White, Erin O. “Given Up for You: A Memoir of Love, Belonging, and Belief”, University of Wisconsin Press, 2018.

Yearnings

Amos Lassen

Erin O. White in her candid memoir this candid and revelatory memoir tells us of her desire for both romantic and divine love, and how this transformed her life. In the late 1990s, she spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and on Sunday mornings she went to Catholic confirmation classes. Then when the Church closed its doors to her, she faced a serious question— What does a lesbian believer do with her longing for God? She shares her feelings with conviction, as she explores heart and soul. Her memoir is candid and intimate and puts forth

 complex questions about the world and how we fit into it. White’s struggle to reconcile desire and belief reminding us, yet again, the loss we encounter when the church refuses our entry. Her story is the story of denied faith. What really hits us hard is the onus that comes with such carnal and spiritual denial.

She believes that “there may be no act more subversive than surrender, no prayer more devout than desire itself.” As she deals with the competing and rivalries of same-sex denial and Roman Catholicism, she shares very personal thoughts. She attempted to juggle these two desires and as we read we often find ourselves feeling exactly the same yet White decided to put his down on paper. White’s prose here is beautiful and heartbreaking in its honesty.

Daly, Anthony. “Playland: Secrets of a Forgotten Scandal”, Mirror Books, 2018.

A Shocking Memoir

Amos Lassen

“Playland” is a shocking and important new memoir from Anthony Daly and I must say that as one who is not easily shocked, I was indeed shocked and surprised as I read this book. This is Daly’s voice as he relates to us from being part of a dark scandal in the heart of London’s Soho in the 1970s. Daly came to London as a way of escaping the trials of living in his native Northern Ireland. He got a job at Foyles Bookshop and began a new life in England. However, because he was naïve, he was soon dealing with predators who were looking for young men to blackmail and sexually exploit. The irony is that he left Ireland in hopes of a better and freer life and found one that was so much worse than he could have ever imagined. He was victim to sexual and mental abuse by some the most influential men in England and he was forced to hide it. However, as time passed, the trauma of it all became harder to contain as he witnessed other revelations of historic abuse coming to light on TV and in newspapers. Ultimately, the voice he though he had lost was heard. For forty years, he had been silent and what he had to say was politically explosive. He has managed to tell all and to do so stylishly and with feeling (a feeling that I hope I never have). This is a haunting true story of a young man’s descent into a “hell designed to satisfy the powerful. A world which destroyed the lives of everyone involved. `[This is my] journey into a world of drink and drugs, a world of gangsters, rent boys, businessmen, politicians, pimps and pedophiles. Because of what happened to me and the fact that I kept a diary at the time, I am in a unique position to tell the real story of Playland.”

Hayes, Bill. “Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir”, University of Chicago Press, 2001, reprint 2018.

With a New Preface

Amos Lassen

Some of you might recognize the name Bill Hayes from another book that he wrote, “Insomniac City” which I recently reviewed. It is a memoir of his years with the great Oliver Sacks. This book was originally written seventeen years ago and I suspect it has been reissued because of the success of the later book.

“We often think of sleep as mere stasis, a pause button we press at the end of each day. Yet sleep is full of untold mysteries—eluding us when we seek it too fervently, throwing us into surreal dream worlds when we don’t, sometimes even possessing our bodies so that they walk and talk without our conscious volition.” Bill Hayes explores the mysteries of his own sleep patterns and has decided, “I have come to see that sleep itself tells a story.”

Hayes has been plagued by insomnia his entire life. The science and mythology of sleep and sleeplessness form the backbone to Hayes’s narrative of his personal battles with sleep and how they colored his waking life. He shares stories of fugitive sleep through memories of growing up in the closet, coming out to his Irish Catholic family and then watching his friends fall ill and die during the early years of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco and finally finding a lover. His stories are an erudite blend of science and personal narrative and they serve as an introduction to the topics for which Hayes has since become famous, including art, Eros, city life, the history of medical science, and queer identity. 

