Seasonally Sissy

I have a Hot then Cold relationship with reading. Usually, when it's Cold outside, I love to read, when it's Hot, I love to do just about anything other than. Being that it's Cold outside now, it's been reading season for me, and the first selection for this year's read-fest is Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums. That's a hell of a lot of S's.

The book is a memoir of growing up queer and queeny as can be in the deep South. In Sessums' South, racism is still alive and "sissy boy" is the third worst insult, right behind "(insert racial slur here)" and "democrat." He spends his entire young life struggling with his introverted, feminine personality, and he later tries to deal with his homosexuality while still trying to maintain his Southern identity. It's an interesting concept, especially for a kid like me that spent most of his formative years in the South, but there's just something off about it.

The problem is I can't get into the book. It may be the voice or the material or the utterly conventional story-telling devices, but there's something there that I can't relate to. Well, actually, that probably is the biggest problem, I can't relate to the material. I feel like I should be able to: I'm gay, I grew up mostly in the South, I've always been fairly introverted. Yet the voice of the author just doesn't grab me.

It could also be that I'm getting a bit tired of the tragic queer-boy story. How many times do we really need to read about how bad another man's early childhood was? And as jaded as this will sound, I've read similar stories before. Sessums' story is absolutely tragic, and I don't fault him at all for being traumatized by what happened (I'm not going to say exactly what the story line is, in case you choose to read it), but I feel like I've read this sad tale before.

If you're going to give me another tragic queer-boy story, how about you give me that story in a new, intriguing style? Or tell me in such a way that I empathize and laugh with you about your horrors? Books like How I Learned To Snap and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower really brought something new and/or interesting to the table, at least in my opinion. Wallflower's story-telling device was completely enthralling to me (to be fair, it is fiction, so not in the same exact category) and Snap's characterization and charming disparity had me re-reading the book over and over again. Which is exactly why I believe that if you want to tell the tragic queer-boy story, you need to do it in such a way that the reader isn't bored with it.

I'm thinking I'm not going to finish Mississippi Sissy. I grabbed a few other books from Unabridged (my favorite bookstore here in Chicago) that I've been meaning to dig into, so I think I'll be diving into that. With that said, if you've read Mississippi Sissy and thought it was good or worth trodding through the last half of the book, let me know and I just might push through to the end.