It's hard to blame a publisher for trying to add a little pizazz to "American Voyeur," a collection of Benoit Denizet-Lewis' reporting. But saying the book covers the "far reaches of modern life," as the subtitle puts it, is a little misleading. Denizet-Lewis' beats are youth and sexuality, things about as distant from our collective experience as the alarm clock and the car keys. More accurately, he reports on the aspects of those subjects some prefer to push far from their minds, such as sexual predators, youth suicide and gay homelessness.
Perhaps the best-known piece included is a 2003 story for the New York Times Magazine that was among the first in-depth looks at gay black men who have sex without their wives and girlfriends knowing. The pervasiveness of "down low" culture has been questioned in the years since, particularly the degree to which it's contributed to HIV rates among black women. But public-health officials were genuinely concerned at the time, and Denizet-Lewis' reporting remains impressively intimate, shedding light on the entrapped feelings that his subjects felt both individually and collectively within their subculture.
"Down low" was built on an urge to present a "normal" public persona in the face of feelings that some consider deviant, and much of "American Voyeur" digs into similar tensions. Denizet-Lewis explores a Christian church striving for mainstream cool among teens; follows a young girl who, with the help of school authorities, attended high school as a boy, and hangs out with a club of gay San Francisco men who strive to drink and play sports just like their heterosexual counterparts (or at least their stereotype). All of those pieces are defined by diligent reporting and unshowy prose; on occasion, as when he writes about frat boys and gay relationships, he openly discusses his own experiences, bringing an honest, self-deprecating tone that avoids editorializing yet clarifies the stakes.
All those talents are on full display in the nerviest piece in the collection, a 2001 feature on NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association) titled "Boy Crazy." The group is typically dismissed as a laughingstock or denigrated as a terror, but Denizet-Lewis finds a more nuanced story in which the group, as he writes, "badly overestimated both the inclusiveness of gay liberation and the breadth of the sexual revolution." Giving voice to its members makes him no NAMBLA apologist: He damningly notes that membership "is, and always has been, remarkably short on boys." But a thread that runs through nearly all of these pieces is that lives can be ruined forever by fear and misinformation about sexuality, which obliges him to get his facts just as correct with pedophiles as with young teens coming out. It's a difficult but critical strain of journalism, and "American Voyeur" testifies to its importance.
Mark Athitakis is a reviewer based in Washington, D.C. He blogs at americanfiction.wordpress.com.
