One of the pleasures of an urban winter has always been escaping the salt and grey slush through the window of a good book. This year, with the crudities of consumerism blowing at our doors and election hype rattling our windows, what we really need is a good gay belly laugh to dump the detritus and restore cheer. Fay Jacobs, longtime chronicler of goings-on in Rehoboth Beach, Del., published a new collection of her short pieces this year. Fried and True (A&M Books, 2007, $17.00) succeeds her gut-busting As I Lay Frying (2004, $15), still in print. Partner and I read the dozens of short pieces in Jacobs’ first book to each other, often laughing so hard we couldn’t read further through cathartic tears. The older entrenched gay and lesbian colony on Rehoboth has been adapting to the onslaught of the new wave of summer queers for the last few decades; Jacobs chronicles the foibles and fun of daily life among the bars, bodies and sandy beaches. Her essays, while often reflecting the self-effacing humor we have long treasured in our community, can also be poignant and thoughtful. Reflections on lesbian square dances or Roy Rogers hold equal sway with recollections of Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford, founders of Naiad Press (Marchant wrote novels as Sarah Aldridge), Jacobs’ mentors, and long-time doyennes of the Rehoboth summer colony. Partner has ordered 10 copies of each to give our friends laughter for the holidays.

Two new biographies worth noting spring gay connections on the unsuspecting and knowing smiles on the rest of us. Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon, $37.50) by Julie Kavanagh is a consuming look at the ‘Brando of the Steppe,’ Russian defector premier danseur Rudolph Nureyev, including his ‘vampiric’ affairs in and out of Russia. The third volume of John Richardson’s encompassing study of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf, $40), chronicles the maturing of his art and relationships. Braque, dealt with in a previous book, is now called ‘my ex-wife’ by Picasso, who is pursued in turn by Jean Cocteau after a chance meeting at impresario Diagalev’s ballet in 1917. The influence on Picasso’s work by first wife, Olga, and mistress Marie Therese is explored fully for the first time.

Of interest to aficionados of all things ‘Papa’ but more on target to those of us interested in transvestite and transsexual aspects of personality is John Hemingway’s Strange Tribe: a Family Memoir (Lyons Press, $24.95). John is the son of Gregory, Ernest Hemingway’s son by his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. When Gregory died in 2001, I remember being shocked at the Tribune Tempo section headline ‘The Old Man and the She,’ on a feature piece by Nara Schoenburg detailing the strange circumstances surrounding his death in a Miami jail. It was the first I had heard of his sex-change operations, though I had read of his early transvestitism and that he suffered trauma because Ernest held him responsible for Pauline’s death. Now John Hemingway, long conflicted by his father’s seemingly erratic behavior, has attempted a post-mortem reconciliation tracking his family history and dealing with his own guilt. John provides insights into the family fascination with androgyny and alcohol, and notes that both father and grandfather were bipolar. He reveals that his father, as he progressed in sex-change operations, tried one breast implant, ‘just to see what it was like, and that he never bothered to remove it or have another one implanted’. John claims that the doctors didn’t see Gregory as a true transsexual, rather a ‘dysfunctional manic-depressive with a fetish problem.’ From the first time young John sees his father in drag to his bitter image of his father pulling up his skirt to show off his new genitals, Strange Tribe is an interesting read that attempts an understanding of a son whose father was never what he wanted him to be. As an exploration of the impact that conflicted gender identity (both the father and grandfather’s) had on a family, the book is revelatory.

Marcia Gallo, academic, activist, and author of Different Daughters: a History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Lesbian Rights Movement (Carroll & Graf, $25.95), was motivated to write her book by what she failed to find in libraries. The DOB, which lasted from 1952 into the early 1970s, was a conflicted organization. Gallo’s history is not in the least dry; she shows how exciting, contentious, and cutting edge the DOB was as it grew to national status and decline. Gallo places the organization in the wider context of U.S. history: the homphobic post-war witchhunts that dumped lesbians wholesale from the military, McCarthy-era paranoia of the 1950s, liberation movements of the 1960s, the Cold War era and Viet Nam. The book has rounded up all the ‘usual suspects,’ including Martin and Lyon, the Barbaras: Gittings and Grier, and a host of writers for DOBs magazine The Ladder (including Chicagoans Valerie Taylor and Jeannette Howard Foster). Gallo checked all the archives and interviewed every ‘Daughter’ she could find. She notes that FBI reports mis-characterized the DOB as a sort of women’s auxillary of male gay groups in the Los Angeles area. She expands our knowledge of some of the national chapters, but unearthed very little about the Chicago group. She shows how the battles waged over whether to align with feminists or male liberationists, about internal racism and the hijacking of the magazine took their fatal toll. Ironically, the closet door is swinging shut again as some of the aged Daughters she interviewed are forced to become circumspect in nursing homes or with caretakers, for their own survival. Gallo sees this as a need for our own retirement homes/communities.

Copyright 2007 by Marie J. Kuda