Customer Reviews

A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Series Q)

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This collection of essays clusters under the idea that the characteristic repetition one finds in American popular culture arrives by way of rituals of "imitation and initiation" in the lives of sexual outsiders [i.e., queers]. These essays are intelligent, provocative, even beautiful analyses of such 20th-century culture-makers as Henry James, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, David Lynch, Kenneth Anger, Maria Montez, Jack Smith, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Each essay is chattily vernacular enough to allow the reader to forget that it's academic scholarship (good for your brain) and not just plain fun. Gossipy tidbits like Cornell's fondness for Kool-Aid and little girls enliven Moon's observations of the artist's memory-saturated work. The way Moon re-homosexualizes an apparently de-homosexualized text such as the film MIDNIGHT COWBOY should inspire a wholly new approach in gay and lesbian criticism. And I thought the treatment of Charles Ludlam's and Ethyl Eichelberger's theatre, largely ignored in academic circles up to now, a fitting climax to a thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating book. A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS deserves a wide and appreciative audience. It offers an elaboration of and a correction to current understandings of the role "camp" has played in shaping contemporary American culture.