Synopsis
An anthology of stories by gay youth reveal their fears and joyous moments as they attempt to survive and thrive in a homophobic society.
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About the Author
Amy Sonnie began working on this anthology when she was 19 years old, while attending Syracuse University. She is a young queer, feminist, writer, educator and activist. In 2000, she co-founded RESYST, a national project run by and for queer youth using arts, education and community organizing for radical social change. This is her first book.
Reviews
Gr. 9-12. "This is for the idea that I am only a sexual being. . . . This is for the idea that queerness only has to do with sex." Jason Roe's prose poem opens this anthology with words that get in your face and under your skin. Not all of the young writers featured here may be revolutionaries, but they all embrace a queer youth culture that is about gender, race, and class as much as it is about sexuality. The voices are raw and sometimes unpolished, and the language is passionate, powerful, and only occasionally graphic. What holds these selections together is the writers' urgent need to define themselves in their own terms. In "Impossible Body," Lisa Lusero confesses that she purposely cut her hair so people would know she was a lesbian: "Passing for straight makes me feel invisible. And I hate that. I want to be seen clearly and explicitly for who I am. Don't assume your world is mine. Then again, don't assume it isn't." These are classic YA voices. Randy Meyer
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Diary excerpts, 1995-1998 Emil Keliane
When earthbound and gagged, when obligated to trivial daily tasks, I begin to dream, and fiercely. I step out of my station, role, and mood to seek the sky because it is arbitrary, universal, and temperamental, like a poet; emotional and expansive like a poet. The clouds like words he would use to express his many moods: now light, now dark, now still, now nomadic--traveling madly. Maybe this is why Mother and I spend so much time in the yard these days: Once we were forced to flee our country, our home, and this escape became a pattern, and this pattern became a restlessness that drove us out into the yard, under the stars, because the sky was the only familiar thing between here and Iran. Mother and I are in the yard again. She's chewing sunflower seeds and doing a crossword puzzle. She is sentimental about this particular puzzle book because it comes from Iran; the clues are printed in Farsy. She even paused once, placed the open page to her face and breathed in the yellowed paper, speaking wistfully. I'm relieved to see her display such soft, childlike sentimentality. I was beginning to feel totally unrelated to her as she has a tendency to be withdrawn, despondent. * * * In Tabriz when I was about five years old, I remember Mother and Father examining a peculiar paper that was hard and unbending, with black and white shapes that were indecipherable, but fascinating. I asked them what this strange new thing was in our home, and wondered silently how my own parents could be so totally enthralled by it. Dad said it was a picture of mom--the simplest way he saw fit to describe an X-ray to a five-year-old. A picture of mom! I saw no resemblance no matter how hard I looked. Squinting helped none. It was evident that the world of adults was to remain a mystery to us children. They even saw things differently. Little did I know then that our disparate views, my parents' and my own, would rarely find unity; that even in adulthood they would always see me from a distorted perspective, a mangled portrait not too dissimilar from an X-ray; that one day I would go to them in need and offer them the gift of five beautiful and provocative words: I think I am gay. A gift they would never unwrap, and a thing they would keep locked in a box and hidden away for always. * * * Some days I awake to regrets like that of a wild animal that has allowed itself to be brutally domesticated. These are moments when I am not in accord with the American culture, when I feel the puerility of having to keep up with trends, when I misplace my essential self, when I am ordering food from a much too sumptuous menu, when I am lost in the labyrinthine aisles of a supermarket, when I say a thing I don't mean, when I miss wholeheartedly and can smell the fecund soil of the village where my father was born. * * * I grew up always in battle. Aside from the Iran-Iraq war, there existed my parents' loveless marriage: a union of differing goals, needs, and wishes. Nineteen years of this. Although most marriages in Iran were generally undemonstrative, especially during the war when the entire populace seemed to slip into a mandatory state of grief and sobriety, I still sensed the absence of kisses, of tenderness, of playfulness. Somehow, naturally, I knew these were missing. Besides, romance was laughed at and considered a silly frivolity for the westerner. Over the course of my parents' marriage the rift grew larger and larger, wider and deeper. And I learned belligerence. I used the same tactics I witnessed my parents use against each other when I was old enough to recognize my own anger for them--when I was old enough to resent them for the wars, the battles. I grew angrier, Mom grew more and more despondent until she was flat out depressed, and Dad graduated from social drinker to solitary alcoholic. So I know about anger, about quarrels. I know them well. I know them intimately, and I don't want this knowledge to navigate my life. I don't want the anger to influence me in writing. I am first and foremost tender, then I am violent. And as a creative person I fear anger most because it is unresolved anger that turns poet into politician.
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