My Queer War » (First Edition)

JAMES LORD's books include A Giacometti Portrait, first published in 1965, and Giacometti: A Biography (FSG, 1985), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent work is Mythic Giacometti (FSG, 2003).

A POWERFUL STORY OF SEXUAL AWAKENING DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR FROM THE NOTED MEMORIST AND CRITIC

In My Queer War, James Lord tells the story of a young man’s exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict.

In 1942, a timid, inexperienced twenty-one-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the U.S. Army. His career in the armed forces takes him to Nevada and California, to Boston, to England, and eventually to France and Germany, where he witnesses firsthand the ravages of total war on Europe’s land and on its people. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, and in a moment of great rashness makes the acquaintance of the world’s most renowned artist, who will show him the way to a new life.

My Queer War is a rich and moving record of one man’s maturation in the crucible of the greatest war the world has known. If his war is queer, it is because each man’s experience is strange in its own way. His is a story of universal significance and appeal, told by a wry and eloquent observer of the world and of himself.

The New York Times - Jed Perl

James Lord…is a tremendous storyteller. He brings dramatic intricacies to his encounters with Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, Peggy Guggenheim and a host of other characters in the memoirs and recollections he published over the course of nearly half a century, from A Giacometti Portrait in 1965 to My Queer War, completed before his death…Lord published two novels in his younger years, and although he later emphatically rejected them, My Queer War reflects the skills of a practiced fiction writer who can track a young man's shifting consciousness and knows what is best left unsaid.