TAXI DANCER: A Novel, based on a sad, depressingly relevant true story

TAXI DANCER: A Novel
MARIVI SOLIVEN
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Welcome to the electrifying underworld of California’s Depression-era taxi dance halls, where a dance could cost you a dime, a chance at romance, or a bullet in your back.”—Rick Bonus, Professor and Chair at the Dept. of American Ethnic Studies in the University of Washington

Based on a true story, Taxi Dancer is a gripping historical novel by Marivi Soliven that illuminates the hidden world of Depression-era Filipino taxi dance halls, weaving a forbidden interracial romance with a high-stakes murder mystery to explore race, desire, survival, and the Filipino American experience in 1930s California.

“If we can’t marry white girls, we can at least dance with them.” In response to Depression-era California laws that criminalized interracial marriage, Filipinos established taxi dance halls where they could mingle with American women. When Filipino farmworker Eli and American taxi dancer Lucinda fall in love, they hope to move to Washington State where they can legally wed. Their plans are derailed when Eli is arrested for the shooting death of a dance hall owner. As Lucinda fights to exonerate Eli, she uncovers a murder conspiracy orchestrated by Mamie Savage, a rival dance hall owner and Sal, her Filipino bartender. The capital punishment trial brings to light abhorrent secrets concealed by the conspirators, the victim, and Lucinda herself. Inspired by true events in San Diego’s Stingaree district.

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

My Review: Laws about whom you are allowed to marry are always popular among the "FREEDOM FREEDOM—not for you for me" religious or otherwise intellectually impaired sort. I get that the state has a need to know with whom its citizens and residents are forming households. Beyond registering those households formed, there's no need to poke further into their business.

That's not a popular opinion in these United States in the year of our lord two thousand twenty-six. It's being shoved down our throats that some people, white men especially, deserve more of the benefits that come from freedom than other, darker and/or female people, do. This is not new, nor is it confined to the US. It's a nasty, unjustifiable piece of cruelty that's been on the run for decades and that rollback of privilege is now taking root. Therefore the demographic and actuarial reality that fewer white males are being born thus diluting their godlike, "god given" dominion over...them...is fading. The present dangerous pass in public life is down to the death throes of the established order being played out with maximal ferocity because, once gone, there will be no way to get them all back.

Exhibit A: look at every "AI" controlling person's color and genitalia.

As proof it's not a new thing, look at the reason this book exists. It's telling the story of a statutorily "inferior" man forgetting his appointed place and having sex with a white woman. Stick to your own kind, race purity is paramount so you getting a white woman pregnant is not to be tolerated! This panic, fomented by the likes of Stephen Miller among others, has deep roots in white nationlism and authoritarian corporatocracy. The Filipina author of this story based it on a tragedy that occurred in San Diego, California; I was surprised at how totally unfamiliar I, a native Californian, was with this aspect of the state's ethnic history.

It was the first of several revelations. Like everyone of my generation, I'd at least heard of (in my case seen) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? so was aware in a vague, general way that there were things called "dance halls" and the dancing was a form of socially accepted foreplay conducted for profit by unsavory people. I had not put that together with the "shocking" idea that the races (stupid term) can mix! Panic! Horripilation! In structuring her story on the bones of a real, dreadful moment in San Diego history, Author Soliven uses the time-honored epistolary method for relevant passages from official records, newspaper accounts, and suchlike demonstations of the story's authentic roots, interspersing the imagined—I'd say better described as "recaptured"—dialogues. It makes Eli and Lucinda and Amado and all the other men and women in the story come alive in sharp relief. Like a change in lighting from fluorescent ceiling fixtures in linoleumed hallways into soft lamplight on carpeted upholstered comfortable spaces.

As the story unfolds the Filipino words and phrases become more than Google fodder, the sounds and the feel of the words in my mouth become part of a truly immersive journey into a cultural state of mind. I had not expected to experience this because I am very unfamiliar with more than the broadest outlines of the milieu. In US colonial history the Philippines loom large, after all General MacArthur had roots there and he was a huge figure in my early life; but that's not the Filipino people, their lives, their needs and wants from coming here. As I spent more time with these fictionalized people and moved between chapters through the epistolary bits, I got more and more into Author Soliven's characters in their raw form. It made me appreciate more and more her careful work of fleshing the factual bones with forms so real I was gripped. I cared more what was coming next in their story after each reminder of the facts.

It all leads to tragedy. All stories do, as death is always without fail the end of The Story. In this case, Amado is shot and killed in his successful dance hall for stupid, petty reasons (at the literal beginning of the book, it's not a spoiler)...but the system's wicked, cruel restraints are, as so often, the levers used to move the structures a bit more in the direction of Justice.

