In homage to David Wojnarowicz, Sycamore ripped
my heart out and put it back together again (this book is dedicated, in part,
to Wojnarowicz, and features his work as a cornerstone of queer grief and
desire, and emulates him quite well). Sketchtasy is a whirlwind of tulle and coke and fucking. Sketchtasy is not light reading. Sketchtasy, may not, in fact, be the book for you. It does not cut
corners, and does not hesitate to throw sucker punches or take a romp through
the gutter. It’s a filthy story about queer struggle and resilience rife with
run-ons—it does not stop to take a breath.
Sycamore is best known for her work editing collections such as Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots, questioning
toxic masculinity and respectability within the queer community, and though
this is fiction, it follows similar lines of questioning. What kind of queers
are “respectable?” What kind of queers will always be on the margins? This
question is answered in Alexa’s days and nights spent turning tricks in altered
wedding gowns, stealing sleeping bags to give to the homeless, covering the
walls in art about healing.
Major, major trigger warnings for this book regarding addiction, incest, and
rape, but major props for dealing with them without turning it into either
trauma porn or think-positive-thoughts bullshit, which none of us, at this
point, need. There’s plenty of that in this world. Alexa suffers deeply; the
people around her suffer deeply. They cope with drugs and booze, they fall on
and off the wagon but they also love, and feel joy, and sometimes that joy is
all your friends doing ecstasy in your sugar daddy’s jacuzzi, and sometimes
that joy is the perfect song or perfect shade of lipstick for the moment. Much
of this story is about seeking glamour, but not the runway, not riches, not
fucking Ru Paul. Glamour,
here, is celebrating survival in a world that wants you dead, glitter on your
nails, twirling together on the dance floor.
As if there’s not enough going on, this is also an AIDS novel, starting with
the disillusionment of late-’90s AIDS activism, recognizing the collective
grief that’s never really gone away, not even now, and coming back around to
the stories that were told,
particularly, again, in Wojnarowicz. This is the kind of dauntless fiction we
need. I’m tired of queer
history being glossed over and made picture-perfect, an endless celebration. It
wasn’t, and isn’t. The first Pride was a riot. We still need to throw
bricks through the windows of cop cars, and we still need our stories and
struggles told for what they were and are.
Sycamore, I hope, is only part of the beginning of this. –jimmy cooper (Arsenal
Pulp Press, arsenalpulp.com)
DIY punk rock
