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
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
