Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China

Rating:
Summary: A book everyone gay, or history major should own.
Review: Bret has demonstrated an academic book can be fun to read. It is both educational and entertaining. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: it is better to read the Chinese scholarship
Review: If you read Chinese, you can find better books. A good example is Samshasha's Zhongguo Tongxingai Shilu (Chinese Homosexual Histories), available in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Samshasha's work is much richer and more substantial. Compared to Samshasha's work, this book by Bret Hinsch is really light. By the way, Samshasha's book in its first print is published many years before Bret Hinsch. The newer version of Samshasha's book, published in late 1990s, certainly surpasses Bret Hinsch much more. If you want reliable scholarhsip, do not rely on this English book only.

Rating:
Summary: outdated already
Review: the book is problmatic. reason (1): it is outdated. it should be updated, when the lesbian and gay texts and contexts in the chinese socieites are so available now. it is dangerous to rely on the book, published in 1990, since so many major LGBT issues happened during the 1990s. (2) the methodology in the book is somehow simplified and naive. it does not read through the material thouroughly enough.
i agree that this book has its own historic value, but we need to expect more professional works on the field.
actually many good books on the field are in chinese, and they are much more reliable. interested readers should try to approach them.

Rating:
Summary: it is better to read the Chinese scholarship
Review: This delightfully accessible book on an inaccessible topic provides an appetizing read. Bejeweled with wonderful quotations which are variously elegant, erotic, bawdy, and sometimes just simply endearing, the author reviews the two thousand year literary tradition of male same-sex attraction known as the "cut sleeve" (based on a lovely story which I will not spoil by recounting). In the course of this overview, the author provides interesting evidence of the benefits to kinship groups of same-sex relationships as well as the manner in which this tradition harmonized with reproductive marriage. Lastly, he describes how this tradition was lost--though one suspects that his explanation based on western cultural influence does not do justice to indigenous circumstance.

Rating:
Summary: Best book written in English
Review: This is the best book on the history of male-love in Chinese history written in English, and Xiaomingxiong's ZHONGGUO TONGXINGAI SHILU is the best one on the same topic written in Chinese. However in both of them, even I a Japanese can indicate some omissions of important persons and famous stories.