Is Okrant crazy? What did she get from all this living by Oprah? And are the results worth it?
![Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk by [Okrant, Robyn]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51-l616CC6L.jpg)
Category: On Books and Publishing
Book reviews and author interviews, as well essays on the state of publishing.
When E. Patrick Johnson conceived his book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History, he did not think the project would ever extend beyond the printed word. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2008, the book was a collection of oral narratives. But halfway through the research and interviewing process, Johnson realized he would need to do more. As he explained to Windy City Times in a 2008 interview: “[H] earing them tell their stories in their unique ways suggested to me that the immediacy of the telling had to be recaptured in a way that reading it on a page would not.”
The Chicago History Museum’s (CHM’s) ongoing series, Out at CHM, featured local gay historian John D’Emilio on April 15. D’Emilio, a professor of history and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, presented a piece entitled “Richard Nixon, Gay Liberationist?” Speaking to a packed auditorium, D’Emilio discussed the implications of his research for scholars of queer history. He argued that while it was tempting to read the virtual end of the harassment of gay bars in the 1970s as a sign of the success of queer resistance to the Daley machine, the truth might be more prosaic and linked to wider national political changes of the time.
![The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by [Bechdel, Alison]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61tluUv0qqL.jpg)
