In the Book Pages this week, Kevin Barry talks about John Lennon, Michael Waters discusses “The Other Olympians” and more.
, the Booker Award-nominated Irish author whose terrific new book, “The Heart in Winter,” is a Western set in Montana circa 1891.
“The Heart in Winter” and “Beatlebone,” as well as his other books such as the wonderful “Night Boat to Tangier,” are in stores now. John Lennon’s22 years later, Kevin Barry found the key to a novel he’d long meant to write These efforts actually trace back to 1936, the year that a prominent Czech sprinter named Zdeněk Koubek publicly transitioned gender and, after his career in women’s track, began living as a man. Koubek’s story was well received by the public, and he became a global celebrity, traveling to New York to perform on Broadway and to Paris to dance with Josephine Baker. People were just curious to understand how a gender transition like his was possible.
Today, gender surveillance policies are still a feature of elite sports, but I argue in the book that perhaps we didn’t have to get to this point. In the 1930s, the public seemed ready to have a nuanced conversation about how male and female categories are imperfect. Shilts wrote this in an emergency, and I admired his ability to make the systems of power and oppression that kept politicians from taking AIDS seriously so legible. This book also helped show me who my queer elders were and what they had been through—something I think all young queer people should be encouraged to do.I wrote a lot of the early pages on my phone, in the Notes app.
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