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NonfictionLGBTQ+

Accompaniment for LGBTQ+ fellow travelers

Feature by Jessica Wakeman

Queer culture has a rich history of elders mentoring younger folks and guiding them through a way of being that’s still far too stigmatized. The millennial authors of these books are hardly elders, but neither had the LGBTQ+ resources they needed until college. Now their books leave a path of breadcrumbs toward authenticity for their less experienced peers, or any individuals seeking insight, solidarity and guidance.

If you started reading John Paul Brammer’s advice column in the Grindr digital magazine INTO, consider yourself lucky. The column, “¡Hola Papi!,” now exists on the platform Substack, as well as between the pages of his first book, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons, where new readers can fall in love with Brammer’s writing for the first time.

Although ostensibly an assemblage of advice columns, ¡Hola Papi! reads more like an essay collection. Each submitted question becomes an entry point for Brammer to share a story from his life as a young queer writer and artist. Growing up in rural Oklahoma, Brammer learned to live a small life so he wouldn’t attract attention. Middle school classmates tortured him with homophobic bullying, so much so that he harbored a desire for suicide in the eighth grade. Branded by this trauma, Brammer remained closeted until college.

But coming out doesn’t provide all the answers. If anything, looking for love and connection on apps like OkCupid and Grindr can make life more confusing. In each essay, Brammer explores his negotiations with himself and others to exist as a queer, biracial man and the universal struggle of wanting to be accepted. Anyone who has grappled with their own identities will relate to Brammer as he wrestles with insecurities and forges ahead through the haze of depression.

Brammer’s talent as a storyteller lies in extracting profound meaning from seemingly minor events and feelings. One particularly tender essay, for example, revisits the time a former middle school bully hit him up on a gay dating app when they were adults. ¡Hola Papi! is a testament to turning past struggles and humiliations into fuel for a brighter future, and to owning your experiences by reframing the narrative and finding agency in the retelling.

The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Girlfriend: Advice on Queer Dating, Love, and Friendship is based on a zine that author Maddy Court created in grad school. Now in book form, her advice is accompanied by lively Day-Glo art and comics by illustrator Kelsey Wroten. Court primarily explores the experiences of women who are lesbian and bisexual, as well as those of people whose genders have been historically marginalized. But her advice—gentle nudges toward therapy or research about attachment theory—could help anyone who needs a compassionate ear.

Of course, there are the usual advice column staples—heartbreak, rejection and jealousy—but Court also addresses problems as varied as painful sex, being new to polyamory and coming out at a Christian college. She’s sensitive and loving as she addresses questions from people who are still in the closet, like how to find closure with people you never actually dated. And when she’s not the best person to provide counsel about a particular issue, she calls in advice from others, such as Le Tigre musician JD Samson and Wow, No Thank You. author Samantha Irby.

Court makes clear that finding queer community and consuming queer media are vitally important, because of how crucial it is to see yourself represented. By its very existence, The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Girlfriend accomplishes this, too, as it assures us that our problems are not so uncommon and we’re all less alone than we think.

Two collections of advice leave a path of breadcrumbs toward authenticity for LGBTQ+ folks, or any individuals seeking insight, solidarity and guidance.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+

The Natural Mother of the Child

Review by Kelly Blewett

When Krys Malcolm Belc sees pregnant women, he turns the other way. He doesn’t want to hear pregnancy stories and finds it difficult to share his own. But in The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, the transmasculine author doesn’t turn away from his story. Instead, he lays it out page by page, with pictures and legal documents juxtaposing his poetic prose.

Belc’s process of becoming himself—the growing realization that he identified as male, the move toward a nonbinary and eventually masculine presentation, the decision to start taking hormones—happened alongside the rest of his life, as he married his partner, as she bore children and as Belc decided to carry a child as well, only a few months after his wife gave birth. 

The result is a family that looks one way now—a father, a mother and three boys—but looked another way several years ago. This is the story of how that family came to be, and of the erasures (often painful) that happened along the way, including the legal erasure of the friend who donated sperm for all three pregnancies. There’s also the erasure of the body Belc had, which he generously laid out to birth his son Samson. “He has permanently altered my composition,” Belc writes.

