Hagerstown Hopes held the Hagerstown Pride Festival outside Hub City Brewery on Saturday, May 30.

(Washington Blade photos by Landon Shackelford)

You’re all geared up.

You’ve got your best parade-walking shoes, your coolest tee, your most-comfortable shorts, and a rainbow flag to carry. You’re set for Pride, but before you go, try one of these great new books about LGBTQ life and history.

After the parade, where will you end up? A place to talk your experience over, to re-hash things for the next parade? Then you may need “The Lesbian Bar Chronicles: The Living History and Hopeful Future of America’s Dyke Dives and Sapphic Spaces” by Rachel Karp (Beacon Press, $29.95).

Lesbian bars, says Karp, are more than just places to drink. They’re also places to find community, and to organize. For many, she says, they are “sanctuaries,” as they have been for at least a century, and this book introduces you to some of the people who run the establishments, the things they do to support their patrons, and the 100-year-plus bravery that it took to own, run, and enter a lesbian bar.

If you had to name a gay icon, there are probably quite a few who come to mind. So read “Without Prejudice: My Life as a Gay Judge” by Harvey Brownstone (ECW Press, $21.95) and add another name to your list.

This memoir, written by Canada’s first openly gay judge, takes readers from Brownstone’s childhood to his life as a lawyer, then to his work within the justice system in Ontario, and beyond, to his current career. This is a surprising, informative book that gives you an idea what gay life is like, north of our uppermost borders, then and now.

Pride is a celebration, an event, but it also demands a peek backwards, and in “The LGBTQ Almanac: 500 Years of Queer Culture in American History” by Deborah G. Felder (Visible Ink Press, $39.95), you’ll get a wide look at the pioneers, allies, policy, and gay life over the course of the last five centuries. Want to know more about religion in the gay community? It’s in here, along with celebrities, presidents, science, business, and more. This is the kind of book that settles bets. It’s one you want to have in any room of your home because it’s comprehensive and perfectly browse-able for all of its 600-plus pages.

And finally, here’s a book to read and think about: “No Fats No Fems: A Guide to Queer Empathy and Unpacking Prejudice” by Max Hovey (HarperOne, $19.99). How do you eliminate hateful, hurtful words, aimed at gay people – by gay people? What kind of stereotypes do we carry, unintentionally? This book takes those things out into the daylight by talking honestly and thoughtfully about them, as well as other issues. It’s a book to have when doubts creep in, when you need a new way of thinking or a different direction, or when you just want something different to read.

And if these great books aren’t enough, head to your favorite bookstore or library and ask for books that you can read before Pride or after. And happy Pride!

When Albert Camus published “L’etranger” (“The Stranger”) in 1942, he was living in Nazi-occupied France, so it’s no surprise that it became one of the most celebrated “existential” novels of all time. A fascist regime is great for inspiring thoughts of an indifferent and meaningless universe.

It wasn’t his first experience with authoritarianism. Born to a working-class white European family in then-French Algeria, he grew up observing the harsh treatment of the native North Africans by the colonists who governed them. It was this personal history, amplified by the spread of European fascism, that found its voice in “The Stranger.” Short, terse, and shrouded in a cloak of ennui, it was his first novel – novella, really – but its impact was seismic.

Naturally, its influence has run through the world of cinema, and, it has been translated to the screen three times — most recently by French filmmaker François Ozon, whose screen version won acclaim at last year’s Venice Film Festival, and is now available for on-demand streaming in the U.S.

Ozon’s vision is captured in gleaming black-and-white, blending the luster of modern-day faux-vintage fashion photography with the nostalgic flavor of classic era “arthouse” and European cinema, and it maintains a largely faithful connection to Camus’s novel, at least in terms of plot. It’s the story of Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a French settler living in the capital city of Algiers, who receives word that his mother has died. He takes time off from work, traveling to the nursing home – where he had sent her three years before – in order to attend her funeral, but remains seemingly emotionless throughout, prompting members of the staff and other residents to mark his apparent lack of customary grief.

