The Powerful Gay Library Conspiracy
Wherein the Philadelphia Free Library sends me a whole bunch of gay books at once.
I’ve found that my reading year has settled into cycles. I normally spend the first part of the year trying to keep up with the Tournament of Books shortlist. (This year’s is over. The list was great. I didn’t love the winner, but that’s not the point.) I also spend the first part of the year tackling the books that made everyone’s Bests of the Year lists from the last year. Without fail, though, as we enter second quarter, there’s a pent up avalanche of gay shit (technical term) that tumbles my way from the library. You’ll see a bunch of that on this week’s episode, but you know the gays are not a monolith, and the books couldn’t be more bizarrely different. All these selections really have in common is boys kissing, and sometimes that’s enough.
Speaking of the Tournament of Books, I threw the link to my newsletter into a comment section there and was thrilled to get a bunch of new subscribers - really smart ones that have poignant and brilliant things to say about books. Please do enjoy and reasonably lower your standards around book conversation!
I’m also not sure if this news letter is going to show up on twitter anymore, since Francis from PeeWee’s Big Adventure Who Inherited an Emerald Mine and Bought Twitter Out of Spite is allegedly banning Substack from showing up there? We’ll keep on chugging here and maybe try the Substack Notes section from some good old conversation once I learn how to use it. Until then…
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
The Shards
by Bret Easton Ellis (2023)
I try to schedule a new author I’ve never read before but probably should have at least once a year. Perhaps shockingly, I had somehow never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis. His books are queer canon, but his politics are getting a bit icky, so it seemed like my potential window of enjoyment was closing, and there was no time like the present to dig in. I was also intrigued that this doorstop was showing up in so many instagram photos from gays that I didn’t even know were readers. A thriller that doubled as this season’s must-have, girthy accessory? I had to know more.
The genius concept pulled me in immediately: a fictionalized autobiography wherein our author/narrator comes of age at his obscenely privileged, preppy high school, and also, just to complicate life, there may a serial killer on the loose. Said killer seems to be honing in on “Bret” and his friend group just as a new impossibly handsome and creepy student enrolls in the prep school to complete his senior year. Coincidence? Maybe! Everyone is gorgeous and at least 13% cocaine at any moment. Set in the early 80s, everyone at this school is a little bit bisexual, like an American version of Netflix’s Elite. The narrator intensely focuses on every single 80s cultural detail, from items of clothing, to what movie they’re seeing, to listing literally every song that’s playing around them. (Even if you don’t like the book, you might still enjoy the early 80s soundtrack, which many have curated online from their mentions in the book.) The details make what I think was the best part of the reading experience, a palpable mood of impending doom.
I ended up enjoying this book quite a bit, especially the way it wrapped up. I even headed over to a terrifying reddit thread to check out fan theories about how the book ends. Note: I should be upfront and say that this book did present some hurdles to enjoyment, but if you can ride them out, the last hundred pages or so go down like one of the smooth martinis these high school students always seem to be drinking poolside. To wit:
The narrator is 17 years old, and you really have to be in the mood to share the headspace of a spoiled rotten teen who is sexually attractive to everyone and is as melodramatic about his music as he is about a potential serial killer.
This book is over 700 pages and could have easily been half the length. I may be writing to you from the Stockholm Syndrome clinic.
Read it if you like: serial killers, unreliable narrators, conflicting fan theories, that one group of kids from Bennington, 80s high school narratives.
Ocean’s Echo
by Everlina Maxwell (2022)
It would be reductive to boil this down to Queers in Space, but that’s what initially got me into this series to begin with. This is book two of Maxwell’s series on, well, queers in space, and while this one takes place in the same universe as Winter’s Orbit did, this is a standalone book with a few overlapping themes. Some of those themes are: terrible space emergency and sexual tension. We’re dropped onto a planet where somehow, as the result of some very shady experimentation on residents, some inhabitants of the planet can read or control minds. Most folks cannot, but those that can are separated into two groups: readers and architects. Readers can read minds, of course, but they can also control chaotic space - a concept explained therein. And architects can impose their wills onto others. Both constituencies have been used by the military for a number of different purposes ranging from life-saving to nefarious.
So what happens when a handsome, strict architect is moved from his military post to impose his will onto a flirty, spoiled, badly behaved reader who has run away from his abusive and government-running family? Well, sparks fly and trouble ensues, of course! Unfortunately for them, as the tension melts between these enemies-to-maybe-lovers, there’s also an interplanetary governmental crisis, and these two star-crossed partners have to dig deep into a conspiracy while syncing - a term used to describe the dangerous process when architects merge with their subjects to create one mind. Sounds potentially sexy! It is, but it could also kill them. Ah, love.
This is some deep sci-fi stuff, something I dig into only a couple times a year. And when I do, I usually require a little romance mapped onto it. The book has some clever things to say about soulmates, opposites attracting, and how we play with one another’s minds when we are falling in love. This world, like in Maxwell’s last book, has some really cool meditations on gender and how we express that construct. Most importantly, this book never lets its intricate world building and engagement with serious issues get in the way of it being a whole lot of fun.
Read it if you like: psychics misbehaving, opposites attracting, cross genre fun, fake dating with mind control, thinking about consent.
High-Risk Homosexual
by Edgar Gomez (2022)
If you’re a man who came out in the early 2000s, always contained in the starter pack that your recruiter gifts you was a book of essays by David Sedaris. So, I’ve always had a soft spot of essay collections that weave the heartbreak of gay life with all of the hilarity and wit that come along with it. One of the latest in the long line of queer essayists combining sex, trauma, and familial spit takes is Edgar Gomez with his memoir High-Risk Homosexual - a class he learned he fit into at the clinic where he was prescribed PrEP for the first time, as it described him based on his own (not at all scandalous) sexual behavior. He is also adorable, if this matters to you.
Gomez is very funny, and all the essays are good. It’s a no-skips album, but two of the works really stood out to me as something special. In one, he describes being sent to his mother’s hometown village in Nicaragua so that his uncles can help make him a man. These two tíos take different tacks in their mission; one brings him to a cockfighting ring, and the other locks him in the room with a young woman. Neither effort really takes, of course, but the essay about machismo, family pressure, and manhood is so lovely and heartfelt.
The other standout essay is a dispatch from the world of survivor’s guilt after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016. Gomez grew up in Orlando and counted Pulse among the hometown bars where both came out and of age. He knew well some of the folks that died. He lays bare emotionally the specific feeling of having your home attacked and generally of navigating queer spaces when life is on the line. He draws parallels between him and the shooter, and how their lives could have been the same if not for certain interventions. He laments how the moment became a branded movement. It’s the missing perspective I’ve been looking for ever since the shooting occurred.
Read it if you like: queer essay collections, hilarious and heartbreaking stories, Latin America, Florida man, ahhhh to be young again.
LIGHTNING ROUND!
Are you not entertained? Have you not gotten enough queer essays? Here’s another collection.
Maybe you’re in the mood for a novel where the protagonist finds out her recently passed mother was not quite as straight and narrow as she imagined?
Ok, maybe you need one more gay essay collection, but only because he’s an IRL friend.
Next time, I’ll give some airtime to straight folks again. (No one’s perfect!)
But until then…happy reading!
I tend to gravitate to queer essay and short story collections. Maybe it's because I came out later in life, who knows? I enjoyed the two selections you included in the Lighting Round. I still need to read High-Risk Homosexual. Two recent favorites of mine are Afterparties: Stories by Anthony Veasna So (rest in peace) and Sweet and Low: Stories by Nick White. Thanks for writing this newsletter!