Books
Two new books celebrate Old Hollywood glory
‘Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intimate Friendship’
By Charles Casillo
c.2021, Kensington
$27.00/389 pages
‘The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock’
By Edward White
c.2021, W. W. Norton & Company
$28.95/379 pages
If you’re queer, especially if you’re of a certain age, old Hollywood is embedded in your DNA.
For those of us besotted by classic movies — there can never be too many books about Tinseltown.
Two new books — “Elizabeth and Monty” by Charles Casillo and “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock” by Edward White — will satisfy your old Hollywood jones.
“Elizabeth and Monty” is the riveting story of the intimate friendship of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
Few people are loved more by the LGBTQ community than Elizabeth Taylor. Who will ever forget Taylor as Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” or as Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?”
Taylor raised millions for AIDS research long before any celeb or politico even said the word “AIDS.” People with AIDS weren’t objects of charity to Taylor. She had many queer friends and hung out at gay bars.
Montgomery Clift, who lived from 1920 to 1966, was a talented actor. Because of the time in which he lived, he had to be closeted about his sexuality. Because of the homophobia in the society and Hollywood then, the support of friends was crucial to Clift and other LGBTQ people of that era.
For much of his life, Clift had health problems that caused him pain. Partly as a result of pain, he had issues with drinking and drug addiction. His behavior could be erratic and uncouth. (He had a penchant for eating food off of other people’s plates.)
Despite Clift’s troubles, you become transfixed by his brooding intensity – whether you’re watching him in “The Heiress,” “From Here to Eternity” or “Red River.”
If you have a heartbeat, you’ll feel the chemistry between Clift and Taylor when they’re on screen together in “A Place in the Sun.”
Though Clift was queer and Taylor was hetero, they were the closest of friends.
From the prologue onward, Casillo draws you into their friendship. The book opens on the evening when Clift, driving home from a party, was in a terrible car accident. He’d crashed into a telephone pole.
Taylor went to Clift who was lying bleeding on the road. “Realizing he was choking on his teeth,” Casillo adds, “she instinctively stuck her fingers down his throat and pulled out two broken teeth, clearing the passageway.”
Taylor stuck by Clift when many of his friends distanced themselves from him.
Taylor insisted that Clift be cast in “Reflections in a Golden Eye.” She put up her own salary as insurance for Clift when no one would insure him (because of his health and substance abuse issues).
It’s clear from “Elizabeth and Monty” that Clift was as important to Taylor as she was to him. Their relationship wasn’t sexual, writes Casillo, author of “Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon” and “Outlaw The Lives and Careers of John Rechy.” Yet, there was an emotional intensity – a romantic quality – in their friendship.
Clift nurtured Taylor. He coached Taylor, who he called Bessie Mae, on her acting. He thought Taylor was beautiful, yet understood what it was like for Taylor when people only saw her for her beauty.
“Monty, Elizabeth likes me, but she loves you,” Richard Burton is reported to have said to Clift.
There are good biographies of Taylor – such as William Mann’s “How To Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood” and of Clift – most notably Patricia Bosworth’s “Montgomery Clift: A Biography.”
Even so, “Elizabeth and Monty” sheds new light on the intense friendship of two queer icons. Check it out. It will imbue you with renewed love and respect not only for Taylor and Clift but for your own friends.
Without Alfred Hitchcock, I’d never make it through the pandemic.
The COVID vaccines are wonderful! But, I’d never get out of my sweatpants without the suspense and glam of Hitchcock’s movies.
Nothing is more comforting than watching serial killer Uncle Charlie in “Shadow of a Doubt” or, with Grace Kelly, James Stewart and Thelma Ritter, observing the murderer in “Rear Window.”
What is more pleasurable than ogling the gorgeous mid-century apartment where a murder has been committed in “Rope?”
Of course, I’m far from alone in loving Hitchcock. Hetero and queer viewers are Hitchcock fans.
Everyone from your straight, straitlaced granny to your bar-hopping queer grandson has had nightmares about the shower scene in “Psycho.” Or had a crush on Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest.”
From the glam in “Rear Window” to Bruno and Guy in “Strangers on a Train,” it’s clear that Hitchcock’s movies have a queer quotient and a special appeal to LGBTQ viewers.
There are more biographies and studies of Hitchcock’s life and work than you could count. Or would want to read.
Yet, “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock” by Edward White is a good read.
In elegant, precise writing, White illuminates Hitchcock’s life and work by examining 12 aspects of his complex personality. As with all of us, the whole of Hitchcock’s self was more than the components of his personality. Any life, despite the most assiduous biographer’s investigations, remains somewhat of a mystery.
