Times Square Red Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany

TSR/TSB is actually two separate essays on similar topics published in one binding. The first (Times Square Blue, despite the order in the title) is primarily Delany’s reminisces on the many men he met and conversations and experiences he had in the porn theaters in the Times Square neighborhood in the 1960s-1990s. He’s very clear that he does not claim to offer an all-encompassing picture— or even, necessarily, an accurate one— of the happenings in that area at that time, but he will do his best to choose anecdotes that will give the reader a comprehensive sense of his own impressions. He also takes care to note that while he is saddened by the changes to the neighborhood, he doesn’t want to— or think it’s possible to— return to those times. Instead, he wishes for institutions that can serve the same social functions in a more inclusive way— such as providing opportunities for safe, consensual heterosexual and lesbian sex. These notes surprised me.

In my readings about mid 20th century gay culture up to this point (not limited to my exam texts), I’ve gotten a very strong sense of nostalgia and longing, as if the best days of being gay are over, ruined by AIDS and gentrification. Where were the corresponding places and what were the corresponding subcultures for women? i’ve kept asking myself. Has being gay ever been fun for women, in the same way gay men seem to fondly remember the pre-AIDS sexual arena of NYC? Delany is the first writer I’ve read on this topic who is more willing to admit that while he had a lot of fun and misses that scene, it also had a lot of bad parts (crack being by far the worst), and that women of all sexualities were largely left out.

When reading a series of memories about conversations and sexual experiences had in and near porn theaters, it’s easy to imagine Delany’s life as largely centering around the pursuit and acquisition of casual sex. But he regularly reminds us: while casual sex plays a role in his ideal sexual life, and while he had meaningful friendships/acquaintanceships with many of the men he met, just because this essay is about Times Square sex cultures doesn’t mean he wasn’t doing an awful lot of other important, meaningful things at the same time. He writes with fondness without romanticization.

In “Times Square Red,” which is the more “academic” piece of the two, Delany examines the socioeconomic forces working upon Times Square and theorizes the exact nature and value of what has been lost. He presents a dichotomy of contact-relations versus networking-relations. Contact relations are inter-class, casual, and more unpredictable. Networking relations are intra-class, competitive and often formal, and highly planned. Both function as stabilizing influences on class tensions and conflicts, but contact is more socially and personally beneficial, with higher potential rewards. His main examples of networking-relations are at writing conferences, which he uses to explain that the appeal of such conferences comes in many young writers with similar needs hoping for moments that will help them breakthrough and get professional success. This is impossible precisely because there are so many people with the same needs in the same place, and very few people with the ability to grant or facilitate such desires. Additionally, contact relations make things more Pleasant, even if they don’t change underlying material conditions.

I also found his discussions of safety and small town visions of what city life is like to be very compelling. Because most visitors to Times Square are tourists, there is pressure for the neighborhood to conform itself to the tourists’ expected image. But the kinds of things that seem safe to tourists create some of the least safe conditions for city living, at least for those who aren’t familiar with the area. Safe neighborhoods have a lot of contact-relations— many different activities and businesses are all interspersed with one another. There is a lot of local traffic. The space is designed to be used by the public, instead of just to funnel the public from one private space to another. I definitely relate to his analysis on a personal level, as someone who was nervous about and intimidated by not just NYC but my own neighborhood only 2 years ago, and whose parents still have a lot of worry about “their little girl’s safety in the big city,” but now I feel very comfortable in my immediate neighborhood, even late at night, even alone.

Delany and I disagree on the political conclusions of his analysis, however. His argument, if I’m understanding it correctly, is that contact is good in part because it smooths over class relations and makes life better. He is “marxian, not Marxist” (in his words). I agree that some things can make class conflict smoother, but I take the position that while smoothness is more pleasant, it doesn’t change the material conditions, it doesn’t change capitalist oppression, and the solution is not to have more inter-class fraternizing, but to overthrow the system entirely. And then we can have mixed-use zoning. Which probably really will be more pleasant.

I also like his implicitly-proposed method of first observing changes in discourse and then searching for the material changes that they were in response to. It’s a nice blend of poststructuralist and materialist theories/approaches that I feel lets the methods live together.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Charles M. Blow

I liked this book a lot until the very end. It begins with a prologue in which Blow, in college, is driving with a gun to his mother’s house with the intention of killing his cousin, who molested him as a child. The prologue ends before he gets there. The rest of the book tells the story of his life from childhood up until that moment, ending with some reflections on his moral and existential crisis in that moment and how his identity and relationship with his bisexuality have evolved since then.

