SOS Book Log: Pride Edition
June’s queer as hell book round-up.
Happy Pride, friends! Or should I say: PADAM, PADAM. (Google it, straights.)
Listen, just because June is almost over, doesn’t mean we have to stop celebrating. While H&M is taking their Pride Month décor out back to burn it in a giant heap, and Benihana pivots back to flipping cooked shrimp into people’s mouths instead of PrEP, I still have something LGBT up my sleeves. And what better way to celebrate than by supporting queer authors via buying/borrowing/recommending their books, then bringing them along for the rest of your summer plans and beyond?
Here are ten books I read and fell in love with this Pride season. I hope one or two—or, better yet, all!—call out to you.
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The Male Gazed by Manuel Betancourt
I am thirty-one years old, and I have spent twenty-eight of those years harboring a grudge against Pocahontas for choosing John Smith—he has the personality of a wet stack of newspapers!!!!!!! I mean, c’mon, his name is JOHN SMITH???????—over Kocoum in the 1995 Disney film, Pocahontas. Perhaps a haphazard landing after jumping from that tall-ass waterfall resulted in a minor head injury, or, more likely, I just wanted Kocoum for myself, and was pissed I couldn’t live vicariously through Pocahontas. But one thing I did know in 1995: I was not like other boys.
Queer Colombian culture writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt arrived at the same conclusion, except with Prince Phillip from Sleeping Beauty. A seamless blend of memoir and cultural criticism, The Male Gazed scrutinizes how queer men—himself included—metabolize the depictions of idealized masculinity served by nineties pop culture and asks the age-old question most of us have, at one point or another, asked ourselves: Do I want him, or do I want to be him?
From animation (from which Betancourt notes he’s learned everything; his mother owns an animation studio in Bogotá to boot) to telenovela stars, and teen sensations like Ricky Martin and Slater and Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell, this collection pulls the veil back on masculinity, revealing its many layers and inviting us to reframe how they texture each other in our culture then and now—and in our own minds. A cornucopia of heart, humor, honesty, acuity, and everything in between, this book is at once a dream and a revelation.
Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby
NO EXPLANATION NEEDED, JUST GET THIS BOOK AND THANK ME LATER.
I Felt the End Before It Came by Daniel Allen Cox
I’ve been prone to the occasional reading slump. They can range from a few days to a few weeks or, more infrequently, but certainly not improbably, a few months—see: 2020 and onward. But once in a while, a hand in the form of a book outstretches itself to me, and pulls me back into the safest place I know: between the pages. I Felt the End Before It Came pulled me in, and kept me close from start to finish.
From the outside, it looks like Daniel Allen Cox found himself at a crossroads. But for him, and many folks trying to examine their upbringing through the lens of their queerness, it’s more complicated than that. In this compulsively readable memoir, Cox reveals how that crossroads is more like a complicated web, one that he still finds himself disentangling to this day. Growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness came with firm boundaries about what was unacceptable and not: His mother almost died because she refused to get a life-saving blood transfusion, a strict rule regarding the sacredness of blood. Birthdays and holidays are not celebrated. But what happens when you yourself are deemed wholly unacceptable? As he struggles to reconcile his religion with his queerness, Cox finds himself unable and realizes it can’t be both—it’s one or the other.
From preaching door-to-door in Montreal in his youth to getting swept away in the rollicking art scene in New York City, Cox straps us into his passenger seat and takes us on an unforgettable ride. A vital and compelling story aside, this book blew me away at a craft level: Cox has the uncanny ability of imbuing his writing with urgency in a way that still allows for tenderness, almost as though his sentences are brought to a boil, then reduced to a simmer. Sorrow and rage bubble to the surface, and what wafts from the page is a powerful reckoning.
Pageboy by Elliot Page
Like I Felt the End Before It Came, Pageboy is also a story of untangling.
And, like everyone else, I, too, fell in love with Elliot Page after seeing Juno, the hit movie that launched his career. While it seemed like this young actor’s dreams were coming true—interviews, press tours, Academy Award nominations, offers for roles multiplying—a nightmare unfolded for him instead. Young starlet was just another role he had to knock back like a bitter pill to play. While his star rose, so did his anxiety. He would collapse from panic attacks, his personal life under perpetual scrutiny. Tabloids tried to bulldoze their way into his personal life; it even became a competition: “The Ellen Page Sexuality Sweepstakes,” read a headline in the Village Voice shortly after the release of Juno. It was the shot that signaled other magazines to see who could attain the corroborating evidence—a source, a photo, anything that could prove that Elliot Page was gay—and break the news first. He continued to force himself to neatly fit within the circumscribing shape of the spotlight, performing the version everyone around him expected to see, until enough was enough.
