“to be or fare well/now and in the hour of our death” — from “Ave I Via,” Pet Sounds
How does a poet tackle the purposefully-gigantic topic of identity in an age like ours? As Eileen Myles says of Pet Sounds: “Stephanie’s seriously interested in a total ride through relationship and humanity, song, family and what else.” Or, as Anna Moschovakis says, this book (or love) “lets the bullshit in and survives it.”
Sentimentality isn’t the cliché we all throw at it; rather, it’s the crime of oversimplification. Love poems fall into the same taxonomy as identity poems for often this same reason: we aren’t always equipped to allow in all of the parts that fester, stink, rejoice, fill with pus and are lanced away. In order for a collection about identity to thrive and resonate, it must be a collection that lets everything in: that truly shows the nuances and complications of categories and relationships living alongside one another. Young seems to instinctively and lyrically know this; what’s more, she positions the poems within the complicated schema of modern-day Oakland, with the “bungalows ready for your move-in” and whiteness. In a poem that names recent victims of racialized violence, Young ends with an acknowledgement of race (something that Claudia Rankine has gone on record saying white people rarely do): “what didn’t kill us/didn’t kill us.”
The positioning of identity is reached for through the way Young describes her marriage and gender and sexuality, and how they are often at odds with one another: “because something is wrong with my brain/because I believe I’m a dumb girl/and men of a certain class know more than me” and “by the time we slept together/it felt perverse, fucking a man.”
The form enacts content well, here—both in the acknowledgement of the fragmentation inherent in the title (Pet Sounds being a Beach Boys album that is notoriously juxtaposed and fraught, but is also tied to so many in the zeitgeist of memories and relationship memories) and also in that the book is essentially a book-length poem. This shows the continuity, the living-alongsideness that both identity and love require, in order to complicate them.
Pet Sounds By Stephanie Young Nightboat Books Paperback, 9781937658946, 88 pp. April 2019
In 1985, Esther Newton’s trailblazing essay “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: RadclyffeHall and the New Woman” appeared within the pages of the lesbian issue of the prestigious feminist journal Signs. Written in 1981 and published in this landmark volume, the piece, Newton explains, “was my return to scholarly work, and it made masculine lesbians my subject. Finally, I could pull my career and my queer life together”
But it is the period preceding this fusion that is the subject of Newton’s memoir, My Butch Career (a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for lesbian memoir/biography). Newton follows a conventional chronological path tracing her ancestral line and unorthodox childhood as she struggled to adjust as a half Jewish illegitimate child whose birth prompted ostracism from her firebrand mother’s genteel WASP family. Describing her early years with her mother and her mother’s second husband and lifelong father figure Saul, Newton clarifies “We signaled our deepest feelings toward and about each other, if at all, in a semaphore in which none of us were fluent” (65).
Newton’s life was also complicated by the fact that in her early years “I became an anti-girl, a girl refusenik, caught between genders.” She loses her straight virginity at seventeen, and, more important, is initiated into lesbian sex later that year. Introduced to the New York lesbian bar scene soon after, Newton provides a cultural snapshot, “That’s what being butch meant in 1959: a masculine girl like me who wore men’s clothes, smoked Lucky Strikes, wore her collar up and T-shirt sleeves rolled and dated femmes.” This formative milieu demonstrates to the young Newton what it’s like to be butch, “the first identity that had ever made sense out of my body’s situation, the first rendition of gender that ever rang true, the first look I could ever pull together.” Nevertheless, Newton doesn’t come out as a lesbian until seven years later during graduate school where her dissertation would become the book Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, a volume that helped establish her reputation as a radical thinker in LGBT Studies.
When Newton leaves Chicago for New York in the summer of 1967, she undertakes her first sexually satisfying relationship with an older woman and discovers the political movement to match her beliefs in the form of Second Wave feminism. This chapter in the narrative rekindles the energy and tensions of that time as Newton chronicles her involvement in the Upper West Side WITCH (Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell), the early meetings of the Gay Liberation Front and interactions with such lesbian icons as Jill Johnston and Bertha Harris. Newton writes compellingly of her struggle to negotiate a longstanding friendship with a married heterosexual colleague and coauthor during these years of political passion and contention.
Six years after her arrival in New York, Newton acts on an impromptu invitation to join friends in Mexico where she meets a French love interest (who has requested anonymity in the memoir). Having received tenure yet alienated from academia,Newton embarks on a long distance relationship with the woman and eventually moves in with her to her Paris flat. This part of the memoir provides an informative counterpoint to the New York years as Newton explores the women’s movement in France, dominated as it was by two separate factions. The first faction, the Feministe Revolutionaire, was led by writer Monique Wittig. The second faction, the Psyche etPo, was led by psychiatrist Antoinette Fouque. According to Newton, the two groups “were not on speaking terms.” Another key feature of Newton’s partial expatriation is her quest to adopt the lifestyle of her butch role model Gertrude Stein and to write an autobiographical novel, a project she eventually abandons before returning to the States.
