Weaves personal anecdotes into a tour of queer spaces spanning continents and decades — from the late 1970s to now, London to Los Angeles. The role these spaces have taken in the movement for queer liberation is explored and cut in with sensorial writing about the smell of body odor …and other things. Lin is great at making places that have long since shuttered their doors or become otherwise unrecognizable come alive on the page!
A v kind (and v hot) human named Mandy gave me this book at a gay bar in Denver when I was but a smol 23-year-old baby queer trying to find my way. While it took me a few tries to finish due to how gut-wrenching it is, I absolutely inhaled it once I decided to commit.
Leslie Feinberg writes with piercing clarity, humanity, and ferocity. Zie/She makes me so proud to be queer, and so, so, so immensely grateful to those in the community who came before me. Whether or not you identify on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, this is truly a must-read.
An unbelievably comprehensive 600-page oral history of the Village Voice, formerly the best of all US alt-weeklies and simply the main way anyone marginally cool knew wtf was going on in town before social media. Dripping with details (e.g. after being the only paper with writers/photographers on the ground at the Stonewall riot, the Gay Liberation Front was founded in rock critic Robert Christgau's spare journalism classroom (!)); casually interleaved with jaw-dropping adversarial interview appearances (both Donald Trump and Michael Alig drop in to give their own perspective on events); and unafraid to critique/discuss the Voice's own historic homophobic, racist, and sexist blindspots, I can't think of a better crash course in What People Talked About in 1960-1995 NYC (the Voice's subsequent Craigslist-induced decline era gets comparatively short shrift).
I think this is one of the best history books I’ve ever read about NYC. It’s less of a “queer history” book and more of a history book through a queer lens. Most of the book centers around my neighborhood, so it’s really amazing to learn about what was happening here 100 years ago and that my neighborhood was once gayer than I thought :’)
