Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing and Hope

Title: Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing, and Hope
Who's it for?: Queer Eye fans, black and gay or nonbinary folks, 

Who made it?: Karamo Brown with Jancee Dunn

Where is it?: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookstores

Length: 305 pgs.

Karamo Brown’s memoir shares his cultural identity and healing journey on his life’s path to becoming a social worker and mentor appearing on the TV show Queer Eye to help people make positive and permanent lifestyle changes starting from within.

Before stating, “I am culture,” in his audition for the reboot of Queer Eye, Karamo Brown had a very strong sense of self and pride in his personal cultural background.  After immigrating to Texas from Jamaica, his parents named him Karamo with a middle name of “rebel” to give him inner courage.  His father taught him to never let anyone else define him but to warmly tell others who he is and why he is OK so they can correct their understanding and see him as warmly as he deserves to be seen.   He eventually found for himself that some other family messages about race, sexual orientation, and addiction were less helpful.  Not everyone around him was receptive to his dreams of  hosting a talk show, dancing like Tisha Campbell Martin in School Daze, or marrying a husband.  However, Karamo was a good student and pursued the opportunities he saw as they became reachable.  He fought for the right to put up the flag and show community spirit to his elementary school principal, was a peer mentor in high school, then pursued business leadership in his mostly white high school and homecoming court at his historically black college where he trained to be a social worker and briefly ran for public office.  He had a crisis of faith, but reconciled Christian beliefs with homosexual orientation without cancelling out any part of himself for good.  He was damaged by patterns of addiction and abuse in his family that were difficult to look at because he was running away from his own feelings on his post-college rise to reality TV stardom on MTV’s The Real World.  From a particularly bad crash into addiction while making public speaking appearances after his season of The Real World ended, he healed when he realised he had a son from his teenage dating life for whom he had to be responsible.  Truly healing was learning to have difficult conversations with himself and improving his parental example for his son and then his second son as his family continued to grow while he continued as a social worker and honed his presenting skills on other shows for OWN and MTV.  He had met his husband and was stabilising a supportive home environment before the big opportunity to be the new culture expert on Queer Eye presented itself.  Having made huge changes in himself and still supported by family and friends, Karamo Brown was ready to broadcast his beliefs about building inner strength for personal healing.  On Queer Eye, he helps the Heroes find the reason they hadn’t changed before and the language to embrace a healthier outlook with which they may love themselves.

A high-spirited manifesto to boost self confidence and promote commitment to a better world.

Yes Daddy : Contains Hyperbolically the Worst Underreported Violent Sex That Could Happen to Gay Men

Title: Yes, Daddy

Who's it for?: Young gay impulsive people who like sex too much maybe.  People who need to spend more time looking at the reality of their party jokes.  Maybe people who thought they had to discard faith entirely to live while gay.  Or people who want to read different perspectives on attention seeking behavior and don’t mind graphic sexual descriptions and toxic relationship examples. 

Who made it?: Jonathan Parks-Ramage

Where is it?: Barnes & Noble

Length: 279 pgs

I can’t read 50 Shades of Grey or watch the films.  I don’t want to identify with a female main character whose first sexual experience is being dominated, manipulated, and controlled by a male partner.  Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage, has many of the same themes as 50 Shades of Grey, but the main plot contains a relationship between gay men who I can find empathy for without liking them too much, forgetting they are damaged people, or taking psychological damage.  So this book is perhaps the only sex thriller I will ever read because I can stay at a safe distance and not get it on me.

  Conversely, I wonder if this book is a wakeup call about abuse for young men who are told they have to be strong and shown that women are disposable like the abuse only happens to women.  As a result of such toxically masculine thinking, sexual abuse of men is under reported and this book may be serving an important social purpose beyond being scary and provocative entertainment.  Anyone who has experienced sexual trauma would likely be triggered by the graphic descriptions of angry, dominating sex and should steer clear of this one.  As a demisexual woman who has boundaries precluding angry or drunk sex, I found the novel a safe space to meditate on how violence, alcoholism and sex become mixed without having to navigate a real relationship with my personal safety at stake.  The hook was bearable, and I stayed through the BDSM violent sex and normalized sexual harassment of gay men at work for the more important messages about gay men and their fathers, faith and sexuality, and the effects of fame and cancel culture in popular culture on my generation.

