gannent's review
challenging
informative
medium-paced
3.0
The parts I loved I really loved, the parts I disliked I really disliked. Obviously as an anthology the quality varies with all the different authors, but that wasn't really my issue. I really enjoyed the nonfiction sections: the gay politics and the gay history sections were vibrant and had so much to say that was new and exciting to me, even if it was from the 1970s and 80s. But the fiction and poetry sections didn't come off as well to me. Several of the stories and poems suffered from exoticization of other cultures and sex partners, particularly Latin America. Lots of "romancing the savage" type of stuff, with very colonial, white superior mindsets. The poetry I liked the least because a solid chunk of it was about teenage boys and adult men. This is a standard of morality that has changed a lot even in the past five years, but finally as a culture we're started to recognize that relationships between adults and teenagers are fundamentally predatory and harmful, and they're celebrated and romanticized in this book.
More...