Beautiful Aliens — #LGBTQ #amreading #pioneers

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

 

Beautiful Aliens

A Steve Abbott Reader

Edited by Jamie Townsend

“Will We Survive the Eighties” is the hypothetical question that titles an essay written by Steve Abbott, a gay man and a leading figure in the 1980s avant-garde literary community based in San Francisco.

In 1992, when attending Naropa University’s creative writing program. I was scheduled to have a one on one critique session with Steve Abbott – but he wasn’t there. He had attended the program and had given a reading and a workshop but had to leave early because he was sick with full blown AIDS.

Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend was published by Nightboat Books in New York.

Abbott survived the 1980s but just barely. He died in 1992 when he was forty-eight.

Abbott was many things – a poet, critic, novelist, and poetic cartoonist – but as his daughter Alysia Abbott (the author of Fairyland, a memoir about her relationship with her father), writes in the afterward of Beautiful Aliens:

“…his work was about building community. It was about hand-illustrating posters for the readings he organized…..It was about going out and engaging young men and women in classrooms but also in the cafes, bars, and bookstores around San Francisco, sharing his vast knowledge and encouraging them to add their voices to queer culture, in whatever way they could, even if that culture wasn’t getting mainstream attention. He knew how important it was to support voices on the edge, writers that were pushing boundaries and weren’t interested in keeping their readers comfortable.”

I found Beautiful Aliens, a selection of Abbott’s writings, mesmerizing.  For one thing, there were so many overlapping areas that we had in common – queer writing conferences that were important to me, and favorite poets and writers such as the lesbian icon Judy Grahn.

I also found that Abbott was a writer who, in so many ways, was ahead of his time, and still has much to tell us.  In his prescient essay “Will We Survive the Eighties,” Abbott writes:

“It is clear that what we are doing now … is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth’s ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that we can no longer afford to see anything – not even ‘gay liberation’ or our survival — as a separate issue needing a separate cultural or a political or a spiritual agenda.

This does not mean I intend to renounce my sexual orientation, far from it. Even in times of sadness or loneliness, it remains my greatest source of strength and joy.”

 

I found Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend, published by Nightboat Books in New York to be that rare thing – a voice from the past that addresses the present.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

 

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Karl Tierney’s poetry collection airing on This Way Out — #amreading #LGBTQ

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

When I began reading Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (2019 Sibling Rivalry Press), I thought the poems of Karl Tierney might be tragic, but instead found them tragically funny – in a way that often makes the soul snicker. I thought the poetry might be tragic because they were brought to us by tragic circumstances.  The editor was friend and literary executor of the author Karl Tierney who in 1994 became sick with AIDs and took his own life in 1995 when he was 39-years old.  The editor, Jim Cory, is a noted poet and essayist in his own right.

Tierney never had a book published during his lifetime, but his poems were published in auspicious places such as the American Poetry Review and Exquisite Corpse.

Karl Tierney as a poet also had his serious side. In the poem “Gertrude Stein to Alice B. Toklas,” he adopts Gertrude’s voice and writes in part of the poem:

 

Our car is …beautiful and blue

and we are beautiful and not blue

and we are fast driving

and do not feel a bit dangerous or dirty.

We have the radio on…

 

In his poems about gay life in San Francisco where he lived, Karl turned his keen poetic observations on life around him.  In “Adonis At The Swimming Pool,” Karl starts with:

“Who dances his thighs across the pool’s water,

spread on a mattress bloated from his breath.

Whose ripe-with-sun skin cuts through the spray

With the alingual grace of a kiss to my brow.”….

And ends with:

“Whose wet curls stroke the evening’s earliest gasp

into naughty tones and murmurs of lust.

Who would have me discussed in seedy cafés

and ruin me since I’m deaf to this hiss

behind the teeth in that insipid smile.”

From Tierney’s take on “lipstick lesbians,” MacDonna, and gay life in the Castro at a certain point in time, I found Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (from Sibling Rivalry Press) to be a page-turner of a good read.

