Reading poet (and Lambda Literary Award finalist) K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary (One World, 2020), is a visceral experience. Its prose is relentlessly, ruthlessly corporeal, and it is fearlessly beautiful. Told from the point of view of Daughter, a Taiwanese American early-adolescence girl, the book deftly threads together three generations of women with each other, land, water, trauma, violence, and love.
Growing up in California, Daughter one day discovers holes in the yard. They multiply in number and depth, and are somehow breathing. They periodically spit out letters from her grandmother, who grew up in Taiwan but lives in another California town.“I, too, was a direct descendant of gravity, born from women who belonged inside their countries the way blades belonged inside a body,” Chang writes. The physical force of inherited violence, loyalty, survival, love, and queerness that Daughter embodies shows up in small and large ways. As Daughter falls in love with her classmate, a girl named Ben, she begins to translate the holes’ letters into English. She shares them with Ben, who helps Daughter translate the meaning of the letters further – to make sense of her past, her inheritance, and her own queer body. “Language is not what’s said but what’s silenced,” Chang writes.
True to the title of the book, the characters are steeped in their animalistic needs and desires, which feels like revealing a truth about human nature. Bestiary is chock full of body, and all the ugly parts, or the parts we’re taught are ugly, are revered on the page. Early in the book, Chang writes, “We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavours from the body.” So often bodies are written with softness, sweetness, especially when it comes to love stories and family stories. But Chang goes all in on the sharp. She artfully, and with precision, breaks the reader open by taking the ideas of intergenerational inheritance and memory and literally grounding them. There’s nothing wistful about it. The holes in the book are not imagined; they are real. Holes in the ground, holes in bodies, holes in language, holes that are hungry and holes as sources of something else – they exist simultaneously as metaphor, character, and setting. In this way, and in many others, Bestiary rejects binary categorization like poetry or prose, or magical realism. Instead, it creates its own landscape.
Much of this landscape is rooted in memory and myth, both of which exist in the bodies of the characters. “Memory is contagious,” Chang writes. “You’re my mother, I said, and you’re supposed to prepare me for any future. But who, she said, can prepare you for the past?” As the narrative approaches what could be called its most roiling moment, the reader finds themselves within the body of the book, as if it had its own lungs and muscles. As Chang herself writes, “To give something new shape, you have to break it.” Bestiary does just that, and it is wonderful.
Have you ever read a short story that could be a book? The hook in the first line is compelling, immediately drawing you in. The characters are fleshed out and well-written within their limited storylines. The plot is unexpected and keeps you guessing, unsure how it could wrap up in the few remaining pages. It’s so finely done that it could go on for a couple hundred more pages, and you would still be satisfied.
That is how every story left me in Ryan Vance’s debut collection, One Man’s Trash.
The uncanny defines these short stories. Each story provides a gripping, disconcerting narrative. From a teenager with an innate power that makes everyone hand all of their belongings over to him, to a seemingly post-apocalyptic world where housemates have to supply a large hermit crab with cowry shells as rent, this collection has a compendium of fantastical short stories that are unsettling and incredibly queer.
Vance has the ability to write about the “odd” in a manner that is simultaneously unnerving, mystifying, and immersive. Generally, short stories do not give a lot of time for the reader to become adjusted to the world of the tale. With fantastical realms, such as Vance’s, this is all the more difficult. Yet, in One Man’s Trash, you cannot help but become immersed in the outlandish domain the author has created.
Take “When All We’ve Lost is Found Again,” where Rob, the story’s neurotic protagonist, copes with recently being ghosted by his longtime boyfriend by obsessing over a newly discovered area in space, where lost items mysteriously turn up. Rob’s infatuation with what has been labeled “Lost Space” slowly takes his boyfriend’s place within his life. As Rob’s boyfriend increasingly distances himself from their relationship, Rob spends more time cataloging the random items floating in space. This is until Rob stumbles upon a cephalopod creature that seems to have slightly moved every time he looks at it. By the end of the story, Rob has let all of his material items go. He leaves them outside his house to either end up in someone else’s home, or in Lost Space, handed over to the cephalopod.
Throughout the story, Vance maintains an eerie yet conversational tone. Rob’s passiveness about everything occurring in his life leads you to just accept it, despite the abnormalities. It is easy to understand how Rob can be so utterly fascinated by the cephalopod because you, as the reader, are itching to know more about it; the reader’s experience parallels Rob’s in this way. Stuck at the same level of comprehension as Rob and learning about Lost Space at the same pace as him, you’re limited to a certain level of understanding. The reader is being kept at a distance from total insight, heightening the disturbing presence of the cephalopod, and rationalizing Rob’s infatuation.
