GLR May-June 2025

D ALE B OYER University of New Mexico Press. 234 pages, $19.95 I SSUED AS PART of the Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series, Nopalito, Texas is the kind of book that rarely garners much attention, but should. Its linked stories create a fictional world more bustling than that of most novels, and its characters, both gay and straight, are more authentic and more sympathetic. While not a work of “gay fiction” as such, the book is populated by several gay characters who play key roles in the town’s makeup. The stories begin with Evelyn Smith in the mid-1950s and end with the same character over forty years later. Through her eyes, and those of other family members and friends connected to her, we experience the hidden life of the town. Writes Meischen: “Nopalito is a fictional town, but I can tell you where it is on a map.” He then proceeds to pinpoint it pre cisely in an area of Southeast Texas. It’s the kind of town where people ardently wish for and desire change, and sometimes—in rare moments—experience it. Mostly, however, those times are like “a comma shifting in the middle of a closed book. The briefest flutter, almost imperceptible, then nothing.” Though this may sound bleak, the stories are full of lovely, beautifully rendered moments, such as a teenager named Jimmy Don, standing unobserved in the shadows outside his house, watch ing his little brother Michael try on his mother’s yellow dress. Significantly, perhaps because of his own recent harrowing ex perience with a girlfriend’s abortion, he remains quiet about it. The dialogue in the stories is admirably terse, and as unfor giving as the terrain. Thus it is somewhat remarkable, for such rightly critical of the failure of most scholars of international relations to grasp the significance of gender and sexuality. But they, in turn, have ignored the wealth of literature that has grown out of the AIDS epidemic, perhaps because they see it as con fined to discussions of public health. This book is aimed primarily at scholars of international re lations. Those unaccustomed to academic language might find reading it demanding. But it is worth pursuing, because there’s a wealth of important material that’s even more relevant in the Trump era, what with its attacks on overseas development as sistance. Certainly non-academics can benefit from the explo ration of the way in which shoddy research is used to bolster extreme positions of hostility towards LGBT people. I finished reading The Global Fight with major reservations, but within its limits it is an important resource, and it’s more relevant today than ever. As authoritarianism and intolerance seem to be on the rise globally, its insights may be of value to LGBT activists everywhere. _______________________________________________________ Dennis Altman is a professorial fellow at La Trobe Univ. in Australia. Just Try to Get Out NOPALITO, TEXAS: Stories by David Meischen

D ENNIS A LTMAN The Conspiracy

THE GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST LGBTI RIGHTS How Transna ti onal Conserva ti ve Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minori ti es by Phillip M. Ayoub and Kris ti naStoeckl NYU Press. 376 pages, $35. HE GLOBAL FIGHT Against LGBTI Rights is based on ten years of intensive research, including firsthand contacts with groups working both for and against strengthening LGBT rights. The discussion of how Russia has increasingly used hostility to sexual and gender diversity to mobilize support—as it has played out in their war against Ukraine—is particularly compelling. Phillip Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl demonstrate that while there has been a remarkable growth of networks and polit ical support around issues of sexual orientation and gender iden tity, this has been matched by organizing and networking efforts by those who oppose LGBT rights. This development is summed up by the authors’ elegant metaphor of the double helix, in which both queer and homo/ transphobic organizations operate in competition, building links across countries that defy the traditional alliances of conven tional international relations. While Vladimir Putin can quote British author J. K. Rowling in attacking trans rights, Tucker Carlson can praise Russia’s defense of “family values.” Having cowritten (with Jonathan Symons) a book on global polarization around our rights in QueerWars (2016), I appreci ate how the authors have refined their analysis. The Global Fight contains a great many valuable firsthand observations of competing political and religious groups, and of the power of conservatives in both the U.S. and Europe to incite hostility to wards our communities. However, the book is unfortunately mistitled, as it is in no sense “global” in scope. Every now and then there is a passing reference to somewhere outside the North American and Euro pean axis—a nod to persecution in Uganda, a mention of de criminalization in Singapore—but this book gives the reader scant sense of how these debates have played out in the non Western world. It only briefly acknowledges the leadership role played by countries and organizations in the Global South—for example, Brazil and South Africa—while also ignoring the ways in which the very contests they point to are played out today in countries outside the Atlantic world, such as Indonesia and Nigeria. A further gap in this book’s coverage is the almost total si lence about HIV / AIDS , which is acknowledged as fueling queer organizing in Eastern Europe, but not elsewhere. And yet, in many parts of the world, the AIDS epidemic served as the cat alyst for a great deal of organizing and unprecedented research and discussion of homosexuality, along with sex work and in travenous drug use. Ayoub and Stoeckl are part of a growing number of social scientists who are taking debates about sexu ality and gender into mainstream academic discourse. They are T

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