Joe Westmoreland's Exhilarating, Heartbreaking and Mainly Autobiographical Queer 1970s-1980s Road Novel
The New York City AIDS longtime survivor on the buzzy reissue of "Tramps Like Us," an unputdownable tale of broken teens fleeing the midwest for America's gay meccas on the eve of the epidemic.
Hi Caftaners. As I write this on a Sunday, a few days back from Mexico City, I’ll freely say that I’m feeling the dissonance of this kind of backward-looking Caftan exercise up against the present sickening horror of the starvation in Gaza and the continued abduction of countless immigrants in our own country by masked goons. Evil and cruelty are surging right now, raising (for me at least) very serious questions about how to do the right thing day to day while still trying to hold together some semblance of a normal life.
So that means I’ll be going to the dentist tomorrow morning but going back to NYC’s federal immigration courts on Wednesday morning with one of the court-watching groups I’m in, to do whatever I can for immigrants who are being hauled away by the goons even as they show up for their hearings as they were instructed. (Talk about a trap.) That means trying to get their vital information before their hearing ends to connect them to emergency contacts and legal help if they are taken away, as they quite often are. For the men who show up alone, who break my heart, it might mean just being by their side as a kind of friend for as long as possible—until they are captured, or (the better scenario) until we part ways outside the train station once they leave the federal building. I’m fairly sure some version of this is going on in every major city if you’re inclined to do this work of bearing witness to the depravity of what is happening. Just Google “court watching,” “ICE” and the name of your city. If you’re in NYC, you can do it through Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, New Sanctuary Coalition or Court Watch NYC. In fact, Democratic Socialists of America-NYC has an online training this Wednesday night July 30. They’re one of the groups I’ve been doing it with and those kids are really well organized.
And if you want to be part of a carefully built nationwide program of nonviolent mass resistance in the weeks and months ahead, connect to Indivisible’s 1 Million Rising project.
I’m doing it! Their next online session is also this Wednesday July 30.
So now I can tell you about this week’s Caftan talk. It’s with the longtime NYC writer Joe Westmoreland, whom I first heard of when I was on staff at POZ magazine in the early-mid 2000s and he wrote a regular column for us. Here is Joe today:
But what I didn’t know at the time, even though it was covered in POZ right before I came, was that in 2001 Joe had published a partly fictionalized memoir called Tramps Like Us….
…about fleeing his abusive midwestern home at the age of 17 and embarking on a decade-plus bohemian journey through 1970s-1980s America, from Kansas City to Jacksonville, Florida, to (briefly but memorably) NYC to New Orleans to San Francisco, where the story fully blooms—and then is upended by AIDS—before Joe moved to NYC in 1987, never again to leave.
In these bleak times, it is a small act of beauty that the venerable publisher FSG has seen fit to recently reissue the novel…
…which is one of the most vivid, real-time novels I’ve ever read of traveling through a bygone America—one that seems, through today’s lens, both incredibly lax but also poignantly innocent, simple and pre-digital. It gave me feels all the way back to Huck Finn and obviously Kerouac’s On The Road, but with the queer sexy rebel edge of John Rechy’s City of Night crossed with the ersatz familial sweetness of Tales of the City. It’s just one of the best American road novels I’ve ever read, moreso because it’s about an almost Candide-like queer 17-year-old punk rocker named “Joe”…
…who discovers sex, music, drugs, friendship, family and love in the interval when post-Stonewall, disco-driven liberation became increasingly shadowed by a terrifying and mysterious new disease.
Wow—that’s quite a sentence, isn’t it? It’s because I want to make you read Tramps Like Us this summer—please buy it at your local bookstore or on Bookshop!—because I know you’ll fly through it. You’ll vicariously experience the wild thrill of sex- and drug-fueled New Orleans and San Francisco nights, and then, I promise, you will cry, cry, cry. Here is just the tiniest sample:
We arrived in San Francisco about 11:00pm the night of July 3, 1979. After stopping by our new apartment, Ali took me to a bar a few blocks up Folsom Street called the Stud. I fell in love with it immediately. It was the kind of bar that I was always looking for but didn’t think existed. They were playing rock music that I only heard on my own stereo… No disco. There were gay punk rockers hanging out….Lots of girls were there as well as boys…Right after I walked through the door of the bar I bumped into the cook I’d worked with when I did food-prep in New Orleans. I took that as a good sign.
I love this book so much and I was so grateful when Joe, an AIDS longtime survivor who’s been through a lot of health stuff the past decade, agreed to talk to me about it. We did, for two hours yesterday. And then our deep dive into the past morphed into a talk about our very unnerving present.
I present you the very gifted memoirist/novelist Joe Westmoreland! And please, if you continue to enjoy the free version of Caftan, consider upgrading to the paid version for $5/month. As I hope you can see by now, I’m not a slacker when it comes to getting you these talks!
Joe, thank you so much for doing a Caftan talk. Congrats on the reissue of your truly amazing biographical novel. Are you happy with the reboot?
I'm thrilled. It's much better than the original release, which came out in spring 2001 from Painted Leaf Press, whose sole staffer sadly had a massive heart attack the week after my books came in. I became my own publicist and got something in the gay paper in New Orleans and in the Bay Area Reporter in SF, but I honestly thought I was going to get more coverage.
How did this reissue happen?
My friend Eileen Myles (they/them), the poet, had been after me for a while to get the book out again but I have a lot of health issues and didn't have the energy to start shopping it around. So right after Covid lockdown, Eileen took it on themself and did this online reading where a dozen people read different sections of it. Then Eileen took the book to their agent and to the young gay editor Jackson Howard at FSG. Within 30 minutes of each other, they both emailed me and said they loved it and wanted to work with me.
Jackson is such an up-and-coming young gay editor in the book world. Do you remember what he said about your book?
That he thought people his age could relate to it because even though it was a different time, the core issues, moving to big gay cities from the midwest and making friends, were the same. We talked a bit about the history of AIDS and he said that a lot of people in their twenties and thirties don't really know a lot about what happened.
Right, and the book is, among many things, a really scary and heartbreaking, almost real-time depiction of how AIDS undoes a pretty idyllic group of young friends in mid-1980s San Francisco. So what has the reception for the book been like the second time around?
Totally different. People are really excited about it this time. I get messages on Instagram saying, "I just finished it and I really loved it." I didn't know there'd be such a buzz about it this time.
Yeah, it's got quite a lot of admiring press hits this time around. Why do you think it's resonating more this time?
Younger people tell me they're moved by the group of friends in the book, how we started out partying but then, when AIDS hit, we had to figure things out by ourselves. A lot of young people tell me they're in touch with their friends over the phone more than in person, and that they wish they could just drop in and see their friends like we did. They're also fascinated by all the hitchhiking, and that it was mostly safe.
They want to know if I was scared. And they also like all the sex and drug sections, like when I describe what went on in a bathhouse.
I'm of that AIDS 2.0 generation, the one that heard about it in high school and college and, by the time we came to big cities, knew what safe sex was—so even though we had a lot of fear, we weren't blindsided and walloped like gay guys who were even just 10 years older than us. And I've always been struck by how the epidemic hit this group of very young people who should not have been hit with so much illness, death and loss until their senior years. Can you say what it was like going from the really carefree era of the 1970s and very early 80s into this dark, scary one that soon followed?
We started hearing about it in the early 1980s but we felt we didn't do whatever gave it to you, like poppers or going to S&M bathhouses. It was older guys who were getting it. But then by 1983 or 1984, a lot started happening really fast and we didn't have time to think. We just had to deal with what was going on. A lot of times we didn't know what to do. This was the period where doctors would tell us that they knew about as much as we did, which was nothing.
What was a typical day like at that time?
I went to work every day [as a word processor], which was weird because my coworkers knew my friends were sick and would hear me on these intense phone calls while I was sitting at my desk. Also, my friends and I started doing drugs a lot more. That's how we dealt with it—by getting high. We'd go from hanging out and getting high to sitting by our friends' beds at the hospital, talking to doctors and nurses. There was a lot of confusion and a lot of emotions flying around. There were also boyfriend things, like who loved the [sick or dying] person more, and these weird interactions around caretaking. We didn't know how to be caretakers. That was a challenge, to say the least. And then families started showing up—people who were horrified that their kid had AIDS, thinking that we, the friends, had given it to them. It was very intense.
Can you differentiate between how you experienced it at the time versus how you remember it?
It seemed more horrifying while it was happening, because in retrospect we knew more about it and there were newer drugs. When I started writing the book in the early 1990s, the new, effective cocktails hadn't even come out yet. But another big difference by then was that there was ACT UP, it was in the papers, people talked about it. In the first years, we didn't have the community support. People were afraid to drink from each other's glasses.
So you'd say more trauma while it was happening than later?
Yeah. Later on was about trying to make sense of it all. That's partly why I wrote the book.
Joe, the book is so incredibly detailed, right down to narrating an entire night out on the town, going from A to B to C to D, beat by beat. Did you keep a diary all those years?
No. Some of it is fictionalized. But I had a really good friend in the New Orleans section of the book, whose name in the book is D.J. In the years after the book takes place (early-mid 1970s to 1986), he moved back to his parents to become a kind of successful painter and we became pen pals. I'd write and tell him all my adventures. That's what kept me going. I think of the book as a long letter to a friend. In the years the book takes place, I kept a sporadic journal, mainly about all the things I wasn't happy about. But even today, I'll hear a song that reminds me of a time and place and can trigger a kind of PTSD memory. That's why I put in the songs we were listening to all the way through the book.
And I love what a punk rocker and New Waver you were, not a disco clone. You could make a great 1970s-1980s alternative playlist from the songs in the book.
Also, as far as details, I took a memoir-writing class with Hettie Jones, who was a Beat poet and writer. Kerouac slept on her couch. One of the big things she taught us was about the senses—what do you smell, see, feel, hear? I kept that in mind with the book and that was fun.
How long did it take you to write?
Close to ten years. I worked in the evening as a word processor and I'd get home around midnight and write for an hour or two. Then my CD4s dropped low enough for me to have an actual AIDS diagnosis, so I went on disability and joined The Writers Room in NYC, which was open 24 hours, so that's when I wrote most of it. I wasn't working anymore but I kept up my work schedule and wrote Monday through Saturday.
Do you remember the experience of writing it? What it felt like as you conjured those memories and set them on the page?
It just felt like there was this story in me that had to come out. I started the book in the New Orleans days or maybe the early SF days, writing a couple of stories. I would write in my journal for 20 or 30 minutes, then fall asleep for about 10 minutes, then wake up and start writing, then edit. I repeated that for each chapter. A couple times, I was the guy at The Writers Room who sat in the corner and cried all night. I'd time-travel back to the situation that I was writing about, and in my head I heard all this commotion—but when I'd stop typing, it would be really quiet and I'd think, "Oh my God, where was I?"
There are scenes of different kinds of drug use in the book that are by turns euphoric, comradely, surreal and sometimes outright dismaying. Like when you all are shooting up heroin together as a friend group—it's so cozy and intimate on one hand and so sad and upsetting on the other. It gets to the place where everyone is really getting together to get high together, and I couldn't help but wonder, as we come into the era of AIDS and transmission via sharing injection-drug equipment becomes known, if you were infecting one another. Oh, and Kat—did she end up getting HIV?
No.
Well, that’s good.
We were actually using clean needles and rubbing alcohol and swabs before AIDS hit. But you're right—we knew about AIDS but we didn't believe it would happen to us. Peopel were still going to the baths and having sex without condoms. So, in the book, I told on myself. It wasn’t like everyone just changed their behavior immediately. There were a lot of times when we asked, "Should we be doing this?" Then we'd say, "Fuck it, I wanna get high, and we probably have [AIDS] already."
What do you think when you look back on nights like that?
Where the book ends, I go to L.A. and get pulled over for drunk driving and wind up in AA and stop drinking and doing drugs. Looking back, maybe we didn't need to do all those drugs to have that intimacy. But we didn't even know how much pain we were in and we were trying to dull it.