GLR September-October 2025

BOOK BRIEFS he highlights numerous recipe inventors, restaurateurs, cookbook writers, and food critics, both LGBT people and close allies. Answers to the question posed by the title are wide-ranging and scattered throughout the book, which is arranged chronologically from the late 1800s to the late 1980s. Bird sall has worked hard to be inclusive of

dence with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell makes a compelling case for understanding their relationship as a form of queer love that defies conventional categories of sexu ality and intimacy—one that radically shaped Carson’s ecological vision. Maxwell contends that Carson and Free man’s shared wonder at the natural world— the call of birds, the turning of seasons, and the quiet communion with the landscape—is a form of multispecies intimacy. These mo ments become philosophical and political forces when understood as “world-disclos ing love”: a mode of connection that reveals new, life-affirming ways of being with each other and the Earth. Maxwell situates Car son and Freeman within a larger queer femi nist lineage, one sharing thematic echoes with Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, whose 1930 collaboration The One Who Is Legion envisioned a genderless, resistant mode of subjectivity and love. Seen through this lens, Carson’s emo tional life and environmental activism aren’t separate spheres but deeply inter twined practices of care, resistance, and imagination. Maxwell repositions Silent Spring as an ecological alarm and a love letter to the world, like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , that calls for an environ mental politics rooted in pleasure and reci procity rather than fear and domination. Love becomes a political act: not private or apolitical, but a force with the potential to reshape our relationships with each other, with nature, and with the planet. This book is a vital contribution to queer intellectual history, critical thinking, and ecological awareness. It deserves a cher ished place not only on queer bookshelves alongside Sappho’s poetry but also in the ongoing conversation about how we live— and love—on an endangered planet. C ASSANDRA L ANGER

PATRICIA NELL WARREN A Front Runner’s Life and Works by Nikolai Endres

Peter Lang Publishing. 270 pages, $94.95 Straddling a line between popular biogra phy and doctoral dissertation, Nikolai En dres’ study of Patricia Nell Warren, author of one of the most popular gay novels of all time, The Front Runner , purports to be the first work to cover her entire life and work. When The Front Runner appeared in 1974, it was in many ways, as its title implies, the first of its kind: a popular novel that pre sented a gay relationship as “normal” and even healthy. And it was the first gay novel to become a New York Times bestseller. For an LGBT community just beginning to emerge from its collective closet, the book was nothing short of a revelation, with many millions of fans over the years declar ing that the book had saved their lives. Aca demia has been less kind, often categorizing Warren as a popular or “romance” novelist. Indeed, in 1999 when the Publishing Trian gle published its list of the 100 best gay and lesbian novels of all time, selected by a panel of esteemed judges, The Front Runner didn’t even make the list. Given its legions of fans, it would be a mistake to minimize The Front Runner ’s merits and influence, and Endres makes the point that Warren’s prose can be attacked on various grounds; her gift was her ability to bring a taboo topic to a wider audience. In other works, such as The Fancy Dancer and Front Runner sequels, she examined themes such as surrogacy, gay parenting, religious dogma, and Native American is sues. An activist to the end of her life, this woman from Deer Lodge, Montana, whose big break was getting a job at Reader’s Di gest , became a voice for LGBT equality and an outspoken defender of civil liberties and of a secular vision of human society. D ALE B OYER WHAT IS QUEER FOOD? How We Served a Revolu ti on by John Birdsall W. W. Norton. 304 pages, $29.99 John Birdsall, author of The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard (2020), knows his way around the history of the LGBT food world. In What Is Queer Food?

many ethnicities and gender identities. One of the lesser-known and most interesting figures is Esther Eng, originally from San Francisco, where she was devoted to Chi nese opera. Apparently a butch lesbian, and always a dapper dresser, she moved to New York, where she opened a restaurant in part to assist a Chinese opera company whose members feared returning home after Mao Zedong came to power. She developed a small chain of restaurants, all managed by ex-girlfriends. Birdsall provides insider information about The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954) and The Gay Cookbook (1965) by Lou Rand Hogan, once a cook on luxury ocean liners. One of the most comprehensive LGBT cook books, Out of Our Kitchen Closets ,waspro duced in 1987 by members of San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. As the cookbook states: “The men made the latkes and the women didn’t.” Birdsall mentions that even mundane recipes become “queer versions” due to cookbook compilers’ intentions. His idiosyncratic writing style may not appeal to all; he often addresses readers in a hectoring second-person voice. Birdsall is on a first name or nickname basis with all the book’s subjects, from Jimmy (Baldwin) to Alice (Toklas), and that can be off-putting, as can the constant use of the word “queer.” None of that diminishes the well-researched content, but it may lessen the pleasure of reading M ARTHA E. S TONE RACHEL CARSON AND THE POWER OF QUEERLOVE by Lida Maxwell Stanford University Press. 176 pages, $25. In Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love , Lida Maxwell—a professor of politi cal science and gender studies at Boston University—presents a profound and bold reimagining of Carson’s legacy. By pairing Carson’s pathbreaking environmental work Silent Spring with her lifelong correspon

TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen by Bonnie Yochelson

Empire State Edi ti ons. 288 pages, $39.95 Bonnie Yochelson, former curator of photo graphs and prints at the Museum of the City of New York, has written an informative and incisive biography of pioneering pho

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