Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Mark Thompson's The Gay Body (St. Martin's Press, cloth, 276 pages, $24.95) attempts to solve a problem that has been at the heart of Western culture and philosophy for centuries: how do we integrate body and spirit? How do we reckon being physical while having a mind that is both confined to the body while simultaneously independent? St. Augustine, Descartes, Sartre, and countless others have had their say. While Thompson is grateful for their contributions, he has his own slant, for his question is about integrating the gay body-- which has been shamed, spurned, and defiled by heterosexual culture-- with the gay spirit.

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Mark Thompson, author of Gay Spirit and Gay Soul-- was an editor at The Advocate for 15 years. He is well equipped to take on this question. Using a mix of autobiography and Jung, he charts for us his own journey to accepting the unity of his spirit and flesh. Thompson's life has been full and rich. He was involved in gay politics and publishing, and explored his body through SM and drugs. Over the past decade, he has been among the primary spokespeople for the Radical Fairy movement, a group of gay men who have sought transfiguration in gay spirituality.

On one level, Gay Body is a frank and startling autobiography. Thompson tells the truth about his dysfunctional family, his (sometimes) sexual relationship with his gay brother, how his SM experiences (including fisting and piercing) helped him understand his body, and the good and bad sides to his drug use. But Gay Body is also an exploration of the gay male psyche. Thompson writes eloquently about how our culture wounds gay men's spirits (as well as bodies) in multitudinous ways. We are cut off from our families, told that we are sick or sinful, threatened with arrest and exile. Gay men often lives their lives in the face of fear and punishment. But once Thompson establishes this, he explores a healing process, which can begin, he argues, only when we accept the goodness and worth of gay sexuality. But for Thompson, this isn't just about gay men; the transformations he has in mind-- social, spiritual, and emotional-- would change the world.

Thompson uses Jungian archetypes and concepts to explain the dark world of SM and the transcendence of sexual play. He takes these gay activities-- condemned by mainstream culture-- and shows how for him they lead to emotional, physical, and spiritual freedom. Thompson's West Coast background may be unfamiliar to some readers, but he explains and elucidates his ideas with charm, energy, and enormous conviction. Gay Body is a rare book because Thompson has refused to follow the usual dictums by which Western culture organizes knowledge. For him there is little difference between the rational and the emotional, the personal and the political, the dream and the material worlds. Reading through Gay Body, this all makes sense. How are gay men to heal themselves if not through emotional growth and physical sex, through transforming the body as well as the soul? Gay Body is an important addition to the writing and thinking gay men have produced these past three decades, as they try to figure out not only how to make sense of their lives, but to make the world a better place for themselves and everyone else.

Art imitates life

Bruce LaBruce-- could there be a gayer name?-- has established himself as one of the most popular and controversial gay filmmakers working today. His first effort-- No Skin Off My Ass-- was a sexually explicit remake of Sandy Dennis's 1969 psychological thriller That Cold Day in the Park, with LaBruce in the Dennis role (of course). He played a lonely hairdresser who falls in love with the brutish (but gay) skinhead and imprisons the young man in his apartment. LaBruce's next film was the ambitious, Fellini-esque Super 8-1/2, a look at how difficult it is to be an artist in the modern world (well, the world of independent, semi-porn parodies, anyway). This was followed by Hustler White, a look at the LA hustler scene, with its now infamous "stump-fucking" scene. In the past decade LaBruce has put himself in the forefront of independent, gay, and sexual cinema.

In his new semi-autobiography, The Reluctant Pornographer (Gutter Press, paper, 207 pages, $22.95), LaBruce charts his career as an artist, political thinker, and self-promoter.

Written as a series of chatty essays with accompanying side-bars of personal commentary, The Reluctant Pornographer is witty and illuminating. While Super 8-1/2 was a Fellini parody (a tough task since much of the original was self-parody), LaBruce's world view and artistic poses mirror those of the Italian film director. There is little distance between LaBruce's preoccupations (sexual and otherwise) and what ends up in his films. LaBruce of the movies is pretty much the LaBruce of real life, or at least real life as portrayed in this book.

At the heart of LaBruce's aesthetic and political stance is that homosexuals are deviants, queers, and outcasts, and that you might as well just glory in it rather than try for mainstream acceptance. You know this already from LaBruce's films: how often have you seen lesbians raping gay men, skinhead sex violence, or stump-fucking in Hollywood cinema? The Reluctant Pornographer explains in even more detail why LaBruce is one of the most outrageous gay artists today.

Rick nicks dick, writes book

If Bruce LaBruce goes out of his way to shake up our ideas about how gay people behave-- or should-- for Riki Anne Wilchins, social agitation seems to be a way of life. In her collection of essays Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (Firebrand Books, paper, 231 pages, $16.95), Wilchins (who identifies herself as a transgendered person, specifically a male-to-female transsexual) takes on the entire structure of how we "become" women and men.

For most people, gender is a given: you look at what is between your legs and that decides who you are, how you act, and how others react to you.

But Wilchins takes a whole new look at what it means to be one gender, or, for that matter, another (although not necessarily "the other"). She is not speaking just of sex changes, as surgically understood, but of rethinking what we mean by terms like "man" and "woman."

A lot of this thinking began with the women's movement ("Why can't women work at this job?") and the gay liberation movement ("Why can't I do this with my dick?"). But Wilchins takes it even further and asks, "Why do we confine ourselves so rigidly to gender identities that don't make us happy? And that don't make society run as smoothly as it might if we all had a little more freedom of self-definition?"

Read My Lips is bold and often sexy-- you want to know what transsexuals do in bed? here it is-- and always smart and provocative.

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