Hit your favorite independent book shop this season to find the perfect gift for everyone on your list. PASSPORT has assembled an eclectic shelf of suggestions for a range of recipients: Pop culture stans, romantic souls, sophisticated intellectual adventurers, and travel fanatics.
—Jim Gladstone
HOLIDAY POP
Frank DeCaro Disco: Music, Movies and Mania under the Mirror Ball
If the soundtrack of your ideal holiday party evokes silver balls and the Hustle more than silver bells and tinsel, share that hopped up Yuletide vibe with loved ones by giving them Frank DeCaro’s throwback opus, Disco: Music, Movies and Mania under the Mirror Ball (Rizzoli. $55. frankdecaro.com). DeCaro, the pop culture maven whose prior books include the classic Gen X queer memoir A Boy Named Phyllis and who spent six years reading film for filth as a dishy critic on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, spins the splendid story of disco’s emergence from New York’s gay, black, and Latino communities into a multimedia juggernaut that dominated the 1970s and paved the way for EDM and much of today’s popular music. An inveterate packrat, both in his home and his head, DeCaro lays out a fabulous hoard of anecdotes, vintage interviews, and visual ephemera from the disco era in this coffee table tome. Among the book’s trivial treasures: A detailed catalog of disco-themed special episodes of network television series, from Barnaby Jones and Wonder Woman to What’s Happenin’? and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour; conversations with Grace Jones, Donna Summer, and Thelma Houston; and a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the movie that helped unmake disco’s dominance: Can’t Stop the Music, which starred The Village People and the era’s most beloved Olympian, a fellow by the name of Bruce Jenner. Full of fond memories for older readers and kitschtastic discoveries for younger ones, this is one of the year’s greatest gay gift books.
Cher A Memoir Part One
Not to be out-diva’d by her sister in song and cinema Barbra Streisand, whose Yellow Pages-thick reminiscence weighed down last year’s sleigh, the one and only Cher delivers the first installment of a two volume lookback, Cher: The Memoir, Part One (Dey Street Books. $36. cher.com). The book recounts young Cherilyn Sarkisian’s early days, including a grammar school production of Oklahoma! in which she played male roles and sang their low vocal parts, dropping out at 16, joining forces with Sonny Bono (and Phil Spector), and the personally and professionally tumultuous Sonny & Cher years. With Gene Simmons, Gregg Allman, movie stardom, and iconic status still ahead, readers will be chomping at the bit for the release of part two, hopefully for next summer’s beach reading rather than a full year away. (We’re predicting a deluxe paperback boxed set for Christmas 2025).
ISN’T IT ROMANTIC?
Chad Beguelin Showmance
Six-time Tony nominee Chad Beguelin, best known as a book and lyric writer for musicals including Aladdin, Elf, and The Prom, makes a smooth page-to-stage transition with his first novel, the charming romantic comedy Showmance (Penguin Books. $19. chadbeguelin.com). While the book’s unimaginative title (see also: The Prom) falls flat, the text effervesces, as Beguelin draws on his own expertise to tell the tale of Noah Adams, a would-be stage composer, whose Broadway debut, an ill-advised update of King Lear set on a space station, gets so clobbered by critics that its opening and closing night become one and the same. That fateful evening is also marked by Noah’s father’s heart attack, which sends him (and his pretentious boyfriend/agent) flying to back to the midwestern town where he grew up. The son of taciturn farmer dad and a daffy but dear casserole-making mother, Beguelin has a field day poking fun at flyover country cuisine, exemplified by Snickers salad made with chopped candy bars and apple slices. There’s a comforting familiarity to most of the book’s familiar beats: Noah meets up with Luke, the jock former classmate jock he blames for his childhood bullying, the local community theater wants to re-fly the jettisoned Lear, that boyfriend/agent has a secret twink side piece. Noah’s past helps him work out his present, then ushers him toward a bright future with a new beau (guess who?). What makes the book stand out among its Red, White, and Royal Blue ilk is a couple of clever plot turns that aren’t entirely telegraphed and loads of musical theater jokes, including a basketful of Easter eggs that will be missed by all but hardcore Broadway babies. The sex scenes are sweet and intentionally tame, making the book appropriate for all ages: It’s chosen family-friendly, a great gift for teenage nephews and nieces, queer or not.
Edmund White The Loves of my Life
Gay eminence Edmund White, now 84, continues his lifelong streak of prolificity and profligacy with a memoir whose sub- title hits like an undercut, philosophically: The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (Bloomsbury. $27.99. bloomsbury.com). Ever the provocateur, White pushes back against prudery, and challenges readers to consider how they define some rather important terms. In a foreword, he writes: “I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered to them—for me it would be thousands of sex partners.” Whilst wondering “What is love?” readers will enjoy juicy anecdotes from White’s fruit- filled life (not to mention a handful of hetero efforts). From call boys with hearts of gold, lead, and every element in between, to a “”sweet but tiresome slave” who was “almost inert” in bed, to “the great love of my life” who we learn had a large penis “which slanted off to one side” (how discrete not to share whether it pointed right or left!); White writes with both wry distance and still-resounding pleasure. Having lived balls-deep in gay sex for the past seven decades, White enriches his spicy dish with real insight about the cultural and attitudinal shifts within (and about) the gay community over the course of his lifetime. Here’s one for somebody who’s naughty and nice.
