GLR January-February 2026

This book was developed alongside a Brazilian exhibition of Gran Fury works, the first in Latin America. The local context is brought into focus: Much of former Brazilian President Jair Bol sonaro’s clueless and wildly dishonest response to the Covid-19 pandemic is reminiscent of the head in-the-sand tactics of the Reagan and Bush admin istrations. If that doesn’t feel pertinent enough, one poster asks whether government inaction on AIDS is tantamount to civil war.

The idea that art is not enough harks back to Bertolt Brecht’s notion that just getting enjoyment or stimulation from art misses the point. It was vital to Brecht that art reach its audience and in spire them to act . While it’s true that ACT UP will forever be famous for its activist interventions, I can’t imagine ACT UP without the works of Gran Fury. Their art clearly met that Brechtian imperative. This exquisite book is a striking homage to the fiery output of Gran Fury, a body of work infused with righteous rage. It’s also a reminder of the resilience and brains the queer commu nity can summon when in crisis. We’re going to need to tap into that energy again, and fast.

ACT UP demonstration at Federal Plaza, June 30, 1987. Donna Binder photo. Artist’s collection.

responded to the crisis as if it were, well, an actual crisis. It was brilliant agitprop art. Gran Fury was exceptional at pointing out the abject avarice of Big Pharma. One poster featured an actual quote from Patrick Gage, a researcher for Hoffmann-LaRoche: “One million [people with AIDS] isn’t a market that’s exciting. Sure, it’s growing, but it’s not asthma.” I had to read the quote several times to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

China’s Living Dead

T HERE’S NOTHING quite like coming out to your parents in a village in China. It’s painful enough most everywhere, but in rural China, you’re likely to be kicked out not only of the house, but also of the vil lage. Fathers weep, mothers slap you, be cause what you are will cause your family to lose face. Saving face demands that you

workers in the city of Tianjin, located some 100 miles southeast of Beijing. In Tianjin, Tsang gets a job as a bartender at a gay nightclub she calls Pistachio to protect the real life model. Pistachio is very popular. It has rooms and suites upstairs where male sex workers can retire with their clients, floor shows that include everything from drag to Chinese opera, and even straight fe

A NDREW H OLLERAN

UNLOCKING THE RED CLOSET Gay Male Sex Workers in China by Eileen Yuk HaTsang NYU Press. 233 pages, $30.

provide your parents with a grandchild. Not doing so is seen as a failure that goes against Confucian values. So the best you can do is move to a city and become a prostitute. But then you’re likely to get HIV and need medical care. And because you’re registered as a citizen of a small town, that is where your claim on the national health system is located. But the medical care you receive there is far inferior to what you would receive in the big city. So when you get HIV, you must return to your home village, come out to your parents (see above), and then go back to the city because your parents don’t want to lose face. There you will be denied medical care because your registration ( hukou ) assigns you to the small village you thought you had escaped. But it doesn’t matter really, because even in the city the doctors think you’re a drag on the system, a less-than-human stain on society, something equivalent to the living dead. That, at least, is the trajectory of the young men interviewed by sociologist Eileen Tsang in her new book about gay male sex Andrew Holleran is the author, most recently, of the novel The Kingdom of Sand.

male customers seeking love and companionship. Everyone on stage is aware that the clock is ticking, that one can do this job for only a limited time. The sex workers go to Thailand and Japan for face lifts and nose jobs and anything else that will achieve the look their clients desire. Muscular gym bodies are in demand, as are certain skin colors (tanned if you want the butch, countrified look, creamy white if you prefer “soft mas culinity”). The golden rule among sex workers is that you must never fall in love with a client—although, at the same time, the young refugees from the countryside are all looking for the sugar daddy who will fund their acquisition of all the accou trements of a modern urban homosexual, a goal that may seem meretricious to the Western reader fed up with consumerism but that is not questioned in places like Pistachio. Ironically, it is working at Pistachio, negotiating payments, dealing with what the client wants, that ends up teaching the sex workers what they need to know when, after they grow too old to attract cus tomers, many of them become what is called “livestreamers”— performers on one of the vast shopping networks selling facial creams, skin toners, and cosmetics online. Some of them get rich doing this—and as Mao’s successor Deng Xiao Ping fa

January–February 2026

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