Aug 18
Late summer reading - Fiction, memoirs, kink and art books with a queer view
Gregg Shapiro READ TIME: 1 MIN.
From the personal diaries of the “Fellow Travelers” author to a new wonderful story by Allison Bechtel, or even the late Edmond White’s saucy memoir and artist Nayland Blake’s kinky life, late summer still has plenty of fresh reading opportunities, whether on the beach or curled up under a blanket on a chilly San Francisco night.
Thomas Mallon is the gay author of the novel “Fellow Travelers,” which was the basis for the acclaimed streaming series of the same name. “The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994” (Knopf) is a gutsy move on Mallon’s part, sharing these diaries filled with roller coaster events and emotions, given the significance of the period in queer history. Most shocking takeaways: 1. Mallon’s politically conservative nature. 2. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
“A Comic Novel,” is what award-winning lesbian illustrator and writer Alison Bechdel calls her wonderful new book “Spent” (Mariner). Autofiction is another appropriate description as the main character (who shares her name with the author), who lives with her wife Holly (aka Holly Rae Taylor, Bechdel’s wife and the colorist of “Spent”), struggles with a seemingly insurmountable existential crisis with humor and humanity.
https://www.harpercollins.com
Published a few months before his passing in June 2025, “The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir” (Bloomsbury) by Edmund White delivers on the promise of the book’s subtitle. A legendary figure in the realm of queer writers and culture, White was the author of multiple novels, biographies, memoirs, and works of nonfiction. He bares all in “The Loves of My Life,” and the results are as erotic as they are entertaining. The chapter titled “Keith” is one such example.
https://www.bloomsbury.com
A meticulously researched work of nonfiction, “American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives” (Dutton) by Robert W. Fiesler, couldn’t possibly be more timely or pertinent. Reminding us that not only was Anita Bryant not the first Florida-based maniac to come for the LGBTQ community, but that in Florida, history has a horrible way of repeating.
In the case of “American Scare,” it was the mid-20th-century Johns Committee, led by hate-mongering politician Charley Johns, who, along with his conservative cronies, was determined to stop any threats to the “southern way of life.” However, as Fiesler writes in the preface, “The history they tried to kill has survived.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
If there’s one thing on which many in the LGBTQ community can agree, we like to eat in restaurants. Be it breakfast, brunch (which we may not have invented, but we perfected), lunch, supper/dinner, or late-night noshing. In “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights, and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants” (Grand Central), Erik Piepenburg narrows his delicious focus on LGBTQ dining establishments, incorporating history and hunger satisfaction.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com
Before Erik Piepenburg wrote about gay restaurants, gay writer Jeremy Atherton Lin took us clubbing for the night in 2021’s “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out.” Lin’s new book, the memoir “Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told” (Little, Brown), described as “a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting” outlaw love story, begins in 1996 at the time of the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act, just as he’s fallen in love. Determined to beat the odds, the pair embark on a global trek in search of a “city of refuge.”
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com
Queer visual artist/writer/educator/curator Nayland Blake, who collaborated with queer writer Dennis Cooper on the 1993 book “Jerk,” is the subject of “My Studio Is a Dungeon Is The Studio” (Duke). Edited by Jarrett Earnest, the book is subtitled “Writing and Interviews, 1983-2024,” and delves into Blake’s “explorations of kink and creativity, as well as on the making, teaching, and curating of art and queer culture.”
https://www.dukeupress.edu