QUEER COMPLEXITY
Ricky Ian Gordon Seeing Through the Chronicle of Sex Drug and Opera
You needn’t be familiar with the work of composer Ricky Ian Gordon to be drawn in by the gravity of his stunning memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $32. rickyiangordon.com). But after reading it, you will be able to listen to his works, among them adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath and Langston Hughes’ poetry, and any other music, for that matter, with fresh ears. Alongside harrowing tales of being bullied and abused in childhood, suffering near-paralyzing neuroses and anxiety, losing his partner to AIDS, and having dangerous dalliances with drugs and alcohol, dating back to an acid trip at age 12, Gordon, now 67, writes beautifully and movingly about music. Whether eloquently pulling the reader into his own creative process, or rhapsodizing at length about other artists’ work (Gordon’s passionate exegesis of Joni Mitchell’s oeuvre is a crash course in both listening skills and extreme fandom), he writes with a beautiful reckless verve. From the execrable to the exalted, Gordon’s life moves in zigzagging extremes, but music remains his constant, his life raft, his infinite balm.
A Great Gay Book
Rescued from the Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover (or even its title) Department comes A Great Gay Book: Stories of Growth, Belonging, and Other Queer Possibilities (Abrams. $50. agreatgaybook.com). This collection, with a studiously plain black-and-white cover design that evokes a bland self-help volume, almost begs you to ignore it at first glance. But turn the hefty volume on its side and you’ll notice the shimmering metallic ink prism printed on the edges of its pages. Crack it open to find a vivid pink ribbon bookmark bound to its heart: This object’s ingenious physical design tells a coming out story on its own. Within you’ll find a similarly brilliant compendium of writing and art from a Who’s Who of contemporary gay creatives. Jeremy Atherton Lin, Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, Bryan Washington, Ocean Vuong, Hanya Yanagihara and Brontez Purnell are among the esteemed contributors, all writers who have all received high praise in this column in recent years. Also highlighted are works by visual artists photographers, painters, and comics illustrators, all elegantly interspersed with a mix of poems, essays, and interviews. Most of the pieces here were originally published in the brainy queer magazine Hello Mr., which, in its short ten-issue existence (2012-2018) under the deft hand of editor Ryan Fitzgibbon (who also oversaw this book), had an outsized impact. Passed hand-to-hand among a high-flown community of intellectual inverts, it was a sexuality-centered publication that brought truth to the fib straight men used to tell about Playboy: “I read it for the articles.”
TRAVEL INSPIRATION
Travis Elborough Atlas of Forgotten Places
Give a bookshelf full of possibilities to the most adventurous explorer in your life. Now in handsome new paperback editions, the Unexpected Atlases series by Travis Elborough (Aurum Press. $15 each. traviselborough.co.uk) introduces readers to some of the world’s most offbeat locales. The 40 sites in Atlas of Forgotten Places: Journeys to Abandoned and Deserted Destinations Around the Globe range from the cathedral-like preserved sections of the Crystal Palace subway, a Victorian-era network of pedestrian passageways in London; to the ghost town remains of Santa Claus, Arizona, once a tourist attraction where Christmas was celebrated year round. Atlas of the Unexpected might prompt a visit to Free Christiana, the hippie, trippy squatter city within Copenhagen, Denmark. And Atlas of Vanishing Places introduces the likes of the Old Adaminaby ruins, where an Australian town was intentionally destroyed by flooding to create a reservoir. Lively, fact-packed texts, photographs, and original maps will be catnip for curious voyagers.
Cecilia Blomdahl’s Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole
After a hectic holiday season, it’s not unusual to long for a bit of solitude, a getaway, some peace and quiet. You can briefly simulate all of the above by sinking into a comfortable chair with a copy of Cecilia Blomdahl’s Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole (DK Publishing. $32. ceciliablomdahl.com). Blomdahl, 34, who grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden moved to this year-round winter wonderland on a lark, intending to stay for just the three months of a temporary restaurant gig. Nine years later, she’s still there, living in a cabin with her partner and pooch, sur- rounded by glaciers, ice floes, and polar bears. Now an Arctic influencer, she has millions of followers on social media, largely folks who pop into her corner of the internet for an escape from the rest of the web’s frantic pace. Perusing Blomdahl’s photographs of her tiny town of 3,000 people and its vast uninhabited archipelago of snowburbs feels like taking a long, deep breath (surely Svalbard is more meditative on the page than in person, with its months of winter darkness, 24/7 sun in summer, and the ever present threat of both polar bears and global warming). Ironically, Blohmdahl’s social feeds have generated a bit of a tourist boom in her neck of the woods, so if you’re looking for soothing seclusion, the pristine vistas in her book may now be more effective, and certainly more convenient, than the real thing.
Rowan Jacobsen’s Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul
No holiday season would feel complete without sweets, but in lieu of cakes or candies, why not give a bonbon of a book. Rowan Jacobsen’s Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul (Bloomsbury. $28.99. rowanjacobsen.com) is a fascinating Indiana Jones meets Willy Wonka adventure. Traveling deep into the Amazon rainforest and through- out Central America, Jacobsen discovers non-corporate cacao, learning how chocolate has been an important cultural and ritual element of human societies since long before Milton Hershey wandered the earth. A witty, engaging writer, Jacobsen not only explores with a naturalist’s curiosity, but feels with an advocate’s passion; We’re missing out on the wide range of diverse- ly delicious chocolate when we treat it as a uniform commodity, and at the same time doing irrevocable damage to indigenous communities. He imagines a world in which the flavor spectrum of single origin chocolate is savored and appreciated similarly to coffee and wine. What’s good for the planet is good for all of us.
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