One of the finds at Pulp bookshop in Montreal on my last visit was Alice Friedman’s QUEER MODERNS: MAX EWING’S JAZZ AGE NEW YORK. Max Ewing (1903-34) was a writer/photographer/ man-about-town from Pioneer, Ohio who moved to New York City in 1923, was mentored by Carl Van Vechten, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance to, got to know everyone in that intersection of black/white/queer/arts/bohemia/Paris/New York/ Harlem, and photographed and wrote about them privately. He committed suicide, just past the age of thirty, at the height of the Depression after the death of his ailing parents when he was forced back to Ohio and couldn’t find a way out., another example of structural queer extinction, dying young but leaving a legacy. Van Vechten bequeathed Ewing’s papers as part of his own donation to Yale University in 1941, creating the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection for the study of African American History. Now Alice T. Friedman has woven these treasures of the archive into our knowledge of queer desire and circles of the period, solidifying and expanding them. We see Tom Sansone, the bodybuilder, The Ritter Brothers, George Platt-Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein  and their circles, Aline McMahon, Florence Mills, Paul Robeson. It’s a more inclusive weaving, now incorporating so many members of the Harlem Renaissance, with queer desire and sexuality now central in the nudes, collages, poses of queer desire, male and female, that thrived in the particular era. The pictures are quite extraordinary. The book is also a lovely complement to @Will Straw’s great NIGHTS IN FAIRYLAND: GOSSIP, BLACKMAIL AND THE MANY LIVES OF BROADWAY BREVITIES.

José Arroyo