Provocative, curious, and noteworthy.
The heady history of a clandestine gay practice.
In this enthusiastic exploration of the “art” of gay cruising, Espinoza (The Five Acts of Diego León, 2013, etc.) provides a unique perspective on this furtive practice of coded signals and physical gestures geared toward spontaneous desire and availability. The author begins with the origins of cruising in early civilizations, when gay men began seeking each other out for covert dalliances unbeknownst to those around them. Its evolution continued as ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence embraced a sexual free-for-all atmosphere structured around the rules of dominant masculinity. Espinoza, a talented tour guide, describes the public toilets of 1700s London and frequently raided “Molly houses” as well as such 20th-century resources as Bob Damron’s Address Book, which served as “a gay yellow pages, a directory listing all the gay friendly bars and places strewn across the United States where men could meet and hook up.” The AIDS epidemic stifled some of the spirit of the defiant post-Stonewall brotherhood before online cruising, chat rooms, and mobile apps restored the passion and the practice. The author incorporates intriguing profiles of former cruisers into his research material, creating a narrative that puts human faces to a subject that may seem bizarre to some readers and captivating to others. Espinoza weaves into the historical material vivid recollections from his own coming-of-age as a closeted Mexican youth “navigating a culture that encouraged hypermasculinity and patriarchy.” Ultimately, cruising unleashed in the author a life-changing self-assurance. Espinoza’s research is richly referential, as he cites the Al Pacino film Cruising; the grisly agenda of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who cruised bars and alleyways to locate his male victims; and George Michael and former senator Larry Craig, both busted in men’s bathrooms. Espinoza candidly inserts himself into this striking examination with memories of his own cruising adventures and segments of stimulating commentary on gay liberation and the tenets of stealthy sexuality.
Provocative, curious, and noteworthy.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-82-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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