Try Doing THIS in a Small Town
The girls, gays, and theys are dancing and romancing in small towns everywhere.
When Sinead O’Connor burst onto the scene for me, I was a tween at the height of my obsession with music charts. (Ask your nerdiest friends, and I’m certain they had an era when they were psychotically keeping track of Billboard charts in notebooks and talking nonstop about chart movement.) Sinead intrigued and terrified and fascinated me. A spitfire with a shaved head, as if she were unsuccessfully trying to blunt the power of her own beauty, she was one of the first people in pop culture that I can remember inviting trouble into her life in the name of the truth.
Sinead was so ahead of her time, so beyond pop. Too sensitive for a world that wasn't able to muster the compassion she knew we all deserved, she needed to be heard but simply couldn't handle being perceived. And she was right about everything the whole time. She really was. Just like when George Michael died, we are seeing so many previously unspoken acts of kindness and humanity from a prodigious talent who struggled in the spotlight. Like a lot of folks my age, I bought I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got because of the massive success of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and because you used to have to buy whole albums to listen to one single. (Kids, ask your parents.) It wasn't until many years later that I really listened to the whole album and recognized it for the masterpiece that it was.
Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about her death in conjunction with all of my feelings after seeing the Barbie movie - how the world’s expectations keep us so many of us from being happy with who we are. And how nothing is ever easy, but have to resolve that and keep trying anyway. And how the unsparing gaze on women will always make it so nothing they do can ever be enough. Sinead was a beacon at great cost to her. She changed so much that it’s hard to imagine what the world was like before her. I hope she knows peace now.
The rest of this episode of the newsletter is about homosexuals doing sexual things in rural places, which has nothing to do with Sinead O’Connor, except for the the fact that she probably would have enjoyed these scenarios. After all, she was "three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay."
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Big Swiss
by Jen Beagin (2023)
A perfect book cover! It’s screaming “madcap sexual hilarity!” This is one of my favorite kind of books because it’s definitely Not For Everyone, and it’s in one of my favorite genres: messed up people doing absolutely crazy shit. And it touches on all the greatest hits of that genre: deep seated trauma, ethically lacking therapists, and all the choices we flawed humans have to make in the name of tracking down and capturing happiness. It’s also part of that trend in books I’ve come across this year wherein a heretofore straight-identifying woman finds herself getting down with another woman.
Greta has floated through life without much direction and currently finds herself living with a drug-dealing witch in a Hudson Valley Dutch house in massive disrepair. Her latest in a series of menial jobs is producing transcriptions for the town’s only sex therapist. (Yes, this is a far fetched and sketchy scenario. Yes, I was happy to go along with it.) By doing this, she gets to know the secrets of everyone in town, and as a former sales clerk in my tiny hometown’s independent pharmacy, I can tell you it’s a whole lot of fun. She becomes fascinated with one patient in particular, a doctor in search of her missing ability to orgasm, and she nicknames her Big Swiss. One day their paths cross, and she recognizes Big Swiss’s voice, and after a couple interactions, they begin a bizarre and almost certainly ill-fated affair. Hilarity ensues.
Really, it does. This book is so funny. It’s also polarizing, if you believe goodreads reviews. For me, the author creates characters that are quirky but stop just short of being obnoxious. The dialogue is dark and sparkly at the same time. I was riveted to find out where things would end up for the ladies, and I’ll be on the edge of my seat waiting for the coming adaptation of the show, which will star Jodie Comer as Big Swiss herself. This will end up being one of my favorite reads of the year.
Read it if you like: very dark humor, suspension of disbelief, so many ways to describe a vagina, sex therapy, very upstate New York.
The Late Americans
by Brandon Taylor (2023)
Brandon Taylor is back with a new novel (that’s really short stories), and you know what that means: sad, sexually fluid graduate students in the Midwest are going to be going through it in between their arts and literature studies. This is his lane, and as usual, if this is what you like reading about, you’re in for something excellent. The reader gets an omniscient chance to observe and judge the goings on in and around what I assumed was The University of Iowa while they screw and try to be the artists they understand they’re meant to be.
True to the queer lives of folks young enough to have the energy to be complicated and prolific, you may need a chart to keep track of who is involved with whom. The stories overlap with characters like much like the relationships they describe. The sex is plentiful, often awkward and sad, and very occasionally hot, depending on the scenario. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, and often that character was present as a minor point in the previous story. The characters are often frustrated with one another, studying how to communicate professionally but unable to do so in real life. Everyone seems to be angry because they’re trying their hardest to find beauty in the world, and something - their partners, their studies, their tuition, their writers block - stands in their way.
The ideas of the novel are stronger than the characters, if we’re being honest. Many of the characters kind of blend together, apart from a few. In fact, I found myself missing my favorite of the characters when he wasn’t around. Seamus, a queer poetry student, seethes at his classmates and their inability to rise above their shallow, obvious politics to create what he believes to be real art. Taylor dares to make him unlikable and abrasive and spiteful and fun. He’s worth the price of admission, and he’s this hyper-specific genre at its best, a character you can’t look away from, a thrilling weirdo full of life you’d be lucky run into in a small town.
Read it if you like: Brandon Taylor’s other books, daisy chains, Midwestern sexploits, grad school, Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
Something Wild & Wonderful
by Anita Kelly (2023)
It’s a gay romance! These handsome boys are processing their trauma by walking the Pacific Crest Trail. If that sounds familiar to you, it should. The author herself says, “Wild, but make it gay.” Things do get wild.
Alexei is a refugee from a family who disowned him after he came out. His conservative, Russian family raised him without any forms of entertainment that weren’t focused on religion, making him one of the very few gay men on the planet without an armor of pop culture facts to hide behind. He decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail both as a way to center his focus on his future after an unexpected layoff from his job and as a way to connect to nature, the one thing he misses about being with his father. Ben (short for Benedeto) is out and proud, and he’s left his tight Portuguese family behind in Nashville to hike the trail after one too many bad breakups. He’s a sensitive soul who is trying to figure out who he is when it’s not in relation to another man. Fate brings them together on the trail and have to figure out if their immediate and electric connection is real or if they’re just lonely in the middle of nowhere.
Guess what. The connection is electric, as some scenes graphically and blessedly lay out, but the boys’ uncertain futures are complicated and perhaps not compatible. They’ve got literal and figurative baggage. Perhaps hiking thousands of miles on and off together is just the kind of time and space they need to understand how they’re meant to be in one another’s lives. Listen, I’m an easy mark for a m/m romance. I swooned. I was rooting for them. I wondered how they’d untangle all the complications. I even teared up a bit. I loved this book, and if you’re into m/m romance, you will too.
Read it if you like: swoony romances, hiking, Wild but with gay sex, family trauma, believing in love.
LIGHTNING ROUND
The only skill I picked up during the pandemic lockdown period was reading tarot cards. (Let me read you, local friends. I need the practice.) I loved this recent book, named after my favorite card, that talks about liberation and self-realization.
I still need to watch the adaptation of this heartbreaking book about a serial killer stalking gay nightlife in 1980s New York.
I also still need to make my way through this list of The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature.
Until next time…happy reading!