In “Dead Skin” the protagonist, Bruce, keeps the reader at a distance and incapable of knowing every detail. After a complete body transplant in which his head was connected to a new body, Bruce is prohibited from sharing any information regarding the surgery, and thus closes himself off to all people, including the reader, who is treated with the same apprehensiveness. Naturally, Bruce is not comfortable in this new body. Everyone knows who he is, being labeled “The Modern Frankenstein” at the center of documentaries and clickbait articles. Bruce essentially lives his life in isolation, refusing to allow anyone to get close to him. He even works as a bouncer for an LGBT nightclub, literally standing guard in all aspects of his life. Bruce wants to be alone until he meets Gale (using ne/nir/nem pronouns) at the gym.
Gale is an awkward stagehand at a local theater. Ne celebrates nir year anniversary on T and dons costumes from the theater for a date with Bruce. Gale does not understand Bruce’s reluctance to share himself, and Bruce thinks ne is only observing him like “a specimen,” because that’s what everyone else does. Still, Bruce slowly opens himself up to Gale by showing Gale track marks from his procedure and even attempting to dance with nir. When Bruce claims he was “‘not made for dancing,’” Gale comforts him, saying that “‘nobody’s made for anything,’” reminding Bruce of his humanity despite how unnatural he feels.
The nature of humanity is reflected in Vance’s stories. In many of the stories, humans are capable of persevering, despite being physically altered, or living in a world that has changed drastically. We learn Bruce had the transplant procedure performed as a solution to some unspoken terminal illness. Despite the public eye treating Bruce as nothing more than a bizarre experiment, Bruce continues to live his life, albeit a lonely one. Even before Gale, Bruce recognizes he was not ready to die, and if the price to continue living was to have the surgery, he was ready to pay it. Bruce’s nature to persevere and live is relatable and undeniably human, no matter how unusual his situation is.
If you are a fan of the weird fiction genre (think Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King), One Man’s Trash is for you. Vance’s debut is a dynamic piece of speculative fiction that artfully jumps from science fiction, telling a tale in which all straight people inexplicably die, to fantasy, with a story in which a Minotaur living in present-day sells ice cream to kids at a skatepark, and even a horror story about a man who creates a rat king out of vengeance. Do not let these peculiar plots scare you away. Underneath the uncanny, Vance’s true understanding of humanity is revealed, through strange situations that ultimately make each story within One Man’s Trash addicting and compelling.
Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s second book of poetry All The Gay Saints, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, is a stunningly sentient collection of ekphrastic love poems inspired by Herman Baspaintings that unpack the intersections and intricacies of rural America, masculinity, queerness, and the body.
In “My Body is Constantly Conjuring a Tempest (Or, Weighing the Pros and Cons of Attending My High School Reunion),” “On Trespassing,” and “I Wish All Children Could Touch the Sky At Least Once,” Candrilli creates portals to an “unsafe house” of a “past life,” teeming with toxic masculinity–“raised fists, those/ holes in drywall”–and the generational violence and destruction it breeds, the “boys that threatened to rape me in high school.”
Body and land, boyhood and Appalachia–where “beware of dog signs are security systems” and “the warning is to draw blood first”–are inextricably and excruciatingly linked. Yet as much as Candrilli’s narrator is entrenched in their homeland, they are just as hyper-aware of its patriarchal mannerisms, its influences and after-effects:
Everything has its doppelganger and nowadays I plagiarize men’s bodies indiscriminately. I have a right to take what’s not mine; this is what both men and the earth have taught me.
Although they were taught by their “father and the land” to be “small and quiet,” they overcome these repressive lessons by “opening [their] mouth” and “[using] it” to reclaim and rename their narrative and body, to detach the body from the aforementioned version of earth. They will, as asserted in “On Wanting Top Surgery in the Fascist Regime,” “rip myself apart,” but “drink/the body to solar power and…make a beautiful mother.” In this way, Candrilli’s poetry is the raw pink of (re)birth and beginning, each poem a root or tendon trusting it’s own vitality and resilience, finding cohesion within transness.
Nowhere is this resiliency more palpable and deeply resonant than in “Our Root System is a Tangle of Pipecleaners (Or, Being Your Man Has Made Me One)” where Candrilli’s narrator and their “future-husband wife,” a transcendent and healing refuge of a human, “lick my wounds/ and yours”and “[together]…have no time/ to be anything less than large.”
In “There is a Point at Which I Tire From My Own Fear,” the dangerous realities and descriminatory histories of being LGBTQ are acknowledged:
Queers are killed
and have always been killed in any number
of ways.
