Book Reviews & Essays
Review: The American Isherwood for The Paris Review Daily
Stephen McCauley’s introduction to The American Isherwood, a new collection of critical essays about the renowned author of the Goodbye Berlin, cites Richard Avedon’s definition of charm as “the ability to be truly interested in other people.” Isherwood definitely had it, and so does this thoughtful collection. One highlight among its nineteen essays is Carola M. Kaplan’s “Working through Grief in the Drafts of A Single Man,” in which Kaplan traces the four major drafts of the novella. We learn that A Single Man used to be called The English Woman, until conversations with Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s lover of three decades, shaped the story into its current form. In other essays, we learn that Aldous Huxley and Isherwood were friends of the Pineapple Express variety, and that Virginia Woolf thought Isherwood was an obnoxious punk. (She changed her mind after meeting him in person, writing in her journal that he was “one of the most vital & observant of the young.”)
Review: High-Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez for Lambda Literary
Publishers tend to market gay memoirs as campy, joyful, and frivolous or serious, profound, and brooding. High-Risk Homosexual, the debut memoir by the talented Edgar Gomez, manages to fall into both categories—a funny beach read with piercing cuts into lived reality, all conveyed in a wry yet generous tone.
The voice and structure of High-Risk Homosexual make each chapter a propulsive delight. Gomez could write beautifully about a toothpick, but the 29-year-old has gathered a roster of peculiar stories: pressured by an uncle at 13 to prove his machismo by having sex with a “girl-woman”; an unexpectedly sweet coming-out story; skirmishes with a bouncer that barely conceal the aftermaths of a national catastrophe. Many of the subjects—sexual disillusionment, complications with coming out, relations across race and class—are common terrain, but Gomez primes the meaning in fleeting intimacy so well that the result is a compelling page-turner.
Raised in Orlando by a Nicaraguan mother and a Puerto Rican father, Gomez first went to Pulse as a quiet 18-year-old Latino still figuring out his queerness. “When I made it to Pulse,” he writes, “I finally understood what it meant to have my life belong to me.” Gomez has his first legal drink at Pulse and his fair share of make-out sessions. Understandably, June 12, 2016, haunts him. His analysis of the Pulse massacre is keen, questioning the limits of public mourning and the representation of minorities as victims or perpetrators, and delineating the psychological impact of Pulse. The night after the shooting, he leaves an angry voicemail for his brother; while his brother doesn’t explicitly know he’s gay, Gomez had still wanted him to check in. “I love you. Once would have been enough. I am a love camel. I would have made that last.”
This is the more elegiac side of High-Risk Homosexual that’s resonant of Paul Monette or Richard Blanco. Elsewhere, Gomez has the droll observations of David Sedaris or Michael Arceneaux. Here’s how Gomez describes a PrEP intake process: “‘Do you prefer to give or receive,’ [the doctor] asked during my last visit, as if the question weren’t about anal but my philosophy on Christmas.” Noting that the good doc wears Toms, Gomez opines, “She cared about orphans. She probably was a normal amount of homophobic. Fifteen percent. She’d cry if one of her kids came out to her, but in her room.”
While the memoir isn’t billed as a manual to gay life, it is full of hard-won insights into the heart, Latinx identity, and contemporary queer life. Here is Gomez discussing poppers: “One sniff from the tiny vial labeled ‘nail polish remover,’ and your body felt as if you were sinking into a cloud of silk.” Drag: “All the things that made people ignore him as a boy were what made him a beautiful woman. Drag was like magic. It made problems disappear.” His love for Valentina before Drag Race fame: “[Her] over-the-top mixture of anguish and sexiness. It’s peak drag: painful, messy, a constant negotiation between holding and spilling out.” Hookups with strangers: “It felt good to kill someone, a stranger who didn’t matter to me.” Then years later and seemingly more experienced at college: “In my room, I asked him his last name, his favorite book. Details I needed to convince myself he wasn’t a stranger I met on a website where people sold used car parts.”
High-Risk Homosexual continually interrogates the boundary between self-definition and socially or legally imposed definitions. Gomez inherits cultural scripts—embody machismo, don’t be malcriado—as well as the government-assigned names—boy in the hospital, and later in his mid-20s after seeking PrEP, a high-risk homosexual. To what degree he meets, rejects, or complicates these assigned names creates an engrossing memoir.
One striking aspect of High-Risk Homosexual is Gomez’s consideration of Omar Mateen, the Pulse shooter. Always inquisitive and skeptical toward government documentation, Gomez critiques the mass media interest in a fifth-grade report that purportedly established Mateen’s inherent criminality because of his callousness on 9/11. “I’m curious,” Gomez writes, “Knowing the way minorities are dehumanized in this country, what it means for an elementary school student to lack remorse. What would have been an appropriate response to terrorism for a child who must have understood that the images flashing onscreen would ruin the lives of so many in his community?”
