COME OUT FIGHTING

A diversity of voices from “brave and useful souls,” as Gore Vidal calls them in the foreword, that attest to the rich, and mostly recent, literature of gay and lesbian politics compiled here by Bull (Perfect Enemies, 1996, etc.).

Each of these 46 pieces has the political crunch of a broadside. The material is arranged chronologically, starting with a great inclusive hug from Walt Whitman, jumping 52 years to Emma Goldman’s recognition of “various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life,” and proceeding through the clinical pathways of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud until offerings start coming in thick and fast with the 1950s. Norman Mailer weighs in with an essay on homosexual rights that, “while honorable as a piece of work, is dressed in the gray of lugubrious caution,” but which nonetheless “helped to blow up a log jam of accumulated timidities and restraints.” After Susan Sontag stakes out the boundaries of “camp,” a fistful of manifestos usher in the ’70s, including a short but provocative item by Adrienne Rich on the power of literature to tether her lesbianism to the earth. Harvey Milk tenders warm urgings to seek political office; Michel Foucault holds forth on sex and the production of power; Vidal pours hot soup into the lap of Midge Dexter, whose essay on homosexuality in Commentary, “for sheer vim and vigor . . . outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Joann Wypijewski closes the collection with an investigative report on the murder of Matthew Shepard, from which readers will exit knowing they have had revealed to them an unmistakable time, place, and people.

Fertile minds at work, pulling the political out of the personal, challenging gay discrimination from every angle—a body of writing all movements ache for.