Reddit reviews Global Gay: How Gay Culture Is Changing the World (The MIT Press)

I’m not Catholic (I’m Jewish). And I’m not gay (I’m bisexual).

But this decently long essay (a touch over 7,500 words) got me to immediately buy a copy of Martel’s book.

I suspect the book will be a more important an artefact in the global civil GSM rights movement than Martel’s last book to be translated into English: Global Gay, How gay culture is changing the world.

Global Gay is an anthropologically rigorous survey of the GSM rights revolution rolling out across the world. But it is a clean and well-done survey and report of how things are on the ground now, or the now of a few years ago (that said, the English translation is also an update of the 2012 French-language original)

In the closet of the Vatican (which I’ve just started as I post this) is no less anthropologically rigorous. But it also a work of equally vigorous investigative journalism. The sort of journalism that changes things. Including enormously powerful and influential institutions.

And, even given the Catholic Church’s power and influence is not what it once was, it is is still a powerful institution.

And it’s power to harm GSM folk is, in some places, still enormous.

If Global Gay was a report from the field, In the closet of the Vatican is a vital exposition on how and why the principal institutional obstacle to LGBT rights at the worldwide level appears itself to be massively staffed by gay men.

This institution will not be able to continue being what it is. And I believe Martel’s book will be part of why that is so.