‘When the Band Played On’
By Michael G. Lee
c.2025, Chicago Review Press
$30/282 pages

You spent most of your early career playing second fiddle.

But now you’ve got the baton, and a story to tell that people aren’t going to want to hear, though it’s essential that they face the music. They must know what’s happening. As in the new book “When the Band Played On” by Michael G. Lee, this time, it’s personal.

Born in 1951 in small-town Iowa, Randy Shilts was his alcoholic, abusive mother’s third of six sons. Frustrated, drunk, she reportedly beat Shilts almost daily when he was young; she also called him a “sissy,” which “seemed to follow Randy everywhere.”

Perhaps because of the abuse, Shilts had to “teach himself social graces,” developing “adultlike impassiveness” and “biting sarcasm,” traits that featured strongly as he matured and became a writer. He was exploring his sexuality then, learning “the subtleties of sexual communication,” while sleeping with women before fully coming out as gay to friends.

Nearing his 21st birthday, Shilts moved to Oregon to attend college and to “allow myself love.” There, he became somewhat of an activist before leaving San Francisco to fully pursue journalism, focusing on stories of gay life that were “mostly unknown to anyone outside of gay culture.”

He would bounce between Oregon and California several times, though he never lost sight of his writing career and, through it, his activism. In both states, Shilts reported on gay life, until he was well known to national readers and gay influencers. After San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated, he was tapped to write Milk’s biography.

By 1982, Shilts was in love, had a book under his belt, a radio gig, and a regular byline in a national publication reporting “on the GRID beat,” an acronym later changed to AIDS. He was even under contract to write a second book.

But Shilts was careless. Just once, careless.

“In hindsight,” says Lee, “… it was likely the night when Randy crossed the line, becoming more a part of the pandemic than just another worried bystander.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are two distinct audiences for “When the Band Played On.” One type of reader will remember the AIDS crisis and the seminal book about it. The other is too young to remember it, but needs to know Randy Shilts’s place in its history.

The journey may be different, but the result is the same: author Michael G. Lee tells a complicated, still-controversial story of Shilts and the book that made America pay attention, and it’s edgy for modern eyes. Lee clearly shows why Shilts had fans and haters, why Shilts was who he was, and Lee keeps some mystery in the tale. Shilts had the knowledge to keep himself safe but he apparently didn’t, and readers are left to wonder why. There’s uncomfortable tension in that, and a lot of hypothetical thinking to be had.

For scholars of gay history, this is an essential book to read. Also, for anyone too young to remember AIDS as it was, “When the Band Played On” hits the right note.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

‘Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies’
Published by Catapult
Available Jan. 14; hardcover $27

Two strangers lock eyes across a bar. Or maybe they reach for the same book on a shelf in a bookstore. Or maybe they’re a model and artist, exchanging nervous smiles as the artist tries to capture a piece of the model’s soul on canvas or film. 

In a Hollywood film, we’d be led to believe that these moments are laden with momentous importance – a flicker of sexual charge and desire, a chemical reaction that leads inexorably to life-altering romance and happily ever after.

But in his new book of essays “Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies,” queer Colombian film and culture critic Manuel Betancourt unpacks the notion that flirting needs to be anything more, suggesting that flirtation can be a worthwhile endeavor in itself.

“One of the things that if you read any kind of love story or watch any kind of rom-com, you’re constantly encouraged to think that flirtation is sort of like preamble to something else,” Betancourt tells me over cookies outside of Levain bakery in Larchmont.

“Actually, flirtation doesn’t need to do that. You can flirt just for the act of flirting, and that can be fun, and that can be great. What is it that you find instead in that moment of possibility, at that moment when anything can happen? Just what happens when you’re trying to be the best person you could be? It’s almost more exciting when you know, there’s nothing else on the horizon.”

But “Hello Stranger”isn’t a how-to guide to flirting. It’s more like a cross between cultural criticism and memoir. 

Over a series of essays that alternate between examinations of flirting scenes in movies, books, and art, and anecdotes from his own personal life, Betancourt traces the ways that we use flirting to create different kinds of intimacies. 

“This is not a how-to, because I don’t think gay men need help with that,” Betancourt says. “But I also know that I’m a gay man in Los Angeles whereas I know there are young folks in Ohio that may not think of it this way because they’ve been conditioned, and actually we now have such a breadth of gay literature and a culture that’s continually teaching us we need to find the one.”

