GLR September-October 2024

B R I E F S terrorized: “If horror has taught me any thing, it is that nothing has been as endur ingly terrifying across time and place as women’s bodies” (as witness TheWitch , Carrie , Ringu , and The Exorcist ). The col lection is awash in clever gems (some could use a little more context), such as De

HOLLYWOOD PRIDE ACelebra ti on of LGBTQ+ Representa ti on and Perseverance in Film by Alonso Duralde Running Press. 336 pages, $40. Brimming with infectious enthusiasm, Alonso Duralde’s Hollywood Pride is an ambitious overview of LGBT representation on the big screen, full of brief but fact-filled entries on the most important movies and the people who created them. The book’s title is a bit of a misnomer, as it includes many films that were decidedly un- Holly wood, either because they were made out side the Hollywood studio system (such as John Waters’ films) or because they were not American movies at all (such as Mäd chen in Uniform , made in Germany in 1930). Serving as both a strong introduction to the newcomer or as a solid reference for the queer film buff, a survey this far-reaching and satisfying hasn’t been created since Ray Murray’s excellent Images in the Dark (which is now almost thirty years old). If there’s one minor quibble, it’s that Duralde occasionally favors celebration of the stars over acknowledgement of the turbulence surrounding some of the figures he covers. For example, Lily Tomlin is justly praised for her remarkable talents and contribu tions, but there’s no mention of the long standing criticism that it took her way too long to come out publicly as LGBT. But this is a minor matter. Hollywood Pride makes for lively and illuminating reading, a welcome addition to any film buff’s library, queer or otherwise. M ATTHEW H AYS DINNER ON MONSTER ISLAND: Essays by Tania De Rozario Harper Perennial. 192 pages. $17. Within the first few pages of Dinner on Monster Island , a collection of essays on monsters and heroes within and without, Tania De Rozario mentions that it took her years to figure out that she probably loved the horror film genre so much because she lived it. By young adulthood, she had en dured her mother’s betrayal, an exorcism (neighbors spent seven hours attempting to pray away the gay), her estranged father’s suicide, and state-sanctioned homophobia and fat phobia. De Rozario, an author and visual artist who grew up in Singapore, takes this trauma and alchemizes it into a Roxane Gay-esque book of essays. While heartbreaking, the work is also en tertaining, especially as De Rozario unpacks several horror films in which women are

South, and goes on to discuss the “street queens” and masculine hustlers in John Rechy’s groundbreaking 1963 novel City of Night. She concludes with the murder of a sex worker in the Philippines in 2018 by an eighteen-year-old white American service man, who used trans panic as a defense in the ensuing trial. Gill-Peterson connects this case to patriarchal military control and violence against people of color who are perceived as gender-deviant. The author wraps up her argument with a passionate defense of trans femmes. J EAN R OBERTA ON BETTE MIDLER An Opinionated Guide by Kevin Winkler Oxford Univ. Press. 224 pages, $29.99 It’s immediately obvious that former archivist Kevin Winkler adores Bette Mi dler. His “opinionated guide” is un abashedly that—a measured retrospective of how the Hawaiian-born bookish teenager became a legend. He tracks her career from inauspicious beginnings as a film extra through her incandescent rise to superstar dom and beyond. The Divine Miss M burst onto the scene as a solo act at the Continen tal Baths in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel in Manhattan. Gay men in towels ap plauded her persona as a brash, brassy, and bawdy broad. Her bigger-than-life persona expanded upon the gay camp sensibility by “mocking the deadly serious, reveling in show business references, gleefully slipping in and out of new identities, upending the whole notion of a diva’s relationship with her fans.” A powerhouse rendition of “Friends” became a stirring anthem to the

Rozario’s wry take on family dynamics in The Exorcist : “Like mine, her single mother did not know what else to do with her daughter’s deviant behavior.” Other essays cover Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees,” inhumane treatment of mi grant workers, psychological hauntings, Singapore’s draconian laws, Westworld (some of which was shot in Singapore), and finding ways to be hopeful. She writes evocatively of life as a young queer person longing for a “mirror-morsel” of herself. The author was surprised to find it on the radio upon hearing Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” and again in k. d. lang’s “Constant Craving.” In Dinner on Monster Island , De Rozario gives readers plenty to sink their teeth into, de claring: “Fuck leaving bread crumbs. I want to leave a feast.” C HAYA S CHECHNER A SHORT HISTORY OF TRANS MISOGYNY by Jules Gill Peterson Verso / New Le ft Books. 192 pages, $24.95 The term “trans misogyny” was popularized by Julia Serano in her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007). In A Short History of Trans Misogyny , Gill-Peter son (who teaches history at Johns Hopkins) focuses on official conceptions of trans fem ininity as expressions of white-supremacist,

colonial cultural intervention. For example, the author of the new book focuses on “trans panic” as a defense used by those accused of anti-trans violence in the U.K., a defense that goes back to the British criminalization of the “hi jras” of northern India in 1852. Hi jras were born male and trained to perform as singers and dancers, and they dressed as women throughout their lives. Their role was interpreted by the British Raj as “prostitution” and “vice,” which had the self-fulfilling effect of sep arating them from their traditional work as singers and dancers and forcing them into sex work. The author describes the paral lel treatment of African-American cross-dressers in the antebellum

Bette Midler in her “Hell in a Handbag” show, Continental Baths.

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