Books

From scholar and filmmaker Dagmar Schultz, comes, Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992, a documentary about Lorde's years living in Berlin mentoring fellow feminists, attending speaking engagements, and performing readings on behalf of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freedom University, Berlin where Kennedy gave the "I am a Berliner" speech in 1963. There, Lorde co-founded the Afro-German movement.

In an imaginary post-gender world, social structures break down and sexual impulse prevails for many of David Cronenberg's socially estranged characters. Trauma radically becomes the source of pleasure, internal homophobia conflicts with a man's duty to the family mafia, and a drug-induced trip to South America lead to a pansexual encounters with buggy doppelgangers.

I was twelve when my friend Joel introduced my to Sybil Dorsett. Not only was her story of a woman afflicted with a psychological condition called multiple personality disorder printed on pulpy old paper and delivered in the same stay-up-all-night-with-the-flashlight gothic style as V.C. Andrews grotesque Flowers in the Attic, here was a heroine with which a gay tween in the eighties could unknowingly align: she was a wallflower whose many shades of fabulousness were so bright that not even the grisly sexual abuse of her schizophrenic mother would contain this girl's spirit. Her psyche had simply found a creative and beautiful way to escape torture and pain. Sybil was sold as the real story of how this young lady worked with a psychologist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, to discover, heal and unite her many selves into one.

"Your politics are fine but your therapy sucks." Ron Abraytis gets down to the nitty of religious identification, counseling gays, and counter-transference in Casebook for Counseling Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,  and Transgender Persons and Their Families.

A gay classic from 1956, as relevant and beautiful as it was a half-century ago.

The book Music on Film: Grease is an homage to everything Grease: The original 1971 play, the 1978 movie, the sequel Grease 2, the TV documentary Behind the Music, the 1994 and 2007 New York revivals, more TV specials, the 2010 sing-along version of the original movie, the promotional John Travolta posters given away with purchase of Helene Curtis shampoo, Grease jeans, Grease jackets, Grease Firestone tires, and Pepsi’s Grease “lucky caps”.

You’re 22 years old and being sent off to war in a few days. You admit you don’t know what the war is all about. (The harshest criticism you make of Saddam Hussein is that he is “hypocritical”, which strikes me a bit like condemning Hitler for being a lousy pinochle player.) You don’t know if you’ll ever return home, if you’ll ever see your family and friends again. You realize that you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life by joining the National Guard; it never occurred to you that you might end up in a war zone.