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In The Land Of Alexander
In the summer of 1989, Keith Hale set out to discover the gay life and culture of Eastern Europe and Turkey, a region not known for its gay movement. This unusual travelogue combines historical and cultural insights with first-hand experiences. Just as Edmund White, in States of Desire , found each city in the U.S. to have a distinct personality, Hale finds each of the countries he visited to have a unique appeal for the gay traveler. His book is of special interest given the dramatic changes that occurred in the Balkans soon after his visit.
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1990
25 people want to read
About the author
Keith Hale
52 books38 followersKeith Hale grew up in central Arkansas and Waco, Texas. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Following a five-year career as a journalist in Austin, Amsterdam, and Little Rock, Hale earned a Ph.D. in literature from Purdue and took a position teaching British and Philippine literature at the University of Guam. Hale writes both fiction and scholarly works including his groundbreaking novel Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada (Cody), first published in the Netherlands, and Friends and Apostles, his edition of Rupert Brooke's letters published by Yale University Press, London.
Keith's books are available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, Scribd, Odilo, Gardners, and OverDrive. Readers may follow new releases on the Watersgreen House website or Twitter account (watersgreenhaus).
Keith's books are available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, Scribd, Odilo, Gardners, and OverDrive. Readers may follow new releases on the Watersgreen House website or Twitter account (watersgreenhaus).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 10, 2021
I loved this book. A great snapshot of life in this part of the world in the 1980s. I felt like I was tagging along with the author's adventures.
March 17, 2023
For a few decades now I’ve been meaning to get around to the author’s novel *Cody*, which was fairly well regarded in its day and sits forlornly on my shelves, but on a whim started with this book instead. It’s such a miserable dog’s breakfast that I might just not bother with *Cody* after all.
What we have here is a travel diary of sorts, written in fairly dull prose by someone lacking even basic fluency in any of the languages of the countries he visited (unsurprisingly, diacritics are usually if not consistently absent from Hungarian and Turkish names and words), so needless to say most of the observations are limited to beaches, food, fellow tourists, the unavailability of suitable accommodations, and boys. (More about that later.) Some of the information is just plain wrong: Homosexual acts were indeed illegal in Albania at the time, and the gay rights movement in the former German Democratic Republic was not supported by the “Episcopal Church” – which has hardly ever existed anywhere in in Germany as this denotes the Anglican Communion – but the “Evangelische Kirche”, i.e., the Lutherans.
Worse, the book can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether it is a travelogue, or a series of lengthy (and pointless, and preachy, and frankly exhibitionistic) digressions about Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, Antinous, Illyrians, St. John the Apostle, and so forth, or a gay guide to the countries visited. Hale makes frequent reference to incorrect or obsolete information in the Spartacus Gay Guide, then offers addresses and phone numbers of gay venues he’s discovered – information likely to have become just as obsolete once this book hit the shelves. (The half life of a gay disco, after all, can usually be measured in months.) Or perhaps the book’s purpose is to dazzle us with the seemingly limitless supply of young men, almost all of whom are impossibly gorgeous, who cross the author’s path. At times I felt like I had to wipe the author’s drool from the pages. At least I hope it was drool.
For someone who apparently made a name for himself as an English professor after several years in journalism – so the Web informs me – and nurtured a passion for all things Alexander, Hale doesn’t seem to have mastered the correct spelling of Pausanias. But then, he's challenged by such terms as "Volkswagen". Certainly one would expect an English professor to know that the past tense of “stink” is not “stunk”, and that when comparing two entities, one of them cannot be the “deepest”.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is the author’s frequent and acute lack of self-awareness. If there’s indigenous music playing (let alone a muezzin calling to prayer) in the background, he more often than not finds it annoying, whereas he’s constantly complimenting bartenders whenever they’re playing good old Anglophone disco and New Wave. But the worst example is on page 231: Just a few lines after criticizing English, German, and American tourists for “tending to want the world on a plate”, we get this: “The Greeks seem proud that there is not a McDonald’s anywhere in their country, but all this means is that it’s impossible to get a decent hamburger in the whole of Greece.” As if one should be going to Greece with the expectation of decent hamburgers. As if McDonald’s made a decent hamburger in the first place. In short: Gay guys can be Ugly Americans too. Yay equality.
A generous 1 1/2 stars, curved downward.
What we have here is a travel diary of sorts, written in fairly dull prose by someone lacking even basic fluency in any of the languages of the countries he visited (unsurprisingly, diacritics are usually if not consistently absent from Hungarian and Turkish names and words), so needless to say most of the observations are limited to beaches, food, fellow tourists, the unavailability of suitable accommodations, and boys. (More about that later.) Some of the information is just plain wrong: Homosexual acts were indeed illegal in Albania at the time, and the gay rights movement in the former German Democratic Republic was not supported by the “Episcopal Church” – which has hardly ever existed anywhere in in Germany as this denotes the Anglican Communion – but the “Evangelische Kirche”, i.e., the Lutherans.
Worse, the book can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether it is a travelogue, or a series of lengthy (and pointless, and preachy, and frankly exhibitionistic) digressions about Lord Byron, Rupert Brooke, Antinous, Illyrians, St. John the Apostle, and so forth, or a gay guide to the countries visited. Hale makes frequent reference to incorrect or obsolete information in the Spartacus Gay Guide, then offers addresses and phone numbers of gay venues he’s discovered – information likely to have become just as obsolete once this book hit the shelves. (The half life of a gay disco, after all, can usually be measured in months.) Or perhaps the book’s purpose is to dazzle us with the seemingly limitless supply of young men, almost all of whom are impossibly gorgeous, who cross the author’s path. At times I felt like I had to wipe the author’s drool from the pages. At least I hope it was drool.
For someone who apparently made a name for himself as an English professor after several years in journalism – so the Web informs me – and nurtured a passion for all things Alexander, Hale doesn’t seem to have mastered the correct spelling of Pausanias. But then, he's challenged by such terms as "Volkswagen". Certainly one would expect an English professor to know that the past tense of “stink” is not “stunk”, and that when comparing two entities, one of them cannot be the “deepest”.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is the author’s frequent and acute lack of self-awareness. If there’s indigenous music playing (let alone a muezzin calling to prayer) in the background, he more often than not finds it annoying, whereas he’s constantly complimenting bartenders whenever they’re playing good old Anglophone disco and New Wave. But the worst example is on page 231: Just a few lines after criticizing English, German, and American tourists for “tending to want the world on a plate”, we get this: “The Greeks seem proud that there is not a McDonald’s anywhere in their country, but all this means is that it’s impossible to get a decent hamburger in the whole of Greece.” As if one should be going to Greece with the expectation of decent hamburgers. As if McDonald’s made a decent hamburger in the first place. In short: Gay guys can be Ugly Americans too. Yay equality.
A generous 1 1/2 stars, curved downward.
August 2, 2012
I only read this because I loved Hale's novel Cody (now re-published under its European title Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada). I had no expectations of actually liking it; I was just curious. Surprisingly, I found it fascinating and wanted to follow in Hale's footsteps just like he followed Alexander's. The final chapter on Greece is not as good as the rest of the book, and I almost deducted a star for that, but overall I did find the book amazing, so it gets five stars.
April 20, 2015
As the main character goes from one country to another (the European Countries) he describes his experiences and tells you what it is to be gay in the countries that he travels. The main character mainly travels to countries in eastern Europe such as Bosnia & Istanbul.Do not fret he also will go some of our favorite Western European Countries such as Greece and other places but you need to read to find out more, So if you like travel and interesting tidbits this book is tantalizing ...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews