10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August 3, 2001

evening'soutiens farmech

A pair of funny, warm memoirs that work well

Love, Sal

Letters from a Boy in the City by Sal lacopelli

Illustrated by Phil Foglio Grass Stain/Greenery Press, $13.95

The Woman I Was Not

Born to Be

A Transsexual Journey

by Aleshia Brevard

Temple University, $24.95

Reviewed by Anthony Glassman

Humans have a fundamental need for confession, a need fulfilled for two millennia by the Catholic church, and for twice that long by autobiography.

Autobiographies are as varied as the people who write them. Some take the form of diaries, others collections of letters to loved ones, others still involve a direct dialogue between the author and the reader, a sort of direct confession between supplicant and confessor.

They can be humorous, they can be melancholy. What counts the most, though, is that they touch something in the reader, widening his or her realm of knowledge while still remaining familiar. Much like with songs, where the listener will say, "That artist is singing about me! I've lived that!"

Certain experiences, or facets of experiences, are universal: Feeling, at some point, like an outsider, moving to a new place and suddenly finding oneself alone. The trick of an autobiography is to combine the universalities, the omnipresent experiences, and join them with the personal experiences, the

things that make each event unique to one person's life, bridging the gap between author and reader and letting the two share a bond despite their differences.

The Woman I Was

Both books here, Sal lacopelli's Love, Sal and Aleshia Brevard's The Woman I Was Not Born to Be, accomplish this task, although they take different roads to the same basic destination.

Brevard's autobiography has her speaking directly to the reader, telling them how she felt as a young rural boy, waking up after surgery to finally be a "real" woman. lacopelli uses the medium of a series of letters to a friend back home in Chicago to sketch out the three years he lived in San Francisco. Both are funny, warm books; Brevard's, perhaps, more a heartfelt search for love and understanding, lacopelli's a sometimes-zany experiment in the old adage, "Wherever you go, there you are."

Around 63 years ago, Alfred "Buddy" Crenshaw came into this world; in the early 1960s, she had an operation to correct the "birth defect," as she refers to it, that made her a him. Now, almost forty years later, having appeared in movies, television, theater, Playboy clubs and her classroom, she is telling her story.

The Woman I Was Not Born to Be meanders, but rather meaningfully. The book starts off under anesthesia, waiting for "the chop."

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Brevard dreams about her childhood, then her more recent past, in a feverish, druginduced haze (which she does a remarkable job of recreating here, but with enough clarity to not confuse the reader).

She takes us through a few failed marriages, trapped in the mindset of the "good" American woman, there to be subservient to her man. Eventually, she manages to come into her own as a person and as a woman in a sexist, homophobic society, a feat that certainly entitles her to a book.

She tells her story with a warm, slightly self-deprecating humor that bridges any sexuality gap; this is not a book for gay men, or transsexuals, or heterosexuals, it is a book for people. She looks at her life with a kind eye, occasionally stopping to remind herself how naïve she had been. It is a joy to read, and could probably stand up quite nicely to rereading, the ultimate test of any book.

Sal lacopelli, on the other hand, is a gay man, was a gay man, and will continue to be a gay man. There's flavoring to that, of course; he's "into" leather, likes the daddy/ bear types, and has a razor-sharp wit that more than likely serves him quite well as an actor in his stage and independent film appearances.

Love, Sal tells of the three years, starting in 1995, when he lived in the City by the Bay, the Emerald City of Oz, San Francisco. Apparently, nobody has any problems getting laid in San Fran, although the unifying theme

of the book is his relationships with the people he meets there, and his journey from enchantment with the novelty of a new city to

longing for his old home to his eventual decision to return. Home is where the heart is, after all, and the heart is usually with longstanding friends, who are usually hard to convince to pack up and move halfway across a continent. It would be nice to take all of one's friends on a move, but their inconvenient, pesky lives tend to get in the way.

The single-frame illustrations by comic creator Phil Foglio (does anyone remember the giant-robot comic book Dynamo Joe?) are cute, but not in a cloying, too-manykittens way. They kind of look like the old Gerard Donelan comics that accompanied the coming out of a generation of young gay

men.

Autobiographies confess. The reader may forgive, but always gets a voyeuristic thrill in stepping outside of himself or herself for the length of a book, seeing someone else's life. With these books, the mixture of "My life is not so bad" with "I wish I had lived his or her life" is, perhaps, the perfect literary cocktail.

Tony Bennett shares the mic with k.d. lang.

lang and Bennett duo leaves crowd barefoot

by Kaizaad Kotwal

The inimitable k.d. lang, toured with the timeless Tony Bennett, and regaled a near-sell out crowd at the Polaris Amphitheater in Columbus on July 27.

She charmed the audience with her coy humor and confident singing style. lang, who exudes an amazing vocal range is sometimes awkward with her segues to the audience, joking at one point, "I am taking Banter 101!"

When a fan from the audience ran to the edge of the stage to hand her an angel pin, lang told the crowd, "Thank you so much. I need all the help I can get!" She sang numbers by Peggy Lee, someone she "worshipped so very deeply," as well as doing standards by the likes of Cole Porter. Her rendition of her classic 1992 release "Constant Craving"

KAIZAAD KOTWAL

got the crowd up on its feet.

She opened the show with a duet with Bennett and then performed a solo set for about an hour, returning during Bennett's set to do two more duets with the master.

lang, who often sings barefooted, joked about her hero Bennett, "I know he will knock your socks off because he did that to me!" She managed to knock the socks off her fans as well who are looking forward to the release of her new album on August 14.

lang, who has recorded duets with Bennett, is clearly in awe of this man who has been singing, as he admitted,❤for over fifty years now." At the start of the show lang said that she was so amazed that she was touring with Bennett. "This is part of my continuing education," she laughed, "and I'm not even paying tuition."