 

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

 

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“What if there was no need for labels?” —Juno’s Swans on This Way Out — #amreading #LGBTQ

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

I don’t usually think of myself as an optimist. But in reading Juno’s Swans by Tamsen Wolff (published by Europa editions), I began to think of myself as something close to an optimist: as one who has hope. After all, as a lesbian and as someone concerned about the world – I do have hope that things can change (for the better).

The reader learns at the very beginning that this is a coming of age story – where a young woman falls in love with another young woman only to have her heart broken. Perhaps it’s an all too common refrain: the beloved is in love with someone else.

The exceptionally good writing is what drew me in.  Through this writing, I learned that this was a big love with a capital ”B”. The narrator Nina – who is entering the last year of high school — falls in love with a slightly older girl named Sarah.  Nina and her best friend have gone to Cape Cod for the summer where Nina is taking acting lessons. There is a convincing back story about Nina. She has been basically abandoned by both of her parents and was raised by her grandparents.  However much she adores her grandparents, it’s easy for the adult reader to come to the conclusion that the narrator was left vulnerable by her parent’s absence.

However, it was the big love that the narrator feels for Sarah that I was struck by. Wolff writes that Nina slid her hand into Sarah’s, shortly after the two of them met, and that Sarah held her hand:

“The world was between our palms, so discreetly and politely pressed, so heated and limitless, curious and fervent.  The world contracted to that electric violet place.  If we had opened our hands right then, the light streaming out would have dazzled you blind. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at her. I just held that pulsing jewel and marveled, brilliantly distracted.”

The novel is laden with Shakespearean references and the title comes from a reference in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It.” The novel is set in the age of AIDS, which is evident in the lives of the characters around them. Perhaps indicative of that time period, the narrator is not into labels.

The reader finds out later that the narrator has at the same time always had boyfriends so that she can fit in at school – even if she is contemptuous of them.  Hmmm, the sarcastic part of my mind commented, things haven’t changed that much.

Still, I had hope. What if a girl can look at another girl and see the air break into pieces around her?  What if we lived in a world where labels weren’t necessary?

This world is possible as evidenced by the trueness of the author Tamsen Wolff writing in her novel Juno’s Swans as she describes Sarah’s comfy feather bed: “In it, we belonged to each other and nothing in the world could touch us.”

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

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Life of David Hockney on This Way Out — #amreading #lgbtq

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

 

David Hockney is one of our pioneers: a well-known artist and a gay man.  As a person – with his loves and inspirations —the two have never been separate.  David Hockney hails from the working-class city of Bradford England, the same place that my mother’s ancestors lived (which I talk about in my book Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters – published by Bella Books in 2012), which may be one of the reasons I was so intrigued with the book.  I had heard of Hockney as a gay man and as an artist but reading Life of David Hockney by the French novelist Catherine Cusset and published by Other Press, in 2019, told me so much more. It was translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

The book is written as a novel.  As the author writes in the prologue, “This is a novel.  All the facts are true, but I have imagined feelings, thoughts and dialogue. I used intuition and deduction rather than actual intervention. I sought coherence and connected pieces of Hockney’s life puzzle from what I found in many sources – autobiographies, biographies, interviews, essays, films and articles.”

The novel is unusual in its fictionization of someone who is still alive. Born in 1937, Hockney is currently in his early 80s. The book does not disappoint. In fact, the word lovely comes to mind. Hockney was always openly gay and obsessed with literature – especially with the gay poets Walt Whitman and CP Cavafy.

Toward the end of the book, the author writes, “That is what attracted David to art, what he liked best in his favorite painters, Piero della Franchesca or Claude Lorrain: the complex balance of colors and opposed elements, the place of man in space, the feeling that he was but a small part of the greater whole. The artist was the priest of the universe.”

He came of age as gay in Bradford when he was a teen, was championed by his mother as an artist and went to the Royal College of Art in London.  He went through all the things that gay people usually go through – like being discovered by one his straight peers – but it was in the late 1950s. Successful as an artist early in life, he went to New York where he was impressed with the number of gay bars along with the museums and vegetarian restaurants. He went back and forth to London for a while, and then settled in Los Angeles where he spent his life until the U.S. wouldn’t admit his lover (a citizen of the U.K.) so Hockney moved back to the region of England where he had grown up.

