Queer literature has exploded in the past 15 years to include a whole modern pack of terrific releases that further expand our gay horizons. Pack one of these books on your next trip to delve deeper into a place.
July 27 2005 11:00 PM EST
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| Bursa, Turkey Middlesex Picador, 2003 In this Pulitzer snatcher, XY-chromosomed Calliope seduces a girl she calls the Obscure Object of Desire, then morphs into medical plaything, underage stripper, and handsome bureaucrat. It all begins in 1922 at the western end of Asia’s Silk Road in the labyrinthine market city of Bursa, Turkey. Here, sibling silk merchants grow mutually infatuated before escaping war, marrying on a transatlantic voyage, and passing on a recessive gene for hermaphroditism. | |
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| Santiago, Chile Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers Arsenal Pulp, 2001 Camilo crosses borders, from furtive adolescent encounters with Santiago’s 1970s Pinochet soldiers to illegal Canadian immigration. He returns to the increasingly open gay scene in his contemporary hometown: “The patrons, whose silhouettes were shattered by violent strobe lights, looked like ghosts boogying in a fog of smoke and dry ice”—a moment of eerie beauty in this gritty AIDS elegy. | |
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| Los Angeles Southland Akashic, 2003 Lesbian law student Jackie Ishida doesn’t dig her heritage, but an enigmatic name in her grandfather’s will pulls her through Los Angeles’s history to the family’s old hood of downtrodden Crenshaw, with stops in Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Echo Park. The resulting whodunit, pregnant with the traumas of internment, racism, and riots, inverts our girl’s world. | |
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| Colombo Funny Boy Harcourt Brace, 1994 An effeminate child banished from both girls’ and boys’ games, Arjun conspires with two women navigating the growing rift between the Tamil minority and Sinhalese majority: Radha, whose interethnic tryst sends her into nearby exile and the hands of a mob; and Arjun’s mother, whose lover dies investigating police torture. As our Tamil protagonist falls for a Sinhalese schoolmate, this lush ocean-side capital bends under fear’s weight during the island’s 1980s conflict. | |
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| New York City Invisible Life Anchor, 1991–1994 Raymond Tyler Jr. is a closeted bisexual black lawyer working in a posh Manhattan firm; troubled by bigotry, he shuttles from Harlem’s Canaan Baptist Church with his beauty queen girlfriend to an upper west side bed with his married male lover. In between, you glimpse landmarks like the swinging Cotton Club and pickup joints like the (now defunct) Nickel Bar. | |
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| Tokyo Kitchen Washington Square, 1993 In a neon-flushed Tokyo of drag bars, incense, and stainless steel knives, orphaned amateur chef Mikage is taken in by a friend and his entrancing transsexual mother. In Shinjuku (Tokyo’s gay district), Mikage treks through busy Chuo Park past glass-and-granite towers, gazes from a high-rise window at cars “like a phosphorescent river flowing through the darkness,” and finds relief from mourning in Asian kitchens from which fresh steam rises like a halo. | |
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| Xi’an, China When Fox Is a Thousand Arsenal Pulp 1995–2004 A trickster fox spirit haunts the concubines and wives of ninthcentury Changan (now Xi’an), China’s imperial capital for 11 dynasties. Fox celebrates her 1,000th birthday in a dark tryst with Chinese-Canadian woman Artemis Wong, who like the Fox harbors mysterious connections to the Tang Dynasty’s poetess, convicted murderer, and Taoist priestess Yu Hsuan-Chi. You’ll glimpse her world of mysticism and faith at the lunar-month festivals of the millennium-old Baxian Gong temple and monastery. | |
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| Idaho The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon HarperPerennial, 1991 “Excellent, Idaho, is where this all happened,” begins half-native hooker and storyteller Duivichi-un-Dua (a.k.a. Shed). It’s in the rugged frontier landscape north of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains that a multiracial town of hookers, miners, and herbalists is brutally remade as a Mormon settlement, and teenage Shed takes up with a bisexual mystic and cowboy who he suspects is his father. | |
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| San Francisco Valencia Seal, 2000 Poet and former hustler Michelle hooks up with knife-wielding Petra, inaugurating a roller-coaster year of love and promiscuity centered in the Latin-infused Mission District. Our heroine careens down Valencia Street into the city’s clubs and also parades down 18th Street on pride weekend in true S.F. style, “with a brand new girl and a 40, while the June sun was high and shining.” | |
| Berlin I Am My Own Wife Cleis, 1992–1995 Taking a leaf from her butch aunt’s resistance book, teenage Lottchen kills a Nazi: her father. In crumbling East Berlin, she then finds her calling: salvaging turn-of-the-century (Gründerzeit) artifacts and becoming her own woman (an 1880s-style housewife) as well as a transgender hero. In the green easternmost section of Hellersdorf, the birthplace of Germany’s postwar gay movement embodies Charlotte’s passion for preservation in times of legislated amnesia. |
29 Other Queer Classics of Time and Place
| Moby-Dick Captain Ahab and his seamen chase a sperm whale around the Pacific. For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City Italian Hours Death in Venice Maurice Passenger to Teheran Orlando Paris France The Condor and the Cows The Sheltering Sky Forbidden Colors Giovanni's Room Big Sur Myra Breckinridge Kiss of the Spiderwoman | Tales of the City Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Prisoner of Love The Swimming-Pool Library The Songlines Bastard Out of Carolina Volleyball With the Cuna Indians A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil The Married Man Men Who Loved Me Cleopatra's Wedding Present The World: Travels 1950-2000 |
