Tim Cummings' 3 favorite reads in 2024

Rex Ogle's memoir of living on the streets of New Orleans after being thrown out of his house by his father for being gay is powerful, important, beautiful, heartbreaking, and astoundingly infuriating. The way young gay people are abused, discarded, and disrespected in this country--and in so many places in our world, let's be honest--is the real abomination against humanity and God. The mistreatment of people by those who claim to operate solely from the fountain of God's love. Give me a break.

I love how the author moves the narrative between light and dark, almost like circadian rhythms of life: the time when the sun is out, the time when it is not. Inside the deepest instances of pain that he recounts about his time on the streets--and Rex Ogle is very visceral, very experiential--a sense of hope permeates, an intuitive need to survive, to eventually find your core strength, stand up for who you are, and fight back.

An essential read for anyone who has ever felt lost, lonely, confused, and then by some discovered sense of grace, came back from the brink, and claimed a beautiful life.

Charlie Jensen deftly examines a handful of our most celebrated films--some of them amongst my faves of all time, like Fatal Attraction, Scream, The Descent, Black Swan--and draws parallels to his life as a young gay man coming out, falling in and out of love, stumbling on the path, righting himself, being tripped up again, and ultimately discovering himself.

The juxtapositions between the fictional narratives and the autobiographical confessions, revelations, and declarations are insightful and sobering, ironic and humorous, and deeply poetic. I loved this book. I especially appreciated the chapter on The Descent, how Jensen hunts the darkness of a brutal traumatic event alongside the characters of that astonishingly visceral and blood-soaked ordeal. His takedown of Dan and toxic masculinity (and how far we have come [or not??] in our understanding of it since 1987) in the Fatal Attraction chapter is as badass as Ellen Ripely taking down the aliens. As far as Billy & Stu: I always knew they were gay.

A collective of mercurial personalities, all seeking faith, meaning, sanctuary or peace--some simply seeking their own sense of self--gather for the creation of a lay community in the English countryside beside an epic Benedictine convent where the nuns are forbidden to be seen and the Abbess is as elusive as the Wizard of Oz, and arguably just as questionable.

The story is told primarily through the eyes of a free-spirited, quietly rebellious, naive young woman named Dora Greenfield who arrives at Imber Abbey to reconcile with her hot-headed and ridiculously misogynistic husband who has been assigned the reparation of ancient texts. Their relationship is laughable at best, maddening, but it gives the book most of its tension; it causes her to make decisions that have detrimental effects on the community. Likewise, the leader of Imber, Michael Meade, a closeted homosexual whose innocent advances result in drastic consequences, some from the past that return to haunt him, some from the present that threaten to unravel him. It is a fascinating and profound depiction of character, especially of a closeted gay man in the mid-1950s.

Iris Murdoch is a magician. She can write like the formation of pointy-tipped icicles off the ledges of frozen rooftops, but her prose is rather like when they thaw out and the sharp ends soften a little. She is more compelled to elucidate the human condition, behavior and response and reaction. The methods she employs to plumb the depths of her characters' inner thoughts is a master class in the creation of an impactful and lasting novel.