Patchwork, by Dan Loughry
The Evolution of Ethan Poe, by Robin Reardon
The Girls Club, by Sally Bellerose. Bywater Books, 288
pages, $14.95 paper.
Marie is the tough sister. Renee is the pretty sister. And
Cora Rose is the uncertain sister – though she has the best hair of the three
working-class Catholic LaBarre girls. As this debut novel opens, they’re
respectively 16, 15 and 14, adolescents on the cusp of womanhood in the 1970s,
best friends one minute and bitter rivals the next, held tightly to the bosom
of a fractious extended family but ready for sexual adventure and fumbling
independence. Over the next near-decade, the girls mature into women, babies
come and boys go, a marriage dissolves into divorce with heated acrimony and
aching heartbreak – and Cora Rose, bearing a colostomy bag as her cross, edges
with tremulous uncertainty into a world of dyke bars and lesbian longing.
Bellerose’s warm novel embraces the concept of sisterhood with propulsive gusto
– mostly the real deal of sisters caring deeply for each other, even as they
squabble, but with hints that the sisterhood of nascent feminism has reached
the small town where the three are realizing their emotional and sexual selves.
Patchwork, by Dan Loughry. Harvard Square Editions, 174
pages, $15.95 paper.
There was a time when the intensity of the "AIDS novel"
sprang from the agonizing immediacy of the epidemic: Paul Reed’s
Facing It,
David Feinberg’s
Eighty-Sixed and
Spontaneous Combustion, Robert Ferro’s
Second Son and
Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers
were all written
by dying men in the days when infection was almost always a death sentence.
Thirty years after the onset of AIDS, and 20 years after those novels gripped
gay readers, Loughry’s unflinching, empathic debut honors the writers’ literary
legacies. The story opens in 1989, as a querulous couple, Sal and Randy, confront
mortality – and a loving monster of a mother who learns of her son’s disease
when he invites her, after avoiding his family for a year, to come visit them
for a picnic at a "quilting exhibit"... the NAMES Project Memorial Quilt. Randy
dies; Sal survives; the story picks up in L.A. a decade later, as Sal finally
accepts that it’s OK to love again. By turns courageously comic and
heart-wrenchingly historical, this is a compelling reminder of the way things
were.
The Evolution of Ethan Poe
, by Robin Reardon. Kensington
Books, 400 pages, $15 paper.
The fourth of Reardon’s teen-protagonist novels packs plenty
of issues into its plot. Sixteen-year-old Ethan Poe knows he’s gay, but isn’t
sure how open to be – until he’s seduced by hunky but closeted Max Modine. His
parents are on the verge of divorce. His best friend, oddly so, is a
straight-edged girl whose accelerating religious kookiness is fueled by a
stepfather’s abuse. His one-year-older brother, also something of a religious
fanatic and afflicted with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), is
determined to destroy his right hand (with which he masturbates), to the point
of lacerating it beyond repair. The small Maine town where all this angst is
set is torn apart by the contentious issue of evolution versus intelligent
design – with ID proponents trashing a schoolroom, killing a dog and stoning a
teacher’s apartment. And there are "power animals." And illegal tattoos. Busy,
busy. By story’s end, Ethan and Max have settled into contented – and open –
first love, and Reardon has resolved this engaging novel’s many dysfunctions
with textured insight.
The Buoyancy of It All
, by Robert Walker. Lethe Press, 88
pages, $15 paper; Chelsea Boy
, by Craig Moreau. Chelsea Station Editions, 78
pages, $15 paper.
One of these debut collections is a book of poetry that
sizzles and sears. The other is a book of poetry that observes and reflects.
First, the sizzling: Walker’s cute title ("Sacred Cows Make Fine
Cheeseburgers") honors the bawdy wit and flirtatious vibrato of many of the
poems, but there’s a darker tone, too, embodied by an introspective nightmare
series (""The One in Which I Am a Wingless Bird") and a wrenching boogeyman
series ("The Boogeyman Wants to Know What I Fear"). Poem by poem, Walker excavates
a painful past with an open heart and a fierce voice. Next, the observing:
Moreau, a well-toned Iowa lad transplanted to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood,
eschews sexy for poems that more often than not hold his environment – and his
place in it, as the Chelsea of AIDS and disco and muscle queens evolves from
heat to history – at an emotional distance. His poems, which offer surface
memoir rather than deep introspection, are passionate about a place, but not
about the self. Two quite different writers, yes, with one common inspiration:
both honor Walt Whitman.
Featured Excerpt
I knew it was wrong./ The boys sang a song/ while
administering the beating./ I was bleeding/ from the gums./ Nick Peters &
his chums/ held me by the shoulders/ their fists falling like boulders./ It
happened in the third shower stall/ my back against the wall./ Cold tile
against knees/ cold tiles against please/ let go,/ no
./ Nick’s waistband
descended/ like an ogre in quicksand, ended/ with his dick in my face./ His
face/ was angry as a trout out of water wearing/ a dangling cross earring/
screaming/ Suck it faggot
.
-"The Rapee Remembers" from The Buoyancy of It All
, by
Robert Walker
Footnotes
Francis King, author of 30 novels, many infused with gay
characters, died July 3, age 88. Few of the British writer’s books were
available in the U.S., though his queerest writing, published or brought back
into print by now-defunct Gay Men’s Press – among them his controversial, A
Domestic Animal
– were distributed in America in the 1990s. In 2010, Britain’s
Arcadia Books published Cold Snap
, with an Oxford Fellow’s passion for a
German POW a significant subplot. It was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award;
King’s first novel, To the Dark Tower
, was published in 1946. Of A Domestic
Animal_, King wrote in 2010: "Autobiographical in inspiration, its story that of an
obsessive love that devoured more than a year of my existence, this was the
most painful novel that I have ever had either to live or to write. With the
aftermath of its publication, the anguish merely worsened. A former Labour MP,
a Brighton friend and neighbor, concluded, I must admit with justification,
that a woman character was based on himself and at once sued for libel... Since
the obsessive love was a homosexual one, many of the reviewers found the book
at best distasteful and at worst disgusting, and when at last a new version was
reissued took an all too obvious pleasure in laying into it. Yet the remarkable
thing is that the book has survived, being repeatedly reprinted and bringing me
more fan letters that any other of my works."
Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid’-70s.