Reading 2019: A catholicity of interests

  NEW WESTMINSTER—The last time I posted a blog about my previous year’s reading (2016), the list was comprised of eleven books written by men. All but four of the authors were white, and the top two have since been “cancelled.” (The first, already in hot water for profiting from dubious claims to Indigenous ancestry, was Joseph Boyden; the second, two years before publishing a self-exculpatory essay by serial sex abuser Jian Gomeshi in The New York Review…

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The perils of nostalgia

    Five or six years ago, around the time I was turning fifty, I joked with some friends that if I ever wrote a memoir (apart from The Rice Queen Diaries, that is) I would call it When We Were Twinks. Reflecting with mock wistfulness on the good old salad days, this breathless tell-all would cast a nostalgic eye on the glories of early adult gay consciousness: on the bountiful harvest of one’s sex…

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