Sex sells, but until recently gay relationships were terribly underrepresented in entertainment media.  I’ll admit to being underexperienced in LGBTQIA literature, but on film I’ve seen two narratives of either hidden sexuality with surprising reveals or normalised sweetness and longing for gay relationships to be seen as equally healthy in comparison to straight relationships.  I used to feel like the gay community didn’t need the equivalent to the mass infantilisation of actresses and disposal of female victims that play out in detective stories too frequently.  But men don’t report sexual violence nearly as often as women, and I worry some of them are hiding survivor status due to toxically masculine rules about having to want sex and also be tougher than anything that  happens to them.  The first half of Yes, Daddy is full of domination, alcohol, and drugs.  The book throws out lots of sex, but the sex isn’t fun.  It’s dangerous, and readers are supposed to want the alcohol removed from dating.  Any hint of possible healthy relationships are ignored by Jonah due to the lack of impressing achievement in people his own age.  It’s also upsetting how easy the men around him find pinching Jonah or grabbing him at work well before he meets playwright Richard Shriver and his drunken friends who likewise find it easy to force sexual touch in semi-public spaces like kitchens and private parties.  Jonah is able to get attention from the powerful famous playwright by flirting with his youthful body, and he also has some body image attachment to maintaining his physique throughout the subsequent abuse and control issues he endures as his #MeToo story escalates from fantasy dating into a scandal with drunken parties and a private sex dungeon where he is treated like a discardable toy.  Anything you ever heard tossed out as a casual party joke is played out to show you that verbally creating awfulness just to destroy ideas wouldn’t be funny anymore if it were all real.  Jonah is a victim of toxic masculinity but also of his own lack of empathy for other humans with an inability to seek out healthier relationships.   

Neither the main character nor his famous romantic target approach life the way I do.  Jonah Keller is self absorbed and finds it easy to lie even to the point of ruining his evangelical pastor father’s life.  There are several points wherein Jonah lacks self awareness and I feel like I myself could easily have avoided this whole mess, but like a moth to a flame he decides he can endure abuse for public attention and access to an expensive lifestyle.  He and Richard Shriver both are more power hungry and have worse relationships with their families.  Richard has a stereotypically toxic relationship with his mother which feeds his writing with her rejection that made him an antisocial narcissist who wants to dominate and control younger partners.  Jonah should have had a better childhood by comparison with very involved helicopter parents, but their strict evangelical church destroyed their family union by rejecting homosexuality as a less common norm and leading Jonah’s father to force conversion therapy on him.  Retaliation in both cases led to public scandal and retreat by their children to spaces where they could be as defiantly different from their parents as possible.

I want to believe there already is more acceptance for homosexuality than either Jonah or Richard got from their parents.  I want to believe that both wealthy families and evangelical families are outliers for either too little attention or too many rules respectively.  Lightly mentioned but unresolved are faith communities that are accepting of gay members who are celibate.  Maybe it is too prying to reach a conclusion for everyone who was on an independent spiritual journey between the rise of the Westboro Baptist Church in the late 90s and the federal recognition of same sex marriages in the United States in 2015.  It just seems like a false solution that denies a key part of personal identity and biological and intimacy needs that are not socially conditioned away. To people who live in faith focused communities, Jonah’s arc may make more sense but fall short of a completely satisfactory resolution.

What I identify with the most in this novel is Jonah’s desire to impress a successful person into a productive mentorship or even creative collaboration.  Living in a fame obsessed culture in a capitalist country surrounded by advertising and people’s successes posted on social media, we are absorbing psychological damage to our self worth.  It’s easy to fall into a dream state of thinking you must be happy to be able to be creative.  I still wonder about the balance between pain and joy for people who are actually productive in their creativity.  It’s probably impossible to ever have an equal relationship with someone who intimidates you by always being more professionally accomplished, and if all you know about someone is what they choose to release to reporters, it’s impossible to gauge the true state of their mental health or whether you would be safe in their private company.  Pop culture writing sometimes has a catty and cynical tone, and it wore me down to hear Jonah repeatedly internalising it unto having hollower relationships with the people around him.  I was also saddened by a sidebar mention of child star problems of having early success and early access to alcohol and drugs with better understanding of how to work than how to maintain healthy relationships. We may be sick of cancel culture already, but it seems important to have documented here the currency of attention and the toxic way entertaining lies or hidden true crime stir public outrage and lead the general public to impulsive actions and the cheapening of their relationships with people who are not famous or powerful. 

