Book Reviews: A Talking Gay Book, and a Fascinating Gay Play

You know how books supposedly sometimes "speak" to their readers? In Bob the Book, a hilarious new comic novel by David Pratt (Chelsea Station Editions, $16), books definitely do speak — to each other, if not always to the humans they're trying hard to communicate with. In other words, in the world of this novel, books have literal personalities and identities, falling in love with each other, even if they're ultimately powerless, unable to move, and often whisked away from friends and lovers by unknowing humans.

Bob the Book tells the story of one book, Bob, a scholarly work on vintage erotic photographs that's on sale in a Greenwich Village gay bookstore. He falls hard for a nearby book, Moishe, a tome about homosexuality in orthodox Jewish cultures (naturally, he's pessimistic and guilt-ridden). But before Bob and Moishe know it, the two books are sold to different owners.

So begins a long comedy of errors as the two lovers do what they can to influence to their owners to get the two of them back into each others, um, arms. Along the way, Bob encounters plenty of other books — from judgmental feminist tracts, to a closet-case vacation guidebook who can't admit there's anything gay in his pages. There's even a book who barely survived a gay book burning.

Okay, this is all basically one long joke, but it's a pretty funny one. Bob the Book is the work of someone who loves and knows books very much — especially the world of gay publishing. Every page is filled with sly inside jokes and ironic commentary. A book can be fresh and shiny one day, catching the attention of every reader who passes by with its cover of a buff guy. But just as with people, it's impossible to know the impact a book will have at the time of its publication: only time can tell.

At the same time, the author takes his characters and story exactly as seriously as any novel should. I found myself caring for Bob and, strangely, started to look at the actual book in my hands with different eyes. (How many souls am I consigning to oblivion by owning a Kindle?!)

This is a book for people who love books — for those who see them as something more than mere entertainment, who love and appreciate and are amused by the whole process of writing and publishing books and the industry that supports them. If that person is you, this book is is sure to make you laugh and is highly recommended.

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You know how Moses led the Jewish people out of slavery, then through decades years of wandering in the desert, but when they finally reached The Promised Land, he wasn't allowed to cross the River Jordan to get inside?

What was that about?

As chance would have it, that's also the story of the founding of the American gay civil rights movement, which didn't start at Stonewall in 1969, as many people mistakenly believe, but with the country's very first gay political organization, The Mattachine Society, in 1950. Four gay men, most notably gay visionary Harry Hay, had the extremely radical idea that gay people were a minority — and an oppressed one at that — and that, further, the only way things would ever change is if we united together and spoke up openly for our rights.

It would've been easy to write a hagiography of Hay and his compatriots. It also would've been really boring, and mostly pointless, with little to say about GLBT rights today.

Instead, playwright Jon Marans has written the brilliantly-titled The Temperamentals, a play that captures all the messy complexity of the founding of a movement (back then, gay people were referred to as "temperamentals," but of course the term has multiple meanings here). It's now out in a printed edition (Chelsea Stations Editions, $16), and its only flaw is an over-use of stage directions that mostly end up being distracting rather than illuminating.

Harry Hay wasn't just a communist; he was a true radical, committed to the idea that it wasn't enough for society to "accept" gay people — he thought gay people were fundamentally different from straights, and he wanted society to change to be more like them in very fundamental ways. The point of this play is that maybe truly radical ideas, like the idea that gay people are an oppressed political minority, can only occur to true radicals. But how does a truly radical person, someone who rejects many of the most basic tenets of a society, work enough within a system in order to change it?

In short, the tensions that have long marked the GLBT rights movement — the fights over assimilation versus "transformation," and accommodation (and socializing) versus political activism — were with us literally right from the beginning.

The Temperamentals is told from the personal point of view of Hay and his friends. It does tell the basics of the founding of The Mattachine Society, and of Hay and his compatriot's ouster a mere two years after it was founded. But mostly it tells a profound emotional and historical truth that, incidentally, isn't unique to gay people: certain people are destined to play certain roles in history, and when their lines are spoken, they must move off-stage.

Basically, to be a true visionary, you need to exist, on some level, outside of time — that's surely where their visionary inspirations come from anyway. But the very thing that gives these men their sparks of inspiration — their radical natures — can be exactly the thing that make them unwilling or unsuited to take the next step after inspiration. Perhaps all visionaries are temperamental this way.

There's much more I could say about this bold, terrific play — I didn't even mention how truly funny it is! So hopefully it goes without saying that all this adds up to a strong recommendation for this edition.

IN STORES NOW

Shorn: Toys to Men by Dennis Milam Bensie (Coffeetown Press, $17,95) may be the single weirdest memoir I've ever read. Bensie, a wig and costume designer for live theater, tells his life-story, which includes an explicit look at his life-long sexual fetish with, well, hair. Bensie is clearly not a professional writer, but for those who share his prediliction, this may be a worthwhile read.

Death Vows: A Donald Strachey Mystery by Richard Stephenson (MLR Press, $14.99), the latest mystery in the Donald Strachey mystery series, centers around gay marriage in Massachusettes. I enjoyed earlier Strachey novels, but truthfully, I found this book (from 2008) to be a little disappointing.

Shadow Walkers by Brent Hartinger (Flux Books, $9.95) is the latest book by, well, me. Sixteen-year-old Zach is gay and isolated on a remote island in Puget Sound. When his grandparents take away his access to the internet, he begins to experiment with astral projection — which leads him into a spiritual dimension of mystery, danger, and yes, gay romance. Yup, it's a gay teen supernatural thriller.