Spoilers in this review:
Queerly Beloved by Susie Desmond falls into the modern romance genre by virtue of the fact that one of its many story lines is a love story with a happily ever after. But more than anything, Queerly Beloved is a love letter: to the city of Tulsa; to the queer community in the city of Tulsa; to the queer community in the city of Tulsa as it existed there and everywhere else where gay marriage was not yet legal in 2013.
Whether or not Desmond intended it, Queerly Beloved is also a love letter to being in your 20s. As someone past that age by, oh, a few decades, I was exhausted and exhilarated reading about heroine Amy's life. You think you're having an ordinary conversation with your best friend and out of the blue he blows up at you and you don't speak for months! An oblivious stranger to town outs you at your job where you are very, very closeted! You tell someone you love them on, like, the fifth date! And they can't deal with it and they dump you! You have a temper tantrum at work because everything is just too, too much! And you fall into starting your own business and it's not exactly right and you work at it and work at it until it is exactly right!
Of course, Queerly Beloved is also a cautionary tale about what it would mean to go back to the bad old days when gay marriage was not legal. The book pauses many, many times to breathe the anger and sadness of the queer community at the fact that its members could not marry same sex partners, the ambivalence many of them felt towards the institution of marriage and the fight for marriage equality, and the history of why that was the fight that the community chose. That in of itself makes this a book worth reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment