Rent Boy by Gary Indiana
And a tasting menu of other short novels
Rent Boy by Gary Indiana is a tight short noir about gay hustlers and a black-market-organ-harvesting-scheme that is sneakily also an epistolary novel. If you like the movie Party Monster, this book is probably for you. It did make me feel nostalgic for the city and all of the versions of New York, particularly nightlife and queer spaces, that likely ceased to exist before I was even born. I will note that there are some really jarring moments of misogyny, racism, and transphobia in this book that I suppose you could argue are in service of characterizing the narrator, but on the whole feel pretty dissonant and nasty.
My favorite thing about Rent Boy is that it reminded me of Kathy Acker’s writing on bodybuilding (Indiana cruelly lampoons Acker in Rent Boy through the character of laughable tattooed lady-author Sandy Miller) and brought me to this quote:
In this world of the continual repetition of a minimal number of elements, in this aural labyrinth, it is easy to lose one’s way. When all is repetition rather than the production of meaning, every path resembles every other path. Every day, in the gym, I repeat the same controlled gestures with the same weights, the same reps,... The same breath patterns. But now and then, wandering within the labyrinths of my body, I come upon something. Something I can know because knowledge depends on difference. An unexpected event. For though I am only repeating certain gestures during certain time spans, my body, being material, is never the same; my body is controlled by change and by chance.
This is perhaps the first time anyone has invoked labyrinths to intellectualize being a gym bro, which I love and now think about constantly.
It feels somewhat uncharitable in the current pre-apocalypse to judge myself for reading less than usual, but by this time last year I had read 20 books, and as of now I’ve read about half that. It’s not to say that I am not reading! I just finished a reread of Andrea Lawlor’s perfect messy ode to Orlando, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, (that post coming at some point in the near future) and Vera Blossom’s tumblr-diaristic personal essays, How to Fuck Like a Girl. But it’s certainly going slower than usual, and requiring more deliberate attention (which might not actually be such a bad thing). Rent Boy was a good respite in this moment because it was relatively brief and propulsive. If you too are having a hard time concentrating on reading these days, might I suggest the following tasting menu of short books and novellas that I have really loved over the last couple of years:
Cecilia by K-Ming Chang - For anyone who has been permanently changed by an intense and emotionally-charged early friendship with another girl.
Women by Chloe Caldwell - A queer breakup novel for the ages. I have known, and maybe been, these dykes. The author lives in Hudson, NY… classic!
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar - A queer woman having a quarter-life-crisis leaves her city home to live in a farmhouse in the countryside. A great book if you too are researching the ways in which winter loneliness unhinges us.
We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets - A disaffected lesbian app moderator explores the dark underbelly of social media and extreme isolation in the digital age. Deeply real-feeling and therefore quite scary.
Role Play by Clara Drummond - A tasty short novel in translation about class difference and the Brazilian art world narrated by an entitled young woman who also happens to be an independent curator.
Greasepaint by Hannah Levene - A union of butch lesbian Jewish socialist piano players in 1950’s New York. What more could you possibly ask for?
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A week ago I was out in Bridgehampton to spend a long weekend with a couple of dear friends at what we have been calling our second annual Winter Beach Residency. Together we stared at the ocean, basked in the warmth of the fireplace, cooked extravagant meals, rested, and worked on a creative project or two. Our guiding question/exclamation for this iteration of the Residency was “What do you want!?” It seems like that theme is going to be carrying us into spring (and Aries season) for the time being.
