In this inaugural Fall event, the The Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute, The SexTech Lab, and the Psychology Department in the Bachelor's Program for Adults, with the Creative Writing Programs at The Schools of Public Engagement present a special reading of the latest book and first literary novel of Professor and prolific writer, Joseph Allen Boon: Furnace Creek (2022).

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past: these events set the stage for the journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to many a places as he confronts life’s many expectations and surprises.

 
In this dialogue, Professor Boone also offers an overview of his journey to and from his last scholarly book, which also grapples with issues of gender, sexuality and desire. The Homoerotics of Orientalism (2014), examined one of the largely untold stories of Orientalism - the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with “deviant” male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of cross-cultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the Homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today.

Professor Boone will offer a reading from Furnace Creek, followed by questions and opportunity for a meet and greet over refreshments.