GLR January-February 2026

J EAN R OBERTA Where the Binary Ends SEX IS A SPECTRUM The Biological Limits of the Binary byAgus tí nFuentes Princeton University Press. 216 pages, $24.95 T HIS IS THE BOOK on biology that you wish you could have read in high school. In the introduction to Sex Is a Spectrum , author Agustín Fuentes invites the reader to imagine being a fish called the bluehead wrasse, living off the coast of Florida. Presumably “you” produce eggs. But then the only male in your group gets eaten, your body changes, and you produce sperm because your group needs a sperm-producer. The author’s choice of organism to represent the diverse and sur prising world of biological sex seems intended to undercut al most any reader’s culturally imposed beliefs about gender. As a bluehead wrasse, would you be more aggressive as an egg-pro ducer or a sperm-producer? Unless you’re a marine biologist, it seems impossible to know. Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, carefully places humans in the kaleidoscopic field of living organisms. By the time he introduces “Animal Sex Biology” in chapter two, he has settled on the terms “large-gamete-producing individu als” for those who produce eggs, the genetic material that even tually becomes a new organism after being fertilized, and “small-gamete-producing individuals” for those who produce sperm, or the material that does the fertilizing. Aside from this general distinction, we’re warned that “the assumption of fixed ‘sex’ differences and ‘sex’ uniformity either between or within species is a major stumbling block to understanding biology and behavior in organisms.” To provide just a sampling of the possible ways in which re production shapes bodies and behavior, Fuentes describes the Hymenoptera (bees, ants, and wasps) in which two types of ge netic systems produce three types of bodies, including “work ers,” those that can produce “large gametes” (eggs) but rarely reproduce. Then there are the Hemiptera (scale insects such as aphids, bed bugs, and cicadas), in which reproductive physiol ogy can be dependent on the temperature of the environment, and large gametes can develop into zygotes without any need demic, which adds to his own sense of persecution and paranoia. Along the way, Hugo has relations with several young men, one of whom appears to have seduced him as a move into liter ary success, to be followed in time by drug addict who’s also an aspiring writer. In both cases, things end badly, though more for the lovers than for Hugo. Unbelievable as many of the literary encounters are, Blackmore is such an engaging writer that I de voured the book, laughed, was moved, and was exasperated. What more can one ask of a novel? _________________________________________________________________ Dennis Altman, professorial fellow at La Trobe Univ. in Australia, is the authorof Righting My World: Essays from the Past Half-century (2025).

D ENNIS A LTMAN A Literary Climber

OBJECTS OF DESIRE by Neil Blackmore Hutchinson Heinemann. 368 pages, £18.99 T O STEAL SOMEONE’S WORK and pass it off as one’s own—even to kill for it—is not a new idea. It lies be hind R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface and the films A Murder of Crows and Deathtrap (based on the Ira Levin play) . Of course, with the development of generative artificial intelli gence it could become the rule rather than the exception, though perhaps without actual violence. Such plagiarism is the underlying premise of British novelist Neil Blackmore’s Objects of Desire , though the book offers much more than a simple story of literary deception. Blackmore is one of the most interesting contemporary gay writers and deserves to be better known than I suspect he is in the U.S. Start with his The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle and then move on to his others. Objects of Desire is a meditation on the conflict between love and fame and the extraordinary lengths to which we will go in pursuit of them. Hugo Hunter—not, of course, his real name—has achieved extraordinary fame on the basis of two novels, neither of which, it appears, he actually wrote. Coming from a poor and mean-spirited Welsh background, he stormed the literary world of London in the 1950s and ’60s, then fled to New York, where, again, he met everyone who mattered in late 20th century literature. At this point Blackmore taxes our credulity. Yes, it’s possi ble that an eager young man from the provinces might find sup port in establishing a career from people such as Angus Wilson and Sonia Blair (aka Sonia Orwell). With sufficient self-pro motion and chutzpah, he also conceivably could encounter vir tually every significant American gay writer of the time, with the striking exception of Tennessee Williams. Muchof Objects of Desire is devoted to his friendships with the lions of the period, above all Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood. As someone who knew all three, though certainly not as intimately as Hugo, I found Blackmore’s depictions of them somewhat jarring. In particular, the conver sations with Vidal struck me as implausible, portraying Vidal as more sentimental than he was. There are also memorable en counters with George Orwell, Truman Capote, and a very drunk Norman Mailer who—in contrast to Vidal, Isherwood, and Baldwin—come across as vicious and unappealing, as I suspect they often were. Possibly it is easier to satirize the famous than to capture them as genuine human beings. The book stretches across sixty years, from Hugo’s birth in 1926 to a final encounter with Muriel Spark in 1986, and strad dles a time when to be homosexual was to live a life marked by constant fear and deception. But given that much of the action takes place in the first half of the 1980s, it’s odd that Hugo seems totally unaware of the explosion of gay politics over the previous decade, although he encounters the first stages of the AIDS epi

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