the feminist librarian reads

Becker replaces Baron Cohen’s absurd foreigner with the softer cliché of the invisible, embedded reporter, but the effect is largely the same: She has written a book that seems designed to dupe major figures in the LGBT world into squaring off against each other in grand combat—the cage-fight-turned-soft-porn-session in Baron Cohen’s movie Brüno that incites a predictable and hoped-for riot among the Arkansas spectators. As with staged cage-fights and riots, no one who accepts the assigned roles in this drama emerges looking good—except of course for the author, who can affect a look of bemused detachment, do the interview circuit, and marvel at how everyone is overreacting.