LGBTQ+ Book Reviews
UPDATE! February 11, 2022. I hope to bring you a review of the new translation of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of world and LGBTQ+ literature, newly translated by Sophus Helle, from Yale University Press (today I submitted a request for a reviewer copy). Gilgamesh, that I’ve read in four separate translations (brief excerpts from Helle’s version are powerful), is a profound love story between two men, who grow together through a series of epic adventures involving gods, monsters, heartbreaking loss, healing, and much more. A thousand years before the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), Gilgamesh includes such key elements, under different names, as ‘The Garden of Eden’ with ‘Adam,’ ‘Eve’ and tempting serpent, ‘Noah’ and The Flood. Some scholars also see Gilgamesh as an influence on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, a thousand years prior to the Greek epic poet. This year of 2022 marks the 125th anniversary of the rediscovery of the stone tablets inscribed with the Gilgamesh epic.
- Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin’s landmark 1929 avant-garde novel that inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s epic film.
- Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities, edited by Stephen O. Murray & Will Roscoe — fascinating collection of anthropological and historical studies about LGBTQ+ lives in Africa.
- NEW! FULL REVIEW COMING IN EARLY MARCH 2022. Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic, by Sophus Helle (2021). Gilgamesh is one of my lifelong favorite books. It’s a profound same-sex love story that also speaks to love as a universal force. It’s a thrilling adventure, filled with gods and monsters and flawed human beings, that also charts the course of how one man, King Gilgamesh, evolves – through his love for the warrior Enkidu – from the poster boy for extreme toxic masculinity into a deeply caring man and, ultimately, a wise and just ruler….
- Hero, science fiction novel about a gay teen superhero, by Perry Moore, the late film producer and author.
- Modern Nature (1992) — filmmaker/painter/poet/memoirist Derek Jarman‘s experimental memoir.
- Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films, by Joseph Lanza.
- The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman, by Niall Richardson, a study of Jarman‘s major films focused on their connections to gender, history, and politics.
- Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Chris Packard, explores same-sex relationships on the American frontier, drawing on literary, non-fiction, and visual sources.
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz, edited by Klaus Biesenbach (a monumental, large-format 664-page analysis of and tribute to Fassbinder‘s 16-hour masterpiece, including his complete screenplay in English translation, essays by Fassbinder, Biesenbach, and Susan Sontag, hundreds of color and black & white photos, more).
- “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People, by Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico.
* LGBTQ+ Literature Resources
Links to LGBTQ+ Literature resources from both this site and selected external sites.
Begun 1997 / Updated February 27, 2022