White explores how “Hitchcock” the phenomenon was invented as well as what made Hitchcock the person tick. He carries out this exploration by writing about Hitchcock as everything from “The Fat Man” to “The Murderer” to “The Dandy” to “The Voyeur” to “The Londoner” to “The Family Man” to “The Man of God.”
Hitchcock was a family man who loved his wife, yet, at times, gazed in, to put it mildly an unsavory manner, at some of the actresses such as Tippi Hedren, in his films.
Impeccably dressed in a Victorian-era suite, he plotted films about murder and rape with his wife (and frequent uncredited collaborator) Alma at his side.
For a half century, “Hitchcock’s persona was the active ingredient in the most celebrated of his 53 films,” White writes, “the way Oscar Wilde’s was in his plays, and Andy Warhol’s was in his art.”
Hitchcock stands alone in the Hollywood canon, White writes, “a director whose mythology eclipses the brilliance of his myriad classic movies.”
The span of Hitchcock’s career was immense — from the time of silent films to the 3-D era. His work, White, a “Paris Review” contributor, writes, runs the gamut from thrillers to screwball comedy to horror to film noir to social realism.
Read “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock.” It’ll take you inside the mosaic of the fab filmmaker’s life and work. Then, break out the popcorn and “Dial M for Murder.”
Books
New book examines queer behavior among animals
‘A Little Queer Natural History’ reminds us of the facts of life
‘A Little Queer Natural History’
By Josh L. Davis
c.2024, University of Chicago Press
$16/128 pages
When you were a small child, someone taught you about the birds and the bees.
It might’ve been a parent or other adult who explained where babies come from, or another kid who filled your head with scary, exciting things that you believed until you learned better. However you learned the facts of life, it changed you forever and in the new book, “A Little Queer Natural History” by Josh L. Davis, there’s more to the wild story.
You are not alone. Just look around.
All kinds of creatures share the planet with us but, in the same way that you shouldn’t judge a person at first glance, you can’t jump to conclusions about those creatures. That’s especially true with sexual behavior. While we can’t rightly attribute human feelings or intentions to them – animals likely don’t understand gay from straight – we may assume “that most species of animal probably exhibit some form of queer behaviour.”
Take birds, for instance: early 20th century explorers noted the Adelie penguin for its male-male partnering activity. Female Western gulls often raise their chicks with female partners. Female pheasants may “present as males” if their estrogen is depleted.
As for mammals, Western lowland gorillas and bonobos both engage in sexual activity with either sex. Domestic sheep, hyenas, and giraffes also “could be considered to have a sexuality that we would define as homosexual or bisexual.”
And “When it comes to sex in plants,” says Davis, “all bets are off.”
Komodo dragons can reproduce through parthenogenesis, or without fertilization. Parrot fish are able to change sex if they need to. Morpho butterflies are gynandromorphs, having “both male and female tissue within… a single individual.” Castrated male cane toads will develop egg cells due to a “Bidder’s organ.” Even dinosaurs are included in this book.
“Despite sex often being viewed as a fundamental for life on Earth,” says Davis, “there is still a lot we don’t know about it and scientists are constantly learning more.”
When you first get “A Little Queer Natural History” in your hands, you’ll notice how whisper-thin it feels. Don’t let that fool you; the pages may be light, but what you’ll find is not.
Author Josh L. Davis stuffs each entry tight with real scientific information, and he uses actual scientific terms to do it. There’s zero dumbing-down in that, but Davis is quick to explain terms and ideas, which helps readers to completely understand what’s here. For sure, you’ll feel like a smarty-pants as you make your way through this book.
Readers, however, may scratch their heads and wonder why some of the entries are included – it may be a stretch to include fossilized creatures or male animals that care for their offspring, for instance. Chances are, though, that you’ll be so captured by the knowledge contained in each short chapter that you won’t mind.
“A Little Queer Natural History” is a smart book, perfect for quick reads at random at this busy time of year. If that’s what you need now, enjoying it’s a fact of life.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Books
New book follows 7 trans kids coping with modern political attacks
Author Nico Lang delivers fine work of journalism
‘American Teenager’
By Nico Lang
c.2024, Abrams Press
$30/288 pages
In great-grandma’s day, they hooked.
They were high-topped and dainty, too, to show off a tiny, cheeky-but-demure ankle beneath long skirts. These days, though, they Velcro, tie, strap, or you just slip your toes into whatever you put on your feet. You gotta wear your shoes but, as in the new book “American Teenager” by Nico Lang, you wish someone would walk a mile in them first.
Seven-hundred-plus.
That’s how many anti-gay, anti-trans bills were presented to state legislatures around the country last year, many aimed at minors. As if being a teenager isn’t hard enough. With this in mind, Lang shadowed seven trans kids, to find out how they and their families cope with our current political landscape.
