Editor: Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: Harrington Park OK, so why a book of queer writing on surviving childhood abuse? Sycamore, author of Pulling Taffy, offers up two main reasons - one, because queer survivors are mostly ignored in books addressing the subject and two, because most texts pathologise and diagnose but don't offer pathways out and around, an after once the initial acceptance has occurred. So here are 29 pieces, some only a page, some not very pretty at all. But they ain't s'posed to be… How do you judge a body of work like this? By measuring it primarily against the goals it set out to achieve, by looking for diversity of narrative and narrator, and by finding sparkling gems of writing gold, unexpected but never unwarranted, especially in a collection by self-defined Writers dealing with the most intimately personal of subjects. As for the latter, there are plenty, and it's these precious words that also differentiate Dangerous Families from the Chicken Soup for the Ass tomes. Take Kate Huh in "Kid Pirate in Suburbia" [(Bless you Kathy Acker while I think of you)], who reminisces, "There was a whole string of these [extremely beautiful] girls, over the years, that I cherished from afar, or up close if they allowed me to worship them in that charming little kid kinda way. I sometimes wonder if any of them grew up to be queer like me." It would take someone with a better grasp of their own past's inadequacies not to identify with something like that. And a more hardened reader than myself not to smile wryly as Douglas A Martin narrates, after being kicked out of home, "Everyone knows. I'm the big fag of the school. I'm driving around the Camaro with the ax mark in its right front side." Not all of the material induces smiles - for every note of survival, there's a strong and loud minor chord of pain and anger, some directed at self, others directed at social portrayals, as Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán comments on the attention paid to Mathew Shepard's death: "I am not the only one who does not mourn you, who is instead angered by the media attention you receive. You are every white child this country has mourned. How many of us colored and mixed left to die, no proper burials, not even named or recognizable, bodies so badly burnt and dismembered families birth and chosen an not identify the remains. And I am left thinking: Even your death is worth more than our lives." Comfortable? So in amongst this diversity, this humour amongst the sharpest of needles, are tales of determination and tales of proper memory for that which has been lost, including childhoods, families, and spots in the park where "I sucked his dick in the reeds, we were cold but warming each other… my mother said you're worrying about the environment at a time like this?" For the fellow queer survivor there are moments of identification so strong that our mouths will fill with the metallic twist of blood. For other readers, welcome, to those "who struggle to overcome the damage."
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Title: Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving
