Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Books get published all the time. I've a pile here of eight new gay-and-lesbian novels, a handful self-help books, some biographies, and a new rush of volumes on queer theology. A few are good, most are kind-of-OK, and others are just outright-- well, why were they published? Looking at my new-book pile makes me wonder: where are the books I actually want to read? I mean the ones that haven't been published and probably not even written.

1) The Compleat History of AIDS I'm teaching a course at Dartmouth about the impact of AIDS on American culture, and when I began putting the reading list together I realized that there's no complete history of the AIDS epidemic. Sure, there's Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, which even with its enormous problems (like his vicious attacks on gay sex and community) ends in 1986 or 1987. There's also John-Manuel Androitte's Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Life in Gay America-- but that's quite different than a history of the epidemic itself. Such a work would help not only sociologists, epidemiologists, and historians, but also queer young people who, for the most part, have no idea whatsoever about what's happened over the past two decades.

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2) Brigid Brophy: A Life The past year has produced two biographies of the great writer Patricia Highsmith. They are both terrific books, but they made me think of other biographies I want to read. Brigid Brophy was one of the most provocative writers in English in the past half century. Her novels (including Flesh, The Snow Ball, and The King of a Rainy Country) are fabulous, and her non-fiction, such as Black Ship to Hell (an analysis of the death-wish in Western culture) and Prancing Novelist (the only book worth reading on seminal gay writer Ronald Firbank) are groundbreaking. Brophy is now, mostly, out of print, but that doesn't mean that a biography wouldn't be in order. Brophy was married to art historian Michael Levy and a longtime lover of novelist Maureen Duffy. She was at the center of the British intellectual world for more than five decades and one of the best delineators of gay male sensibility. A good, critical biography would be a boon.

3) Inside / Outside: The World of Willard Motley The same is true of American novelist Willard Motley, bestselling writer in his time. His first novel, the 1949 Knock on Any Door, was such a hit Life magazine did a full-length profile of him, and Hollywood snapped up the huge, sprawling book only to make a pint-sized movie out of it. Motley's four novels were critically acclaimed and popular successes.

Motley was from Chicago and African-American, although he almost always wrote about white working-class folk. Gay themes run, a little between-the-lines, in his books, and while his private life was very private, there's all the reason in the world to think that he was homosexual.

Unfortunately Motley has fallen from critical and popular favor-- Knock on Any Door is in print in a university press edition, but his equally good other novels, including the sequel Let No Man Write my Epitaph, are not. Because he was never considered a "gay writer," the gay academics have ignored him, and the critical African-American establishment has never embraced him because he never really wrote about people of color. By the end of his life, disillusioned with race relations and the general political situation in the US, Motley retired to Mexico (probably because gay sex was easier there as well) and adopted a son. Motley's story-- a black, gay man living on the fringes of society while he wrote bestselling novels and now banished to near-oblivion-- is a fascinating one.

4) Broadgay! In recent years there have been some very good books about the influence of queers on Hollywood (and vice versa.) William Mann's Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1919-1969 and Richard Barrios's Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall are both marvelous. But as yet no one has written a serious, researched look at how gay people shaped the American theater-- or, at any rate, Broadway. There is a tremendous book waiting here-- the material screams out, so to speak, to be written about. Such a work would be a godsend to both gay historians and anyone interested in the theater (two categories with probably a large overlap). From Clyde Fitch to Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter to Michael Bennett, Mary Martin to Cherry Jones-- we would not have American theater without homosexuals putting on the show. This is a book that would sell, but alas, no one has yet taken on the project.

There are, of course, many more books that should be written. And many more that should never have been. Given the enormous economic pressure on publishers to produce money-making books, the leveling off of hardcover sales, and the difficulty that queer books have in actually getting out into the world, I'm not holding my breath for my fantasy titles to appear on my desk anytime soon.

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