Heartlands: A Gay Man's Odyssey Across America

Rating:
Summary: Too long, overwritten, but important
Review: Yates Rist has taken the classic American genre of the literary road trip and transformed it into an intimate portrait of the true diversity that describes the American "gay community" of men. The author is on a deeply felt quest to locate what connects one gay man to another. If he never finds his own personal grail--for, as he learns, we are all individuals, and "community" is determined by many, many factors--he does offer the reader an abundance of well-observed depictions of gay men far outside the now-traditional gay male urban world. While "Heartlands" is an important sociological text and an often moving memoir, its length and writing style indicate a lack of rigorous editing. Yates Rist writes quite lyrically, and his descriptions of the natural beauty of this country are often inspiring, but all too frequently there is page after page of needless mush. And there are so many men, so many descriptions of gay cowboys and Bayou boys and Eskimos and Southwestern psychics, that the overall effect is a kind of numbness. The book itself becomes promiscuous in its presentation of men: each seems interesting at the time but after awhile they all blur together, leaving the reader with the overall impression of an overlong, somewhat flabby book. This is a shame, for its message of respecting and encouraging true diversity rather than prepackaged, niche-marketed identity-boxes is more necessary today than ever.