GLR January-February 2025

Helms. An archivist has pulled out the mock-up for Dr. Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), which was the book that launched the legitimization of transgenderism as a medical diagnosis along with gender confirming medical and surgical treatments. (See my earlier essay in the Sept.-Oct. 2024 issue of this magazine on his relationship with Christine Jor gensen, who attracted global attention to “sex change” treat ment in 1952.) We get to face Antonio de Erauso (b. San Sebastián, Spain, 1592; d. Cotaxtla, México, 1650) dressed as a lieutenant of the Spanish Navy, in which he served between 1625 and 1628. The “Lieutenant Nun” confronts us sporting short-cropped hair with a steely, utterly defiant gaze. In 1626, Erauso (née Catalina) petitioned King Philip IV of Spain for a life pension and the right to dress as a man in recompense of their naval service. After the king granted only the pension, Erauso effectively went over his head to Pope Urban VIII, who granted a lifetime authority to dress in male attire. Erauso’s supposed autobiog raphy was published two centuries later (1829) and tells of Catalina’s escape from a nunnery at fifteen and his cross dressed military adventures in the Spanish New World under various male names. Antonio eventually settled in Mexico.

Other significant figures include Jorgensen, Candy Darling (a Warhol Superstar), jazz pianist Billy Tipton, and actress Lav erne Cox. It also includes less well-known individuals who de serve to be widely known. Reed Erickson is represented by some of his trippy paintings and the educational pamphlets his Erickson Educational Foundation published when he was still funding endocrinologist Harry Benjamin’s sexology research. A box of Clairol’s “Born Beautiful,” color 512 “Dark Auburn” (1975), features the stately Tracey Africa Norman, who worked in stealth when she started her modeling career. Her meteoric rise ended abruptly after she was outed in 1980. It was not until 2016 that she was able to professionally model again, once more for Clairol, on “Nice ‘n Easy.” The essays are by scores of leading trans activists, academ ics, artists, and creative writers. The volume as a whole demon strates how far Trans Studies has come since it emerged in the 1990s. The editors have undoubtedly done heroic work shap ing the individual entries into engaging prose, unburdened by the academic jargon of some monographs in Queer Theory. It should be on everyone’s coffee table, and I hope some generous donor will help MOTHA become the gleaming architectural des tination it deserves to be.

B R I E F S involvement in these organizations and the lives and deaths of her comrades, she tells us, she was “saving herself.” We see in her scorching prose as a teenager becoming an adult, observing, feeling, loving, losing love. We see her witnessing, and surviving.

BLOODLOSS A Love Story of AIDS, Ac ti vism, and Art by Keiko Lane Duke University Press. 312 pages, $26.95 There have been many books and memoirs written about the AIDS crisis, but few are as well-written and moving as Keiko Lane’s BloodLoss . As a sixteen-year-old Oki nawan-American teenager in Los Angeles in 1991, Keiko Lane joined Queer Nation and ACT UP. She was drawn to the edgi ness and immediacy of those organizations and the queer men and women who filled them. In stunning prose, Lane describes the struggles of her friends and comrades, their bravery, their terror, their anger. In the process of helping them and loving them, she discovers herself. Now, decades later, she addresses what she calls “the problem of memory,” and does so with exquisite skill and extraordinary honesty. “I remem ber the feelings,” she tells us simply, and her memory does not fail. One of the remarkable things about Lane’s story is her lack of hesitation at such a young age. She inserts herself into the lives of some of her ailing colleagues and their political actions without fear or second guessing, and describes with intimate detail what she calls, in an evocative phrase, “the ferocity of queer commitments.” Her de scriptions are riveting and sometimes painful to read, but they are essential, for the agony of queer bodies at the time is some thing that cannot be forgotten. Through her

Ghaziani argues that LGBT nightlife has partially shifted from the “bar scene” to thematic parties, or club nights, that cater to segments hitherto underserved by estab lished bars. The bars’ heavy fixed-cost business model has given way to initiatives that rent out spaces (and their liquor li cense) by the night, and get the word out through social media. Ghaziani sees this trend as subversive and anti-capitalist, though I think it could also be seen as an example of Schumpeter’s “creative destruc tion,” exemplifying a gig economy dy namic. The more segmented, flexible market allows a variety of spaces to flour ish that focus on the many subcultures that make up the mosaic of British society and its queer community. That said, I was struck by the extent to which Ghaziani highlighted the specifically racial and ethnic characteristics of these LGBT events. At times in his interviews he seems to challenge some people’s claims that ethnicity was unimportant. When one man repeatedly states that “I just see myself as British,” Ghaziani seems determined to dismiss his efforts to distance himself from an ethnic category, commenting: “I wonder if our need to belong is so deep and so fun damental that it can motivate some who are multiracial to identify as White.” On the other hand, there is a curious deficit in this book of talk about sex, which is, after all, a lot of what “queer nightlife” is about. Y OAV S IVAN

What Keiko Lane ultimately shows us, and with great skill, is that truth—the diffi cult, bloody, gritty truth—is beautiful, as Keats famously maintained, no matter what is being revealed. This is a memoir that de serves to be widely read. HNH IRSCH LONG LIVE QUEER NIGHTLIFE How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolu ti on by Amin Ghaziani Princeton Univ. Press. 288 pages, $29.95 Stories about the decline of the gay bar had led Amin Ghaziani to expect his sabbatical in London in 2018 to be a dull affair. He was surprised to discover that queer nightlife was more lively, and more nuanced, than the drastic headlines would suggest. The big city still offers plenty of options for LGBT peo ple out looking for fun. Endowed with re search grants, Ghaziani, an American sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, interviewed 112 London ers—from city officials to party organizers to party goers—over a period of several years. The result is a beautiful book replete with attractive photographs of London’s club scene just before the pandemic.

TheG & LR

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