__Spoilers Below__

Blow decides in a split second not to kill his cousin, to take the exit off the highway and go back to college instead. In that moment, he realizes he can’t allow his trauma to affect his life so completely— he is an adult, and he needs to exert adult control over his emotions and not throw away his future with a murder charge.

However, the way the narrative of his decision on the highway flows into more general reflections on Blow’s subsequent emotional growth makes it sound like he had all of those revelations immediately. We don’t get to see the journey from that first moment of self-realization to where he is now— it’s all stuffed into a meditative summary that goes much, much faster than the rest of the book, which takes its time in tracing significant moments in his life. He stops showing and starts telling.

His actual words are very clear that his journey was not over in that moment and he still had decades of figuring stuff out and healing from his traumatic past left to go. However, the way the book is structured makes the arc become, to oversimplify, “Once I decided to get over my molestation, then I was happy and suddenly ok with being attracted to men.” Which is explicitly not the case, but rushing the rest of that development into only a handful of pages after two hundred-ish about how the trauma shaped his life still implicitly carries that message. This book falls into the kind of arc that other memoirs I’ve read, like those by Jacob Tobia and Juliet Jacques, actively tried to resist. The “being lgbtq is terrible, and you will be miserable, until you decide to get over it” implication is dangerous, even though I don’t think that message is his intention, and even though in this case it’s embedded in a relatively unrepresented story of a bisexual man, and a bisexual Black man at that. The only other bi man memoirs I can think of off the top of my head are white celebrity memoirs, of John Barrowman and Alan Cumming.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde

Here is what I knew about Audre Lorde prior to reading this book; famous Black feminist leftist lesbian poet librarian, affiliated with CUNY, died of breast cancer, wrote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I think that’s all. I thought I knew one of her other poems, one that my grandma had cut out of the newspaper and mailed to me when I was 14, but apparently that was actually by Elizabeth Alexander.

I had read a little of The Cancer Journals in a memoirs of illness seminar, and probably a few other poems across the course of my education. When compiling my reading list, I tried not to include two works by the same author, prioritizing reading as many voices as possible. (I broke this rule once: I’m reading both Fun Home and its sequel, Are You My Mother— I rationalize this because they are both graphic memoirs and therefore faster reads). So, I had to choose between Zami and The Cancer Journals. I chose this one. Partially because I’d read excerpts from The Cancer Journals already, and partially because I hoped Zami would include more lesbian content.

Zami covers Lorde’s life from childhood to around her late twenties/early thirties, and its focus is the many women who were significant in her life up to that point— her mother, her sisters, friends, and lovers. I felt it started slow, but once it got going, it was incredibly gripping. As I remarked to my coworkers recently, I know this is a well-established opinion, but Lorde was a badass.

It’s hard for me to separate my scholarly reading— “reading for exams, reading to understand the history and substance of the genre of queer memoir, reading for criticism” — from my own literary cravings. Like so many of the authors of the books I’ve been reading, I’m a queer woman hungry for role models through books, eager to construct my own canon of intellectual and cultural heritage. Not only in terms of sexuality, but in terms of being a woman, being an academic, living in New York. I’m sure I’d read many books set here before I moved here, but now I’m reading as a resident, trying to make sense of the place I now inhabit and to understand my place in it, and the history of those who were here before me.

The day I read the passage in which Lorde and her sisters walk from Harlem into the Heights to visit a comic book shop, I realized I had climbed that very same hill and walked that very same path earlier in the day, as I came home from running an errand for a friend and visiting another in the same building. I now live only a few blocks north from where Lorde moved as a preteen, in-between the same cross streets. Her New York and her experience of it were both so very very different from mine, yet we have walked along the same streets. As she writes about her visits to the downtown lesbian bars, I know I’ve seen the same buildings she did on my way to my own lesbian bars. Although the socioeconomic makeup and social status of the Village is far, far different now than it was in the 1950s. I treasure her descriptions of her own shitty apartments, her own nights drinking cheap wine with friends, her own commutes to and from various CUNY campuses. I was delighted to learn she lived in Stamford for a little while. A year ago I had never even heard of Stamford, and now I have a friend who regularly visits from there. I was delighted to learn she lived in Mexico City for a little while, studying sociology. I have a friend who used to be a professor of sociology there. My friend is much younger, but I like to imagine she knew some of the same people that Lorde knew there. As I read, I felt the many tiny, tenuous connections between us, and I felt happy.

