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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE DECEMBER 19, 1997
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BOOKS
A good, gossipy read, but it ignores historic events
The Gay Metropolis 1940-1996 by Charles Kaiser Houghton Mifflin, $27 hardcover
Reviewed by Bob Roehr
The Gay Metropolis has all of the trappings of the gay book of the season. A major publishing house, a sexy title, a brooding artistic cover done in silver foil, and an author who as a former mainstream journalist has garnered widespread reviews. And to top it off, it's a well written, gossipy read.
This social and political history of modern gay life in America is, as is any such broad survey, indebted to prior, more focused efforts. In this case it is books such as Allan Berube's Coming Out Under Fire, Eric Marcus' Making History and Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, among others.
Kaiser's degree of dependence is veiled by the current rage of not footnoting quotations, but rather matching them at the back of the book. Kaiser's major contribution of original material is essentially gossip.
A history often tells as much about the present and the author-the prism through which events are viewed as it does about the past. Kaiser's writing often reflects the jumping contextual experience of MTV and the Internet, where pieces are short and joined together in disparate ways. His fascination with celebrity and sex mirrors that of popular culture.
He divides the book into chapters of equal length for each decade. Within this artificial constriction he then expands or squeezes history-whether the turgid forties or the actionpacked eighties-to fit the allotted space. This contributes to the book's unevenness.
One problem, inevitable with any survey, is what to leave out. Kaiser's choices seem idiosyncratic. He wants to have it both ways, writing an essentially New York story but with the luxury of jumping to wherever-Israel,
Washington, Los Angeles-whenever he has a good tale to tell, regardless of its centrality to the main threads of history.
He lacks the discipline to cut out juicy stories that are, at best, tangential to this purpose-JFK's purported bisexual encounter, Howard Rosenman's fling with Leonard Bernstein in Israel. He has the marketing sense to know that these tidbits will get picked up by the media, they will lure readers to purchase. They are essential to sales, not to understanding how gays got to where they are today.
But making room for these tales left no space for mention of the AIDS Quilt, any of the three marches on Washington, or Stonewall 25 and the Gay Games. Surely these events were some of the most broadly significant ones in shaping both the gay community and its social and political identity in contemporary America. Kaiser looks past them. They are serious omissions.
He relocates the 1980 Democratic convention to San Francisco, when it fact it took place in New York. It was there that the first (and to my knowledge, the only) openly gay person was nominated for national office. Mel Boozer, in withdrawing from consideration as a vice presidential candidate, told the convention: “I know what it means to be called nigger. I know what it means to be called faggot. And I can sum up the difference in one word: None." It is a key link between the black and gay civil rights struggles.
Instead, what we get from Kaiser is a fixation on individual white males of physical beauty, artistic accomplishment, and, often as not, economic means. Most people will find it a compelling, entertaining tale, but that does not make it a good general history.
Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis is to history what Jackie Collins is to literature. Both have their places, so long as one understands the strengths and limitations of what one is reading.
Informative look at women musicians has some flaws
Backstage Pass
Interviews with Women in Music by Laura Post New Victoria, $16.95
Reviewed by Harriet L. Schwartz
Capturing emotion like June Millington's unbridled enthusiasm and declarations like Ani DiFranco's "mental revolution," Laura Post's Backstage Pass rocks with interviews and profiles of 40 outstanding artists.
With an ongoing dearth of books about women in music, Post's book is an important contribution to the world of popular music literature. Covering pioneers like Millington and Cris Williamson as well as younger artists like DiFranco and Joan Osborne, Post provides a fairly broad survey of her subject.
She includes artists like Ferron, Janis Ian, and Saffire, well-known in the women's and lesbian music worlds, and others like Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker and solo artist Marianne Faithful, who found fame completely outside of the women's music genre. Post's book would be even stronger had she included a few artists like Joan Jett or the women of L7, Tribe 8 or some other rockers from the harder end of pop music.
Backstage Pass is essentially a collection of articles and adaptations of articles that Post wrote for a number of publications throughout the 1990s. Unfortunately, this leaves some of the interviews rather dated. If Post would have arranged the interviews in chronological order and made the dates of the original articles more clear, then the book would flow more naturally. As is, the interviews sometimes seem at best outdated and at worst inaccurate, when in
fact they are just out of context.
In addition, Post often combines Q & A and narrative formats. This disrupts the flow of the chapter, as the voice of the piece varies from stand-alone direct quotes to the background and commentary that Post provides.
Laura Post
The chapters would read more smoothly if Post had put her narratives either before or after the interviews, and then stayed with the Q & A format.
Despite the structural difficulties, Post's book will be an interesting and informative read for anyone interested in women musicians. Post is a skilled interviewer and most often creates discussions where her subjects go well beyond the surface, revealing a backstage look at the musicians and their music.