TRICYCLIST, slice-of-queer-life novella-length story

TRICYCLIST
JOON OLUCHI LEE
Nightboat Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The love child of The L Word and Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends, with a disaffected flair all its own.

It’s San Francisco in the early aughts, and Howie Song is floundering. His failed projects—as a professional ballet dancer, as a boyfriend, as a friend—have left him forever the “third wheel.” But maybe he likes it that way? Leaping wildly between lovers, centuries, and an ever-changing cultural landscape, Howie might just feel most himself in the fracture.

Delicious, poetic, and delightfully pornographic, Tricyclist is an ode to the “abnormal angles” of people and art. As Howie overcomes his own ambivalences—in large part thanks to two suitors, and a circle of supporters who happen to be lesbians—Joon Oluchi Lee portrays, with his signature flamboyance, all of life’s joys, pitfalls, and pirouettes.

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My Review: The cover image is...arresting. In a compact 144 pages I was not expecting to get rich, immersive detail, like something explaining why there's a guy flashing his ass from under a schoolgirl's plaid skirt on the cover. That expectation was met. Howie's character is shown to me by the surfaces he gets distracted from his aimless wanderings by. Jeb, for example; the romance blossoming on Jeb's side was doomed because Howie...doesn't, and I went through the cycle of can't and won't before landing on that...reciprocate what I'm presented as sincere interest in Howie. He's not indifferent to Jeb, as we're presented with open-door sex scenes as the romance world describes them. I've read far more explicit and descritive gay sex scenes in the #Hollanov group on Tumblr. Far.

Val and Tish's romance, as Howie looks on, develops nicely; he does not lack for queer relationship success models. He had a past situationship with some guy that we're told stank. I bet I know why: Howie isn't commitment minded. Permaybehaps he will be, but I'll bet not based on what I know about people who seek and form commitments to romantic partners. Howie feels to me, with his surface-level vision and his general absence of attachments to the kind of people he wants to sex up, like a floater. He has his girl-pack who love him and emotionally support him, so he has no reason to risk boredom, domestic routine, deepened familiarity...all the things he appears to be uninterested in. His ballet "career" of useful, decent dancing without seemeing to desire improving his technical skills, still less exploring the deeper creative depths, to excel or even succeed at is a larger example of his aimless rootlessness.

It's a mixed bag of a read for me. I'm always pleased with the juxtaposition of raunch and refinement because that's the way the world really is. It's presented here in thoroughly measured, considered, polished prose. I'm not fond of Howie. I think people who don't want to make commitments are better off sticking to one-night stands. But of course the real issue is, does Howie introspect as well as he dissects others with his lesbian posse? I don't know, I never see it; and if I'm not seeing it I doubt it occurs; so Howie is probably unaware he's hurting others.

We spend 144 pages to make that unremarkable discovery, with pretty prose to sweeten the cup of Life's bitter dregs.

Need to feel involved in a real-life story? This one scratches that bump with the comforting distance of fiction keeping we-the-reader from feeling voyeuristic.

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival, "extreme" is an addiction of its own no matter what it's to

WHAT TRIED TO KILL ME HAD MANY NAMES: A Memoir of Spirit, Sex, and Survival
MARC GAUSS
Sibling Rivalry Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is a fearless memoir of spirit, sex, and survival.

Raised in a strict Christian home where every desire was measured against sin, Marc Gauss grew up believing that love-especially the kind he felt for other men-was something that had to be hidden, prayed away, or punished. As he moves from small-town boyhood to college campuses, locker rooms, churches, and the neon freedom of gay nightlife, Gauss confronts the contradictions between the life he was taught to live and the truth of who he is.

Along the way he encounters cruelty, rejection, ecstatic freedom, and moments of devastating despair—including the kind of spiritual shame that nearly costs him his life. Told with disarming candor, humor, desire, and vulnerability, What Tried to Kill Me Had Many Names is the story of a man who survived religious judgment, sexual awakening, and the many identities others tried to force upon him. It is a memoir about reclaiming joy, owning one's body, and learning-finally-to live without apology.

