38 jfrat M f t January 21.2000 BOOKS F A fc\ îr>5 ri^‘ L A ▼ Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series, will be signing copies of his books on February 6 ,1 2 - 2 pm . Something for everyone Get your copy of the new Redwall book, Legend of Luke, signed by the author. Just Out reviews recent nonfiction books, from the sublime to the erotic 4807 NE Fremont Street - 284-8298 Portland's only independent children's bookstore P ortland ' s ONLY iNDiPEttoittr • N oncommercial L istener -S ponsored ( ommunitt R adio S tation 0«' UloM t*» * 90.7 fH PORTLAND » 92.7 (OLUfillA 60 R 6 E « 100 J klLLAMtTTt VALUT cThe imperial (Sovereign 9 ?ose Court Proudly Presents... O 0 DO bite % o n % % night and ‘Debutante Dali Saturday, January 29, 2000 Doors 5:00pm Ball 6:00pm Donation $5.00 Embers Avenue 110 NW Broadway The Imperial Sovereign Rose Court is a Non-Profit 501(c)4 Organization dedicated to raising money for charities in and around the greater Portland metropolitan area. F o r more information, you may e-mail us at isrc@aol.com or check out our website at... www.rosecourt.org A ssuming the P osition : A M emoir of H ustling By Rick Whitaker. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999. $18 hardcover. hilosophical Trick: Explicit Sex, Implicit Wis dom— I read this memoir last summer in Room 11 at the W hite Horse Inn in Provincetown, Mass., the same room where eight years ago the author and 1 had a hot and philosophically charged summer. His intensity continues to echo in the pages of his new meditation-cum-memoir, Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling. After his lover dumps him, Rick Whitaker, a successful Hunter College philosophy major with his fingers in some of the East Coasts most respected cultural pies, finds his fingers in some of New York’s most respected men. Leav ing jobs with publisher Alfred A. Knopf Inc. and the New York City Opera, Whitaker spites his ex-lover by striding into the wilderness of prostitution and drug addiction. From the smoky pre-Giuliani New York City hustler bar Rounds to a country house in Connecticut, from the Carlyle Hotel high on crystal meth to the calm vantage of sobriety, Whitakers words reveal something of his soul, the soul of a hus tler, a verisimilitude of every soul. Explicit in its simplicity and candor, Assum ing the Position interweaves philosophical tracts of Wittgenstein, Leonard Woolf and Thoreau with Whitakers contemporaneous impressions recorded during his wild flight from, and into, his darkest demons. — Lake Pemguey T he T rouble with N ormal : S ex P olitics E thics of Q ueer L ife By Michael Warner. Free Press, 1999; $23 hard- cover. and the Definitely controversial, Warner’s book ana lyzes the relationship between conduct and sta tus, shame and stigma, identity and action, as well as the underlying behavioral archetypes that result in the pinning of shame on sexual minorities. Pointing out that “normal” is merely a sta tistical range, Warner emphasizes the transfor mative and educational force of freaks, fairies, queers, prostitutes, trannies and others whose sexual lives and experiences fall outside the sta tistical norm. Their life experiences, and the cultivation of a respect for what is aberrant, helps us to extend the possibilities of pleasures, private and cultural. Warner reminds us that it is the freaks on the fringe who make the Aber crombie & Fitch fags, bourgeois queers and conservative homos seem so normal and rep utable. In our quest for rights, Warner avers, the queer movement has cowered from its historic mission to dismantle the stigmatization of sex and is instead playing along with the nation wide sex panic that is behind the desexing of New York City and police traps of gay men in parks and other public sexual venues. Highly accessible, The Trouble with Norm al is a welcome wake up call to all queers to examine the principles by which we fight for freedom and by which we live our lives. — LP S omething for the B oys : M usical T heatre and G ay C ulture By John M. Clum . St. Martin's Press, 1999. $26.95 hardcover. recently watched a veteran show queen friend of mine go into paroxysms of shock. I We were sitting with members of the current London cast of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, the ballet that won three Tonys this past year ay marriage fatigue. Aren’t there some while on Broadway. No one in our après-show other issues we could focus on for a while? salon knew who Irving Berlin was or what he Do you wonder why it seems that so many contributed to musical theater; nor did many of of the headliner issues these days focus on mar them know the standards from Annie G et Your riage, military and glossy media stars? Why, Gun, nor the favorites from Kiss M e Kate. My suddenly, are pop stars speaking for the gay learned friend had been certain that community? 20-year-old dancers would For those of you who know the details and high aren’t suffering from an amnesia of queer history in lights of a long and rich these days of a bull tradition in which they market or relative were now playing such an success as the gay important part. But they niche market, were just beginning to Michael Warner’s The learn. Trouble with Normal: Thankfully, John M. Sex Politics and the Clum’s Something for the Ethics o f Q ueer Life Boys: M usical Theatre and reminds and instructs G ay Culture provides a us about the inherent history lesson for serious discriminatory aspects Broadway aficionados of legal marriage. and culture mavens of all To Warner, it seems levels of theatrical expe curious that private rience. T he book is part individuals would strive exploration, part history so hard to have the right and always a celebra effectively to invite the tion. Clum outlines the government into their camp, sensuality and lives. Sure, he recognizes costume codes and the rights and privileges interprets gay plot lines of marriage, but he is that served as signifies troubled by the intense and expressions of focus of resources on the queer sensibility in subject, which lesbian American and British comic Kate Clinton calls theater from the end "the mad vow disease." of World War I through the pres e