A Few Quick Cool Things I Want to Tell You About Before The Next Big Caftan Interview
The rediscovered 1979 diary of Black gay L.A. teen Sean DeLear, the June NYC revival of my friend Nora Burns' funny and poignant play "The Village!", and the new shitshow of a memoir "Tweakerworld."
Hi Caftan readers! It’s May 4 in NYC and it’s gray and drizzly and chilly out there—yuck! I wanna go run in the sun! What’s been up with you? As for me, I’m happy that some good early reviews for my new novel Speech Team (out Aug. 1) are starting to come in and I am VERY MUCH looking forward to spending the second half of June in France (where I have not been since the end of a five-year relationship with a Frenchman in 2015) and Spain. I love nothing more than “changing the channel” on my life, so to speak, and waking up and looking at something other than my own apartment and Queens neighborhood, much as I love them both. I am going to Madrid for the first time and, in addition to Paris, I’m going to both Montpellier (very gay friendly!) and Nice for the first time, too.
On the flip side, these hateful legal attacks on trans kids (and even adults in some states) and their families seeking trans-affirming medical care continue to infuriate me. It is hard in some ways not living in one of the states where they are taking place where one could participate in protests, rallies and lobbying against them; that not being the case, it feels like the only thing to do is to donate to groups like the ACLU, Lambda Legal and the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund , as they are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of challenging these heinous laws in court. Please consider that if you can! I mean, what else can we do, except to have conversations with family and friends about why these laws are cruelly and cynically intruding on private health decisions and should be opposed?
I am in the middle of a really good long Caftan interview that I will likely post in mid-May; it’s with someone very well-known in NYC queer activist circles whom I’ve long admired and been fascinated by (and even briefly worked for) because he has devoted his life to social justice and service to an extent that feels almost monastic—and also because he embodies some of the tensions of what happens when something that started purely as mission grows into a multimillion-dollar operation with many stakeholders and a lot of can’t-please-everyone decisions to be made. Stay tuned!
Meantime, I wanted to tell you about a few things I am loving. The first is I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Diary of Sean DeLear. I won’t belabor it here, because instead you can read this interview with the book’s editors I just did for TheBody.com, which I write for regularly. But I will merely say that Sean DeLear was, from the 1980s until his cancer death in 2017, very well-known in L.A.’s underground punk/indie/queer music and party scene—but that before that, including his self-renaming, he was Simi Valley teenager Tony Robertson…
…and, at age 14-15 in 1979, he kept an insane diary of his sexual exploits as well as all his artistic, social and other ambitions, from buying new music (so much Donna Summer!) to wanting a waterbed to taking photos to desiring to escape permanently to L.A.’s cool music scene. Seriously, click through to my interview to learn more about the book and read some tidbits from it. All I’ll say here is that this is a treasure-chest discovery from a certain time and place, written by a brazenly exuberant, hilarious and touching pre-AIDS young queer who had no shame about his desires and desperately wanted to be part of the larger gay world. Yes, it’s troubling when you think about all the adult men (and even a woman or two) who had sex with him when he was a teenager—its adults’ job to gently but firmly rebuff advances from the underage—but it’s never less than clear that Sean was seeking out these connections with a gusto that can only be called pure of heart—and dick.
I laughed so much reading this diary, and was also touched in many places because as sexually precocious as Sean was, he is still in so many ways a kid (excited to hit the rollerdisco with his friends!) and there is a lot of family tension in his life at this time that he underplays but still reads clearly between the lines. You will find this book a delight—trust me. And if you don’t? Well, as Sean says continually in the diary—quotes and all—“Oh Well!”
Also, if you plan to be in or near NYC in June, consider getting tickets to my hilarious and talented friend Nora Burns’ play The Village! A Disco Daydream, which is coming back to Dixon Place (after its debut last fall) for eight nights in June—Pride Month!
And guess what? It’s also set in 1979, which is the year Nora moved to NYC from Boston and became a big ole party girl and (very much in her own words) fag hag supreme. I just interviewed Nora about the show for TheBody.com, which you can click through to, so I won’t go on much here except to say that the emotional arc of the show is from raunchily (retro-ishly) hilarious—so many wink-wink jokes about the future from characters who “don’t really know” what the future holds—to heartbreaking (it is modeled on Our Town, that classic American existential weeper, after all) to sheer joy at the beauty and wonder of being alive and among friends. It’s really fun and it’s very Nora, which means just a little bit WRONG, but in the very best way—in fact, something we need more of in these hyper-delicate times.
Oh—there is one other thing I want to mention—Tweakerworld: A Memoir. Last week, I interviewed the author, L.A.-based screenwriter Jason Yamas, about this new book, which recounts his going from a rather routine meth user in the gay world in San Francisco to, briefly and chaotically, the city’s biggest meth supplier to the gay community. That interview, for TheBody.com, is not published yet, but here’s another one in the meantime, and you can see that Jason is, well, a SIZABLE personality, on or off meth.
As someone who struggled with meth in my late twenties and early thirties, I thought the book expertly captured the paranoid, delusional, everyone-is-conspiring-against-me, I-don’t-know-what-is-real-anymore toll that longterm meth use takes on your brain—and on relationships with family, lovers and close friends. I can’t even describe what a rollercoaster shitshow Jason’s story becomes—you have to read it to believe it. But it also deals honestly with what gay wounds meth gives us the impression of healing—until everything collapses—and how getting past meth is not necessarily as easy as going to Crystal Meth Anonymous or other 12-step meetings, although such meetings are enormous lifesavers (and life-rebooters) for many folks, as they were for me for a time.
Well that’s it, folks, and I’ll see you in mid-May with a nice fat interview, to be followed by a few more I already have lined up. Until then, thank you for support as always and remember to think about what you might do to push back on the hate that LGBTQ folks, especially TRANS FOLKS and DRAG QUEENS, are facing in so many states. Sadly, every advance brings a backlash and our work of being totally free in the world may well never be totally done.
Love and caftans! Please tell your friends about Caftan!
Tim
(Photo by the talented Eric McNatt)