Barnard College’s famous 1982 “Scholar and Feminist IX” Conference marks a turning point for Newton, together with her friendship with feminist thinker Gayle Rubin and perusal of an article by writer Amber Hollibaugh. These catalysts allow Newton to reject what she perceives to be the rigidity of certain lesbian feminist dicta and to finally declare “It was OK to be butch; for the first time in my life, I embraced it without ambivalence. . . I knew then that I would never be with another partner who was attracted to me but ashamed of who I was, who did not consciously identify as femme.”
Occasional debatable assertions notwithstanding, My Butch Career is an importantnarrative of liberation that contributes singularly to the growing body of collective LGBTQ history. It covers the first forty-one years of the writer’s life, a time frame that calls out for a sequel. Newton concludes her memoir with a tribute to the queer writers who have preceded her. With this work, she has secured her place in that pantheon.
My Butch Career: A Memoir By Esther Newton Duke University Press Hardcover, 978-1478001294, 274 pp. November 2018
It is hard to read Alex DiFrancesco’s All City and not think of Hurricane Sandy and the destruction done to New York City during that particular catastrophe. The sentiment that “New York didn’t seem like a place that could have an end. We would all wake up to our coffee in Greek paper cups and be furious about the train delays no matter what happened” is very real, and certainly during the days leading up to Sandy, there was a distinct feeling that whatever the news was reporting was over-hyped and New York could withstand anything. Even when the evacuation warnings started, a good percentage of New Yorkers ignored it until the very last possible moment. This is all to say, the storm-wrecked metropolis of All City feels very real, and very possible.
In All City, the fictional Superstorm Bernice hits, and New York City is left completely flooded and destroyed. The book tracks several characters as they survive and strive to rebuild. The story begins with Makayla, a young Native New Yorker from, as they say, the wrong side of the tracks. Struggling with money, Makayla works at a 24/7 convenience store, sometimes for twelve hours a day. When the storm comes, she is holed up in her friend Jaden’s apartment, where they stay for longer than they have rations for. Jesse, a homeless, genderqueer street punk, lives in an abandoned IRT station with three other homeless young people, including their trans girlfriend Lux, all who struggle to care for each other in the midst of supply-raided pharmacies and overcrowded hospitals. Another character Evann, to contrast, has money and lives in a posh building with a priceless Basquiat adorning the walls.
The government-controlled shelter is unsafe and overcrowded. Jaden and Makayla, along with her grandmother and a young Latinx child they assume care of, find an abandoned luxury building and move in after the disaster has left most places unlivable and without food. Together with a few others from the shelter, they begin to build a socialist community of their own, with committees for everything from childcare to food prep to construction, as they work to remove the water damage done to the lower floors of the building.
The commune operates idyllically—for a while. With residents of all ages inhabiting this empty apartment building, each person is dedicated to doing their part and helping the system run smoothly. Makayla becomes the de facto leader, guarding the supply closet and essentially becoming Operations Manager. Somehow, news of this community spreads, and others are drawn to the promise of somewhere safe and kind to rebuild their lives. Jesse and their friends come down (walking from the Bronx to Brooklyn which is insane, but what else is there to do, really) and join the building, bringing their anarchist sentiments with them.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, a rogue Banksy-esque artist is traveling through the city, creating murals on the walls to commemorate and commentate on the tragedies that were a result of the storm. The murals become a testament to human creativity, beauty, and resilience. But the murals also draw unwanted attention.
With All City, DiFrancesco breaks the speculative fiction/social commentary divide. The novel is a very astute critique of wealth disparity. It exaggerates our current economic stratification, especially within city environments, but it isn’t really that far off from our current truth. The ultra-rich are able to escape disaster like the one depicted here, while lower income communities suffer.
The novel expertly uses language as a world building technique. Each one of these characters uses a particular dialect to indicate their culture and class: Evann’s chic infusion of French phrases contrasts against Makayla’s A Clockwork Orange-like slang (“slosh” instead of money, “jawing” instead of talking) and Jesse’s profanity-laden speech patterns. DiFrancesco is skilled at creating a world that isn’t so unlike our own, but is just different enough to create a bit of distance. These gestures make the book feel less like an unbelievably far-fetched dystopia and more like a novel written thirty years from now, that simply fell out of a wormhole onto a contemporary editor’s desk.
