cover image Queer Reader -Op/085

Queer Reader -Op/085

. New Press, $25 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-56584-210-6

Although the subtitle suggests that Higgins, a lecturer in history at Cambridge University, has compiled a Bartlett's for gay readers, his book is much richer than that. It focuses not on memorable one-liners (though those abound) but on sustained anecdotes from literature, biographies, lyrics, dialogue from plays and films, and so on. Ovid, Michelangelo, Whitman and others praise homosexual love, but Higgins balances the picture by also citing denouncers. Linked series of quotations create thumbnail ``biographies'' of such figures as Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden and Tennessee Williams. Chapters are organized chronologically, leading the reader from antiquity to the present: essays that begin a chapter are informed and accessible, putting the quotations that follow into historical context. This absorbing book rewards both casual and sustained attention. (Oct.)