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.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

read by Michael Crouch

It’s 1985. Yale’s career as the development director for an art gallery has just begun, his friend Nico has just died of AIDS, and almost everyone he knows is terrified or in denial or both. Nico’s little sister, Fiona, has become the key to a coup that could make or break Yale’s reputation in the art world.

It’s 2015. Fiona is trying to find her daughter, who disappeared into a cult years ago; a random bit of footage has led her to Paris. She’s staying with an old friend, Richard Campo, a photographer who famously documented the ravages of the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s and 90s.

Days pass in Paris. Fiona is frustrated at the pace of the private investigator’s search for her daughter and heads out to seek her on her own. Meanwhile, Richard and his partner urge her to just enjoy the city while she’s there. She’s not so sure she’s ready for the sorts of enjoyment that are on offer, though. Romance, trips through her own past—that’s not where she’s at. She's in too much pain, too worried about her daughter.

Weeks pass in Chicago, and then months. Disaster looms over Yale’s entire community; some people flee, some descend into debauchery, and some get political and fight to be seen and heard. But for Yale, there’s nothing to do but soldier on, try to close the next deal, try not to feel too alone and scared as his friends get sick, one by one. Meanwhile, he’s getting to know the elderly benefactor whose art collection may or may not be a windfall for his gallery. And she seems to know more about him than he thought he was revealing.

This story winds a sinuous path back and forth, back and forth, between a past when nobody knew who would be struck down next and a today shaped by the loss of a generation of young men. We get to be there in that past with Yale. We see what it does to him, what it feels like on a daily basis to be subject to irrational hatred and constantly on the edge of existential terror, meanwhile going through all the normal growing pains of being a young man just getting started in the world. 

And we get to see, 30 years later, what carrying all that history, all the stories of all those extinguished lives, has done to Fiona, how it has scarred her—and, through her, scarred her daughter, who was only a baby during the worst of it.

I wasn’t there for the AIDS crisis in the same way Yale and Fiona were. Although I lived in San Francisco, or within an hour’s drive, during the 80s and 90s, and a relative I hadn’t seen in years died pretty early on, I was in middle school when things really hit the fan. So I was a little young to be very deeply affected, though of course I was aware of what was going on all around me.

I did work at a dry cleaning shop a few blocks from the Castro during the mid-90s, and I remember watching a lot of customers get sicker and sicker and eventually disappear. It was horrible, but they weren’t my community, my family, my friends. I knew I could become infected if I wasn’t careful, but I also knew I wasn’t at high risk. It wasn’t *personal* to me. It was just how things were. (I never believed I’d make it to age 30, but I didn’t think a virus would take me; I thought it would be that cowboy running the White House with his finger hovering a little too near The Button that would get us all in the end.)

The Great Believers makes AIDS personal. You will walk away from this book shaken. You’ll have some appreciation, if you didn’t before, of what a loss to us all was the loss of those young lives. What living in the middle of it was like—it was like a war, but one that you had to be ashamed of being the victim of, one that you kept to yourself as hard as you could if you wanted to have any chance of a happy life. What caring about and caring for so many young men who didn’t make it was like, what it was like to survive and try to build a life after losing literally everybody you cared about.

The book does this all unsentimentally, cleanly, without tear-jerking melodrama. It just lays the stories out, one beautifully-formed slab after another, each atop the last in ways that seem impossible because of the way the story goes back in time, and yet somehow perfect. 

Read this book. Once you start you won’t be able to walk away, and it will hurt, but that lost generation deserves to be mourned. You’ll be glad you didn’t turn away.

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.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

read by Lin-Manuel Miranda

It’s 1987 and 15-year-old Aristotle Mendoza has a whole summer ahead of him, with all the freedom and potential for adventure and boredom that that implies. He needs to get away from the house one fateful, stifling day, so he heads for the public swimming pool. He doesn’t know how to swim, but he can still splash around and cool off. As it turns out, there’s another bored 15-year-old there—his name is Dante, and he offers to teach Ari to swim. Ari’s not sure why he takes Dante up on this odd offer, but he does.

Aside from bonding over their similarly odd names, the two couldn’t be more different. Ari is a working-class kid, the youngest of four, though his oldest brother went to prison when Ari was only 4 years old and both of his sisters grew up and left the house years ago. His Vietnam-veteran dad is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and his mom pushes him to succeed. In response to all this, Ari has developed an uncaring, tough-guy exterior and is completely out of touch with his own tremendous store of pent-up anger and sadness.

Dante, on the other hand, wears his enthusiasms and admittedly odd thoughts and points of view on his sleeve. The only child of affectionate, well-to-do parents, he’s somewhere between happy-go-lucky and neurotic. He’s also as close to openly gay as a teenager can be in El Paso, Texas in 1987.

The two accept and even enjoy each other’s differences, and they make each other laugh. Soon they develop a friendship that can survive anything… even Ari saving Dante’s life. But sooner or later Ari is going to have to figure out who he is and who he wants to be, and what that means for him and Dante.

If you can possibly get your hands on a copy of the audiobook version of this, do (pro tip: you can probably download it from your library for free). Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lively and nuanced reading makes an already-fantastic story spring to 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.