Be warned, there is trauma and violence in this book: rape, death, and assaults on queer and black bodies. But these moments are blips on the radar of the narrative, parts of a larger commentary on human behavior and survival. The interior lives of DiFrancesco’s characters are rich and move with momentum. The plot is laced with sly commentaries on gender, income inequality, and gentrification (the way disaster and struggle can be spun by craven opportunists into something that later hangs in a museum, removed from the context which gave it meaning). DiFrancesco illuminates this landscape with nimble prose and complex characters, which feel shockingly familiar.
All City By Alex DiFrancesco Seven Stories Press Paperback, 9781609809393, 240 pp. June 2019
At the age of 100, Nora Lindstrom is nearing the end of her life thanks to advanced small cell lung cancer. She has a lot to be proud of after a decades-long career as a physicist who worked tirelessly to end childhood leukemia. A few things are haunting Nora’s last days, however, including how she had to walk away from her grand-niece Diana without explanation when Diana was a young child.
Nora is still living in her own home, but her rapid decline in health signals that it’s time for her to get some help and put a power of attorney in place in case someone needs to make medical decisions for her. They might be estranged, but who better to make those crucial choices than Diana, who stayed in Nora’s heart all these long decades that they’ve spent apart?
Some of the best memories of Diana Lindstrom’s life were spent with her Great Aunt Nora, Diana’s greatest champion and overseer of many of her science experiments. She hasn’t seen Nora in decades and long thought she’d passed away, so Diana is in for the shock of her life when she receives word that Nora is alive and wants to see her. Meeting Nora again is bewildering and soothing at the same time, delivering all the proof Diana never knew she needed that Nora had loved her all along, and they’re both determined to make up for lost time for as long as they have left together.
Diana teaches at Columbia University, Nora’s living in Provincetown, and Nora won’t let Diana walk away from her job to take care of her. Luckily, Nora’s friend and family doctor has just the solution—Brooke Sheldon, a former pediatric nurse who had worked with Nora at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Brooke and Diana get along well and it isn’t long before an attraction grows between them that Nora picks up on (possibly even before they figure it out for themselves). As the weeks pass, and Nora’s time draws to a close, she comes to a decision and asks several things of both women that are all intended to bring the two together—hopefully forever. Helping Diana and Brooke find happiness means exposing some of those other regrets Nora’s been carrying for decades. Will it be enough to secure a future for them?
Chain Reactions is a romance novel, but it’s also a story about love in its many forms—familial (both of blood and choice), romantic, and even the love for humanity that might drive someone to seek a cure for a terrible disease. The love between Diana and Nora is exquisitely lovely, still there despite their time apart and with the same purity it held when Diana was a child. It’s that timeless love anyone might carry for a loved one who’s imprinted on their heart, long after any physical connection is severed by distance or death. Every moment between Nora and Diana holds a poignancy alongside the joy of reuniting because they’ve lost so much time and there’s so little of it left between them.
The love that builds between Diana and Brooke, on the other hand, is cautious. Diana is married to her career and Brooke is just finding her feet after having burned out from taking care of sick children for so long. The pull between them is palpable almost from their first meeting, but the odds are a bit stacked against them since they live in different cities and want different things, not to mention that they’re both laser focused on ensuring Nora has the best end-of-life experiences she possibly can. Many of Brooke and Diana’s conversations, thoughts and actions that are a result of these challenges can come across as overly dramatic, especially for readers who are frustrated by crises in romance that can be solved with a conversation. Luckily, Nora was prepared for something like that, because her foresight ensures the kind of ending that’s worth sticking it out for.
Nora’s past is also a major part of the story, but it’s impossible to talk much about without spoiling some major plot points. That said, it’s one of strongest parts of the book and is fascinating, compelling, and well-researched, giving a glimpse into what will be for many a little-known contribution women made to the war effort in WWII.
Readers who enjoy a blend of contemporary and historical fiction will especially want to pick up Chain Reactions. Actions taken by Nora, Diana, and others are connected across the decades (hence the title), and seeing the way they all culminate is well worth the time.
Chain Reactions By Lynn Ames Phoenix Rising Press Paperback, 9781936429165, 284 pp. February 2019
James Polchin’s Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall, excavates garish true crime headlines to reveal the forgotten murders of gay men. In pursuing these trails and trials of blood and ink, Polchin exposes American society’s exploitative misunderstanding of gay men, as well as the initial cultural shifts that fueled the revolution that was Stonewall.