Pageboy breaks the silence he—and so many other queer and trans people—are conditioned to operate in. It is a testament to the inherent nonlinear nature of queerness and transness, and offers a map to fluid answers and solutions that are not concrete—identity is messy, ever-changing, and do we ever stay at one destination for good?—but the return to self.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
This book is the equivalent of eating a Good Humor Strawberry Shortcake bar: It’s so good you chew on the stick even after you’ve finished. I had a hard time letting this book go after I finished it, but at least I can always return to it.
In Open Throat by Henry Hoke, our narrator is a queer and hungry mountain lion who quickly burrows their way into the reader’s heart. Their home is the land ravaged by drought underneath the Hollywood sign, where they spend their days standing guard over a nearby homeless encampment and eavesdropping on hikers fluent in therapy-speak. Told through fragmented prose not unlike poetry, we learn about the lion’s past: their loves, losses, and caring mother and violent father, the latter firmly rooted in the depths of our protagonist’s mind. They recall sharing a deer carcass with another male mountain lion while they witness two men having sex in a cave, and, in recognizing a mutual queerness, they begin to wonder what other traits they share with those who dwell in the densely populated streets below.
As a man-made fire destroys the encampment and surrounding area, our leonine narrator is forced from the desert hills to the other side of the highway where their proximity to humans fans the flames of temptation. As they struggle to find community while their world diminishes, by virtue of flooding and burning, they come to realize that Angelenos, too, grapple with complexities that render connection to each other (and themselves) a challenge. What dawns on them is the glimmer of their own humanity within.
The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser
My favorite books are the ones that feel like you’re sitting with a friend at the end of a sparsely populated bar on a weeknight, the soft glow of a tea light dancing across your faces, while your conversation steers you in places you didn’t know needed visiting—or revisiting.
This book is that friend.
Their viral essay, “The Crane Wife,” from 2019 sprouts into full bloom with this indelible memoir-in-essays of the same name. Expanding an entire collection around a hit piece online can be risky, as sometimes there’s not enough fuel to arrive at the author’s intended destination, the engine beginning to sputter just a few chapters in. But that is not the case here. To me, it actually seems to be the other way around. Their viral essay, while crafted with laser point precision, sits atop a gold mine; there is so much more to mine and explore and learn from underneath—and CJ Hauser gives us that in spades with The Crane Wife.
Ten days after breaking off their wedding engagement, they leave the home they’ve shared with their fiancé in upstate New York for Texas, to study the whooping crane for their second novel. Now in their late thirties, they look back on this person who waded a week through the gulf, and uses that version of theirself—and all the other versions of theirself since—as their guide to better understand the things we shed in our attempts to make room for the things that cushion personhood, the things that make us feel—or simply propel us on our ways toward feeling—like the softest versions of ourselves. It is a work-in-progress that can only be done by looking back.
From kissing strangers off the internet, to officiating weddings, and revisiting an array of literary and cultural staples from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to the 1940 film starring Katherine Hepburn The Philadelphia Story, Hauser masterfully braids themes of grief, intimacy, love, friends, and encourages us to reexamine what we have been taught about the things we want and need—ultimately asking us to reconsider what love—how we give and receive it—means to us.
In the end, you don’t even realize your breath was taken away, because your heart is too full to feel anything else.
Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns
This was an immediate yes for me.
A satirical twist on Martin Scorsese’s iconic 1970s movie Taxi Driver, Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns is a wildly funny and biting novel about a rideshare driver named Damani, a queer Tamil woman living paycheck to paycheck in a city brimming with protests aimed at police brutality, climate change, and disparities in wealth. Trying to make ends meet while caring for her mom on the heels of her father’s death, she meets Jolene on the job. Jolene, who is white, wealthy, and privileged, is also a well-read activist and social worker. Their chemistry is palpable from the start, and their relationship intensifies until Damani brings her to Doo Wop, a socialist collective housed in an abandoned building. Shit hits the fan when Jolene gets into a heated argument with Damani’s friends at Doo Wop and does something that leads to catastrophe.
TL; DR: THIS BOOK SLAPS.
Leg by Greg Marshall
The way I wanted to sublet Greg Marshall’s brain for a few months after reading this addictive memoir.
