The GLBTRT has been reviewing books and movies in its newsletter since the early 1990s. Trace the evolution of queer publishing through these historic reviews. This review was originally published in Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1992.
Because some of our best writers publish their work in local, unindexed gay and lesbian newspapers, they don’t enjoy the wide readership they deserve. Anthologies of material originally published in our newspapers is therefore almost always a good thing for the gay and lesbian communities. When the writing is as well crafted as “A. Nolder Gay’s” is, there is cause for general rejoicing that a new and wider audience will now be able to benefit from his intelligent observations.
Best Friends contains fifty brief essays that originally appeared in the Boston-based publications Gay Community News, Esplanade, Integrity Forum, and Bay Windows. The author of these essays, whoever he is, began writing his newspaper columns in 1973; the earliest items in this anthology date from 1974 and the most recent item included first appeared in 1987. The essays are all so good that many readers will want to track down another 43 of them published in the author’s previous and equally excellent collection, The View from the Closet: Essays on Gay Life and Liberation, 1973-1977 (Union Park Press, 1978). Only four of the essays from the earlier collection are reprinted in this one.
There are several reasons why this man’s essays are so interesting. Most of them articulately and succinctly capture one man’s thoughtful reactions to a person, place, moment, or issue that has been important to lesbians and/ or gay men at one point or another over the past twenty years, or that always has and always will be important to us.
The author’s style is conversational and light. His work is refreshingly free of the dogmatism many of us have corne to expect from our periodicals, which too often seem to be written by mostly relatively young writers with little sense of history. This older writer’s droll humor, his obvious compassion and humility, his love of travel, libraries, old bookstores, and a special interest in matters of the spirit-as well as his sheer native intelligenceshines through his work.
Finally, the short length of these essays makes them extraordinarily easy to digest. This is a book to dip into when you’re in the mood for something intelligent, amusing, or surprising about gay and lesbian culture but not in the mood for a book-length treatise or the articulate agonies of, say Andrew Holleran or a Larry Kramer.
Although he has grouped his work into broad subject categories rather than arranging them chronologically, the essays stand alone and need not be read all at once or in sequence.
There’s something here to interest or instruct anyone. As the writer admits, there’s more here of interest to gay men than lesbians, and he does write from the dispassionate perspective of a relatively comfortable white gay male of a certain class. But he is aware of this limitation (insofar as it is one); if anything, he is often too self-effacing, although, fortunately, he usually expresses this in a delightfully amusing way.
In any case, “A. Nolder Gay” writes about everything: from his extensive world-wide travels to gay aspects of particular works of art, from opinions about specific books or authors to reflections on current events. His essays often focus on an ironic, and obscure, an underexamined, or under-appreciated aspect of gay or lesbian cultural life-but he writes so well about anything that many readers will find themselves investigating his treatment of topics they might otherwise skip over.
It’s puzzling that the author continues to prefer to conceal his identity while at the same time strewing throughout the book so many clues to it. Many readers would probably like to thank “A. Nolder Gay” for consistently producing such readable and humane prose — some of it, like the essays on AIDS for example, written very beautifully and movingly. Regardless of what he’s writing about, this man’s essays are marked with a large-hearted, educated perspective missing from much gay and lesbian commentary today.
Recommended for all community operated gay/lesbian libraries, for larger public libraries, and for academic libraries with gay/lesbian collections.
Reviewed by Cal Gough
Atlanta-Fulton Public Library
Atlanta, Georgia