RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe book provides an invaluable snapshot of a particular moment in the worldwide response to the queer rights movement. It also raises provocative and uncomfortable questions about Western assumptions of the universality of \'human rights,\' specifically whether sexual orientation and gender identification are such inviolate aspects of personhood that the state should make no laws, nor uphold any cultural bias, that restricts them, as well as the conflict between international norms and national sovereignty and even if LGBT identity is a one-size-fits-all proposition. Having raised these questions, Gevisser never definitively answers them. Indeed, these larger issues tend to get lost in the more personal stories Gevisser tells in a book that alternates between personal reportage, standard journalism, and memoirish self-reflection. If the whole of the book is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves can be thought-provoking and may provide the starting point for future studies that are less ambitious but more coherent ... despite its sprawl and the unanswered questions it raises, The Pink Line is a consequential book. Gevisser’s opus will knock its Western readers out of any parochial sense of complacency about LGBT rights and challenge them to think both globally and strategically about how best to support their brothers and sisters on the other side of the pink line.
Eric Cervini
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksCervini’s complex and layered narrative contains many threads ... Cervini is not afraid to quote at length from interviews and primary sources, but he does so skillfully rather than heaving big, undigestible chunks into the narrative ... Cervini’s many examples of Kameny’s domineering and inflexible personality make it clear he was, or could be, a deeply problematic person ... If there are weaknesses in Cervini’s narrative, one is his failure to explicitly connect Kameny’s privilege as a white, educated man to his activism ... Cervini also chooses to summarize the events of Kameny’s life after 1971. This is understandable, given the length of his biography, but the story of how Kameny faded in obscurity and poverty is the story of many of the early LGBTQ activists. The question is why the community allowed this to happen to Kameny. Granted, he could be pretty awful, but Cervini’s description of him in his sources and acknowledgments as, at age 80, \'living in near destitution,\' is heart-breaking and deserves elaboration ... one is left wondering how Kameny found himself in such miserable circumstances at the end of his life. On the other hand, Eric Cervini’s amazingly researched and beautifully written biography guarantees that Kameny, warts and all, will take his place among the heroes of the social justice movements in the United States.
Alex Espinoza
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksOne of the most interesting discussions in the book asks whether the contemporary hook-up culture promoted by apps like Grindr and Scruff is an extension of cruising or an entirely different practice ... there are many thorny questions raised by the culture of cruising that Cruising side-steps or simply does not ask. Cruising is a relatively brief book and clearly meant to be celebratory. As such, it is hardly the last word on the subject. If it was simply a memoir, based on Espinoza’s positive experience of cruising, it could be taken at face value. But cruising as the practice of men having sex in public spaces raises some tough questions and, because the book calls itself a history, however brief, a reader might legitimately ask why they were not addressed as part of that history ... As a memoir, Cruising is touching, resonant, and deeply felt. As a history of cruising it is, if not definitive, a provocative starting point. Whatever its omissions, Espinoza’s book invites us to think about the right to freedom of sexual expression and where it fits in within the larger aims of the LGBTQ community. That’s certainly a discussion worth having.
James Polchin
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BOoks... formidably researched ... While Polchin does ultimately make his larger points, the narrative is so dominated by extended accounts of the grisly murders that his argument can sometimes be submerged beneath the gore. Nonetheless, Indecent Advances is a significant contribution to queer history and to understanding the forces that shape contemporary queer identity ... Indecent Advances is an important book not least of all because, as the Stonewall celebrations begin, it reminds us that queer identity has been shaped as much by trauma as by courage.
Dustin Lance Black
RaveNew York Journal of BooksAs the title implies, the main subjects of Dustin Lance Black’s memoir Mama’s Boy are Black and his mother, Anne. Both have remarkable stories ... Black is very good at depicting the kind of destitution in which the smallest luxuries take on outsized meaning. He writes touchingly of the family’s annual Christmas tradition ... even now, Black’s tender and heartfelt love letter to his remarkable mother is an act of courage and reclamation. It’s a well-deserved tribute.
Pajtim Statovci, Trans. by David Hackston
RaveNew York Journal of BooksDespite its modest length, Crossing is nothing less than the tale of human existence: of how we construct ourselves, how that changes as we try to fit ourselves to the changing world around us, and the price we pay... a tale of desperation and survival ... a melancholy account of displacement and disappointment ... This description of spiritual desolation points to the novel’s larger theme ... The crossing from one identity to another requires the constant abandonment of who and what you were and living largely in a state of flux—what Buddhists call a bardo, the disorienting and rootless interval between one life and the next in the unending cycle of reincarnation ... Crossing is a challenging and brilliant work of fiction.
Hallie Rubenhold
PositiveNew York Journal of BooksHallie Rubenhold’s book about the \'canonical\' victims of Jack the Ripper is, at one level, a victim impact statement ... What she has to say on that topic is as horrifying as the Ripper’s crimes ... Rubenhold is an engaging writer though, as she readily admits, these women’s lives were not well documented before they achieved their notoriety, and the reports that followed their murders are not reliable. Then, too, there is a certain grim monotony as we follow the five in their doleful circuit from poor house to flop house to the streets where they would be killed. Still, Rubenhold does a commendable job in bringing these women on stage and through their stories illuminating the appalling reality behind the veneer of Victorian complacency.
Bryan Washington
PositiveNew York Journal of Books\"... vivid ... Washington’s writing is spare but sensual, the characters unsentimental but compelling. Lot is a deep dive into a world that that most people glimpse from freeway overpasses or on the local news reports of drive-by shootings and drug busts. Most of the remaining stories that fill the book don’t quite measure up to the family stories ... These cavils aside, Lot is an unsparing but compassionate work of fiction. Bryan Washington is a name to remember.\