One tragic story after another charts reportage of a shocking crime transmogrified into sympathy if not outright support for the perpetrators -once the victim’s sexuality becomes decoded. Killers are “cherubic cowboys” provoked by the supposed shock of a homosexual advance. Unasked at the time, over and over: why relative strangers would meet in hotel rooms for reasons other than sex. Within Indecent Advances, we witness the birth of the “gay panic” defense. Though this hideous justification has been degraded as visibility and legal rights in the U.S. have been asserted, “gay panic” is still successfully deployed by defense attorneys to excuse the murder of gay men (Texas, 2018). Such crimes often led to pogroms by the press and local officials, as seen in the brutal murders of William Simpson in Miami, 1954, and Fernando Rios in New Orleans, in 1958. While Simpson’s killers were pardoned in the newspapers but found guilty of manslaughter (a lesser crime) in court and both served time, Rios’ murderers were not only acquitted, but rewarded with uproarious applause. Both communities reacted by expunging its gay citizens with every legal means at their disposal.
Viewing gay history through the lens of crime, Polchin re-orders mid-century events and history-makers in startling ways: Walt Whitman’s horrific beating by a trick in a hotel room becomes another link in this traumatic chain of assault. Chicago gay murderers Leopold and Loeb, the source for Hitchcock’s The Rope, are gleefully pounced upon by the media as universal proof of homosexual deviancy. William Burroughs and Ginsberg’s friendship with murder victim David Kammerer is examined as well as its influences on Kerouac’s life and work, including his novel, The Subterraneans. Sources like Chauncey’s classic Gay New York are duly sited, and nearly forgotten texts like Terror in the Streets and The Sixth Man are recovered as invaluable socio-political reference points. The works of Baldwin and Gore Vidal provide additional insight, and Polchin mines the African-American press of the time to provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the era than what was printed in white-owned newspapers desperate for blood, high on indignation while low on integrity.
We fought back. With the formation of the Mattachine Society came ONE magazine, the pioneering effort to combat homophobia, which was organized against such egregious press coverage; “the need for an independent publication to counter narratives of homosexual criminality and mental sickness in the popular press was crucial in building a wider consciousness about homosexuality as a minority identity. Launched in January of 1953, the publication had over 2,000 subscribers within a few months.” The sexual earthquake that was Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male added scientific heft to the conversation. The seeds for revolution were sown.
Ours is a history of violence. One once voraciously cheered on by the press. Though, speaking broadly, their opinion of us has journeyed from loathing to neutral scientific curiosity to pet cause, is it really a shift in the nation’s attitude toward queer folk, or do we just hire better lawyers? We’re far from free of the violence that Indecent Advances details. See David McConnell’s searing, contemporary Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men. Though no longer actively encouraged by the media, blood is spilt anywhere and everywhere over a misconstrued look, a poorly timed pass, outré´Biblical passages or anything and everything that would make straight men think others might perceive him a fag.
Newsflash: our enemies are not simply misinformed or a bunch of closet cases. They are dangerous and organized. Indecent Advances collects and rescues significant gay history and goes a long way toward clarifying why we fight, what we fight for and how prejudice is an historically institutional force.
Sidebar quote:
“Once a man assumes the role of homosexual,” wrote the editors of the widely circulated Coronet magazine in 1950, “he often throws off all moral restraints,” adding such men “descend through perversion to other forms of perversion, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” This progressive model of perversion, in which anti-social behavior spirals toward ever-increasing, dire forms of violence, was a prevalent idea in popular magazines and newspaper articles about sex crimes in the late 1940s.
Patsy, the title character in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s exemplary second novel, yearns for one thing in the book’s opening pages: an American visa. Her best friend and lover, Cicely, long ago disappeared there, resurfacing in letters that promise a new life, a fresh start, and freedom. And though Patsy is a mother to a little girl, Tru, she desires nothing more than to escape the stifling life of Pennyfield, Jamaica, alone.
But the American dream that Cicely speaks of is far from the reality Patsy finds when she arrives in New York City on a temporary visa. Cicely has not exactly been forthcoming about the truth of her life: she has a son by her abusive, racist husband, and that tie, unlike Patsy’s own to her daughter, is enough to keep Cicely emotionally captive. Patsy’s fantasies of a new life with Cicely quickly dissolve, leaving her alone in an unfamiliar city, without documentation, without money, without community.
Depression threatens to subsume her, but she quickly discovers that as an immigrant, with no access to benefits or a safety net, allowing the “Devil’s cold” to take over will cost her livelihood. Thus begins her life in New York City, first as a bathroom attendant, then as a house cleaner, and ultimately, ironically, as a nanny.