The book is a deeply personal one for Betancourt, who recently got divorced from his husband and joined a polyamorous relationship as he began writing it.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about different intimacies with strangers, with friends, with lovers, things that fell outside of what we understand as traditional. And so it felt like an easy way to turn all of these things that I was dealing with on a personal level into a more cohesive and coherent project,” he says. 

“I wanted to think through where the joy in flirtation lies. Like, why are we so drawn to it? Why was I so drawn to it? Why do I enjoy it so much? And of course, being the kind of literary academic that I was, I was willing to find other people must have thought about this, other people must have depicted it on screen and books,” he says. “Other people can teach me about this.”

The book starts with examinations of the fleeting, flirtatious intimacies seen in films like “Closer” and “Before Sunrise,” before diving into more complicated (and queer) relationships in the books “The Sexual Outlaw” and “A Little Life” and the portraiture of photographer Peter Hujar, using them as springboards to examine Betancourt’s own relationships to cruising, dating, nudity, and relationships both monogamous and otherwise. 

“I wanted to begin with those straight, very common, understandable ways of thinking about these things, and then the book slowly gets clearer and we end in polyamory and conceptual monogamy, and these very different ways of thinking. 

“What else I wanted to do for those gay readers that are maybe looking to find something here, is show that none of this is new. I think a lot of us try to think, like, ‘This is modern and polyamory is so 2024,’ but what I wanted to do is give a cultural history of that.” 

Though it’s not an instruction manual, Betancourt says he did improve his own flirtation skills while researching the book, as evidenced in a spicy anecdote he recounts in the book about cruising a man in a hotel bar, where he was actually working on writing “Hello Stranger.”

“You just have to pay attention, open yourself up, which is also what Hollinghurst, writes in ‘The Swimming-Pool Library.’ His protagonist is able to like cruise and hook up anywhere he wants to in London, because he’s always looking, like literally looking. He’s constantly out seeing the world as if it’s a cruising playground and that is all apparently you need to do.

“If you’re crossing paths and you see someone who you’re attracted to and you lock eyes, that is the moment to make something happen and it’s about being open to the possibility and then also letting the other person know that you are.”

Nurturing that openness was difficult at first for Betancourt, due to his upbringing in Bogota, Colombia.

“For me it was a very different cultural thing because of the kind of culture of violence, the culture of unsafety in Colombia. You’re sort of encouraged to not really trust anyone,” he says. “It takes almost locking that away because you can’t approach any of those situations with fear.” 

“This is about, like, teaching myself because I’m not great at it either. So, it’s about reminding myself, oh yeah, be open and more attentive.”

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

‘Cher: The Memoir Part One’
By Cher
c.2024, Dey St.
$36/413 pages

Mother knows best.

At least that’s what she’d like you to think because she said it a hundred times while you were growing up, until you actually believed. One day, though, if you were lucky, you learned that Mother didn’t always know best, but she did her best – like in the new book “Cher: The Memoir Part One” by Cher, when Mom helped make a star.

Though she doesn’t remember it, little Cheryl Sarkisian spent a few weeks in a Catholic Charities orphanage when she was tiny, because her father had disappeared and her mother couldn’t afford to take care of her. “Cheryl,” by the way, was the name on her birth certificate, although her mother meant to name her “Cherilyn.”

That first time wasn’t the last time little Cher was left with someone other than her mother, Jackie Jean, a beautiful, talented struggling singer-actress who’d been born into poverty and stayed there much of her life. When money was tight, she temporarily dropped her daughter off with friends or family, or the little family moved from house to house and state to state. Along the way, relocating in and out of California gave Cher opportunities to act, sing, and to learn the art of performance, which is what she loved best.

In the meantime, Jackie Jean married and married again, five or six husbands in all; she changed her name to Georgia, worked in the movies and on TV, and she gave Cher a little sister, moved the family again, landed odd jobs, and did what it took to keep the lights on.

As Cher grew up in the shadow of her glamorous mother, she gained a bit of glam herself, becoming sassy and independent, and prone to separation anxiety, which she blamed on her abandonment as a small child. In her mother’s shadow, she’d always been surrounded by movie and TV stars and, taking acting classes, she met even more.