Harder to endure is the flat othering perspective that it seems gay men have of women in general, though I know I’m not the target audience here.  Other than mothers with control complexes or enabling mothers to take money from, this book has a couple of female enablers who probably know that abuse is happening but don’t want to jeopardise their professional reputation or cut off money from a repeat customer by having Richard investigated.  The healthy relationship Jonah is ignoring with his coworker is connected to an aspiring songwriter who doesn’t have any dialogue but quietly achieves more success in the background than any of the men who are mixing sex and career goals.  It continues to bother me that Jonah casts his mother as equally awful to Richard’s, she shows very little emotional growth when I would have thought she would have been more likely to change than his father, and in the end she is abandoned to the same sort of fulfilment of faith community participation that divided her family.  If she was so willing to finance Jonah’s journey away from her to New York, you would think her final reaction to him and his dad would be more reconciling at the point that Jonah’s father shows growth as a person.

The main lesson in this book, of course, is that recognition comes from your efforts to develop a creative portfolio and business skills to market the work produced.  The substance you bring to a portfolio will outlast any attention seeking stunts or slander of other creators.  I wish, however, that gay men wouldn’t abandon female friends they’re not attracted to as soon as they find a great romantic relationship.  It would be nice to keep a dating free zone for building professional or emotional resilience together in friendship, and I wish it didn’t have to end with college and marriage to romantic partners.  I think whether it’s female friends, church service, or even therapy, cancelling all further contact with an entire group or concept doesn’t build your self worth or resilience.  After the nightmares, the end of Yes, Daddy left me thinking that boundaries can be rebuilt and resilience after bad experiences may be found.  But I’m not sure how many things Jonah cancelled forever.

Who’s it for? Young gay impulsive people who like sex too much maybe.  People who need to spend more time looking at the reality of their party jokes.  Maybe people who thought they had to discard faith entirely to live while gay.  Or people who want to read different perspectives on attention seeking behavior and don’t mind graphic sexual descriptions and toxic relationship examples.  I found a lot to think about, but it was never really for me.

It Never Ends: A Memoir With Nice Memories

Title: It Never Ends: A Memoir With Nice Memories! 

Who's it for?: Best Show fans, Friends of Tom, music geeks, creative underdogs, people who live with depression, New Jersey scene kids of the 80s and 90s, arcade addicts of the 70s

Who made it?: Tom Scharpling

Where is it?: Amazon!

Length: 279 pgs

Radio comic and television writer Tom Scharpling embodies the spirit of New Jersey as he recovers from depression while learning to write for television in tandem with his weekly comedy improv platform show in his comedic memoir.

Tom Scharpling grew up in New Jersey with a family of independent entrepreneurs and access to the New York music scene in the late 1970s through early 90s.  His childhood includes great adventures like setting high scores at pinball, a family court battle against arcade bullies, watching a classmate attempt to score a switchblade in Times Square while going to see Billy Joel in 1983 and even auditioning for The New Monkees! He also worried intensely about his mother’s health and nearly succumbed to depression at the end of high school.  Luckily his life didn’t end there, and he eventually channeled his music obsessions into radio comedy on his weekly platform program, The Best Show on WFMU.  A passion for prank phone calls and rock and roll both indie and hard led to a life changing relationship with punk band Superchunk’s drummer John Wurster and some lively improvised radio comedy like the legendary Rock, Rot, and Rule call about a fake book designed to be the “ultimate argument settler” for music fans.  There’s a lot of heart in his statements about creating and his commitment to trusting his creative instincts in the face of an audience that doesn’t initially understand what he’s trying to do.  At the same time as the platform show, he learned to write humorous content for both The Onion and the entire run of USA’s hit detective show Monk.  There are life lessons on the ethical approach to meeting heroes from encounters with celebrities like Patti Smith, Mickey Dolenz, Adam Sandler, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; some professional weirdness with Papa Roach; and some truly great music videos directed for Yo La Tengo and Aimee Mann by Scharpling himself.  His personal growth feels like an uphill struggle through family illness, fear of mental healthcare and its effects on memory recall, and a codependent fixer mentality. In places there are breaks for garbage food and addiction to gaming machines with even an obsessive knowledge of how to feel broken pinball bumpers and dislodge stuck character cards from a coin pusher game. There’s a horrible car crash on the eve of a horrible president.  Above all, there is Jersey pride throughout in a music trivia genius who always cheers the little guy and overcomes personal tragedy to summon the courage to make his next show a great party for his culture-savvy listeners. 

A lively recharge to affirm sense of purpose for underdogs everywhere.

Naturally Tan (Memoir by Queer Eye's Stylist)

Title Naturally Tan

Who's it for?: Casual fans of Queer Eye, People who nothing about Pakistan or fashion business

Who made it?: Tan France with Caroline Donofrio

Where is it?: Amazon

Length: 304 pgs

The charismatic fashion stylist from the Emmy winning show Queer Eye expounds upon his rise to fame with much heart, words of wisdom, and fashion savvy jois de vivre.

