Book Review: The Gay Book of Lists

By Al Preston

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            I have read many books about queerness, all with their own unique way of expressing information, stories, and ideas. So naturally, when I found a book titled The Gay Book of Lists, I just had to get it.

            Leigh Rutledge has complied a huge amount of lists about gayness, sex, and history. That’s it! It’s literally a book of lists. Lists of historical people, actors, and events, one right after the other. It’s great!

            I also say that these lists are about ‘gayness’ specifically because, as Rutledge admits in the introduction, the majority of the people spoken about within these lists are in-and-of themselves or speaking specifically about, gay men. He admits that this book is so heavily leaning towards gay men.

            Within the introduction, Rutledge explains that this bias is due to the fact that these lists come from a collection of paper archives that he has saved. As he is a gay man, he has held onto the little bits and pieces he found over the years that reflected himself.

            While more about lesbians or transgender folks could have been great, this book is still really interesting. As a culmination of saved paper material, this book really reminds me of something that archivist use quite frequently. A finding guide is, essentially, a list of everything that is within an archived collection. It’s a quick and easy way to know what is in the collection. Rutledge’s book of lists about gayness feels like his own personal finding guide of all of the information he has saved over the years.

            Which is such a fun concept! Rutledge explains that he started collecting all of this paper material since he came out as gay. He says that he did this because he wanted to understand himself and gayness, so he just started collecting tons and tons of information all about being gay and gay men. Specifically, enough information to fill a 20 foot by 4 foot walk in closet (for those archives nerds out there, that’s about 30 linear feet).

            Despite feeling like a finding guide, this is a book. As such, it has an argument, even if one was not fully intended. This book was published initially in 1987, and it is a look into 1987, much closer to the AIDS crisis than we are, but also the eras before 1987. We can see what information was available and existed in 1987. It could very easily be argued that some of the information that Rutledge shares in this book may no longer be accessible anywhere else.

            That seems like a wild claim, but it could very easily be true. Here’s the thing about archiving and what we have managed to save as a people; we are actively losing 90% of it. Consider all of the things that are around you right now. Some of these things may be made to last, others will certainly not. Just like we have a lot of things, so did many of the people of the past. We are only lucky that we have the things that we have.

            Imagine you’re sitting on a couch. There’s a rug under your feet, a TV is playing the news in front of you. Just like the TV remote that you always seem to lose, just about all of these items will be lost to time, including the newscast.

            Couches, to us, are a dime a dozen. So are rugs and TVs. A lot of people have them. How many times have you thought ‘wow, I need a new couch, but let me save my old couch for future generations to know what my couch was like’? No? Makes sense. Where would you keep your old couch? Would that place preserve it well enough to make it recognizable as a couch decades down the timeline?

            You wouldn’t keep your old couch. Nor would you keep the rug or the TV once you got a new one. If you consider the furniture and rugs you see in museums. These are rare, found in houses that somehow, despite the odds, managed to stay preserved. What about the newscast? That’s digital, you say. All news programs achieve their shows!

Well, even if they do archive it, if there isn’t a really dedicated worker sitting at a desk all day every day, making sure those saved news casts are an updated version of video player…they’re gone within a few decades. This may be a niche feeling, but have you ever found an old CD you burned music onto as a kid and wanted to play it? And when you went to your modern day computer to play it, you realized that your computer didn’t have a way for you to even insert the CD?

Unless you get an external CD player, which is also increasingly hard to get, whatever is on that CD is fully lost. You can’t get it back. Same applies to paper archives. Paper is easy to lose. It easily disintegrates and can’t last as long as it used to when it was made out of reeds or animal skin.

So, books like this are really valuable. Rutledge is a great author too, so it’s not only a fast read, but a really interesting one. I had no idea what to expect when I picked this book up, I was also extremely excited to learn that Rutledge made a sequel in the 1990s, which I will be picking up (he has also written a lot of books about cats, as he used to care for thirty rescues).

The lists are actually really organized. It’s not just a bunch of lists randomly placed one right after another. Rutledge seemed to have a reason to the order of the lists. For example, on pages 42 to 44, the two lists are titled “5 Possible Origins For The Word ‘Faggot’ As A Pejorative For Gay Men” and then “6 Famous Men Who Disliked The Word Gay”. Clearly, those two lists have a theme, and therefore went together.

However, it can get deeper than that. For example, from page 135 to 139 there are two companion lists; “24 Famous Men Who Were Arrested On Gay Sex Or Morals Charges” which is a simple list of names, but is followed instantly with; “The Stories Behind 11 Of Those Arrests”.

There is a logic as you flow from one list to another. Sometimes one explains others or maybe the topics are related.

To me, the most interesting part were the ‘gay facts’ that I wasn’t aware of! While, yes, this book was published in 1987 and some of these ‘facts’ may be, today, incorrect, it’s really cool to see the information that was readily available and where some ‘myths’ may have arisen about people and events.

I can’t pick out any one list I liked more than the others. There was something interesting about all of them, something I didn’t know or something I wanted to look far more into. This book is very much a finding guide, a way to find research questions or people of interest. I love it, and if you just want to know some interesting fun facts, I highly recommend it.

I will briefly warn that there are many conversations about sex, specifically there are entire lists about sex and sex positions. There is also one image that has a very big—particular body part in it. So, do turn the page with caution if you’re in public!