And then she met Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, who was a friend before he was a lover. So, here’s the very, very happy surprise: “Cher: The Memoir Part One” is a downright fun book to read.

If you’ve ever seen author Cher in interviews or on late night TV, what you saw is what you get here: bald-faced truth, sarcastic humor, sass, and no pity-partying. She tells a good story, ending this book with her nascent movie career, and she leaves readers hanging in anticipation of the stories she’ll tell in her next book.

The other happy surprise is that this memoir isn’t just about her. Cher spends a good amount of the first half writing about her mother and her grandmother, both complicated women who fought to keep their heads and those of their offspring above water. Readers looking between the lines will be enthralled.

Surely, “Cher: The Memoir Part One” is a fan’s delight, but it’s also a great memoir for anyone who particularly loves the genre and doesn’t mind a bit of profanity. If that’s you, then you got this, babe.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

‘I’ll Get Back to You’
By Becca Grischow
c.2024, Penguin Books
$19/320 pages

Christmas tree lots, ugh. Santa, New England, snowflakes, mistletoe, blah blah blah.

The cable TV lineup is full of that stuff this time of year but it’s nowhere near as magical as Hollywood wants you to believe. Honestly, thinking of romance (or the lack thereof) right now is almost enough to bring out your humbug. Get this, though: There’s plenty of romance to go around this Yuletide, but in “I’ll Get Back to You” by Becca Grischow, it might take some planning to find it.

It was supposed to be a great dual-birthday celebration.

Murphy and her BFF, Kat, were planning a “Blackout Wednesday” of drinking and debauchery, followed by a sleepover and snacks at Murphy’s house before they went to Kat’s parents’ place for Thanksgiving. That was the plan, until Kat ruined it by bringing her new boyfriend, Daniel, along and assuming that Murphy wouldn’t mind.

Murphy minded very much. She hated being the gay third wheel, and it was doubly annoying when they all ran into Ellie, who’d graduated a few years before Kat and Murphy.

Wait, Ellie was straight in high school, wasn’t she? Well, she wasn’t now and when Ellie, Kat, and Daniel started comparing notes about attending the University of Illinois, it was all Murphy could do not to roll her eyes.

She wasn’t feeling this holiday thing. She was feeling kind of loser-ish, in fact: still living in her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house, working a job she’d had since she was 16, still at community college and failing accounting.

And, apparently, failing at love, too, because Ellie told Murphy that they could be friends, and that was all. But when Murphy realized that Ellie’s mother was the professor who was about to fail her in accounting class, Ellie came up with a plan.

If they could pretend to have a relationship, then maybe Ellie’s mother would grant Ellie her dream of attending college in New York City. And maybe she’d “play favorites” and give Murphy a passing grade.

It was a weird plan. Super weird. 

Alright, let’s just admit this: A book like “I’ll Get Back to You” isn’t going to change the world or influence people in high places. It’s probably not going to land on the bestseller list. It’s just a light, fun little story – and isn’t that what you need during the holiday season?

With your typical girl-meets-girl, struggle-and-argument, wacky-plan-happy-ending format, author Becca Grischow tells a tale of friendship and romance and growing into the place in life that’s meant to be, which is a good but subtle reminder for some readers who need it. Grischow gives readers a cast of characters who are kind but authentic, fallible but trustworthy, and mostly pretty likable, too, which makes this an easy book to enjoy at just the right time.

If you haven’t found your holiday romance for the season yet, here’s one to look for beneath the mistletoe. Find “I’ll Get Back to You” and you’ll like it a lot.

‘One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman’
By Abi Maxwell
c.2024, Knopf
$28/307 pages

“How many times have I told you that…?”

How many times have you heard that? Probably so often that, well, you stopped listening. From your mother, when you were very small. From your teachers in school. From your supervisor, significant other, or best friend. As in the new memoir “One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman” by Abi Maxwell, it came from a daughter.

When she was pregnant, Abi Maxwell took long walks in the New Hampshire woods near her home, rubbing her belly and talking to her unborn baby. She was sure she was going to have a girl but when the sonogram technician said otherwise, that was OK. Maxwell and her husband would have a son.

But almost from birth, their child was angry, fierce, and unhappy. Just getting dressed each morning was a trial. Going outside was often impossible. Autism was a possible diagnosis but more importantly, Maxwell wasn’t listening, and she admits it with some shame.

