BiblioVault - Books about LGBTQ+

Fantasia for the Man in Blue

Tommye Blount

Four Way Books, 2020

In his debut collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence. A black man’s late-night encounter with a police officer—the titular “man in blue”—becomes an extended meditation on a dangerous erotic fantasy. The late Luther Vandross, resurrected here in a suite of poems, addresses the contradiction between his public persona and a life spent largely in the closet: “It’s a calling, this hunger / to sing for a love I’m too ashamed to want for myself.” In “Aaron McKinney Cleans His Magnum,” the convicted killer imagines the barrel of the gun he used to bludgeon Matthew Shepard as an “infant’s small mouth” as well as the “sad calculator” that was “built to subtract from and divide a town.” In these and other poems, Blount viscerally captures the experience of the “other” and locates us squarely within these personae.

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Far from Atlantis

Poems

Raymond Luczak

Gallaudet University Press, 2023

In Far from Atlantis, Raymond Luczak makes use of traditional poetic forms to tell the stories of two vastly different worlds: the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which often looks like an island on the map, and the fabled island of Atlantis. The poems in this collection are rooted in the natural world, with the power of water as a means for escaping the cruelty and tedium of an ableist society. While recounting his troubled childhood as the only deaf person in a large hearing family, Luczak aligns himself with mythological, monstrous, and superhuman beings who, like him, exist on the margins. The narratives invoked and the worlds created in these poems are both autoethnographic and speculative, and include figures lost to history like Lucy Frances Fitzhigh Hooe and Frances Peterson, along with 1970s pop culture icons like the Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman.

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Feeling Backward

Loss and the Politics of Queer History

Heather Love

Harvard University Press, 2009

Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet.

Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present.

Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.

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Forgive the Body This Failure

Blas Falconer

Four Way Books, 2018

Engaging the past and present, these poems attempt to reconcile loss and longing while also seeking to understand our own impermanence. Written in a plain-spoken voice, they are meditative, elegiac and tender.

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Fred in Love

Felice Picano

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    In the early 1970s, when he was still an aspiring, unpublished writer, Felice Picano began a remarkable relationship with an extraordinary animal: a days-old kitten slated for euthanasia who refused to perish. Rescued, named, and trained, Fred became an extraordinarily intelligent companion, ally, teacher, and constant wonder to the author as he began his ascent through the Bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, among musicians, actors, curious characters, and even the famous British actress in hiding right next door.
    But when an acquaintance brought his female cat to be serviced by Fred, an entire new set of experiences opened up for the cat-and for Picano, who'd never had the nerve to befriend her owner, his ideal man. The course of love seldom runs straight for cats or for men, and this time would prove (hilariously) no different.
    This is another of Picano's distinguished portraits of a vanished era, when a new gay domain was solidifying only a few years after the Stonewall Riots, and the still nascent gay literary world that Picano would help invent was just a conception. Fred in Love is a charming, nostalgic, funny, gossipy, involving, and ultimately enlightening story about how we learn and grow, and how we love-whether the object of our affection is a cat or another human being. It's sure to take its place next to Picano's now classic literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay.

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From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche

New and Selected Poems

Francisco X. Alarcón

University of Arizona Press, 2002

On the other side of night, Francisco Alarcón is waiting.

One of Chicano literature's premier poets, Alarcón has brought his luminous images to the page in such acclaimed volumes as Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes and Snake Poems. Now he has assembled the best of his work from fifteen years, along with fourteen new poems, in a book that distills his magical sense of reality into a cup brimming with passion.

Raised in Guadalajara and now living in the San Francisco Bay area, Alarcón sees that " 'Mexican' / is not / a noun / or an / adjective / 'Mexican' / is a life / long / low-paying / job." Participating in a poetic tradition that goes back to the mystic Spanish poets of the sixteenth century, he brings us sonnets infused with romance and tenderness—and shorter poems that are direct and hard-hitting commentaries on American society, as he cries out for "a more godlike god," one "who spends nights / in houses / of ill repute / and gets up late / on Saturdays."

Alarcón invokes both the mysteries of Mesoamerica and the "otherness" of his gay identity. "My skin is dark / as the night / in this country / of noontime," he writes, "but my soul / is even darker / from all the light / I carry inside." In lyrical poems open to wide interpretation, he transcends ethnic concerns to address social, sexual, and historical issues of concern to all Americans. The fourteen new poems in From the Other Side of Night offer startling new commentaries on life and love, sex and AIDS.

Shifting effortlessly between English and Spanish—and even Nahuatl—Alarcón demonstrates the gift of language that has earned him both a wide readership and the admiration of fellow poets. With this book, he invites new readers to meet him where the darkness is palpable and the soul burns bright.

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Full Foreground

Roberto Tejada

University of Arizona Press, 2012

Poet Roberto Tejada uses lyrical poems to explore and give a voice to the troubles of global citizenship, US–Mexico relations, Latino identity, and the political emotion of queer sexualities. His collection provides a holistic ground-level view of pivotal world events from the mid 1990s to a more recent present.

Tejada’s innovative work dramatically widens the scope of Latina/o literature, showing us exactly what it can accomplish. The poems move very much like a three-act play, in which the first act is one of origins; the second, a staging of desire; and the third, a symbiosis. These acts magnify one another when unified. Each poem within the collection positions itself within the avant-garde, in which the artful use of language aims to dazzle, surprise, and enliven. The poems dance by, preserving a tension between hurry and delay, momentum and stasis, and every line is like a newly launched firecracker, sending out startling patterns of spark and flare.

Tejada’s exuberant language stretches the limits of selfhood and the way it is represented in poetry. He illuminates the tangled webs that are woven when identities are linked to sexuality, nationality, privilege, and temporality. The concerns and obsessions voiced here turn the construction of desire on its head, forcing us to ask ourselves what is worthy of our attentions.

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Funny Boy

The Richard Hunt Biography

Jessica Max Stein

Rutgers University Press, 2024

"The most sensational, perpetual teenager in the world.” —Jim Henson

"To know him was to love him, and we do." —Mark Hamill

Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo. Hunt also acted, directed and mentored the next generation of performers. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable in that he crammed them all into only 40 years.

Richard Hunt was just 18 years old when he joined Jim Henson’s company, where his edgy humor quickly helped launch the Muppets into international stardom. Hunt lived large, savoring life’s delights, amassing a vivid, disparate community of friends. Even when the AIDS epidemic wrought its devastation, claiming the love of Hunt’s life and threatening his own life, he showed an extraordinary sense of resilience, openness and joy. Hunt’s story exemplifies how to follow your passion, foster your talents, adapt to life’s surprises, genuinely connect with everyone from glitzy celebrities to gruff cab drivers – and have a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

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The Future Will Call You Something Else

Natasha Sajé

Tupelo Press, 2023

“Natasha Sajé’s quicksilver, wideawake poems in The Future Will Call You Something Else never fail to delight and impress me with their at-the-ready empathy, encyclopedic wit, and prismatic range of allusions. With its ‘all systems go’ verve and vigorous attention to the myriad world, this dazzling, exhilarating new book is a treasure and a wonder.”
—Cyrus Cassells

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