Short Book Reviews: An Inspiring Tale of Courage, Queerness, and Punk Rock

Music from Another World, by Robin Talley (Inkyard)

In the late 1970s, the gay rights movement was getting underway, with cities like San Francisco leading the way. Harvey Milk’s election as city supervisor (1978) catalyzed a generation of LGBTQ youth and their allies, while in other parts of the country Anita Bryant was campaigning for anti-gay laws. The punk music movement was in full swing, giving voice to the chaos and rage many of these young people felt.

Into this world come two young women, high school students at extremely conservative schools. A summer program pairs Sharon, a Catholic from San Francisco, with Tammy, a Baptist from Orange County. Each harbors a secret she dare not let her homophobic parents know: Sharon’s twin brother is gay, as is Tammy herself. Gradually, through diaries and their correspondence, the girls discover the courage to fight free of the homophobia, repression, and secrecy of their lives. Matters come to a head when Tammy is outed and flees to San Francisco. Under a pretext, she and Sharon convinced Sharon’s mother to let her stay with them. Here she’s caught up in the Castro Street scene and a radically, woman-owned bookstore. Tammy and Sharon find that adjusting to in-person intimacy is very different from the openness they enjoyed in their letters.

So much of this book evoked memories for me. I wasn’t in San Francisco when the story takes place, but my sister was. We both frequented book stores like the one in the story; we both knew people struggling with their sexual orientation, with the condemnation of their families. We knew the fear of bigotry such as Bryant’s and the exhilaration of Milk’s election. That said, we were both older, and Tammy and Sharon are still teens. The teen years are agonizing enough without issues of identity and the terror of being sent to a conversion camp or being rejected by family and friends. It was no wonder gay teens had such a high risk of suicide. But this story is filled with hope, too. The love and support of some friends and some family, and the riotous energy of the music, and the deep friendship between the two girls is a message of hope.

Nowadays it’s all too easy to look back on “those terrible times,” as if they will never happen again. That’s a false confidence, as daily news stories remind us. The eternal vigilance that is the price of freedom means that books like this one have enduring value. Even in “enlightened” times, there are teens who struggle, who come to loathe and even destroy themselves, because of isolation and hatred. I would love to give each one of them this book, with the message, “It Gets Better.”

REVIEW: ROVING PACK by Sassafras Lowrey, or Why Every Straight Parent Needs This Book

This novel, told in the form of diary entries and email, offers a glimpse into the life of a young person who is gender*-fluid, marginalized, at tremendous risk for suicide, homelessness, and victimization by hate crimes, and who finds a tenuous stability in a loosely-woven community, where individual relationships are fragile but the group itself endures. It's extremely well executed, with a strong narrative voice, easy prose, smoothly handled nuances, and action that moves right along. Ultimately, it's a hopeful story, with resourcefulness and loyalty as well as despair. But it's also a disturbing book.

*Gender (as opposed to sex, which is the plumbing and genetics you're born with, or sexual orientation) affects so many aspects of our lives and how we see each other and the world. We grow up being told we're a boy or a girl and what those mean. (Whether we turn out to like boys or girls or both is another matter.) When a person experiences who they are as the opposite sex from the body and identification they've been given, we call them trans-gendered, as opposed to cis-gendered, when it matches. Some people are neither trans- nor cis-gendered; how they see themselves changes, not only from one sex to the other, but neither, something that does not fit into the tidy binary division. One such person is the narrator of Roving Pack, who over time changes name and gender as well as address.

When I made my way through this story, I became aware that I could not read it dispassionately. I could empathize, using my imagination and my past conversations with gay and trans-gendered friends and family. But everything I myself experience is colored by my own gender identification, which is fixed (as opposed to fluid) and congruent with my biology. I waded through the coarse language, the drug addiction, suicide, disease and promiscuity, trying to reserve judgment, trying to listen to what these kids were trying to tell me, to understand their lives in their own terms.