Naturally, Tan France’s memoir includes both mention of Tan’s family background and of fashion retail and styling education. Tan’s grandfather ran a denim factory that inspired Tan’s expertise in clothing construction. Encounters with racism while absorbing colourism in Doncaster, England and Tan’s identity as Pakistani-British and also homosexual led Tan to intern in Utah in the United States where Tan eventually became engaged to Rob France whose art is present throughout this engaging memoir. Their dating stories are sweet and they have a sensible marriage that no doubt keeps a stable home foundation of supporting each other's goals despite the mental health attacks that come naturally with a dual career in fashion and the entertainment industry. Rob always talks Tan down from emotional ledges and is an equal hero in this book beyond their engagement story which proved useful for applying to a reality show.  Being cast as a stylist for reality show Queer Eye is also included, with resulting travel and award show elation when the team won an Emmy. There are fashion do’s and don’ts that transcend shallow fashion magazine articles when combined with dating stories and the design philosophy of blending Mormon and Muslim modesty with British style in designs for Kingdom State and Rachel Parcell. For readers who are not business-oriented, there is a genuinely nice overview to starting Kingdom State and some nice advice on taking interviews and how personal finance changes when one becomes a public figure. More unique to Tan's less common perspective are stories about an early smartphone enabling dating, sweatpants losing an important relationship due to letting self care go, crushes on male Bollywood stars in conflict with family assumptions, and special shoes that went missing after taking a solo trip abroad without telling family members about the risk that travel routinely is to personal safety. Other wild adventures include a past job as an airline steward, quitting a job for LGBTQ Pride, and dressing as Britney Spears for television changing Tan's mind about drag and accepting innate femininity despite a more gendered cultural outlook conditioned in childhood. Most important and poignant is Tan's September 11^th, 2001 essay about irrational stereotyping and racist treatment of Muslim and Sikh Americans following the World Trade Center bombing, and it's sort of a pity the happy ending and ongoing story of Tan's USA citizenship happened the year after this memoir's publication since everyone really should know that the United States still accepts new citizens even in the Trump era after nearly a decade of harassment in airport security exacerbating lazy thinking about the general public's unchecked racial bias and fear.

There are many laughs mixed with calls for empathy in this memoir which contains far deeper, more substantial content than you would expect from a reality television star, let alone most people in fashion.

Sidebar-- it's nice that Tan's humorous cowriter is credited on the book and not a ghostwriter.

Rob Delaney: Survivor. Town crier. Disability-knowing empath. Child creator. Platonic example. Bon vivant. Bandage.

Title:   

Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.

Who's it for?: Comedy fans who appreciate @robdelaney, fans of Catastrophe on TV
Who made it?: Rob Delaney
Where is it?: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081299308X/ref=x_gr_w_glide_bb?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_glide_bb-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=081299308X&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2
Length: 208 pages

I've been following Rob Delaney on Twitter since maybe 2010 and I saw some of the tweets in this book when they dropped or got retweeted, so there's a great "I was THERE, man!" feeling and also some great motivation to write my own book and find a way to fit some of my own tweets in. They are the best microblog time capsules that show how the author thinks and reacts to subjects both topical and timeless.  For reference, these tweets were written during the Obama presidency.

Mr. Delaney's book is so much more than just these intercalary tweet sections between the topical parts, however.  There are twenty great comedic essays about his childhood, travels, recovery from addiction, and transformation into a loving and responsible father who still loves to write jokes.  Despite a near self-destruction, he retains an epic jois de vivre to be envied by people who would have an easier time stopping themselves from bungee jumping off a bridge. 

Though surviving wild oat sowing is not sufficient proof to try any of these stunts at home, Mr. Delaney has been living a vivid life and responsibly explains what was at stake and could have gone worse in the adventures without consequences, and he is bluntly honest about the ones that hurt the most.  He's very lucky to be alive and we as an audience are lucky to get a percentage of his experiences in the reading  to shake ourselves out of mundane existential ennui and depression.

He also spent some time in France studying art and French and theater.  Though some of these stories read like fraternity pranks, Mr. Delaney is sharply intelligent and an emotive illustrator of moments both ephemeral and life-changing.  I think to appreciate his comedy you have to detach yourself from a need to apply the same social rules to everyone.  Also it helps to know that comedians have a tone of voice they use to look at negative subjects at a safer distance than the one in which they have experiences. The tone one uses to tell a joke is not the one used to apologize to parents and teachers or address cops at traffic stops. We have free speech just so we can indulge in theatrical interpretation of important matters and keep our self-worth separate from the theatrics enough to control our own emotions and make the outcomes better for those listening to us.

