GLR May-June 2025

a hardscrabble town, that it’s a place you come to love as the book moves along. Indeed, the book reads a little like a cross be tween any of the short story collections in Alice Munro’s œuvre and Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show . As with Munro’s stories, secrets are everywhere. As one character (Albert) re flects: “Live very long in a small town and sooner or later you surprised most folks with their pants down around their ankles.” One character who literally gets caught in the act with an other boy is Grady, someone whose fate haunts the lives of many of the characters, especially as he later disappears with very little trace. Emerging as a young gay man in the mid 1960s, Grady is trying naïvely to forge his own path; sadly, it is not a happy one. This attempt is in direct contrast to the town’s one unequivocally “out” character, Albert, a man who lives with his mother above the town’s liquor store. Older and visibly ef feminate, Albert frequently reminisces about an affair he had much earlier in life with a French man, for whom he still pines. That the town grudgingly accepts Albert says a lot for his pluck. Indeed, the end of one story finds him literally facing down an angry bull in a field as he metaphorically deals with the town’s disdain for him. Other characters appear and reappear, and come full circle as well. In a story called “This Business of Not Forgetting,” the hard-hearted mother of the missing gay boy, Grady, says at

one point years after her son’s disappearance (for which her husband bears some indirect responsibility): “I have learned something. ... You can love somebody and not be able to for give him for a hurt you can’t get over. That shouldn’t be possi ble, but it is.” As it probably goes without saying, Nopalito is a town that proves very difficult for anyone to find their way out of. As one character, Candace, says: “One minute I had my escape planned, the next minute I was pregnant.” She is stranded in a town she doesn’t like with a husband she doesn’t love and a child she hadn’t wanted. Later in life, facing the harsh reality of a mas tectomy, she reflects wistfully that her breasts had “always been my ticket out”—and now she will be losing them. Still, Meis chen doesn’t render her situation entirely bleak. Listless and di rectionless after the surgery, “Candace could feel a buoyancy in [her husband] she didn’t share. Hope, she would have called what lifted him. She didn’t have the strength, but she was grate ful for the foothold he offered.” What Meischen offers in Nopalito, Texas is his own foothold on a path to hope and understanding. It is an impressive ac complishment, achieved through the creation of several indeli ble characters. _______________________________________________________ Dale Boyer is the author of Thornton Stories , among other works.

B R I E F S earth, and her skin/ responds, like a woman/ to her lover.”

classes in fine arts at NYU. Life-altering en counters with more than half a dozen men eventually lead him to discover his true self. Classmate Elena Dolores Pesko is aware of his situation. After a brief physical con nection they remain best friends and share secrets. He knows she’s involved with a married man, and she knows that he has been groomed by their thirty-year-old bi sexual Spanish teacher, Ollie Stork, who in sisted he didn’t want Andy to “have a bad first experience with a stranger.” When Ollie leaves for a vacation in Spain, Elena supports Andy’s forays into the city but cau tions him against inherent dangers. Her warning proves all too prescient. During Andy’s first excursion in a Western shirt and Frye boots, he stumbles into Tug’s. After five Budweisers, a one-night pickup with a “lanky body and a Jesus beard” leaves him raped and bruised. The after math of the assault becomes the emotional template for the remainder of the novel. Raasch suffuses the novel with com bustible sex scenes. As summer winds down, Andy begins to separate heartbreak ing differences between fleeting attraction and the possibility of love. The Summer Be tween ends on a high note at a disco with the promise of a new relationship. Readers might hope for a sequel that navigates Andy’s undergraduate life. R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK

GOOD PICTURES ARE A STRONG WEAPON Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty by Louise Siddons Univ. of Minnesota Press. 320 pages, $34.95 Louise Siddons’ new book on Laura Gilpin, the pioneering photographer who spent decades capturing the lives of the Navajo people in New Mexico, focuses on how les bians and Native Americans found common ground in their shared struggles. GoodPic tures Are a Strong Weapon is an art histori cal monograph that applies intersectional methodology and ally politics to lesbian and Indigenous experiences. Siddons refutes the normative and reductive lenses through which Gilpin’s photography has been interpreted. The introduction and first chapters estab lish the value of queer theory in looking at Gilpin’s legacy. Siddons takes pains to stress the crucial role that Gilpin’s friends and ac quaintances played in documenting and pre serving Navajo culture and sovereignty. She focuses on “commonality” in exploring how gays’ and Native Americans’ experiences evolved during the 1930s and ’40s. She ar gues their shared awareness of sexism and gender fluidity as marginalized groups led to them to develop strategies for empowering both. I think Native American poet Joy Harjo captured the spirit of Gilpin’s art: “She feels the sky/ tethered to the changing/

Siddons study of Gilpin’s impressive ac complishments expose the ongoing sexism, homophobia, and racism that leads to so many outstanding female artists being so lit tle known as compared with their male peers, such as Ansel Adams, with whom Gilpin was good friends. In examining Gilpin’s life and art from the vantage point of a professor of visual politics and queer theory, Siddons brings fresh insights into the complexities of the Navajo Nation’s attitudes and traditions on gender diversity. Her last chapter and notes provide extensive research and evidence of Native American queer pride as the most visible manifestation of gender diversity in the Navajo Nation. C ASSANDRA L ANGER THE SUMMER BETWEEN: A Novel by Robert Raasch Greenleaf. 328 pages, $28. Is vulnerable eighteen-year old Andrew Jackson Pollock of Maple Ridge, New Jer sey, bi or gay? That’s what he wants to know as he comes out and comes of age in Robert Raasch’s stunning debut, The Sum mer Between . A recent high school graduate, he moves from innocence to experience as he explores his sexual identity, lusting, forming crushes, and cruising in gay bars in Greenwich Village in 1978 before starting

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