Ultimately, it was his courage to be himself – specifically his gay self – that along with his artistic genius, his dedicated work habits (he worked every day), along with the good people in his life and fate, that factored into his huge success as an artist and a gay pioneer.

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

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Is cruising a lost art? — on This Way Out — #amreading #LGBTQ

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

 

Is cruising a lost art?

There might be several answers to this question according to Alex Espinoza the author of the book Cruising, an intimate history of a radical pastime – a book about the experiences of gay men.

 

When I first started reading this book, I explained gay male cruising to my partner, as a way of some men hooking up with random strangers for casual sex. I told her that the gay men might wait for hours for the right guy to come along – just as straight guys on a fishing expedition might wait for hours to land a fish. It was, as you probably can imagine, the kind of semi-hilarious conversation that lesbians might have about men.

But then I started reading the book and I have to admit I was fascinated. I learned a lot. The first thing that I learned was that cruising can have a cultural context.  On reflection, I realized that this shouldn’t have been a surprise. Everything has a cultural context. Growing up as a Mexican American, Espinoza’s first memories of “cruising” was his brothers and their friends dressing up to go out to pick up girls. As the author writes:

“It’s hard to trace exactly how the term became associated with anonymous sexual encounters in the gay community. People cruised in their cars. My brothers and their friends [quote] “cruised for chicks.” All of these involve, to some degree or other, the act of leisurely crossing and re-crossing the same place.  They involve the acts of seeing (and being seen), of pursuing (and being pursued). Yet, no one knows exactly when or how the phrase became synonymous with secret sexual encounters. We know the word has its origin in the Latin word crux, or cross.”

I learned about the history of the gay bar, in places called “molly houses” in London in the 1700s where men would meet, as Espinoza writes, “to stage drag shows, mingle and have sex.” It was, of course, at the time, a crime. Many were arrested. In one raid in 1726, Mother Claps – London’s most infamous molly house at the time – forty men were arrested. More than a few gay men resisted arrest – resistance that might have been overcome at the time, but which portended changes to come.

As he travels through history, Espinoza writes about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and how it devastated the gay community and subsequently changed the behavior of many gay men.  He writes that the massive losses of the time caused many gay men to turn to long-term monogamous commitments. He also writes of the history of online chatrooms and the gay hook-up apps of the day.

He writes that, “An argument can be made that, because of its ability to pre-screen and its exclusionary practice, using apps like Grindr does not qualify as ‘cruising.’”

He also writes about the drawbacks of using poplar gay hookup apps in repressive countries:

“…while such apps have helped people connect, they have also become tools for authorities. In countries like Russia and Uganda – the latter known as the most dangerous place in the world to be gay — the act of modern-day cruising, with its digital paper tail, can be a death sentence.”

But Espinoza also writes that the act of cruising is eternal:

“We are doing something we know is illegal and subversive. The act itself becomes a protest, an uprising. Cruisers are renegade outlaws. And like all revolutionaries, we continue moving between the light and the dark, our lives forever tethered to one another.

As it always has been.”

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

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The Life of Alain Locke — #amreading #lgbtq #NationalBookAward

Note: This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

 

I have long been fascinated by the figure of Alain Locke – who I knew as the first African American Rhodes Scholar (in 1907), the philosopher that the civil rights leader Martin Luther King spoke about, the influential Howard University professor (the historically black university located in Washington D.C.), and perhaps most importantly (to me) as the philosophic architect of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke was known for the fact that he championed such writers as Zora Neale Hurston.

That I had heard he was gay only made him more interesting. Then I learned that the long-awaited biography of Locke was coming out written by Jeffrey C. Stewart titled, The New Negro, The Life of Alain Locke had been published in 2018.  It was published by Oxford University Press and received the 2018 National Book Award for nonfiction.

