Backward Glances : Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: A truly interesting, intelligent, and readable meditation on gay male culture from the mid 19th century to the present. Jargon-free, wide-ranging in its use of sources, and both sensitive and informed in its use of history. Turner takes on issues of great interest to anyone curious about queer history and theory, and he presents his ideas in a way that is enjoyable and informative. This scholarly and accessible book is almost the direct opposite of the leaden and incoherent prose being marketed by so many these days under the name of "queer theory."

Rating:
Summary: Academic and Drained of Sex
Review: In Backward Glances by Mark W. Turner, queer (a too lengthy discussion of why "queer" and not "gay" erupts in the middle of the book, which is a relief from the even lengthier discussion of a flaneur, by way of Baudelaire) cruising in the streets of New York and London is drained of sex. This is a fairly passionless treatise in general that is short on historical content but waist deep in literary references, although often not to cruising but to an examination of queering urban spaces in a far more general sense. The discussion on Walt Whitman is often inciteful and interesting but veers off topic as Whitman's influence on more recent gay artists is presented. This is a intelligent, academic, often dull piece that never brings the reader a sense of history as actual events take a backstage to literary and artistic representations.