These two titles are the first offering in the new "Outlines" series, which promises to bring out small, affordably priced biographies of gay artists, writers, actors, and composers. Probably the publisher's location in Britain led the editors to choose Benjamin Britten as one of the first entries, a choice unlikely to make the book as successful on this side of the Atlantic. To make matters worse, in this slim volume TV and screenwriter Wilcox (Gay Plays Five, Heinemann, 1995) finds most of the operas wanting in many ways, and 18 exceedingly brief essays do little but catalog hidden gay subtext within each pieceallusions that would have been created by the librettist in most cases. Art historian and filmmaker Adam's work on the English painter David Hockney is by far the more successful of the two. The sensual, the libidinal, the homosexual have always infused Hockney's art, and the author clearly, almost lovingly, opens up the artist's personal life to explain how it came to inhabit his professional body of work. Hockney chose friends, lovers, and family members for his pastel-colored portraits and poolside paintings that forever transformed Western art's previous idealized and allegorical image of the male nude to a more honest and natural one, from the heroic to the erotic. Not meant to provide in-depth biography or academic analysis, "Outlines" is a promising new series whose second offering, on Hockney, is recommended for most collections.Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
