GLR Review March-April 2019

P ETER M UISE The Rave Decade Sketchtasy by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Arsenal Pulp Press. 256 pages, $17.95 N OSTALGIA for the ’90s seems to be in the air. Troye Sivan and Charli XCX have a pop hit with their song “1999,” while the protagonist of Andrea Lawlor’s 2017 novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is an omnisexual shape-shifter sleeping his way across 1990s America. Not all the 90s nostalgia is lighthearted, though. Ryan Murphy’s TV show The Assassination of Gianni Versace focused on AIDS and the oppression of the closet as much as it did on fashion, while two gay men are stalked by murderers at a gay cruising area in The Devil’s Path , a horror film shown at film festivals in 2018. Maybe the 1990s weren’t so great after all? Both the highs and the lows of that decade are featured in Sketchtasy , Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s third novel. The nar- rator is Alexa, a college-age genderqueer person living in Boston in the 1990s. The term “genderqueer” wasn’t used at the time (and isn’t in the novel), and it’s interesting to read how Alexa and her friends try to navigate gay male culture at a time when there were fewer categories available to describe gender. At night they don outrageous club-kid drag, dance at the gay bars, and refer to each other almost exclusively with female pro- nouns. During the day they dress in traditional male clothing for their boring jobs, though Alexa, calling herself Tyler, earns money as a butch hustler servicing older gay men. Alexa and friends also take drugs. Ecstasy, ketamine, mari- juana, Xanax, cocaine, and many others are consumed in large quantities. Although the characters tell themselves they are using drugs solely for entertainment, it’s clear they’re also self- medicating to cope with a homophobic environment, sexual abuse, and the AIDS epidemic. Some readers might find the frequent and lengthy descrip- tions of drug use off-putting, but Sketchtasy offers some com- pelling insights into queer culture. One of them is how LGBT people share culture and educate each other. Alexa and her friends share music and DJ mixes. As Tyler, she reads the works of David Wojnarowicz with Nate, an older wealthy trick. An- other trick plays Alexa his favorite operas. Alexa introduces a group of recovering alcoholics to Todd Haynes’s film Poison , and in turn they show her Breakfast at Tiffany’s . Sketchtasy , with its detailed and well-researched descriptions of gay life in Boston twenty years ago, is itself educational, showing younger readers what the city was like before the Internet ruined gay night life. The novel also explores the ways in which LGBT people suc- cessfully and unsuccessfully nurture one another. Alexa’s friends give her the nickname “Mother One,” but her mothering often takes the form of feeding their addictions with drugs and alcohol. She also opens her apartment to Joanna, a recovering junkie, but The book’s essays constitute a disjointed autobiography. Arceneaux writes about his childhood sexual experiences, his early religious indoctrination, his love for female recording artists (particularly Beyoncé), his struggle to make a living as a writer, coming out, and dating. He frequently makes fun of himself. There are disastrous first dates where he drinks too much, his struggle to live in Los Angeles without a car, and his fear that a man he met online has infested his apartment with bedbugs. His humor, however, cuts both ways. He doesn’t hesitate to call one of the men he dates a stupid, superficial jackass. Forced to ride the bus in L.A., he complains: “On top of the bus being crammed full of people who needed to better familiarize themselves with manners and strong deodorant, it was a wonderfully shitty way to get around the city.” It is not surprising that a blog he wrote is called “The Cynical Ones.” He refuses to express sympathy he doesn’t feel, whether toward dysfunctional members of his own family or poor people riding the bus. He’s equally uncompromising in his use of black vernacular. Words such as “nigga,” “ho,” and “bitch” appear frequently, usu- ally in a benign if not humorous context. Confronted with homo- phobia in a class at Howard University, he writes that he “promptly raised my hand to shut the dumb shit the fuck down.” Here the comic effect of the language underscores the seriousness of the situation. All of the essays in I Can’t Date Jesus have pro- foundly serious things to say about being gay and black in Amer- ica. Remembering the time Fr. Marty, anAfrican-American priest who must have sensed that the young Michael was not likely to date girls, approached him about becoming a priest, he does comic riffs on confession and vestments. It was this encounter that prompted him to ask fundamental questions about embracing a religion that expected him not to act on his sexual desires. The strongest essays deal with Arceneaux’ conflicted rela- tionships with his mother and father, with the man currently oc- cupying the White House, and with the power of “whiteness” to oppress black people. When Michael was young, his paternal uncle died of AIDS. His father’s drunken reaction, “Fuck that faggot,” caused Michael to fear both AIDS and his own bur- geoning sexual impulses. Combined with his father’s abusive treatment of his mother, this experience initiated difficulties with sexual and emotional intimacy that continue to plague him. He acknowledges that his mother is the strongest person he has ever known and that she’s responsible for his drive to succeed. But the Christian doctrines that she lives by make her unable to accept that her son is gay. There is no happy ending to this story, only a declaration of “how much we love each other.” The short essay on the 45th president is called “Sweet Potato Saddam.” The title is one of Arceneaux’ substitutes for “that jackass’s name.” In blunt terms, he calls out the undeniable racism inAmerica that determined the outcome of the 2016 elec- tion, a racism that surprised everyone but black people. “The Pinkprint” is a powerful essay that addresses the tremendous gulf between black and white America. Arceneaux is unflinch- ing in his comments about the real reasons for the high rate of HIV infection among black and Latino gay men and about our delusional discussions concerning sexual racism among gay men. It is a defiant essay, written by a country boy who gave up on Jesus and, with Beyoncé’s help, put his faith in himself. ______________________________________________________ Daniel A Burr, a frequent contributor, lives in Covington, KY.   