GAY GIANT, a graphic memoir from Chile about being Different in a place at a time where that was Bad

GAY GIANT
GABRIEL EBENSPERGER
Street Noise Books
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A child who feels like an outsider in a world that’s set against him. A boy who sings on the playground instead of playing soccer, who likes Barbies, and whose secretly favorite car is the one called Tutti Frutti. Gabriel Ebensperger shares with us his struggles with his own inadequacy, his feelings of guilt, and above all, his fear that his “difference” will be discovered. The vibrant bright pink pages of Gay Giant paint a picture of what it was like to grow up being gay in the ’90s, through the voice of an endearing character, who on the way to becoming an adult realizes that the rejection of the world is never over, and that true acceptance comes from within yourself.

A gay giant can't hide. This charming coming-of-age and coming-to-terms with oneself story shows us what it feels like to grow up queer in a heteronormative society in the 1990s.

Filled with pop culture touchstones from Cher to Steven Tyler, from Jurassic Park to Grey's Anatomy, this book navigates both the joy and the pain of puberty surrounded by ignorance and homophobia. How do you love yourself if you've learned so well to hate yourself? For all of us who've ever felt bizarre, damaged, or strange, we are shown that all is full of love, and that true acceptance must come from within yourself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Chile isn't exactly famous for its history of QUILTBAG rights protections. The country legalized same-sex, um, relations in 1999. But like everywhere else on Earth, at every time since there have been humans on Earth, people been usin' what they got to get their groove on since forever.

What Author Ebensperger experienced, then, as a youth in a macho culture, wasn't external affirmation or even acceptance. He was, well, weird. And weird kids suffer at the hands of their peers. It's the hands of their parents that do the most damage, though it looks like Author Ebensperger's parents were either remarkably chill, if significantly out of their depth, or he glossed over some stuff. Frankly I don't think that is the case because he and I share a favorite car: The godlike Citroën CX. He prefers the first year, 1974; where I idolize the 1978 Pallas model. Probably because I drove one and had A Crisis. *shiver*

How do I know this about him? He draws all of his cars very carefully, so I can see them vividly. (I confess I don't understand why his parents' 1967 Peugeot was evil; but I totally support his assessment of the W114 Mercedes-Benz as the Vehicle of the Antichrist.) And at a crucial moment, the aforementioned Citroën CX does a Back-to-the-Future-esque cameo. And that explains why I rated this graphic memoir a full four stars when 1) I HATE PINK and b) I ain't wild about sequential-art storytelling in general.

Look:

Under normal circumstances, I'd struggle to find something polite to say about the pinkness of the exercise, despite the really wonderfully clear message of self-acceptance and a dropping of one's internalized homophobia about "nelly queens" or "femmes" or, generally, men who don't fit the masculine stereotype. I mean, no one's asking you to marry the guy! Just don't sneer at him, or belittle him, or even (if you simply can not keep your heteronormative judgments to yourself) pollute his air with your breath. (Pink was the only color my mother could really love so I was surrounded by it. I hate it for that reason.)

But let me say again for the rare newcomer to my ambit: I am always looking for ways to challenge my habits and patterns and prejudices because I am hell-bent on not dying above the neck before I do below it. I get lovely rewards, like reading this charming essay in knowing your true self and working until you're in a love relationship with that self. I get to look at people from countries so very far away from my own perch in the Northestern US tell stories that were true for me, thirty years before these stories took place. I am not alone; neither is the author; we are connected in an experience of the world as outsider other unwanted and, as a result, damaged in ways no one should be.

Here we are, in a new century, in a world that keeps trending towards a better, brighter future (if you ignore climate change) and yet there are always people who don't fit and whose pain is crippling. Yes, Our Flag Means Death was renewed, and there's a lovely clap-back against the vile racism recrudescing in the Star Wars stewpot, and still we hear the lunatic right-wing idiots braying their teeth out about pedophile faggots (almost exclusively a heterosexual crime, pedophilia, but we all know how much that crowd respects facts). I am still gruntled and kempt as I contemplate Street Noise Books's list in all its truth-telling glory. I am still wreathed in happy smiles as I leaf again through this 256-page bath of pinkness, because it tells me that my story is shared...right down to the survival and thriving of its main character.

Who has awesome taste in cars.