Title: Pulling Taffy Author: Matt Bernstein Sycamore Publisher: Suspect Thoughts Press Publish Date: February 2003 Pages: 224 Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Pulling Taffy is a book about survival: surviving abuse, yes, but mostly surviving life. It’s a book about being young and queer and thoroughly oneself: it’s about the refusal to capitulate to society’s demands of normalcy. “Sometimes I think I’m a ’70s lesbian feminist,” the protagonist says, and it’s an apt point: for Matt, a.k.a Mattilda, the personal is the political. Which isn’t to say that this book takes itself too seriously: it’s a sex-and-drug-filled romp through one city after another, a whirlwind life told in equally fast-paced prose that manages to be clever and funny and touching all at once.

When we first meet Matt, he’s in Boston, celebrating a friend’s negative HIV test results, getting harassed on the T for his dyed hair and too-queeny appearance, and catching up with his grandmothers (who “love everything about Boston except for the homeless people” and tell Matt that he shouldn’t be hustling). “Why can’t you be a normal homosexual?”they ask, but Matt has no patience for assimilation. (He dresses in drag, but only sometimes, causes fusses in clubs and magazine stores, and hangs out with an assortment of queers, including drag queens who he refers to in one sentence as “he” and in the next as “she,” and leather dykes who like to dance dirty with fags, to give just a few examples of the way Matt likes pushing boundaries and refusing to be predictable.) We proceed to follow Matt from Boston to Seattle to New York, into a world of backroom sex clubs, guys jerking each other off in parks, grimy walk-ups where drug-dealers live, and the posh apartments of Matt’s tricks. As the scenery changes and we’re introduced to one group of bar-hopping friends after another, Matt’s voice and presence keep the story grounded, even though he himself is often freaking out.

The way Matt narrates his life is what makes this book a stand-out: it’s not the story that’s so spectacular, but the way that it’s told. Matt’s got this perpetual sense of perspective, an awareness of absurdity, whether it’s the world’s or his own. Matt-as-narrator and Matt Bernstein Sycamore as author have an amazing eye for detail and a willingness to present life in all its realness: including all the little breakdowns and overanalyzing and second-guessing that fill our lives, but that we’d maybe like to forget about. In one scene, describing the way he’s agonizing over whether to go clubbing or stay home and snort herbal energy pills, Matt says, “I have this big silent drama about the herbal energy pills [...] I throw the pills out the window and it feels good, though why does everything have to be such a fucking battle?” Later, laughing as he and several other diners sing along to “Lean On Me,” he says, “and I’m happy and that’s all, it’s moments like these that save me.” And ultimately that’s what it’s about, saving oneself, not letting anyone else do it for you, finding some euphoria to balance out the panics and shitty days, and this book captures it near perfectly.