July Books: A Miami Native Comes Home

“They say that when the world ends, the World Book Encyclopedia will remain intact, and that, in fact, its twenty-two gold-edged volumes will replace the world” – a frightening thought, especially for those of us who venerate the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In any case, there is a decadent, “end of the world” quality to The End of the World Book, as if McCartney was writing in a hurry, before Doomsday arrives.

Though The End of the World Book does not have much of a plot, its encyclopedic entries tell us a lot about the life, thoughts and opinions of its protagonist - and of McCartney himself. We learn, for example, that the protagonist is “thirty-six and have yet to acquire my driver’s license. Living in Los Angeles, you might think this puts me at a disadvantage, but you would be wrong.”

We also learn that “I used to go out dancing every night. Then I cut back to Saturday nights. Lately, I have been going out dancing less and less.” Furthermore, “Unlike the rest of the world, I have never really liked the Beatles.” On the other hand, McCartney’s entry about “Miller, Tim,” written in the second person, is basically a love letter to his longtime companion:

“When I first saw you at that lecture in London in 1994, it was so eerie and momentous, I knew how Goethe must have felt, when, on his twelfth birthday, he was given that puppet theater, for which he wrote his first play, an event that utterly changed the path of his life and altered the course of who he would be. . . . All my life, I had been waiting with the radical patience of a puppet, and, as soon as I saw you, I knew you were the puppet.”

It is quite a leap to go from Alistair McCartney’s fantasies to the gritty lives of the young Black and Brown gay men in Kai Wright’s study Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York (Beacon Press; 224 pages; $24.95). In Drifting Toward Love, Wright goes where few gay journalists go: into the lives of young men of color whose lives are a constant struggle with racism, homophobia (both internal and external) and economic anxiety.

Author Kai Wright

“This book explores the lives of a handful of young gay men of color . . . I narrowly focus on the experiences of three young men, along with their friends and loved ones, and closely follow their efforts to carve out both physical and emotional space for an honest, free existence.”

By chronicling the lives of Manny, Julius and Carlos (all pseudonyms), Wright tells us a lot about what it’s like to be a racial and/or sexual minority in modern urban America.

From White Crane Books, an imprint of Lethe Press, come two collections of writings by two of our most venerable authors. The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1969-2007 (140 pages; $14.95) is a fascinating collection of verse by Jeffrey Beam that combine sexuality and spirituality to the benefit of both. Beam has been writing for almost four decades; and any literary gay man who is unaware of Beam or his poems ought to be ashamed of himself! If anything, The Beautiful Tendons serves as a good introduction to this unjustly ignored artist.

Poet Jeffrey Beam

Much better known is Malcolm Boyd, who’s known to the world as an Episcopal Priest, civil rights and gay activist and inspirational author with almost five decades of writings to his credit. Some of Boyd’s best work is collected in A Prophet In His Own Land: A Malcolm Boyd Reader (324 pages; $33).

Edited by Bo Young and Dan Vera, editors of White Crane, and with a Foreword by Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, A Prophet In His Own Land is a compendium of five decades of prose, poetry, prayers and interviews. Its publication coincides with Boyd’s 85^th birthday and his receipt of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award, an award he shares with his life partner Mark Thompson. (A Prophet In His Own Land includes a White Crane Conversation with Malcolm Boyd and Mark Thompson.) Those who want to read more Malcolm Boyd should pick up his 1978 classic Take Off the Masks, now back in print in a brand-new White Crane edition.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and community activist who lives in South Florida with his life partner and many friends. Reach him at jessemontagudo@aol.com.