Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)
*Starred Review* For this collection of 40 interviews, Gambone traveled the nation for two years, talking with LGBTQ people to repudiate a “portrait of our community that . . . is often a sadly impoverished one” and “to open up a wider panorama than the tiny, cramped window that currently looks out onto LGBTQ America.” Comic Kate Clinton, interested in occupying “the radical middle” of the sociopolitical spectrum when interviewed in 1993, has reflected and encouraged change in this country with her increasingly political material; she regards what she does as “a sacred opportunity.” National Book Award–winning poet Mark Doty explores and expands his main themes of exile and loss in poems that “confront the . . . way things unravel, dissolve” and recently includes gay content that doesn't necessarily take center stage; he dislikes the notion that there's a right way to write gay: “We did not go through a great struggle for liberation . . . for someone to tell us how to be gay.” Further interviews with politicians Barney Frank and Hillary Goodridge (a major force in legalizing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts), with Stephin Merritt, “the Sondheim of indie rock,” and with more than 30 others blow fresh air through that big picture window of Gambone's. --Whitney Scott