skygiants

One of the many things that Aster Glenn Gray is consistently fantastic at, when writing historical queer romance, is immersing herself and the reader in characters whose cultural and contextual views simply don't map to those of the present; her latest Tramps and Vagabonds is another simply spectacular example of this.

In this one, it's the Great Depression, and twenty-year-old orphan protagonist James has been riding the rails for years out of necessity. After an unusually stable summer at a Civilian Conservation Corps, he sets off again with his new friend Timothy, who asks if James can take him along with him on the road for a while -- ostensibly to ease the stress on his struggling family, but in fact, as it rapidly becomes clear to the reader, because Timothy not only has a huge crush on James, but also already knows and recognizes himself as queer, and is hoping the outsider society of the road will provide a way to live a kind of life and form a kind of relationship that's simply not possible at home.

Unfortunately for Timothy, it turns out that the road has its own, different but equally set rules about sexuality, and James is an expert on survival in every respect: he's more than happy to fool around with his buddy Tim, but he also takes it as his responsibility to take him under his wing and teach him the ropes, and not following the rules that keep you respectable in the eyes of other tramps is one of many, many ways to die on the road.

Which, for the record, is another thing that Aster is really and consistently good at: this book, like many of her others but especially I think The Larks Still Bravely Singing, is really good at balancing extremely charming slice-of-life relationship-building with largely internal tension against a matter-of-fact presentation of relatively grim realities. Timothy and James often have quite a lovely time on the road -- they ride Ferris wheels and camp out under the stars and talk about books and their dreams -- and, also, they frequently go hungry, and get beaten up by cops, and face choices about transactional sex, and are shadowed every day by the awareness that in many ways their life is simply unsustainable; it's absolutely not an unrelenting misery-bucket but it's also not sugar-coated either, and the end result is a story that feels really satisfying and real.