Her child had been saying, in so many ways, that she was a girl.

Once Maxwell realized it and acted accordingly, her daughter changed almost overnight, from an angry child to a calm one – though she still, understandably, had outbursts from the bullying behavior of her peers and some adults at school. Nearly every day, Greta (her new name) said she was teased, called by her former name, and told that she was a boy.

Maxwell had fought for special education for Greta, once autism was confirmed. Now she fought for Greta’s rights at school, and sometimes within her own family. The ACLU got involved. State laws were broken. Maxwell reminded anyone who’d listen that the suicide rate for trans kids was frighteningly high. Few in her town seemed to care.

Throughout her life, Maxwell had been in many other states and lived in other cities. New Hampshire used to feel as comforting as a warm blanket but suddenly, she knew they had to get away from it. Her “town that would not protect us.”

When you hold “One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman,” you’ve got more than a memoir in your hands. You’ve also got a white-hot story that seethes with anger and rightful resentment, that wails for a hurt child, and rattles the bars of injustice. And yet, it coos over love of place, but in a confused manner, as if these things don’t belong together.

Author Abi Maxwell is honest with readers, taking full responsibility for not listening to what her preschooler was saying-not-saying, and she lets you see her emotions and her worst points. In the midst of her community-wide fight, she reveals how the discrimination Greta endured affected Maxwell’s marriage and her health – all of which give a reader the sense that they’re not being sold a tall tale. Read this book, and outrage becomes familiar enough that it’s yours, too. Read “One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman,” and share it. This is a book you’ll tell others about.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

‘A Little Queer Natural History’
By Josh L. Davis
c.2024, University of Chicago Press
$16/128 pages

When you were a small child, someone taught you about the birds and the bees.

It might’ve been a parent or other adult who explained where babies come from, or another kid who filled your head with scary, exciting things that you believed until you learned better. However you learned the facts of life, it changed you forever and in the new book, “A Little Queer Natural History” by Josh L. Davis, there’s more to the wild story.

You are not alone. Just look around.

All kinds of creatures share the planet with us but, in the same way that you shouldn’t judge a person at first glance, you can’t jump to conclusions about those creatures. That’s especially true with sexual behavior. While we can’t rightly attribute human feelings or intentions to them – animals likely don’t understand gay from straight – we may assume “that most species of animal probably exhibit some form of queer behaviour.”

Take birds, for instance: early 20th century explorers noted the Adelie penguin for its male-male partnering activity. Female Western gulls often raise their chicks with female partners. Female pheasants may “present as males” if their estrogen is depleted.

As for mammals, Western lowland gorillas and bonobos both engage in sexual activity with either sex. Domestic sheep, hyenas, and giraffes also “could be considered to have a sexuality that we would define as homosexual or bisexual.”

And “When it comes to sex in plants,” says Davis, “all bets are off.”

Komodo dragons can reproduce through parthenogenesis, or without fertilization. Parrot fish are able to change sex if they need to. Morpho butterflies are gynandromorphs, having “both male and female tissue within… a single individual.” Castrated male cane toads will develop egg cells due to a “Bidder’s organ.” Even dinosaurs are included in this book.

“Despite sex often being viewed as a fundamental for life on Earth,” says Davis, “there is still a lot we don’t know about it and scientists are constantly learning more.”

When you first get “A Little Queer Natural History” in your hands, you’ll notice how whisper-thin it feels. Don’t let that fool you; the pages may be light, but what you’ll find is not.

Author Josh L. Davis stuffs each entry tight with real scientific information, and he uses actual scientific terms to do it. There’s zero dumbing-down in that, but Davis is quick to explain terms and ideas, which helps readers to completely understand what’s here. For sure, you’ll feel like a smarty-pants as you make your way through this book.

Readers, however, may scratch their heads and wonder why some of the entries are included – it may be a stretch to include fossilized creatures or male animals that care for their offspring, for instance. Chances are, though, that you’ll be so captured by the knowledge contained in each short chapter that you won’t mind.

“A Little Queer Natural History” is a smart book, perfect for quick reads at random at this busy time of year. If that’s what you need now, enjoying it’s a fact of life.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

‘American Teenager’
By Nico Lang
c.2024, Abrams Press
$30/288 pages

In great-grandma’s day, they hooked.

