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.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder

read by the author

My first reaction to listening to the audiobook version of this autobiography, which Gene Wilder narrated himself, was, “Ah, that voice—that’s the gentlest voice in the world. I love that voice.”

My second reaction was, “Man, Gene Wilder was really screwed up.”

It’s a truism that a lot of comedians and comedic actors are pretty screwed up. The line between a desire to please others and make them laugh, and an enjoyment of fame and attention—and a *need* for all of that, as a stand-in for love or a way of staving off deep, crippling anxiety—can be a fine one. In Gene Wilder’s case I think he spent most of his adult life on the sane side of that line. But he achieved that only after a lot of therapy.

We get to hear about the events of his childhood and young adulthood that shaped him as a person and contributed to his artistic and comedic sensibilities. Mr. Wilder was very open about who he was and how he responded to things, so we really get a sense of his life journey. For example, he was, if not scarred for life, at least greatly set back and discouraged, by an early encounter with the opposite sex, and while he definitely seems rather bitter about the other person involved, he doesn’t hold back about his own reaction, either.

We get to hear about his training as an actor, his friendships and romantic relationships, and his films--though the one thing I found a little disappointing about this book was that he doesn’t go into as much detail as I’d like about the making of most of his films. The only one he spends much time on is Young Frankenstein; I’d have loved to have heard much more about the personalities and the general experience involved with, say, The Frisco Kid and Blazing Saddles. Still, what he did include was more than I already knew. I loved, for example, hearing his impression of the young Harrison Ford.

And we get to hear, of course, about Gilda Radner. They had a deep love and a tumultuous relationship and he doesn’t spare himself or her in his descriptions. And we get to learn about the woman he married and was with until he died, Karen Webb.

This autobiography is full of beautiful little nuggets about the life of a very gifted man who had a lot of issues. Highly recommended to anyone who is a fan of his work.

The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage

read by Paul Michael Garcia

Published in 2005, The Commitment is a snapshot of a time in our country’s life as well as famed sex-and-relationship-advice columnist Dan Savage’s life. A decade before June 26, 2015, when the United States Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage and legalized it everywhere, there was still a lot of very contentious debate on the topic—not least among those most directly affected by it.

For example, there was Dan Savage, his boyfriend Terry Miller, and their son, DJ, aged 6 at the time. None of them wanted Dan and Terry to get married. At least, Terry doesn’t want to get married; not because he isn’t committed to Dan and their son, but because he doesn’t want to “act straight.” He’d rather they get matching “property of” tattoos. 

And DJ is against it because, in his six-year-old worldview, boys don’t marry each other. (Never mind quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.) Plus he doesn’t want to be there when his dads say mushy things to each other and kiss in front of everyone. But he wants cake. If there’s going to be a wedding, he’s definitely going to want some cake.

But Dan isn’t sure. Marriage does seem pointless when there’s no legally-binding aspect of it and you’re an atheist. On the other hand, his Catholic mom would be beyond thrilled. Plus he’s already planning a ten-year anniversary party—the anniversary of his and Terry’s first date—and he wants everyone in the family to travel to Seattle for it, and to take it as seriously as they take other major family events. And it’s not like he’s going to be leaving Terry.

So he sets out, in his somewhat contrarian way, to explore the issue. He takes his little family to a summer camp for kids with queer families, so DJ can see that other kids *do* have parents with matching genders. The following summer, he brings his whole family along—mom, siblings-and-partners, everyone. He has conversations with them about why they have or have not chosen to marry and/or have kids, he has debates with Terry about the drawbacks and virtues of marriage and tattoos and how best to plan for their anniversary party.

The most interesting conversations he has, to me, are the ones he has with his older brother, Bill. I realized while listening to Dan recounting them just how much his philosophies on life, sex, and relationships are informed by Bill’s. In fact, many of Dan’s most regularly-repeated nuggets of wisdom come directly from the conversations about marriage that he had with Bill that summer.

In case you’re not already a Dan Savage fan and don’t already know how the story ends, I won’t spoil it for you. Whether you’re already one of his readers or listeners or not, though, I do  highly recommend this book. It’s an interesting and very personal and journey through what the politics of DOMA and the religious right put families through, and it’s told with clarity, frankness, and (sometimes self-deprecating) humor. It’s no longer ripped-from-the-headlines current, but it’s an important piece of (recent) LGBTQ+ history and a moving story.

