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AIRPLANE READ OF THE MONTH
Sadly underappreciated in his native land, but a prize-winning bestseller in France, Bruce Benderson has long been dispensing passionate, contrarian wisdom about class conflict in gay communities and gay relationships in books of fiction, including Pretending to Say No and User, and his acclaimed 2006 memoir, The Romanian, about his nine-month obsession with a street hustler. His new collection, Sex & Isolation (University of Wisconsin Press. $24.95. www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress), includes two long, fiercely thoughtful essays that are must-reads for anyone not ashamed to call himself either a homosexual or an intellectual. In the title essay, Benderson contrasts the rich textures of discovering his sexuality while criss-crossing America through the late 60s and early 70s, with the vacuum-packed sexual aesthetic of today’s online scene. The constant outpouring of sexual chatter on the internet, he suggests, is loaded with Puritanical shame: “…a kind of vessel for irresponsible outpourings, projected far from their source out of a necessity to disown them.” Benderson much prefers the eye contact, shoulder brushes, and crotch grabs of good old fashioned street cruising. In the book’s closing piece, “Toward the New Degeneracy,” he mourns the loss of the pre-Disneyfied Times Square with its seedy sexual marketplace, where rich and poor alike met up to get off, full of “lustiness, energy, and degradation.” Between these two broadsides, Benderson travels to Paris for a disastrous interview with drag club owner Michou, “the French Liberace,” disses Gen Y artistes who put more effort into marketing their work than creating it, and chronicles his friendship with the late Argentinean writer, Manuel Puig, author of Kiss of the Spider Woman. At under 200 pages, this is a concentrated bundle of brainy, sexy dynamite, perfect for reading in a single flight. Be sure to leave it in your seat-back pocket afterwards to hijack the brain of the next unsuspecting passenger.

If a check-in clerk ever looks at you funny when you insist that yes, you only want one bed for you and your same-sex travel companion, or a concierge seems appalled when you ask for suggestions about nearby gay clubs, consider sending their managers a copy of Jeff Guaracino’s Gay and Lesbian Tourism: The Essential Guide for Marketing (Butterworth-Heinemann. $39.95. www.elsevier.com). Guaracino is a vice president of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation and helped create the City of Brotherly Love’s landmark, “Get Your History Straight and Your Nightlife Gay” campaign, which not only instigated major gay tourism increases in Philly, but inspired dozens of cities and regions to initiate their own efforts to provide a welcoming environment for GLBT visitors. Written as a primer for travel and tourism professionals, this easy-reading tome also offers food for thought to gay travelers who are interested in understanding the courting techniques being practiced on them by destinations and travel businesses. Some of the anecdotes and case studies in the book may even help readers make new travel choices: Did you know that Bloomington, Indiana (home of the Kinsey Institute) is a Midwestern gay mecca? Or that Kimpton Hotels are a major supporter of GLBT charities? Perhaps the most important advice in the book for destinations courting gay travelers is this: While offering a warm welcome to gay people is important, we do not want be treated as if our interests revolve solely around our sexuality. Yes, we’re interested in bars and clubs, and perhaps a bit of naughtiness, but just like hetero travelers, we’re interested in dining, museums, history, cultural attractions, and all the other things that make travel exciting, regardless of sexual orientation.

Flipping through the hectic, collage-like pages of Times of the Signs (Birkhauser. $49.95. www.birkhauser.ch) is like a brisk walk through downtown Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto—three of the visually-dense Japanese cities at the heart of this simultaneously exhilarating and troubling book. Author and multi-media artist Eric Sadin has assembled a remarkable collection of over 2,000 urban images dominated by messages and images on billboards, electric signs, building facades, stickers, flyers, leaflets, sandwich-board men, and dozens of other delivery systems. It is provocatively captioned—“Uninterrupted informational fragmentation,” “Who speaks on T-shirts?”—and occasionally interrupted by essays on the excitement we may feel, the skills we may develop, and the faculties we may find impaired as we’re confronted by a tidal wave of text. A DVD that includes street-scene images and video clips featured in Sadin’s original museum installation, which inspired the book, accompanies this dynamic volume.

If the barrage of high-tech signage featured in Sadin’s book makes you a bit anxious, the territory explored in Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace’s The Second Life Herald (The MIT Press. $29.95. http://mitpress.mit.edu) may give you a chronic case of the heebie jeebies. This eye-opening, mind-expanding nonfiction blend of detective story, travel narrative, and social-psychology plunges the reader into worlds that exist parallel to our own that tens of millions of enthusiasts escape to every day: the virtual nations of multi-player online “games” including The Sims and Second Life. To many of their participants, these online destinations offer identity-shifting escapes from their real-world lives. Far more immersive than the vicarious experience of armchair traveling by reading a book, voyages to these Internet locales allow visitors to actively involve themselves in a new culture, forming emotional and entrepreneurial bonds with other part-time “residents.” As happens with many new technologies, some of the most intriguing initial uses involve sexual matters (think of the porn booms that accompanied the advent of VCRs and of web surfing); the authors note the relative commonality of master-slave relationships, and the very real business of designing, selling, and appending detailed, lifelike penises to character avatars. Ludlow and Wallace’s in-depth exploration of exotic places that many readers over age 40 have never considered visiting before makes their book a heady trip indeed.

[Published: May, 2008]