Fifteen-year-old South Dakotan Wyatt is in 10th grade. He knows that the lawmakers in his state “will just keep turning up the boil” on trans bills and it makes him physically sick. When Lang asked Wyatt to describe himself, Wyatt couldn’t do it, as if, says Lang, he was “still in transit, not yet arrived.”
Near Birmingham, Rhydian is a good student at the Magic City Acceptance Academy, the only school in the South that specifically welcomes LGBTQ students, and he enjoys the deep love and support of his parents and grandmother. But he’s frustrated: Rhydian’s been waiting for months for top surgery, which has been put on hold for reasons that are political.
Mykah identifies as gender-fluid, Black, and bi-racial and they desperately dream of a future performing career. In Houston, Ruby’s beloved church held a re-naming ceremony for her when she turned 18. Seventeen-year-old trans boy Clint is Muslim, and has managed to avoid scrutiny from his Chicago mosque.
Jack, along with her mother and nonbinary sibling, Augie, were homeless before their mother finally managed to find housing; in the meantime, Jack lost her health care. And in Los Angeles, Kylie has health care, support, friends, and an activist mother.
She has advantages that most trans kids can only wish for – and she knows it.
Acne. Peer pressure. Social media. Being a teen has always been difficult, even without anti-LGBTQ legislation. In this fine work of journalism, author Nico Lang shows how a handful of kids in one group are coping with governmental policies and life in general.
Hint: you can expect the unexpected.
“American Teenager” shows the highs and lows of being a teen with the added stress of politics included – and here, the individuality inside the ordinary is striking and wonderful. Lang is careful to show how these are just typical kids – good-hearted, smart, funny, sarcastic – and it rings throughout each profile how much the discrimination they endure affects their lives and relationships. That’s a clarion call, absolutely, but readers who can see between the lines will also enjoy this book’s humor, it’s compassion, and the sheer joy of meeting decent, thoughtful teens.
Parents will like this book for its candor, and that goes doubly for adults who love a trans kid. Start “American Teenager” and before long, you’ll be hooked.
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Books
Randy Rainbow doesn’t hold back in new book
Something snide and cynical that’ll make you laugh
‘Low-Hanging Fruit’
By Randy Rainbow
c.2024, St. Martin’s Press
$28/224 pages
Whine, whine, whine.
You got something to say, say it. Got an opinion? The world is waiting. It doesn’t do any good to mutter, sputter, or whine when something’s bothering you. As in the new book, “Low-Hanging Fruit” by Randy Rainbow, take it to the complaint department.
Randy Rainbow has a lot to say, and he’s not afraid to say it.
For starters, he’s “resigning from trying to fix you, effective immediately.” Any boneheaded thing you want to do now, whatever. Nothing is his responsibility anymore. He has other issues to worry about.
“The truth is,” he says, “I have a lot of complaints about a lot of things.”
There are right ways of doing things, he says, and there are wrong ways and we just all really need to know the difference – especially if you’re a “Karen.” He’s compassionate if you were born with that name, but not too much.
“I’m a flamboyant homosexual who’s lived my entire life with the name Randy Rainbow, so you’ll get little sympathy from me in this department.”
Other than that, you may wonder what Rainbow’s (ahem) “position” is: he’s actually thinking about running for president as a member of “a Rainbow coalition…” He doesn’t have much experience but, he says, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, that doesn’t matter at all. He stands on a green platform, but he can’t ban fluorocarbons because, you know, the hair thing and all.
Rainbow misses his 20s, old-school dating sites, hooking up, and his former attention span. He waxes nostalgic about the places he’s lived, including an apartment overlooking a “fruit market.” He wonders why teenagers are suddenly “successful lifestyle gurus.” He hates when “stars begin losing their luster” and he wishes again for actors like Hayworth and Garbo.
But, he says, “Diva-complaints aside… I really do thank God for all the opportunities I’m given.”
So the elephant in the room right now might be one you’ll (never?) vote for, but you know that author Randy Rainbow will reliably skewer that political animal online, hilariously. The fun-poking continues in the most deliciously snarky way in “Low-Hanging Fruit.”
And yet, that’s not the only subject Rainbow tackles. Readers who love catching his posts and videos are treated here to a random string of observations, opinions, and rants-not-rants, with the signature sassy style they’ve come to expect. What you’ll read can be spit-out-your-wine funny sometimes, and other times it touches a nerve with nods toward culture, new and old, that’ll make you nod with recognition. Nothing in Rainbow’s path goes without sharp-edged comment, which is exactly what you want from his books. Unexpectedly, this one also includes a soft word or two and a few slight confessions that are gentle and that might even make you say, “Awwwwww.”
If you’re ready for something snide and cynical that’ll make you laugh, something that you’ll want to read aloud to a companion, “Low-Hanging Fruit” is what you need. Look for this book now and you’ll have no complaints.
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