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This article explores conceptions of same-sex sexual behavior and desires by American gay males who grew up in Pacific Island or Asian societies. In the absence of systematic survey data, representations, which are not assumed to be autobiographical, by two South Asian emigres to Canada (Badruddin Khan and Shyam Selvadurai), two second generation Filipino-Americans (Joel Tan and Ricardo Ramos), a second generation Chinese-Hawaiian (Norman Wong) and three men of Chinese descent born and raised in Southeast Asia (Lawrence Chua, Justin Chin, and T. C. Huo) are examined. The unsatisfying script of sexual submission of Asians to whites is particularly central, except for the South Asians. These books provide recurrent evidence of role distance, of switching roles (often without rewriting a dominance-submission conception of insertion-reception) and of some degree of reconceiving the (sexual) self. KEYWORDS. Asian, Pacific, desire, sexuality, homosexuality, personal narratives, fiction

Chester Himes's novel Cast the First Stone is an avowedly autobiographical account of the prison world Himes knew from his incarceration during the late 1920s and early 1930s in an Ohio state prison (where he had been sentenced to a twenty-year sentence for robbery). Paying relatively little attention to the melodramatic plot, this article takes the novel as a reliable representation of the sexual attitudes and sexual culture of prison life in early twentieth-century America. Gender-stratified homosexuality (in which the 'wolf' sexually uses the 'fag,' who casts himself or is cast as feminine) is routine. Ungendered (proto-'gay') homosexual relations and love (in contrast to sex) threaten this cosmology and are ruthlessly suppressed by other prisoners and (albeit with more anguish) by the novel's narrator, a 'Mississippi white boy.' Although the racial dynamics of prison homosexuality were elided by this authorial choice of perspective (after the manuscript had been rejected by Henry Holt), the book nonetheless provides an insider account of prison homoeroticism, the insistence on gendering sexual relations there, and the inability of the narrator to accept the love of the portentously named Duke Dido.

Gay Cuban Nation. By Emilio Bejel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 257 pages. Cloth, $50; paper, $19. Literature is taken seriously by theocracies, including those in which peasant revolutions [...]

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376 pages. Cloth, $40.00. Often, book titles promise more [...]

This study of 299 social and physical scientists at universities reveals that strong personal contacts were more useful than reliance on weak ties (acquaintances) for job information. Using personal connections for employment information is thus an efficient job seeking method. (SK)

Reports the study of ritual verbal insults among Black men and among gay men. Gives examples of these insults and explains the situations in which such insulting takes place. (PMJ)

GREEN, JAMES N. Beyond carnival: male homosexuality in twentieth-century Brazil. xiv, 408 pp., illus., map, plans. London, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999 PARKER, RICHARD. Beneath the equator: cultures of [...]

LANG, SABINE. Men as women, women as men: changing gender in Native American cultures. xviii, 398 pp., illus., maps, tables, bibliogr. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1998. $50.00 (cloth), $19.95 [...]