From the Bookshelf of Queereaders…

The Creamsickle

Rhiannon Argo

Why we're reading this: I love books that have San Francisco references, plus the skater grrls/bois are cute.
[close] I love books that have San Francisco references, plus the skater grrls/bois are cute.

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Jun 23, 2009 Faith Reidenbach rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-queer-fiction

It’s unusual to encounter literary lesbian fiction that's also a guilty pleasure, but both terms apply fairly to this book. The Creamsickle itself is full of trash--it's an unheated, lopsided flophouse in the Mission district of San Francisco that has an "ever-revolving door." Over the years, it’s been occupied by revolutionaries, "hippie fags and fairies," grunge lesbians, and now The Crew, three 20-something skateboarding bois who have made the house their "ultimate bachelor pad." Their proces It’s unusual to encounter literary lesbian fiction that's also a guilty pleasure, but both terms apply fairly to this book. The Creamsickle itself is full of trash--it's an unheated, lopsided flophouse in the Mission district of San Francisco that has an "ever-revolving door." Over the years, it’s been occupied by revolutionaries, "hippie fags and fairies," grunge lesbians, and now The Crew, three 20-something skateboarding bois who have made the house their "ultimate bachelor pad." Their procession of lovers are not mere lipsticks lesbians but "fierce girls," the "tough bunch of femmes with razor heels and sharp tongues" who can handle the neighborhood. The novel is more about queer family--creating it and maintaining it--than about individual relationships, and the house plays a Mansfield Park-like role in the story.

Poetry-loving Georgie is the most romantic and also the most sensible of the three bois. We meet her when she’s lovesick over a heroin-addicted girl, but she’s smart and strong enough to move on soon. She makes wise-beyond-her-years observations about herself and her friends, often wry or hilarious, like this one that made me LOL heartily in recognition (of myself and a previous partner): "Soda was the ultimate subletter of hearts......the first three months Soda was the best live-in lover a girl could possibly have. She usually didn’t have a job so whatever girl she was currently fucking became her part-time employment. Girls would try to promote her to full time or permanent status, but she made sure to keep herself at entry level." Georgie’s literal transformation in the novel comes when, unemployed and broke, she adopts an outwardly femme identity and warily takes a job dancing in a strip club.

People in my demographic (50-ish, suburbanite) may need to read this novel with a cyberdictionary of urban slang and a cyberglossary of skateboarding terms at hand. The effort was worth it to me in order to get inside a world of young queer women who divide themselves into bois and girls, tops and bottoms—except when they don’t. Georgie sets a good example for readers in acknowledging that she doesn’t understand all the family dynamics, notably the feelings of my favorite character, a friend of hers who is considering transitioning (becoming more fully biologically male). I appreciated her discussions with that friend and from other characters who have conversations along the lines of "I don’t get dating a transboy. I mean, what’s the difference from a man?"

Most of these characters are working poor and are just getting launched in life. For example, the official end of Georgie’s relationships is simply "the divvying up of the sex toys," and in an 8-speaker argument about same-sex marriage, no one comes close to imagining why most older couples want it. But the only thing that made me feel apart from the characters was their constant alcohol and drug abuse, which after a while just seems sad and boring. Georgie is not an addict, though, and she relieves the irritation with self-aware comments like "I find a direct link to the amount of coke everyone is doing to how dramatic they all are being."

Argo avoids all the mistakes that too many lesbian writers make with regard to sex—-saving it for one or two dramatic scenes, only alluding to it, describing it almost clinically, or ignoring it altogether. References to sex start on page 1, and Argo often covers a lot of ground in a single sentence that contains the verb fuck. The book’s only major flaw is disjointedness. Some of it reads like performance pieces or stories strung together, with characters appearing on the scene and leaving again with no strong narrative thread. However, this didn’t keep me from staying keenly interested in what happens to the 3 main characters and to the house. ...more

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Aug 30, 2009 Larry-bob Roberts rated it really liked it

Shelves: queer

Evocative of the churn of dot-com era queer San Francisco, the book focuses on the lives of queer skate punks (originally dyke-identified, though in some cases that changes) moving through a house in the Mission. The main point of view character undergoes a transformation from butch skater to reluctantly femme stripper. Though the names have been changed for the most part, a San Franciscan familiar with the milieu can recognize the bars and strip clubs mentioned.

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