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ralowe's review
5.0
at souley vegan, just as i dove upon the meal sat before me, a black woman tarrying near the dessert counter turned and asked what book i was reading. short stories, a journal, some poetry: i gave gary fisher's biography: black and gay student of eve sedgwick. emphasized he died of aids in '93. and eve died later of cancer. my inquirer was moved by this, "and had cancer, too?" did my sheepish tabloid brief curry moderate legitimacy as politicized tragedy? (if not shock value?) a mild non-implicating curiosity? this black woman might have been queer herself, even given her male dining companion, also black. i wonder if she knew sedgwick was white. but here: i significantly omitted gary's aesthetic and personal interest in racialized sexual submission. that biographical detail aloud almost certainly would definitively villainize the common inscrutability of the black bookworm: it is why i'm reading this. this omission allowed me to appropriate her only partially informed possible mourning for my purposes. it's still dangerous to admit we share any of fisher's curiosity. after spending all this time trying to size up the discursive perimeter of the genocidal ostensive site of seroconversion obliterating black gay and bisexual men, marinating on the implications on a queer afropessimism, i at last crack open this book. the ego loss is barely accommodated in purloined mourning. i think i remember adding to my epicure's bio comment that fisher had such incredible potential, also receiving a murmur, the dimensions of loss are crushing, clearly. the affinity i feel for fisher aptly tests the antirepresentational propaganda i regularly spout off, no denyin'. the proof is in the things unsaid in my dining encounter. what was fisher on to? where would we have gone? in crude summary: one half of the book explores his lust to be tyrannized by white cock, the other half is kind of like *sisterhood of the traveling pants*. the ability to convincingly navigate these extremes is shattering evidence of his genius. sedgwick uses ellipses to reign in the massive amount of material, usually at the beginning of a journal entry. gary fisher and the imponderable mystery of what might have been take ellipsis as bitter metonym. ugh.
gagne's review
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Sexual violence, Racial slurs, and Cursing
Moderate: Homophobia, Medical content, and Terminal illness
Minor: Body horror, Cancer, and Death of parent
Sadomasochism
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