Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style

By Tim Gunn with Kate Moloney
$17.95, Abrams Image

“Make it work,” the impossibly composed Tim Gunn is fond of saying on Bravo's Project Runway. The former chair of Parsons the New School for Design's fashion department shares his wisdom on how to make it work in his new book, written with his former Parsons assistant chair, Kate Moloney.

As viewers of the Bravo show might expect, Gunn dispenses his pearls with wit, clarity and an appealingly wry humor. While focusing primarily on the fashion needs of women (or those who plan to wear women's clothing, at least), there are plenty of nuggets for the average gay male. Gunn emphasizes the importance of knowing who you are fashion-wise. His discourse on the “Age Trap” can easily be transposed from older women attempting to dress like teenagers to a gay male scenario. And his thoughts on “The Challenge of a Good Fit” might save scores of gay men from packing too much into too little in a low-rise jean.

Where Gunn really got me was introducing the 19th-century Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in his discussion of closet cleaning. The fashionista reminds us that “clothes do not exist to humiliate their owners.” If looking at something in your closet makes you queasy, get rid of it! Brilliant.

Gunn also surprised me when his discussion of “Signature Looks” pointed to punk poet Patti Smith and Grey Gardens' eccentric Edie Beale as people who found a look that works and stuck to it. This informative and entertaining book is not your mother's fashion guide. —Christopher Cappiello

Jack and Lem

By David Pitts
$26.95, Carroll & Graf Publishers

With so many books written about John F. Kennedy and his presidency, it is hard to imagine that there is anything left to say. For a fresh angle, journalist David Pitts latched on to the lifelong friendship between the charismatic president and his gregarious—and gay—prep school chum, Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, for Jack and Lem.

JFK had a gay pal? It sounds like a promising prism through which to take yet another look at Kennedy's thoroughly chronicled life. But early on we learn there will be no smoking gun, no bi-curious moment for the dashing and famously heterosexual president, so the book becomes a fairly unremarkable tale of a closeted gay man devoted to his handsome and ambitious straight friend, and probably suffering under a lifelong unrequited crush.

The friendship seems to have been grounded in a shared love of a good time. From prep school through the White House years, Billings was one who could make Kennedy laugh. Letters from their early adulthood reveal a playful Kennedy who seemed to know the power he held over his fawning friend. Billings was basically a member of the extended Kennedy clan, accompanying the president on foreign trips and playing the fun-loving, unmarried uncle to Kennedy kids after the president's assassination.

Jack and Lem includes some hilariously biting quotes from Gore Vidal, who dismisses Billings as “the guy who carries the coat,” and “a kind of idiot friend.” But these sharp moments are few and far between in Pitts' mostly uncritical writing. There is much repetition, and a chapter on how gay life changed during Billings' life falls short of telling us much about how it affected him personally—which is the major problem with the whole book.

We already know who Jack Kennedy was, but by the end of Jack and Lem, we're still not really sure who Lem Billings was. —C.C.