Then the book arrived.  I have to admit that I was daunted by its 800 pages – 878 to be exact. Also, like many people, if not most, I rarely read biographies.  But once I started reading this one, I found it so fascinating that I could barely put it down – even though it is physically hard to pick up because it is so heavy.  So, even if you rarely read biographies, I would suggest reading this one.  It’s a real page turner and you’ll learn a lot of important historical information.

Locke – as Stewart writes – was “a tiny effeminate gay man – a dandy, really, often seen walking with a cane, discreet, of course, but with just enough hint of a swagger, to announce to those curious that he was queer, in more ways than one, but especially in that one way that disturbed even those who supported Negro liberation.  His sexual orientation made him unwelcome in some communities and feared in others as a kind of pariah.”

Some of the intriguing things that I learned was that Locke was very close to his mother, in fact after her death in 1922, left him bereft, and after a stint in travelling in Europe where he could be more sexually open, and after being fired for a time by Howard University for being too vocal on race relations (although he was later hired back), he poured himself into their shared love for art and commenced on starting the Harlem Renaissance, with the idea that there was liberation in art that was African American identified.

The Harlem Renaissance loomed so large in my mind that even though I already knew that it was basically over by 1929, when the American stock market collapsed, it was rather depressing to read about it again.  Harlem, long the African American section of New York City, was hit very hard by the Great Depression.  The Harlem Renaissance, however, remains an important part of history – and many African American identified visual artists and writers were influenced and inspired by it long after the 1920s, as Stewart writes.

Some of the things that I learned that intrigued me was that Locke was very close to his mother and that after her death, he replicated his relationship with her to some extent with several older women who were important to him.  I also found it fascinating that the campus of University of Oxford (where Locke found himself after he won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship), was a hotbed of gay male activity – and that this was the same university that the gay legend Oscar Wilde was graduated from in 1878, three decades before Locke arrived.  I also learned that Locke faced less racism in Europe.  However, some of the major racist obstacles that Locke faced at Oxford were created by other American Rhodes Scholars.

Most of what I learned was that Locke, a black, gay man, faced major obstacles in his life because of racism and homophobia. Despite these obstacles he thrived, and he changed the course of history.

His life is inspiring.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

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THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders reviewed on This Way Out — #amreading #LGBTQ #LGBTRadio

This week on the LGBTQ radio syndicate, This Way Out (TWO), lesbian author and playwright Vanda, reviews my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books — New York/Lisbon).  The producer added the hymn “The Waters of Babylon” to the review.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

“What I liked most about the book was that I was a part of the discovery.  I would be reading about Tamar and her family and friends and then suddenly one of them would mention a relative or acquaintance who lived in another land; gradually I would come to realize this person was a famous Biblical character, for instance Naomi and Ruth from “I go whither you goest,” fame.

As a young teenager I was in search of answers, so I read the Bible from cover to cover twice. l   don’t know that I found any answers, but I enjoyed the stories. I was able to connect to those ancient people. The stories in They are told in simple, everyday language; they do not sound Biblical. They sound human.”

–reviewed by Vanda, author of The Juliana Series

To hear the entire review, click here

THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders is available through bookstores and online where books are sold.  It’s also available through your local library.  If the library doesn’t already have it, just ask your librarian to order it.

For more information on THEY, click here.

 

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Two books from Other Press airing internationally this week: Can love conquer all? — #amreading #lgbtq

Note: This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

As a lesbian writer, I am continually confronted with the fact that we are many things – at the heart LGBTQ but perhaps not in everything we do.  I’ve come to the conclusion that LGBTQ status shouldn’t matter even when it does.

Recently, I was reminded of this dilemma in the reading of two books from Other Press about men who happen to be gay in the Middle East. Both books are well-written and delightfully complex. Both also represent stories within a story. 

In The Parting Gift (Other Press 2018), a novel by Evan Fallenberg, we meet an unnamed narrator who tells us the story by writing a letter to his former lover Adam who he knew in a university in the states when the narrator left abruptly for Israel where he fell in love with a for a time lived with an alpha male who was previously heterosexual – and who in fact, as the narrator tells us, may not have an orientation other than being macho and selfish.

