A unique and sophisticated understanding of Hollywood’s indispensable gay and lesbian culture.
Mann (Wisecracker, 1998, etc.) intriguingly chronicles the experience of gay men and lesbians in Hollywood during the studio era: “a haven for homosexuals, a place to thrive and, within parameters, live and work with a degree of personal authenticity.”
While the Hollywood studios from the 1920s to the ’60s were hardly committed to gay rights, writes the author in this engrossing study, they did provide a milieu in which gays and lesbians worked as actors, directors, writers, costumers, decorators, and journalists, openly during the best of times, and never less than an open secret during the bad times. Mann sets the homosexual subculture within the larger social context: the freedom of the ’20s, the crackdown by the self-appointed ethics police and the imposition of the Production Code of the ’30s, the burgeoning of a gay community and consciousness during the war years, the anti-progressive lunacy of the ’50s, and the liberation of the ’60s. Working from primary sources and thousands of interviews with gay and lesbian movie people and their families, Mann’s analysis is complex but illuminating: he is at home discussing the class (and predominantly white) circumstances of gay expression as he is with shaping the notion of gay sensibilities at work in design and costuming. He handles with ease the gay subtexts in George Cukor’s work, the tangy feminism of Dorothy Arzner, the evolution of a gay culture with its own language, customs, and folk history. He treats with intelligence and without mercy both the sorry result of Catholic reformers getting their fingers into Hollywood in the post-Prohibition years, as well as the equally pathetic reason gays and lesbians were not more prominent on the blacklists: “The discrimination gays faced at the hands of the Communist Party.”
A unique and sophisticated understanding of Hollywood’s indispensable gay and lesbian culture.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03017-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
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
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