Terry Dactyl
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, ranging from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.
Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.
Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.
In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sycamore (Touching the Art) spins a shimmering tale of art, drugs, and friendship spanning from the AIDS crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic. The reader first meets Terry, a young "coked up" trans woman new to New York City, in the early 1990s, when she's dancing at the Limelight. That night, she joins a group of club kids on a trek to the Hudson River, to spread the ashes of their friend who died of AIDS. Several years later, Terry wanders into an art gallery high on ecstasy and dressed all in pink. The gallery owner, Sabine Roth, has been looking for an assistant with a connection to the nightlife scene, and she hires Terry on the spot. What follows is a whirlwind of parties and exhibitions set against the continuous loss of friends and lovers from AIDS. By the time Terry is middle-aged and back in her hometown of Seattle, a new pandemic has begun, and she joins in the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches. With Terry, Sycamore has crafted an arresting voice, equal parts youthful energy and hard-won wisdom, that swerves from offhanded aphorisms to lyrical images: "Yes, the best way to dance is with a broken heart. A dead leaf flying through the air like a butterfly." It's indelible.
