Gay Fairy & Folk Tales: More Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men [Hardcover]

Peter Cashorali (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1997

For centuries fairy tales have been shared between friends, using gentle humor and irony to teach life lessons, and Cashorali's charming tales, contemporized for a sophisticated audience, unite traditional stories with social, psychological, and cultural issues in today's gay community. Characters within them learn to come out and be proud of who they are, love, trust, and help others, confront issues of aging, mortality, and HIV, learn what it means to be a caregiver, grieve, and rejoice in unexpected renewal in their lives. The thirteen stories draw on classic sources including the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Perrault, as well as tales from Irish, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian, Yiddish, Chinese, and Gypsy folklore and legend. They feature fairy tale favorites such as magical dwarves and sprites, talking animals, handsome princes, and powerful but generally misguided kings, as well as a cast of characters new to fairy tales - models and photographers, clothing designers, brawny woodcutters, sugar daddies, bestial tops and subservient bottoms, and many more.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Los Angeles author and performer Cashorali follows up his Fairy Tales with this collection of 13 fables adapted to speak to contemporary gay men. If the book's premise seems odd (do we really need a "Jack and the Penis"?), Cashorali makes us take a second look. Here are the Princes Charming and Fairy "Godmothers" kept so vigilantly out of the nursery--ready to flesh out, in a "normal" vocabulary, childhood fantasies usually treated as abnormal. Cashorali's tales assume the naturalness of men loving other men, and he treats even the most painful difficulties of gay life with delicacy, tact, humor and empathy. Not everyone will be convinced, however. Like the subjects of an enchanted photographer in "The Beauty in the Mountain of Ice," gay readers may ask, "What's so compassionate about someone finally taking a picture that really looks like me?" But the key word here is "finally," and it can be applied without reservation to Cashorali's sequel collection.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 159 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571199267
• ISBN-13: 978-0571199266
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,502,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice to hear gay themes in fairy tales, February 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Gay Fairy & Folk Tales: More Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men (Hardcover)

I liked this book. I've always had an interest in fairy tales and the different ways that various cultures tell the same stories.

What made this book nice is that it re-told the fairy tales that you heard as a child using gay characters, so that you actually felt like the stories were about you. However, some of the stories were completely new to me -- I had never heard of them.

I especially liked "The Ugly Duckling."

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Once upon a time, to tell your lover for a goodnight., October 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Gay Fairy & Folk Tales: More Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men (Hardcover)

Cashorali takes the old well known tales and shifts them the little to the pink side and makes them a little treasure, so close to gay men's lives they never were. Sometimes simple, sometimes touching, but always with that deep, eternal wisdom the original tales had as well. With "the Queer Garment", a remake of "the emperors new clothing", he adds a refined ending to the plot and it seems as if he tells the true story, one Hans Christian Andersen never dared to tell.