Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

This book is shockingly good, and also not for the faint of heart. It’s sex, drugs, queerness, rough trade, postpunk, university town politics, womyn’s festivals, and magical realism, all mashed together and set in 1993. How could I resist? It’s like they wrote it just for me.

Paul is an artsy, opinionated, and super-louche queer boy. He tends bar at the only gay bar in a college town and lives perpetually on the bleeding edge of poverty and the AIDS epidemic. He trades on his good looks and alluring hauteur for sex, coffee, and whatever else he can get his greedy little hands on. He’s Desire personified, and he’s got a secret: he can change sex at will.

Literally: we’re not only talking gender here, we’re talking everything. His face, skin, build, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, everything. Think of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. (Yes, I’m using “he/him” pronouns; that’s what Paul uses throughout the book, even when he’s Polly.) In his resting state, he defaults to male. But whenever he feels like it (and whenever it feels safe) he can physically transform as much or as little as he likes, from vaguely femme right up through being a fully-fleshed-out female.

It takes some effort to stay that way, but it’s worth it. His constant, restless appetite—for food, drugs, sex, experiences of all kinds—takes him everywhere, and his ability to shapeshift means “everywhere” can include women’s spaces and straight boys’ beds. And lesbians’ beds, too: and then he falls in love with one, which means suddenly he needs to maintain his female form all the time. Except he can’t.

Hijinks ensue, taking him across the country and finally landing him in San Francisco. Along the way he goes through just about every sort of struggle and every height of pleasure available to a beautiful, impossible-to-categorize young queer in the 1990s. The writing is gorgeous, Paul is irresistible, and you’ll develop your next playlist as you read. Read this book.

Unprotected: A Memoir

by Billy Porter

Billy Porter first burst into my awareness at the same time he burst into the awareness of most people who aren’t especially into musical theater or gospel-tinged R&B: when he wore the now-famous tuxedo dress to the Oscars in 2019. But I don’t usually bother to watch the Oscars, and I don't care about haute couture. (Sorry not sorry.) So while I was delighted by his subversion of gendered clothing choices, he quickly faded from my awareness.

Then we all started sheltering in place and I discovered the first two seasons of Pose on Netflix and I fell in love with the show and with his character, the emcee Pray Tell.

The world of Pose is the world of the documentary Paris is Burning, which I watched with some interest in my Gender Studies class (then called Women’s Studies) back in the 20th century. It’s the underground ball culture of New York City in the 1980s, and this is not the place to try to explain or define it. If you’ve never heard of it, and if you love good storytelling, LGBTQ+ and/or New York City history, and really excellent representation, go watch Pose. You won’t regret it.

The character Pray Tell combines wit with glamor, a sharp mind with a sharper tongue, complete loyalty with a history (and present) of deep trauma, and more live-out-loud charisma than one person should have with incredible warmth. All of this, never mind the fact that he's easy on the eyes, makes Pray Tell fascinating to me. And Billy Porter inhabits that role like it was written for him. Which, as it turns out, it was. Suddenly Billy Porter became interesting to me, not just as a person on the front lines of the gender wars (and thank you very much for that, Mr. Porter: you’re fighting a truly good fight), but as the performer who brought that character to life.

Of course he didn’t spring into existence on that TV set like Venus rising from the foam. He’s almost exactly two months younger than I am, which makes his explosion into American pop culture in the late ‘teens remarkable. And indeed, he was something of a late bloomer as far as mainstream fame goes. But he had a long career before that, and a difficult life that both informed his career and his future roles and made his eventual success much, much more difficult than it should have been for a man of his talent and drive.

Billy Porter was born Black and gay—gay in a way that was obvious to everyone around him; there was no possibility of a closet for this kid—to an impoverished, disabled mom. His family and community were deeply religious, which meant he heard messages all his life that he was evil, worthless, and headed for an eternity in Hell. He was frequently and blatantly mistreated by members of this community and sometimes his own family, and his mother wasn’t in a position to defend him. And as if all of that weren’t enough, from a very young age he was abused by his stepfather, leaving him deeply traumatized.

Any one of those disadvantages would be enough to make many folks throw in the towel in terms of being some kind of major success in life. Billy wasn’t having any of that, though. What he had going for him was his mom’s unwavering love and support, his incredible vocal talent combined with a work ethic that never quit, his combination of stone-cold realism and determination, and an extremely hard-won sense of his own worth.

The narrative starts in the confusion and horrible anxiety of the early months of Covid, then dips back into his early childhood. It goes back and forth like that, as a series of chapters from his early life interspersed with episodes from his present moment. Getting to know the man he is now in parallel with learning how he got here really worked for me. So did his writing voice, shifting fluidly from formal to childlike to slangy and back again. This is a man with clear eyes, enormous talent, and a huge heart who knows how to put all of that down onto a page and make you care.

Go read this book. And if you like that sort of thing, get the audiobook; he performs it himself, and his gorgeous, inimitable voice makes his story come to vivid life.