"Beach Reading" and Other Gay Goodies

Bill Konigsberg is an acclaimed sportswriter for the Associated Press who won a GLAAD award for his inspiring, coming out story. Konigsberg combines sports and gays in his first novel, Out of the Pocket (Dutton Juvenile;$16.99).

Author Bill Konigsberg

In previous young adult novels similar in nature, the gay teenager would pine in vain for the star quarterback. But in Out of the Pocket, the star quarterback Bobby Framingham, is himself gay, not to mention highly conflicted about his sexuality.

Bobby’s coming out is the crux of this novel and Konigsberg unites his skills as a sports writer and his life experiences as a gay man to create a story that is both realistic and interesting. Though Out of the Pocket is mainly written for juveniles, adult readers will also enjoy this inspiring book.

Gay historians, dwelling on the achievements of New York or San Francisco, have long ignored Chicago and its contributions to the GLBT community. But it was the Second City that gave gay Americans our first gay rights organization, the Society for Human Rights (1925); and it was Chicago that was home to such pioneers as Henry Gerber, Pearl Hart, Samuel Steward, Bob Basker and Jeannette Foster.

Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community (Agate Surrey Books; $30.00), is a pictorial history of the city that is home to America’s most currently influential man and woman – Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

Editor Tracy Baim, co-founder of Windy City Times newspaper and publisher and executive director of Windy City Media Group, worked with such distinguished contributors as John D’Emilio, Jonathan Ned Katz, Jorjet Harper and Chad Heap to chronicle the queer presence in the Windy City, from the days of Abraham Lincoln till today.

Out and Proud in Chicago is a companion volume to an equally interesting documentary series, produced by WTTW TV in Chicago.

The casual gay reader will probably ignore Fred Fejes’s Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America’s Debate on Homosexuality (Palgrave Macmillan). Not only is the book very scholarly (and sometimes dull) but, at $79.95, it is also very expensive. This is a shame, since Fred Fejes, who teaches at the School of Communications and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, has given a new twist to the history of the gay movement in the decade between Stonewall and AIDS.

Author Fred Fejes

Professor Fejes begins his narrative in Miami, site of the first major defeat for gay rights legislation (1977), and goes on to similar debacles in St. Paul, Wichita and Eugene before reaching the rare gay victories in Seattle and California’s Briggs Initiative (1978).

Fejes did a thorough study of gay highs and lows during the “me decade,” based on an in-depth study of contemporary newspaper accounts and interviews with survivors of that hectic era. (One of the Miami veterans that Fejes interviewed was a certain Jesse Monteagudo.)