Book Marks
by Richard Labonte
May 18, 2009

Shaming the Devil, by G. Winston James. Top Ten Press, 160 pages, $14.95 paper.

James, with two poetry collections to his credit, brings a poet’s ear for resonance, a poet’s eye for detail and a poet’s voice for characters to his first book of fiction, a dozen powerful, unflinching stories depicting a black gay cultural and sexual landscape. In “Rahen,” a desperately lovelorn schoolboy lusts for both a star athlete and a best friend; in “The Embrace,” a hesitant young man opens himself to gay sexual variety; in “Sick Days,” a 42-year-old man with a graduate degree and a Fortune 100 day job finds himself in a holding cell when he’s charged with public lewdness for subway sexual pickups; and in “Confining Rooms” – crafted with rhythmic Southern black dialect: “I on’t go to school no more…on’t nobody wanna hire you if you black” – a high school dropout with a devoted girlfriend is enthralled by a boy whose sexual suggestiveness both arouses and terrifies him. On one level a collection of same-sex loving erotica, James’ stunning, vulnerable stories also consider issues of racism, class and violence with clear-eyed candor.

Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-‘70s. He can be reached in care of this publication or at BookMarks@qsyndicate.com.

Top Pen Press is proud to announce that on Sunday, May 17, 2009 G. Winston James was inducted into the Saints and Sinners Literary Hall of Fame along with authors Jim Duggins, Michael Thomas Ford, Radclyffe and Jess Wells.

G. Winston James Displays Hall of Fame Plaque

Past years’ inductees have included Dorothy Allison, Ann Bannon, Maureen Brady, Patrick Califia, Mark Doty, Katherine V. Forrest, Nancy Garden, Jewelle Gomez, Jim Grimsley, Tara Hardy, Ellen Hart, Kenneth Holditch, Joan Larkin, Lee Lynch, William J. Mann, Stephen McCauley, Val McDermid, Tim Miller, Felice Picano, J.M. Redmann, David Rosen, Steven Saylor, Carol Seajay, and Patricia Nell Warren.