Meanwhile, Tru, Patsy’s daughter, finds herself adrift amid her new life with her father and step family—a new mother and brothers she hadn’t previously known. She misses her mother and tries to follow her imperative to “be a good girl,” though as the years pass, this promise becomes harder and harder to keep. Tru finds solace in excelling at school and in soccer matches with the neighborhood boys. She’s whip-smart and sharp-tongued, refreshingly rebellious and centered as a teenager. Despite her occasionally self-destructive actions, Tru is able to embrace her sexuality and imagine a way out of a culture that doesn’t understand who she is—a hope that helps her navigate the rough waters of her life.
Patsy spans approximately ten years—from 1998 to 2008—and runs the gamut of undocumented immigrant experience: culture shock, indignity, loneliness, confusion, fear, regret, and eventually, uneasy acceptance. Dennis-Benn strives for an authentic portrayal, giving Patsy a distinct voice and emotionality as she grapples with the decisions she’s been forced to make.
Patsy, despite her struggles, can be difficult to empathize with, perhaps in part because of her seemingly careless abandonment of Tru. While there is no imperative for a mother to love her child, and while the idea of Patsy not feeling cut out for motherhood is well established, her break remains incomplete—encased in a sometimes baffling silence. (Indeed, one of the most heartbreaking elements of Patsy’s story is that despite her bravery in fleeing a place where she feels she has no voice, she finds herself even more invisible in America.) As the story progresses, however, it digs into the meat of Patsy’s past, exposing the constrictions placed upon working-class women in Jamaica. As the years pass, Patsy’s feelings about the life she left behind move away from ambivalence, toward reckoning, and ultimately, redemption.
Of course, Patsy’s not the only character in the book whose behavior pushes the boundaries of sympathy. Most, if not all, of the women in Patsy are forced up against their limits. If they often behave in incomprehensible ways, and say unkind things, and refuse to see one another for who they are; if they, ironically, refuse to recognize the desperation they all (sometimes ungracefully) face, then it’s hard not to blame their behavior on the circumstances of poverty and patriarchy and expectation.
Though Patsy gets off to slow start and loses momentum towards its finish, the bulk of the novel is compelling. As Patsy’s story unfolds, it gains poignancy, finding a steadiness of heart. Tru’s sections shine throughout, pushing as they do to understand a child’s sense of loss, loneliness, and otherness. Dennis-Benn has an eye for detail and ear for dialogue, and she does not shy away from confronting the brutal reality that immigrants face in a place like New York City. As the narrative winds to a close, Patsy may be no closer to her dream of American citizenship, but she may be closer to the freedom of spirit she’s been looking for all along.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter to a mother from her son, beginning from the riddles of distance: “Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” The son goes by Little Dog, a moniker his grandmother gave him as an act of protection. Evil spirits—the thinking went in her Vietnamese village—would skip over the weakest, easiest prey if they were named something hideous. “To love something,” Little Dog ruminates in his letter, “is to name it something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.”
Such is the devastating terrain of Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, which charts the violence and beauty that follows from human connection with startling empathy—startling, in part, for Vuong’s proximity to Little Dog. On Earth is not a memoir, yet it certainly does not shy away from the biographical. The first chapter of the novel received publication two years ago in The New Yorker, categorized then as “personal history.” Little Dog also shares obvious similarities with his author—Vietnamese American, late twenties, a writer who reached New York City by way of Saigon, Vietnam and Hartford, Connecticut—and these parallels make On Earth all the more affecting. In its finest moments, Vuong’s prose features the sort of tender, aphoristic flourishes and sense of lived experience contained in the work of James Baldwin, who Vuong gives a “deep bow” to in the novel’s acknowledgments.
Little Dog writes to his mother about their family, the war they emerged from, and the generational trauma they share. He bares so much of himself, he acknowledges, because his mother, who is illiterate, will never be able to read his letter: “[T]he very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.” Thematically, On EarthWe’re Briefly Gorgeous covers ground Vuong first approached in his outstanding 2016 poetry collectionNight Sky With Exit Wounds. (The novel even shares its title with a poem from that collection.) In a piece from Night Sky, Vuong lays bare the harrowing equation of his existence: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.” Vuong’s debut novel offers an extended exploration of that “yikes,” which, while painfully specific to Vuong and many other Vietnamese Americans, also embodies the ubiquitous violence enshrined in American life more generally. Scenes from the US occupation of Vietnam stand alongside thoughts on Tiger Woods, lyrics from 50 Cent, and descriptions of urban nail salons—the composite, enthralling in its congruence.
