DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, I'm picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love

DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 23, 2026

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe—Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival.

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry—a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus—dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world—involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

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My Review: The Swerve was a life-defining read for me in 2012. In it, Author Greenblatt took a horrendously complicated, unpleasantly difficult classical Latin poem about atomism and made it into a living document that gave form to a way of thinking that defines modernity in the 21st century.

If anyone can make a sea of "maybe"s and "perhaps"es into a life story, it is him. And he does.

Kit Marlowe is of enduring interest to many of us for lots of 21st-century reasons, including his apparent sexual interest in other men, his apparent involvement in anti-catholic espionage, and his very obvious murder in what we think was a tavern brawl before he turned thirty; but there's enough uncertainty about all of it that one can't pin him down. His plays survive him; Tamburlaine the Great and The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus shocked then, shock now four hundred years later, and likely delight in their transgressiveness to the same degree though for very different reasons in both ages. Marlowe knew how to use the prejudices of the world he wrote to entertain to deliver pointed messages well beyond the obvious scope of his story.

A provocateur's work is never done. He can still raise a rage-filled shout.

I think that would delight Kit Marlowe. I know he's not as revered as Shakespeare, his contemporary; but that's down to chance, the unpredictable lightning of luck (and probably Shakespeare's longer life thus larger surviving body of work). It could also be that Marlowe's authorship of The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer, making the homoerotic subtext of male loving friendship that was so celebrated in Elizabethan times into blaring text, had a little something to do with it. Homophobia is an evergreen form of hate, powerfully corrosive to even the most wonder-inspiring talents' gifts. If the ewww-ick response is your default response to gay sex, why are you thinking about it?

Imponderables like this float through my mind as I read this fantabulous work of stitchery that sews a bit here, a scrap there, none of them large, into a very interesting if unclear portrait of a man whose unapologetic purpose was to confront and discomfit the world he so obviously saw in perfect clarity, then whipped out his microscope to look more closely at its flaws.

Dark Renaissance is well titled...the renaissance of a dark figure, the Renaissance's dark side considered then and now, the renaissance of darkness in Marlowe's lifetime and his life and times...layers, layers like an onion, gleaming, and making one tear up as the essential oils of a man's very skin hit your eyes.

MORRIS KIGHT, Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay rights and Gay Wrongs, important story about unjustly neglected pioneer

Book cover photo credit: Henning von Berg
MORRIS KIGHT, Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay rights and Gay Wrongs
MARY ANN CHERRY
Process (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Morris Kight fought for gay rights the only way he knew how—outrageously

New York and San Francisco gay liberation activists’ work is well documented but allow us to introduce Los Angeles' preeminent gay rights pioneer—say hello to Morris Kight. His activist work began in the 1930s as a teenager. As the only male living in his mother’s Texas brothel, he secretly helped women working there get vital healthcare.

During the 1950s, he was part of an underground network of gay ‘safe houses’ that provided bail, health care, and legal advice at a time when the United States had laws criminalizing same-sex relationships. He turned his unique charisma and organizing skills to the 1960s anti-war movement and then working the rest of his life in the now public fight for “Gay Liberation.” He fostered vital relationships with fellow activists, politicians, socialites, and gangsters. His style of organizing and activism showed the power of the “influencer” decades before social media brought millions together with a meme.

He founded groups that lead seminal protests that resulted in: The American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality as a disease from its diagnostic manual, protecting civil rights for gay citizens in California, and reducing police violence against the gay community. And for every good thing Kight did, he took credit for more. He was a man who, with his many flaws, managed to alienate as many people as he brought together. His story brings to life his work as remembered by those who loved and loathed him.

Morris Kight, an exciting rebel among rebels, came to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s and immediately addressed the needs of a marginalized fraction of society: gay men. He wrote his phone number on walls in jails and bars to offer help with an underground bail fund, private counseling, and backroom treatment for STDs. This was the beginning of a community where there was none. Influential in the anti-war movement in the 60s, Kight then parlayed his energies into the post-Stonewall bi-coastal gay revolution. Through coalition building, he created a seat at the table of social reform for homosexuals.

This biography tells Kight’s personal tale entwined with a narrative of activism and the gay rights movement. Though Kight is included in many anthologies, historical narratives, and feature-length documentaries, this book is the first in-depth analysis of the man, the activist.

