GLR March-April 2026

changes posed to marriage and the family. Although they cham pioned heterosexual monogamy, liberal Quakers never con demned people just because they were homosexual. Blackmore uses the tragic story of Bayard Rustin and a novel by Christo pher Isherwood to convey the paranoia of this period. Before he became identified with the Civil Rights movement, Rustin was a nationally recognized Quaker pacifist and commu nity organizer. He was also openly gay. In 1953, he was arrested for performing public sex with two men. The Quakers immedi ately distanced themselves from Rustin and removed his name from their most famous statement on nonviolence. Years later, Rustin would be similarly betrayed by the Civil Rights move ment when he was not allowed to take part in the 1963 March on Washington, which he was instrumental in organizing. Blackmore’s use of Isherwood’s The World in the Evening as evidence of his thesis is less convincing, because he misses the novel’s complexity. Published in 1954 but set in the years before World War II, the novel is best known for its depiction of a happy union between two gay men, one of whom is a Quaker, and for a brief discussion of the role of camp in gay culture.

Stephen, the narrator and central character, is neither gay nor a Quaker, but he was raised by one and spends time in a Quaker community in Philadelphia. Stephen is dismissive of the Quak ers’ lack of style and their smugness about proper sexual be havior. Blackmore misreads a passage from the novel to indicate that Stephen fears censure from the Quakers for past sexual en counters with men. Actually, Stephen calls Quakers hypocrites because they would condemn his many liaisons with women while secretly envying them. No character in the novel explic itly condemns homosexuals. By the end of the 1950s, Quaker attitudes toward homosex uals had advanced. In 1963, after five years of work, a group of British Quakers published a pamphlet that Blackmore calls the earliest “public evaluation of gay sexuality from a Christian group in the twentieth century.” They were responding both to the 1957 Wolfenden Report that recommended the decriminal ization of homosexual acts and to an alarming number of sui cides by closeted gay students at Cambridge University. “Toward a Quaker View of Sex” stated boldly that laws, moral codes, and theological doctrines that condemned homosexual

B R I E F S BEFORE GENDER Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850 1950 by Eli Erlick Beacon Press. 272 pages, $28.

She attempts to balance these mini-biogra phies as much as possible, and she writes with respect for her subjects’ identities, omitting deadnames and using their pre ferred pronouns whenever they are known. J EREMY C. F OX MARYVILLE by Joelle Taylor Clemson Univ. Press. 128 pages, $24.95 Joelle Taylor is among those rare writers who are very good at a lot of things. She started as a prizewinning performance poet (many examples can be found on YouTube), then moved on to readers who prefer books over live shows. Here too she reached heights of acclaim, winning the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize, remarkable not just for a performance poet, but because author pho tos revealed her to be one of the butch les bians who populate the verse of C+nto and Othered Poems , that prizewinning volume. Maryville , brings back some of those les bians and shows their lives and deaths over five decades in the context of the epony mous lesbian bar. Taylor describes the book as “a poetry collection in the shape of a tel evision series, using the language of film to steer a way into each poem, to focus, and pull out into the wide-angle narrative.” Not only does each mise-en-scène poem have lighting instructions; it also carries a sound track—gay anthems from the specific times written about. Taylor suggests: “Play them as you read. Step into the scene.” I love the mixed-genre form of this story; it offers a complete context for the engaging tale of these five butch lives and the dyke

THE CBGB CONSPIRACY: A Novel by Gabriel Rotello Koehler Books. 344 pages, $20.95

It’s always intriguing to see how writers fa mous for their nonfiction fare when they make the plunge into fiction. Gabriel Rotello, a former columnist for The Advocate andau thor of Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Des tiny of Gay Men , doesn’t disappoint with The CBGB Conspiracy , in which he mines his exhaustive knowledge of Manhattan’s under ground ’70s scene. The novel fuses fictional characters who are trying to solve a murder mystery with such real-life luminaries as William S. Burroughs, Holly Woodlawn, Bella Abzug, and Allen Ginsberg, all moving in and around the legendary music club. In summer 1977 a young poet is found dead of a heroin overdose, and the police dismiss it as an accident. But his friends sus pect foul play and decide to investigate. Rotello keeps the plot twists—and celebrity cameos—rolling as New York City itself emerges as a character. The book is awash with uneasy nostalgia; Rotello is frank about the multiple crises New York was mired in at the time (almost bankrupt, crime-ridden), while he simultaneously longs for the punk infused creativity and authenticity that the city once hosted. The suspense kept me keenly tuned in, and there’s a cinematic quality to Rotello’s writing, so much so that I started speculating on which actors might play various roles. Anyone with an interest in one of New York’s most exhilarating decades will get a buzz from The CBGB Conspiracy . M ATTHEW H AYS

While anti-trans bigots frequently argue that transgender identity is a 21st-century phe nomenon, scholar and activist Eli Erlick has set out to show that gender-nonconforming people have been among us throughout his tory, even prior to the word “gender” com ing into common use in the 1950s. Before Gender contains more than two dozen case studies on 19th- and early 20th-century trans people split into four sections: “The Kids,” “The Activists,” “The Workers,” and “The Athletes.” Erlick includes the tale of Mark and David Ferrow, English brothers who were celebrated in the late 1930s for “becoming among the first men in England to medically transition”; the story of Sally-Tom, a for merly enslaved Black trans woman who was one of the first in the U.S. to have their gen der identity legally recognized; and the saga of Elsie Marks, a six-foot-three Indian im migrant who worked as a “bearded lady” in a circus and later as a snake charmer, lead ing to a fatal bite. Many figures in the book lived difficult lives on the margins of soci ety, but others found acceptance in times and places where one wouldn’t expect it. Erlick has dug deep into the archives to locate stories that are untold or forgotten, but she acknowledges that the telling is often possible only when trans people made headlines or appeared in court records, and that such documentation is biased in favor of white trans women and sensational tales.

TheG & LR

38