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First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far)
edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel
Arsenal Pulp Press
How to order Code of Conduct
by Rich Merritt
Kensington Books
How to order

Compiling an anthology is always a touchy thing -- editors want to include myriad points of view, but want only quality material. Understandably, many anthologies end up trading one for the other. Not so in First Person Queer. This wonderful collection of 40 essays manages to hit the jackpot each time. Editors Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel leaned on some excellent writers well represented in GLBT literature -- Kate Bornstein, Tim Miller, Katherine V. Forrest, D. Travers Scott, Archy Obejas -- but they've introduced new names (at least to the casual reader) as well, and all are terrifically engaging.

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I>First Person Queer purports to be a snapshot of where queer life and thinking is today. Of course a snapshot is never going to show you queer life's crazy diversity (a series of montage-driven videos, on the other hand...), but Labonte and Schimel come as close as you can.

Joy Parks's succinct political argument against state-sanctioned, legal same-sex marriage -- "Why I Don't Want to Marry (and Why I Don't Want You to Either)" -- is a standout. While she understands the need for public acknowledgment of queer relationships, Parks deftly points out the flaw in promoting marriage equality: by hyping marriage as the essential, defining aspect of gay equality, activists run the risk of foreclosing actions on many other issues. She also touches upon an aspect of the marriage equality fight that is often ignored: why are we looking for state sanction of our lives, relationships, and desires?

Equally challenging is Jeffrey Dalton's "Homofauxbia" which charts his complicated relationship with homophobia in his high school. While he has the usual problems with casual queer-baiting remarks, Dalton hits a nerve when he complains about his heterosexual friend Evan talking about his queerness in pubic. When he tells Evan how he feels, his friend asks "Do you not want them to know you're gay?" In an age of gay student associations and books telling queer young people how to behave, Dalton manages to be more complicated and real.

In "Miss Scarlet, with Cat Poo in the Castro" Kirk Read documents his experience with a man who invites him, via AOL, over for late-night sex only to refuse to answer the door. Read, not one to be dissed, harasses him in a number of cunning ways -- some of which may be criminal. But his goal here is not petty revenge -- he is not Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction -- but rather confronting gay incivility about sex. More then willing to own up to his sketchy behavior, Read forces us to look at how much we as queers are willing to put up with to avoid thinking ill of ourselves.

Katherine V. Forrest writes about how growing up in the mid-20th century provoked her to write lesbian novels that celebrated the "rightness" of queer love.

Blaine Marchand details his involvement in "intergenerational love" -- a term he calls a "sound bite... that disguises what really happens" -- in ways that are complicated and conflicted as he makes distinctions between sex in the park with a stranger when he was eight to a complicated ongoing relationship he had with a priest when he was 15.

In "Hoowahyoo" Kate Bornstein writes movingly of her relationship with her mother after she has transitioned from male to female, and how this new person was always faced with the question "who are you?" -- be it from her mother's friends, a client on a phone sex line, or her family rabbi.

Bornstein's question hits on the theme of this volume. We've had a gay movement in the U.S. going on 60 years, and it's over 35 since that movement turned radical. But even as we are always evolving -- and devolving, some writers here would argue -- we've never been stable, are always asking who and where we are. First Person Queer is less of a snapshot than a mirror, and we may not all like what we see.

Men in uniform

Rich Merritt had a great splash with his 2005 memoir Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star. Now his first novel, Code of Conduct, presents us with a new take on what it is like to be queer in the armed services -- and while this is fiction, it's as visceral and potent as his memoir.

Set around the early days of "don't ask, don't tell," Code of Conduct follows Don Hawkins, career Marine, through a series of military, erotic, and romantic adventures as he attempts to navigate his way through the treacherous shoals of institutionalized homophobia while coming to grips with what it means to be a man who loves men in a milieu that offers only a straight and narrow definition of masculinity. Merritt has a great conversational style, and the book is as gripping as it is compulsively readable.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com