I found this New York Times article, "'I Just Want Something that's Gay and Happy': LGBTQ Romance Is Booming," both informative and uplifting. There's even a local angle, for the article title comes from this paragraph:
"People want to see themselves," said Laynie Rose Rizer, the assistant store manager at East City Bookshop in Washington, D.C. "Customers will come in and say, 'I just want something that's gay and happy.' And I'm like, 'I have 10 different options for you.'"
When I first encountered Death Trick (1981), the first novel in Richard Stevenson's Donald Strachey mystery series, I devoured it, and the next several installments, as soon as they came out. Even though I didn't sustain that interest over the 17-book series, it wasn't because of any disaffection with Lipez's writing, which by all accounts remained masterful until the end. Richard Stevenson Lipez (his full name) passed away on March 16 at the age of 83. In addition to the Strachey series, Lipez regularly reviewed mysteries for the Washington Post. Here are obituaries from the Post and the New York Times.
My thanks to Octavio Roca for sharing this article from Esquire, "25 Must-Read Books by Queer Authors." I winced when I realized that we've only read three of these as a group, but felt slightly better when I took another look and saw we've read other books by several of the authors listed. How many of them have you read?
Reporting that Russia has allegedly compiled lists of gay Ukrainians and LGBTQ organizations to imprison (or worse) made me curious what Ukrainian gay literature might look like. I didn't find much info online, but this article, "Ukrainian Queer Culture: A Difficult Birth," was helpful. It's an excerpt from a 2007 book by Vitaly Chernetsky titled Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization. For those interested in non-LGBTQ Ukrainian literature that has been translated into English, the New York Times has helpfully compiled two lists of six volumes each: history and fiction/memoirs.
The latest edition of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles' weekly Book Club newsletter reminds us that precisely a century ago today, Beat writer Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents. As Charles observes, "English was his second language, but he left an indelible mark on it."
Although his tribute does not allude to Kerouac's bisexuality, there is no shortage of material online that discusses it. In particular, I recommend a 2019 Paris Review article, "The Queer Crime that Launched the Beats." While his Wikipedia entry never addresses the subject directly, contenting itself with a comment about homosexuality being one of many themes in On the Road, "Talk: Jack Kerouac," an archived set of Wikipedia discussion threads about his entry, explores the topic at length.
Tomorrow at 3 p.m., New Yorker writer Amanda Petrusich will participate in a virtual discussion, sponsored by Politics & Prose, to consider the question "Does Jack Kerouac Still Matter?" The other guests will be Holly George-Warren, who's working on a new biography of Kerouac; the novelist A.M. Homes; and New York Times reporter John Leland, author of Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of "On the Road" (They're Not What You Think).
And if you're in the mood to go on the road yourself (sorry), Kerouac@100--a committee that includes the Kerouac Estate and the Lowell National Historical Park--is celebrating the writer's centennial all year in Lowell (here's a full list of activities).
Alternatively, Charles reports, you can get regular hits of Beat wisdom by following @DailyKerouac on Twitter. As Jack once asked, "Isn't this the time now to start following what I know to be true?"
Rejoice, fellow Friends of Dorothy (Parker): All the poems published in her 1926 collection, Enough Rope, are now available in the public domain. Ditto for "The Algonquin Hotel: Summer 1927," the introduction to Marion Meade's comprehensive 1989 biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? Here are some sample poems from Enough Rope:
