TO THE STARS: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu

TO THE STARS: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu
GEORGE TAKEI
Pocket Books
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Best known as Mr. Sulu, helmsman of the Starship Enterprise™ and captain of the Starship Excelsior, George Takei is beloved by millions as part of the command team that has taken audiences to new vistas of adventure in Star Trek®—the unprecedented television and feature film phenomenon.

From the program’s birth in the changing world of the 1960s and death at the hands of the network to its rebirth in the hearts and minds of loyal fans, the Star Trek story has blazed its own path into our recent cultural history, leading to a series of blockbuster feature films and three new versions of Star Trek for television.

The Star Trek story is one of boundless hope and crushing disappointment, wrenching rivalries and incredible achievements. It is also the story of how, after nearly thirty years, the cast of characters from a unique but poorly rated television show have come to be known to millions of Americans and people around the world as family.

For George Takei, the Star Trek adventure is intertwined with his personal odyssey through adversity in which four-year-old George and his family were forced by the United States government into internment camps during World War II.

Star Trek means much more to George Takei than an extraordinary career that has spanned thirty years. For an American whose ideals faced such a severe test, Star Trek represents a shining embodiment of the American Dream—the promise of an optimistic future in which people from all over the world contribute to a common destiny.

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My Review: The fascistic turn new Trek has taken has a hard job erasing the original series' legacy, as there are still some dollars to be extracted from the nostalgia for those bygone, halcyon days of TOS (The Original Series in Trekspeak), of inclusion and celebration of human decency over disgusting, primitive violence and hatred of Others.

Thirty years ago, this book stood out. Nowadays, it's a bloody unicorn. See my review of They Called Us Enemy for the expanded and more self-focused story of Takei's childhood experiences with US racism and exclusion.

This is the story of Takei the man, the actor, the ground-breaking Asian role model. What it isn't, to the moaning of superfans of TOS, is a gossipy tea-spilling tell-all about the shenanigans behind the scenes of TOS. I was mildly miffed by this on my 1990s read; but this is a re-read, and it's been an entire generation for news to have filtered out about this fact, so no pearl-clutching from me.

Takei does not shy away from discussing his on-set conflicts with Shatner, of course, because they're part of his ground-breaking for actors who aren't white. He stood up for the integrity of his vision of Sulu. That would've been unthinkable even ten years earlier. Better contracts for actors! Imagine! The entertainment industry, like all capitalist enterprises, demands workers sacrifice for the profits of the owners. Takei stood against that; his actions might be small, but they were in concert with others, and had a real impact on the well-being of those across the industry who were also not white.

I mostly reveled, if I'm honest, in the opportunity to hear Takei's voice in my head as I read his conversational writing style. Of course, in the 1990s, the conversation didn't include even a whisper of his now-public gayness. He came out when the legalization of "gay marriage" was vetoed by Arnie the Terminator; around the was when Proposition 8 began being mooted. Never think, babyqueers, that straight people are your friends. Anything "granted" to you by their charity is something they can, and will, take away. May take them a long time, may take them a week, but anything they can take away they will eventually.

Would his very open (in fandom, anyway) secret have caused a stir had he discussed it in 1994? You bet! Remember how very different the landscape was then: AIDS was still a death sentence, though it was now deferrable to those who could afford the meds. There was the travesty of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that the inexperience and indifference of the Clintons gifted us with wreaking havoc; also the indefensible "Defense of Marriage" Act. The social landscape was not such that the revelation to the normies that George was a big ol' 'mo would've done more good than harm...to the book, to the franchise, to his inclusion in the Star Trek/industrial complex of convention appearances and tat-sales.

I understood that then, I'm more clear than ever about it now, and I urge those unhappy with this decision made by a stranger they do not know personally to accept a perspective check from one who was there, who knew that landscape intimately.

He had our backs when the chips were down and his voice really counted. Let go of judgment, let the past be the past, accept that now things are different in part because of a brave man who's lost it all more than once in his life.

SEPARATE ROOMS, classic Italian novel of grief and loss in the AIDS plague's early years

SEPARATE ROOMS
PIER VITTORIO TONDELLI (tr. Simon Pleasance)
Zando (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover; he condemns himself to moving cities every few weeks instead, in the hope of finding a semblance of peace.

He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge—and where reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. Leo's memories become clearer with every road he takes, much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live separately: in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on.

André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: Separate Rooms is a singular and unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a fiery and unforgettable literary talent.

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My Review: This book came out in Italian in 1989. I assume most of y'all remember something about 1989, but probably not the sheer awfulness of the AIDS epidemic eating the gay-men's communities around the world at that time.

I was there. I loved and lost more than once in the hell of the times. It happened like Tondelli, dead a year and a half after this book appeared, said it did:

In his last moments, Thomas is back in the family fold, with the same people who brought him into the world. Now, with their hearts torn asunder by suffering, they are helping Thomas to die. There is no room for Leo in this parental reconciliation. Leo is not married to Thomas. He has not had children with him. Neither of them bears the other's name at the registry office, and there is not a single legal record on the face of the earth that carries the signatures of witnesses to their union. Yet for more than three years they have been passionately in love with one another. They have lived together in Paris and Milan, and they have travelled together, played music together and danced together. They have quarrelled and abused each other, and even hated each other. They have been in love. But it is as if, without warning, beside that deathbed, Leo realised that he had experienced not a great love story, but rather some little school crush. As if they were telling him: You've both had a good time, and that's okay, too. But here we're fighting a life and death struggle. Here a life is at stake. And we—a father, a mother and a son—are what really matters.

That made Thomas one of the lucky ones, the ones whose families did not reject him, refuse to see him, or came to his deathbed simply to reject him one final time. Leo? Oh please, like anyone not gay thought a thing of the feelings and needs of the ones left behind!

The book is a series of leaps and hops in space...around the cities Thomas and Leo occupied for moments in time...and time, either spent together or remembered in the loss of love, or remembered in the moment of being there as one of the spaces Thomas wasn't with Leo. I think this fracturing into the three acts of an operetta, as Tondelli said he aimed to do, this absence of cohesion in the third-person narrative awareness, pretty perfectly explains grief's effects on the grieving mind.

In the grief of losing one's belovèd partner there's a profound silence. Leo's early response of lurching heedlessly from pillar to post is a way many people have of trying to escape that horrific, entombing silence. In looking at places he saw with Thomas, there's a sense that the existence of the places he saw with his love somehow, in some small corner of their physicality, contain an Akashic record of the emotional bond they shared. It's as though Leo, seeing this place or that, gets his love now vanished without a record, memorialized. If people still living don't see Thomas and Leo's love as valid, the squares of Paris or Milan recorded and validated it by holding them as their moments ran steadily out. In Leo's still-prevalent idea of what makes a couple worthy of acknowledgment, these places are the best substitutes he can identify for external validation.

By the third movement Leo feels, as he did in their life, that he and Thomas are meant to live in separate rooms. There is no more separate room than the tomb. Leo, permaybehaps too late, thinks his way through his actions in light of the ending of the love story he so possessed, the love object he so powerfully cherished. It is not a story about Leo's resolution of his regrets. It is Leo's reckoning with his (now alienated from their proper object) feelings. It is Leo's possibly impermanent realization that he, and Thomas, simply were not going to be able to invent for themselves and each other a way to accept they could live in anything but separate rooms.

I don't think it will speak to everyone. It spoke to me because my "Thomas" is ever with me, as Leo's is in this récit. The reckoning Leo is doing, I have done, and expect I'll do many years to come.

It's very beautiful. It is the last work Tondelli ever completed. It might mean a lot to people like me who lived it; but the experience of intense grief for what one has experienced the tearing, severing, bloody viciousness of death ripping away will speak to you all.

Maybe not today, but it will.

FRIENDS OF DOROTHY: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Icons, excellent gift book for your favorite gay guy

FRIENDS OF DOROTHY: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Icons
ANTHONY UZAROWSKI (illus. Alejandro Mogollo Díez)
Imagine! Publishing
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This giftable collection of Instagram-worthy illustrated biographies takes you on a tour through LGBTQIA+ history from the 20th century through today—featuring Judy Garland, RuPaul, and Lady Gaga.

