The streamers are throwing queer content as fast as they can at us, and with no end in sight for the writers’ and actors’ strikes (solidarity with SAG and WGA, of course) we need to enjoy the content while we can. Here’s a quick speed round of what I’ve been watching (some of which are literary adaptations.)
Red, White, and Royal Blue - I’m not sure there’s a piece of gay literature so on the tips of the tongues and fingers of the gay internet since the great A Little Life Discourse Wars many moons ago. Of course, both books feature unhealthy amounts of self mutilation and amputation. Kidding. RWRB was a really special novel to me, and I thought the adaptation was solidly fine! Really fun sometimes! I missed the Austenian, epistolatory horniness and expanded breadth of characters from the novel, but the leads were super hot, they had some nice chemistry, and producers found a way to fit penetration onto Amazon Prime. Uma Thurman says “bottoming” and “Truvada” in a Fred Thompson accent. Overall, thumbs up! I’m glad I watched it.
Heartstopper - As a gay man over the age of 40, I’m required by code of conduct to let you know that I would have given anything to have something like this when I was growing up. I’m being glib, but that’s actually true. It’s so nice to see queer stories adapted cleverly to feel like the graphic novel from which they’re derived. It’s the rare show on television that I’m not damning with faint praise when I call it nice. The show is also kind with its characters and manages to move me, even if the focus is on folks way, way younger than I.
Glamorous - Samantha Jones, ahem, I mean Kim Cattrall eschews the SATC Cinematic Universe for the most part by playing a former supermodel and current cosmetics mogul who plucks a gender nonconforming sass machine from makeup counter obscurity to become her assistant. The company is in big trouble, I think, and a ragtag team of queer employees has to band together to fix things, while the new assistant navigates a very active dating life. The show doesn’t always makes sense, but it’s really great to see SO many queer actors employed. I would not call this show “good',” but I would absolutely call it “great,” if you understand what I mean.
And Just Like That - An absolute nightmare of a fever dream where the some of the queer characters have: run away to become a Shinto monk, refuse to bottom because they don’t want to be a “woman,” and have become the worst significant other on television in quite some time. It’s a show that dares to ask, “What does it matter if we do horrible things to beloved characters as long as people talk about it the next day?” Of course, I will watch every single episode of this until it goes off the air.
Can’t wait for the Dante and Aristotle adaptation coming soon.
If I can be earnest for a moment, I’ve been doing this for a year now, and as a Sagittarius with ghosting tendencies, I’m very proud that we’ve made it this far. I’m also very grateful for readers of this little project and everyone who reaches out to say nice things and/or offer suggestions. I’m so glad this newsletter is sparking joy in your inbox. Say hello anytime.
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Mobility
by Lydia Kiesling (2023)
If you listen to Crooked Media podcasts, like I occasionally do, you almost certainly have heard of this book, the first one to be featured as part of their publishing imprint. They plan to “explore politics, current events and activism, narratives on culture and policy, memoir, pop culture, history, and investigative journalism from a wide and diverse range of perspectives…” Wonderful. I love those things! Their first foray into the fiction world is truly great, and I’ve been thinking about it for days since I finished it.
Bunny is a diplomat’s daughter, dragged around the world with her siblings and recently planted in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan for those of you who didn’t make your State Geography Bee in middle school. I did and lost to a couple home schooled children, and I’ve been bitter to this day. Anyway, Bunny is a cipher of a character whom we follow from her teen days in Baku to her adult life working in the energy industry, and in doing so (I think) we’re meant to see her as someone who personifies America’s ever-growing reliance on fossil fuels. She sort of ambles through life without realizing what’s happening around her, or maybe nefariously she’s able to delude herself out of any complicity. Eventually she becomes another cog in the machine who helps package the industry into something palatable and even feminist.
As far as political fiction goes, this book doesn’t feel at all didactic or dry. It’s based very loosely on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, the novel There Will Be Blood was based on. Mobility is actually quite funny in parts, and the last chapter is truly one of the most chilling things I’ve read this year. I’m excited to see what Crooked delivers next, but for now, we’ve got a thoughtful and terrifying oil novel for this century.
Read it if you like: political podcasts, protests, getting a little depressed about your own complicity in the ending of the world, feeling a little smug, hating on Texas
Hello Beautiful
by Ann Napolitano (2023)
If you’re the kind of person who reads newsletters about books, then you’ve certainly already heard about this one. Oprah picked this as the 100th selection for her Book Club, and Amazon named it the best book of the year so far, halfway through the year. This book comes wildly pre-hyped. I was happy to find that I enjoyed it quite a bit.
The novel is loosely based on Little Women in that there are four sisters, they get along like gangbusters, and their love lives are intertwined and complicated. You need not have read Little Women to enjoy the book, but it does make the text a bit richer to catch the Easter eggs Napolitano leaves along the way. These particular sisters have been dropped into 1970s Chicago, and we travel with them across the decades as life happens to them. They’re a tightly knit group of Italian Catholics who can’t seem to get out of their own way, and things get complicated when a broken man enters their lives. The family feels genuine, and the story, of course, does get a little sad. I can’t give away too much here, but I will say when you base a story on Little Women, someone’s always going to be the Beth!
I can see why so many people love this book - I’m one of them. Great characters. I wish we got more of the twin sisters, who sort of get short shrift in service of concentrating more on the mystery man. But, it’s an incredible family saga to lose yourself in, and it’ll make you want to call your siblings.
Read it if you like: family narratives, Greta Gerwig movies, the Chicago Bulls, complicated love triangles, that old tv show Sisters
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos
by Nash Jenkins (2023)
Trend alert: This is the second hefty book this year that I’ve read that’s more than 600 pages and comes with a playlist of songs. In fact, each section of the book begins by letting you know all of the music that fits on the limited bites of the protagonists iPod. We are in 2008 when Obama was just elected, the nation is feeling hopeful, and Foster Dade has just started at his boarding prep school in New Jersey where scandal and infamy await.
What we know: In 18 months from the beginning of Foster Dade’s prep school career, he will be expelled following a series of events that leave everyone around him scarred. This big old book has everything, but especially drugs, excess of the absurdly wealthy, very bad sex, heavy suggestions of closeted homosexuality, more drugs, and occasionally homework. Foster can never quite fit in at the prep school, no matter how he tries, until he finds friends named Jack and Annabeth to take him under their wing. Things start to spin out of control when Foster starts his own…business. A mysterious narrator tries to piece together the fragments of rumors about Foster’s story years later, and we have to ask ourselves whether he’s a hero, a villain, or somewhere in between. One thing is for sure within or outside of this book, and that is that masculinity is a prison.
Prep school books are fun because generally we drop children who are barely able to make even one good decision into situations where adults have very little influence. Even though the characters in the book weren't the same ages I am, it felt nice to wade through late 2000s optimistic nostalgia (and music) and be transported back to an adolescent time when a simple kiss or a bad grade meant nothing in the grand scale of the universe but still could absolutely rearrange your own personal cosmos.
Read it if you like: drugs, prep schools, wishing that the kids in I Have Some Questions For You were a little bit wilder, schools that have lacrosse bros, Passion Pit
LIGHTNING ROUND
Maybe you’re in the mood for a graphic novel that’s a queer retelling of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey?
Or a graphic novel that’s a retelling of a Vietnamese fairy tale with a queer spin on it?
Or a graphic novel that paralleled my life of navigating queerness while growing up in a funeral home in PA?
Until next time…happy reading!