André

Pure filth. Undeniable Queer, kinky, nasty filth. Pushing every single taboo across every single line and never losing sight of what doing that ~means~. Not everyone will get it, and it clearly doesn't WANT to be gotten by everyone. That's the beauty of Queer art, or art from any subculture: it's not for everyone. It's for us. I've rarely read a novel so dedicated to pushing its reader to the absolute limit. The ones who get it, will get it. On a deep level. It's free-form, it never goes where you expect it to go, it plays with what plot even is, it exists in this bizarre space just one parallel dimension away from our present and immediate future, just far enough to not be libel. John Waters would be proud.

My husband has a special attachment to Josephine Baker, having also left NYC for Paris as a young man and found it to be his new chosen home, and a place where he faced not no racism, but a different kind of racism. So I already knew plenty about her from his anecdotes over the years, but getting these vignettes into her life is still fascinating. It’s a bit of an odd structure, essentially compiling interviews carried out over a 20 year period into a chronological timeline of her life and career. At times a bit disordered, and feeling wholly unedited. But that’s the charm of it. It’s not a manicured portrait of a celebrity, it’s not tight and clean. It’s a raw peek inside the way she thought and spoke. Unfortunately it also glosses over many parts of her life, and ultimately feels incomplete as a result. Whether that is due to Baker not wanting to reveal much on some topics during the interviews, or the interviewer not pressing on certain issues is hard to tell. Fascinating peeks into her life, but not the definitive autobiography one may expect.