I, Gloria Grahame
by Sky Gilbert
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Pub Date 2 Nov 2021 | Archive Date 31 Aug 2021
Dundurn Press | Rare Machines
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Description
A professor of English literature writes the autobiography of his fantasy alter-ego, wanton movie star Gloria Grahame, while his own sexual desires go frustrated.
Denton Moulton — a shy, effeminate male professor — lives inside his head, where he is really a long-dead movie star: the glamorous Gloria Grahame, from the golden age of Hollywood. Professor Moulton is desperate to reveal Gloria’s shocking secret before he dies. Does he have the right to tell this woman’s story? Who, in fact, has the right to tell anyone’s story at all?
A scandalous, humorous novel of taboo desires and repression, I, Gloria Grahame alternates between Gloria’s imagined life with her film-director husband, Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, and Denton’s increasingly frustrated real-life attempts to produce his own work of art: an all-male drag production of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The novel takes us from high-strung film sets to dark bars and the puritanical offices of government arts granting agencies, where Denton runs up against the sternest warnings that he may not, in fact, imagine himself as someone else, even in art.
A RARE MACHINES BOOK
Advance Praise
"Brilliant. An important addition to Two-Spirited literature." — Tomson Highway
"Brilliant. An important addition to Two-Spirited literature." — Tomson Highway
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781459748286 |
| PRICE | US$18.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 200 |
Featured Reviews
A. G, Reviewer
I've been requesting several books from the LGBTQIA+ section on Netgalley these past few weeks. As a young queer person, I wanted to read a lot of gay books during Pride month. This, however, is one I wish I'd avoided.
At its core, this is a book about appropriation and isolation. In this story, an ageing cis gay professor named Denton Moulton escapes his mundane, lonely life by daydreaming that he is a glamorous Old Hollywood star named Gloria Grahame. The narrative is split between Moulton's point of view, and the viewpoint of Moulton as Gloria. I thought this would be an interesting read, but I was wrong.
Gloria feels like a caricature of a woman because she is imagined by a man. Though he is gay and in touch with his femininity, Moulton is still a cis man; thus, he sees Gloria through a male perspective. He cannot help objectifying her in his fantasies. To him, she is a costume. We are reminded of this throughout the text. The professor is asked if he's trans, and denies it, so it's not as though he is a closeted trans woman.
I didn't like the way this novel seemed to mock people who call out the appropriation of Indigenous culture and two-spirit individuals. It also felt transphobic at times. There is a whole plot point where the professor isn't allowed to produce a play because he's not 'diverse' enough as a cis white gay man (79-83). Then, the protagonist pretends he is a Black man and immediately gets approved to stage his play. This idea is adjacent to a popular right-wing talking point. It perpetuates the idea that marginalized people get things handed to them because of diversity quotas. Not only is this untrue, but it's also harmful because it portrays oppressed individuals as having some sort of privilege. It's a scenario that just doesn't happen in real life, and it's something that privileged people imagine happening, so they can victimize themselves and call out 'diversity' practices in workspaces. I did a bit of research on the author, Sky Gilbert, and discovered that he has a transphobic past. As a result, I'm not surprised that these sentiments have crept into his work.
