Travel
Bound
by Jim Gladstone
 AIRPLANE
READ OF THE MONTH
Charming. It’s not necessarily the first adjective
I anticipated would come to mind in describing a book
titled All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs
of Gay Washington, D.C. (Atria, $15. www.craigseymour.com),
but author Craig Seymour’s warm, wry, matter-of-fact
storytelling voice goes a long way here. Now an English
professor at the University of Massachusetts, but once
a pent-up patron, then a balls-out performer at the infamously
full-frontal venues he chronicles here, Seymour blends
a remarkable variety of information into what amounts
to significantly more than a memoir of wild times. Having
written his Masters thesis on the scene at D.C. clubs
including Secrets and The Follies, Seymour brings interesting
sociological perspectives to the table, without ever slipping
into the sort of academic jargon that bogs down too many
books on sex work. Through Seymour’s interviews,
readers are asked to consider the complexity of strippers’
sexual orientation: “I’m straight. But I’ll
say I’m bi because the customers like to think there’s
a chance. And in a way I am bi because there’s no
way I could get up on the bar like that and let hundreds
of men touch me if I wasn’t…it’s a sexual
act because people are stroking me. It’s not oral
or anal, but it’s still sexual. So, basically I guess
I’m bisexual.” Seymour also asked his subjects
to think about their clientele’s mindsets: “It
was easy to think of the customers as just dirty old men,
but many…had led lives that had been full of secrets
and compromise. That made their time at the clubs seem
less like a hedonistic indulgence and more like a taste
of hard-won freedom.” We get glimpses of D.C.’s
gay history, from the relatively open socializing in Walt
Whitman’s time to the Cold War lockdown of the McCarthy
era. All of this is woven into Seymour’s personal
narrative, including his efforts to maintain a loving
partnership while simultaneously shaking his moneymaker
on the bar tops. There’s a refreshing frankness and
lack of sensationalism throughout that invites you to
listen closely and never pass judgement. Seymour charms
because he disarms.
While hardly “the comprehensive encyclopedia of
historical gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders”
its subtitle boasts, Queers In History by Keith Stern
(BenBella Books, $19.95. www.queersinhistory.com)
will make a great addition to your colllection with
its snippy biographical entries on over 900 famous and
infamous personages. Usual suspects, from Michelangelo
to Truman Capote to Ian McKellen (who penned a fleeting
foreword), make their appearances, but the real gems
here are in the less expected profiles and the odd connections
readers may forge between them: 40s film star Cesar
Romero, who played the Joker on TV’s original Batman,
is here, creating an interesting lineage between Batman
and Brokeback; Nancy Kulp and Lily Tomlin, both of whom
played Miss Hathaway in versions of The Beverly Hillbillies,
are included; Russell Wright, famed designer of American
dinnerware, makes an appearance, as does Chef Susan
Feniger of Two Hot Tamales fame (Gourmets galloping
and frugal Graham Kerr and Jeff Smith are absent, just
one of many reminders of just how uncomprehensive this
volume, almost by necessity, is). Uncomprehensiveness
is perhaps what we should wish for as time goes on and
society evolves; a comprehensive book of notable African
Americans or notable Jews seems unfathomable. In the
meantime, there’s lots of fun to be had between
these covers.
 It’s
hard to believe it’s been four years since the
publication of Douglas A. Martin’s last collection
of dreamy, autobiographical fragments, They Change The
Subject. Since then, this prolific, underappreciated
author has published an historical fiction based on
the life on Emily Bronte’s brother, Branwell, as
well as a collection of poems. As with all of Martin’s
work, his latest, Once You Go Back (Seven Stories
Press, $16.95. www.sevenstories.com),
could well come labeled “Some assembly required.”
Billed as a novel, this volume of snapshot tales, presented
in a voice at once concise and emotion-drenched, forms
its larger narrative only with the aid of a reader’s
thoughtful engagement. Even dealing with coming-of-age
anecdotes and an awakening sense of outsiderdom (the
stuff of so much clichéd gay fiction), Martin’s
singular perspective and mosaic approach yield fresh
rewards.
 There’s
fun of another sort between the covers of two recent
collections, Ken Shakin’s Love Sucks: New York
Stories of Love, Hate, and Anonymous Sex (Lethe
Press, $15. www.lethepress.com)
and Special Forces: Gay Military Erotica, edited
by Phillip Mackenzie, Jr. (Cleis Press, $14.95. www.cleispress.com).
“Times have changed,” writes Shakin in the
preface to his casually gritty memoirs;  Times
Square, too, as these chronicles make clear. Shakin’s
Rotten Apple is a Manhattan long ago scrubbed clean
by Disney, Giuliani, and other forces of moral rectitude.
He does a lively job of taking the reader back to dingy
piano bars, dirty back rooms, and jaded queens, all
punctuated with immoral erectitude. Love Sucks reads
like the prosaic lovechild of John Rechy and Ethan Mordden.
Make no mistake, Special Forces is a stroke book, not
a literary selection. That said, it’s marked by
an unusually high quality of writing and imagination
for the genre—Jeff Mann’s hot and tender P.O.W.
story “Sarvis” takes place during the Civil
War! Other tales here are set in WWII Germany, 60s Saigon,
and contemporary Afghanistan, making for interesting
variety within the overall theme of repressed sexuality
unleashed. The explicitness of that unleashing is quite
the rebuttal of current military policy: Do tell, boys,
do tell!
[Published:
February, 2010]
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