Other chapters of High-Risk Homosexual argue that without his queerness that questioned machismo, without solid friends and a POC counselor to ensure some fairness, Gomez would have gone through a penal system that offered no second chances. One powerful paragraph about Mateen reads:
“It could have stopped when he was fired from the prison. It could have been stopped had he not been hired at G4S and granted a permit to carry a weapon. It could have been stopped when he was placed on the FBI terrorism watch list. It could have been stopped by his father. It could have been stopped at the gun store. It could have been stopped if at any point in his childhood he saw Pulse as a place that would have taken him in, like it did me, like it did so many of us.”
This is not a defense of Mateen, but rather a powerful call for accountability within a society that is quick to categorize and demean certain groups while claiming innocence from enabling such violence.
The battle between social scripts and subjective truths is a familiar story, but when told in such an honest and perceptive light, it remains a profound one. High-Risk Homosexual makes a convincing case that no matter what society makes of you—criminal, reject, a high-risk homosexual—a life of one’s own making is worth every risk.
Appreciation: On Audre Lorde for Transformative Learning in the Humanities
I learned of Audre Lorde as a bookish kid in Alaska. I cannot overestimate the difference between her world and mine. I had never been to the East Coast and thought Harlem was pronounced with a definite article before it. She would bristle at my militaristic and Christian fundamentalist upbringing, where a pastor each Sunday unfurled a detailed map of hell (at least the colors were stunning — now I wonder where he found that red glitter to outline the flames of hell- Michaels?). White supremacy was so absolute in my world that my mother’s lineage, Chicana and Black, was subsumed to the point that I was unquestionably and categorically white.
Lucky for me (but unfortunate for the pastor) I was also gay, so a sense of difference followed me from my earliest memories. The poem that opened me to Lorde was “School Note” from The Black Unicorn (1978), which I passed in an anthology at 18. There are certain poems that find you — less acts of discovery than of recognition:
For the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is
The form struck me: this elegant balance within imbalance; the crest of the m in home and the trough of nor. Lorde’s poetry reflects her conviction of what humanity can be; her speeches and essays are also indicative of why Lorde is a great artist: she uses her power to fight the strictures of race, class, religion, gender; she connects with people she seemingly has nothing in common with. “I am a warrior,” Lorde wrote, “and poetry is my weapon.”
In the essay “Man Child” from the 1984 collection Sister Outsider, Lorde reflects on raising a 14-year-old son, Jonathan, who was barred from a feminist conference. Lorde ponders over the many shifting situations that she as a feminist, lesbian, mother, and “warrior poet” must navigate, particularly the use of anger and love. She thinks about the future of her children: “If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.” It’s in this always-changing landscape that Lorde quotes ‘School Note.’ Here is the final stanza:
My children play with skulls
and remember
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.
Now as I teach writing at Lehman College, far from my origins of white supremacy, this poem still shocks me. Lorde’s vision was for a radical reality of empowerment, not a glib multiculturalism, but a praise – informed by recognition – of difference. Lorde writes toward the end of “Man Child”: “And Frances and I, as grown women and lesbians coming more and more into our power, need to relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening.”
There is so much to discuss in Sister Outsider: from Lorde’s dissection of “horizontal hostility” in “Eye to Eye” to her vision of poetry in “Uses of the Erotic.” This February, my classes have read “Learning from the 60s.” Speaking in February of 1982 on the legacy of Malcolm X, Lorde examines the liberation movements of the 1960s, praising their radical vision while critiquing their limited views of who counted as “us.” Her assessment is passionate but undogmatic, fair but firm, steadfast in an assault on false hierarchies. Near the end, she writes:
Can any of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?
Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect.
Personal Essay: “How Books Shaped My Life as a Gay Escort” for Prism & Pen
In the 2012-2013 academic year, I probably made more money than any of my friends who had majored in English literature. I moved to New York City at 22 and applied to over 300 jobs. With no connections and gargantuan naïveté, the best I could do was a series of demeaning retail jobs in asbestos-lathered basements.
After a month, I had $48 in my bank account. I dreaded having to return to my home state of Alaska as a failure. I had done everything a good student was supposed to do to find decent work after graduation, but as I was quickly learning, merit had little to do with job placement. When someone approached me about an escorting gig, I was desperate and, even more so, curious.
I became a big reader in middle school, and the habit had positioned me to always root for the underdog, which included the figure of “the prostitute.” When I finished undergraduate studies, I could think critically about human suffering, especially its causes and obfuscations. I knew how to analyze situations through the lens of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Michael Warner.
