An informative memoir that fills in some gaps in the social justice record.
Francis writes about recovering gay history one document at a time in this debut memoir.
What’s past is prologue, not only for individuals but for whole communities. “But what if you cannot find the past?” asks the author in his introduction. “What happens when all evidence, every shred, has been erased, deleted, sealed, or purposefully forgotten? What if the past is torched or stuffed into garbage bags and dumpsters? For LGBTQ Americans this has been the way of our world.” Archive activism, the process that Francis describes in this book, is the attempt to recover that history in the form of whatever archival materials have been squirreled away in attics, basements, government archives, and law libraries as a means of furthering social justice causes in the present. The author’s passion for reclaiming gay history led him to resurrect the Mattachine Society—a 1950s-era gay rights group—in 2011. Through the Society, Francis was able to retrieve troves of records related to such actions as Nancy Reagan’s refusal to help Rock Hudson get into a leading hospital for his AIDS treatment and attempts by President Lyndon Johnson to hide the sexual orientation of one of his aides. The author makes his own additions to the corpus of gay history, recounting his exposure to gay cinema as a graduate student in Los Angeles and his eventual involvement, beginning in the 1980s, as an out gay man in Republican Party politics. (He even helped presidential candidate George W. Bush connect with gay and lesbian voters.) Francis writes with candor and conviction, as here when he describes his meeting with Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove: “I emphasized this would represent a new generation ready to make homosexuality a nonissue for the Republican Party. There could be no going back to the Reagan years of psychologically self-tormented, closeted cases…” Though Francis may not be who readers first think of when they think of an activist, his account is a fascinating and illuminating addition to the history of gay liberation.
An informative memoir that fills in some gaps in the social justice record.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781574419085
Page Count: 288
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© 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.
