Powered by Max Banner Ads Anxiety and Relationships by Mackenzie Worrall “Most people probably daydream about winning an Academy Award, but I spend a lot of time imagining my funeral or how I’d look in a body cast. I don’t even get scared. I just like to imagine them, all these potential emergencies.” (Holding Still For As Long As Possible, Zoe Whittall, Anansi, 312 pages, $18.95... 

Pleasure by Mackenzie Worrall “Wasn’t language one long dying, / one long walling off meaning / from living, a boundary between / death and life, impermeable / not a repetition of belief, but / the annihilation inherent / in naming “positive” / and “negative”.” (Pleasure, by Brian Teare, Ashahta Press, 75 pages, paperback, $17.50) Pleasurable moments, given enough years, take on a tinge... 

Out of Step By Troy Petenbrink When J. Lee Watton was discharged from the Navy in 1965 she found it easier to tell her parents that it was because she suffered from a mental illness than to tell them it was because she loved a woman. “Shame is a wound that goes deep,” said Watton, as she gathered with other former military servicewomen at a restaurant in Washington, DC, just one day after the repeal... 

Bookmark by Richard Labonte Moffie, by Andre Carl van der Merwe. Europa Editions, 368 pages, $15 paper. Young Nicholas Van der Swart, already scorned by his strict Afrikaans father as a moffie – a gay sissy – is an unhappy conscript into South Africa’s National Defence Force in the 1970s. Apartheid still rules, homosexuality is deemed abhorrent by both church and state and the segregated... 

Bookmark by Richard Labonte Taking My Life, by Jane Rule. Talonbooks, 284 pages, $19.95 paper. It’s good to go through all the boxes. That’s how scholar Linda M. Morra came across an astonishing, never-catalogued find: a posthumous autobiography, handwritten on yellow foolscap paper, recounting Rule’s first 21 years from the thoughtful, ironic and sometimes painfully honest perspective of old... 

Like No Other Lives by Mackenzie Worrall “The stories are horrifying and mundane, hilarious and grim, wistful and insistent. They are anybody’s life because they are like no lives anyone else has ever had.” (Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris ed. David Bergman, University of Wisconsin Press, 426 pages, $29.95 paperback) History was my least favorite class in high school.... 

Bookmark by Richard Labonte Stealing Angel, by Terry Wolverton. Spinsters Ink, 288 pages, $14.95 paper. Estranged lovers, custody fights, child abuse, kidnapping, spiritual beliefs, the shadowy boundary between religion and cult – Wolverton’s fourth novel juggles a number of hot-button issues with commendable fluidity. Once upon a time in Los Angeles, Maggie and Yolanda shared custody of... 

Naked Boys and Debauchery by Mackenzie Worrall “They were poets and aesthetes, carrying sunflowers and dressing flamboyantly. They shocked society and posed a threat to the status quo. Every gay stereotype we have today comes from these men. They politicized their aesthetic. They broke all convention. They were the original uppity fags.” (Teleny and Camille by Jon Macy, Northwest Press, 248 pages,... 

Book Marks by Richard Labonte August 22, 2011 The Two Krishnas, by Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla. Magnus Books, 348 pages, $14.95 paper. A closeted husband, an unsuspecting wife, an achingly needy younger lover – the three pivotal people in Dhalla’s second novel are stock gay-fiction standards transformed into wrenchingly real characters by the author’s mastery of human emotion. Banker Rahul, outwardly... 

Book Marks by Richard Labonte August 8, 2011 The Kid, by Sapphire. Penguin Books, 384 pages, $26.95 hardcover. This is a book that will make readers flinch. A sequel to Sapphire’s 1996 novel, Push, it opens with the funeral of Precious, that book’s center, nine years later – leaving her son, Abdul Jones, an orphan scrabbling for survival in a world where molestation is a festering norm. The...