I also found it valuable to read about Lorde’s experiences of race and racism, since they are somewhat unlike the descriptions of both that I’m more familiar with. I grew up in the South, and mid 20th century NYC racism didn’t always look the same as the racism we learned about in my own community. I also reflected on the differences between Lorde’s description of KyKy dykes (often Black lesbians, lesbians who rejected being either butch or femme, lesbians who were by implication probably prostitutes) with Esther Newton’s description of kiki dykes (spelling and capitalization differences aside, still lesbians who rejected butch and femme roles, but typically upper middle class lesbians who were slumming it downtown or faking attraction to women for attention), and how their respective subject positions inflect their views on the term/the people it applies to.

The parts I’m still pondering are what exactly “biomythography” means, and what, if anything, makes bonds between women special that cross-gender bonds (or same-gender bonds between other genders) cannot have. We’ve moved past political lesbianism and second wave feminism. But what is important for us 21st century women to take with us?

I love the term biomythography. I love how open and ambiguous it is. I love how it makes me think of Lorde’s Significant Women as a pantheon of goddesses who shaped her life. I love how the term implicitly says that not everything in the book might be literally true, but it is how she remembers it, how she tells the story to herself, how she wants to tell the story to her readers, how she wants to pass it along, and that that is Okay, and even Good.

I wanted it to last longer— I wanted the book to cover more of her life, more of her relationships (romantic and not). Particularly, I wanted to read about her marriage, her relationship with her husband and with motherhood and with performing heterosexuality and how they all mixed together for her. In Zami, Lorde thinks Muriel will be her life partner—I want to read about her other life partners. Wikipedia describes two different women as such, and their timelines overlap. What are those stories? Why did she cut off the writing when she did, instead of continuing? I’m left wanting to read so much more of her prose.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story, by Jacob Tobia

I don’t know what the “best” LGBTQ+ memoir I’ve read (or will read) is, but Sissy is definitely my favorite so far. Tobia is from my hometown, and only a few years older than me, so it was SUCH a delight encountering place after place that I knew, or could picture.

Their Toys R Us was my Toys R Us. Their mall is not “my” mall, because it’s on the other side of town, but it’s certainly a mall I’ve been to many times. The coffeeshop they mention writing the end of the book in? The same coffeeshop I treasure my annual visit to when my cousins and I do homework together over Thanksgiving break. Their church and relationship with church is different from mine, but their church is just down the road from the one I grew up in. They’re also definitely one of the people I would have envy-resented in high school, since they went to the special progressive charter schools that were definitely Better Than My Schools, but that I also hated because Charter Schools Are For Rich Preppy Snobs (sorry Jacob). And also Governor’s School, definitely the dream summer program for every middle class North Carolina nerd and NOT one I was accepted into. And also Duke, the school pretty universally hated by public school kids in the Triangle. (As they say, Duke is Puke, Wake is Fake, the One I Hate is NC State. You can’t go to heaven in a red canoe, ‘cause God’s favorite color is Carolina Blue!) (Except if you’re an engineer you go to State and if you’re a rebel you go to literally any other UNC school besides Chapel Hill.) (I went to UNC-Greensboro, formerly the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Once a Spartan, Always a Spartan)

As you can see, I have a lot of local feelings. And certainly have never read anything that better represents my exact brand of race-class-regional background.

I laughed and laughed at all of their Cary jokes, their NC jokes, their Duke jokes. I felt a twinge of pain in my heart when they described their campus organizing around Amendment One, our state’s anti-marriage equality amendment that passed right as I was coming out to myself. I vaguely remember hearing about the campaigns for gender neutral housing at nearby universities that they must have been involved with. I spent a little too much time on their Instagram looking for posts tagged with place I knew.

But all of this made me ask: Who is this book written for? Originally, I intended to recommend it to every nonbinary person I knew from Cary. But as I read, that seemed less and less appropriate. Some of Tobia’s goals in the book seems to be demonstrating to others 1) how deeply pervasive and painful gendering is, 2) how everyone, including cis people, has gender trauma, and 3) that “trans” is much more expansive than binary transitions to the “opposite” sex, that sometimes “passing” is both definitionally impossible and not desirable, and how gender nonconformity poses unique everyday risks and struggles.

