp apartment, eighteen states still had sodomy laws on the books.' He and his boyfriend — who overstayed his visa by years to remain with Lin in California — dreaded immigration authorities so much that they became 'convinced you couldn't go to a hospital without being deported.' The metaphysical impact on Lin's boyfriend, who is addressed throughout in the second person, was drastic: 'I think after years without legal status, you sometimes considered yourself to be insubstantial.'
Reading Lori Ostlund's excellent new short-story collection, 'Are You Happy?,' I found myself reflecting indignantly on the subtitle Lin chose for 'Deep House.' Surely laying claim to being the gayest love story ever told — or the gayest anything, however flippantly — risks devaluing that which isn't quite so … overt? Promiscuous? Coastal? Male? Though Ostlund's stories dwell less on heady sex and front-line politics, other hallmarks of the LGBTQ experience are everywhere present. Her protagonists have parents who never accepted them and colleagues they never told about their significant others. They sleep with their partners in the basement on separate couches when visiting home. Ostlund's stories may be less graphic than Lin's memoir, but there's nothing less gay about them. Besides, the lesbian couple that runs a furniture store named after Jane Bowles's 'Two Serious Ladies' could hardly be gayer — that's a pretty sapphic bit of branding.
Don't let 'Are You Happy?' pass you by: There's not a word out of place in these brilliant Midwestern sketches. They're lonesome, for sure: Family members greet each other from a distance, 'like two people on opposite banks of a fast-flowing river.' But they're also hilarious. 'How is it possible,' one character wonders, 'for a family to have two stories about eating glass?'
Also set a little further from the madding crowd is Seán Hewitt's first novel, 'Open, Heaven,' which takes place largely in a 'foggy northern village' in England. It's all a bit reminiscent of the film 'God's Own Country' — in rural Thornmere, to be gay is to be lonely and furtive — though with more longing and less flesh. As in Lin's 'Deep House,' we're reminded of how recently the culture has shifted toward tolerance. When James, our sensitive, stammering hero, comes out in 2002, Britain is still a year away from repealing Section 28, a sliver of legislation that effectively quashed discussion of sexuality in England's schools, and he is left feeling like a stranger in the only home he's ever known. While delivering milk bottles one morning before school, he meets Luke, a boy lodging with his aunt and uncle while his dad is in prison. Before long the strong-jawed Luke is all James can think about — but does Luke feel the same way?
The book's appeal may depend on its readers' willingness to take adolescent romantic longing as seriously as we do when we're young. It succeeds because Hewitt knows when to stop — he casts a spell, like first love, that he knows can't last forever. Or can it? Throughout this short book, Hewitt muses on the passage of time, the way 'the years spin like this all of a sudden,' and considers how easy it might be for time to fold in on itself and the world to revert to an earlier state, taking us with it. The consequences of such a regression for our narrator, and for us all, are potentially dire.
We have plenty of regressions to worry about outside of fiction, not least from the Supreme Court, which hinted only last year that it may be willing to revisit marriage equality. Progress in immigration reform also appears vulnerable: Lin, who finished 'Deep House' before January, has observed of the crackdown under Trump that 'our paranoia has become the reality.' Yet there is some consolation to be found, amid all this, in the humor, hope and humanity in the stories still being told.
Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.