Historical atrocities are never purely past-tense events, Vuong’s protagonist comes to realize. He imagines history not as a line but a spiral that boomerangs back upon itself: “As time carries us, we come face-to-face with the tragedies we created.” The mother-son relationship in On Earth provides a complex portrait of this historical reckoning. The novel opens with Little Dog reflecting on his mother’s violent outbursts: “The first time you hit me, I must have been four. A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze of touch.” The narrator proceeds to chronicle his violent upbringing (“I fell playing tag,” Little Dog offers as an early lie to teachers) alongside moments of remarkable tenderness. Blows to his head are juxtaposed, for example, with maternal consolation during a turbulent plane ride: “You wrapped one arm around my shoulder, leaned in, your weight absorbing the plane’s throttle… With the universe back in order, I sat back and watched as we broke through one mountain after another.” A survivor both of war and domestic abuse, Little Dog’s mother lives in the clutches of PTSD, and Little Dog’s reflections on this trauma are trenchant: “I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children… Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.”
As Vuong draws on the personal, so too does he pull from his poetic prowess, animating On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous with his gift for vivid precision. Raindrops slide down a soldier’s “dirt-baked cheeks… collecting like ellipses along his jaw.” After being bullied on a school bus, a young Little Dog repeatedly kicks his light-up shoes, which “erupt with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulance, going nowhere.” Of the bully, Little Dog reflects, “He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.” Such sensitivity to environmental forces colors Little Dog’s descriptions of Trevor, the wild and rough farm boy Little Dog falls for when working on a tobacco farm one drug-fueled, teenage summer. Trevor struggles to reconcile his rugged masculinity with his sexuality and tender instincts. Vuong captures Little Dog’s passion and anguish for Trevor with exquisite care, allowing the prose in these sections to eventually break into stirring verse where Trevor’s discordances rapidly layer atop one another. He moves quickly from all hard edges (“Trevor the carnivore, the redneck, not a pansy, shotgunner, sharpshooter, not fruit or fairy… [T]he pine-stick thumb on the Big Lighter…”) to soft day-dreamer (on why he likes sunflowers: “Imagine going so high and still opening that big”), the accumulation feeling, ultimately, doomed for collapse.
Taken in isolation, some of Vuong’s sentences could feel affected or ornamental; one remarkable achievement of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, however, is how hard-earned these flourishes feel. This is a novel filled with myriad heartaches and Vuong, in not shying away from such depths, gives voice to the beauty that remains nonetheless. As Little Dog recognizes, “All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but rather, that violence, having passed through fruit, failed to spoil it.” In a recent profile by Kevin Nguyen for The New York Times, Vuong revealed that his own mother was just diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer; her prognosis is grim. Vuong has had to translate for her during doctor visits, much like how Little Dog translates doctors’ words for his mother in the novel. If this news highlights how ceaseless cruelty can be, perhaps it may also underscore the immense vulnerability Vuong pours into his art—and what a gift that is. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong offers so much of himself and, in doing so, makes suffering feel, if not less senseless, then at least less lonesome. There’s nothing little about that.
Jamey Christoph has illustrated many children’s books in his 15-year career as an illustrator, but it is perhaps his most recent work illustrating a new children’s book on the history of the Stonewall Inn that has become his most personal.
“As a gay artist and as someone who had my own struggles coming to terms with my identity, and valuing these type of stories that show adversity but give hope, it was personal,” Christoph said. “I really gave it my all.”
“Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution,” written by Rob Sanders and illustrated by Jamey Christoph.Penguin Random House
Starting with the building’s beginnings as a horse stable in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood in the 1840s, the picture book covers the history of the famed landmark as it became a bakery and then a restaurant and then finally a gay bar named the Stonewall Inn.
The book goes on to describe the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, when a riot broke out at the Stonewall Inn between bar patrons and police officers in response to one of the police raids that had become a common occurrence at the then-illegal establishment.
The Stonewall uprising, as it is widely known today, and the series of protests that followed helped galvanize the LGBTQ community and resulted in the very first pride march, then called Christopher Street Liberation Day, that occurred in New York City one year later, on June 28, 1970.
The book’s release is timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the uprising, and it comes nearly three years after Stonewall was designated a national monument by former President Barack Obama.
“If there was something that kids needed to know about in LGBTQ history, it would be Stonewall, and there was nothing out there in the world of picture books,” Sanders said of his desire to write the book.
“And so I set out with the intention of finding a way to write the story so kids aged five to 10 could read it and understand more about the history of our community,” he said.
Wanting to ensure the story was as accurate as possible, Sanders’ research involved receiving first hand accounts from people who were at the uprising as well as relying on newspaper reports and documentaries.
The challenge then came in trying to decide how to best tell the story while taking in all the different perspectives that had resulted from the event.
“I found that there were so many different stories and different accounts about how Stonewall started, that it became a real process trying to decide how to tell the story,” Sanders said.