It seems like a nonbinary person would not need to be told these things, so while many nonbinary people might enjoy reading the book and be happy to see their community represented in memoir, they are not the intended audience. (What would a nonbinary memoir written for nonbinary people look like? I don’t know.)

As I got further into the book, I thought maybe I would recommend it to my parents instead. They understand that some people use they/them pronouns and reject the gender binary, but they don’t really understand why someone would want to do that or what it really means. I thought a memoir that’s otherwise from a very similar cultural position as them could be an easy way in to greater understanding for them. Certainly, in the afterword, Tobia notes that they hope other parents of gender nonconforming children find the book helpful.

But, it’s not really written for cishet people either. Tobia specifically says they were not interested in writing a Trans 101 book, and it’s not. There’s a lot of gay dialect and colloquialisms that might be alienating or at least unfamiliar to a cishet person. They don’t define terms, or even talk about how they first learned about different identity terms— just how they came to embrace the ones they use now. There are casual references to queer history icons and queer theorists (Sedgwick, Butler) that anyone with a little WGS background will know, but anyone without it will not. Tobia doesn’t explain for those who will not. (I might still recommend it to my parents.)

In the end, I kind of ended up thinking it was written for people like me— queer people who are not themselves nonbinary, who walk and talk in similar circles but can still benefit from an inside view + greater understanding of a particular way of experiencing gender. I have already recommended the book to my sister, who also matches this description.

But that doesn’t seem quite right, either. In the footnotes, the last couple chapters, and in the interview included in the back of my paperback edition, Tobia repeatedly talks about how therapeutic the writing process was, how it brought them closer to their family members, how it helped them unpack and process different experiences and gender traumas. They say they tell all of their friends to write a memoir too, because it’s better for you than years of therapy. So maybe it’s just written for themselves. Which, if true, seems like the best intended audience for a memoir.

At the very beginning, they talk about the typical arc of a trans memoir: always knew you were different, trauma trauma trauma, serious serious serious, big coming out, difficult transition, find acceptance. They reject this arc. They want to write a funny trans memoir, they want to be honest about their many privileges while also simultaneously experiencing oppression, they want to express how coming out is a long process, and parental reactions are complex, not Yes or No, and how they haven’t “solved” the “problem” of their gender. It is ever-unfolding, ever-being-discovered, and while they have found significant professional success in the years since they’ve graduated college, and in many ways get to express themselves in comfortable ways, they still experience nagging self-doubt, confusion, pain, and loneliness. They write about how they have to exclusively try to date bi/pan guys, since just straight or just gay guys aren’t interested in their fluidity. (Which is very sad and frustrating, but also, hell yeah bi and pan guys, who don’t get acknowledged enough.) And they do do all of these things! And it’s great! But they also still kinda do follow the traditional arc— most explicitly in the front matter that introduces and frames the book.

So I’m asking myself, what genre features are “quintessential” of the “typical” trans memoir (to the extent that there are enough for anything to be typical)? Does it really matter that the arc is in some ways similar, if so many other features (like the tone, like the “conclusions,” like the emphasis on fluidity and inbetweenness, like the near-total lack of discussion on hormones/surgery/other physical changes that people may do as part of a transition process). Unlike every other memoir I’ve read so far, they also talk very little about books/other media that was important to their gender and sexuality journey. We don’t learn about how Tobia learned about the concept of being gay, or being trans, or being nonbinary. We even get a relatively small amount of discussion of their activism work (other than the run across the Brooklyn Bridge), although it’s clear that they put a lot of time into many different activist projects.

A lot of queer memoir is full of queer trauma. That’s certainly a difficulty of the genre, that the stories are both true but also send harmful messages about the queer experience. (That it’s always traumatic, or just traumatic, or you need enough trauma to be properly queer.) And this book does have some of that. But this book also has a lot of queer joy in it. Parts that are unabashedly HAPPY and made me feel happy as a reader, even though they are also totally upfront about their pain and many struggles.

I think the end message is fully hopeful: that if parents can be more affirming and encouraging of gender nonconformity in their children, that if people can get more comfortable with people who don’t easily fit into boxes, that if we can change social structures so that there is room—and welcoming room— for all genders, then life doesn’t have to be this way.