In the hundreds of works of literature I encountered, I started to wonder why ‘whores’ rarely narrated their own stories. It always seemed like someone else was speaking for them: in Evelina, the protagonist freaks out that prostitutes can afford finer clothes now and she may be confused with one; in 100 Days of Solitude, the only access we have to the interiority of a 15-year-old prostitute is through the eyes of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. The figure of the whore is used to prove a point about the cruelty of inequality (Les Miserables) and to exemplify the inevitable route to redemption (Moll Flanders).
The whore was rarely the author of his own story, rarely an end rather than a means.
For me, sex work became a way to prove a point: if society wasn’t going to give me a decent job with access to healthcare, I would find my own way, even if that required climbing what the sociologist James O’Kane called “the crooked ladder.”
I also wanted to act on my belief that consensual sex work between adults should be, much like homosexuality, decriminalized. Finally, I wanted to be one of those whores who would (one day) become their own author.
Working through Hourboy and Rentboy opened doors to different classes I normally would never have access to. I met provosts and presidents, B-list celebrities and national journalists. I flew to Palm Springs and received oceanfront massages in Oahu. One client gave me books every time we met. Through him, I encountered Javier Marías, Rita Dove, Anthony Marra.
Most importantly, I had my time back to read and write. In one day I could make as much as I had made in one month. On a whim, I dropped $300 in Boston’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop. I negotiated a steep discount with one regular if he bought me a BILLY Bookcase from IKEA and drove it up to my apartment in Upper Manhattan. While my friends spent their days as receptionists and mail boys, I re-read The Color Purple and A Visit from the Goon Squad.
I became familiar with the less glamorous parts of escorting, too: the retired custodian who saved up for one special night a year with a “treat”; the depressed Broadway composer who layered his townhouse with pee pads for his poodles; the recently divorced man blaring Fox News in the background who didn’t want to pay up. I became my own marketer, agent, accountant, security, and quality assurance team. I learned that sex work is, indeed, work.
Before 2012/13, I had caught glimpses of gay male sex work in Memoirs of a Geisha and My Private Idaho, but now, I looked for work that better reflected my experience. John Rechy’s novel City of Night described a world of hustling that no longer existed in the digital age, same for the only memoir on gay male sex work I could find, Assuming the Position by Rick Whittaker. Chicken by David Henry Sterry remains one of the best memoirs on sex work I’ve read, but Sterry only worked with women.
The more readily available accounts of sex work were always heterosexual and tended to be glib (The Happy Hooker, Secret Diary of a Call Girl) or painfully moralistic (Paid For). These accounts were written for mainstream audiences, and to deflect the opprobrium on sex work, their authors had to pick a side on the pro/con ban and stick with it. They did not make room for the nuance I regularly encountered.
But some queer works did. There’s a sugar-mommy situation in Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, and I recognized the sort of mentorship I at times experienced with my clients who gave me job advice and feedback on essays. I saw my relations in the Manhattan-grit of Mary Gaitskill’s short stories where menace and kindness are always mixed. In life and in literature, I learned that queer experiences are constantly engendering new forms of love, or as Adrienne Rich observed in Necessities of Life — “lust too is a jewel.”
Ultimately, my time as an escort was empowering, but it was also brutal on my self-esteem. I stopped (mostly) by the end of August 2013. In the following years, I looked to literature and film to understand what had happened. “Tangerine” (2015) captured the joy, humor, and betrayals of sex work. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016) perfectly articulated the emotional landscape between clients and escorts.
I found more and more works that dared to ask about the complexities of queer life, how sex work intersected with consent, aging, love, abuse, obligation, sacrifice: The Romanian by Bruce Benderson; “Mysterious Skins” by Gregg Araki; Moonstone by Sjón. These works helped me understand my own experience as an escort, as well as the many distinct experiences of sex workers at large.
In my world, sex and literature are inextricably linked. When I learned about one form, I learned about the other.
My favorite example is when a client took me to The Algonquin Hotel on Thanksgiving. We ordered drinks at the Blue Bar. I asked why he chose this place. He replied that my profile said something about wanting to be a writer. He asked if I had heard of The Algonquin Round Table. I shook my head.
He told me about Dorothy Parker sitting at this very table spinning out witticisms. Someone once challenged her to use ‘horticulture’ in a sentence. Her reply was one of his favorites and, in time, became one of mine, too: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”
Reading Life: “The Bradbury: Reading (and Writing) Whatever” for Brevity Blog
I’d like to tell you about a morning ritual of mine: The Bradbury.