What makes a gay icon? Free, uninhibited expression; an open mind; creativity; and bravery. Friends of Dorothy celebrates a wide range of people with the strength, vulnerability, charisma, and style that set them apart and gave them status with the queer community.

Queer icons include supporters of LGBTQIA+ rights such as Marsha P. Johnson, and others like Divine and RuPaul who shattered social barriers to become important cultural ambassadors of queerness, changing the world in the process. Other icons are timeless entertainers with unique appeal, from Judy Garland and Bette Midler to Grace Jones and Lady Gaga.

This collection welcomes readers into a flamboyant world populated by larger-than-life figures who inspired LGBTQIA+ people—over the decades—creating controversy, challenging conventions, and sometimes putting their own lives on the line in order for new generations to live in a more equal and accepting world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Watch Anthony Uzarowski's interview with Robert Bellisario!
My idea of a good, entertaining browser's book for gifting this #Booksgiving.

It is important to note that thes mini-biographies are of queer icons, not necessarily queer people. No one, the author is careful to state, imputes a private sexual behavior to the not-out folk in here...though I guess you would have to be a diehard homophobe to ignore the unspoken realities of some of the faces herein. Still, there is no necessity of being out, still less out and proud, to be a bona fide gay icon.

The author, whose interview linked above you should totally devote an hour of your life to watching, is a major pop culture maven. His credentials are spread all over gay media. He knows, in other words, his stuff. He has selected a good balance of music, film, and activists of both sexes and other genders. The forty lovely illustrations are both good art and witty commentary...Freddy Mercury has one fun portrait in here!...so the package is aimed directly at gifting, whether to yourself or others.

It isn't groundbreaking new information, or incisive commentary, it is pretty much just what it says...celebratory profiles with portraits, meant to be engaged with in bursts or otherwise over time. A browser's book, as I said before; thus pretty much perfect for the gift giving season.

BAD GAYS: A Homosexual History, spill the tea on these mad, bad, dangerous to know men

BAD GAYS: A Homosexual History
HUW LEMMEY & BEN MILLER
Verso Books
$19.95 trade paper, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE!

Rating: 4* of five

WINNER 2022 GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD—History & Biography

The Publisher Says: An unconventional history of homosexuality

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, one central to major historical events.

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My Review: This book made me laugh a lot more often than it made me angry...given the subject, that is quite a compliment.

Every so often it is useful–and let's not front, good catty fun–to contemplate the lives of those gay guys among us who exemplify the adage, ‘if you can't be a shining example, you can be a horrible warning...choose wisely.’ We in historically oppressed minority communities tend to hold up the shining examples and quietly ignore the shady, rotten, or even downright evil people that make up our world. Since those people are literally everywhere, some among them statistically must be gay...often we know they were, at least by modern lights, but we stay shtumm to avoid handing ammunition to Them, The Oppressors.

Time to wiggle out of that girdle, y'all, the haters gonna hate no matter what we do or don't celebrate, talk about, venerate.

This browser's garden of delights is so much fun to romp through, tutting in horror, chuckling in sympathy, staring slack-jawed in appalled repulsion. What these figures from the past would make of being lumped into a category based on what history—gossipy old thing, history—has to say about their sexual lives and/or natures, we will not likely ever find out. I'm pretty hopeful that the current round of gains made by the QUILTBAG spectrum of outlaws will solidify and become embedded in the culture. The sheer rage and hate that the thunderous scum on the reactionary end of the social spectrum tells me that they're very afraid of that happening and are doing everything they've ever done before to stop it from happening...but it seems to be less effective this go-round.

Books like this remind us all that just because They are worse, doesn't mean we are all good. Accepting that people are people, an inconsistent and highly changeable lot, every-damn-where on every metric and spectrum any huan mind can devise, is a key weapon to deploy against demonization by Them.

Learn your history...all of it...and no one can ever surprise you with a hurld accusation again.

Self-gifting for the whitest gay (not lesbian, trans, or PoC) guy this #Booksgiving. If you know some white gay man well enough to want to give him a gift, you can count on this one making a hit.