6

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE November 20, 2009

ever

www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com

How to do non-fiction

Essays on trans life and historical figures come from opposite ends of the spectrum

by Anthony Glassman

Some people are just hard-wired for fiction, apparently.

Give them a novel, a collection of short stories, a film, and they're happy as kittens on a pillow, as long as reality doesn't enter into the equation.

These people will not be happy with

* AT SAMA NGUO

EXIT

THE NEAREST EXIT MAY BE BEHIND YOU

essays by S Bear Bergman

*THERE THAT YOU ARE WHEN RRELÆN YOUR TRAGENES SA

S. Bear Bergman

S. Bear Bergman's The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (Arsenal Pulp Press, $18.95, trade paperback), a collection of essays that illustrate one of the major dangers of writing: failing in the followthrough.

Bergman, for those not familiar with his writing, is a transman now living with his husband

in southern Ontario. Growing up as a little Jewish girl in New York... well, okay, not

a little Jewish girl, more an incredibly robust Jewish girl (or a dainty Jewish tank) Bergman always felt different. Stories about bat mitzvahs follow, along with recollections of the emotional freedom afforded to Jewish children.

Unfortunately, at least in this collection of essays, Bergman starts strong in each piece, but seems to miss the mark by the end. Some of them don't so much conclude as peter out.

A notable exception

is "Today, I Am a Man (and Other Perorations of the Tranny Jewboy)," in which S. Bear discusses a male cousin who cried inconsolably for three days following the death of his grandfather, Bergman's great-uncle.

Instead of telling him to suck it up, the boy's parents, cousins, siblings and other assorted family members gave him the space and time he needed to process his emotions. On the third day, he emerged. from his room, played videogames with his brother, had some food and continued his grieving in a more social atmosphere.

Bergman notes that he was never asked to be seen and not heard as a child, and that in his upbringing, girls were allowed to be pretty and smart.

That essay's examination of gender construction in a Jewish family was quite interesting.

However, the titular essay, in which a fellow passenger on a very small plane

asks to change seats so she doesn't catch "gay" from Bergman, starts off well but degenerates into navel-gazing, lacking any real direction other than curiosity about what this overly "Christian" woman thought Bergman was-which signifiers was she picking up on?

Now, for non-fiction that grabs you by the various body parts and makes you want to keep reading, there's Quears in History: The Comprehensive Encyclope-

dia of Historical Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgenders by Keith Stern, with an introduction by Ian McKellen (BenBella, $19.95, trade paperback).

Obviously it cannot be a complete list of every LGBT person who ever lived and became somewhat famous, even leaving aside arguments about the social construction of LGBT identity.

However, Stern does dig up thousands of years of boys doing boys, girls doing girls, boys being girls and girls being boys. And he presents it all in an engaging, fast-reading style that Wired magazine referred to as "history and dish garnished lavishly with innuendo, riddled with sarcasm and schmooze."

And it is.

You get one of the early Mormons getting the boot for sucking cock, eventually becoming a founding father of Des Moines.

You get one of John F. Kennedy's closest friends and confidantes, the inventor of Fizzies tablets, who was assured after the president had surgery on his foreskin, "As for your rather unnatural interest in my becoming circumcised, JJ has never been in better shape or doing better service."

(In the interest of full disclosure, Kennedy knew his friend Lem Billings was gay, and told him it didn't matter to him as long as he didn't try to seduce him. He never did.)

There is Gian Gastone, the last grand duke of Tuscany, whose lowering of taxes and granting of freedoms made him popular among the people, and whose hiring of nubile young men to service him made them more financially secure than they were before penetrating both the Grand Duke and his pocketbook.

Going back even farther into the graying mists of time, there was Polycrates, the Greek ruler who united much of the Aegean before his death in 515 B.C. Erecting a statue of his lover Bathyllus in the temple of Hera might have been a mistake, however, since she was the goddess of women and marriage.

For those readers of a certain age, there's Forrest Tucker, the brawnier of the stars of the 1960s sitcom F Troop, who played many a heavy in westerns.

Of course, there are many women represented too, like Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose work was unsurprisingly unappreciated by Stalin.

Actresses Pola Negri and Tallulah Bankhead, who were not particularly

"THIS IS HISTORY AND DISH LavISHLY

GARNISHED

WITH INNUENDO, RIDDLED WITH Sarcasm

AND SCHMooze."

We Ne

QUEERS IN HISTORY

THE COMPREHENSIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA of HISTORICAL gays, Lesbians, BISEXUALS, AND transcenders ket H ste RN

INCLUDES Mographies of over 900 FROMINENT people, from 1450 BC to today

Keith Stern

fond of each other, both have listings in the book. Bankhead once said of Negri, "The biggest phony in Hollywood, darling! A lying lesbo, a Polish publicity hound. Had a mustache and couldn't act her way out of a paper bag!"

Oh yes, there are poets and kings and queens, saints and sinners and actors and writers and politicians. They're all here, and none of them are spared Stern's acerbic wit.

This is how to do non-f n-fiction! Hmmm. Maybe S. Bear Bergman's next book. should take an encyclopedic form. He could list all the invectives used against him in his life, all the neologisms used to describe transgender people, and why each one is right or wrong. That could be fun.