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My Review: Know any freshly-out babyqueers looking around for evidence of their elders? I can't think of a better character for them to learn about than abrasive, annoying, essentially contrarian and always cranky Morris Kight.

He comes across vividly in Author Cherry's personally grounded recreations of Morris' life of outsiderdom...mother ran a brothel in Bible-Belt Texas!

He came by his larger-than-life persona honestly. And Author Cherry writes it direct, pulls no punches, hides no warts. There were so many wonderful things he did, he started, he forced into being by his will alone. (Or so he'd've told you.)

All of this work, all of his contributions, and is he lauded and celebrated today? Under the current kakistocracy, of course not. But I am here to tell you, my cishet siblings, this man's life is one you should trumpet to the young, directionless, disheartened and downhearted, because there's no better cure for paralysis than action. Kight's story is a klaxon, a billboard with a searchlight on it, an unmistakable shout from the past: "Get up and do the work!"

I recommend it. I wish it'd had inline citations, but really the endnotes are very, very extensive; just not quite as useful for source checks as I would like. There are many illustrative snapshots and photo ops, but I left most of them out...much of a muchness after a while, more there to set the scene and build the mood of the times.

A quality addition to the fast-fading memory of my own elders, whose work and sacrifices have let me lead a better out-life than they could.

THE SIX LOVES OF JAMES I, frankly opposing historical homophobia...and queer-identity appropriation

THE SIX LOVES OF JAMES I
GARETH RUSSELL
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking and insightful exploration of King James I, enigmatic successor to Queen Elizabeth I, from the “meticulous researcher” (The Wall Street Journal) and author of the “enjoyable and readable” (Philippa Gregory, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Palace.

From the assassination of his father to the explosive political and personal intrigues of his reign, this fresh biography reveals as never before the passions that drove King James I.

Gareth Russell’s “rollicking, gossipy” (Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets), and scholarly voice invites us into James’s world, revealing a monarch whose reign was defined by both his public power and personal vulnerabilities. For too long, historians have shied away from or condemned the exploration of his sexuality. Now, Russell offers a candid narrative that not only reveals James’s relationships with five prominent men but also challenges the historical standards applied to the examination of royal intimacies.

This biography stands as a significant contribution to the understanding of royal history, illuminating the personal experiences that shaped James’s political decisions and his philosophical views on masculinity and sexuality.

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My Review: I'm in two minds about this read. I like the writing; I'm open, if not warmly welcoming, to the subject being included among our queer ancestors; but he was still medieval about religious stuff, and was inimical to "witches" among his subjects. (There were not, and are not, witches in the sense these people used the term. Pace, modern wiccans.) It really, really bothers me that Edward Gorey is co-opted to be One of Us, when he explicitly said he was not. (Go read my review.) So James VI and I? I'm not mad at or about the folks who want to say he was gay.

It's evident to me, after reading this book, that his greatest love was George Villiers. It appears to have been reciprocated, as much as we can know these things about people 400 years dead (as of this year). The extant evidence supports the conclusion that this complicated, traumatized, deeply and passionately emotional man was lucky enough to find some people...his wife Anna of Denmark, the aforementioned George...in his lifetime who met him where he was, who offered him the precious gift of companionship. Inasmuch as a royal can experience such a commoner's thing, more especially then when royal power was less trammeled than today.

Author Russell is scrupulous in making you au fait with his sources. He specifically says, on the occasions he makes a logical leap, that this is what he's doing. Where people in the past used the lens of homophobia to "tar" a man's reputation (viz, Frank Barlow's William II) with the stench of sodomy, much more often than not the "charge" was made absent solid evidence, and for some sort of political or ideological reason. As my best example, in this book Esmé Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox, frequently accounted as James's first love(r), is shown to have been at most a crush, with no evidence pointing to a more intense relationship.

So I'm happy to accept Author Russell's well-founded and -informed conclusions about the rest of the King's emotional life. As the life of a king, as the lives of us all, is mostly spent outside the bedchamber and away from our intimate partner, the pretext of the book must needs fall away as events demand attention depart Mary and George territory. (Excellent show, Nicholas Galitzine {George Villiers} naked is a most enjoyable view to have.)

