‘When the Band Played On’
By Michael G. Lee
c.2025, Chicago Review Press
$30/282 pages

You spent most of your early career playing second fiddle.

But now you’ve got the baton, and a story to tell that people aren’t going to want to hear, though it’s essential that they face the music. They must know what’s happening. As in the new book “When the Band Played On” by Michael G. Lee, this time, it’s personal.

Born in 1951 in small-town Iowa, Randy Shilts was his alcoholic, abusive mother’s third of six sons. Frustrated, drunk, she reportedly beat Shilts almost daily when he was young; she also called him a “sissy,” which “seemed to follow Randy everywhere.”

Perhaps because of the abuse, Shilts had to “teach himself social graces,” developing “adultlike impassiveness” and “biting sarcasm,” traits that featured strongly as he matured and became a writer. He was exploring his sexuality then, learning “the subtleties of sexual communication,” while sleeping with women before fully coming out as gay to friends.

Nearing his 21st birthday, Shilts moved to Oregon to attend college and to “allow myself love.” There, he became somewhat of an activist before leaving San Francisco to fully pursue journalism, focusing on stories of gay life that were “mostly unknown to anyone outside of gay culture.”

He would bounce between Oregon and California several times, though he never lost sight of his writing career and, through it, his activism. In both states, Shilts reported on gay life, until he was well known to national readers and gay influencers. After San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated, he was tapped to write Milk’s biography.

By 1982, Shilts was in love, had a book under his belt, a radio gig, and a regular byline in a national publication reporting “on the GRID beat,” an acronym later changed to AIDS. He was even under contract to write a second book.

But Shilts was careless. Just once, careless.

“In hindsight,” says Lee, “… it was likely the night when Randy crossed the line, becoming more a part of the pandemic than just another worried bystander.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are two distinct audiences for “When the Band Played On.” One type of reader will remember the AIDS crisis and the seminal book about it. The other is too young to remember it, but needs to know Randy Shilts’s place in its history.

The journey may be different, but the result is the same: author Michael G. Lee tells a complicated, still-controversial story of Shilts and the book that made America pay attention, and it’s edgy for modern eyes. Lee clearly shows why Shilts had fans and haters, why Shilts was who he was, and Lee keeps some mystery in the tale. Shilts had the knowledge to keep himself safe but he apparently didn’t, and readers are left to wonder why. There’s uncomfortable tension in that, and a lot of hypothetical thinking to be had.

For scholars of gay history, this is an essential book to read. Also, for anyone too young to remember AIDS as it was, “When the Band Played On” hits the right note.

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‘Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies’
Published by Catapult
Available Jan. 14; hardcover $27

Two strangers lock eyes across a bar. Or maybe they reach for the same book on a shelf in a bookstore. Or maybe they’re a model and artist, exchanging nervous smiles as the artist tries to capture a piece of the model’s soul on canvas or film. 

In a Hollywood film, we’d be led to believe that these moments are laden with momentous importance – a flicker of sexual charge and desire, a chemical reaction that leads inexorably to life-altering romance and happily ever after.

But in his new book of essays “Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies,” queer Colombian film and culture critic Manuel Betancourt unpacks the notion that flirting needs to be anything more, suggesting that flirtation can be a worthwhile endeavor in itself.

“One of the things that if you read any kind of love story or watch any kind of rom-com, you’re constantly encouraged to think that flirtation is sort of like preamble to something else,” Betancourt tells me over cookies outside of Levain bakery in Larchmont.

“Actually, flirtation doesn’t need to do that. You can flirt just for the act of flirting, and that can be fun, and that can be great. What is it that you find instead in that moment of possibility, at that moment when anything can happen? Just what happens when you’re trying to be the best person you could be? It’s almost more exciting when you know, there’s nothing else on the horizon.”

But “Hello Stranger”isn’t a how-to guide to flirting. It’s more like a cross between cultural criticism and memoir. 

Over a series of essays that alternate between examinations of flirting scenes in movies, books, and art, and anecdotes from his own personal life, Betancourt traces the ways that we use flirting to create different kinds of intimacies. 

“This is not a how-to, because I don’t think gay men need help with that,” Betancourt says. “But I also know that I’m a gay man in Los Angeles whereas I know there are young folks in Ohio that may not think of it this way because they’ve been conditioned, and actually we now have such a breadth of gay literature and a culture that’s continually teaching us we need to find the one.”

The book is a deeply personal one for Betancourt, who recently got divorced from his husband and joined a polyamorous relationship as he began writing it.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about different intimacies with strangers, with friends, with lovers, things that fell outside of what we understand as traditional. And so it felt like an easy way to turn all of these things that I was dealing with on a personal level into a more cohesive and coherent project,” he says. 

