GLR July-August 2025

H ANK T ROUT RIVER CROSSED by Bruce P. Spang Wisdom House Books. 388 pages; $19.99 B RUCE SPANG’S latest novel, River Crossed , is a long and somewhat convoluted coming-out story set in the mid- to late 1970s in West Virginia. Since I was born and raised in that state, went to college at WVU in Morgan town—just an hour or so west of where River Crossed is set— and came out in 1970, I was looking forward to reading this book. In the novel, Jason Follett is the youngest son in the well heeled and respected Follett family—Dad is a VP at Mo torola—who live just outside of Chicago, “where being a Republican was almost a religious affiliation.” He has just fin ished two years of study at the Vanderbilt Divinity School and has decided not to enter the ministry but to seek a career in pub lic service instead. A friend gets him a job as a director of Head Start for two counties in eastern, rural West Virginia, and so off he drives to Pearsall’s Flats. Jason isn’t just running from his family; he’s running from himself. He recognizes his homosexual urges but fears what they could do to his life. It was the ’70s, and despite progress in major hubs like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, LGBT people were very much at risk of discrimination, ostracism, and even violence. Jason hopes that moving to a quiet rural envi ronment, where he can be alone and work on his poetry, will di She provides numerous examples of misogynoir—the in tersection of anti-Black racism and contempt for women—in cluding the stereotyped persona of a welfare mother, “Shirley Q. Liquor,” performed in blackface by a gay, white, male come dian. And she shows that in the current cultural climate, “epi demic levels of dehumanizing violence” continue to be aimed at Black trans women in particular, and even celebrities such as Laverne Cox are not safe. In her discussion of the use of racially fetishizing terms on dating apps for gay men, Story quotes Fatima Jamal, a writer, performance artist, and model, who produced a documentary on these dating apps, No Fats, No Femmes , to “consider how white supremacist, colonial gazes severely impact how we see ourselves and also how we see and understand others.” This slim book provides much evidence that the “Rainbow Nation” is fractured by intersecting forms of institutional ha tred, including Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism. The steady assimilation of Pride Week into a neoliberal culture of extreme economic inequality, in which racist and queer-phobic police violence persists, is sobering. This book is a wakeup call that needs to be widely read. _______________________________________________________ Jean Roberta, a frequent G&LR contributor, is a widely published writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Those Sexy, Scary ’70s

J EAN R OBERTA Divided Loyalties THE RAINBOW AIN’T NEVER BEEN ENUF On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity by Kaila Adia Story Beacon Press. 224 pages, $28.95

I N The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf , Kaila Adia Story makes a compelling case for recognizing the continuing racism, classism, transphobia, and sexism in today’s queer communities, a legacy of the limited “gay rights” movement that gathered strength after the Stonewall Riots of June 1969. She calls out the erasure of the drag queens and trans women, including people of color, who fought the New York City Police during the three nights of conflict and who showed up at meet ings and demonstrations soon afterward. A perception that “gay rights” tend to exclude the rights of people who are not white, not male, and not visibly binary seemed depressingly wide spread and intractable even before the conservative revival that accompanied the first Trump presidency. In her introduction, Story, an associate professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, uses her own life experi ence as a lens through which to analyze the actual lack of sol idarity within the “Rainbow Nation.” She cites the example of Chadwick Moore, a white, conservative gay journalist, who opposed making Juneteenth a federal holiday because it fell during Pride Month. In 2020, Moore tweeted: “I’m sorry blacks, but you already have a month. Juneteenth isn’t a thing. Don’t colonize our month as well. Thanks! Signed, the gays.” This is just one of Story’s descriptions of racist condescen sion, and worse, perpetrated by people who claim to be op pressed themselves. As an educator, Story explains that an exclusively white, cis-male-centered version of “gay” history distorts reality. She teaches a course in LGBTQ + studies that is intended to inform students who are too young to remember the Stonewall Riots that LGBTQ communities outside the white, middle-class main stream already existed at the time. The culture of the Black and Latinx ballroom community is introduced as a source of slang expressions used by some of her students, who apparently be lieve that RuPaul invented them. The author describes her own introduction to the queer Southern ballroom scene in 2009, and she traces this culture back to Harlem in the 1860s. The “pansy craze” of the 1920s produced drag balls that attracted thousands of participants. Then, in the 1930s, a legal crackdown on cross-dressing forced the balls, and the community that organized them, out of the cultural mainstream until the late 1960s. A New York City ordinance against cross-dressing that was enacted decades earlier was the excuse for the police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969. As Story explains it, the LGBT liber ation movement that followed the riots was made possible by years of multiracial queer and trans organizing, largely in coastal urban spaces.

July–August 2025

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