When he returns to Algiers, he encounters Marie (Rebecca Marder), a former co-worker, and after spending the day together, the two become romantically involved. Their relationship continues over the next few weeks, while they also associate with Meursault’s neighbor Raymond (Pierre Lottin) – a suspected pimp who, after beating his Arab mistress, is being followed and harassed by her brother (Abderrahmane Dehkani) and his friends. After a skirmish with the Arabs, Meursault encounters the brother alone during a walk on the beach, and shoots the young man dead with a pistol given to him for protection by Raymond. On trial for murder, he offers no defense and expresses no remorse. He is convicted and sentenced to death, facing it all with emotional detachment, and seeming to find liberation in the recognition that none of it matters, anyway.

Though it’s a tale that includes romance, murder, and courtroom drama, it feels like a story in which nothing really happens – which is, of course, the perfect effect to emphasize the point of Camus’s philosophical viewpoint; but while that might satisfy the kind of viewers drawn to a film of a Camus novel, Ozon’s movie probably won’t hold much appeal for audiences seeking action, suspense, feel-good sentiment, or easy answers to the moral dilemmas that come hand-in-hand with being alive. Camus was interested in the opposite effect, a confrontation with existence which leaves no room for comfortable denials, and Ozon’s inflection on the original’s themes makes no effort to soften the blow. 

What it does, however, is introduce – without having to adjust the narrative provided by Camus – an element of queerness that lends the whole story a new layer of subtext through what can only be described as the “gay male gaze” that anchors the film’s visual aesthetic.

It’s in the way the camera – aimed by Ozon and cinematographer Manu Dacosse – remains fixated on its star, the exquisitely beautiful Voisin, lingering on his face, his frame, or his body in swim trunks. There’s a sensuality in the way the director shows us female beauty, too, but it’s never framed as the “object” of desire; and in the narrative’s key scene – the killing by the sea – there’s an inescapable element of repressed homoeroticism, born perhaps by associations with the mid-20th-century queer aesthetic of writers like Jean Genet or artists like George Quaintance, or pretentiously artsy commercials for high-end men’s cologne, or just from real-life memories of cruising on the beach. On the surface, Meursault gives no sign of queerness; but the emphasis that Ozon brings to the story – almost purely through visual suggestion – lends the character, already an outsider to the world of “normal” human experience in the first place, an even deeper sense of “otherness.”

As to that, Voisin’s performance is effective for reasons beyond his model-esque physical perfection; there’s a vast inner life happening under that pretty face, and the actor conveys it with a “less-is-more” approach that aligns perfectly with the character’s dissociation from conventional humanity. He’s compelling enough to engage us, and intelligent enough in his expression of Camus’ ideas to help us grasp them even as he makes us feel them – and frankly, that’s saying a lot.

The rest of the cast is effective, as well, though most of them serve primarily as a foil to reflect Voisin and his character. Marder brings a relatably savvy-yet-romantic presence as Marie, and Lottin gives Raymond a kind of louche charisma that evokes a brand of appealing-but-toxic masculinity. Swann Arlaud also stands out as the prison priest who attempts to convert Meursault on the eve of his execution, bearing the full brunt of Camus’ existentialist arguments in a scene that somehow taps into transgressive homoerotic fantasies even as its characters discuss impending death.

Camus, for his part, did not see himself as an existentialist; instead, he embraced and promoted a viewpoint in which human life is defined by its relationship with what he called “The Absurd” – the gap between reality and our assumed expectations about it, where our circumstances and behavior become obviously ridiculous – and believed that, in a meaningless universe, we are free to find our own meaning. An essay he published around the same time (“The Myth of Sisyphus”) posited that finding happiness in the struggle was perhaps the most logical response to facing an unfeeling world, and the Absurdist movement he helped to define used humor – albeit often the dark and sardonic variety – as a means to expose the madness of trying to impose sense on a nonsensical world. In the end, his writings reveal him as a deeply humanistic thinker, whose acceptance of objective reality served only to deepen his dedication to the ideal of a better mankind.

Whether or not any of that comes across in Ozon’s artful film, which emphasizes the immediacy of experience – the beach, the sea, the sun, the visceral responses we get from sex or violence – over the intellectual arguments that Camus would elucidate throughout his life, probably depends on one’s own grasp of Existentialist thinking and its offshoots. In any case, while Ozon’s “The Stranger” might fall short in the challenge to convey its philosophical arguments, it more than succeeds as a stylish piece of international art cinema, and it just might – hopefully – inspire audiences to go on a deeper dive into the mind of Albert Camus.

And even if it doesn’t, it’s still pretty to look at.