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Across the Page: Short Stories

For some reason I have always struggled with short stories. I read to be transported to a different world, and I find that escape is often easier with a novel. The following collections, however, are filled with complex stories that are moving, engaging and absolutely transporting: Hear Us Out! Lesbian and Gay Stories of Struggle, Progress, and Hope, 1950 to the Present by Nancy Garden; The Best Short Stories ofLesléa Newman by Lesléa Newman; Come to Me by Amy Bloom.

Hear Us Out! Lesbian and Gay Stories of Struggle, Progress, and Hope, 1950 to the Present by Nancy Garden (Farrar, Straus Giroux)

From the author of the classic young adult novel Annie on My Mind comes this collection of stories thatdepict life for gay and lesbian teenagers over the last six decades. Hear Us Out! also includes essays to illustrate and explain what was happening at each moment in history.

Nancy Garden begins the book by describing her experience as a 16-year-old in the early 1950s, when she turned to Collier’s Encyclopedia to look up the word homosexuality. As expected, the definition was far from comforting. Directed to sexual pathology, she discovered that “homosexuality is commonly found in regressive mental disorders” and “psychopathic personalities.”

By the early ’70s, the American Psychiatric Association had taken homosexuality off its list of mental disorders. But as the characters in Garden’s stories show, this did not eliminate other forms of denigration: self-hatred, parental rejection, religious denunciation, schoolyard bullies, suicide and, in the ’80s, AIDS. The teens in Hear Us Out! struggle to prove their worth not only to other people but to themselves.

But it isn’t all bad. There’s also love, discovery, fortitude, determination, hope. That’s what teenagers do, right? They fall in love. They rebel. They evolve.

Garden captures all of this with stories such as “Dear Angie, Sweet Elizabeth,” about two young women in the ’50s who admit their love in a series of letters. The correspondence is interrupted by Elizabeth’s mother, but that doesn’t stop either of them from pursuing a relationship.

In “Cold Comfort,” the daughter of a preacher man refuses to believe there is anything wrong with falling in love with another girl: “[S]he had looked carefully through her Bible and had not found anyplace where Jesus himself condemned love, not even the kind of love she now understood she felt for Andrea.”

The essays in Hear Us Out! are just as interesting as the stories and provide a brief but compelling overview of LGBT history in America. Garden has also written several other books for young adults and children, including Molly’s Family and Meeting Melanie.

The Best Short Stories of Lesléa Newman by Lesléa Newman (Alyson Books)

The Best Short Stories ofLesléa Newman features stories from six of Newman’s books, including A Letter to Harvey Milk and She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not.Each collection is represented by three well-chosen stories that capture Newman’s impressive range as a writer of lesbian fiction.

Whether it is about the joys and challenges of being a lesbian parent or fighting breast cancer, Newman does not shy away from painful and delicate subjects. A significant theme in her work is the lesbian family or the “gayby” boom – what it means to be a lesbian mother (both biological and non-biological) and what it means to be a child raised by a lesbian parent.

In “Of Balloons and Bubbles,” a single woman debates whether or not to have a child. To help her with this decision, she takes her friends’ daughter out for the day. The outing is enlightening – “being a mother isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I realize” – but leaves the narrator with just as many questions, if not more.

In “Right off the Bat,” a young girl introduces herself and explains why it’s important that everyone understands that her mother is a lesbian. After recently losing her best friend as a result of this discovery (“‘Go away, my mom says I can’t talk to you anymore. Your mother’s a dyke'”), she’d rather face the rejection up front.

As with many of Newman’s stories, “Right off the Bat” is multilayered. Though it is certainly sad that this young girl is forced to defend her mother, the voice is also filled with humor (“Maybe I’ll be a nun, except my mom says Jews can’t be nuns”) and empowerment.

In the collection’s strongest story, “A Letter to Harvey Milk,” a young Jewish lesbian deals with her family’s rejection by teaching a writing course to elderly immigrants. In the class she meets Harry Weinberg, a holocaust survivor, who composes letters to Harvey Milk for an assignment.

The struggle for many of Newman’s characters is to connect and to communicate. In “A Letter to Harvey Milk,” an older man and a young woman from seemingly very different worlds offer each other the ability to do both, and in the end find redemption.

There are also some lighthearted pieces here, including “A Femme Shops Till Her Butch Drops,” about a couple who spends the day at the mall, and “Butch in Training,” which features the same couple.

The ever prolific Newman, whose name you might recognize as the writer of the pioneering children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies, is the author and editor of over 40 books, nine of which were Lambda Literary Award finalists. This collection is an excellent introduction to her work.

Lesléa Newman

Come to Me by Amy Bloom (HarperPerennial)

Nominated for a National Book Award, Amy Bloom’s Come to Me is a brilliant collection of short stories about family, friendship, loss, mental illness, sexuality and love.

Many of the characters in Come to Me struggle with how to define and establish romantic relationships. Bloom, however, does not resort to traditional or conventional love stories. As in real life, the characters here often connect lust to other revelations. In “Song of Solomon,” a mother falls in love with her obstetrician. In “Only You,” a middle-aged woman, Maria, bonds with the hairdresser who makes her feel beautiful for the first time.

In “Love Is Not a Pie,” a young woman is at her mother’s funeral reflecting back on a summer from her childhood. While staying with her parents at a lake house, she learned that her mother was having an affair. The discovery – especially the possibility that her father knew and accepted the arrangement – has haunted her for years. A conversation at the funeral with her sister offers a new understanding of the situation and of marriage itself – an understanding that forces the narrator to reconsider her own engagement.

Bloom is at her best in the trilogy “Hyacinths,” “The Sight of You” and “Silver Water.” Each story revolves around a character from the same family.

In “Hyacinths,” David, the father, recounts a childhood memory that pushed him away from Christianity and toward psychotherapy. “The Sight of You” features David’s wife, Galen, who is having an affair with Maria’s husband, Henry (from the story “Only You”). And then there’s “Silver Water,” the beautiful and unforgettable tale of David and Galen’s two daughters, one whose schizophrenia nearly destroys the family.

Bloom, the bisexual author of Away, is also a psychotherapist. In these stories she reveals and examines the complexities inherent in a range of relationships. Rather than judge, she cares about her characters – the good, the bad and the ugly – and it is impossible not to do the same.

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