The story line, like the sexuality of the two male beloveds, is fluid. “This story, like most stories, could begin in a number of different places,” writes Fallenberg.  His narrator explains that he chose to go to go to Israel “because if you’re a Jew you can get off the plane in Tel Aviv, tell them you want to be a citizen, and you get processed right there at the airport.  Full rights and benefits – housing, education, medical.”

Once in Israel he meets and falls in love and lust with a spice-dealer who is close to his ex-wife and his children. The gay narrator becomes totally ensnared in the relationship and once things quickly begin to go bad, he is forced to examine entitlement – first that of his lover but then also the entitlement that he himself grew up with even as he acknowledges that he is now on the receiving end of entitlement.  It is being used against him. The narrator explains to Adam (and to the reader) that he didn’t leave abruptly because, “I had no friends, no real prospects. I was suddenly a 1950s housewife, trapped and helpless.”

The Diamond Setter, a novel by Moshe Saka (Other Press 2017) which was translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen is a sprawling novel that traces the role of a blue diamond — a cursed but inanimate object with a storied past — in connecting people and communities.

A main character — Fareed a young Arab man from Syria who crosses the border and sneaks into Israel with the destination of Yafa – is gay. Fareed (who is carrying the diamond) finds himself in a community that evokes his past.

In addition to being culturally significant, or perhaps as a result, the novel has love at its core. It begins with a few paragraphs that contain the passage that this a story “from back in the days when the Middle East was steeped not only in blood but also in love.”

When Fareed is amazed at the acceptance of gays in Israel, one of his new friends in Yafa warns that,

“Most gay Palestinians in Israel are closeted. It’s a very conservative society. Even our leaders, the ones in the Knesset, say things like, ‘Arab society is not yet mature enough to contend with this issue.’ What is it mature enough for it to deal with then? … What’s for sure is that the Shami Bar, here in Yafa, is an oasis.  It doesn’t represent anything going on in this country, certainly not the discrimination and racism against Arabs.”

Perhaps the novel can be summed up by what Sakal writes in the Afterword:  “Anyone who lived in Palestine before the State of Israel was established in 1948 had tales of brave relationships that survived even the bloodiest of times, love affairs and friendships between Jews and Arabs … “

As complex as The Diamond Setter is, it can leave the reader with the feeling that with love, anything is possible.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (just published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

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Paris Adrift (by Vanda) — lesbian history on This Way Out — #amreading #LGBThistory

Note: This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

When I heard that the lesbian writer Vanda had a new book out, book three of her Juliana Series, I was very excited.  You see, I love historic novels and when a historic novel is written by a lesbian and includes lesbian characters that makes me very happy.

Paris, Adrift is the title of Vanda’s newest novel, and it may be written as the third book in a series, but it can be read on its own.  At the same time, there are allusions to previous circumstances that were in the early novels, that the reader all the entire series will get.  And if that reader is like me – who has read the series as the individual books were published – this means that the characters are even more real. They have become people with histories – backstories that make the novel I am reading even more complex.

The two main characters Alice (Al) and Juliana, a famous singer whose career Al is managing.  The two women are also lovers.  They are from New York City and when the novel opens in 1955, they are taking an ocean liner to Paris where Juliana is booked to sing in nightclubs.

The tenor of the times – which are so real that Al and Juliana experience blackmail – reveal to the reader that intense homophobia is as alive and well in Paris as it is in New York.  Vanda writes a passage from the point of view of Al that sadly echoes sentiments that I have heard in the not so distant past:

Of course, Max would have no choice but to fire me.  I’d lose all my clients. Who’d want to be represented by a mentally disturbed, potentially criminal, unnatural woman? A thing. I’d lose my gay clients too, like Marty. It would be too dangerous for him to be represented by me.  I’d never work again, at least not in show business or government or civil service; Is there anything left?  I’d be poor again. Maybe scraping by in low level jobs like my father.  I’d hate that.  I did have savings and stocks so I could hang on for a while. But my work in cabaret. I must have that. It was my life.  Still – I’d survive it.  Somehow. But Juliana….? She was used to being adored. If it came out that she was … The worst for me would be that this would most likely be the end of us, and that I didn’t know how I would live through.

