Thursday, January 30, 2014

LGBT Literature: Essential Books

(from dailykos.com
by Dave in Northridge)


Chrislove's grand project of a book a month for 2014, which was to begin today, has been derailed by that peskiest of pesky things, his dissertation proposal. Naturally, I don't have anything in my draft file. So another list, but this one you'll propose entries to yourself. We examined David Halperin's How to be Gay a few months ago, and his take off point could have been a book from which a movie had been made, James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941). What book would you suggest a young (college age) person read to find out more about our subject?

My reasoning below the great orange bookplate:

At the grand birthday dinner the SF Kossacks held Sunday night, I was talking to norm, who is planning to update the bibliography, Gay Rights on the Ballot, which he wrote in December 2008. This got me thinking that we might be able to help him in an open-source kind of way, but that's not what this is about, because I don't think I should send you to a library catalog to do research this early in the morning.

This is also not an "aha!" kind of list where I ask you to write about whatever you propose, although I would hope that if you propose a book it will get the diary wheels churning.

So that said, I think that of all the books I've reviewed, what I'd pick would be the first two books Armistead Maupin wrote in his Tales of the City series. Because it's about San Francisco in the 1970s in that first blush of possibility, mostly, because it's been a serial, a book, a TV series and a musical, and because it's fun. because it doesn't set high expectations for the reader either (like, say, Dancer from the Dance does).

Propose away!! I'm going to make coffee.

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