My Butch Career by Esther Newton

Sophomore year of college, a freshly-declared double major in English and anthropology, I was in a used bookstore and spotted “Margaret Mead Made Me Gay.” I had to buy it, of course. But I didn’t read it— not for several more years, until the summer before I started my PhD program. It was one of three books I wanted to make sure I read before I moved to New York, alongside The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam) and Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed). So in that sense, I loved Esther Newton long before I knew who she was. Certainly, we never studied her in my anthropology department.

Last fall, Newton was a guest speaker at my school as part of the press tour for My Butch Career. I was thrilled. Elderly feminist academics fascinate and enthrall me. I look at them to imagine who I might have been if I was part of another generation, and to imagine who I might be in my future. I crave their approval and their mentorship. I want to adopt all of them as my proverbial scholarly grandmothers. I am terrified of them.

So that’s what was in my head going into the event.

And you know, she really was an important person in the field, and she really is a role model for young queer academics with a social science bent like me, but also— she’s human. I remember feeling uncomfortable when she talked about trans women, briefly. It was clear she knew she ought to be supportive, but was tentative, uncertain, unsure of what to make of the idea. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember feeling disappointed, yet still excited to have gotten to go to the talk.

I felt the same way reading My Butch Career. Partially because of what Newton says about trans issues (basically she says she thinks trans men transition because they are really butch lesbians who feel pushed into socially transitioning and changing their bodies by a patriarchal culture), and partially because of how she treats the issue of academic labor in the book. i have no doubt that it was very difficult to be one of the few women in a graduate program, dominated by strict gender expectations, with the assumption that she would marry a male anthropologist rather than become an anthropologist herself, all while carefully trying to stay closeted. Yet she still easily gets a tenure-track position immediately out of grad school, and even after she is effectively fired by being denied tenure, she gets a new tenure track job at SUNY Purchase seemingly very easily afterwards. She doesn’t even have to relocate. I and everyone else currently in graduate school will be lucky if we get a tenure track job, ever. Anywhere. Period. Newton writes with guarded awareness and sensitivity about many issues, even those she admits she does not fully understand, but seems unaware in this area, and only somewhat aware in terms of her other economic privileges (a generous upper middle class dad and a substantial inheritance from her grandfather), which I feel detracts from the power of the “I did some very cool and very important academic stuff while battling a lot of systemic obstacles” arc, even though the sexism and homophobia she faced are very, very real.

However, I was OVERJOYED to learn a new term: ki-ki dyke, which was a pejorative at the time but now I love. It was someone who was neither butch nor femme, but somewhere in between, but went to lesbian bars, but was rumored to be bi, and was probably middle class (which would be why she looked obviously out of place in a working class lesbian bar), but went anyway. (Apparently kikis were also suspected of being undercover cops.) Because there’s a subset of lesbians who think bi women cannot use butch/femme as terms, and I don’t really feel like either one is accurate for me anyway, I was very happy to learn a word from the same time period that butch/femme developed that I do feel like applies to me, even if it was negative at the time. (In some circles being bi is still negative in our time, so whatever.)

So, having finished the book, I feel similarly to how I feel after the talk. I learned a lot more about an important person who broke ground in my field, learned more about mid 20th century NYC and academia and feminism, and also have political disagreements.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I first heard about The Argonauts either shortly before or shortly after I moved to New York, and it seemed like everyone was talking about it. I got it out from the library about a year ago, thinking I would read it over winter break, but never did. I’m glad— I feel like the book talks about questions that are already on my mind now, both personal and scholarly (but of course they are not mutually exclusive), and not so much a year ago.

Some questions/themes:

• What are the limits of language? What can be expressed, what is inexpressible? Should we feel limited or liberated by it?

• How is pregnancy simultaneously extremely (hetero)normative and extremely not normal at all? What does it even mean to be “queer”?

• How do you write about your life when that means writing about other people’s lives too? (When those people might be very private people, or not agree with your representation of them, or be too young to be able to consent to being represented)

• How relationships continue being themselves and growing even when the people and dynamics within them change a lot

It reminds me of a prose-poem by Heidi Priebe that my partner read to me recently: “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.”

Again, with this book I was confronted with what feels like my own puritanism, or maybe just self-consciousness. I was shocked that Nelson would essentially begin the book with anal sex, and later write about BDSM— a book her friends would read, her professors, her family. I know that this is common, I know that many people write scholarly and literary texts in which they talk about their sex lives. I know many of the books I’ve already read for this orals list did it, and I know that many more will. I even enjoy and appreciate it when people do— I just can’t imagine doing it myself. What makes me feel like my sex life ought to be totally separate from my scholarly/writerly/public life, when of course I know that my body and my emotions and my relationships with others shape my thinking about everything all the time, and vice versa?

And how do you know, as a reader/critic or as a writer yourself, when it is gratuitous/for “shock value” or marketing juiciness, and when it is….”important”? Meaningful? I’m not sure what the right word is, because all of the words that come to mind set up a moral dichotomy that I’m not comfortable with. What do “important” and “meaningful” mean, anyway? Why can’t people just write about sex? Surely something that permeates our time, stories, culture, lives, etc. so much is already important and meaningful.

When I was discussing this book with someone close to me, they asked me if I thought the book would be as popular and widely praised as it is if she wasn’t writing about loving and parenting with a trans person. Their implication was no. I agree. I think it’s beautifully written, and I found many parts personally meaningful, and when I briefly met Nelson at an event last year I certainly found her likable and compelling, but I do agree that part of the hype and pull for the book is around the queerness, but specifically Harry’s gender.

On the one hand, Nelson quotes Harry as asking, “Why don’t you ever write about the queer part of your life?” and I read that as, “Why don’t you ever write about me/us?” She also discusses how they revised the first draft together until he felt comfortable with how she represented him. Yet on the other hand, she directly says he was angry and uncomfortable with however she portrayed him in the first draft, and he describes himself as an “epileptic [a very private person] married to a strobe light [a professional memoirist].” I took this as a metaphor for their extreme differences in relation to privacy, but the person I was discussing the book with pointed out that there is a more concerning layer: it’s not just that they are very different, but that the epileptic is directly vulnerable/put at risk in relation to the strobe light. GGG consent seems so gray and foggy when it comes to this issue—when you’re highly emotionally intertwined with someone, and their career is involved, how can you not feel some pressure? When you’re the memoirist, how can you ever know if you really have their full consent, how can you ever know you’re not pressuring them to be okay with how you’re portraying them, or that you’re writing about them at all? I don’t know.

Comedian Bo Burnham has apparently said in interviews that all of the stories he tells about his family are lies, because he feels that only he decided to be a comedian, and none of his family or friends decided it, so it would be unfair to talk about and make fun of them for money. This seems admirable and ethically responsible to me.

But I also love memoir, I think it’s important and meaningful and beautiful. Especially for LGBTQ+ memoirs and memoirs by people from other oppressed groups— as Fun Home and Trans: A Memoir especially show, LGBTQ people need/want/crave/benefit from these stories to help us figure out who we are and how we want to view ourselves and our community/community history and what we want our place in the world to be.

Nelson’s partner also writes parts of the book toward the end himself, parts about being with his mother in hospice. Presumably he wrote them how he wanted to write them and feels comfortable with those sections. But I find that to make the situation even more politically complicated. How did that composing process go? Nelson says they originally talked about writing a book together, but decided the process would be too fraught to be worthwhile. What was this process like? Why did he write those sections and only those sections, why are those sections there at all? Whose idea was it? Even framing it that way is false, since composing is such a recursive process.

And what can we do as critics, if so many of these questions can’t be known from the book itself? Theoretically one of them could talk about it in an interview, or write about it elsewhere, or if I knew them personally I could ask, but that would only resolve the questions for this particular book, and there are many more like it. If so much of the ethics and ethos of a book depend on unknowable things, what to do?

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

I have wanted to read Fun Home for a very long time, and now I finally got to. When I originally tried, my undergrad library didn’t have it in, so I read the sequel, Are You My Mother?, instead. I first learned about it when we read a few pages for a Rhetoric of the Body class I took sophomore year. I don’t remember the content of the excerpt, but almost the entire book felt familiar to me as I read. Maybe because so much of Are You My Mother? includes discussions and visuals of the writing process of Fun Home?

I noticed how in this book, too, like Trans: A Memoir, the texts that the author was reading and encountering and thinking about, both in relation to their identity and not, are absolutely integral to the book. Bechdel does not explicitly discuss all, or even most, of them, but she includes them by sketching in the titles on stacks of books in the panels. Some I recognize (like Orlando ), others I have heard of (Earthly Paradise by Colette), and others I haven’t. Like with the books mentioned in Trans: A Memoir, I’m adding some of them to my list. It also made me decide I need to add Mark’s book, Queer Literacies, to my orals list as secondary source material. All three of the memoirs I’ve read so far are wrapped up in their authors reading. Fitzgerald, Joyce, and whatever the lesbian section of the library looked like in the 1980s swirl through the book.

