Taboo (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies) - Hardcover

Rickel, Boyer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299162605 ISBN 13: 9780299162603

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

Synopsis

An impressionistic memoir offers images of a life in progress, including scenes from Boyer Rickel’s rural Tempe, Arizona, childhood in the 1950s; his relationship with a physically shrinking father; his eccentric teenage friendships; his growing awareness of his sexuality among young, Hispanic gays; and a trip through Italy with his lover. A personal book, but also wholly universal, Taboo investigates the way one breaks through taboos and becomes a self-realized adult.

About this title

About the Author

Boyer Rickel is the author of a collection of poetry, arreboles, and his work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Sonora Review, and many other magazines. He is assistant director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

A sequence of autobiographical essays by poet Rickel (Creative Writing/Univ. of Arizona) kicks off the new series Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies with an elliptical whimper. Rickel offers only a few biographical specifics: he grew up in placid Tempe, Ariz., in the '60s, scarcely traveled, and moved to Tucson, where he lives with his longtime partner, an artist. Here he offers mostly quick snapshots of meaningful moments in his emotional life from childhood to the present, in prose so humorless and smoothly polished that it seldom communicates the wallop these epiphanies apparently packed for the author. In one skillful essay, he tells how at age six, in reaction to vague household tension, he killed the family canary beloved by his pianist father; beyond this striking moment, the author offers scant details about his parents breakup, though there are several sketches of his current dealings with his aged, crippled father. More central to the story is the history of his homosexuality, from precocious prepubescent sex play through sublimated crushes on a succession of friends, many heterosexual relationships in high school and college, and finally, in his early 20s, gradual self- acceptance as a gay man. He was troubled by the typical conundrums of repressed homosexuality in adolescenceand less typical ones, such as what to make of a teachers gift of colorful nylon underpants (Rickel gave them back). As an adult, he spent years pursuing fruitless relationships with younger Mexicans he met in bars; he acknowledges the racist overtones to my obsession with these boys, but rather than examine this, he writes about how he willed himself to be attracted to non-brown boys as part of a process of suspending my need for a defining narrative. Such cold language obscures what makes the author tick. An uninvolving memoir of an uneventful life. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this first volume of Living Out, a new series of gay and lesbian autobiographies, poet Rickel (arreboles) offers 16 impressionistic, often sexually explicit essays that follow no particular chronological order. The hallmark of his style is his adaptation of poetic techniques and structures to the narrative memoir. In "Ground," for instance, a brief essay on the role of habit and repetition in grounding one's sense of selfhood, Rickel makes his point effectively by invoking seemingly disparate anecdotes about a bird's nest, a mirror, the momentary loss of a bike, his father's extreme discomfort with unknown sounds and a friend's calling attention to his habitually furrowed brow. While this fragmentation subverts the traditional autobiography, it can also nudge the reader toward greater insight and emotional response, though Rickel occasionally stops short of a deeper, more rewarding examination of some of the issues he raises. In other essays, Rickel recalls growing up in Arizona in the 1950s as the child of classical musicians; caring for his aging father; his childhood sexual experiences with other boys, which were divorced from any notions of homosexuality; his sexual preference in youth for Hispanic boys; and the passionate sense of meaning and identity he found on discovering literature. Rickel's smooth, accessible writing and his candor about such personal failings as racism and, in one episode, latent pedophilia often elevate this account of an otherwise conventional gay life.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This impressionistic memoir by Rickel, author of the poetry collection Arreboles (Wesleyan Univ., 1991), is part of the new series. His 16 essays chronicle episodic rites of passage, from his earliest childhood memory ("of dustballs floating like ghosts along a brown, cracked, concrete floor") to a recent trip to Italy with his partner, Gary. "Manhood" describes such recollections as accompanying his father to the barbershop, playing unobtrusive kid brother at the local pool hall, and falling in young love with Leon. In "Man Shrinking," he visits his frail, aged father, who inquires "So how's my boy?" causing Rickel to reflect on their complex and evolving relationship. These profoundly personal pieces don't always achieve the universality to which they aspire, but they are evocative and sensuous prose poems, lovely and loving fragments of one gay man's life.AJames E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rickel, a poet (arreboles, 1991), here offers a memoir cum commentary on contemporary life that flashes back as far as his 1950s rural Arizona boyhood, when he insisted on wearing his sister's dresses, and as near as the last few years, in which he has observed his aging father's ongoing physical shrinkage. He also recalls his high-school senior honors English teacher and youthful friendships that often included sex but in which, through the years, he became, as he fought his attraction to other young men, almost frenziedly determined to be heterosexual. He recounts his breakthrough into self-realization and self-acceptance as a gay man, seeing it as parallel to Huck Finn's decision, which Rickel teaches as a graduate student, to transgress then prevailing societal mores and choose eternal damnation--"All, right, then, I'll go to Hell" --the supposedly sure punishment for helping to free his runaway-slave friend, Jim. Neither Rickel nor his prose, which soars in certain self-revelatory passages, shows any signs of going to Hell, though. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299162605
• ISBN 13: 9780299162603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120