And conquered:
But my partner tells me again and again
how they love me, and I know one day I’ll try to die
in their arms. I know this is how we will win.
All The Gay Saints is a book of vital reminders that a distinguishing quality of our love is it’s protectiveness – loving for survival and both self and communal preservation. That the dichotmous, conflicting truths of “glitter, glitter, glitter, and guns” musn’t deter or demoralize us from loving ourselves and our queer/trans siblings, but instead fortify and fiercen our queer love. And that:
With their suggestive titles and gorgeous, pink-suffused covers, P. J. Vernon’s Bath Haus and Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s Yes, Daddy seem like frothy beach reads—and, to a certain degree, they are. But woven into twisting plots, shocking scenarios, and lush settings lies a deeper, more disturbing concern: how trauma experienced by young gay men can propel them into unhealthy, even dangerous, adult romantic relationships.
In Bath Haus, recovering addict Oliver Park from rural Indiana has everything that should make him happy: his partner, Nathan, a handsome, attentive, and wealthy trauma surgeon; a sprawling townhouse in Washington, DC; and, most importantly, his sobriety. Why, then, in the opening pages, is he going to a local gay bathhouse for anonymous sex? When he follows a stranger into a private room, everything goes horribly wrong, and he barely escapes with his life. He has crossed a forbidden line and cheated on Nathan. His choices have nightmarish consequences, and his desire to keep his transgression from his partner leads him deeper into dangers both from outside and, due to his slowly crumbling sobriety, from within. The questions linger: Why risk destroying a good thing? Is it a good thing after all?
What makes Bath Haus so engaging is that Vernon gives Oliver many layers. He’s not superficial or hedonistic or merely foolish. You can’t write him off. Trauma clouds his past, including a “bad boy” ex-boyfriend and an abusive father, and confusion fills his present—does Nathan love him or want to control him? Does he need that stability, or is it suffocating? As the screws continue to turn in the story, Oliver journeys through hell, navigating a vicious psychopath, Nathan’s manipulative mother, rampant snobbery from family and friends, and his own self-destructive impulses. Vernon knows how to grab you from the first line and not let go; he also knows that plot means nothing without a character we can root for, even when he’s making terrifyingly dangerous choices.
Like Bath Haus, Yes, Daddy is the story of another twenty-something gay man seeking financial security and, in this case, career advancement. Jonah Keller moved to New York City to ignite his playwriting career but has ended up waiting tables at a dead-end job. In the mode of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Jonah ingratiates himself with an older Pulitzer-prize winning playwright, Richard Shriver, and manipulates himself into the older man’s bedroom, but the power dynamic quickly turns. When Richard takes Jonah out to his vast and austere compound in the Hamptons, Jonah is confronted with Richard’s staff of zombie-like young men—all buff and beautiful, like something from a gay Stepford Wives. In addition, Richard’s high-toned social group smirk and leer at Jonah, reminding him of his place, testing him, and gradually hinting at their much darker intentions.
Parks-Ramage suffuses his narrative with a rich atmosphere, somewhere between the Gothic and The Great Gatsby, all while horrors await Jonah just under the surface of his lover’s lavish estate. Early on, you sense that this book may be a morality tale, a Faustian bargain about trading freedom (artistic and otherwise) for wealth. But what it becomes is more disturbing and difficult to parse. It takes its main character through a nightmare of controlling personalities, drugs, and sexual violence. Unlike Tom Ripley, whose cleverness causes us to align with him despite his amorality, we sympathize with Jonah because horrible things happen to him far beyond anything he may deserve for his earlier manipulations. Also, unlike with Ripley, we are given a layered backstory about Jonah’s homophobic religious parents and brutal experience with conversion therapy, eventually helping us to understand why he was drawn into danger and what he must do to heal from his experience.
The glossy “summer-read” marketing for these books tells only part of the story. As you read, the pages fly by—the writing is very good—but these writers have more on their minds than sheer entertainment. In each, we have an indictment of the wealth and status-obsessed circles of some urbanite gay men. This culture’s drug-infused superficiality belies a darker truth that gay men can—and do—prey on each other as a means of establishing and maintaining control; this particularly applies to the young men in these novels whose traumas have made them vulnerable. Gay culture isn’t immune from the damaging patriarchal systems that all too often govern straight culture.