They were high-topped and dainty, too, to show off a tiny, cheeky-but-demure ankle beneath long skirts. These days, though, they Velcro, tie, strap, or you just slip your toes into whatever you put on your feet. You gotta wear your shoes but, as in the new book “American Teenager” by Nico Lang, you wish someone would walk a mile in them first.

Seven-hundred-plus.

That’s how many anti-gay, anti-trans bills were presented to state legislatures around the country last year, many aimed at minors. As if being a teenager isn’t hard enough. With this in mind, Lang shadowed seven trans kids, to find out how they and their families cope with our current political landscape.

Fifteen-year-old South Dakotan Wyatt is in 10th grade. He knows that the lawmakers in his state “will just keep turning up the boil” on trans bills and it makes him physically sick. When Lang asked Wyatt to describe himself, Wyatt couldn’t do it, as if, says Lang, he was “still in transit, not yet arrived.”

Near Birmingham, Rhydian is a good student at the Magic City Acceptance Academy, the only school in the South that specifically welcomes LGBTQ students, and he enjoys the deep love and support of his parents and grandmother. But he’s frustrated: Rhydian’s been waiting for months for top surgery, which has been put on hold for reasons that are political.

Mykah identifies as gender-fluid, Black, and bi-racial and they desperately dream of a future performing career. In Houston, Ruby’s beloved church held a re-naming ceremony for her when she turned 18. Seventeen-year-old trans boy Clint is Muslim, and has managed to avoid scrutiny from his Chicago mosque.

Jack, along with her mother and nonbinary sibling, Augie, were homeless before their mother finally managed to find housing; in the meantime, Jack lost her health care. And in Los Angeles, Kylie has health care, support, friends, and an activist mother.

She has advantages that most trans kids can only wish for – and she knows it.

Acne. Peer pressure. Social media. Being a teen has always been difficult, even without anti-LGBTQ legislation. In this fine work of journalism, author Nico Lang shows how a handful of kids in one group are coping with governmental policies and life in general.

Hint: you can expect the unexpected.

“American Teenager” shows the highs and lows of being a teen with the added stress of politics included – and here, the individuality inside the ordinary is striking and wonderful. Lang is careful to show how these are just typical kids – good-hearted, smart, funny, sarcastic – and it rings throughout each profile how much the discrimination they endure affects their lives and relationships. That’s a clarion call, absolutely, but readers who can see between the lines will also enjoy this book’s humor, it’s compassion, and the sheer joy of meeting decent, thoughtful teens.

Parents will like this book for its candor, and that goes doubly for adults who love a trans kid. Start “American Teenager” and before long, you’ll be hooked.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

‘Low-Hanging Fruit’
By Randy Rainbow
c.2024, St. Martin’s Press
$28/224 pages

Whine, whine, whine.

You got something to say, say it. Got an opinion? The world is waiting. It doesn’t do any good to mutter, sputter, or whine when something’s bothering you. As in the new book, “Low-Hanging Fruit” by Randy Rainbow, take it to the complaint department.

Randy Rainbow has a lot to say, and he’s not afraid to say it.

For starters, he’s “resigning from trying to fix you, effective immediately.” Any boneheaded thing you want to do now, whatever. Nothing is his responsibility anymore. He has other issues to worry about.

“The truth is,” he says, “I have a lot of complaints about a lot of things.”

There are right ways of doing things, he says, and there are wrong ways and we just all really need to know the difference – especially if you’re a “Karen.” He’s compassionate if you were born with that name, but not too much.

“I’m a flamboyant homosexual who’s lived my entire life with the name Randy Rainbow, so you’ll get little sympathy from me in this department.”

Other than that, you may wonder what Rainbow’s (ahem) “position” is: he’s actually thinking about running for president as a member of “a Rainbow coalition…” He doesn’t have much experience but, he says, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, that doesn’t matter at all. He stands on a green platform, but he can’t ban fluorocarbons because, you know, the hair thing and all.

Rainbow misses his 20s, old-school dating sites, hooking up, and his former attention span. He waxes nostalgic about the places he’s lived, including an apartment overlooking a “fruit market.” He wonders why teenagers are suddenly “successful lifestyle gurus.” He hates when “stars begin losing their luster” and he wishes again for actors like Hayworth and Garbo.

