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.

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.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Narrated by Michael C. Hall

For Valentine’s Day this year, my partner took me to a special screening-with-dinner of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was just about the perfect date. I’d seen the movie maybe half a dozen times, all told, but never on the big screen, and he’d never seen it at all. I fell in love with it all over again, warts and all—and the warts, I admit, are a pretty disfiguring blemish on what is otherwise a crown jewel of a movie.

To start with, you have Audrey Hepburn playing the quirky, unapologetic gold-digger, Holly Golightly. The point of view character, Paul Varjak, is also something of a whore (though in the service of his art), and is played by a very debonair young George Peppard. The two are a perfect match, because they can each love other for who they actually are; there’s no need for pretense between them. But of course it can never work, because they both depend on their lovers for money and neither of them has a dime of their own, and nobody ever heard of open relationships or polyamory in those days.

In case you’ve never seen the movie, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Go see it! Seriously. Be prepared to cry at the end, but also, be prepared to have to stomach some breathtakingly casual racism—not just part of the scenery because 1961, but mined, over and over again, for laughs, because ha ha, we’re all white folks together here and aren’t those people funny. But if you can and are willing to handle that, see it. It’s a masterpiece and I cry every time.

I had never, in spite of my love for this film, read the book it was based on. Hadn’t realized it was based on a book at all. But it turns out that it is: it’s based on a novella by Truman Capote, and the novella is just as flawed and just as much of a jewel as the movie.

(Ah, a dying art form, the novella. And yet it shouldn’t be. I get that books are expensive and people want a lot of bang for their book-buying buck, and so publishers favor enormous tomes these days. And I do love me a really good, meaty, enormous tome. But haven’t we all read at least one bloated, flabby enormous tome too many that should, and in the hands of a good editor would, have been a really excellent novella?)

The basic setup is the same as the movie. Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak are neighbors in an apartment building in New York City; he’s an aspiring professional writer, and she’s an aspiring wife of somebody rich. Ideally, somebody rich who isn’t a complete rat, though really, any man who refrains from trying to take advantage of her situation pretty much qualifies as a non-rat; she has a generous heart. She has a lot in common with her cat: they share a fiercely independent but deeply affectionate nature. She’s also a runaway from her own past as a child bride from Texas.

She has to hide all of this from the wealthy men she seeks, with a great deal of success, to intoxicate, and whom she hopes to lure into marriage so she can be financially secure at last. But she doesn’t hide a thing from her neighbor, Paul, who after all isn’t anywhere near the demographic she’s seeking. Which means he gets to know the real Holly—the Holly she has invented for herself, who contains but is far more worldly, self-assured, and fun-loving than the Lulamae Barnes she used to be.

Paul, meanwhile, struggles to get published, and struggles with an extremely low sense of self-worth: as a man, he should be able to be a self-sufficient success. He starts out nonplussed by his flighty neighbor; he appreciates her beauty and the vulnerability she radiates and the unexpected things that happen when she is part of his world, but is taken aback by her chosen path in life and her pursuit of it with a predator’s cold, clear, unswerving sense of purpose. Eventually, of course, he falls in love, and things—not hijinks, exactly, though some of them closely resemble hijinks—ensue.

Many of the scenes in the book are written exactly as they ended up being portrayed on the screen. Capote’s gift for description—of people’s appearance and surroundings, directly, and of their character through their words and the way they speak—is tremendous; anybody having read the book first would be delighted at the faithfulness of the film adaptation.

However, there are numerous differences, large and small. Paul Varjak isn’t a sugar baby in the book; his empathy for Ms. Golightly is harder-won than that, and slower to develop. There’s a major character in the book who is written out of the movie script. And the racism, just as breathtakingly casual in the book as in the movie, is mostly aimed at a different target and isn’t mined for laughs; instead, it rears its head as a method of describing-without-describing just how flawed a person Holly Golightly is, as well as being generally in the background because 1958.

Still, the story is intriguing. It’s written with such skill that not a single necessary or desirable detail is left out, and yet not a single unneccessary word is left in. As one would expect, the characters are more complex and fully-fleshed-out than in the movie.

Oh, and the ending is different. I won’t spoil it. Read the book!