“Old man,” he said, for he did not know his name, but the old man did not stir, so he remained in the old man’s bed, waiting for daybreak, watching him sleep, thinking about, if he had to choose, would he choose Pepa or the ship, wondering whether love was just an excuse for cowardice. When dawn came, the old man was still sleeping, so he left him to his dreams and found his way back to the river.” (98)
And here we have Anne Raeff’s newest novel, a celebration of time, space, and woven narrative. The novel traces the stories of a half dozen people all intertwined, over the span of about fifty years. Throughout the passage of time and the history of the world (wars, guerrilla movements, the spread of yellow fever, the coming and going of queer tourists, and love lost and found) the central crux of the story is the celebration of connection—however fleeting.
Fleeing to Nicaragua from Vienna during a worn-torn era, Pepa and her family settle in the jungle town of El Castillo. While there, Pepa’s parents contract yellow fever, leaving her to wander, learn about, and fall in love with both Nicaragua’s lush landscape, and its inhabitants. In particular, Pepa finds herself thrown into a love story with a local named Guillermo, who shows her how to find home in a new place, and a new way.
Pepa’s world comes further into chaos and heartbreak when her family abruptly decides to move to New York. Straddling the boundaries and borders of love, passion, and geography, Only the River shows two things simultaneously: what parallel universes can look like, writ large, and also the fragmentation that happens due to war, fleeing, and settlement. The idea of home, in people and places.
It is wonderful to see multi-generational narratives that involve queerness as fluidly as queerness happens—that is to say, queerness as normalized. Guillermo and his foray into blurred spaces with the two German lovers, Liliana, left by her wife and pining. In this novel, queerness is not a static land that one enters or leaves—it is as running and evolving and changing as the river around which this story revolves.
In our modern world, we need more depictions of love like this, more depictions of landscape like this, more depictions of what love can look like when it is told from many angles—with both the light and the dark. As in her novel about WWII (Winter Kept Us Warm), Raeff has a remarkable ability to be able to take us to new places—fantastical new places—on often well-trot soil. What’s more, the stories Raeff tells, and the fluency with which they are told, earn their place in a canon that is timeless, classic, and necessary. This is a triumph of a novel and a must-read for our times.
This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists.
But, as with pornography itself, first impressions can be misleading. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography, at $28 for the eBook, is enlightening and even affordable. Its author, Jeffrey Escoffier, a founder of OutLook and director of Out/Write, a professor who has taught at Berkeley, Rutgers, and The New School and is now a researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, avoids pedantry. His graphs, viewed in close focus, give us a rich view of the upheaval in global culture that has taken place since the nudist and bodybuilding magazines like Physique Pictorial, passed furtively from hand-to-hand among closeted men in the 1950s, giving way to Tom of Finland and the abundantly stuffed crotches of his models, and all that has followed since.
“Perversions” and “Scripts”
Escoffier’s book recounts an engaging history that culminates, after millennia, in the mainstreaming of modern hard-core porn—meaning, in his very specific definition, sexual imagery, particularly in videos, of explicit depictions of intercourse, including oral copulation. Escoffier notes that sex researchers of the 1920s, whose focus was primarily on married heterosexual couples, broke ground that later was deeply plowed by Alfred Kinsey, who began in the 1940s publishing the results of surveys that included homosexual feelings, fantasies, and behavior. He doesn’t mention Magnus “Max” Hirschfeld, the German doctor whose Institute for Sex Research, founded in 1919 in Berlin, was the first association in the modern world to promote homosexual and transgender rights.
The author employs the words “perverse” and “perversion” in a way that might be off-putting to an LGBTQ audience. But he is openly gay himself, and no prude, and uses these words in context as a social scientist and historian. Escoffier is known, among many other things, for his earlier studies of “gay for pay” film actors wh6ose heterosexual orientation does not impede their sexual performance with men. He has examined with particular interest what he calls “the social conditions that enable heterosexually-identified men to turn in credible sexual performances in gay pornographic videos.”
Like “perversion,” the word “script” has a special meaning for Escoffier, who devotes most of the book’s attention to films featuring sex between men, and treats pornography as a vast screen on which all of our fantasies are projected. He writes boldly, “Sexual scripts are necessary at every stage of production and are the reason that people watch porn.”
Such a broad assertion concerning people’s interest in porn risks neglecting the developments we see in amateur, do-it-yourself fuckbuddy videos, in which guys who obviously like and are attracted to each other are having fun—not posing or “performing” together. Amateur videos may prove to be a more reliable measure of what people want than statistical analyses of commercial video sales. Joe Gage, creator of rough-trade classics beginning with Kansas City Trucking Co. in 1976, commented in a 2007 Butt Magazine interview, when asked if he liked the work of other directors, “I like amateur porn the best, because it’s real. It’s real sex.”
