Book Reviews: RuPaul Gets Meta, Hamlet was Gay and Woodstock was Too!

Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, is a terrific journalist. Last year, in his book America Anonymous, he chronicled eight people and the ways they deal with their addictions (and revealed his own sex addiction in the process).

Now he’s put together American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life (Simon & Schuster, $15), a collection of articles, all previously published, on contemporary social topics as varied as a summer camp for pro-life teenagers, dry frat houses, and the founder of Abercrombie & Fitch.

But Denizet-Lewis is gay, and most of the articles involve “gay” topics, including ones about how same-sex marriage is changing gay life, the harried members of the much-maligned National Man/Boy Love Association, a social group for butch gay men, what happens when a street is changed from “Gay Street” to “Green Apple Road,” and the African American subculture of being on the “down-low” (a piece that originally appeared in 2003 and helped start the whole media frenzy over the phenomenon). He's even got a follow-up piece on the repercussions of that article.

Part of me always gets a little annoyed by “trend” pieces, which is what many of these articles are, and how often they use specific examples to wildly overstate their case. That’s sometimes what happens here. “Whatever Happened to Teen Romance” talks about the trend of teen sexual hook-ups – and to hear the piece tell it, teenagers don’t date anymore: they simply meet up and have sex. But I happen to know dozens of actual teenagers for whom this is simply not the case.

The biggest problem may be one of tone. Denizet-Lewis generally removes himself completely from his articles and lets his subjects tell their own stories, which is probably exactly the way a good features article should be; when you’re reading a features article, that’s all you need.

But when these articles are compiled into book form, many of them read weirdly impersonal. America Anonymous, which also told the stories of other people, somehow worked better because it was framed with the author’s own dealings with addiction and, therefore, you could imagine exactly what he was feeling when he interacted with them. Reading all these feature articles in a row, there’s a sense that you’re being led around by the invisible man (although, in fairness, the book is titled American Voyeur).

But these are all still interesting topics, very well-told.

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Say what you want about RuPaul, but he’s definitely a survivor. What with his break-out TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, his career is hotter than ever. And like all survivors, Ru knows something about reinvention.

What’s the secret to his success? In Workin’ It! RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style by RuPaul (HarperCollins, $19.99), he’s telling all.

Okay, maybe not all. The bulk of the book are his style and “beauty” secrets – which often start out directed to men interested in doing drag, but are then expanded to include anyone interested in looking or feeling better about themselves.

The book is also heavy on Ru’s philosophy of life, which – it must be said – is surprisingly metaphysical. Then again, if anyone would know anything about life being all an illusion, it would probably be a drag queen.

Ru starts off the book with an anecdote about the best advice he says he’s ever received: “Don’t take life too seriously.” But he literally spends the rest of the book revealing that he takes his own life – especially his career in drag – very, very seriously indeed.

So is there a contradiction? Not in Ru’s mind. Success and happiness are all about knowing what’s important, and why. Doing drag and being happy are both about exactly the same thing: attitude.

Ultimately, Ru says, success in anything is “inside job” – if you don’t feel it on the inside, it doesn’t matter what’s going on on the outside. Every week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, RuPaul says, “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?” He really, really means it.

Workin’ It! has a bit of a feel of “Let’s capitalize on my current success!” in that it has lots of lists and pictures – and not much text. On the other hand, the pictures, all of RuPaul, are pretty darn terrific – a testament to his incredible look.

This book is a love letter from RuPaul to his die-hard fans – and the fans will surely love it right back. But the more casual fan? Paging through it in a bookstore might be all you need.

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It’s always a little frustrating to read a novel that has more than a touch of genius, but that, in the end, doesn't quite live up to its promise of greatness. Such is the case with The Lunatic, The Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes (Harper Perennial, $13.99).

In the world of this book, the characters from Hamlet and Shakespeare’s love sonnets are real-life people mixing it up with each other, not to mention the real-life Shakespeare, who would apparently go on to take some serious liberties with them, since they’re nothing like their fictional counterparts. There’s plenty of gay action as well, with Horatio madly in love with Hamlet, and so on.

Measure for measure, it’s all quite a tempest – a midwinter’s night dream, if you will.

This book is terrifically well-written, and for the first third of it, I was prepared to rave it to high heaven. But, well, all didn’t end well. I confess my love’s labour was lost a little when the plot flagged in the middle (with a distracting alternating POV, among other things). And while I’ve seen plenty of Shakespeare in my day, I found the sheer magnitude of the references and in-jokes to be not so much fun as eventually a little off-putting, like the author and her Shakespeare-aficionado friends were sharing a conversation that I only half-understood. This is definitely not a story that "stands on its own."

So is The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet much ado about nothing? Absolutely not. It’s exactly as you like it – as long as you’re a Shakespeare scholar.

Next Page! Woodstock was really, really gay!