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Alvin’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alvin’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Alvin Orloff’s Followers (141)
627 books
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794 friends
7,480 books
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64 friends
4,047 books
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96 friends
1,554 books
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1,084 friends
187 books
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1,082 friends
1,847 books
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1,613 friends
1,450 books
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115 friends
633 books
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201 friends
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Alvin Orloff
Goodreads Author
Born
in Los Angeles, The United States
Website
Twitter
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Member Since
April 2007
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Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person
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published
2004
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3 editions
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Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
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published
2019
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2 editions
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Vulgarian Rhapsody
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The Unsinkable Bambi Lake
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published
1996
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3 editions
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I Married An Earthling: A Novel
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published
2000
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2 editions
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Gutterboys
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published
2004
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2 editions
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Why Aren't You Smiling?
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published
2011
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6 editions
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![[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [...](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/nophoto/book/111x148._SX50_.png)
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[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [By: Orloff, Alvin] [October, 2011]
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I was not prepared for the weirdness!
The English eccentric, Quentin Crisp, once said that, "Only a lie is boring," and I believe that truer words were ne'er spoke. I wanted my memoir, "Disasterama!" to be exciting, so I told the truth about my louche and feckless youth as a club kid, hustler, and somewhat delusional cultural activist. When, after 56 rejections, it was accepted by Three Rooms Press for publication in the fall of '19,
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Alvin’s Recent Updates
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Alvin
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| AFOC offers a fascinating peek into the goings on of mid-century Marxists. As many reviewers have noted, Mitford was largely oblivious to the glaring faults of communism, but in her defense was mostly in it for the most noble of reasons: anti-fascism ...more | |
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Alvin
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| Sean Hangland, the unsuccessful middle-aged writer/bookstore clerk protagonist of "Service" is right up there at the apex of the hilarious literary anti-hero pantheon with Ignatius J. Reilly from "Confederacy of Dunces." His self-serving self-sabotag ...more | |
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| As ever, Baldwin's prose is dazzling, his characters vivid, and his social and psychological insights keen. He makes clear the appeal of the churchyness pervading the world in which the story takes place, while also exposing its hypocrisy and dysfunc ...more | |
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Alvin
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| An utterly absorbing and highly original tale! The narrator, an aged and quite understandably neurotic gay man, recounts his memories of (and speculations about) a mentor wiped out decades earlier by the red scare and homophobia in between descriptio ...more | |
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Alvin
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| The book starts off with a long account of Smith's deprived childhood followed by a whirlwind and celebrity-packed tour through her amazing 197os rock career. Then readers are treated to a sojourn through her renunciation of showbiz for an idyllic ma ...more | |
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Alvin
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| Crighton writes not just about Cosmic Thing, but covers the entire B-52s career - from a very queer perspective - and intertwines his own queer coming of age/out journey into the story. For those familiar with LGBTQ-dom there won't be many surprises ...more | |
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Alvin
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| I read this because I'm a super-fan of Christopher Isherwood. And yes, there's a lot about him and his fascinating relationship with Bachardy. There's also a lot of pretty good gossip about all the Hollywood movie stars they socialized with and who s ...more | |
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Alvin
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| Lin weaves together a charmingly candid personal love story with a pithy, erudite history of gay marriage. Even if you're not a fan of other people's love stories or gay marriage (and I'm sort of not!) the book is unputdownable because Lin is an amaz ...more | |
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Alvin
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| This treasure trove of bite-sized reviews of bizarre products, movies, and (alas) poetry is an unending delight. It's full of sly wit, pop culture erudition, and cogent critical analysis. I read selections as a mental palate cleanser between every bo ...more | |
“Reagan's going to mess everything up, cutting taxes for the wealthy and getting rid of the safety net and all that. The rich and the poor won't be able to mix socially. The rich will be afraid of getting ripped off or asked for money and the poor won't be able to afford to hang out in the same places anyway. Society's going to be divided by class and instead of expressing themselves, people are going to spend all their time advertising their status. It'll be shallow, like the Eisenhower era. Parties will suck.”
― Gutterboys
― Gutterboys
“Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul--bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror--is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.”
― Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
― Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
― Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
― Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
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“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
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“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest.”
― The Female Man
But the frogs die in earnest.”
― The Female Man
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
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Hi Alvin, thanks for the add. I had no idea you wrote "Why Aren't You Smiling?," it's already on my TBR list!
Wow, great to meet you!
Alvin