TRAMPS LIKE US, a bit of history all in 21st-century Western culture could learn from

TRAMPS LIKE US
JOE WESTMORELAND
MCD (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A treasured cult classic following a young gay man crisscrossing 1970s and ’80s America in search of salvation. Now reissued with an introduction from Eileen Myles and an afterword from the author.

Abused by his father and stifled by closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn’t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown’s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music, a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.

Told with openhearted frankness, Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth—all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive. As Eileen Myles writes, “I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.”

Back in print after two decades and with an introduction by Myles and an afterword by the author, Tramps Like Us is an ode to a nearly lost generation, an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When I first read this in the Aughties it was already historical fiction. It was my life, my graduating class, and my generation of gay men who were, to all intents and purposes, vanished. Many died that I knew...almost none I was really close to until the late 1980s.

Reading the story again, at well over sixty, reminded me forcefully of that *horrible* severing. All hope seemed to die. With every memorial service there was less reason to feel as though anyone cared, as though people like me were on anyone's priority list.

I started volunteering here and there. I saw christians at their absolute worst. Mothers rejecting dying sons, fathers speaking loudly with their absence...it was the last nail in my faintest glimmers of religiosity.

So being there wasn't...nice...but it did make me recall the value of community (and the reality of burnout). When my true love was dying of CMV in 1992, I had men around me who loved him, and who supported me so completely (thanks Joe and Domingo!) that I could latch onto Ali and Joe as they created their magic circle, as they ran from haven to hearth looking for home.

It was breathtaking. It was heartbreaking. It was very much the way I want to remember the squashed possibilities of gay liberation...none of this *fighting* for equal rights we've been distracted with for decades, but coming up with new ways to define ourselves in the world.

Not even my grands have come back to that level.

What might have been, sighs the young heart in the elderly chest. Visit it for y'all's selves.