The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Sparkle: The Queerest Book You’ll Ever Love
By Rob Rosen
Fierce Publishing, 2011
Five Stars

This is a comic – yet poignant – saga of gay life in the 1990s. This is Rob Rosen at his cleverest, giddiest, and most vivid. Although there are typical lapses in grammar (me, I, PLEASE!) and consistent choices of wrong words (sachet for sashay, e.g.), I loved every page of this book and was sorry to see it end.

Bruce Miller is our narrator, and he is at the hospital bedside of his friend Sparkle (aka William Astan), who has been shot and lies in a coma. Bruce – known by Sparkle as Secret – tells us all how we got to this point, as if we’re a friend who dropped by. Sparkle, he tells us, had lots of enemies, so finding out who might have shot him will be no easy task. Then Bruce/Secret launches into the whole story, from the moment he met William Astan in 1991, eight years earlier, and they became friends.

What is revealed, in slightly hysterical increments over the many brief, camply-titled chapters, is that Sparkle is more than the arrogant, selfish, mean queen he seems to be. There is a reason he and Bruce become friends and stay friends in spite of everything that happens. With the telling of the adventures of Sparkle and Secret, both men in their very early twenties, we learn a great deal about gay life in San Francisco (and in America) in the 1990s. It is a far cry from my own gay life in the suburban East at the same time, but captures the essence of truth, good and bad. I admit to being puzzled by the fact that AIDS is not mentioned even once – although people were still dying and longterm survival of the virus was still far from typical. This stems from the real-life fact that Rosen himself didn’t move to San Francisco until later on and is probably fifteen years my junior. His experience of AIDS would be entirely different from mine. So, I had to put that qualm aside and just roll with the narrative, which moves quickly and kept me chortling until the very last page.

This is a funny, engaging and heartfelt book. Rosen is an uneven author, but when he’s at his best he…sparkles.