But in the midst of these erasures, something new emerged: an identity and presentation that was always there but in shadow, just beyond view. Bearing Samson clarified the man Belc wanted to be.

The Natural Mother of the Child refuses easy stories or pat answers. Instead, Belc tells a counterstory that resists hegemonic narratives and pushes toward something messier and truer. Belc’s devotion to his son—and especially his bodily devotion—comes through powerfully, a clear signal. By comparison, some of the other signs that supposedly tell us who we are—birth certificates, marriage certificates, adoption certificates—seem desperately incomplete.

Krys Malcolm Belc’s growing realization that he identified as male happened as his wife bore children and as Belc decided to carry a child as well.
NonfictionTrue CrimeLGBTQ+

Last Call

Review by Jessica Wakeman

A serial killer in New York City sounds like an atrocity that would dominate the headlines. Men were disappearing; days later, their body parts would be found in trash bags outside the city. These were grisly deaths. Yet because Richard Rogers, known as the Last Call Killer, murdered gay men in the 1980s and ’90s, during the height of the AIDS crisis, you may not have heard of him or his victims.

In Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, author Elon Green recounts this particularly frightening chapter in New York, contextualizing it within the city’s history of anti-queer violence. Weaving together multiple histories and jumping back and forth in time can be hit-or-miss as a narrative structure, but Last Call does it well, thanks to Green’s original reporting conducted with law enforcement, politicians, victims’ families and patrons at gay bars where Rogers lurked.

True crime too often focuses on the “bad guys,” as if repeatedly mulling over their motives may eventually explain evil. In Last Call, Green instead foregrounds Rogers’ known victims. He shows us the people they were and the lives they left behind. Their lives mattered, and Last Call is a testament to how homophobia shaped these men’s lives and, eventually, their deaths.

Readers should be aware that there’s a lot of gore in Last Call; after all, Rogers dismembered his victims. Regular readers of true crime may not find the violence unexpected, but the cultural context of the AIDS panic adds additional weight to this brutality. To his credit, Green never lets us forget the amplified threats that existed for gay men during this era. However, because Last Call shows how the passage of time often changes culture for the better, it’s ultimately uplifting—if a book about a serial killer could, in any way, be called “uplifting.”

In Last Call, Elon Green foregrounds the Last Call Killer's known victims, showing us the people they were and the lives they left behind.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+

All the Young Men

Review by Jessica Wakeman

The history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. is often told from the perspectives of white, openly gay men who lived in major cities. But that’s not even close to the whole story. Ruth Coker Burks’ All the Young Men tells of the HIV-positive men who lived and died in the deeply conservative state of Arkansas, where the stigma of homosexuality was nearly as deadly as the virus.

In 1986, Burks was 26 and visiting a friend in the hospital when she became aware of a young man dying of AIDS in another room. The medical staff, disgusted by the disease, neglected him in his final hours. As a devout Christian, Burks couldn’t bear to let the man die hungry, scared and alone.

She soon developed a reputation in Hot Springs, Arkansas, as someone who would help care for gay men dying of the virus. Many of the men who came to her were from religious families who believed that, through illness and death, these men got what was coming to them. Refusing to treat people with HIV as outcasts made Burks a pariah in her community and particularly in her church, where appearances mattered more than anything. As a single mom, Burks was well versed in the conservative social politics of the South and adept at “killing them with kindness.” She showed great ingenuity as she shamed politicians, businessmen and medical workers into taking action on behalf of AIDS patients.

Throughout the memoir, it’s hard not to fall in love with Burks for her big-heartedness and enduring sense of humor in the face of suffering. However, All the Young Men isn’t an uplifting book. Ignorance, denial and cruelty have always been, and always will be, killers. But as Burks forges a path alongside these vulnerable men, her embrace of education and rejection of bigotry light the way forward for us all.

The history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. is often told from the perspectives of white, openly gay men who lived in major cities. But that’s not even close to the whole story. Ruth Coker Burks’ All the Young Men tells of the HIV-positive men who…

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