When I started reading, my partner asked me, “Isn’t there some criticism that she doesn’t hold her father accountable enough for being a pedophile?” I didn’t know, so I paid attention to moments of accountability as I read. There are multiple times she writes about struggling to feel angry with her father, or even feeling much at all, despite that it is easy for her to list his flaws as a person and parent. Yet while she doesn’t directly write about the issue of her father preying on teenage boys very often, Bechdel’s grappling with the issue is evident in the art. Even when the main thrust of the narrative is about something else, she draws moments when in retrospect something untoward might have been happening in front of her eyes, even when as a child, she did not know it. Certainly the verbal and physical abuse is only alluded to in the text, but is made very, very clear in the pictures.

Because the book is less than 15 years old, and I first learned about it even more recently, I have to repeatedly remind myself that Alison is close to my parents’ age—slightly older, actually— and her parents more like my grandparents. Her reflections on her childhood and what was likely happening without her knowledge are not only revising the story of her life after receiving new information, but reflecting from an even greater distance on those initial weeks. How much of the subtle “background” details of the panels depicting her childhood did she insert into her mental story during her twenties, and how much was only added as she was drawing the book?

Part of the difficulty and beauty of Fun Home is the coexistence of both deep pain and deep love Bechdel has in relation to her father. She describes her family as “arctic” in climate, yet still they were a family, and there are multiple moments of profound intimacy between her and her dad in the book despite their simultaneous alienation from each other.

When writing about her childhood visit to NYC in the late 1960s, Bechdel marvels at the trip as a strange interlude between her parents’ young adulthood in Manhattan a decade earlier, and her own young adulthood in Manhattan a decade later. They visited only weeks after Stonewall, although she did not know it at the time. She wishes her dad had been able to live in a more progressive area, and maybe he would have been more at peace and less predatory, yet knows that if he had, she might not even exist. On the same trip, Bechdel’s little brother goes missing and a man tries to pick him up at the piers. Their dad panics more than he might have, because he knows, but he’s also less angry than he would characteristically be, because he knows.

Although Bechdel’s dad and my dad have very little in common, I couldn’t help but feel some feelings anyway. The dream sequence where Bechdel tries to show her dad a beautiful sunset but he reaches the top of the hill too late really hit me, as did their conversation about her dad’s history with men in the car. I came out to my dad while we were driving in a car. There are other moments that sparked my own memories for me, but they’re even less obviously related and hard to put into words. At first, it seems silly to me to identify with moments in Fun Home that really aren’t very much like my life at all, or only in surface ways; Alison’s coming out process was nothing like my own, my conversation in the car with my dad was nothing like hers. We were just both in the car with our dads. Our families and family dynamics have very little in common. Yet that says something, I think— that I was personally moved anyway, and moved to think about things that haven’t really been on my mind in months.

I think it says something about the isolation and yearning for stories like our own that so many LGBTQ+ people experience, even when we think of ourselves as having a community. I don’t think of myself as feeling particularly isolated in this sense, but I guess I must, because I felt kinship and understanding with Alison and treasured that feeling, even as she was finding kinship with Colette and the other queer women she read about.

When reading the parts on Bechdel’s move to NYC and her hopes for finding a lesbian community, and her own reflections on what it must have been like to be butch in New York during the 50s, I thought about how many decades—entire generations— of LGBTQ people have come to NYC for exactly that reason, hoping to find community. And I thought about how I didn’t, and that i’m grateful I’m here for another reason and not that, because it means the world is better now because I didn’t feel that pull. Except I’m wrong. Because I did.

When I was applying to PhD programs, and people asked me why CUNY, I told people I liked the flexibility of the curriculum, the preponderance of archives and other schools and resources that would be available to me, the different certificates available, that I could study rhetoric without having to only study rhetoric, and the fact that New York would also be a good location for my partner, who works in theatre. And all of that is true.

But I made a joke while writing my personal statement that the most accurate way to paraphrase what I wanted to say was, “Please let me come to your school, because you’re gay and I’m gay and I want to study gay things.”

I came here for graduate school, but I came here for graduate school in part because I wanted openly queer teachers doing openly queer scholarship and an environment that would let me do the same.