Do-it-yourself
As is so often the case, LGBTQ people were at the forefront of a social upheaval that soon paid benefits to the entire world. Remember “Chat Rooms”? Maybe you don’t, but if you use any form of social media you are an heir to the slow, noisy, dial-up services that began in the early 1980s, patronized by gay men eager to hook up in a new, virtual way. Personal use of the Internet exploded as men learned to cruise without having to look their best—and, as the technology evolved and allowed them to share photos and videos, to create a new species of pornography. This new generation of do-it-yourself porn embraces various body types, ages, and racial groupings—not as fetish categories for commercial-porn keyword clicks, but as real-life guys doing what comes naturally.
Escoffier refers to the video audience as “spectators,” reinforcing the understanding of porn as a creation tightly controlled by producers who believe they know what the porn-consuming public wants. He nods to Pornhub as the world’s largest distributor of porn and notes that “video pornography on the Internet is not only a hugely popular form of entertainment, but also a body of knowledge about sex that is both a form of sex education as well as a self-help guide”—the modern pillow book. What he doesn’t mention is that the early growth of Pornhub was driven largely by non-commercial, amateur, DIY videos making Pornhub and other amateur sites like XHamster and @ment4us wildly profitable.
From the 1970s through the end of the last century, commercial studios refined and professionalized their product, catering to increasing numbers of fetishes, “perversions,” and interests, in slickly produced, high-quality, keyword-driven commodities. Long gone are the original black-and-white “Old Reliable” films of the early 1970s, which featured snarly, rough-trade types masturbating on camera, often on a familiar worn-out couch, chewing cigars and, occasionally, flipping off the viewer. Meanwhile, technology has allowed fuckbuddies to make quality video recordings of themselves and to post their videos online for anyone to enjoy. The production values are not as impressive, but the intimacy more than compensates.
The Object of Knowledge
But even this erudite observation is subject to reexamination: In a section near the end of Escoffier’s book, perhaps to atone for the statistics and graphs in earlier chapters, he quotes from reviews written by film critics who have had the opportunity to hire their favorite porn actors for live, in-the-room-together, sex. A film scholar studying PornHub and OnlyFans is likely to be able to find his favorites on RentMen. An enterprising performer/escort uses his recognized profile name everywhere, and posts his travel schedule months in advance.
These explicit reviews end the book on a good-humored note: “He was not Rick Gonzales the porn star… he was Rick Gonzales my LOVER for two hours and he just made love to me.”
Andrew Holleran, in his 2015 essay “Notes on Porn,” commented that the occasional moment “when two men do make contact is more powerful than all the anonymous pistonlike fucking of ordinary porn films.” The three-page essay was one of the most often cited items ever to appear in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Concerning the illusion furthered by porn that the viewer is, in Plato’s terms, experiencing “the object of knowledge,” Holleran wrote, “…you are as alone after sex with someone in a porn film as you were when you began. Depending on your age or temperament or circumstances, this may be a good or a bad thing.”
Queer friendships, in art as in life, are often complex. Zak Salih’s debut novel Let’s Get Back to the Party powerfully and broadly explores these friendships—the joys and tensions that exist within them, and the lines between platonic and romantic that can blur to the point of disappearance—celebrating the ways in which they help define us.
Shortly after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, Sebastian Mote, a high school art history teacher, runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding. In the decades since they last saw each other, Sebastian has faded from Oscar’s memory, while Oscar still occupies a potent space in Sebastian’s mind. As children, Sebastian’s role as Oscar’s protector defined their closeness—their friendship was a cocoon within which Oscar could forget about his difficult home life and severe father.
Now, at least on the surface, they couldn’t be more different. Oscar, distressed by the new “epidemic” of marriage, sees gay domestication as a death. He is equally affronted by the “colonization” of uniquely queer spaces—gay clubs attracting straight women, the gayborhood now “just another neighborhood.” Endlessly pursuing casual, detached sex as a distraction from everyone around him coupling off and settling down, Oscar is, at first, a frustratingly one-dimensional character. (Aware his friends see him this way, he can’t quite admit they’re right.)
After a chance meeting with Sean Stokes, an older writer whose frank, explicit autobiographical novels of 1970s gay life captivate Oscar, leading to a friendship and correspondence through which Oscar becomes enthralled by what he sees as a distant past where “being queer was still strange.” Sean’s words become manifesto-like truths for Oscar—amidst the tame “storybook love” now ubiquitous, he glamorizes a lost era of risky, rebellious sex, the “grit and grime … the sheer faggotry of it all.”
