Last month (scroll down), I posted an item here about the New York Times Book Review's ambitious plans to celebrate its 125th-anniversary year. As part of that retrospective, Parul Sehgal, a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, has delved into the archives to critically examine its legacy in full. I found the resulting critique, "Reviewing the Book Review," fascinating, but her examples of how poorly the Times (along with many other literary publications, to be fair) treated the LGBTQ community until recently are particularly salient (if painful).
For instance, Carlos Baker's review of Truman Capote's 1948 first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, ends with this putdown: "The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told, except to get it out of the author's system." Even more savage is Rebecca West's 1974 takedown of Conundrum, Jan Morris's landmark memoir about her gender transition. Throughout her review, West refers to the author as Mr. Morris, sneering: "One feels sure she is not a woman." (!)
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