Review | Four books to read for Pride Month (2024)

Perhaps because I too once benefited from an amazing dog-sitting gig in the West Village, I tore through Thomas Grattan’s “In Tongues.” An accomplished second novel, it’s a witty picaresque set at a time when, New Yorkers will tell you, much was possible if you were young and portable and in possession of a good face. It’s 2001, and 20-something Gordon has fled a breakup in Minneapolis for New York with a pocketful of stolen cash, the lonely look of a junkyard dog and a penchant for rough anonymous sex. He’s unsure what he wants next; “I’m not an aspiring anything,” he says (not joking). After befriending a lesbian couple who get him a job as a dog walker, his story shifts into exotic new gears. An older gallerist couple in the West Village catches him in their tractor beam, and before he knows it Gordon is the ambiguously labeled and incongruously dressed young man at the gathering — one at which he may not naturally belong.

Armed with a cheery anything-goes outlook, he soon embarks on adventures in Europe, Mexico and the Midwest. Romance and heartbreak ensue. Returning to New York a hair wiser, he comes to realize that being needed is “a drug I couldn’t turn down” and finally finds a job that’s right for him.

Gordon is a fine creation. With his disarmingly straightforward narrative style, he makes for a convincing and likable hero — you totally get why someone might both love and be disappointed by him (as they do; as they are). Writing with economy and comic generosity, Grattan pulls off an amiable, zippy novel that also smuggles in a sharp analysis of family, class and the intergenerational inheritance of gay men.

If your tastes bend more to the surreal, K-Ming Chang’s novella “Cecilia” is the skin-crawling fever dream for you. Our narrator, a young woman named Seven (after the 7 Up her mother drank by the liter while pregnant), is working in a chiropractor’s office when she re-encounters her girlhood friend Cecilia. On leaving the office that day, the two women board the same bus, neither quite stalking the other. But Chang is not concerned with the surface events of her story — her real subject is the gleaming cobweb of erotic obsession that falls like a veil across Seven when she sees Cecilia again.

Chang broke through with her novel “Bestiary” before winning the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction with “Gods of Want.” In “Cecilia” she continues to take soundings in the murky depths of carnal desire. “To me,” writes her narrator, “love was lodging yourself in the wall between two units, growing in the dark like a mushroom.” Note that it’s not like growing in the dark like a mushroom; Chang’s way with metaphor is often unnervingly literal, leading her into surreal, violent, polymorphic landscapes filled with pulsing organisms and painful metamorphoses.

As in “Bestiary,” there are animals and organs everywhere — tadpoles of drool, a regurgitated liver, slugs and crows and raccoons. It gets pretty gross at times, and your mileage may depend on your taste for body horror, not to mention the fantastical elements Chang’s so fond of and her weakness for rather airy poeticism. These elements can detract from her skill at capturing that most straightforward of human emotions: the plain anxiety of being in the presence of the desired. “All my thoughts thrashed in shallow water,” she writes. “I panicked at the thought that we were never going to touch.” For me, that’s where she cuts deepest.

Nonfiction is in an equally exciting spot right now. Lucy Sante’s “memoir of transition,” “I Heard Her Call My Name,” is one of The Post’s 28 books to read this summer. There are big new biographies forthcoming of Christopher Isherwood (by Katherine Bucknell) and Thom Gunn (by Michael Nott). The British writer June Thomas’s “A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture” promises fresh research and insight into lesbian experiences in the second half of the 20th century.

New, at least in English, is “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles” by the late Chilean writer and activist Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015). This intoxicating and profane selection has been rendered into English with eye-bulging frankness by Gwendolyn Harper. Each brief “crónica” (reportage, basically, though with a Capote-ish flair for embellishment) is a mini-revelation. Sexy, political and deeply humane, these coiled essays demonstrate clearly the perennial importance of radical speech acts. “Pedro Lemebel reminds us that literature is not inoffensive,” the novelist Alejandro Zambra has written, “that it’s not mere decoration, that it does something to society.”

Lemebel lived through a particularly dark time in Chile’s history, the one-two punch of dictatorship and AIDS. We read about the disappeared, the ignored sounds of torture next door, the exiled elites and their obliviousness — or indifference — to what’s happening back home. We also witness the suffering and resilience of a community ravaged by death. But camp always offers, for Lemebel, a redemptive, conciliatory strategy. In his hands, a funeral becomes “a runway show of exquisitely selected, newly debuted Calvin AIDS models, all giving their friend what she deserves, a send-off like she never dreamed of in Neverland’s golden airport.”

Harper excels at capturing the spirit of source material often considered untranslatable. Significant lexical inspiration is required to express Lemebel’s arch, rat-a-tat punning, while ninja syntax skills are needed to re-create the fragments and convolutions of his sentences. What she makes of his crónicas retains the eccentricities of the original while being quite exquisite in English. Though one might wish that the dates of composition had been included in-line in the text, this is a tiny quibble; we all owe Penguin Classics a round of shots for “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.”

Last but perhaps most timely, with the Paris Olympics soon upon us, is Michael Waters’s “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports,” a deftly written and engrossing book that shows how sport has always been a lightning rod for society’s worst instincts about how to treat trans people.

Think of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and you probably picture a triumphant Jesse Owens or heiling Nazi crowds. What you might not realize is that there were athletes present whom we might now consider to be trans. If you know who to look for, there’s even a shot in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia,” the controversial cinematic record of the Games, of a German high jumper who just two years later would turn his back on women’s sport and start to live as a man.

That athlete, Heinrich Ratjen, is one of several who publicly transitioned in the mid-1930s, including the Czech runner Zdeněk Koubek and British field athlete Mark Weston, whose lives Waters traces in moving detail. Their stories are entwined here with a number of interrelated historical movements that would converge in Berlin, namely the rising prominence of women’s sports and the desire of male administrators to dictate who could compete in them. The ill-considered outcome of this confluence was a regime of invasive, dehumanizing sex testing whose horrendous impact on female athletes has yet to end. Indeed, the questions no administrator in 1936 could answer remain pertinent today: What characteristics are definitively masculine or feminine? Where on the spectrum might one draw a line? And who gets to say? “There was no real plan,” Waters writes, “just an ambient sense of panic motivated by groupthink and pseudoscience.”

Of course, many female athletes are still persecuted for their different naturally occurring characteristics. Meanwhile, the conversation around trans inclusion in sports continues to hurt trans people and to generate strong feelings. Waters treads carefully, drawing no more than a dotted line between his historical subjects, who might in any case have identified as intersex rather than trans, and the plight of present-day trans athletes. Nevertheless, he does argue that the very concept of sex testing is a fallacy, part of what he calls the “fiction that ‘men’s sports’ and ‘women’s sports’ were logical concepts.” He goes on: “Abolishing sex testing would mean acknowledging that people cannot be sorted inherently into male and female categories. And if human sex is not built on a binary, fans might start to ask: Why, then, should sports be?” It’s a radical question that demands radical answers. Something to think about during the pentathlon.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.