Meanwhile, a failed “experiment in domesticity” with a now-ex-boyfriend has left Sebastian single, housesitting at his father’s rural northern Virginia home. Unlike outgoing Oscar, Sebastian keeps to himself: avoiding the popular gay dating apps, he spends long afternoons at museums and pores over biographies of the artists he teaches. (One of the most moving and inventive episodes in the novel is an extended section in which Sebastian recalls moments in his boyhood through works of art—Copley, Turner, Pollock—interleaving these memories with the story of a gay student’s suicide at the school where he teaches. Perhaps, he argues, intimacy and artmaking come from the same impulse, that “uncanny, inexplicable compulsion” to reach out to another.)
Sebastian takes an interest in the self-assured, magnetic Arthur, a student whose “uncanny confidence” he admires and envies. Like Oscar and Sean, Sebastian and Arthur form something like a friendship, but while Oscar longs for Sean’s past, Sebastian yearns for Arthur’s present. For him, Arthur is a reminder of the desperation and shame of his own adolescence: “[the] boyhood I never had, the warped manhood I was stuck with for the rest of my life. … If I had his life, then I wouldn’t have to have my own.”
Salih treats his two narrators’ sensibilities with meticulous care. They begin as distinct voices: Sebastian’s episodic, digressive reflections, populated with nods to art history (“…flung across the flannel sheets like a troubled Fuseli dreamer”) are a stark contrast to Oscar’s snappy, bold observations, which pulse with attitude and sarcasm, recalling the bullet-like directness of cruising apps. But as the novel progresses, a shift takes place; the two voices blend and blur. Most strikingly, Oscar begins to transform—growth that is no less moving for its expectedness. His aversion to change yields as he starts to feel the hollowness in the reports he brings Sean of his sexual escapades; he attempts to frame queer rebellion in new ways. Sebastian changes, too. His friendship with Arthur allows him to reconsider how he sees himself as a gay man and to search deeply for the beginnings that lie within all endings.
In a letter to Oscar, Sean writes, “Perhaps experience without transformation isn’t experience at all.” Whether in pursuit of gay rights or in search of our own queer identities, what is the point of the struggle if we can’t, then, acknowledge and celebrate the progress? Salih addresses the queer “struggle” within and without—how the ways we fight in the community are always in conversation with the ways we fight within ourselves; our need “to be desired, to be seen” but also the need to look inward and see ourselves. Throughout the novel, Salih deftly captures the pervasive, intangible melancholy that can color experiences of detachment and isolation, writing movingly of the relationships—friendships and otherwise—that can bring us back from these moments. Let’s Get Back to the Party reminds us how we fight to keep going in spite of it all.
Ruth Coker Burks never intended to be an advocate, activist or even an angel. She just wanted to do the right thing.
“Oh, I’m no angel,” Coker Burks, 62, told TODAY. “I’m just a person.”
But that’s how her legacy has been defined when one fateful day in 1986, at just 26 years old, she was visiting a friend, Bonnie, at a local hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been suffering from oral cancer. Bonnie had her tongue removed, and Coker Burks was her interpreter. This was their fifth extended hospital stay, but this time there was something different. Out of the corner of her eye, Coker Burks spotted a door down the hall with a bright red tarp across it, food trays piled up outside and a group of nurses at the door, unwilling to go in.
Ruth Coker Burks in the mid-1980s.Courtesy Ruth Coker Burks / Grove Atlantic
“I had been in hospitals a lot of times and so I thought that was really bizarre,” she said of the biohazard red door. “The nurses were literally drawing straws to see who would go in and check on this person. They would draw straws and it’d be best out of three, and then they didn’t like that and so then it’d be best 2 out of 3 and then no one would end up going in to check in on this person. They just walked away.”
Her curiosity overcame her, so when the nurses left their stations, she snuck into the room to see who was there. She struggled finding the person at first, who was so frail and near death, she couldn’t even tell he was in his bed. “I had to look for him,” she explained. “I thought maybe he was in the bathroom. You couldn’t tell the difference between him and the bedsheets. It was just horrible.”
This was the first time she would encounter a person dying from AIDS, but it wouldn’t be the last. Over the next decade, Coker Burks would care for over 1,000 gay men dying of the disease who were abandoned by their families.
In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month and the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in 1981, TODAY had the opportunity to talk with the accidental activist to look back on her incredible story that above all else, shows what happens when someone overcomes fear for love and life.
‘Nobody’s coming’
Prior to that fateful hospital visit, Coker Burks had heard rumors about the then-unnamed disease when visiting her hairdresser cousin in Hawaii. A devout Christian, single mother of one and real estate agent working in the timeshare industry, Coker Burks pretended to know a lot more about the gay community than she actually did.
