Dustin Lance Black’s memoir Mama’s Boy pulled up emotions I thought I’d long buried. The suffocating, terrifying fear that you live with, born from a mix of homophobia and religion, that infects introverted, creative gay boys. That unique blend of anxiety that comes from feeling that you are already broken and must hide behind a... Continue Reading →
The very existence of Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles feels subversive. Comic creators Mark Russell (writer) and Mike Feehan (pencils) took classic Hanna-Barbera characters and used them as a platform to talk about institutionalised homophobia in the 50s with harsh echoes for today. Reframing the pink, theatre loving, fourth-wall breaking cougar (clearly coded gay... Continue Reading →
New York writer Peter Kispert’s debut collection of short stories, I Know You Know Who I Am, is an interesting, frustrating and frankly disheartening look at gay life. Though unconnected, these stories and snippets paint a world of insecurity, dishonesty and dystopia covered in a gloss of language. Deception is the core theme running through... Continue Reading →
The one advantage of COVID-19 mandated lockdown is the time to start working my way through the ever-expanding “LGBTQ+ reading pile”, which brought me to a book I’ve been meaning to start for almost a year now - Iolanda Zanfardino’s beautiful Midnight Radio. Midnight Radio drops in on the lives of four people around the... Continue Reading →
Michael Cashman’s One of Them is not only a rich, often hilarious, occasionally heart-breaking and surprisingly candid memoir, but also a fascinating and important document of social history and the fight for LGBTQ+ equality. It’s gripping from the very first page where Cashman describes the day of his civil partnership (legal recognition for same-sex couples... Continue Reading →
Author Stephen Bourne was at London's British Film Institute last night to discuss his new book Playing Gay in the Golden Age of British TV and kindly offered The Queer Review the below extract from his talk. When the theatre company Gay Sweatshop was founded in the 1970s it quickly established a reputation for the... Continue Reading →
Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo is being presented as a 'Young Adult' book, but don’t let that make you think it’s childish, this is a gorgeous and moving first person exploration of sexuality, poetry, blackness and love that most ‘adult’ books struggle to achieve. The Black Flamingo is the story of Michael, a mixed-race child... Continue Reading →
The Coming of the Night (1999) is a novel that shouldn’t work. Readers ought to be left frustrated, disappointed, and confused. How, they may wonder, was the book authored by the mastermind behind City of Night (1963), a landmark in gay storytelling? Often, when plot fails, characters can save a text. We fall for their... Continue Reading →
There is something utterly joyous and enlightening about Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel, Gender Queer: A Memoir. In part an autobiography, as well as a primer on non-binary gender issues, Kobabe unveils a personal story with such warmth and beauty it’s impossible not to love. It’s the paradox of art that specificity creates universality (the more... Continue Reading →
