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Love and hate
New books examine brutal bias,
marginalized memories and furry friends
by
G lenn W illiams
and for once, comparisons to Baldwin are
well-deserved.
Glave will be in Portland to read
7:30 p.m. March 13 at Powell’s Books on
Hawthorne. He also will read during the
Gender Symposium at 4:30 p.m. March 15
in Lewis & Clark College’s Templeton
Student Center.
H ornito : M y L ie L ife
by Mike Albo. Harper Collins, 2000;
$23 hardcover.
f coming into adulthood in contempo­
rary society is w'eird, coming into adult­
hood gay in contemporary society is far
beyond freaky. Fortunately for us, Mike
Albo has been there and has written
down for us all the gorgeous and gory
details: the bullies, the parental oddities,
the awkward romances, the eternal search
for “the one.”
Hornito: My Lie Life offers back all the
bumed-out, shaken memories of our youth
that we have driven from the table of our
minds and ladles them right back into our
bowls again—luckily,
with a sprinkle of
understanding and a
strong dash of humor.
What he writes
about his old room­
mate can aptly be
applied to himself:
“He has as many
stories as I do about
being a sissy or mon­
key in the middle or
the queer that is
smeared in Smear
the Queer. And now,
like me and many
other guys we know,
he has worked very
hard to excise that
and remake himself.
Now he can have
sex and feel the possibility that guys may like
him back.”
On the surface, this novel is about smolder­
ing, the act of grousing through the years
toward the possibility of a life. It is memoirlike
yet full of immediate slow-motion dreami­
ness—it dams together the intricacies and
details of a life lived just beneath the surface.
At times, Hornito: My Lie Life is bone-
shatteringly funny. The short Six Million Dollar
Man fantasy sequence alone is worth the cost
of the book.
But Albo also dives into the gut-and-
sinew issues from the gay experience: to test
or not to test, friends who are not real
friends, commitment vs. voracious sex, the
seamless thread between childhood impulses
and adult urges. And through it all weaves a
shadow road of paranoia that only a member
of a marginalized community can feel:
“For a time I think that my parents are
impostors and that they are sent to study or kill
me, I’m not sure, and I think the bathroom
mirror could be two-way, and my impostor par­
ents could be spying on me. They study me in
the bathroom, my every gerbilly move.... My
family members are robot pawns of a whole
secret system sent to observe me.”
Hornito: My Lie Life is simultaneously
!
W hose S ong ? and O ther S tories
by Thomas Glave. City Lights Books, 2000;
$12.95 paperback.
homas Glave is no E. Lynn Harris. His
work is in an entirely different class. Harris
has won popular recognition for his bright,
sexy tales of moderately wealthy African
American men struggling with being true to
themselves and their nature.
Nothing is bright or wealthy in Glave’s
fiction. In the course of these nine tales, he
unflinchingly examines violence, homopho­
bia and prejudice among the lower and mid­
dle classes of African American culture.
These are sad, gorgeous, complicated tales
occasionally pierced by sweet beauty and
hopeful tenderness.
The collection begins with a story that fol­
lows a young African American man’s after­
math of horror and the systematic way violence
moves into the psyche and takes over. It is an
appropriate way to begin this book. Glave’s
brave volume of stories features a young gay
black man marrying under threat of his father’s
gun, a white woman terrified of “them” and
“their violence,” an old Caribbean man haunt­
ed by loss and drawn to a fellow widower, a
witness to the killing fields of an unidentified
island tyranny and many others. The author is
not afraid to explore brutality, hatred and the
scars left by a history of racism.
The writing is extraordinarily diverse, play­
ing on different styles of colloquialism. In some
cases, the prose abandons the formal use of
punctuation, grammar and other rhetorical
devices to create an oral text—one that begs to
be read aloud. In others, the style is dense and
follows through every flight of thought a char­
acter thinks. Each time, Glave’s style woos
with brilliant twists of language.
Above all, this collection confronts what a
recent study called “the greatest taboo”: homo­
sexuality in the African American community.
Here, Glave is covering territory similar to
Harris: black men with a propensity toward
loving other men caught in the constraints of a
community not known for its acceptance of
homosexuality.
The Bronx-born son of Caribbean ex­
patriates, Glave has received a slew of
well-deserved honors; he is only the second
African American writer, besides James
Baldwin, to win the prestigious O. Henry
Award. This is a collection of short stories
worthy of every recognition it has received,
T
insanely autobiographical and utterly universal,
lending to the tone and detail of the novel a
truly authentic touch. This is Albo’s first novel,
although he has written several performance
texts, including three solo shows that also draw
on his life material. Given what we have here,
we only can hope he will write more, if noth­
ing else to remind us of the joys and hells we’ve
all come through.
T he B ear H andbook
Compiled by Ray Kampf. Harrington Park Press,
2000; $14.95 paperback.
ll right, all you big, furry, sexy lunks out
there (you know who you are), at last the
manual has been written for us! Ray Kampf
has drawn together the quintessential guidebook
on how not only to survive but thrive in this
thin-is-in, gym-buffed, hair-is-icky gay world.
Within these pages lie tips on dating
bears, explanations of those confusing but
oh-so-explicit “bear codes,” guides to bear
bars, Internet sites and even where to pick
up bears when you’re feelin’ like a little fur.
Drawing heavily from Internet sources,
magazines, clubs and informa­
tion revealed in Les Wright’s
pioneering study on the subcul­
ture, The Bear Book 1, Kampf
sifts the diamonds from the shit
and comes up with excellent
drawings, funny charts and
some damn hilarious prose.
This book illuminates the way
we bears really behave in all
our startling (and usually
humorous) glory!
The Bear Handbook: A Com­
..
Rte)
prehensive Guide for Those Who
Are Husky, Hairy and Homosexual
and Those Who Love ’Em is a
smart, tongue-in-cheek look at
bears: a group of gay men inter­
ested in accepting gay men as
they come...pun intentional.
The “bear movement” was
born as a reaction to the commercializa­
tion—the Abercrombie-and-Fitching, if you
will—of gay culture and the harmful stereo­
types this breeds among us. The bear move­
ment signaled an open-minded spirit of
inclusiveness among its gay brothers. This
“be yourself’ outlook has become such a posi­
tive, progressive
step forward,
groups of lesbians
recently have
begun to identify
as bears and have
welcomed women
of all shapes and
sizes into the den.
The Bear Hand­
book might have a
sly grin on its face,
but in its heart lies
a big damn hunk
of self-esteem and
joie de vivre. If you’re a bear or if you like bears,
put down your beer, get on your plaid shirt,
comb the chips out of your beard, and go get
this book. jn
A
G lenn W illiams writes poetry, prose, plays,
periodica and pom m Portland.
‘D ozæk ‘B a ' bj R osts ¡
A^ARÇTT IK VAST
$19.99
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