A Great Gay Book: Stories of Growth, Belonging, and Other Queer Possibilities

Artist Fitzgibbon debuts with an insightful collection of essays, interviews, fiction, and artwork from Hello Mr., a queer magazine he founded in 2013, which ran for 10 issues before shuttering in 2018. Highlights include an interview between novelists Garth Greenwell and Hanya Yanagihara about how gay life has been sanitized in popular culture for the sake of “acceptance and visibility” and the challenges of pushing those boundaries in art; musician Ben French’s rich, ecstatic “Slutboys,” which celebrates gay sex (“Turn up for the holy glory only found in dive bar glory holes”); and “Blurry Soles,” in which journalist Mathew Rodriguez draws surprisingly tender links between his foot fetish and his anxieties about having diabetes. “The prospect of losing your foot when you have a foot fetish is, I guess, nature’s little homophobic joke,” Rodriguez quips, then reminds himself that “what makes gay sex great” is its embrace of “parts that other people might turn away.” The stylistically diverse contributions are linked by a preoccupation with the question of whether increased mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ people must come at the expense of what makes the community unique. It’s an illuminating snapshot of the changing face of queerness. Photos. (May)