We're still working on fairness. It appears to be a Sisyphean task.

NO SANCTUARY, part of our QUILTBAG history of creating safe places for youth

NO SANCTUARY: Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses
STEPHEN LANE
ForeEdge
$22.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: School can be a special sort of nightmare for LGBTQ youth, who are sometimes targets of verbal or physical harassment with nowhere to turn for support. No Sanctuary tells the inspiring story of a mostly unseen rescue attempt by a small group of teachers who led the push to make schools safer for these at-risk students. Their efforts became the blueprint for Massachusetts’s education policy and a nationwide movement, resulting in one of the most successful and far-reaching school reform efforts in recent times. Stephen Lane sheds light on this largely overlooked but critical series of reforms, placing the Safe Schools movement within the context of the larger gay rights movement and highlighting its key role in fostering greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals throughout society.

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

My Review: This academic study of an important piece of Pride Month's celebrations...the history of how we, as Queer or QUILTBAG or Gay people came to have safe spaces and allies in Massachusetts's schools...starts its journey with a solid overview of the struggles to get going against conservative outrage and loudly performed "fear" of what they saw and see as sick, perverted people having open and honest contact with the youth of Massachusetts. This hideous risk to their children's physical, psychic, and moral safety was intolerable, and they made no bones about shouting it. The problem was that there was, and remains, no scintilla of evidence to support their fear-mongering. What the evidence showed, and still shows, is that QUILTBAG students face physical threats and psychic battering from their intimates, and need the schools the law says they must attend as safe spaces, as refuges against the ignorant fearful powers that control their very lives.

A group of teachers, whose front line positions place them in the path of evidence of physical harm and threats to mental health disproportionately meted out to these minority-among-minorities students, and allied administrators worked together to create some safety for the abused from their abusers while they were at school. But that story isn't the beginning of The Story. Education in the US is a fraught subject. We're arguing, in 2022, about what students should be allowed to see that might affirm and support ideologies like anti-racist thinking and identities like Queerness. Many conservative...misnomer; I believe these people are radicals, determined to remake Others into invisible or absent non-persons...parents are deeply threatened by their children learning that white is not Right. (See my review of Jason Stanley's HOW FASCISM WORKS: The Politics of Us and Them for more about why this fear is expressed now.)

In the more-openly racist times of 1970s Massachusetts, teachers were aware of the horrors their Black queer students were suffering. And that, bless their born-in-the-1940s hearts, moved them to action and got them nagging their administrators to assist in designing ways and means that school could be turned into the Safe Schools program, created to provide guidance and professional development for administrators and teachers about this at-risk population. It was, and remains, a startling resource to someone whose contact with the schools was indifferent at best and malevolent at worst.

What results from this program is remarkable both as educational and social policy. It affirms its allyship and it defends its vulnerable client-students. What the author does to make this come alive for us, however, is not always as energetic or as riveting as these results might suggest. If your first respsonse to this story is, "I don't know anything about the gay-rights struggle so I won't *get it*," allow me to assure you that you will know quite a bit more about the gay-rights struggles, the civil rights struggles, and the reactionary resistance to them by the time you get to the Safe Schools story.

The fact that we're given a whirlwind tour of forty years' activity before we get to The Story isn't necessarily a bad thing. It pays for you, the potential reader, to know what you're in for before starting the journey. I was passingly familiar with the history presented here on a national level but the specifics dealing with Massachusetts are new, or at least new in this kind of detail, to me. I do not think the subtitle, "Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses," overstates the delivered story or oversells the impact of the program Author Lane profiles.

Again quoting Author Jason Stanley's book referred to above, "For the fascist, schools and universities are there to indoctrinate national or racial pride, conveying for example (where nationalism is racialized) the glorious achievements of the dominant race." The gender and sexual minorities are very much included in this exclusion, if you'll forgive the ugly phrase that still says what I mean better than anything else I came up with. Safe Schools is an enemy enclave, a Mariupol that the reactionary right needs to take control of. It flies in the face of the fascist agenda of normalization for only the identities and people that the fascists deem desirable and worthy for schools to act as places of succor and freedom for those Othered.

In the four years since this book first appeared, its chronicle of good people seeking to give weak, vulnerable people safety and affirmation has become more elegiac in the reading. There are so few places left in the US where this kind of active, protective stance is being taken on this level and with goals as ambitious as these goals are. I'm sure the future holds more challenges to the Safe Schools program, and the need for it will only increase on a daily basis.

