Galley Girl: Transgender Editon

an style='font-weight: bold'>TRANSGENDER SPLENDOR:
They don’t make transsexuals like they used to. Aleshia Brevard (born Alfred Brevard) joined a transgender support group, thinking it would be helpful. But Brevard underwent her own sex-change operation back in 1962, when only a few people had undergone the then-gaspably painful surgery. Contemporary transsexual America is a different story. "Maybe there’s just a generation gap," muses Brevard, 63, the author of "The Woman I Was Not Born To Be" (Temple). "Where I felt it important to learn about makeup and walking and sitting and talking, none of that was really important [to the group]. The attitude very much seemed to be, people need to accept us as we are. And I have difficulty with that, because I’m from another school entirely. Perhaps this is old hat, but I did feel, and do feel, that I was joining a sorority, and that I needed therefore to understand the history and the rules and what was expected of women in general. There is a political movement that has totally left me in the dust."

Brevard tells the story of her fabulous life, including her childhood as a feminine boy, her pre-surgery years as a 20-year-old drag queen at San Francisco’s world-famous nightclub Finocchio’s, and her much-married (three times) adulthood. And of course, she tells the story of her $2,500 operation. Looking back to the early years, Brevard says "The transsexuals that I met at that time — and there were just a handful — were very feminine. They all wanted the same thing. We were misguided, but we wanted to get married and live this very normal heterosexual life. Only after I got there did I realize..." Brevard laughs. She has no plans to walk down the aisle anytime soon. "Never again! They’d have to hit me in the head — and most have. I’m not interested at all. I don’t even date." Brevard’s life is a great story, a spellbinding documentary waiting to happen. Filmmakers, send us a message and we’ll hook you up.

DOG DAYS:
"Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd," a character explains in the first of eleven stories by Ana Menéndez (Grove; May). All of the stories speak of the attempts of immigrants to create new lives in the U.S. Says PW, "Menéndez’s voice, falling somewhere in between the slangy eloquence of Junot Díaz and Dagoberto Gilb and the lyrical exuberance of Sandra Cisneros and Esmeralda Santiago, is a welcome addition to the chorus of Latino fiction writers." Author tour.

THE READ BARON:
PW says that Baron Baptiste is known as "the king of American yoga." He’s certainly the king of the cash register. PW says that Simon & Schuster’s trade paperback division just "shelled out well into seven figures for a two-book deal embracing North American, audio and first serial."

LIBERAL ARTS:
Why do an ever-increasing number of Americans distrust the government? Why has the government come to be seen as the source of many problems, rather than the solution? In November, Yale will publish "The Strange Death of American Liberalism" by Texas A & M history professor H.W. Brands. Brands is the author of "T.R.: The Last Romantic" and "The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin."

THE HONEYMOONERS:
PW is gaga about "Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale" by Chuck Kinder (Farrar, Straus; June), giving it a starred review. "An exuberant, raunchy romp, Kinder’s second novel (after ‘Snakehunter’) is a chronicle of two writers who share a ‘stupendous dream’ of fame and freedom in the Bay Area in the 1970s, the heyday of drugs, booze and indiscriminate sex." One of the writers is based loosely on Raymond Carver. Says PW, "If the media pick up on this book’s unusual history — its long (25 years) gestation and original length of 3,000 manuscript pages, as well as the fact that Kinder was purported one inspiration for the protagonist of Michael Chabon’s ‘Wonder Boys’ — it might garner feature as well as review coverage."

MEDIC ALERT:

Algonquin hopes to ride the current wave of W.W.II books with "The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of W.W.II" by Leo Litwak. Litwak, a retired professor from San Francisco State, is now almost 77. But he was an 18-year-old student at the University of Michigan when he joined the army in 1943 to fight in W.W.II. As a medic, he went to the front lines as a noncombatant, treating his fellow GIs as well as German enemies. Jewish. Litwak, who is Jewish, experienced raw anti-Semitism firsthand. His account of the war is honest and blunt. Not surprisingly, Litwak says that the war affected him profoundly. "In some ways, it gave me perhaps a permanent feeling of insecurity, a sense of not wanting to get too far away from safety. At the same time, it introduced me to a lot of kinds of people I never would have met. I think that’s one of the most important accomplishments of the war, that a lot of us who weren’t natural fits became comfortable with each other, and learned about each other. So even though there was a lot of bigotry and intolerance, you could see the beginning at least of a change. And I think there was a change in me as well."

BOOKEXPO AMERICA:
Invitations for this year’s BookExpo are cascading in. The annual industry convention will be held in Chicago from May 30 to June 3. Among this year’s authors: Naomi Wolf, Vernon Jordan, David Halberstam, Jack Welch; Wynton Marsalis; Bill O’Reilly; David McCullough; Isabel Allende; Quincy Jones; Joyce Carol Oates; Jim Lehrer; John Edgar Wideman and Sebastian Junger. If past years are any indication, BookExpo should serve as a great indication of what will be coming in the next year. We’ll be there to bring the buzz back to you.

CATNIP:
PW is surprised by "The Catsitters" by James Wolcott (HarperCollins; June 27). "Fans of Vanity Fair’s famously mordant critic might be puzzled by the rather mild tone of his first novel." Still, says PW, "Wolcott’s reputation alone will be enough to ensure reviews everywhere and brisk sales. That the novel will appeal to both male and female readers is another plus." The book is being positioned as the male counterpart to "The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing."

WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE:
PW admires "The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder" by Mark Crispin Miller (Norton; May). "Miller, an NYU professor of media studies, has fashioned a devastating compendium of President George W. Bush’s grammatical gaffes, syntactical shipwrecks, mind-boggling malapropisms and simply dumb comments. Page after page (after page) of quotations, suggests Miller, reveal that Bush is a man who, while not stupid, is prodigiously illiterate and woefully uneducated. Further, and compounding the problem, Bush could not care less about these shortcomings. How then, Miller asks, and this is his larger concern, did someone — in Miller’s opinion — so obviously unqualified to be president convince so many voters that he was? Miller’s answer is, in a word, television. Bush succeeded on TV not despite his ‘utter superficiality’ but because his superficiality blended seamlessly with the vacuous culture of the tube."