Jonathan Alexander WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM | GOOD READS
The Creep Trilogy & Podcast WEBSITE
Contact Andy Reynolds at andy@popularpublicity.com
BOOK TITLES INFO & EXCERPTS (tap links)
“Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir” (March 15, 2022, Acre Books)
“Stroke Book: Diary of a Blindspot” (October 26, 2021, Punctum Books)
“Bullied: The Story of an Abuse” (November 4, 2021, Fordham University Press)
IMAGES
DOWNLOAD “Stroke Book,” “Bullied,” “Dear Queer Self” covers + author photos.
PRESS RELEASES/NEWS
05.04.22: “Bullied” wins IPPY 2022 Gold Award for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction
05.02.22: Photos from “Queer Memoir Matters: Jonathan Alexander & Myriam Gurba at Page Against The Machine” in Long Beach, CA April 28
04.07.22: Jonathan Alexander Foreword Face-Off interview.
03.17.22: “Dear Queer Self” is Foreword Review’s Book of the Day
03.11.22: Queer author Jonathan Alexander says he understands—but does not condone—Smollett’s alleged actions
02.09.22: DEAR QUEER SELF author: I wish I knew now what I knew then!
01.27.22: Jonathan Alexander discusses “Dear Queer Self” on Matt Baume’s brilliant “The Sewers of Paris” podcast. Listen.
10.26.21: Being Queer Is Everything! (That you “just happen to be” LGBTQ is a Lie.) Author asks, what stories do we tell ourselves to survive our queerness?
10.26.21: NYC, LA Events for Jonathan Alexander
09.30.21: Author Jonathan Alexander Makes Lambda Literary October’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Books List
09.23.21: The Queer Time Warp & 5 Ways Queerness + Age = Power
09.10.21: 10 Reasons All Queers Are Creeps (and why that’s a good thing)
EVENTS
06.16.22: Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, NYC with Jonathan Alexander and Edmund White. TBC.
06.14.22: Frenchmen Art and Books, New Orleans. Details TBA.
06.07.22: Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd. West Hollywood. 7 p.m. with Jonathan Alexander
04.28.22: Page Against The Machine, Long Beach, CA. 7 p.m. Book event with Jonathan Alexander and writer and artist, Myriam Gurba. See Jonathan’s interview with Myriam for his “Writing Sex” series for the Los Angeles Review of Books here.
03.22.22: Mercantile Library, Cincinnati. 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. Free. Dear Queer Self Book Launch. with Jonathan Alexander and publisher Acre Books is based in Cincinnati.
11.09.21: UCI Illuminations (University of California, Irvine (Zoom event) Faculty Book Talk Featuring Author and Professor Jonathan Alexander (5 p.m.- 6 p.m. PST / 8 p.m.– 9 p.m. EST)
11.04.21: Book Event – Bureau of General Services–Queer Division presents “”Cruising into Age—Getting Older Queerly” with Jonathan Alexander and Alex Espinoza
10.27.21: Skylight Book/Skylit Podcast w/Jonathan Alexander and Julietta Singh
Text below is from the “Being Queer is Everything!” press release. View/download the Word/PDF/plain text without images/videos here.
Being Queer is Everything!
(That you “just happen to be” Gay is a Lie.)
Author asks, what stories do we tell ourselves to survive our queerness?
“One of our finest essayists.” – Tom Lutz, founding editor, Los Angeles Review of Books
For author Jonathan Alexander, the claim that one “just happens to be” lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender is a lie, a dismissive denial of the core queerness which is as much a part of who we are as our gender or skin color. Being queer is everything. It is the prism through which we perceive, imagine, and at times obfuscate our experienced reality.
In Fall 2021, Alexander published “Bullied,” the second book in “The Creep Trilogy,” as well as “Stroke Book.” These titles constitute the latest in a series of creative nonfiction memoirs in which he grapples with how our relationship to our own pasts is always changing, how time is experienced differently by queer people, and how our identities continue to form and reform with new relationships, new experiences, and shifting political realities.
Alexander’s Creep Trilogy consists of “Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology” (2017, Punctum Books), “Bullied: The Story of an Abuse” (November 4, 2021, Punctum Books) and “Dear Queer Self” (March 15, 2022, Acre Books).
“Creep: A Life, A Theory, An Apology,” a Lambda Literary Award finalist, is Alexander’s often humorous dive into owning one’s otherness, one’s queerness and making friends with one’s inner creep. “We’re all creeps, but much of that creepiness is a manifestation of the thwarted desire to know others,” he says. “We are curious about each other, but our culture has withdrawn the tools to approach each other openly and with interest. People are so unused to engaging strangers face-to-face, that what was once an innocent glance, hello or compliment is now questioned as creepy.” (“Creep” is also available as an 8-part podcast, accessible through the “The Creep Trilogy” website and on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts.)