 The book is part reflection on his own lifelong turmoil with sleep and part inquiry into the worlds of sleep research, psychology, medicine, mythology, aging, and mental health.” Hayes brings memoir, history, and science together and pulls them apart again in a book that switches genre and subject. We have fascinating research and memoir of a gay man who grew up in a household filled with Ireland, Catholicism, and the military. Hayes brings together

his coming-out and queer-sex stories within the overarching theme of sleeplessness and in doing so he pushes the borders of gay autobiography, giving new life to a powerful genre. We might say that this is an “obsessional autobiography”.

Roberts, Robert E. “Mad Dogs And Queer Tattoos: Tattooing the San Francisco Queer Revolution”, Fair Page Media, 2018.

Every Tattoo Has a Story

Amos Lassen

Robert E. Roberts was trained as a classical musician but he gave up composing harpsichord music to become a tattoo artist. In this memoir, Roberts, aka “Mad Dog,” describes coming out as a gay man and shared ink stories that document the height of the San Francisco Gay Revolution. He shows us that every tattoo has a story, and the way that Roberts categorizes tattoo images gives their meaning in gay life. The stories provide new insights into the great social changes that were taking place. Roberts details the identities, challenges, sorrows and joys of gay life in powerful images that have come to represent machismo, bear culture, tribalism, and mythology.

Tattoo ink is permanent ink and is eyewitness to the sex, art, and skin it took to create our queer identities after Stonewall. A tattooist is like a barber or bartender in that get to hear secrets of their customers. There is a unique authenticity here. Roberts is a master of anecdote from San Francisco to Amsterdam and he builds gay history from his clients’ tales. He tells all about tattooing and reveals truths about surviving gay human life because our tattooing is “a blood art with needles, existentially suited to rage against AIDS”. He lost his own lover to the disease and this has empowered to put names to faces of men long gone—men on whose skin he inked images drawn by Tom of Finland, Rex, and Disney. This book is a wonderful and alternative contribution to San Francisco gay history that is extremely well written. I would love to be able to say that this is a fun read but it is more bittersweet than fun.

Roberts was dedicated to his art of tattooing as he was committed to live to an openly gay lifestyle in “the very heterosexual tattoo world.” His history is also a history of the gay movement in San Francisco from the 1980s and beyond.

Duberman, Martin. “The Rest of It: Hustlers, Cocaine, Depression, and Then Some, 1976–1988”, Duke University Press, 2018.

A Brutally Honest Look at Himself

Amos Lassen

This is a book that I never expected to read but am glad I did and I will explain that during the course of this review. Martin Duberman has always held a very special place in my mind in that he was not only a respected scholar but also an out gay man. I just never thought that he would have the same kind of problems and life situations as the rest of us.

When Duberman’s mother died, he began a twelve-year period filled with despair, drug addiction, and debauchery. He became involved in cocaine use, had a massive heart attack, and immersed himself into New York’s gay hustler scene. He became close to suicide and severe depression and he enrolled in rehab. This is the story of how Duberman managed to survive his personal life while at the same time held leading roles in the gay community and the academy.

Even with what was going on, Duberman was able to remain productive— he wrote his biography of Paul Robeson, rededicated himself to teaching, wrote plays, and co-edited the prize-winning Hidden from History. His founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies and in doing so he inaugurated a new academic discipline. At the outset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Duberman was politically active, and in this book he describes the tensions between the New Left and gay organizers, as well as the profound homophobia that brought about queer radical activism. Duberman gives us a lot of gossip here and we read about such people as Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Vivian Gornick, Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millett, and Néstor Almendros, among many others. The book was written with brutal honesty giving us insights into a troubling decade of both personal and political history. We certainly see why this was too painful to share until now.

What we really see here is Duberman’s passion about who we are and how we live. He both challenges gay invisibility and confronts anti-gay bigotry among the intelligentsia. These were unhappy years that was filled with crises and they reveal that our heroes are not always heroic and in many ways are just like the rest of us. What Duberman experienced was during a pivotal era in the United States and in the LGBTQ rights movement. He was part of shaping many of our movement’s milestones and in this book, he fills in the gaps of his life and we are very lucky that he did so.