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.

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.

How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

Such a good book. I couldn’t get over how good this book was the whole time I was reading it—and that was after thoroughly enjoying How to Build a Girl. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to think twice about reading it in public. There was one, comparing a man’s parts to a turnstile, that was so good that I had to call my partner and repeat it to him and laugh all over again.

First off: no, you don’t have to have read How to Build a Girl to enjoy this book… but it would probably help. If you haven’t already, I recommend it. It’s a terrific book in itself and I’ve already reviewed it on this blog.

Second: if swearing, casual drug use, excessive drinking, and frank discussions of sex that don’t mince words aren’t your bag, this is not the book for you.

Now that’s out of the way, let me tell you a bit more about this fabulous book. It’s about Johanna Morrigan (AKA Dolly Wilde) again, but now it’s 1994. She’s 19, living in London, and a successful writer. She’s still desperately in love with John Kite, and he still doesn’t return her affections, but never mind: she has a plan. She’s going to write him into being in love with her.

Along the way, she’ll have to somehow get her marijuana-addled dad to move out of her flat, teach John to value his teen girl fans, and—and this is the whopper—decide what to do about being very publicly slut-shamed by the entire London music scene after a disastrous encounter with a Famous.

This is How to Build a Girl for the #metoo era. Tremendous fun. Read it!

Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free by Wednesday Martin

Read by the author

I’ll state right at the outset that this book is not for everyone. If you’re not interested in frank, open, sex-positive discussions of female sexuality—or if you’re so triggered by the thought of women who cheat on their partners that reading an account of them that doesn’t condemn them will make you fly into a rage—or if you aren’t interested in the distinction between consensual and non-consensual nonmonogamy, you probably shouldn’t read this book.

Or maybe you should.

Wednesday Martin is standing on the shoulders of the authors of Sex at Dawn, What Do Women Want?, and What Love Is and What It Could Be. From that vantage point, she can see quite a lot that our society and past sex researchers (almost exclusively male) not only couldn’t see, but actively pooh-poohed. Because she doesn’t assume, as they did, that women are more naturally monogamous than men, but is open to other possibilities, she’s able to look at existing research without discounting evidence that doesn’t fit into that box.

And what does she see? That taken as a whole, women, not men, are the ones who have a harder time maintaining monogamy. That it’s at least just as natural for women as for men to cheat on their spouses or have multiple sexual partners. That it was the rise of agrarian societies, not biology, that put a premium on controlling women’s sexuality. That in societies where women are free to have more than one sexual partner at a time without social sanction, they often do.

These ideas aren’t entirely new, of course. What Ms. Martin brings to them is the backing of scientific research. She then goes on to conduct interviews and research of her own, all of which are fascinating. She talks to women in long-term monogamous relationships, women who have cheated on their spouses, and women who practice consensual nonmonogamy. She visits a women-only sex club aimed at women who identify as basically straight, to see what women’s sexuality might be like absent the male gaze. And she draws some interesting conclusions.

This is a very wide-ranging book; topics include social anthropology/ethnography (of both familiar and less-familiar cultures, past and present), primatology, and evolutionary psychology. The numerous interviews she conducts put a human face on the scientific studies she cites. The book does occasionally seem to wander a bit aimlessly, but never for long; another fault in her writing is the focus on female vs. male as if they were immutable categories. However, overall it's a well-researched and informative book, written in a conversational tone that keeps it highly readable. Strongly recommended for anybody who is interested in female sexuality.

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

I ended up keeping this book on my wish list for a really long time—close to a year, I think—because while initially it appealed to me, I started to have reservations about it and it got lower and lower on my list. Finally, though, I was in the mood for something a little nostalgic, even if it was British working-class crumbling-industrial-town nostalgia, after having gone through the end of the world with the Amish; so I went for it.

And actually it was really great. I’d say that Dolly totally reminded me of me at that age if it weren’t too embarrassing—oops, did I say that out loud? Of course, Dolly’s humiliations and triumphs are exaggerated in order to make them better reading. But it is, indeed, wonderfully amusing reading, especially her gleefully lusty enjoyment of life in general and of lust in particular. And her cultural touchstones—Blackadder, Blade Runner, and her blundering entry into the local Goth and indie music scenes—made my heart go pitter-pat.

Oh, and the reader was spot-on perfect. I can’t imagine this in anybody else’s voice.

In short: I am so glad I decided to read this book after all. I haven’t had so much fun cheering a character on in a long time.