Hiya BetterMost friends!!!!
I'm here late today! But better late than
pregnant never!
Went out today to the book store, and decided to expand my gay library, and picked up three books.
"Queer" - Simon Cage, Lisa Richards, Howard Wilmot
With plenty of color photos, graphics, best-of lists and miniprofiles of celebrities, plus a foreword by Boy George, Queer is a lighthearted celebration of gay and lesbian culture, especially of the last three decades. Edited by freelance writer Lisa Richard, former Boyz magazine editor Simon Gage and journalist Howard Wilmot, the book includes a survey of the gayest cities in the world, a retrospective of gay and lesbian contributions to entertainment and fashion (from drag kings to Versace) and spotlights of activists and icons ("Princess Diana: Latter day saint and gay icon or stupid spoilt bitch?"), all in a busy, slick package that will remind readers of their favorite glossy magazines.
"Bear Like Me" - Jonathan Cohen
Fired from his job at Phag magazine, Peter Mallory has to find a way to make a living - and get revenge! When his best friend suggests writing a book about the bear community - and using his new "bear" look to go undercover at Phag - Peter is soon letting his body hair grow and practising the fine art of flannel couture. When Peter's sabotage campaign works only too well, he starts to run the risk of discovery. With an envious fellow bear set to unmask Peter as a fraud, and a relationship with an intriguing bear on the line, things are about to get very hairy!
"Young Man From the Provinces" - Alan Helms
In his 20s and early 30s, Helms was at once the most privileged and self-destructive of men, at the giddy peak of his career as "the most celebrated young man in all of gay New York." The Manhattan of the 1950s and '60s embraced the Columbia student as a "U.T." a "universal type," or "someone everybody wants," photographed by Avedon, directed by Edward Albee and pursued by any number of men. Repudiating the drab miseries of his Indiana boyhood, Helms pursued those who pursued him: his more celebrated lovers included Anthony Perkins, Larry Kert and Luchino Visconti. Leonard Bernstein wooed him ardently, and chum Noel Coward helped Helms reconcile with a lover. But the relationships were doomed to fall apart, as Helms (held aloft by adoration, alcohol and drugs; brought thuddingly to earth by excess: bulimia; alcoholism; joyless, frenetic promiscuity) began to self-destruct. Self-acceptance came with the more temperate joys of work as a college professor and with counseling from the Harvard psychologist Robert Coles. As he grew older, Helms was better able to distance himself from the past. Because Helms is neither an elegant nor a modest writer, the reader is less willing to repudiate his glittering excesses; Helms's vigorous name-dropping has more charm than the somber self-reproaches that accompany his sobriety. This self-described "D student in the school of life" depicts a New York that, after the Stonewall riots, would never be as closeted or as cozily familiar again.