But, he says, “Diva-complaints aside… I really do thank God for all the opportunities I’m given.”

So the elephant in the room right now might be one you’ll (never?) vote for, but you know that author Randy Rainbow will reliably skewer that political animal online, hilariously. The fun-poking continues in the most deliciously snarky way in “Low-Hanging Fruit.”

And yet, that’s not the only subject Rainbow tackles. Readers who love catching his posts and videos are treated here to a random string of observations, opinions, and rants-not-rants, with the signature sassy style they’ve come to expect. What you’ll read can be spit-out-your-wine funny sometimes, and other times it touches a nerve with nods toward culture, new and old, that’ll make you nod with recognition. Nothing in Rainbow’s path goes without sharp-edged comment, which is exactly what you want from his books. Unexpectedly, this one also includes a soft word or two and a few slight confessions that are gentle and that might even make you say, “Awwwwww.”

If you’re ready for something snide and cynical that’ll make you laugh, something that you’ll want to read aloud to a companion, “Low-Hanging Fruit” is what you need. Look for this book now and you’ll have no complaints.

The LA Blade sat down with Carter Wilson, novelist and anthropologist, to discuss his new novel “The Provider.”

Wilson is best known for his 1980s gay bestseller about a fictional photographer on the expedition where the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu were “discovered,” featuring a love story between the photographer and a Peruvian guide. With co-writer Judith Coburn, Wilson contributed Harvey Fierstein’s narration for the Oscar-winning documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk,” and wrote Dustin Hoffman’s narration for “Common Threads,” which also won an Academy Award. Wilson’s research on gay Mexico enabled him to help gay men seeking asylum in the U.S. as members of a persecuted minority.

Los Angeles Blade: What is your novel “The Provider” about?

Wilson: A married contractor approaching 40 decides to give in to his curiosity about casual sex with other men. When he meets a wealthy older man, he finds himself falling in love.

Los Angeles Blade: What’s special about your main character?

Wilson: Jake Guarani has always prided himself on being a sexually accomplished ladies’ man. In ten years of marriage, however, he has not cheated on his wife. He’s the “provider,” working hard in the construction business to take care of his family—something he’s both proud of and resents. Though brash and forthright, Jake also has his insecurities. Through friendship with a school pal, he was raised around North Shore of Chicago wealth, so the casual put-downs of his clients and co-workers hurt. At one level, “The Provider” is about how sex and class work together—or don’t.

Los Angeles Blade: Why did Jake wait so long before exploring his sexual interests in other men?

Wilson: The conventional demands of his life and profession kept him from allowing himself to think seriously about that side of himself. Now the internet has helped make hook-ups easier to arrange.

Los Angeles Blade: In the story of a “straight” guy’s affair with another “straight” guy, what will be of interest to people in the lesbian and gay community?

Wilson: Well, it’s a love story. Though it’s a cliché, in the past lesbian book people assured me that women were buying my fiction because they love a love story. How other people of any stripe manage the difficult waters of sex, relationship, and obsession is always a strong pull.

Los Angeles Blade: Where did the impulse to tell this particular story come from?

Wilson: From talking with married men who have sex with men about how they handle the complications, contradictions, and the fun.

Los Angeles Blade: About a quarter of the way into “The Provider,” the reader encounters a lot of graphic descriptions of sex between the two main characters. Why is this?

Wilson: Jake, my protagonist, is also a “provider” in the sense that he gets off on pleasing his partner. It is sexual hunger which brings him and the older guy together in motel rooms and then leads them along into something else. (I had a friend who used “motel” as a verb: “My cousin used to come by and motel me,” he would say.) The two men get to know each other primarily in these brief interactions. So I couldn’t go dot-dot-dot on the subject of bodies and hearts and minds when all three are in play.

Los Angeles Blade: Is it easy for you to write about sex?

Wilson: Ha! I started to say it’s not easy for me to write about anything, but after so many years at it, that’s not exactly true anymore. The hardest part of writing about sex is avoiding the clichés. They crop up all around. Equally hard is letting the reader feel the wonders which sometimes attach to the physical acts.

Los Angeles Blade: Is there really some distinction between “erotic writing” and porn?