Calypso by David Sedaris

read by the author

If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read, go google Santaland Diaries right now. You want an excerpt of him on NPR. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

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All right, now that you’ve listened, you’re starting to get the picture. Sedaris is a memoirist and a performer of his memoirs, which are written in short… anecdotes? They’re more structured than that. Stage performances? You do definitely want to hear him read his work, but it also works very well in print. Stories? They are definitely that, but also highly personal and, to say the least, quirky as hell. Also deeply, sometimes shockingly, funny. You’re never sure how much of them to actually believe.

The term I see bandied about is “semi-autobiographical essays.” Which seems accurate enough, if a little pedantic. He collects these semi-autobiographical essays into books every so often, and Calypso is one of those collections.

It’s a bit of a departure from a lot of his previous work, because he was writing these stories/memories/anecdotes at a time in his life when he was dealing with the death of two family members. It’s still funny, because he’s a man who can see the humor in literally anything, and make you see it, too--and be a little shocked at yourself for laughing.

What you’ll be laughing about in this collection is a series of family vacations at a beach house on the Carolina coast, haunted by bickering, badgering, the arrival of middle age, and both the specter and the reality of mortality. There are snapping turtles and book signings, transatlantic travel and family dinners. Sedaris writes in lovingly, gleefully unsparing detail about everyone’s quirks and faults, his own most of all.

If that idea makes you squeamish, or really, if you’re squeamish at all, you should probably skip this one. But if you can handle a little tumor humor and a lot of blatant (but never gratiutous) oversharing, dive in. If he can laugh at his life, and make us laugh at it too, maybe you can start seeing the ridiculousness in yours.

Oh. And if possible, listen to the audiobook version, which he reads himself.

Life by Keith Richards and James Fox

read by Joe Hurley, Keith Richards, and Johnny Depp

If you’re above a certain age, it may surprise you to learn that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger aren’t baby boomers. They’re members of the Silent Generation, by two or three years. But the band they formed, along with Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart is such an intrinsic part of the baby boom generation that I think we’ve got to give them honorary membership. To this day, if you want a lively debate among Boomers (not to mention a significant portion of Genexers), all you’ve got to say is three words: “Beatles or Stones?”

And Keith Richards’ autobiography is necessarily a biography of the Rolling Stones—from his point of view, of course. And it turns out that he is disarmingly charming. James Fox captured his voice, first over hundreds of hours of interviews, then in writing—and he did a fantastic job. If you listen to the audiobook, Johnny Depp does some of the narration (mostly in the first few chapters and then again for a bit near the end) but Keith does quite a lot of it himself, and it’s wonderful to hear his stories.

For me the most fascinating part was how the band got together, and then their early days—both before they became famous and then after they really caught on. There was a certain early-to-mid-career part, where the sex and drugs were very present but not yet all-consuming, where Keith was fascinated with learning and perfecting his five-string open tuning, and when the relationship with Anita Pallenberg was first occurring and then was at its best, that feels to me like a golden age—if not in Keith’s life, then in the course of the book. 

But his recounting of how heroin took over his life, and heroin and paranoia took over Anita’s, and all the difficulties with parenting and with the deterioration of the friendship between Keith and Mick, is also deeply interesting. All of that went into making Keith the person he is at the end of the book, too—that, and the various deaths in his circle of family and friends and co-famous-people, and new relationships we don’t get to hear so much about anymore.

It’s not possible for me to listen to the Rolling Stones with new ears. I’m too familiar with their canon up to about Tattoo You, and I don’t care enough about anything they produced after that. But after listening to this book, and stopping frequently to listen to the song being discussed, I can say I have listened to their work with, at least, new appreciation. For the history of each track, of course, but also for the artistry that went into so much deceptive simplicity. And there was definitely artistry—technique and concept both. Keith geeks out about all this in several places, and I found it oddly charming.

In the end I can say that Keith Richards is a man of depth and complexity who follows all of his passions well beyond the dictates of common sense—which is the reason for his genius as well as numerous brushes with the law and with death. In short, he lives up to his reputation. 

Which is not to say that all of the rumors are true; according to him, at least, some are and some aren’t. And the truth behind at least one major one will remain forever a mystery if he has his say. No, I won’t tell you which is which. Read the book! Go on, I dare you.

