Mean Boys
A Personal History
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"An intellectually vivid and curious collection that refuses to find simple answers to its complex questions."-NPR Books We Love
"This book is a rare comfort, a companion . . . Makes you say: yes, that is exactly how it is."-Torrey Peters
A ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present.
You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our society: an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril.
In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging. Fusing personal essay and cultural critique, Mean Boys investigates exile and return, transgression and forgiveness, and the value of faith, empathy, and friendship in a world designed to make us want what is bad for us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spike magazine editor Mak debuts with an intellectually rigorous memoir-in-essays that pairs reflections on his difficult sexual coming-of-age with sharp musings on the digital era. Growing up gay and Asian in Southern California during the 1990s and 2000s, Mak struggled to fit in. He came out to his family at 29, and was rejected by his evangelical parents, who refused to accept that he wasn't straight. Struggling with feelings of inferiority, Mak moved to Berlin and threw himself into the city's druggy, sex-driven club culture. For years, he prayed at the altar of cool, aspiring to be part of something akin to Andy Warhol's Factory. Instead, he found self-loathing and addiction, and eventually returned home to treat "unspecified psychosis." In "My Father, the Minister," Mak recounts his father's eventual contrition for rejecting his homosexuality, and compares cruising bars to church, with "gods in all those saunas and sex clubs who had fallen short of the glory." In the title essay, he analyzes Norwegian bomber and mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik's manifesto and finds uncomfortable parallels to his own personal insecurity and desire to align himself with whiteness. Throughout, Mak delves into the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, online fashion magazines, and myriad other corners of internet culture to illustrate the contemporary obsessions with status and belonging that have long plagued him. By turns heartbreaking, enlightening, and frenzied, this burrows deep in the reader's psyche and doesn't let go.