As someone who lives with chronic pain and illness, I often joke about having to come out of the closet twice: once as queer, and again as someone with disabilities. Greg Marshall understands what I mean: He’s come out as a gay man, and then, later in life, as a man living with cerebral palsy. So naturally, I was endeared from the get-go, because I know what it’s like having to explain your disability—whether visible or not—to those who don’t (or won’t) understand the toll it takes on your day-to-day life.
I was guffawing from the first page. Leg is hilarious just as it is insightful, and Marshall’s voice is a fucking miracle (it has inspired me to dive back into writing my own chronic illness memoir). He grew up in 1990s Utah as the middle sibling out of five in a family living in perpetual crisis: His mother endures debilitating chemo for cancer in between writing her newspaper column; his father battles ALS; and he walks with a perpetual limp that none of the various therapies and surgeries he’s undergone were able to mitigate. On top of all of this (or bottom! Or somewhere in between. Who am I to put anyone in a box?), is a young boy struggling to reconcile his growing fondness for boys. His parents keep his cerebral palsy a secret from him in an effort to shield him from ridicule, and it wasn’t until he turned thirty that he uncovers one of his mother’s newspaper columns which confirms his diagnosis.
Finally able to put a name to a whole part of his identity that has eluded him his whole life to that point, Marshall paints an extraordinary portrait of a young man around the facets of identity that we are unable to change about ourselves. What we’re left with us is a reminder of the inherent tools at our disposal that we can use to carve the space for ourselves when the world at large won’t.
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane
Everyone in my immediate network has read this banger of a book, and chances are you have, too (I know my audience!), but in case you haven’t, may I kindly suggest hurling whatever device you’re reading my homosexual propaganda on across the room and immediately instead purchase or borrow a copy of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane?
In the not-too-distant future of America, there are no prisons. Instead, a government entity known as the Department of Balance has installed surveillance cameras in every home and punishes wrongdoers by relegating them into a class of people called “Shadesters.” Forced to live as second-class citizens, Shadesters are flagged by an extra shadow, sometimes more than two—even if the crime committed is minor or unintentional—that is meant to serve as a constant reminder of their misdeeds. They don’t even have to commit a crime to warrant a shadow; anyone who is deemed a threat to the status quo by the Department receives this physical brand. This ostracization leads to limited food options at the grocery store, longer waits for healthcare benefits, and the deprivation of other civil rights protections and freedoms in addition to the maltreatment from “NoShads.”
Kate is bereft with grief after losing her wife, Beau, to childbirth and is left to raise their child alone under the watchful eye of the nefarious Department. She copes with her loss by drinking and watching reality television, and the only thing keeping her afloat is raising their daughter, Bear, who was born with a second shadow after “killing” her mother. As Bear grows up, so does her unwavering light, which shines bright enough for Kate to see hope for the future in the form of queer solidarity, community, and resistance.
These characters—especially Bear—will find a permanent home in your heart and mind.
Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis
All I needed for my eye to land on was the “dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn” on the backcover copy and that was enough for me!
Girl, was I glad I answered this book’s siren call. The only thing I’m interested in reading about is messy queers!!!!!!!!! In this smart, funny, and gloriously tense debut novel by Jenny Fran Davis, three Brooklyn couples head to the Hudson Valley to spend ten days in a bucolic farmhouse. Our narrator is Sasha, the titular “dykette,” a high-femme graduate student who desires a matrimonial future with her butch lesbian boyfriend, Jesse. When the invitation comes to spend the holidays at the country home of two older, richer lesbians—a prominent cable-news host, Jules Todd, and her partner, Miranda Saraff, a podcasting therapist—they eagerly accept. Joining them are Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their new girlfriend, Darcy, an artsy blue checkmarked influencer Sasha raises an eyebrow at, yet covets the clout she possesses.
What follows is a debaucherous bacchanalia filled with feasts, drinks, infidelities, and unbridled sapphic yearning (BLESS). As desires, infatuations, confessions, and jealousy form a complicated game of Cat’s cradle, each couple’s future hangs in the balance. Ultimately, we are left with a whip-smart and propulsive exploration of queer intergenerational dynamics, the oftentimes performative nature of gender and sexuality, and the complicated ways our desires manifest.
Do yourself a favor and get this book. Bonus: gift your straight friend a copy and watch their head go PADAM!
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Credits
Art by: James Jeffers
Editorial assistant: Jesse Adele
You can follow my other unhinged missives by following me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. My debut memoir, Born to Be Public, is out now.
Can’t wait to read all of these!