“I wanted to think through where the joy in flirtation lies. Like, why are we so drawn to it? Why was I so drawn to it? Why do I enjoy it so much? And of course, being the kind of literary academic that I was, I was willing to find other people must have thought about this, other people must have depicted it on screen and books,” he says. “Other people can teach me about this.”

The book starts with examinations of the fleeting, flirtatious intimacies seen in films like “Closer” and “Before Sunrise,” before diving into more complicated (and queer) relationships in the books “The Sexual Outlaw” and “A Little Life” and the portraiture of photographer Peter Hujar, using them as springboards to examine Betancourt’s own relationships to cruising, dating, nudity, and relationships both monogamous and otherwise. 

“I wanted to begin with those straight, very common, understandable ways of thinking about these things, and then the book slowly gets clearer and we end in polyamory and conceptual monogamy, and these very different ways of thinking. 

“What else I wanted to do for those gay readers that are maybe looking to find something here, is show that none of this is new. I think a lot of us try to think, like, ‘This is modern and polyamory is so 2024,’ but what I wanted to do is give a cultural history of that.” 

Though it’s not an instruction manual, Betancourt says he did improve his own flirtation skills while researching the book, as evidenced in a spicy anecdote he recounts in the book about cruising a man in a hotel bar, where he was actually working on writing “Hello Stranger.”

“You just have to pay attention, open yourself up, which is also what Hollinghurst, writes in ‘The Swimming-Pool Library.’ His protagonist is able to like cruise and hook up anywhere he wants to in London, because he’s always looking, like literally looking. He’s constantly out seeing the world as if it’s a cruising playground and that is all apparently you need to do.

“If you’re crossing paths and you see someone who you’re attracted to and you lock eyes, that is the moment to make something happen and it’s about being open to the possibility and then also letting the other person know that you are.”

Nurturing that openness was difficult at first for Betancourt, due to his upbringing in Bogota, Colombia.

“For me it was a very different cultural thing because of the kind of culture of violence, the culture of unsafety in Colombia. You’re sort of encouraged to not really trust anyone,” he says. “It takes almost locking that away because you can’t approach any of those situations with fear.” 

“This is about, like, teaching myself because I’m not great at it either. So, it’s about reminding myself, oh yeah, be open and more attentive.”

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‘Cher: The Memoir Part One’
By Cher
c.2024, Dey St.
$36/413 pages

Mother knows best.

At least that’s what she’d like you to think because she said it a hundred times while you were growing up, until you actually believed. One day, though, if you were lucky, you learned that Mother didn’t always know best, but she did her best – like in the new book “Cher: The Memoir Part One” by Cher, when Mom helped make a star.

Though she doesn’t remember it, little Cheryl Sarkisian spent a few weeks in a Catholic Charities orphanage when she was tiny, because her father had disappeared and her mother couldn’t afford to take care of her. “Cheryl,” by the way, was the name on her birth certificate, although her mother meant to name her “Cherilyn.”

That first time wasn’t the last time little Cher was left with someone other than her mother, Jackie Jean, a beautiful, talented struggling singer-actress who’d been born into poverty and stayed there much of her life. When money was tight, she temporarily dropped her daughter off with friends or family, or the little family moved from house to house and state to state. Along the way, relocating in and out of California gave Cher opportunities to act, sing, and to learn the art of performance, which is what she loved best.

In the meantime, Jackie Jean married and married again, five or six husbands in all; she changed her name to Georgia, worked in the movies and on TV, and she gave Cher a little sister, moved the family again, landed odd jobs, and did what it took to keep the lights on.

As Cher grew up in the shadow of her glamorous mother, she gained a bit of glam herself, becoming sassy and independent, and prone to separation anxiety, which she blamed on her abandonment as a small child. In her mother’s shadow, she’d always been surrounded by movie and TV stars and, taking acting classes, she met even more.

And then she met Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, who was a friend before he was a lover. So, here’s the very, very happy surprise: “Cher: The Memoir Part One” is a downright fun book to read.

If you’ve ever seen author Cher in interviews or on late night TV, what you saw is what you get here: bald-faced truth, sarcastic humor, sass, and no pity-partying. She tells a good story, ending this book with her nascent movie career, and she leaves readers hanging in anticipation of the stories she’ll tell in her next book.

The other happy surprise is that this memoir isn’t just about her. Cher spends a good amount of the first half writing about her mother and her grandmother, both complicated women who fought to keep their heads and those of their offspring above water. Readers looking between the lines will be enthralled.

Surely, “Cher: The Memoir Part One” is a fan’s delight, but it’s also a great memoir for anyone who particularly loves the genre and doesn’t mind a bit of profanity. If that’s you, then you got this, babe.

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