Tarts, Stars, Jewels, and Fairies.(Review)

Images worth remembering recall us to ourselves, in forms that are familiar and in others that dare us into luxuriant self-invention. Velvet Goldmine startles me into aesthetic/erotic self-recollection.

I have fallen in love with a luminous extravaganza, a cathedral of queer, the crew of beautiful men who love and fuck one another and sometimes women: rock stars Brian Slade and Curt Wild, teenage fan Arthur Stuart, who later in life becomes a journalist, and Jack Fairy, apocryphal descendant of Oscar Wilde.

I am their twin in lust and gender, their camp splendor and tenderness, and we are silly and deliriously gorgeous.

Promiscuous beauties Wild and Slade dispel my fear of inhabiting tartish style.

Slade shimmers like alien royalty. …