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

My Review: No one on Earth survives contact with high-control systems unchanged. It's not possible to be told how to be yourself without responding to that pressure somehow. Marc Gauss fell into many unhappy experiences on the road away from the horrors of his family's deeply unChristian take on christianity. His story is another block of evidence that "what does not kill me makes me stronger" is a choice of how to respond to your life's less carefree passages.

If you're hoping for non-fiction porn about sex work, not in here, you could be disappointed. Discussions of Sex are aplenty. The sex act itself isn't absent...it can't be. What's not given to you is the salacious stuff that nosy old queers (me) might've thought we were getting.

It's a better book than that. Becoming you, finding a Self in the noise of life is hard for most of us; all of us, I suspect, but I always leave wiggle room because if I don't some annoying twidgee or another will "well, actually" me and I'll be forced back to the poppet-making curse-casting ways of my English ancestors. Ways Author Gauss must've seen for the rage trap they are.

A book that will heal a hurt many gay men of every generation bear. A story that only adds to the world's stock of recovery from evil without succumbing to it examples. Well worth seeking out and spending a weekend with.

And I am positive I am not the first old queer guy to say that about, or to, Marc Gauss.

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS, exploring the alt-hist "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS
JOHN BOYNE
Henry Holt & Co (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?

When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite." The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne's extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?

In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.

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My Review: I am not a big fan of Author Boyne. I came within an ace of deleting this widget. Because I've learned to be super-scrupulous in reading the whole text of something my urge is to ignore/delete *before* I do it, I saw the open-sesame of the offer: "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

Sold.

You would have to go some to get me not to finish this story. The entire course of Anglophone culture would've changed without this famous sodomite...what an ugly word...being a complete idiot and suing a nasty little waster for saying a true thing in a vicious, pointed way. Wilde was fucking the man's son, a little anger and hatefulness was to be expected in that time and place. Of course it went very badly indeed for Bosie, but broken eggs∈omelette....

Author Boyne has this version of Oscar continue to be abrasive and obnoxious to the world at large (because genius y'know), continuing to flaunt...and I use this word in its strictest sense...his sexuality while continuing to produce literary genius for the enthralled masses. I know this is a hard swallow fo y'all "the way it is is the way it is and so it must only be this way" folks when the subject is history. The alternate history genre comes from the nineteenth-century thought experiment, a technique of gaming out what might happen in a multifactor scenario. War colleges in particular, giant corporations, political operatives, all use thought experiments...counterfactuals colloquially...to help with decision making. Applying the technique to fiction delights me.

Of course the hurdle he faced in bringing this scenario to life is writing a genius's words that were never spoken. I'm feeling charitable: the effort he put into the research, the absorption into Wilde and his world was so extensive, that I was able to suspend disbelief.

“Are you deliberately trying to be rude?”
“No, it comes quite naturally to me.”

It's the sort of line you or I would be proud as hell to skate off. It would not end up in The Big Book of Oscar Wilde Quotes.

Much as I absolutely loved "Oscar's Law" and, in honesty, felt it was a very reasonable conjecture on Author Boyne's part, it contributed to my growing sense of unease about the "Mary Sue"-ness of the Wilde in this story. Some of his Forrest-Gumpian meet-everybody-impress'em-all quality is just projecting his actual past into an unlived future. It does not take away one bit my unease at the way it reads.

Another qualm the Mary-Sueness of it all did not help the story is the sheer number of people who float through the six-hundredish pages. If one is not versed in the dramatis personae of the early twntieth century, this story will bore you rigid with "who was that? why should I care?" feelings that result from putting too much of one's research on the page. It clutters up the reading experience, though I'll say it delighted me personally. His take on Lady Thelma Furness versus Wallace Simpson...*chef's kiss*

It was a successful read, an enjoyable trip...for me. I suspect others won't entirely agree. The last words properly belong to Oscar Wilde hinself, summing up this imagines life succinctly and well:

“I wanted to be a writer. And I became a writer. That is how I spent my life. Sometimes loved; sometimes scolded. Sometimes celebrated. Sometimes loathed. Sometimes a force for change; sometimes my own worst enemy. But I was always read.”

As is meet and right.