“Bullied: The Story of an Abuse” probes the legacies of homophobic violence experienced by Alexander growing up in the Deep South of the 1980s and looks at how the pressure of being queer inescapably and fundamentally shapes our lives and the stories we tell ourselves to make our queerness bearable. Alexander reflects on a host of other oddly but intimately related topics, from drug abuse, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, and cruising to MAGA-capped boys and why Jussie Smollett may have staged his own homophobic attack. (“I don’t condone it. But I get it.”) We are our experiences, even those we imagined. But what happens when what you thought was the defining moment of your life–in Alexander’s case, sexual abuse by an uncle, which he blamed for his queerness–might be a figment of your imagination? How does one deal with the evaporation of a lie of one’s own making?
Winner 2022 IPPY Gold Award for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction
“Bullied” Comparisons
Maggie Nelson’s “The Argonauts” mixes theory and personal narrative, much like Alexander, to confront the complexities of living a queer life. Hilton Als’ “White Girls” offers a series of essays tackling the vexed racial and sexual subjectivists of its authors, comparable to the way in which Alexander grapples with the legacies of homophobic abuse and the temptation to tell untrue stories to exonerate himself from being queer. And Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Humiliation,” much like Alexander’s Bullied, blends personal narrative and theoretical and philosophical insights to investigate what it means to adopt — and come to love, however perversely — a self that one was taught to hate.
“Dear Queer Self,” published March 15, 2022, is a love letter written by Alexander, a gay middle-aged man to his youthful self, struggling to find a way to live and love as a young man who believed he had been sexually abused—when, in reality, what he was mostly struggling with was the self-hatred instilled by an insidiously homophobic culture. “We’re all still working on life,” he says, reflecting. “For queer people, it doesn’t necessary ‘get better,’ but viewed through our experiences, it does get richer. We learn to appreciate our complexity, our density.”
“I can’t recall the last time I was so moved as I was while reading Dear Queer Self. With unvarnished frankness, Jonathan Alexander pens these letters to his younger queer self about the messy borders that exist between love and obsession, loneliness and acceptance, during moments in history marked by uncertainty and upheaval. What emerges is a striking account of the ways we draw strength from tragedy and learn to face our past transgressions with equal parts humor and resilience.” — Alex Espinoza, author of Author (Still Water Saints, The Five Acts of Diego León, and Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime).
Accompanying the Creep Trilogy, and also to be published this Fall, is “Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot” (October 26, 2021, Fordham University Press). In the aftermath of an unexpected medical crisis—a minor stroke—Alexander considers how a lifetime in a society still toxic to queer people (recounted in “Bullied”) has impacted his health as well as his perception of queer time. Untethered to the markers of heteronormative life (marriage, birth of a child, raising kids, grandchildren), how do we queers experience time? Our aging bodies?
“Stroke Book” Comparisons
Patrick Anderson’s “Autobiography Of A Disease” deals with a similar medical crisis and the author’s attempt to understand it in the context of his life. Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s “Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life” recounts its authors handling of an unexpected stroke, particularly in relation to cultural issues as a Korean American, in much that same way that Alexander contextualizes his stroke as a gay man. And Herve Guibert’s “To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” recounts in fragmented form, much like Alexander’s, the trauma and possibility of confronting one’s mortality, Guibert from AIDS, Alexander from a stroke.
While all four books are memoirs, the pervasive questions raised are universal, particularly within the multifaceted universe that is queer life. Who do you think you are? How do you know? What stories, what lies, do we tell ourselves to survive our queerness? Does time feel differently for you as a queer person? And what does it all add up to?
About Jonathan Alexander
Jonathan Alexander is a writer living in Southern California where he is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, co-author, or editor of twenty-one books. His cultural journalism has been widely published, especially in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) for which he is the Special Projects Editor. He is also the host of LARB’s “Writing Sex,” a YouTube series of short interviews with contemporary writers on sex and sexuality. (Previous guests include Garth Greenwell, Andre Aciman, and Dennis Cooper.) LARB founding editor Tom Lutz has called Alexander one of “our finest essayists.” He lives with his husband and cat, and when not writing, dabbles in watercolors and plays piano in a music ensemble with friends. For more about Jonathan Alexander and his books please visit www.thecreeptrilogy.com and www.the-blank-page.com.
While Jonathan Alexander’s books are available at the major online retailers, we strongly urge readers to support their favorite queer and independent bookstores, such as the Bureau of General Serviced–Queer Division in New York and Skylight Books in Los Angeles, both of which are supporting Jonathan with online events in November. Check “56 LGBTQ-Owned Bookstores You Can Be Proud to Support” (organized by state) from Oprah Daily to find a queer book shop near you.
Review copies available on request at andy@popularpublicity.com.
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