Read this deeply tendentious tale of the right thing getting done. Let its factual basis inspire you to take action of your own.

NATIONALIST LOVE, a Polish graphic novel about QUILTBAG people...just not the ones you're thinking of

NATIONALIST LOVE
JAKUB TOPOR
Europe Comics (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Zapsky and Byro meet during a right-wing nationalist march, their joint escape from the police results in an unexpected and violent outburst of passion. Their initial euphoria quickly turns into doubt and fear—after all, if their buddies found out about them, the consequences would be terrible... But now that they’ve come together, will they be able to simply forget and move on with their lives? Or is it something more lasting, despite the risk it represents for both?

"Nationalist Love" is the third graphic novel by Jakub Topor, nominated for the graphic novel of the year award at the Lodz Comics Festival.

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

My Review: Two skinhead boys, Zapsky and Byro, meet at a hate-rally held in their Polish city. The Nationalists, our Proud Boys writ Euro, throw stuff and set fires and hurt cops. These are some revolting people. They're each stupider than the other, they got no class or brains, yet still they find each other...attractive? available? attainable maybe. Their stupid antics require them to hide from the cops...naturally they decide to do it together, since Zapsky's mother is away for a month. Hijinks ensue.

This isn't the first time I've seen these boys, just never so thoroughly reduced to their ugliest shapes and colors. As a not-especially-convinced experiencer of sequential art, this was always something I found irritating...this kind of "artwork" would get the horselaugh from so many artsy types I've known. I'd absorbed that prejudice and simply never bothered to challenge or examine it until the past few years. Now, I look at this art's clumsiness and its garishness and think...well, how better to narrate this story?

Whaddaya expect, anyway, in a world centered on two losers without a shred of class or decency between them? They are always gonna have to hide abnormal, sick sexual proclivities from the world their undereducated, credulous, angry, and powerless class lives in. Funnily enough, like so many who live in that hate-defined and -bounded world, it's also the one they resent. But Zapsky and Byro got lucky, found each other....found love...which is the most dangerous thing of all. Zapsky definitely feels this, after a brief and deeply unsettling period of being truly happy with Byro, and under pressure to prove he's not a fag to his co-workers, he sends a break-up text that callously dismisses Byro.

Zapsky's Mammele, escaping her loser son's ubiquity and her own pointless existence, is at a beach resort-cum-health spa. And guess what? She meets A Man too! (Called Manfred. No lie.) The sheer awfulness of the art, as in the ugliness of the people and the garishness of the colors, goes so well with this horrible tale of numerous disgusting creeps that it's almost eerie. And that's when I felt myself really giving up, shedding the weight of, that habit of contempt. It isn't pretty! But who said art needs to be pretty? I like Jackson Pollock and Agnes Martin, for gods' sweet sake. I'm not one of those Impressionism-über-Alles sofa-matching-art people!

Or maybe I am...and hide it from myself by liking things that made my mother cringe? That certainly includes comic books...I've been so snobby about them for so long that it feels fake to say, "there is no other way this story could've been told, and it very much needed to be told," but it's just the truth.

Chapter 3 is called "Spoiled Rich Kids"...seems to be a pattern among Polish émigré writers. Like Jedrowski in Swimming in the Dark, Topor gets a character (Byro Bad-skin here) among the wealthy who are privileged to consume and exist as they like. Then he lets him sink or swim...sink in this case. Byro's rebounding from his breakup text, and searches the Internet for gay clubs...he decides he's going to fix himself up, be less Nationalist looking, by dressing better and hiding his skinhead under his loser father's long-unused toupée. The club scene scares him, he doesn't know the culture and is about to get himself into serious trouble but is rescued by one of the rich kids. They decide to keep him when leaving the club becomes a good idea...he almost loses his cool when a "darkie" (an Arab guy called Jamal) is in the house party, too. He's eventually, and inevitably, outed as a Nationalist; but not until after kissing a straight guy at the party. The violence the posers inflict on Byro is pretty mild...more about humiliating him for not being like them. And that, despite the fact he doesn't *want* to be like them, is the worst rejection he suffers. (Not that he is recovered from being rejected by Zapsky, please understand. Just trying to figure out how to move on.)

Mammele gets lucky with Manfred. That scene's just grisly. Even Byro's parents decide to fool around (more grisly still). Byro's Dadzio figures out the kid's got his wig. That should be fun! I thought, watching him explain what the hell he was doing with the damn thing....

