CONFLUENCE, our queer elders show us how they did it in times more dangerous than today

CONFLUENCE
ALEX TURNER with Lucian Childs
Arsenal Pulp Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate, deeply moving queer coming-of-age novel that evokes '50s small-town life and the surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall '60s

In 1956, lonely teenager Teddy is drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town, where he meets bad boy Wade and becomes overwhelmed by his attraction to him. During the rapturous early period of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways before falling out after high school over Teddy’s sexuality. In the years following their separation, Teddy—now going by Ted—struggles to live openly as a gay man, finding and losing lovers at parties, dance clubs, and cruising spots in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. He is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment both as a gay man and as an artist. Returning to his hometown nearly a decade later, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the one who once meant so much to him: the sexy and mercurial Wade.

Confluence is a collaboration between late author Alex Turner and his husband, Lucian Childs. Drawing on his sixty-year history with his beloved West Coast home, Turner wrote much of this beautifully rendered novel before he passed away in 2019. Childs, an award-winning author himself, completed the work, a novel that is simultaneously poetic, humorous, and exuberantly down to earth.

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

My Review: "Exuberant" is a very good word to use with this novel's affect in mind. It's inherent, in a funny way, in the idea of coming of age; it feels a lot harder and more like a chore as you're doing it than the reality from the outside, and later the memory of it, report.

Teddy and Wade, misfits in their small town of origin, do what misfits most often do. They find common cause, they make a mutual defense pact against the world...in this case more like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact than the Kellogg–Briand Pact, one ending when they began a war and the other still in force. Teddy's attraction to Wade is different than the usual alliance of convenience only neither knows it until it's been the glue between them for quite a while.

It's quite a common experience, the different relationships/same people one. As always there's an event that brings out the need to discuss what each feels as adolescence presses its hormonal buttons. Wade, being straight and it being 1956, doesn't respond very kindly or acceptingly towards Teddy, hastening his departure for the big city of Vancouver.

Life, as is its wont, happens; Teddy becomes Ted, a good-looking young queer-about-town exuberantly exploring the joys of sex and the consolations of friendship. It's a story I've read oh so many times, set in a place I've never been but recognize as a cognate with my natal place San Francisco, my coming-of-age place Austin, and my home Manhattan. It's the island of safety in an unsafe world.

That safety, the sense of it being okay to be yourself, is what makes this such a magical read. Its hormonal passages aren't lacking in number or excitement. Its more important idea, though, is the safety to explore the hormonal drives because there's a safe place to do it, albeit still without any legal protection; but a loving group of likeminded people to cushion the fall from the heights of Love and the pangs of loneliness that follow the ends of things. That's honestly more important in the long run.

Of course a novel will always need resolutions to big unresolved threads in a life. Reality doesn't impose such conditions on us. We-the-reader need to know, though, what happened to Wade who stayed behind.

We find out.

It was a pleasure to be with these young gay men in their youth, distant by decades from my own youth and most of a century removed from the present. It is vital to have these words of witness from someone who was there to understand it from the inside, who lived its reality and thought it good to bring those moments to life for us who followed in time. I hope those younger than I am will find those words, realize how similar humans are to each other, how much different their own time is from the story's time and hopefully to find those differences contain mostly improvements.

We live in a time of miracles being commonplace. Appreciating that is a great way to honor those who worked for a world better than their own to come into being.

QUEERS AT THE TABLE: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (with Recipes), a guide for those perplexed by the hows

QUEERS AT THE TABLE: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (with Recipes)
ALEX D. KETCHUM & MEGAN J. ELIAS (Editors)
Arsenal Pulp Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An anthology of essays, comics, and recipes that reveals the dynamic and transformative relationship between queerness and food

Food has long played an important role in queer culture. Lesbian- and queer women–run feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses have been safe spaces for queer and trans folk where gender norms can be challenged and where female authority is legitimized. During the AIDS epidemic, gay men and their allies centered food as an expression of collective care for those who needed it most. And queer and trans folk have asserted themselves in a restaurant culture largely controlled by white cisgender men.

Queers at the Table celebrates the various intersections between queers and food. In its essays, comics, and recipes, the book shows how this shared culture fosters connections, defies norms, honours legacies, and creates community. Taylor Hartson and Tristian Lee write about a queer farming community in which queerness is part of a broad network of living things to be enjoyed and shared; Danielle Kydd writes about food security issues as faced by LGBTQ2S+ folk; and Blue Delliquanti's comic on urban foraging in Minneapolis demonstrates the role of a queer friend group in a local ecosystem.

In full color throughout, Queers at the Table is a diverse and enriching anthology that reveals the myriad nurturing ways that queerness informs food production and restaurant culture and how food empowers, transforms, and unites queer and trans folk.

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

My Review: Many are the queer folk who, throughout the decades, have no holiday cheer...they very often have no space to spend holidays that is accepting of them as they are. It's a painful passage to realize you can't go home for {insert food-centered holiday here} without hiding your self and/or receiving abuse. It knocks the Cindy-Lou-Who out of you, turning you into a grinch.

But...and this is key...someone has been here before you! They can show you fellowship via sharing their stories. It's axiomatic that food holidays are about community. It's becoming more and more understood that community comes in many types and styles. The queer people ou know will, I hope against hope, have a community with you...but even if they do, a reminder that their complicated feelings around food holidays are perfectly in keeping with those who have trodden this path before them can't hurt. Know someone young, or relocating, or just thinking afresh about their place among us? This is a great gift to give.

examples of essays in comics form

No book about food is going to be truly complete without some recipes! A newly-fledged wannabe host is likely to need a simple place to start, along with a visual reference to be sure there's at least some resemblance between product of labor and intended appearance.