Wilson: My friend Jay Cantor says erotic writing may just be “the higher porn.” The difference, however, is real. In a XXX movie, telling the pizza man you don’t have any change but you’d be glad to get horizontal with him in the bedroom might suffice. But it is just not enough for character-based and memorable erotic writing, the kind of thing you find in D.H. Lawrence or Flaubert.

Los Angeles Blade: You say “class” is seldom related to sexuality these days. Why is that?

Wilson: Mainly because in our current culture, we pretend that social class with all its weird markers and its cruelties does not exist. Ethnicity (or gayness) blankets a lot of our troubles that are really about class. Jake Guarani is proud of being a working guy, but the fact he’s pleasuring a patrician, old-family fellow is a large part of the affair’s turn-on for him.

Los Angeles Blade: What is your feeling about what “bisexuality” is really about?

Wilson: We often talk about bisexuality in very sloppy and unhelpful ways. Take me as an example. I have been out of the closet for 47 years. I have not had sex with a woman for 41 years. I identify as being gay (I sometimes excessively shout it from the rooftops). Yet given the experiences of my past, am I technically somehow still really “bi”? But the interesting problem lies deeper than that. It lies in what theorists of sex call “sexual object choice.” Is it possible not to have some kind of long-term preference for men or women? And if so, how many people are there really like that? When a psychiatrist friend tells Jake he thinks Jake is that relative rarity—a “true” bisexual—Jake asks if that means there’s some kind of discount or something he hasn’t been putting in for.

Los Angeles Blade: Why are gay men sometimes suspicious of men who claim to be bi?

Wilson: In one way the suspicion is justified. Being heterosexual remains a privilege despite all we’ve done to equalize things. So proclaiming yourself bi can be a way to cling to hetero privilege while also enjoying all the fruits of being queer. (I was going to say the fruits of being a fruit, but I won’t.) However, I’m against the cynicism in judging others that way. That’s some of what “The Provider” is all about.

Los Angeles Blade: Six novels, nonfiction, a children’s book, film work. You’ve had a long and varied writing career. Are there common themes that hold it together?

Wilson: I’m old enough to have passed through the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, a time for which I remain grateful, as it gave me the… well… balls to come out. The idea that the liberation of the body and the exploration and fulfillment of desires would elevate and enlarge the mind and the spirit remains strong in me. My other fascination has been Mexico and especially Mayan people there. Three of my novels take place in the state of Chiapas, and I think there was liberation from middle-class fuddy-duddyness in getting to know a second culture as well as I could.

Los Angeles Blade: Working on two Academy Award-winning documentaries must have been fun, yes?

Wilson: Fun yes, but also hard work done under a lot of time pressure. The narration of a feature-length documentary is like one long poem, and you have to be able to hold everything you need to say in your head and not repeat or even echo yourself. Especially on “Harvey Milk,” my co-writer and I got to contribute to the structuring of the film when the director and others had worn themselves out trying different possibilities.

Los Angeles Blade: You’ve also done a good deal of movie writing.

Wilson: Yes, though nothing that ever made it all the way up to the big silver. Dramas with friend Tim Hunter, original comedies with Judith Coburn, an adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean melodrama “The White Devil” with Tim, and by myself a screenplay for Christopher Isherwood’s excellent first American novel “The World in the Evening.”

Los Angeles Blade: Are there things you learned from film writing that help writing fiction?

Wilson: A good rule for movies is always to know where your main character is. Where did we see her last and when will she show up again? In fiction this is less necessary, but if you keep to it, you won’t wander off and lose time on peripheral stuff you’ve later got to cut. Of course, the big difference between fiction and film is that unless you have a voice-over narrator, in a feature you can’t just say “The next morning Winky woke up with a hangover as big as the Ritz.” You have to indicate all that somehow. Well, you can put up a card, “Six Years Later in Amalfi, Italy” but that’s a little shoddy usually.

Los Angeles Blade: Tell us a little about your work on gay asylum cases from Mexico.

Wilson: In the 1990s under Janet Reno, the Department of Justice allowed prejudice against gay men and women and people with HIV in Mexico to become a reason for them to seek asylum in the U.S. The standard, however, was strict—you had to have a reasonable fear for your own life if you were returned to your country of origin. Because on my anthropological side I had studied and written about gay life and HIV in Mexico, I was able to serve as an expert witness in over 60 cases in immigration court. Most of this was pro bono work, and it was great to be able to use my “academic” knowledge to help others. You don’t encounter that possibility very often in universities.

