Part history lesson, part appreciation for the LGBTQ movement and a show that continues to thrive because of it.
How the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race both draws on and influences ideas and inspiration from the LGBTQ community at large.
The LGBTQ community has come a long way, write married bloggers Fitzgerald and Marquez (Everyone Wants To Be Me or Do Me, 2014). It is no longer bound by outdated laws restricting men’s clothing choices or being declared mentally ill. Here, the authors focus on a unique, historically defiant subculture of gay life: drag queens. They spotlight liberators and “street queens” like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who, when faced with the “attempted social genocide” of their demographic, openly confronted and defied designated societal norms and demanded their rights. Elsewhere, the authors celebrate the pivotal personalities who have impacted LGBTQ life through outreach, activism, or within their own personal devotion to drag culture—e.g., Charles Pierce, Jim Bailey, Divine, Leigh Bowery, Lypsinka, and José Sarria, among many others. The authors consistently cross-reference a host of LGBTQ cultural touchstones (“Herstory” lessons) with Drag Race and how it continues to represent queer culture. Fitzgerald and Marquez are generous with show references, sketch and lip-syncing challenge analyses, and how contestants on the show have drawn either acclaim or derision (or both) through their on-air interactions. A description of the show’s Speedo-clad “Pit Crew” dovetails with a discussion on desire and male physique, and the authors compare queens mastering the “art of shade” with the “reading” performers in the 1991 drag documentary Paris Is Burning. Informative, entertaining, melodramatic in its obsessiveness, and written with equal amounts of insight and wit, the book serves as a commemorative archive of drag in American life. Younger LGBTQ readers and RuPaul devotees will most appreciate the authors’ dedication to accurately chronicling the movement, detailing how race and gender blend harmoniously within the drag culture, and the minute details of a colorful and often controversial show that continues to mature.
Part history lesson, part appreciation for the LGBTQ movement and a show that continues to thrive because of it.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313462-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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