A thoughtful presentation to address an ever-growing (sad to say) need.

THE ANTIFA COMIC BOOK: Revised and Expanded (2nd Edition, Revised) builds on the success of the first edition

THE ANTIFA COMIC BOOK: Revised and Expanded (2nd Edition, Revised)
GORD HILL (Introduction by Mark Bray)
Arsenal Pulp Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: With fascism in our midst, Indigenous artist Gord Hill revises and expands his brilliant graphic history of fascism and anti-fascist movements

When it was first published in 2018, Gord Hill's The Antifa Comic Book was heralded for its searing imagery documenting the history of fascism and anti-fascist movements over the last century. In the years since its publication, the term "antifa" has been co-opted by the right to falsely describe far-left political extremism and even terrorism. But the role played by antifa movements in fighting fascism and racism around the world remains as relevant and important as ever.

For this expanded edition, Gord Hill adds new material depicting more recent flashpoints of fascist activity, including the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack, the murderous spree by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, the infamous 2022 Canadian convoy protests, and Islamophobic and anti-migrant sentiment in a growing number of fascist governments in Europe. At the same time, Hill depicts the important work being done by anti-fascist individuals and organizations to combat this worrisome trend, made all the more crucial by Donald Trump's return to the White House.

Powerful and inspiring, The Antifa Comic Book is an important reminder of fascism in our midst and what can be done to stop it.

The book includes a new foreword by Mark Bray, historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

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

My Review: If you're wondering why this graphic novel's appearing here, welcome! You must be a first-time visitor. This is not a safe space for fascists or their silent supporters. You will be offended, and not accidentally. Do not complain, you've been warned, and have the option...nay, encouragement...to leave any time. More than your kind offer to the decent people you're victimizing for whatever it is you hate so much.

So, everyone else, this is a graphic novel/history of the horrors the fucking fascists enact in pursuit of their disgusting, evil goal of immiserating people their tiny brains and smaller souls hate with fury and passion. It is meant to summon the answering, opposite...oppositional...fury and passion in you.

What's the point of this, I can hear people in my circle ask. It is easy to get numbed by the onslaught of awful these scum are unleashing. "They", to use the paranoid tense, are busy undoing generations of progress as fast and as hard as they can. Court orders say cease and desist? Ignore them! People hate your agenda? So what, do it anyway, we've got the Army.

In a coup, there is no neutrality. Yes, it's hard. It's scary. It's not fair. Your other option is silent, supine submission.

If that's not okay with you, you'll need some emotional support. Sometimes the best way to get that is to read...even read outside your usual genre or medium preferences. I was heartened by reading this book because it got past my text-reader's prejudices. my "I can handle anything words can say" conviction by putting it in images.

It's a valuable thing to have, to give to someone you know who's flagging...support is a wonderful gift to give and to receive.

SHUCK, a gay man's roman à clef of 90s Manhattan

SHUCK
DANIEL ALLEN COX
Arsenal Pulp Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: “Set in the late 1990s, Shuck describes with great clarity and verve the last gasp of a gritty Manhattan.”—Bruce LaBruce, film director

Shuck is the intense, dazzling diary of a male hustler in New York who tries to manage his reputation as the city’s porn star du jour when he’s not dumpster diving, tweaking, or trying to get published. A remarkable peep show of a novel about what binds artists and prostitutes, and the collateral damage of what happens when they try to recover what they have lost.

Daniel Allen Cox is a former porn star. This is his first novel.

My Review: In the late 1990s, hustler/street trash Jaeven Marshall gets rescued by remittance man/blocked perfectionsit artist Derek Brathwaite, who grooves on Jaeven's bruised and abused body. The two begin a peculiar and passionate love affair that never involves sex, but truly touches the heart of any romantic in its deep and vital connection. Jaeven uses Derek as a home base, a touchstone, and a security blanket. He rises (!) in the just-then-efflorescing porn world as a porn performer and a model, taking it as his 22-yr-old naif would: His due.

What no one but Derek, and the strange photographer/trick Richard, know is that Jaeven is a writer. A real one, one who writes and who sponges up images...the book is littered with lists Jaeven keeps of the "shit and ephemera" that Manhattan excels at putting in the path of the observant, letting the reader in on Jaeven's private coping mechanism for his rampant ADD (and his inability to break past the surface of anything, too)...so while he's using himself to live and eat and keep moving, he's fueling the creative rage inside himself. Derek, blocked because surfaces are all he knows, uses Jaeven's unpublished writing to break through into an actual creative frenzy, painting at last the gaudy and exciting colors that he's seen but never managed to reach inside to create before. Jaeven's downward track is, well, inevitable: He gets into meth, gets meth-mouth, stops getting calls from his various munificent tricks (except the peculiarly loyal Richard), and even manages to make Derek so angry that he gets thrown back onto the streets he's only just clawed his way up from. In the end, though, as is inevitable in a first novel, the redemption occurs and all is well.

It's a first novel, or I would've been more chary with my stars. I think it's a fun ride through a Manhattan that's been sanitized out of existence. I liked that Manhattan, I trolled it, and I felt at home in it; I'm inclined to spot Mr. Cox some points for that. It's reasonably clear to me that it's also a roman à clef, and that also counts in my ratings. I have no way of knowing how much of it is self-referential, but at a guess I'll say a lot. I like a writer whose take on himself isn't in any way reverential. I like reading about the world that my thirties were spent in. I like a lot the amiably nihilistic, irretrievably broken kid comes out (!) with hope, and therefore a future. It's not perfect, but damn it's good. Read it!