Erik the Pink, by Matthew J. Metzger

[Ulysses]

Erik the Pink
By Matthew J. Metzger
JMS Books, 2018
Five Stars


It is somehow assumed that gay men are automatically tuned into understanding what it means to be transgender. We are not. It is just as puzzling and, frankly, terrifying to us as it is to straight people. Sad but true. And that’s why I bought this book. Matthew Metzger is a wonderful writer, and I’ve loved every book of his so far. I bought this book because I thought it might open me up to understanding. It did, indeed; but “Erik the Pink” is also is one of the best-written portraits of a same-sex relationship I’ve ever encountered. It is about intimacy and identity, and how the two are inexorably intertwined.

Erik Lerouge was an abandoned baby who grew up in foster care. Andreas Mão de Ferro is Spanish, and was rejected by his family when he came out to them as transgender. Both of these men have built their own lives and identities in the face of abandonment. Both of them have always dreamed of having a family. Andreas puts off his medical transitioning in order to give birth to his and Erik’s baby, and the book begins with that birth. What it becomes, however, is a remarkable two-sided story of these two men becoming new fathers, even as Andreas deals with the emotional and physical complications of gender dysphoria that are magnified by the process of pregnancy.

This book is not a lecture or a lesson. Metzger draws us into the heads and hearts of both Erik and Andreas. We see them, and inevitably we come to love them. There is no better path to understanding than through love, and Metzger takes us there, a profound gift that left me teary-eyed and happy at the end. I felt I had crossed something of a threshold. I read a great love story, and I changed as a person for having read this.