The novel takes the reader through history – a factually accurate history – that provides for plenty of interesting asides and insights. But ultimately it is a love story between these two women Al and Juliana – and it is a tale of how their lesbian love which must remain hidden is able to survive.  As Vanda writes:

“Oh, there have been a few women like us who lived in Paris somewhat openly; women artists who were already considered odd like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  They weren’t really accepted by most, merely tolerated.  Many others who came here to write or be artists kept their relationships secret. No. I don’t think we’ll ever be treated like everyone else.”

    “Then let’s stay here all day and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. “

     She kissed me, and we made love again.  Everything would have been perfect …. [except]

 

There has been much written about the importance of telling our stories.   For me, as a member of the lesbian community, as someone who recognizes that our stories are so often marginalized and dismissed, the importance of telling our story – especially in an historic novel in a lesbian context – is proof that we do exist and, in fact, have always existed.

 

To read my review of Vanda’s first book in the series, Juliania, click here.

To read my review of Vanda’s second book in the series, Olympus Nights On the Square, LGBT Life in the Early Post-War Years (1945-1955), click here.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (just published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

 

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“Chaser” — a trans detective story with a feminist heroine — #amreading #LGBTQ

Note: This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

 

Despite the fact that I am (still) filled with lesbian rage, I am a nonviolent person – if not by nature, then by principle.

But, at the same time, I have to admit that a woman hero avenging injustice gives me a little thrill.  Lately, I’ve developed an intellectual reasoning to this:  we need more feminist heroines.  We need to keep believing that a woman protecting other women is possible and we need to keep thinking that it’s important.

Reading Chaser (a Jinx Ballou novel) published in 2018 by Pariah Press furthered my thinking on this.  The book was written by Dharma Kelleher who is heralded as one of the top authors in transgender crime fiction.

I don’t ordinarily read mysteries.  But when I do I am impressed with the suspense and tension inherent in the form, and I always learn something new.  As a non-mystery reader, I found that the book was a delightful and suspenseful page turner with heart.

The narrator, Jinx Ballou, is a bounty hunter hired to bring a teenage disabled girl — charged with her mother’s murder — back to face her charges in court. The girl has skipped bail which is why Jinx was hired to find her.

Jinx takes on this case after she is outed by a local newspaper as transgender and is fired by her former agency.

Jinx is astounded to discover that simply by knowing she is transgender can make it now obvious that her employer is small minded.  As the author writes:

“I sighed, even as my heart revved in my chest like a race car engine.  ‘I’ve always been a girl, Sara Jean.  It’s just that through some crazy mix-up of biochemistry or genetics, I was born with a boy’s body.  It’s hard to explain.’

“She fixed her gaze on me once again. ‘Ain’t nothing to explain. Boys is boys, and girls is girls. God made you what you are.  Ain’t no changing it.’

‘I wish it were that simple, Sara Jean, but it’s not. I’, — ‘

‘Perverts like you’s what’s wrong with this world.  Making it dangerous for God-fearing folks to use public restrooms.’

‘A pervert?  Seriously, Sara Jean, is that what you think I am?’  I rolled my eyes.  ‘Want to know what trans people do in public restrooms? We pee. We poop.  And we wash our hands which is more than I can say for some people.”

 

And so the author proves her point.  Discrimination that can be proven with the prohibition of use of public restrooms, is absolutely ridiculous.

Jinx goes on to find new work, gets her girl who she develops great empathy toward. While doing so, she confronts a mobster running a human trafficking operation.  I observed that in many ways this novel contained many mysteries including who outed Jinx to the reporter, and why should the fact that she is transgender matter anyway?

And so I learned a lot from Chaser, but perhaps most of all, I learned that yes, given the right circumstances, I can count myself as a fan of crime fiction.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (just published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

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