Diversity Book Club

January 10: Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods - My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine
by Noelle Howey

If the only time you think you've seen a transsexual is on the Jerry Springer show, Noelle Howey's thoughtful, funny memoir of her suburban childhood with a cross-dressing dad may leave you wondering where all the fireworks are. The first half of Dress Codes is like anyone's story of parental neglect. “I had a dad possibly like yours,” Howey explains, “sullen, sporadically hostile, frequently vacant.” It was her loving mother who eventually confided her father's secret when Howey was 15, by which time it came as a relief that the remoteness, the drinking, the mood swings were not the young Noelle's fault, but the result of her father's constantly stifled “yearning for angora.” Although the early chapters are interesting, Dress Codes really takes off at the halfway point, when her father realized he was not a heterosexual male transvestite, but a woman. His sexual transition, and the family's awkward adjustment to it — including the author's inability in high school to keep any secret aside from this One Big Secret — is written with warmth and insight, and colored with a lonely girl's lingering disappointment.

February 14: Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein

In this transfixing memoir, Bernstein, a freelance writer, and Schein, a filmmaker, take turns recounting the story of how each woman, at age 35, discovered she had an identical twin sister, and the reunion that followed. Despite disparate upbringings, education and work experiences, the twins share matching wild hand gestures, allergies, speech patterns and a penchant for the same art movies. Louise Wise Services, the adoption agency, will reveal only that their biological mother was schizophrenic and unaware of who their father was. Records of the study the agency conducted about them are sealed, so the authors spearhead their own research project by poring over birth records, tracking down their birth mother's brother and interviewing researchers, who claim that twins raised apart are more similar than those raised together. Much of the book is devoted to fascinating stories of other twins and triplets who, when reunited as adults, are shocked by how much they have in common with one another. Bernstein and Schein's relationship becomes extremely close and also fraught with expectation. Once you find someone, Bernstein writes, you can't unfind her.

March 13: The Meadowlark Sings
by Helen Ruth Schwartz

“A strong America . . . A STRAIGHT America” — ??? The year is 2008, and the great earthquake that had been predicted for decades hit California. Approximately 40 miles east of the coastline, the earthquake created a chasm that quickly filled with the raging waters from the Pacific. A piece of land that was once the west coast of California was now separated from the mainland of the United States by the newly formed body of water. An island had been born. America's right-wing elite formed a plan: the newly created island would be a modern gulag — a place to which sexual undesirables would be shipped, never (they hoped) to be heard from again. There would be no relationship between the new island and the United States; such was the strength of the “righteous” fear of homosexuality. By 2112, the religious right has affected an awful change in America's moral climate. The United States has become a place where any gay or lesbian adult is given a clear choice: conform to new, viciously repressive sexuality laws, or — exile. And for the youngest citizens, there is no choice. Any child found to carry the newly discovered and much-feared “gay gene” in his or her DNA is put on a ship before reaching three years of age — banished, forever, from US shores. But they forgot that gays and lesbians have brains, skills, and passion. On their island they built a new country, and called it Cali. In the gorgeous Southern California climate they pooled their resources, shared their knowledge and skills, learned to live together. And the best of them worked to form a new government — a society where all citizens of the new nation lived in freedom, without oppression, where productivity was rewarded and participation was encouraged. Quite naturally, human ingenuity, unfettered, brought progress. When it became known that citizens of Cali are living longer, healthier lives than citizens of most countries, the rest of the world wanted to know why. And because of world interest, for the first time, a delegate from Cali was invited to participate in an international conference on aging, held in New York City. Meet Cara Romero — the youngest member of Cali's Prime Minister's cabinet. Chosen for her winning combination of youthful enthusiasm, expertise in the field of aging, and political savvy, Cara — 32, blond, and quite attractive — departs on an unforgettable journey no one from her country has ever made: to a hostile United States, on a mission to share knowledge (but with a hidden agenda of her own). In the States, she meets Jessica Mooran, the sultry, dark-haired, genetically “straight” daughter of the President, and the two women fall in love. How can this be? And what has become of the American woman who was once the great love of Cali's Prime Minister, Miriam Ekstrom? Cara must discover all of this, and more, before time runs out, in The Meadowlark Sings.

In this groundbreaking work, historian and scholar Rediker considers the relationships between the slave ship captain and his crew, between the sailors and the slaves, and among the captives themselves as they endured the violent, terror-filled and often deadly journey between the coasts of Africa and America. While he makes fresh use of those who left their mark in written records (Olaudah Equiano, James Field Stanfield, John Newton), Rediker is remarkably attentive to the experiences of the enslaved women, from whom we have no written accounts, and of the common seaman, who he says was a victim of the slave trade...and a victimizer. Regarding these vessels as a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory, Rediker expands the scholarship on how the ships not only delivered millions of people to slavery, [but] prepared them for it. He engages readers in maritime detail (how ships were made, how crews were fed) and renders the archival (letters, logs and legal hearings) accessible. Painful as this powerful book often is, Rediker does not lose sight of the humanity of even the most egregious participants, from African traders to English merchants.

May 8: Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides

For the first fourteen years of life, Calliope Helen Stephanides, the narrator and main character of this second novel from the author of The Virgin Suicides, is a coltish schoolgirl, the bright, coddled daughter of a hard-working Greek family who own a chain of hotdog stands in Detroit. But for Calliope, the transformations of puberty do not consist of the usual ripening of womanly curves, but rather the solid musculature, husky voice and nascent mustache of shocking, unsuspected manhood. Named for the muse of epics—of which this wonderful comic novel is surely a modern version—Calliope is the rarest form of hermaphrodite. "Like Tiresias," she explains, "I was first one thing and then the other."

The author of the internationally syndicated column “Savage Love” brings much-needed humor, and a reality check, to the bitter gay-marriage debate with this polemical memoir. As Savage (Skipping Towards Gomorrah) and his boyfriend, Terry, neared their 10th anniversary, Savage's mother put on the pressure for them to get married. But, Savage notes, there were several other points to consider before deciding to tie the knot: among them, the fact that marriage doesn't provide legal protection in Washington State; Terry prefers tattoos as a sign of commitment; and their six-year-old son declared that only men and women can get married. Furthermore, Savage himself worried that the relationship would be jinxed by anything more permanent than a big anniversary bash, though the one they plan quickly assumes the proportions and price of a wedding reception. While documenting the couple's wobble toward a decision, Savage skewers ideologues, both pro– and anti–gay marriage, with his radical pragmatism. Disproving Tolstoy's dictum that “happy families are all alike,” he takes a sharp-eyed, compassionate look at matrimony as it is actually practiced by friends, his raucously affectionate family and even medieval Christians. When he explains to his son what marriage is really about, you want to stand up and cheer, and the surprise ending is both hilarious and a tear-jerker. As funny as David Sedaris's essay collections, but bawdier and more thought-provoking, this timely book shows that being pro-family doesn't have to mean being anti-gay.