Some Styles of Masculinity

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Some Styles of Masculinity is an intimate, urgent, and rollicking account of thinking and enduring through upheaval and plague. Prompted by the surge of white nationalism in the United States, Gregg Bordowitz reflects on his experience of assimilation and marginalization as a Yinglish-speaking child of outer-borough Jews and a queer person who has been living with AIDS since his twenties. He tells his own story by considering three totems of masculinity that were formative to him as he came of age in New York City in the 1970s and '80s: the rock star, the rabbi, and the comedian. These figures taught Bordowitz how to balance reinvention and tradition, and how to be different even as difference is under assault