Basically, I take three random books – poetry, nonfiction, fiction – and read each for 10 minutes. I don’t worry if these books support my projects or whether I’m using my time wisely. I choose to feel zero guilt over commercial vs. literary, whether I skip the beginning, or if I’m actually decreasing the ratio between read and unread books in my New York City apartment. The point of the Bradbury is to read: to open my eyes and let the world in, to find surprise and delight in “my own explicable life.”
That quote comes from a Lucille Clifton poem I encountered today, “Wild Blessings.”
For today’s fiction portion, I read chapter three of Annie and the Wolves by fellow Alaskan author, Andromeda Romano-Lax. Blending historical fiction with a contemporary thriller, the novel alternates between the famed American sharpshooter Annie Oakley and a young historian, Ruth McClintock, who’s obsessed at articulating the unspoken and awful truth behind official documents. The dialogue is especially compelling, and Romano-Lax somehow bridges plausible speech across three centuries. Here’s one admirably restrained example from one of Annie’s battles against yellow journalism:
At her very first trial, in Scranton, the defense lawyer had taunted her. “You’re the woman who used to shoot out here and run along and turn head over heels, allowing your skirts to fall.”
“I beg your pardon,” Annie replied without emotion. “I didn’t allow my skirts to fall.”
For nonfiction, I grabbed What It Means to Write about Art: Interviews with Art Critics. This is a brilliant compilation by Jarrett Earnest of spellbinding interviews with Hilton Als, Chris Kraus, Siri Hustvedt. Today, I started the interview with renowned art critic, Rosalind Krauss. The app on my phone starts, ten minutes per genre, and I don’t pause when life comes up. During the countdown with Krauss, I wanted coffee; I wanted to hug my partner in the kitchen and joke about the co-working space our kitchen has become during Covid. This took about two minutes away from Krauss. But the Bradbury absorbs these incursions. It knows life is more important. What I ultimately took away from the starting the Krauss interview was that at least twice a year, she and Leo Steinberg would have dinner. I love that policy: twice a year, two friends, two dinners.
You may have guessed that The Bradbury comes from Ray Bradbury. My memory has revised it to be a morning ritual, when Bradbury actually suggested this activity at night. I appear to have invented the 10-minute markers, and I have egregiously ignored his advice on avoiding contemporary poetry. I’m fine with this productive misremembering. The point is to reawaken the senses, make the material your own, find your own forms, regardless of social propriety or a publisher’s template.
The Bradbury is orderly and not. The result typically is the same: a refresh for the new day, a reorientation toward life marked by readiness. After this ritual, my mind is jolted to recognize everything in new ways; my eyes enjoy a sort of popping noise, as if they are literally moving closer to the world. My awareness of the world simply reaches a greater resolution, like my vision’s been upgraded from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 12.
Oftentimes, I’ll find titles for potential stories or essays: Practical Nihilism; a Jesuit in Paraguay; Enjoy the Ride; Themes of Sexuality; Player King; Sines and Co-Signs; If You Have to Advertise; Update Your Model; The Subject of Fate; a Life of Constant Improvement.
Forced into Procrustean time limits, I see fragments in greater resolution. Sometimes life interrupts, and I only have a line or two to think about; sometimes those lines are all I needed. One day I only got a paragraph into Rayola (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar. But that paragraph was enough for me to appreciate the granular brilliance of that novel, how well it describes quotidian love: “Oh,” Talita said, picking up the duck and wiping off the footprint with a kitchen rag. “You’ve caved in its ribs. So it’s something else.”
Other days, I will act first and think later, assembling whatever books my groggy eyes first pass. The other day that included a college copy of Candide (happy to report my French has improved!), Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin, and The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.
With The Bradbury, long-standing gaps in my education are unexpectedly closed. One morning I dipped into Basic Writings of Nietzsche to learn that Zarathustra had a lot in common with Dionysius, or “The Dionysian Monster,” as Nietzsche calls him. I had tried to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in high school and enjoyed the rhythm, but zero clue as to who was even speaking. Now, years and years later, I have my clue.
Some books are so good I only want to experience them slowly. This is how I have come to know the tactile atmosphere of Gwendolyn MacEwan’s brilliant travelogue, Mermaids and Ikons: a Greek Summer.: “A Fred Astaire film came on television, and Christina went out into the garden to feed the doves in their big wire cage.” It’s the daily acuity here that builds to such thunderous sentences as:
‘In this country you are drawn like a bow between heaven and earth, and you may come to know life and death as one blinding, fluid reality. The soul is the arrow shot from that bow, only once.”
By this time I’m amped-up and inspired. Beautiful things beget beautiful things, and I’m eager to move my own hands toward something approaching creation.