Chapter 4 is "Zapsky Looks for a Girlfriend"...the co-workers' plan to get Zapsky laid results in him finding one. Because he's never been in any relationship at all except the brief honeymoon with Byro, he ignores the red flags of an abusive, angry, selfish woman looking for something in exchange for the sex she doles out to him. In his months-long journey through this hell, Zapsky confronts low self-esteem, and his work pals do a lot to support him and care for him. They are crude but actually touchingly kind. Since we focus on Zapsky, we never learn anything more about what happened after Byro's night out...disappointingly...or about Mammele's reactions to the girl Zapsky gets with.

But long story short: Girl gets dumped. Zapsky gets lonely. One rainy day who does he see under a bus shelter but...BYRO!! It's a loving reunion, the bond of real love between them reasserts itself, and they, well, do what young guys do when under the heady influence of reciprocal attraction and genuine connection. They fool around.

...and there's a PoS from their earlier Nationalist lives filming their reunion.

Naturally, the evidence gets shown to the wrong people. All the old gang, I mean this literally, are on the hunt for Zapsky. They find him.

Things end as they so often do.

It's awful to know that this happens and happens and happens to men and women, cis and trans, all around the world because "don't be so sensitive" and "it's just a joke" aren't seen for what they are.

They are normalizations of hate, and soft volleys preparing the way for violence.

I downloaded this graphic novel from Europe Comics, an outfit with whom I am unfamiliar...how shocking...so, if you're in the same boat, here's their mission statement from NetGalley:

Europe Comics is a joint digital initiative run by 13 European comics industry players from 8 European countries. Its main purpose is the creation of a pan-European catalog of award-winning graphic novels from across the continent, published digitally in English and available through major retailers and library networks. Europe Comics also works towards the promotion of European authors and the creation of a European comics online directory, meant for both comics readers and professionals.

Well...so this Polish creator found his way to this American oldster via a social system intermediated by several levels of technology that are under a lot of pressure all the time to justify its worst users' behaviors. This is an example of positive social and personal results from being massively online. Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee.

AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS, revolting crimes committed by disgusting people

AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS: Desire and Rage Among Men
DAVID McCONNELL
Akashic Books
$15.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York-based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin's death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.

Beginning in 1999 and lasting until the 2011 conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they're cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim's personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man's will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer's internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They're almost never that simple.

Together, the cases form a secret American history of rage and desire. McConnell cuts through cant and political special pleading to turn these cases into enduring literature. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is more soulful, more sensitive, more artful than the sort of "true crime” writing the book was modeled on. A wealth of new detail has been woven into old cases, while new cases are plumbed for the first time. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events—grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM AKASHIC BOOKS. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is no secret that I'm a leftist, anti-religion queer. I loathe the existence of the systems of "Rightness" that the murderers in these crimes use to justify their actions. The mere ability of a person to point to a bible and have any segment of society secretly or not-so-secretly justify or even agree with the heinous crime of murder is shameful to us as a society.

That said, it's still true. These accounts of the motives and actions of some seriously mentally ill young men, certain that they are Right and they are Correct in the actions, are enlightening and chilling. The cases are appalling...Scott Amedure was shotgunned by a man he confessed to having a crush on on national TV, and his killer is now walking free after serving twenty years...the legal teams for the prosecution of the hate criminals are hampered by public sympathy for the killers, and the culture changes so so slowly....

I spent most of the time I read this book alternating between scaring my dog with loud, rasping screeches of outraged indignation that such stupidity is allowed to exist by this gawd person most of these boys, their families, and their communities profess belief in, and miserable, hopeless weeping of sympathetic pain at the agonies of loss, grief, and longing that the families, the parents, the loving friends of the murdered men will spend the rest of their lives experiencing, because the so-called "Holy Bible," actually full of holey babble, and its hellspawn idiot-friendly "christian values culture" don't like the idea of men having sex with each other.

Who cares what you think? Did someone ask you? Drag your mind out of the prurient gutter of thinking about what other people do in their bedrooms. It's often this fear of People Knowing that motivates a hate criminal to kill a gay victim...take the Matson and Mowder murder committed in 1999 by the Williams brothers. They were Living Faith Fellowship zealots who got too violent for even those yahoos. They ended up with an anti-semitic hit list, a list of synagogues to burn down...motivated in part by questions around their sexuality. Can't have people thinking we're fags...let's go kill the unclean scum infesting the world!

McConnell has written a book as horrifying and as necessary as In Cold Blood, and as likely to stand the test of time as a document of the consequences of sociopathic thinking. I can't recommend that you read it; but really, you should. Depressingly, most of you won't. It's not YOUR friend, brother, cousin, so why bother?

Because until people confront the horrible consequences of their smug, exclusionary language of "salvation" and the like, this won't be the last time a book like this is necessary.