“Oh honey, don’t worry about that,” her cousin told her about the disease soon to be labeled HIV and AIDS. “Just the leather guys in San Francisco are getting that.”
But it was that day while caring for her friend Bonnie when she encountered AIDS for the first time in person — and knew it wasn’t just affecting the “leather guys” in California.
“I went over to the bed and I didn’t know what to do but I took his hand and I said, ‘Honey, what can I do for you?’” she remembers of the fateful encounter. “He looked up at me and he didn’t have any more tears to cry. He was so dehydrated there was nothing left to produce any tears. But he looked up at me and he said he wanted his mama.”
Coker Burks felt this was something she could do: Get his mother to come to the hospital and then go back to Bonnie and get back to minding her own business, something she admits she’s never been very good at doing. But what she quickly realized is that his mother knew where he was, and she had no intentions to visit him.
“I went over to speak with the nurses, and they backed up like I had them at gunpoint,” she said. “They said, ‘You didn’t go in that room, did you?’ Well yeah, I noticed that y’all weren’t going in. So they started fussing at me and then they just backed up even more.”
She recounted what they said to her: “His mother’s not coming. Nobody’s coming. He’s been in this hospital for six weeks, nobody’s been here and nobody’s coming and don’t you go back in that room.”
Well, Coker Burks didn’t listen.
The man’s name was Jimmy, and his experience was more common than not. Many gay men who became sick with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s were shunned by their families, abandoned and left to die alone.
Coker Burks tried calling Jimmy’s mother numerous times, but each time his mother refused to take the call. After a few attempts — and a heated threat to put his obituary in her local newspaper — his mother answered her questions. “My son died years ago when he went gay,” she told Coker Burks. “I don’t know what thing you have at that hospital but that’s not my son.”
Coker Burks knew that was the best she was going to get out of her, so she stayed by Jimmy’s side until he died the next day.
“I thought he would be the only one, and I would get back to going to church every Sunday and you know, being a good Christian living the best life I could,” she said. “I had a young daughter, her father and I were divorced, and I was just trying to be the best mother and set the best example I could for her. I thought I’d just go back to that.”
Coker Burks and her daughter, Allison. Grove Atlantic
But after leaving Jimmy’s hospital room after he passed, she learned that the homophobia these men experienced lived on well after their final breathes. The nurses said the body needed to be dealt with, and that the hospital’s morgue didn’t want him because they were scared the other bodies would get contaminated. (She jokes, “Of course, you don’t want a dead body contaminated with anything, especially imagination.”)
The nurses insisted she take him. It was difficult to find a funeral home who would take Jimmy, but after many attempts she was able to find a place that would cremate him and she buried him with her father. With her daughter Allison by her side, they got a cookie jar for his ashes, dug a hole above her father’s coffin and planted flowers to mark the spot.
“We had a little do-it-yourself funeral, said the Lord’s prayer, put the flowers and a big rock on top of him and we left,” she explained. “And I thought, you know, that’s going to be the only person I ever have to do this for. I mean, who would think you would ever have to do it twice in your life, right?”
She went back to selling timeshares. Then more and more local men in Arkansas began getting infected with HIV and becoming sick with AIDS. Nurses started giving out Coker Burks’ number to their patients.
No matter what, Coker Burks answered their calls. She buried 39 others in her family’s cemetery and cared for hundreds more for over a decade.
Coker Burks with Billy, who became one of her best friends before he died of AIDS at 24.Grove Atlantic
Hope, friendship and understanding
Coker Burks tells her story in the book, “All the Young Men,” published in December 2020.
“It is not to diminish her story to say that heterosexual angels weren’t the dominant narrative of the AIDS crisis, but a vanishingly rare exception to a rule of homophobia, cruelty and prejudice,” writes The Guardian’s Olivia Laing. “That said, there’s something immensely uplifting about her decision to involve herself in the travails of a community not her own, simply because she could see that there was a need. It’s a brighter story of human nature…”
Last year, it was also announced that her story will be made into a film as well, “The Book of Ruth,” starring Ruth Wilson and Matt Bomer.
Above all else, Coker Burks wants people to understand that her story is one of hope.
“It’s about friendships, and it’s about having the very worst of situations and turning it into something else,” she said. “It’s about kindness and stepping through the door, whatever the door is. It’s a fear that you override. Whatever fear you have and you just walk into that room, because everybody always asked me what made me walk into that room. To me, it was a voice of God saying, ‘Go in there. It’s going to be OK.’”
