Sometimes it feels like an entirely different news cycle is happening for queer folks than for our straight counterparts. This week I checked in with confused straight friends to see what they thought about the twink-identified United States Senate aide who made his own home movie in the Senate Hearing Room. I won’t link to it here, but it was part Last Tango in Paris and part Summer of My German Soldier. It was all I heard about for 48 hours, and yet, the only straight people who knew about this were the Republican male politicians who care more about my sex life than I even do.
Then there was the backlash to the criticism - how dare anyone criticize someone trying to be sex-positive? And the backlash to the backlash - this person has brought shame to the entire community, and now the far right will try even harder somehow to take our rights away.
A couple take away lessons from this for me:
Growing up and coming out before the proliferation of social media is something I’m grateful for every single day. Imagine having to become your own brand manager and stand-up comedian upon discovering who you were. I would have recorded and posted for the world to see unparalleled stupidity in my early 20s if given the chance.
There’s no act any queer person can participate in that’s going to make the far right hate us more, so we need not blame (or credit) a stupid 25 year old for any kind of innovation in that field.
You have to fire this kid because he did something stupid, not merely because he was having gay sex. I hope someone will gracefully usher him back into professional life someday, but he’s got to go. It’s actually NOT homophobic to fire someone who films porn at work, unless that’s their job.
This act was still one of the less harmful things to the American public that ever happened in a Senate Hearing Room.
Please don’t even get me started about George Santos appearing on Ziwe!
As of this publication, I have not started Christmas shopping, plus I have so many books I’m trying to sneak under the arbitrary wire of year’s end. If this is my final newsletter before my year-end wrap up, Happy Holidays to you and yours!
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Blackouts
by Justin Torres (2023)
Talk about Zach-nip. Blackouts is the long awaited follow-up to Torres’s debut short story collection, We the Animals, which ripped our hearts out when we realized it was (11-year old spoiler alert) actually all about growing up queer when the only kind of love you’ve ever received from men was the toxic masculinity in your family. To build the intrigue around the novel, it won the National Book Award before I could get my hands on it. I could not have been more excited to dig in.
And now…I’m still sitting with it. The novel is incredibly put together - a combination of erasure poetry, meandering stories, real life history, photography, and more mixed media. Our narrator, only referred to as nene, goes to a mysterious place called The Palace after he experiences one of his blackouts at his apartment, causing an accident that forces him to leave his home. While at The Palace, he has long, meaningful conversations with a man from their past stints as a psychiatric institution, Juan Gay, who seems to be adored by everyone at the palace. The two of them trade stories that get to the heart of queer erasure throughout history and trace their origins through a real life text called Sex Variants.
If that sounds incredibly confusing to you, that’s because it is. This is not the kind of book one can just peruse while one’s watching the Food Network. It’s a book that rewards deep concentration, critical thought, and holding the book in your hand as an object. (This is definitely not one for audiobook, folks.) I say I’m still wrestling with it now because it’s such a rich text that’s stuck with me, even though I can’t say I loved reading it. I wouldn’t say the book is presents a pleasant reading experience, but I don’t think it’s trying to. The book is one of a kind, truly unique, and since reading it, I’ve been mulling over the way folks have pathologized queerness, how we think about death and the body, what we deserve from queer inheritance, and how we overlook lesbian activism. A worthy award winner, this is a book that feels important, though distant, even as it continues to grow in my estimation in hindsight.
Read it if you like: queer literature, award winners, mixed media, puzzles without answers, undersung lesbian heroes.
Wellness
by Nathan Hill (2023)
They say history doesn’t repeat, but it does echo. And like you just read minutes or seconds ago and above, this is a book I’ve been salivating for because I love the author’s last work. The Nix ruled! So does Wellness. I have to admit I was totally Franzen-pilled at an impressionable reading age, so if you’re promising me a lengthy saga about a family in peril that not only gets personal in character study but also tells us something about how we live today, I’m going to say, “Well, yes!”
And on top of it all, Oprah approved. Jack and Elizabeth meet in college, and it’s kind of love at first sight since they live right next door and can see each other through their windows. This book charts how their first meeting in person, in which our hero Jack romantically mutters to Elizabeth a simple “come with,” sets them on a course to marriage and all that marriage brings with it for better or worse (as we say at the altar.) Or does it?
While all this is happening, we get to see exactly all the build up throughout the decades for these two people to meet through tangential passages dealing with the art world, a ranch in Kansas, a compound for a rich family in Connecticut, mean moms in neighborhood facebook groups, fighting with parents on social media, and psychological testing through placebos. And more; it’s very long. Did I mention that the protagonists are just a few years older than I am, so it’s a delightful, light skewering of young Gen X/elder millennial culture?
There’s an overabundance of books that focus on straight marriage and parenthood, but very few could make me rush through 700 pages like this one did. It’s insightful, hilarious, wistful, frustrating, and most importantly, it makes the pages turn.
P.S. What’s with all the doorstoppers this year? Thick books everywhere you look!
Read it if you like: family sagas, looks at the way we live now, marriage story, the sad way nothing stays the same forever, thinking about what a soulmate exactly means anyway.
American Mermaid
by Julia Langbein (2023)
I would not have picked this one up but for the shortlist for the Tournament of Books, which was recently released to overwhelming joy from the cultists like me who follow it year in and year out. I wasn’t especially moved by this year’s list, truth be told, but I always find a couple of gems on the list I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. This particular gem - it’s true, I liked it a lot - was available at the library the moment the list was released, so it seemed like book kismet to check it out. It has some low marks on goodreads, but let me point and tap the sign again. *points to and taps sign that says Do Not Trust Goodreads Review Averages*
I’m so glad I picked this up because this book is actually hilarious. Like, it made me laugh on the train. There’s a particular conversation about asexuality that made me chuckle out loud in public and another between a grown woman and child that reminded me of the conversation Kristen Wiig has with a child in the jewelry store in Bridesmaids. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Penny Schleeman has written a novel called American Mermaid, which has been optioned to become adapted into a feature length movie, so she leaves her cushy teaching job in Connecticut to make her way to Hollywood where nothing but glamour and ease await her arrival.
Kidding, of course. She’s immediately greeted by difficult entertainment industry people who systematically take apart her novel to make it something sexier, and, it must be said, dumber, so that the masses can understand it. As Hollywood deconstructs her art, it weird things are happening around her that make her think that maybe her mermaid protagonist has come to life and is haunting her? Who knows! It’s a book within a book kind of novel, so we get to read along to see how the original sci-fi novel she wrote stands up to the suggested changes and the parallels in her own life. Think of it as The Blind Assassin for a post-Barbie world.
Read it if you like: actually funny books, Hollywood, books where you could easily cast Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role if you were adapting it, books within a book, novels by stand-up comedians
LIGHTNING ROUND
I appreciate how NPR doesn’t curate a small book list for picky readers, it just says here’s all the books!
As I panic about finishing all the books I want to this year, here comes the list of the best LGBTQ+ books to look forward to next year. Please hold!
And all the best anticipated debuts too? It’s all TOO MUCH!!!
Until next time…Happy Reading (and Holidays!)