Tuesday, March 12, 2024

A hopeful note from Africa

I want to thank Lee Levine very warmly for alerting me to an informative, inspiring Feb. 21 New York Times article titled "The Needle Has Been Moved." It explores the state of queer literature in Africa which, despite persecution of the LGBTQ community in many countries, is booming--especially in Nigeria. I must confess that I only knew one of the authors cited: Chiké Frankie Edozien, a 53-year-old Nigerian, whose 2017 memoir, Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man, I read and nominated for our reading list a few years ago. (I may renominate it this fall.) Here are a few other writers cited in the article whose work I want to check out:

Arinze Ifeakandu, Nigerian, 29. His debut short story collection, God's Children Are Little Broken Things, came out last year; it won the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers and was a Lambda Literary Prize finalist, among other honors.

Abdellah Taïa, Moroccan, 51. The author of nine novels (he has made two films, as well), he is often considered the first openly gay Arab writer and filmmaker.

Damon Galgut, South African, 60. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and 2010, he won it in 2011 for The Promise.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Dueling Oscars

The 10 of us who attended last night's BookMen meeting enjoyed a very lively discussion of Matthew Sturgis' Oscar Wilde: A Life (the original title; the paperback edition goes by a much jauntier handle that somehow makes me think of the "Just Jack" running joke from "Will and Grace": Oscar). The Sturgis bio, published in 2019, has many strengths: clear prose, and skillful use of insights gained from Wilde's correspondence and other primary sources that only recently became available to researchers. (To take just one example, Sturgis cites a grandson of Wilde who has evidence that Constance Wilde died of multiple sclerosis rather than complications from syphilis contracted from her husband, as earlier writers had speculated.) It is an accessible, solid introduction to Wilde's life and work, and on that basis I concur with the other attendees who said they were glad to have read it.

All that said, I don't think Sturgis' account in any way supplants Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, published posthumously in 1988. I read it for the first time right before tackling Sturgis, as a way of establishing a baseline, and it was very useful. Although Ellmann's approach is highly academic and his prose is at times stodgy, he does something Sturgis does not: He is always careful to give the year in which events occur. His indexing is also much better than Sturgis's (when I looked up the reference to Constance Wilde mentioned above, none of the page numbers in the index matched the page that contains that note).  

Another reason I prefer Ellmann is that, after taking a cheap shot at his biography in the introduction, Sturgis proceeds to lift passage after passage from him! Sometimes he troubles himself to alter a few words, but most of the time he simply plunks Ellmann's work into his manuscript without giving any attribution. Not a gentlemanly act, as Wilde himself might remark.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

With Ru my heart is laden...

Many of you have probably heard that RuPaul Charles just published a new book, The House of Hidden Meanings. But did you know this is actually his fourth book and third memoir? (I had no idea.) His previous books were Lettin' It All Hang Out (1995), Workin' It: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Style (2010), and GuRu (2018).  Here are reviews of the new autobiography in the Washington Post, New York Times and The Daily Beast.


A black-and-white photo of RuPaul in 1979 shows a young Black man with slicked-back hair, a striped cotton jacket and a loosely looped thin necktie.
A portrait of RuPaul taken in an Atlanta photo studio in 1979. About half of the memoir is set there.Credit...Tom Hill/WireImage, via Getty Images

Thursday, February 29, 2024

James Baldwin's best books

Although he never won any major literary prizes, James Baldwin (who would be turning 100 on Aug. 2 were he still with us) has become and more influential since his death in 1987. His appearance in the most recent episode of Ryan Murphy's "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans" on FX, as portrayed by Chris Chalk, shows us why. If watching that piques your curiosity about his books, check out this New York Times article, "The Best of James Baldwin." As it happens, our merry band has read two of his novels (Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head), but not the other selections the article recommends. Perhaps that is a gap we can begin to fill in next year's reading list?



Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Gay love in the 1950s

Lee Levine was kind enough to draw my attention to this review in The Guardian of The Gallopers, a brand-new novel by Jon Ransom. It tells the intertwined stories of three gay men in England from 1953 into the 1980s (roughly the same timespan that the recent TV adaptation of Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers depicted). John Self concludes his review thus: "At its best, The Gallopers offers a surprising and quietly devastating account of three men, and their troubled relationship with themselves and the world they live in." I'm sold!



"This Arab Is Queer"

I'm grateful to Octavio Roca for flagging a 2022 book, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers. It certainly sounds like a promising candidate for our next reading list!

Dorian Gray on stage

As we prepare for next week's discussion of Matthew Sturgis' monumental biography of Oscar Wilde,  I found this TheaterMania review of Sarah Snook's performance in a solo show based on The Picture of Dorian Gray timely indeed. With a flock of video screens floating above her, Snook (whom many of us know as Shiv Roy from "Succession") plays every single character in Wilde's text--from Dorian, to his hedonistic mentor Lord Henry Wotton, and tortured artist Basil Hallward. It sounds amazing; here's hoping it transfers from London to this side of the pond! (This just in: The Economist's reviewer is also wildly enthusiastic about the play.)




sarah snook
Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Theatre Royal Haymarket 
(© Marc Brenner)