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:

A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on. But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s growing-up years.

The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside, they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both feel deeply wrong to them.

The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation (like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.

So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you through the lens of one person’s experience.

You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their parents and/or peers, that is.

Definitely worth a read.

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

read by the author

I am not a fan of Sonic Youth. Yes, I admit it: I was in my 20s during the 1990s and yet, although I understand their appeal and I quite like a few of their songs, for the most part I have no particular liking for them. Dissonance has it place, but doesn’t generally do anything for me. On top of that, I’m easily startled by sudden loud or jangly noises. So you can see why they’re not my favorite performers. I do like Kim’s spooky, haunting moan of a voice—what’s not to like?—and those songs of theirs that highlight it and are more melodic. But yeah, I know, faint praise.

My main memory of having gone to see them in concert (I think it was at the Masonic?) sometime around 1992 or ‘93 was of not recognizing any of their songs and being bored. Oh, and their “opening band” was Ciccone Youth, which was an experimental band composed of… the members of Sonic Youth. The friends I attended with thought this was clever and witty of them. I’ll take their word for it.

Fast forward to 2018. Kim Gordon has published her memoir (in 2015), which I’ve bought for my partner; he has read it and enjoyed it very much. But then, he’s a fan of the band; I had no desire to read it myself. Then in early 2018 I learned that Kim Gordon and Chris Kraus (the author of I Love Dick, the book upon which the sadly short-lived TV series was based) were going to be interviewed together at City Arts and Lectures. This was obviously a perfect birthday present for my partner, so I bought the tickets and we went.

And I learned that Kim Gordon is affectless and somewhat inarticulate, especially as compared to Chris Kraus. She also came across as somewhat self-absorbed and self-important. So, okay. Not impressed.

Why did I finally decide to read the book? I think it came down to having attempted and failed to read three fiction books in a row—I didn’t even get through the first chapter of two of them. Having failed to get through a vampire novel and two different sorts of speculative fiction, I decided I needed something based in the real world. Not even realistic fiction, but nonfiction. And I came across Girl in a Band on my Libby app and basically thought, well, what have I got to lose? So I started it.

Right away I was struck, as I had been during the interview, by her affectless, flat voice. But as she talked about her childhood in Southern California and her relationship with her more-than-difficult brother, I began to understand why she talked that way. I won’t spoil it, but there’s a reason for it. She opens up in this book  as she takes you on a journey through her life, and although I still find her self-important, I also see her as strong-willed, creative, independent, and admirable. The kind of self-important she is is the kind she needs to be, as a person and as an artist, and I’m no longer put off by it.

I do wish she had gone into more detail about the earlier, better days of her relationship with Thurston Moore, but I can see why that would have been painful for her. And the audiobook version really missed an opportunity—there’s a long section where Gordon talks about a number of different songs and her memories relating to them, and it would have been great, especially for someone like me who isn’t especially familiar with the band’s oeuvre, to have heard the song in conjunction with the narration.

But overall, the book is well-written in a quirky, somewhat choppy way, and I’m glad I got to know her just a bit. Verdict: if you like memoirs or are a fan of the band, read it. You'll discover a person worth knowing about.

I'm still not a fan of the band, though.

Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography: #tbt review

Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a teenager.

Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still there at the time.

These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who faces many of the same problems that other teens face.

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup

Read by Louis Gosset, Jr.

In this harrowing 1841 memoir, Solomon Northrup, a free man of color from New York State, is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the swamps of Louisiana. The memoir, published in 1853, was groundbreaking in its day; it played a huge role in opening northern whites’ eyes to the brutalizing effect of the “peculiar institution” and significantly changed public opinion in favor of abolition.

I never saw the movie—very deliberately, because I didn’t feel like I could stand to be immersed in the story that way. But I finally decided I did need to know the story, so I decided listening to the audiobook was the way to go.

It’s a deeply painful story, even knowing in advance that it has a “happy ending”—as if having twelve years of your life stolen can ever have a truly happy ending. Knowing the sort of life enslaved people must have led is one thing; reading a first-hand account is something else entirely. Mr. Northrup endured having absolutely everything, even his name, taken away, and was treated with a brutality that would be hard to believe if we didn’t know better. His keen observation of people and of how things were done is put to eloquent use in his memoir. Every American should read this book.