Coker Burks and drag queens from the Discovery Nightclub in Little Rock, Arkansas.Grove Atlantic
Coker Burks said what she learned the most was to see joy in everything, even in death.
“Oh no, my guys lived until the day they died,” she said. “I learned more about living from the dying than I ever learned about dying with the dying.”
“Hope was all they had. That was it. And, you know, we would go to drag shows. … I had never even heard of a drag queen but I would stand by the stage with my dollars, I wouldn’t even go back to my chair, I was just handing out dollars all night, thinking to myself these are the most fabulous creatures I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Step out of your lives, step out of your boundaries and deliberately meet new people who aren’t you.”
During LGBTQ Pride Month, TODAY is sharing the community’s history, pain, joy and what’s next for the movement. We will be publishing personal essays, stories, videos and specials throughout the entire month of June. For more, head here.
Last year at this time, as much of the world was on lockdown due to the pandemic, Leslie Jordan began posting daily videos of himself on Instagram.
The actor known for roles in the “American Horror Story” franchise and “Will & Grace” was staying near family in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was bored.
Many of Jordan’s videos included him asking “How ya’ll doin?” He referred to his followers as “hunker downers.” Sometimes he posted stories about Hollywood or his childhood growing up with identical twin sisters and their “mama,” as he calls her. Other times he did silly bits like complete an indoor obstacle course. He quickly became a bright spot during an otherwise bleak time and his followers grew.
“Someone called from California and said, ’Oh, honey, you’ve gone viral.’ And I said, ’No, no, I don’t have Covid. I’m just in Tennessee,” said Jordan. Celebrities including Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Alba and Anderson Cooper, along with brands such as Reebok and Lululemon, would post comments.
Soon he became fixated with the number of views and followers he had, because there wasn’t much else going on.
“For a while there, it was like obsessive. And I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Stop, stop, stop.′ You know, it almost became, ’If it doesn’t happen on Instagram, it didn’t happen.’ And I thought, ‘You’re 65, first of all. You’re not some teenage girl.’”
The spotlight led to new opportunities. Earlier this month he released a gospel album called “Company’s Comin’” featuring Dolly Parton, Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Eddie Vedder and Tanya Tucker. He also has a new book called, “How Y’all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived.” It’s Jordan’s second book. His first, “My Trip Down the Red Carpet” was published in 2008.
“That sort of dealt with all the angst and growing up gay in the Baptist Church and la, la, la, la, la. And this one, I just wanted to tell stories.” In “How Y’all Doing,” Jordan writes about working with Lady Gaga on “American Horror Story,” how meeting Carrie Fisher led to Debbie Reynolds calling his mother, and the Shetland pony he got as a child named Midnight.
Jordan says it was hard to narrow down what he wanted to write about because he’s a storyteller by nature.
“It’s very Southern. If I was to be taught a lesson or something when I was a kid, I was told a story.”
With no shortage of anecdotes, Jordan ends the book with a tease there’s more to come. “This is not goodbye forever,” he writes but won’t say if there is an official plan for more, just that if this book does well, he’d love to write another.
Now that the globe has hit the one year mark of the pandemic, Jordan is less reliant on Instagram. He sometimes has to remind himself to post something new and can scramble for content.
“I didn’t plan it in any way at all,” he said of his quarantine surge in popularity. People say to me, ‘Tell me what you did, because I want to get a lot of followers.’ I have no idea. I remember the day it got to a million. Now it’s almost 6 million. … I’ll tell you where it helps, when they go to negotiate the money,” he laughed.
Jordan, who was most recently in the Fox comedy “Call Me Kat” starring Mayim Bialik and “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” says he made a decision when he turned 60 to treat showbiz like a regular job and clock out each evening. “At six o’clock, the curtain goes down. TV and movies, see, that’s my job. I have other things that I do besides that.” These days, Jordan spends much of his spare time taking riding lessons and is preparing for his first horse show in June.
Friday, April 23 Online program Free | $5 suggested donation
In honor of National Poetry Month in April, poet James J. Siegel will read excerpts from his new poetry collection The God of San Francisco (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020), a poetic exploration of San Francisco’s queer history from the North Beach drag scene to Twin Peaks Tavern in the Castro, from the triumphant election of Harvey Milk to the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic. Siegel will be joined by queer poets Natasha Dennerstein, Dazié Grego-Sykes, Baruch Porras-Hernandez and Jacques J. Rancourt to read poems that explore our personal connections to LGBTQ history, our queer ancestors and the ongoing fight for equality. Register online here.
