Holiday gift ideas for bookworms

As usual, 'tis the season for "best of the year" lists.  Here is the "100 Notable Books of 2021" compilation from the New York Times and the 2021 "Best 50 Fiction Books" and "Best 50 Nonfiction Books" lists from the Washington Post. Both roundups are notable for LGBTQ authors and subjects, and we'll be reading at least two of these selections in 2022: Alec and The Magician. 

Discord at Concordia

This item appeared in the Sept. 24 edition of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles' "Book Club" weekly newsletter. Sadly, recent events in Virginia and other states have made it even more relevant than when I first read it. 

"The Plum Creek Literary Festival is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Founded in 1996, this convention at Concordia, a Lutheran university in Nebraska, usually draws thousands of children to see the nation's top writers and illustrators. But less than 48 hours before the festivities were set to begin, the events planned for today and tomorrow were canceled because many of the guest authors withdrew in protest over Concordia's discriminatory policy toward LGBTQ people.

The controversy started when two-time National Book Award finalist Eliot Schrefer was getting ready to attend Plum Creek. He noticed that the festival website was missing his recent novel, The Darkness Outside Us, about a relationship between two teenage boys on a spaceship. The website was also missing Ask the Passengers, a celebrated LGBTQ novel by another festival guest, A.S. King.

Schrefer says the festival director told him that the omission of The Darkness Outside Us was "an inadvertent slip." But when Schrefer looked into Concordia, he discovered that the university's official code of conduct calls homosexuality "a sin" deserving of "disciplinary intervention."

At this point, Schrefer withdrew from the festival. "When you're visiting an institution, there's kind of an implicit trust, and that left when I put all the pieces together," he told me. "I couldn't contribute to the campus life of a school that actively discriminates against gay people or lesbian people."

Alerted to Concordia's code of conduct, Tim Miller, Varian Johnson, Molly Idle, Laurie Keller, and other authors and illustrators announced they would not attend Plum Creek, either.

Newbery Medal winner Meg Medina came to the same decision. "There was just no way that I could go to that festival without feeling like it was implied that I was OK with that policy," she told me. "I was thinking of children--gay children, straight children--all over the country and what it would do to them to have me attend a conference with such a policy." She says Plum Creek needs to think hard about how it wants to move forward. "If they're trying to run an inclusive conference that includes children's literature as it is today, then it needs to honor the lives of all children. It needs to be a welcoming and safe and nondiscriminatory place."

Dylan C. Teut, director of the Plum Creek Literacy Festival, sent me an email saying that The Darkness Outside Us was not included on the children's book sale website only because Schrefer was scheduled to speak to a middle school group about one of his other novels. (The Darkness Outside Us, which is listed as YA [Young Adult], was going to be available for sale at the adult conference, according to Teut.) And he said that Ask the Passengers was not included because he wasn't familiar with it.

Teut went on to say: "Plum Creek does not discriminate against attendees, nor does Concordia University discriminate against its students based on sexual orientation or identity. Since the festival began 26 years ago, we have hosted multiple authors, illustrators and attendees who have various sexual orientations and identities in our open and welcoming community.

Alas, that's the institutional version of "But some of my best friends are gay!" It is simply not acceptable to host a book festival for a general audience on a campus that's officially homophobic."

To which I say: Amen!

Some podcasts with LGBTQ content

[Note: I've updated this item to clean up the format.]

The Atlantic recently recommended five podcasts in its daily newsletter to subscribers, and I was struck by the fact that three of them had a gay connection. Here they are (all descriptions are from The Atlantic): 

Great Lives, "Alvin Hall Chooses James Baldwin" (BBC) 

The great joy of James Baldwin's prose is its rhythms, so he's the perfect subject for a podcast episode. This 2015 episode of the BBC's long-running biography series Great Lives explores his life and work, and provides a great introduction to his unforgettable voice. If you love biography, the Great Lives archive is a treasure chest. (Note: We'll be discussing Baldwin's final novel, Just Above My Head, in February.)

It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, "Brandon Taylor Wrote 'Real Life' and 'Filthy Animals' for His Queer, Black Friends" (National Public Radio)

Sam Sanders' delightful show has been a great mix of humor, thoughtfulness and existentialism. In his recent interview with the writer Brandon Taylor, Sanders poses the oh-so-small questions: "Do we ever really like our lives? And do we ever really like our friends?" I couldn't help but smile listening to their easy banter, and I loved hearing Taylor explain his artistic philosophy: to write stories that will make the people he loves laugh, cry, and feel seen.

Short Wave, "The Mysterious Ice Worm" (NPR)

This is a PSA: Ice worms--worms that live inside glaciers--are real, and a recent episode of NPR's daily science podcast is here to tell you about them. Everyone needs a break from the wear and tear of the pandemic, and for me, delightful natural-world-facts podcasts have been an absolute saving grace. I honestly recommend all Short Wave episodes, which cover topics as diverse as discrimination in health care for transgender people and whether your cat actually hates you. But this ice-worm joint is a great encapsulation of what a science podcast can do: inform, delight and make you wonder about important real-life issues such as why ice worms get fatter over winter. 

Jasper Johns' "Skin"

Jasper Johns actually created two versions of this self-portrait, the second of which has a Frank O'Hara poem appended to it.

Memory Piece (for Frank O'Hara)

This is one of the Jasper Johns pieces Brad Gooch discusses in the O'Hara biography we recently read.

 

In Memory of My Feelings

As some of you know, I took in the Jasper Johns retrospective, "Mind/Mirror," at the Whitney while visiting a close friend in the Big Apple last month. While I am not a skilled photographer, as you'll see (to put it mildly), I did take some photos of several paintings related to Frank O'Hara. So I'm posting those here, both as souvenirs of the exhibition and as a shoutout to the Brad Gooch biography we discussed last month, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara.

Ite lista est: BookMen DC's 2022 Reading List

This list incorporates selections approved during last year's nomination process, but not yet scheduled; those are denoted with an asterisk.

FICTION

*A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale. 

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. 

Alec by William di Canzio. 

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. 

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin. 

Lie With Me by Philippe Bessone. 

*P.S. Your Cat Is Dead: A Novel by James Kirkwood. 

Plays Well With Others by Allan Gurganus. 

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. 

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. 

The Magician by Colm Toibin. 

*The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams. 

NON-FICTION

Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner. 

*No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions by Ryan Berg. 

Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples by Rodger Streitmatter.

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America by Eric Cervini.

BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR

A Tale of Two Omars: A Memoir of Family, Revolution and Coming Out During the Arab Spring by Omar Sharif Jr. 

Careening into Gay Midlife by James Daniels. 

Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks. 

Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman. 

*Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David Feinberg. 

POETRY

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. 

Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of the Greek Anthology translated by Daryl Hine. 

ANTHOLOGIES

*Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914, edited by Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt.