2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
A TRUE SPECTRUM OF QUEER NORTH CAROLINA WRITING a review by David Deutsch Wilton Barnhardt, Editor. Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
DAVID DEUTSCH is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Understanding Jim Grimsley (University of South Carolina Press, 2018; reviewed in this issue) and articles on queer American fiction. As part of a new project on post-WWII queer American fiction, he is working on a book tentatively titled Bad Beatitudes: Queer Angels in Post-WWII American Fiction and Culture. WILTON BARNHARDT is the author of four novels, including Lookaway, Lookaway (St. Martin’s Press, 2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). He is a Professor of English at North Carolina State University.
OPPOSITE Wilton Barnhardt and Zelda Lockhart at the Regulator Bookshop, Durham, NC, 11 Apr. 2019
Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina, edited by Wilton Barnhardt, offers a welcome addition to contemporary queer literary anthologies. In his introduction, Barnhardt sanely declares “the Age of the Spectrum” and his careful inclusion of fiction and nonfiction from a variety of authors lives up to this declaration (1). “Gayness,” he observes, “is more than whether a certain sex act took place; it is a whole complex of love, lifestyle, and sensibility.” To evidence this point, Barnhardt has selected stories that represent diverse races, sexualities, and genders and that make the case for investigating “a whole complex” (3) of queer life in both North Carolina and in the US at large. While Barnhardt has chosen pieces by writers who are “natives of, residents of, or connected strongly to North Carolina” (2), the value of Every True Pleasure is not limited to its reflections of queer life in one state. As queer Southern studies of literature, culture, history, and sociology flourish, readers will be particularly interested in volumes that are set in specific regions while also illustrating the complexities of queer culture more generally. Usefully then, this volume nods both explicitly and implicitly to regional specificities while acknowledging a queer complexity that expands beyond regionalism and a Southern exceptionalism to offer larger observations about queer culture in the US. Particularly of note are the volume’s memorable chapters that acknowledge the hardships
RIGHT Toni Newman at the
International Transgender Day of Visibility, San Francisco, 31 Mar. 2019
of trans individuals but that focus on their intellectual, social, and romantic successes. In an excerpt from I Rise: The Transformation of Toni Newman, Newman offers a heartrending story of secrecy and self-discovery merged with the value of successfully pursuing an education. She describes her early life with her family and her time as a black gay effeminate male student at Wake Forest, from which she eventually graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Newman recalls her early encounters with less fortunate women in local trans communities and notes that in her own process of transitioning she too would end up “selling [her] body just to exist and survive, taking female hormones, and injecting [her] body with silicone” (48). Newman refuses to shy away from recounting these hardships, but her story remains one of survival and eventual success. While Newman offers a first-person portrait of a young black trans individual, Belle Boggs presents an older white couple dealing with a husband’s transition in “Jonas.” Boggs filters the short story through Melinda, who accepts, in a caring and compassionate fashion, her husband Jonas’s transition into Joan. While the couple has difficulties with Jessie, Melinda’s daughter and Joan’s stepdaughter, who has gotten married to a “hell-bent Baptist minister,” Boggs highlights her characters’ small COURTESY OF TONI NEWMAN
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