Transgender Book Reviews

Boys Like Her: Transfictions
By Anna Camilleri, Ivan E. Coyote, Zoe Eakle and Lyndell Montgomery
Copyright 1998, 222 pages, $15.95 (with photographs)
Press Gang Publishers (Canada)
ISBN 0-88974-086-0

Capsule: four artistic lesbian women, two who identify as boys and two who love this kind of boy, come together as a performance group called Taste This. This very visual, imaginatively-designed book evolved from their performances, which explored their history, relationships and sexuality.

Full review

Boys LIke Her is a well-crafted, out-there book that begins with a soft touch and ends rough and with little ambiguity.

It's all aboutTaste This, a performance troupe of four artistic Canadian women who come together to explore and demonstrate their histories, relationships and sexuality. Moving way beyond their lesbianism, they explore the polar attraction between femme lesbians and "boy" lesbians. It's not hard to divine that Anna and Zoe are the former and Ivan and Lyndell are the latter. Also, one learns that Ivan and Anna, and Zoe and Lyndell were briefly lovers.

The material in the book was first developed for live performances in Canada and the U.S., which were apparently warmly received by the lesbian/gay community.

There are 33 short stories and several poems, around which photographs of the women are cleverly arranged. The design is exciting and contemporary. Boys Like Her is categorized as fiction, but most will read it as nonfiction.

Three themes predominate: the isolation brought about by being different, the exhilaration and closeness of being performance partners, and the power of sex. Much of the book describes the search for self-validity and the worship of self-uniqueness.

One experience keeps reappearing throughout: the trauma of being hassled by male Canadian border cops upon returning to their own country, purely because they look different (lots of skin piercings and the boyish looks of Ivan and Lyndell). Having their performances applauded earlier, and then having a personal diary and a dildo guffawed at is quite a comedown. Men as a whole don't come out too well in most of these stories.

Parents and families play a part. In one story, Anna writes about a grandfather who molested her and eventually paid for it in prison.

Some of the stories stand alone as excellent short stories. Zoe writes about a lesbian waitress working in a hetero pickup bar in Greece and all the tensions that creates. Anna writes about picking up a harassing male off the street and giving him his just desserts. Towards the end, Ivan describes being humiliated and dominated in an SM scene, and the intense emotion that involves. She has another good piece about a person desperately searching for someone to share a corduroy fetish with.

Boys Like Her is a good combination of whimsy and hard-edged reality. Much energy went into it.

(Reviewer: Valory Gravois) (Copyright ©1999 by Alchemist/Light Publishing)

Where this book can be purchased
Return to list of reviews
Return to home page