The reign of the king was bound to be complex. He succeeded the longest-ruling, to that point, monarch of the country; he was the first ruler to have an explicit, publicly acknowledged right to both British thrones; he was in power at the dawn of the modern world with its marvels and mysteries supplanting the certainties of his own world, the one he was raised in. It was a morass of warring interests, as the world has always been; James was not always the best one to make good, for the time and information he could have, decisions.

An unenviable position as monarch of two countries who had been at war for centuries, and whose mother he never met because she was imprisoned and murdered by his predecessor. Fractious nobles, upstart commoners, churchmen jealous of their vanishing prerogatives (this despite or because of his commissioning if the King James Version of the Bible), kidnappings, assassination attempts...this is the "remember, remember, the Fifth of November" king...it's no wonder he was paranoid and prone to act as if people were out to get him. They all too often were. It still left me wishing he would pull his head out of his medieval ass and get with the modern world borning in his care. It's irrational, unfair, and quite pointless, but it shows how very invested Author Russell got me into King James.

In all, a read I enjoyed more than didn't, that I finished in a very good time, and found more reasonable and more honest about its royal subject than the vast majority of the biographies I've read.

Your royal-watcher should get one this Yule. A strong corrective for the ick-factor fall of Andrew Windsor.

BAYARD RUSTIN: A Legacy of Protest and Politics surveys a life lived in resistance, & LOST PROPHET: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, biography of his gayness

BAYARD RUSTIN: A Legacy of Protest and Politics
MICHAEL G. LONG (editor)
NYU Press
$27.95 harcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Celebrates the life and legacy of Bayard Rustin, the civil rights leader behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

While we can all recall images of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin.

This was far from Rustin’s first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King by helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolent resistance. Rustin’s legacy touches many areas of contemporary life—from civil resistance to violent uprisings, democracy to socialism, and criminal justice reform to war resistance.

Despite these achievements, Rustin was often relegated to the background. He was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. With expansive, searching, and sometimes critical essays from a range of esteemed writers—including Rustin’s own partner, Walter Naegle—this volume draws a full picture of Bayard a gay, pacifist, socialist political radical who changed the course of US history and set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from LGBTQ+ Pride to Black Lives Matter.

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My Review: Too long ignored for being queer and open about it, the life of a Quaker resistor of Wrong and Wickedness was a complicated one. I wish this collection of essays had been edited to reduce the repetition of basic information about him, but appreciate that it was done at all.

I imagine the experience of being friends with Bayard Rustin was pretty fraught...his stadards were very high and his judgments usually spot-on, which combination is uncomfortable for himself and others. This reality played itself out in his double invisibility in gay-rights circles: Blackness and religious belief. He felt he wasn't needed or wanted in that world so, until he fell in love with Walter Naegle at 65, he focused on Black liberation and didn't involve himself in gay rights. The sad part to me is that the man was ahead of his time in his politics, his morals, and his social beliefs, and still deeply internalized both homophobia and misogyny.

If you're utterly unfamiliar with Rustin, this collection of essays will fill you in. Read the way any collection should be, piece by piece over time, the cumulative effect is to bring an unjustly underknown man's contributions to the best things that happened in the era of Civil Rights expansion to light. He is, be aware, not critically examined in these essays. Part three of the collection, "What Rustin Means to Me," is probably my favorite to read because the legacy of this upright, intelligent, unsparing actor on the public stage is dealt with by those whom he has inspired. I suppose anyone who stood up for an unpopular belief because it was right to do so can't hope for a better legacy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

LOST PROPHET: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
JOHN D'EMILIO
The Free Press
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Bayard Rustin is one of the most important figures in the history of the American civil rights movement. Before Martin Luther King, before Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America's consciousness. A teacher to King, an international apostle of peace, and the organizer of the famous 1963 March on Washington, he brought Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence to America and helped launch the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has been largely erased by history, in part because he was an African American homosexual. Acclaimed historian John D'Emilio tells the full and remarkable story of Rustin's intertwined lives: his pioneering and public person and his oblique and stigmatized private self.

It was in the tumultuous 1930s that Bayard Rustin came of age, getting his first lessons in politics through the Communist Party and the unrest of the Great Depression. A Quaker and a radical pacifist, he went to prison for refusing to serve in World War II, only to suffer a sexual scandal. His mentor, the great pacifist A. J. Muste, wrote to him, "You were capable of making the 'mistake' of thinking that you could be the leader in a revolution...at the same time that you were a weakling in an extreme degree and engaged in practices for which there was no justification."

Freed from prison after the war, Rustin threw himself into the early campaigns of the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements until an arrest for sodomy nearly destroyed his career. Many close colleagues and friends abandoned him. For years after, Rustin assumed a less public role even though his influence was everywhere. Rustin mentored a young and inexperienced Martin Luther King in the use of nonviolence. He planned strategy for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until Congressman Adam Clayton Powell threatened to spread a rumor that King and Rustin were lovers. Not until Rustin's crowning achievement as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington would he finally emerge from the shadows that homophobia cast over his career. Rustin remained until his death in 1987 committed to the causes of world peace, racial equality, and economic justice.

Based on more than a decade of archival research and interviews with dozens of surviving friends and colleagues of Rustin's, Lost Prophet is a triumph. Rustin emerges as a hero of the black freedom struggle and a singularly important figure in the lost gay history of the mid-twentieth century. John D'Emilio's compelling narrative rescues a forgotten figure and brings alive a time of great hope and great tragedy in the not-so-distant past.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: So, after deciding that I wanted a biography of the complex gay man Bayard Rustin while reading essays about him, I found this hefty tome. I love library lending because I couldn't justify spending full price on a book I expected to admire not like when my $12 investment represents 5% of my total monthly spending power.

I'm going to buy it for myself now because I want to support this historian whose stylish writing and tireless researching of a crucial figure in gay and Black history has enriched my life.


Rustin's Quaker upbringing strongly influenced his social-justice compass and his anti-violence stance. He refused to serve any military or enabling function in World War II, serving instead jail time for following his conscience. He was consistently anti-war and anti-colonialist in his world view, modeling his resistance to them on Mohandas K. Gandhi's successful anti-British actions in India. Rustin, and mentor A. Philip Randolph, founder and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, planned a mass march on Washington in 1941 for the same goals that the 1963 event had (Jobs and Justice) but called it off because President Roosevelt asked them to. The brink of war was used as an excuse to delay urgent public action...as always...but both men were active in making sure the March on Washington took place, at last, in 1963. We remember it mostly for assassinated leader Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s rousing and glorious "I Have A Dream" speech. If, like most, you've only ever seen the highlight reel version, go treat yourself to the entire seventeen and a half minutes at the link. But Randolph, responding to ongoing scurrilous efforts to paint MLK and Rustin as sexual lovers not friends, really shone in his ringing defense of Rustin's involvement as the leader and backstage manager of this titanic event that kickstarted so many changes in US society: "Bayard Rustin IS the March on Washington." He faced down, on behalf of his gay friend and fellow life-long resistor of social and political injustice, the President of the USA, J. Edgar Hoover ofthe FBI...arguably the more powerful of the two men...and Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem's immensely influential Congressman, who coveted Rustin's control and directive roles.

The over five hundred pages of this story aren't a chore to read. The reason is that Author D'Emilio made the effort to make it a story. Many, if not most, biographers are excellent researchers and fans of their subjects; fewer wre storytellers with an eye for the illustrative anecdote. My best example is the moment when, during a public meeting after the Montgomery, Ala., church bombing killed four little girls, Rustin took those loudly calling for a violent response to task by accusing them of proposing to accomplish nothing.

That is some kind of drama, folks, and it perfectly encapsulates a lifetime of Rustin's moral and political learning.
What leads me to talk about this lost prophet, buried in homophobic judgment, in connection with the essays just published about him, is the fact that Rustin had so much internal-to-the-struggle opposition to cope with that his never hidden, never centered homosexuality was never the focus of his resistance to power's abuses. Bear in mind that a known, avowed homosexual Black man was principally responsible for the community activism model and playbooks that succeeded in achieving the end of the legal fig-leaf of Jim Crow laws in the US. Could he have done the same had he set his sights on axhieving the same for queer folk, when the DSM-II of NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT still defined homosexuality as a mental illness, and the Feds led by Hoover had barely stopped the Lavender Scare? During the latter events, do not ignore, Rustin was a victim and STILL LED THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON!

Sorry. The awfulness of his treatment during his life by his fellow Quakers and Christians, and after his death by literally everyone simply forgetting he existed, lead me to the shouting.

The man himself noted that liberals couldn't hate Blacks and Latinos anymore, but they sure could—and did—hate fags. Realist that he was, he spent his life of organizing, resisting, and inspiring in the fields where he could do the most good. Admirably clear-sighted and honestly, to me at least, movingly generous of spirit of him not to insist on perfection but work for better. Events have proven his approach was effective for QUILTBAG folk as much as for ethnic minorities.

I salute author D'Emilio for putting in the hard labor and the gigantic energy to create this readable, enjoyable story of an important and ignored man, his life and his loves and his legacy. A perfect accompaniment to Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics.

BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS, as mordantly amusing as it sounds

BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
MARK DERY
Little, Brown
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.

But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known—in the late 1940s, no less—to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?

He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.

Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SIX TIMES. ULTIMATELY A LIBRARIAN BOUGHT ME A SALE KINDLEBOOK. (True story!)

My Review: There are few things my elder sister and I agree on. One of them is that Edward Gorey's a bloody genius, and about as hilarious as it's possible to be. (We also both love Jo Walton, so it's not as though she's a waste of space. Entirely, anyway.)

That's what Edward Gorey's superpower is, though. He speaks to a certain inner weirdo in some people, a rebellious streak that demands the sheer nonsensical pointlessness of Life be acknowledged and celebrated. Poor Xerxes...a Gashlycrumb Tiny I truly felt for.

Now that Gorey's safely dead, what's the skinny on his narrow gay ass? Welllll...not that fascinating, if I'm honest. He was exactly as you'd expect someone who could think up a child called "Xerxes" would be. Strange, a misfit, completely and utterly himself because he *designed* himself with great care. His artwork was justly celebrated for its technical merit...by three or four people. Weirdness exacts costs from the weirdo. Gorey was famous...if you know who he is. I'm never sad or sorry that I know who he is, unlike many famous people. But Gorey's talent as an artist was never the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Snooty Stuff or the Obscene Wealth Collection.

Unlike most of the art you'll see in those cultural institutions, you've seen a Gorey image. (If you're reading this blog, you have.) The Mystery! series opening sequence? Gorey. The 1950s Anchor Books images? Gorey. Over 100 of his own books, popular culture objects. He was a niche force, but a force nonetheless.

However, Dery's exhaustively researched biography goes into some detail about the skinny on Gorey's sexual nature. I think, like Greta Garbo, he wanted to be left alone. He never, ever once said he was gay. He lived through Stonewall...long after it was entirely okay with most people to come out as gay, he didn't.

Because he wasn't.

He said, in an interview collected in Ascending Peculiarity, "I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something ... I've never said that I was gay and I've never said that I wasn't ... what I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else ... " That, mes amis, is a clear statement of being. He was what we, in 2022, call "asexual." That doesn't prevent him from presenting himself in a striking and deeply queer-coded manner. But if the twenty-first century has taught me anything, it's that people are who and what they say they are. Gorey? Asexual, and presenting himself as a strange misfit. And that is all there is to it.

I wasn't pleased by Author Dery's claiming of him for the gay men of the world solely because we have his own words on the subject and they are not, despite the fact they could easily and safely have been, "I am gay." So. He wasn't. Yes, let's claim him as an ikon of the QUILTBAG spectrum! Yes, let's celebrate his Otherness, his determined design of his Otherness, and the glorious art that came out of it..."There's so little heartless work around," said Gorey. "So I feel I am filling a small but necessary gap."

But let's not posthumously (!) reassign his stripe on the flag for our own need to possess him. Let's celebrate the way he said he was with the gratitude and laughter and little frisson of unnerved nerves that he designed it to evoke in his viewers.

WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF is a beautiful 200th birthday present to the Good Gray Poet.

WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF: In the Nineteenth Century, in America
JEAN HUETS
Circling Rivers
$34.99 trade paper, available now

THIS IS A LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS BOOK REVIEW

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF immerses the reader in the life and times of the poet called “America’s bard,” with over 300 period images and text including extensive quotes by Walt Whitman and his family and friends (and a few enemies). Explore the fascinating roots of Whitman's great work Leaves of Grass: a family harrowed by alcoholism and mental illness; the bloody Civil War; burgeoning, brawling Manhattan and Brooklyn; literary allies and rivals; and his beloved America, racked by disunion even while racing westward. The coming year 2019 will mark the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth; this book anticipates the celebration with a perspective of Walt Whitman “in the nineteenth century, in America,” as he himself put it.

My Review: What an extraordinarily lovely surprise this book was to me. It is physically beautiful: Printed in four colors, with Whitman's own words highlighted for the reader's eye by being printed in a handsome shade of Process Blue; daguerrotypes and other photos printed in rich and period-appropriate shades of umber and sepia achieved by using the four process colors; paintings and archival materials reproduced in very clear and obviously carefully proofed separations. The paper is uncoated, but is a top-quality book paper; this means it isn't vividly bleached to an eye-hurting whiteness, thus making the text a chore to read. Instead, the whole package, in its design and execution, is meant to be an inviting visual and tactile experience. This makes its contents that much more appealing to view.

This is a coffee-table book about a poet, not about poetry. It would look very well on anyone's conversation-starting furniture of whatever description. The purpose of the book is to bring a modern reader, perhaps one not familiar with Whitman or, at most, glancingly acquainted with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" or "To A Stranger" (if a gay man over 40), a sense of Whitman the man and the way he became that man. The 19th century brought huge changes to the USA, as your history class sledgehammered into your adolescent brain. The world Whitman was born into on the 31st of May in 1819—two hundred years ago today—resembled not at all the world in which he wrote his poems or in which he died, in March of 1892, at seventy-two well-lived years of age. Steamships, trains, escalators...a Civil War whose battles we fight to this day...a world that Whitman embraced with wide-open arms and eyes, with reservations he always set aside to be more fully present in his moment. We could all do well to live in imitation of Whitman's way.

If one approaches this volume in the spirit of an interested browser, it will delight and edify; those seeking A Life or, perish forbid!, a monograph on Whitman's poems, will go away dissatisfied, though certainly diverted. I came to the book informed about Whitman, and came away delighted at the quantity of insight I gained from reading it. I loved the images, I knew I'd be sucked in by the 300 or so lovely reproductions, but I was equally edified by the organization of the text into Walt, and his world. It is explicit in the title: You're going to 19th century America with Walt Whitman's life as your tour agenda. As I am a New York City boy, those sections resonated strongly with me; as a Long Islander, Whitman's experiences highlighted for me the unslackening pace of change in this vigorous and vibrant world. Whitman was born in Hempstead, where I spent a decade! Believe you me, if we resurrected Walt and placed him in the Hempstead of today, he'd love it for its vibrant urbanity and be shocked to learn it's his birthplace.

I found Pete Doyle's tale, with whose outlines I was familiar, to be unbearably poignant. Soul father Whitman, 45 at the time, met his 21-year-old life's love on the streetcar where the lad worked. The rest of Whitman's life, and of Doyle's I learned here, they were connected, they were in love. What that means to someone in an intergenerational relationship in this disapproving and minatory world...! The storms of life could separate their bodies, death could knock with her unignorable tattoo, they were in love:

I have Walt's raglan here...I now and then put it on, lay down, think I am in the old times. Then he is with me again. It's the only thing I kept amongst many old things. When I get it on and stretch out on the old sofa I am very well contented. It is like Aladdin's lamp. I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always near by. When I am in trouble—in a crisis—I ask myself, "What would Walt have done under these circumstances?" and whatever I decide Walt would have done that I do.

I hope with all the fibers of my being that my Pete, my Young Gentleman Caller Rob, has occasion to remember as fondly after I am dead.

It was such points of commonality, uncommon to find in a work about a long-dead author, that kept me returning to the book with a curious mind and an eager eye. After reading WITH WALT WHITMAN, HIMSELF, I was soul-satisfied that I had found my spiritual ancestor. No poet I, nor truth to tell much of a poetry consumer; but Walt Whitman, comme d'habitude, pursued me down the street to talk to me.

I am so very glad that I stopped to listen.