Los Angeles Blade: Do you have a next project?

Wilson: I have a nonfiction story called “Happy Monet Christmas, Darling” which is about actress Martha Hyer having hubby producer Hal Wallis’s great Impressionist paintings copied and sold off, which I’m preparing for publication. Ad line: ‘Skulduggery in the ranks of Hollywood Royalty.’

Los Angeles Blade: What’s your life like now?

Wilson: Quiet. Retired from the University of California Santa Cruz for 22 years, live within sight of the ocean (we can hear seals on the beach on winter nights when the wind is right), husband who prefers his cooking to mine, a lot of satisfaction with life, though I’m trying not to be piggy or smug or intolerable about that.

Los Angeles Blade: Any regrets?

Wilson: A younger and better-looking writer, 54, apparently has the same birth name as mine, and his production of thrillers and suspense has “blanketed” me some on Amazon and the Wiki. You can’t copyright a name. It was OK with me when a “Carter Wilson” from Virginia became Miss World America 1979. I told everyone I did OK in bathing suit and gown, but got lower marks in talent for my juggling on a unicycle act.

Los Angeles Blade: Do you sleep in the nude?

Wilson: I do. Also shower there.

Born and raised in Washington, DC, Carter Wilson taught at Harvard, Stanford, Tufts University, and UC Santa Cruz during his long career. His 1995 book “Hidden in the Blood: A Personal Investigation of AIDS in the Yucatán” won the Ruth Benedict Prize from the Gay and Lesbian section of the American Anthropological Association. He lives now on the Monterey Bay with his husband and their two dachshunds and one very mellow female pittie named Peaches.

Website: https://bankilal.ag-sites.net/index.htm

‘Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life’
By Michael Nott
c.2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$40/720 pages

A confession: Until reading “Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,” I hadn’t known much about the accomplished, controversial gay poet’s life or read many of his poems. But this first biography makes me feel like I know him and his large body of work intimately. Michael Nott, coeditor of “The Letters of Thom Gunn,” draws on interviews with friends and family, as well as Gunn’s letters, notebooks, and diaries, to tell the triumphs and tragedies of his life.

Born in England in 1929 to journalist parents, when he was 15, he and his younger brother Ander found their mother dead from suicide. He would not discuss this tragic event in his poetry for years, including one of his last poems “My Mother’s Pride.” He published his first book of poems, “Fighting Terms,” while still an undergraduate at Cambridge University.

At Cambridge, Gunn met his life-long partner, Mike Kitay, an American studying theater. Gunn followed Kitay to America, studying poetry under Yvor Winters at Stanford University. At one point, Kitay, doing his military service, was investigated as part of suspicion of homosexuality among his unit. Gunn wrote to friends of his worry both of what might happen to Kitay as well as to himself. While nothing happened, the event reminds us of the precarious state in which gay men lived until recently.

Eventually, they settled in San Francisco, which Gunn loved. Even when he became worldwide famous, he enjoyed the anonymity of the city’s gay bars, where he could pick up men. He taught at UC Berkeley for 40 years, one term every year so he could concentrate on his poetry. His and Kitay’s home was filled with friends and sex partners, usually of Gunn. This arrangement seems common for many gay men of the time, reminiscent of Dan Savage’s idea of “monogamish,” where committed gay couples might have other side partners.

In San Francisco, Gunn discovered leather and drugs, both of which he took to readily. He caused a stir by appearing in his British publisher’s conservative club in leather gear. Toward the end of his life, he became a crystal meth addict, frequently using with other addicts whom he also slept with. In 2004, his housemates found him dead from substance abuse.

He explored leather, drugs, and gay sexuality frequently in his poems. His collection “Moly” (named after the drug in The Odyssey protecting from the witch Circe’s magic), looked at the appeal and downfall of drugs. The Man with Night Sweats, perhaps his most famous collection, dealt with the AIDS epidemic, the painful death of so many friends and lovers. He won the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant afterwards.

The biography presents Gunn in all his humanity, from his poetic genius to his insecurities. After each book came out, he struggled with writer’s block, which led to hookups and drug use. As he aged, he worried about finding “gerontophiles” who would sleep with him. I hope this book encourages readers to discover or revisit his work, filled with the joys and complexities of modern gay life.