GLR July-August 2025

minish his temptations and keep him safe from the draw of liv ing a gay life. “I thought of myself as a straight guy. Normal,” he lies to himself. Nearly as soon as he starts to settle in the rural community, he begins meeting one gay man after another, men in varying degrees of “outness.” The older man who owns the lodge where Jason lives is gay (his wife, who hates sex, knows this and ap proves) and often has weekend parties of six to twelve men at the lodge; Jason has sex with two of them. This kind of thing goes on for a while, until at last he meets a young man at yet an other party with whom he connects not just sexually but on many levels. Eric is a young, athletic biracial man (Korean mother, African-American father) who loves Jason deeply. But after months of a truly great, mutually rewarding relationship, Jason, resolving to be “normal,” leaves Eric and takes up with a woman named Debra, who gets him to move to Nashville with her. A year later, around the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 (and possibly inspired by it), and having been dumped by Debra, he resolves to go back to Eric in Cumberland and give gay life a try. There is much to praise in Spang’s book. For instance, his characters are almost all finely drawn, especially Jason. And the journal entries that Jason writes, reflecting his inner tur moil, are quite good. “I came here to live off the grid,” he muses. “I thought that maybe, to shed my dystonic feelings and quell the rumblings of desire, a far away place would give me a reprieve … but for me getting away from my fears has turned out to be the opposite of what I intended. I find myself im mersed in gay life.” Jason has a lot of faults, but lack of self awareness is not one of them. There are also problems with this book, starting with its plausibility. I lived in West Virginia for the first 27 years of my life. If there is any part of the state that can be considered so phisticated or urbane, it’s Morgantown, the home of WVU. In all those years, and despite six years spent in the English and Drama Departments from 1970 to 1977, I met only two other gay men. For me, that makes Jason’s being “immersed in gay life” quite a stretch. I suppose it’s possible, but I never found this life. Also problematic, for me at least: I understand Jason’s con fusion about his sexuality, but his never-ending “sampling”— try a woman this week, a man the next, and back again—gets repetitive and even boring. And I think if Jason had used the word “normal” to mean “not gay” one more time, I would have thrown the book into the recycling bin! Add to that, River Crossed is riddled with the kinds of errors that a competent ed itor or proofreader should have caught. A very small sampling: “He all clinked our glasses”; “would do just what as it was de signed to do”; “of how I given it”; “types of men who might such as soon”; “to the to discover”; “did, indeed, connected us”; “but she tickets already”; “I tried to justified”; and so on. Such mistakes are distracting and tend to take the reader out of the narrative. All that said, if you can overlook these shortcomings, and if you’re a fan of coming-out stories, there is enough to enjoy in River Crossed to make it worth your while. _______________________________________________________ Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most re cently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. 44

An Outsider Looks Inward

N ILADRI C HATTERJEE

WALK LIKE A GIRL: A Memoir by Prabal Gurung Viking. 320 pages, $32. F ASHION DESIGNER Prabal Gurung is only 46 years old: too young, one may think, to merit a memoir. And yet, in less than half a century he has experienced enough emotional and professional highs and lows to put any roller coaster to shame. His name, according to Gurung, means “the strongest one.” In my native tongue, Bengali, “prabal” means “powerful” or “intense.” What these meanings have in common is the sense of power, and that power is palpable in his memoir, Walk Like a Girl . In the foreword, he addresses the difficulty Americans have in pronouncing his name: “Do you have a nickname? Can we call you P or PG?” “No,” he protests, “My name is Prabal. Like ‘trouble’ with a P.” “Trouble” crops up at least six times in the first few chapters, before disappearing from the text, but Prabal continues to make trouble—one could say “necessary trou ble”—all through the memoir, causing discomfort to homo phobes, racists, conservative arbiters of taste in the fashion world, and his father. Slowly and quietly, Prabal navigates the choppy waters of life with a grit worthy of his extraordinary mother and ever-supportive siblings. At times, the memoir reads like Shyam Selvadurai’s loosely autobiographical novel FunnyBoy , especially when he talks of dressing up in his mother’s clothes, much to the disapproval of his father. His mother, Durga Rana, makes an early appearance in the narrative and stays, reassuringly, until the end. The reader sees the calm defiance of her character when she walks in on lit tle Prabal trying to apply lipstick. She takes charge, applies the lipstick properly, and says: “It’s okay, leave it on. You look beautiful.” An average mom she ain’t. While born in Singapore, where his father worked, Prabal moved to Nepal as a child and found out in school that his com portment was regarded as feminine and thus troublesome. At boarding school, he was subjected to hazing, and—at the hands of a teacher—sexual abuse. But what makes the narration of the incident troublingly honest, and therefore powerful, are his feel ings of being both scared and aroused. Many who have been sexually abused would recognize this confusion. At this time, he was also watching American television and poring over U.S. magazines, which gave him a taste of what life might be like in the country where he would eventually become a citizen. But before that he spent time in Delhi and Mumbai, India, where he observed that homophobia was combined with racism. But it was also in India that he got his first glimpse of the world of gay parties. He witnessed the hypocrisy of fashion designers who are on the surface rebellious and iconoclastic while simultaneously being classist and disparaging of people who don’t speak English well. In India he fell in love and had his heart broken by a young man called Abhiyaan (meaning

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