Sketchtasy

Meet Alexa: a resilient twenty-one-year-old queen who lives without rules or apologies.

Sketchtasy takes placein that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything fallsapart: it's an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queerworld-making in the mid-'90s.

  Thisis Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, anincisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determinednonchalance. Rejecting middle-class pretensions, she negotiates past andpresent traumas with a scathing critique of the world. Drawn to the ecstasy ofdrugged-out escapades, Alexa searches for nourishment in a gay culture bondedby clubs and conformity, willful apathy, and the spectre of AIDS. Is there anyhope for communal care?

  Sketchtasy brings 1990s gay culturestartlingly back to life, as Alexa and her friends grapple with the impact ofgrowing up at a time when desire and death are intertwined. With anintoxicating voice and unruly cadence, this is a shattering, incandescent novelthat conjures the pain and pageantry of struggling to imagine a future.