Sex and the "Secret City"

There's already been a lot of buzz about journalist James Kirchick's new book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which covers the years from FDR's presidency through Clinton's. A tip of the hat to Richard Schaefers and Octavio Roca for independently suggesting it as a candidate for a future BookMen DC reading list. It certainly sounds promising! Here are a profile of Kirchick in the June issue of Washingtonian magazine, an Axios interview, and reviews from the New York Times (largely laudatory) and Washington Post (highly critical).

Barney Frank gets graphic

The May issue of Washingtonian magazine reports on the publication of Eric Orner's new graphic novel, Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank. (Many BookMen members will recall Orner from his long-running comic strip in the Washington Blade and other gay publications, "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green.") As the former congressman's longtime staff counsel and press secretary, and a fellow gay man, Orner is uniquely equipped to tell the story of Frank's rise from an insider's perspective. Here is the excerpt that appears in the magazine writeup about the book:

Happy 23rd Birthday to Us! 🌈

On May 11, 1999, Potomac Gay Men’s Book Group, the original incarnation of our intrepid band, met for the first time. And 23 years later, we’re still going strong!   

For a good overview of our illustrious history, here is the profile Metro Weekly published in conjunction with our big 20th-birthday bash at the D.C. Center, back in 2019. The Washington Blade also ran an article, but it's a bit cumbersome to get to; you have to click on the PDF file and scroll to p. 38. And, of course, there are various postings on the subject from the spring of 2019 on this blog (scroll down to "Older Posts," select 2019 and go from there). 

"We're not in Cairo anymore"

We just passed the 10-year anniversary of Omar Sharif Jr.'s coming out in the pages of The Advocate, back on March 16, 2012. As we prepare to discuss his memoir this Wednesday, I thought it would be useful for us all to read (or refresh our memory of) that bombshell declaration. And no, my decision was not influenced in any way by the illustration the magazine used with the article! 😎

Some LGBTQ poets to get to know, Part II

Here are more LGBTQ poems (not all by LGBTQ authors, I should note), courtesy of the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter. Enjoy!

I Sought the Wood in Winter            by Willa Cather

Reinforcements                                by Marianna Moore

At the New York AIDS Memorial    by Stefania Gomez

Femme Futures                      by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Much Later                                       by Gertrude Stein

Pastoral                                            by Djuna Barnes

Divorce Song                                    by Jameson Fitzpatrick

from "The Land"                              by Vita Sackville-West

Mercy                                               by Jose Antonio Rodriguez  

Guitarrero!                                        by Cyrus Cassells

Some LGBTQ poets to get to know, Part I

About a year ago, I began a periodic series of postings here spotlighting LGBTQ poets whose work the American Academy of Poetry has featured via its Poem-a-Day newsletter (as well as a smattering of straight poets who have addressed such themes in their work). I've fallen seriously behind on that project, so here are two catch-up compilations featuring those poems, which were disseminated between December 2021 and now. Enjoy!

three Black poems from August        by Danez Smith

(Note: We read his second poetry collection, Don't Call Us Dead, back in 2019.)

Root Systems                                     by Kay Ulanday Barrett

Vaccinated                                         by Jericho Brown

Farewell                                             by Federico Garcia Lorca

Having a Fight with You                   by Patrick Phillips

Euler's Equation                                by Bino A. Realuyo

February                                            by Tamiko Beyer

As I Grew Older                                by Langston Hughes

Shadow                                              by Bruce Nugent

Drift                                                  by Alicia Mountain

Romance is in the air...

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.'"