I read this right after finishing Just Kids, and while none of the book takes place in New York City, the entire book is informed by the title character's experience there in the early nineties, just after Robert Mapplethorpe's death and the end of that memoir. It was a clear thruline, although not intended, and Patti Smith is mentioned often, and so are so many other aspects of culture referenced throughout that memoir.
This book isn't a memoir, and can't be, really--Paul is a shapeshifter, whose primary form is that of a young gay man, but who shifts into the body of a lesbian in order to go to Michigan with his best friend, a dyke named Jane, and often shifts into whichever queer body he needs to inhabit to explore both himself and the world. The book takes us from Iowa to Michigan to his hometown in upstate New York to Provincetown in the winter and finally, of course, to San Francisco, with flashbacks to his time at Pride in New York City. And it takes us to every single version of queer identity and culture and sex that existed in 1993 America, with a clarity and knowledge that made me laugh out loud multiple times and marvel at things I had once known but forgotten, and yet could not hope to remember how I had learned of it for the first time. I haven't felt so known by a piece of queer culture since first hearing the song "Ring of Keys" (and now that I write that, it's obvious to me that how I know of so much of the culture depicted in this book is from Dykes to Watch Out For), and the book just hit a part of my heart that I didn't know I needed to have pinged: what it was to be queer through the nineties, even if the character Paul is about ten years older than I am.
Paul's gender identity and sexual behaviors are both fluid, as is his exploration of what kind of queer he's going to be, regardless of how he presents. It's such a fascinating use of magical realism, this depiction of someone who truly lives between worlds and genders and identities, always the outsider, always finding his way through a porous barrier. The sex is frequent and explicit and the sort that I almost can't believe is still shocking, except that of course it is, and every cultural reference (with the exception of one that is so egregious an error I almost have to believe that it's me misremembering rather than it being something that made it through editing, except that I know it's wrong) is so pitch perfect it felt almost disorienting to look up from the pages and still be in 2019. I don't miss the early nineties; I was in my early teens, and even beyond that, queer life in America is better now, no matter how rosy the glasses of nostalgia are. But in the same way that the music of your youth always sounds good to you in a way that music from no other era ever will, this book thrums a very specific chord that I will always respond to.
Grade: A
This book isn't a memoir, and can't be, really--Paul is a shapeshifter, whose primary form is that of a young gay man, but who shifts into the body of a lesbian in order to go to Michigan with his best friend, a dyke named Jane, and often shifts into whichever queer body he needs to inhabit to explore both himself and the world. The book takes us from Iowa to Michigan to his hometown in upstate New York to Provincetown in the winter and finally, of course, to San Francisco, with flashbacks to his time at Pride in New York City. And it takes us to every single version of queer identity and culture and sex that existed in 1993 America, with a clarity and knowledge that made me laugh out loud multiple times and marvel at things I had once known but forgotten, and yet could not hope to remember how I had learned of it for the first time. I haven't felt so known by a piece of queer culture since first hearing the song "Ring of Keys" (and now that I write that, it's obvious to me that how I know of so much of the culture depicted in this book is from Dykes to Watch Out For), and the book just hit a part of my heart that I didn't know I needed to have pinged: what it was to be queer through the nineties, even if the character Paul is about ten years older than I am.
Paul's gender identity and sexual behaviors are both fluid, as is his exploration of what kind of queer he's going to be, regardless of how he presents. It's such a fascinating use of magical realism, this depiction of someone who truly lives between worlds and genders and identities, always the outsider, always finding his way through a porous barrier. The sex is frequent and explicit and the sort that I almost can't believe is still shocking, except that of course it is, and every cultural reference (with the exception of one that is so egregious an error I almost have to believe that it's me misremembering rather than it being something that made it through editing, except that I know it's wrong) is so pitch perfect it felt almost disorienting to look up from the pages and still be in 2019. I don't miss the early nineties; I was in my early teens, and even beyond that, queer life in America is better now, no matter how rosy the glasses of nostalgia are. But in the same way that the music of your youth always sounds good to you in a way that music from no other era ever will, this book thrums a very specific chord that I will always respond to.
Grade: A
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