That’s when Sanders decided to tell the story from the perspective of the building itself.
“The thought came to me that these buildings have stood here for over 150 years, if only these walls could talk,” he said. “And the thought rang in my head, ‘that may be the way to tell the story.’ To let the buildings talk about how they have watched history through all these years until the night they became a part of history.”
“Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution,” written by Rob Sanders and illustrated by Jamey Christoph.Penguin Random House
When Christoph was asked to join the project as the book’s illustrator he immediately knew it was something he wanted to be a part of.
He said it has been an honor to be a part of the growing canon of children’s books helping to tell the stories of notable LGBTQ individuals and events that have made a mark throughout history — but have often been ignored by the history books.
“I think learning LGBT history is important — to be able to give that reverence and dignity to this story in the same way we do to early American history and civil rights and suffrage,” Christoph said.
Having grown up gay in what he describes as a “small Southern town,” Christoph understands there may be some individuals who are not so receptive to his latest book project. But he stressed it is still important that these types of stories be told.
“There may not be much support or enthusiasm for books like Stonewall back home, but they are needed in these parts of the country most,” Christoph said. “The thought of creating a safe place, an affirming resource, a picture book that tells this important story to kids for the first time, it gave me such hope as I was drawing.”
Howard Williams, who helped to coordinate a reading and lecture of “Stonewall: A Building. An Uprising. A Revolution” at New York City’s LGBT Community Center last month, said with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising occurring this summer, parents could expect children to have more questions about Stonewall and its place in history due to the increased exposure.
“A simple, straightforward answer is the best,” Williams said. “And after an answer, it sometimes might be helpful to listen, ask them if they understand, and ask them what they’re thinking.”
Asked about the importance of a book like the one Christoph and Sanders have produced, Glennda Testone, executive director of the LGBT Community Center, said that understanding history is what “provides the perspective and inspiration needed to keep making progress.”
“In order to preserve the rights that we do have and to continue moving forward toward true equity and equality, it’s imperative to be aware of the immense effort that so many people have made throughout history to get us to where we are today,” she added.
In his debut collection Company, Sam Ross focuses on what lingers, exploring the idiosyncratic and at times seemingly indiscriminate nature of memory. When suffering takes many shapes and sizes yet appears as persistent fact, how may we forge memories that shimmer, so that love matches the loss? The answer often appears in the company we keep. Ross captures how delicate and dangerous connection can be—especially sexual connections and the truths they reveal—yet Company offers testimony for not turning one’s back on those intimate ties that bind.
Ross’s poetry is refreshingly crisp and unaffected, taking the quotidian and the extraordinary as part and parcel. His tone frequently turns conversational, providing glimpses of vernacular familiarity perhaps reminiscent of James Schuyler. In “Time Expanding the Air Forcibly” Ross asks, “About the picture, you said that’s how it felt, /but not how it looked. How could that be?” Ross fascinates over visual limits, playing games by covering his eyes in “Struck” (“so the sun becomes another thing sewn up / tied inside. I am making a mystery / where none exists”) and yearning to be seen differently in “Tableau Vivant”:
_____What I want you to see
what is backlit, behind me. _____Not the silhouette— but the negative space I make blocking light.
These poems bookend “After Assault,” a striking piece where violence extinguishes the visual (“Quick to flee— // dark swam on a path no one else could see.”) Here Ross’s lines approach the ephemeral, as readers work alongside Ross to piece together what has happened: “Less the blood than the timing // Running till my mouth unlatched in the street.” The poem offers harrowing insistence that what remains is not event but feeling, enigmatic clues toward recreation.
This is not to say Ross keeps his eyes closed; much of Company finds Ross making sense of what certain visuals reveal. From shooting a heron trapped by a fishing line to lawn mowing around a snake in seizing throes, Ross can sound detached from the suffering he encounters. Indifference, however, emanates not from Ross but the world we share (“clouds coiling through a mountain pass // revealing the landscape’s real form— / indifference.”) Referencing the Elizabeth Bishop line “The War was on,” Ross notes, “one can end // any poem like that and still / tell the truth.” The poems in Company don’t avert their gaze from the suffering of the natural world, nor do they ignore the suffering we do onto each other. Blood is a frequent motif in this collection, and it receives particularly careful consideration in “Recommendation (Number 9)”:
_____Blood resists form, handful of mercury. After the hurricane, I tried to offer mine. After every
_____disaster, deferred—in spite of a red sign that says We are always in need.
From bureaucratic discrimination to physical assault, the queer subject in Company knows its proximity to human violence. Within this landscape, even jokes from a cashier taking credit card information ring ominously (“And the last four digits, she said. And a fingerprint, she laughed. And your / blood, she laughed.”) As a result, when a narrator in one of Ross’ poems details the night they said love for the first time, it is a shock but not a surprise when the narrator notes awaking the next day with blood filling their eyes.
