Books section: Metro Weekly

Benign Fun

Writer, performer, activist Tania Katan pulls back the cancer curtain

Published on November 10, 2011, 4:34am

Cancer may not be the funniest thing in the world. It's probably not even in your Top 10. But when cancer happens to a funny person, humor finds a way. ''I'm using humor as a lens to enter a world that is uncomfortable,'' explains Tania Katan, who at 40 has already faced down breast cancer – twice – and proactively had her ovaries removed due to genetic inclination for certain cancers. She grants, however, that there may be the rare ...[more]

Photo Quality

A new book illustrates a range of genuine gay men across America

Published on November 3, 2011, 3:54am

Things have a way of serendipitously knocking Scott Pasfield off course. Or, perhaps, back on course. In 1994, it was the avalanche out West that buried him under a foot of snow. He crawled out with a new direction in life and a commitment to turn his passion for photography into a career. He moved to New York and made that dream come true. The more-recent course correction was far less dangerous. He also seems a little sheepish about admitting ...[more]

Religious Enrichment

Jay Michaelson argues that gay people enrich religion

Published on October 19, 2011, 11:44pm

Jay Michaelson thought coming out would spell the end of his religious life. He was wrong. It became a new beginning. ''I really thought that God wanted me to lie and hide and repress who I was,'' says the Conservative Jewish-raised Michaelson, who came out 15 years ago while in his mid-20s. Rather than reject religion, Michaelson made it his mission to push back against religious intolerance and hostility. Michaelson's new book, God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, ...[more]

Montgomery Co. Mensch

Wayne Hoffman returns to his suburban roots for his new novel

Published on September 16, 2011, 3:35pm

In his 2006 novel, Hard, Wayne Hoffman presented a gay 1990s Manhattan struggling to strike a balance between ''safer sex'' and ''sex positive.'' With his new novel, Sweet Like Sugar, Hoffman presents a more intimate – though far less explicit – tale, as young, gay Benji and elderly widower Rabbi Jacob Zuckerman find common ground in their humanity. ''Hard is much less autobiographical, but with so many real details,'' Hoffman says of his earlier novel, whose setting is familiar to ...[more]

Book It

The Center toasts LGBT literature on Saturday

Published on August 4, 2011, 7:08am

''It's so rare these days that we have the opportunity to celebrate LGBT literature,'' says David Mariner of The Center, D.C.'s LGBT community center. ''We've seen so many of the LGBT bookstores close down in recent years.'' Under Mariner's direction, The Center will launch its inaugural OutWrite Book Fair this Saturday, Aug. 6. It's part of The Center's growing arts program, and builds on the regular OutWrite author events The Center has hosted over the past couple years. The fair ...[more]

Auntie Hero

Family bond leads to OutWrite event at The Center

Published on May 12, 2011, 1:00am

At first glance, the upcoming OutWrite ''Pioneers'' event at The Center, the area's LGBT community center, is already substantial, celebrating re-releases of two powerful books: From the Closet to the Courts by Ruth Simpson, originally published in 1976, and Unbought and Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm, originally published in 1970. Adding to heft of this pioneering prose, however, is the connection that the editor of these re-releases has to one of the authors. Actually, it's really editor Scott Westbrook Simpson's relationship ...[more]

Unorthodox Material

Miryam Kabakov's new anthology features first-person narratives from queer Orthodox Jewish women

Published on October 13, 2010, 10:29pm

Miryam Kabakov's new anthology features first-person narratives from queer Orthodox Jewish women In his writings, the influential 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides speaks of a group of women. He tells men in his community, ''You shouldn't let your wives go in to visit with them, and you shouldn't let them go visit your wives.'' In other words, stay away from non-heterosexual women. ''I was ecstatic to read that,'' says Miryam Kabakov, a queer Jewish scholar. ''This was the first time ...[more]

The Atwood Anomaly

The acclaimed author comes to Lisner

Published on October 29, 2009, 12:00am

For the novice, mention of Canadian author Margaret Atwood likely conjures thoughts of The Handmaid's Tale, her 1985 novel of an America at war with itself, with right-wing Christians governing the Republic of Gilead with a sort of repression Pat Robertson could only dream of. You might have to know her work a bit better to have read her response to police raids on gay bathhouses in Toronto decades ago: ''What do the police have against cleanliness?'' Somewhere between those ...[more]

Bundle of Grief

Andrea Askowitz's 'Miserable, Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy'

Published on September 18, 2008, 12:00am

For the first few months of her pregnancy, Andrea Askowitz didn't know what was wrong. ''I just felt really anxious and angry and just not myself at all,'' says the 40-year-old Miami resident and author of My Miserable, Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy. Andrea Askowitz ''Like my best friend wanted to come over... and I was like, 'God, I cant be around you, I have to fart,''' she says with a laugh. ''I just hated everybody and everything.'' Turns out, Askowitz was ...[more]

Jordan Airs

Actor and author Leslie Jordan joins Gay Men's Chorus of Washington's 2008 Spring Affair

Published on May 15, 2008, 12:00am

In the early 1990s, long before taking on the role of Karen's sassy rival, Beverley Leslie, on Will & Grace, or Brother Boy in Sordid Lives, Emmy Award-winning actor Leslie Jordan was reaching under his bed for inspiration among the hundreds of journals he's written since his youth in Chattanooga, Tenn. He was crafting his first one-man show. Leslie Jordan ''I keep them under my bed, because I always thought when I was a kid that that's where the monsters ...[more]

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