My favorite part of this book is Mr. Delaney's  literary voice which is similar to his Twitter feed in its  brazen balance between bluntness, devil-may-care optimism, and mock outrage and condemnation toward violations of his actually quite sound ethics system.  In my own comedy writing I sometimes get bogged down in the emotional weight of the subject I want to cover and am so overwhelmed and verklempt I have trouble getting back to the light riffing attitude that comedy needs in order to connect with an audience.  Or I imagine I'm going to be attacked by socially defined people for being too careless with the feelings of sensitive people who aren't even being targeted by the jokes (why do they lurk my head without showing themselves? nobody ever @s me on Twitter to say I'm an insensitive monster but I still have a brutal inner critic that never seems to manifest).  

Mr. Delaney's book probably shouldn't be my writing warmup, but if I'm trapped under a heavy mood or sensing a condemning socially defined lady ghost trying to control me with her pre-emptive psychological constructs, just a few minutes of Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. will leave said ghost gobsmacked and incapable of torturing me any further, since this kind of malevolent spirit is generally too afraid to learn life-saving information about STDs and fecal incontinence and rehab.  It's really the loss of that ghost and her sycophants that they aren't able to use comedy to make these subjects approachable enough to take action on when life happens. Anyway, I feel indebited to Rob Delaney, his book, and also his fun television show Catastrophe for giving me a mix of fun and hard experiences to envision and be prepared for if I ever find myself in closer proximity to them in my life or with friends.


This book is staying on my Kindle for as long as Kindle exists and if that's not my whole life I might buy it again. 

If At Birth You Don't Succeed (don't give up on leaving your parents' house and making a living)

If At Birth You Don't Succeed Who's it for?: Bitter disabled people who need to laugh more, ableists who didn't know they were being ableist
Who made it?: Zach Anner
Where is it?: your local library, hopefully, or http://ifatbirthyoudontsucceed.com/ and Amazon:
Length: 352 pages

Zach Anner is one of the most prominent disabled celebrities who is changing the public image of what being disabled is like.  His autobiography If At Birth You Don’t Succeed jumps around in the first thirty years of his life to present the most interesting moments in the optimistic tone of his comedy. Having had his own TV show on OWN and a few hit web series, Mr. Anner has always connected warmly to everyone he meets while acknowledging his disability but never in a way that garners pity or sadness.  He’s happy and having fun, and why shouldn’t everyone else have fun with him?  Cerebral palsy and a wandering eye may be the first thing some people notice about him, but there are so many more interesting facts to know. This book shares the best public success, then the worst gastrointestinal challenge while in pursuit of that public success, then all the times he found a challenge but just kept rolling along anyway.  The very first thing everyone should know about Zach is that he finds something to be happy about no matter what circumstances he finds himself in, and he can take jokes as well as he makes them.

Zach has made his life’s work about traveling and recording his experiences as a disabled traveler.  Reading his book, it seems like it never occurred to him there was any reason not to travel or that his disability should ever keep him at home.  From an early childhood story of running away from home with intent to meet his celebrity crush Cindy Crawford to his Riding Shotgun webisode about exploring tree villages in Canada, once Zach sets his mind to a travel destination he always finds a way to have a decent adventure.  His brother or friends help him along the way to leave his chair and climb up to the tree village even after a larger public bridge forbids him to cross it.  In another story he road trips to NASA to pilot the Mars rover training simulation.

As a female reader, I did find some of the early chapters tried my patience with Zach’s attitude toward pursuing romance.  His sense of humor with regard to dating comes on very strong, appearance focused, and a bit objectifying to portray girls as potential lays.  (This is true for most of his dating stories though not for his appraisal of the female chef who was the other person in the final round of the OWN network reality show competition.) But he also comes across as sincere and a gentleman who actually does value the feelings of any lady he spends time with.  Once he meets his wife Gillian Grassie, a harpist and singer-songwriter  whose music is beautiful and also worth checking out on YouTube, they travel together for a bit before getting married.  Accessibility barriers don’t stop Zach from attending Gillian’s concert in Germany or visiting her family home, and then she visits Zach in California and they go to Disneyland.    

In the end, I left this book with a feeling that no excuse is good enough for not pursuing your dreams on some level, yet you also have to forgive yourself for imperfections and just roll with whatever punches life throws at you.