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Title: Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After by Kevin Bentley ISBN: 1-931160-08-2 Publisher: Green Candy Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Every year the same honest story
Comment: The first part of the book gives an idea about gaylife in San Francisco at the glory days. No fear of AIDS, just 'concerning' being a top or a bottom and while kissing a man flirting with the bartender.
Then death comes to town. Kevin, the author, just describes he is missing his friends and in the meanwhile is still hungry for sex.
This book has no real message. It is a dating-report of twenty years full of sex. Like a pornmovie, that makes it quite boring after a few pages. On the other hand, it is very honestly and maybe that's the reason that you will read it to the end.
Rating: 5
Summary: A dramatic, vividly portrayed, and legendary gay milieu
Comment: Kevin Bentley's remarkable memoir, Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries And After, is set in San Francisco during the late 1970s and is based on Bentley's personal diary. In 1997 he was 21 years old, bookish, exuberantly promiscuous, laughably romantic, terrified new arrival. A young gay man arrived in the "gay mecca" that was San Francisco, a place where he would stay until his fortieth year. Here detailed are the gay bars, baths, a quirky old financial district book store, a funky apartment building on Nob Hill, street fairs, and side trips to Monterey, Santa Fe, and even West Texas. But it is the stories of love, sex, self-doubt, friendship, and unapologetic partying that comprised the basic elements of the gay lifestyle that truly grab the reader's total attention. Wild Animals I Have Known is an autobiographical "picture window back through time" offering a dramatic, vividly portrayed, and legendary gay milieu.
Rating: 5
Summary: Being young and gay in San Francisco during the late-1970s
Comment: The entries that Kevin Bentley has chosen to publish from his "Polk Street Diaries" of that era are primarily about sexual adventures, often comic misadventures. Anyone who does not want to read about men having sexual encounters with men should steer away from this book. Like Renaud Camus's TRICKS from the same pre-AIDS era, or Ricardo Ramos's FLIPPING about that time in San Francisco, Bentley was finding out who the men he met were through sex: what they did, how they did it, and the places they lived. It was often the books (or the total lack of books), the recorded music (LPs then),, and the artifacts in a trick's room or apartment that made incompatibility obvious.
"Getting laid" was a focus then and there for gay men (and for most young men most of the time in other eras and locales). However, it was necessary to make a living to have a place to live and to pay bar cover charges (and, perchance, to eat, bhough that was a low priority at the time). The gay novels of Manhattan/Provincetown/Fire Island sex, drugs, and disco elide this, leaving readers to guess how the characters acquired money. Something I particularly appreciate in Bentley's book is his chronicling the difficulty of making a living. It also chronicles what the Swedish investigator Benny Henriksson dubbed "the risk factor of love" (reducing "promiscuity" and having unprotected sex with an HIV-infected partner).
Like the fictional inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane, Bentley paid no attention to politics (gay, HIV-prevention, or any other kind). Less sexually adventurous than Bentley, and writing in a "family newspaper," Armistead Maupin in his well-known "tales" only hint at what life was like for gay men during "the golden age of promiscuity." Written at the time (though culled recently), these diary entries tells it like it was--without apologies, without shame, and without the chauvinism of "lgtb pride."
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Title: Boyfriends from Hell: True Tales of Tainted Lovers, Disastrous Dates, and Love Gone Wrong by Kevin Bentley ISBN: 1931160147 Publisher: Green Candy Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Best Gay Erotica 2003 by Michael Rowe, Richard Labonte ISBN: 1573441627 Publisher: Cleis Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Dirt Peddler by Dorien Grey ISBN: 1879194724 Publisher: GLB Publishers Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Common Sons by Ronald Donaghe ISBN: 0595097081 Publisher: Writers Club Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Last Summer by Michael Thomas Ford ISBN: 0758204051 Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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