Ultimately, Company attempts a reclaiming of the past despite the violence enshrined therein. As Ross notes in the collection’s concluding piece, “I began // to call something like the past mine / only recently.” This past is comprised of small moments of intimacy and joy, often in the face of hostility. “Bowers v. Hardwick” derives an air of intolerance from its title yet depicts remarkable quotidian joy (“Or we can just spend the day / drawing dirty pictures of each other. / There’s time.”) While “Still Animals” begins again with the sight of animal death, it ends with the sweetness of two bodies intertwined at night (“arranged in the position you called your favorite: / my mouth at your neck, barely, and you feigning sleep.) If fleeting, these moments feel especially meaningful, fragments toward a useable past. The final words in Company offer as much: “Little history— / sweep it from the floor— // put the light in me.”
The poetry of Company displays a clear care for precision and a delicate approach to sentiment. Ross’s stanzas often break quickly, and his concision brings a gentle musicality to many of the poems here. Ross’s style allows his images—the terrible and precious alike—to emerge vividly. Company is a promising first collection, one that passionately offers argument for pursuing certain connections—perilous as they may be—and never loses sight of the work such connection requires: “I would learn rare // and love and want and wait, / I had to start at the beginning.”
Company By Sam Ross Four Way Books Paperback, 9781945588334, 112 pp. February 2019
If Act Up politics of the 1980s were somehow jettisoned into the present, blended with psychedelic pastel salt water taffy, and scored with a soundtrack of Incense and Peppermints, you might end up with something close to Eric Kostiuk Williams’ new book, Our Wretched Town Hall (a finalist for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award). Don’t underestimate this slim compilation of comics, posters, and commentary: it’s easily one of the best comic books of the year.
The flow of these short tales, both true and imaginary, all merge to become Williams’ commentary on the state of the world around him. That includes the title, which Williams explains, “is me thinking of the stories’ themes as being part of a figurative ‘townhall’/state of the union type assessment of things.” An opening story, “No. 1 Song in Heaven,” praises the importance of an ultimate club and dance party (“we’ve been aching for a spot like this to open up”), then bumps into a story about a woman who swipes a stone from a Yoko Ono art piece. Inscribed Love Yourself, “…the stolen rock is valued at $17,500 USD,” the price standing in stark contrast to the original artistic sentiment. That tale drifts into “Videofags Here for a Real Good Time,” about a real Toronto art/performance space whose founder Keith Cole warns, “one day it will all be gone. Use it now and use it often.” Right away readers will sense common themes of the importance of shared space and collaboration, and of the intrusion of money and gentrification into these treasured human assets.
“Twanking” addresses aging and the commodification of youth, specifically among gay men. “What if nobody wants me?” a skull-faced Williams asks, terrified of twanking out of twinkhood. “Be the truest you possible. Be visible. Be someone that younger-you might have found some comfort in seeing around,” his guardian angel, the Willendorf Braid (also featured in his book Condo Heartbreak Disco) wisely advises.
A centerpiece of the book is the story “Grand Opening,” which confronts the gentrification and commodification of gay culture head-on. Queer restaurant workers thwart a conservative who ridicules an increase in minimum wage, while he hypocritically has sex with underpaid restaurant staff. The workers turn him into the restaurant, stripping his flesh for steaks, milking his nipples for juice. The restaurant’s a huge hit. When a customer asks a waiter, “I know everything is local here, but is the farming ethical?” the waiter can only reply, “There are no ethics in the restaurant business.”
Williams’ art is what makes an over-the-top story like this flourish, twisting and manipulating the conservative’s body from a person into what looks like a flesh-colored bouncy-castle. His art easily combines street art with cosmic plasma, political activism with grand ideas like love, self-identity, and even what happens to us when we die.
One of the comic’s most memorable scenes is a psychedelically illustrated death-bed conversation between two characters:
“Considering how dreams can alter our sense of time, it’s entirely possible that an all-at-once dose of the dreaming chemical could induce…eternity.”
“Am I still me?”
“Yes. But your memories are becoming intertwined with the universal consciousness.”
Williams’ skillful, mind-expanding art is the perfect medium to let us gaze at our own demise, with wisdom and empathy. But in a refreshing right face from self-help platitudes, this comic of queer-loving and support resurrects the bite of David Wojnarowicz, inspiring readers with a fierce sense of humor and an activist rallying call.
