Queer spirits : a gay men's myth book

W. Roscoe

Award-winning author (The Zuni Man-Woman) and spearhead of the gay men's spirituality movement in the U.S., Roscoe has assembled and annotated a diverse, sometimes irritating, sometimes involving collection of poems, stories and myths that either explicitly or implicitly engage archetypal gay experience. Some of his choices are intriguing and amusing-Hans Christian Andersen's ``The Ugly Duckling'' becomes in context a fable of coming out. Classical figures-Ganymede, Hyacinthus, Endymion-are admirably well represented, as are figures from Native American myth. The ``two-spirit'' of Zuni mythology is an empowered ``third gender'' figure that Roscoe presents as a positive alternative to the Oedipal narrative of the homosexual's genesis. Less satisfactory are Roscoe's annotations, many of which are self-indulgently autobiographical; one can't help wondering if the book sometimes blurs the distinction between what is personally meaningful and what is genuinely archetypal [From Publishers Weekly].