I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear

by Sean DeLear, Brontez Purnell (Introduction), Michael Bullock (Editor)

A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA’s most influential artists of subsequent decades.

When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered—among other treasures—an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn.

DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis.

DeLear’s forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, “It wasn’t cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren’t even in the vocabulary.” I Could Not Believe It , Padilla continues, “is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid’s journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It’s not cognizant of being literature. It’s as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn’t written with the desire to be published so Sean didn’t hold back. Sean’s goal was to be true to himself.”

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Memoir, Gay

216 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2023

Reviews

[levitations]

not the kind of book one rates as it is not a book much in the literary sense, but a diary, a private confession to oneself. I read this on the bus and on the train, at the kitchen table over tea, and on benches waiting for lyfts, consumed it as though it were a packet of M&Ms, wishing I could slow down and accord to each line my eyes fell on the weight of the event that it described—a shift at McDonalds, a hookup in a bowling alley bathroom, a night's sleep behind a bush—but I found Sean’s life so addicting in its quickness, it seemed I was rightly gaining something in not reading it so fastidiously. It’s a question I ask myself all the time as a journal-keeper in different ways, and in different words: how quickly to read it, how quickly it should read, how not to lose the beauty in the speed. I would love to, for example, read this an entry a day, day for day, running the line of Sean’s life parallel to mine so as to feel the days and months that passed in and between entries. Maybe next year starting where his diary starts, the first of January, I will. It’s the kind of work one never finishes reading or wondering about, as it’s, like any diary, inevitably circumstantial and wears its quotidian shackles unlike a novel, which demands greater mobility from an author, thus harsher adaptations. With a journal, one never really knows why they wrote this line or that line that way. Maybe they only had the language or time to account for half the day they had, and maybe they were dead tired and even misremembered that half. I was reading for those moments of ambiguity and slips in the language, many of which I couldn't crack and had to abandon. It was a privilege anyhow to have had this and learned about Sean in his own words. My curiosity about them, having only finished the book some hours ago in a TSA line, spills over all the more.

[Zuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

im nosy so this was great

[Benjamin Priday · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am not hyperbolizing when I say this is the worst book I have ever read. There was simply no point.

[Jooee Karwande · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think before reading this book you need to ask yourself if you already know who Sean DeLear is and if you care about this person enough to read their raw, unedited, non-annotated 13/14 yr old self's thoughts.

[Emelie Olofsson]

Det är en dagbok och inte en speciellt litterär sådan. Den är repetitiv på ett sätt som är både indragande och trist. Sean De var så otroligt ung när han skrev den och eftersom den är utgiven efter hans död känns det nästan som att överskrida hans gränser att läsa den. Det är ett intressant dokument över en tid och en plats och en version av ungdom. Han är både väldigt ung och väldigt vuxen på samma gång och trots att han skriver varje dag under ett helt år känns han märkligt distanserad. Han beskriver (sina många) sexuella eskapader så nonchalant och verkar samtidigt törsta efter att bli sedd och bekräftad.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Een mooi tijdsdocument, maar het blijft een dagboek van een tiener. Niet erg spannend.

[Kamille · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like it so bad but it’s literally a diary of unprovoking thoughts 😭

[Alvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sean De had a very distinctive laugh, long and low and utterly unlike anyone else's. I was only lucky enough to meet him a few times, and this was decades ago, but I can still hear that laugh. Of course I adored him. The way he floated through a room with the grace of a runway model! The way he could crack jokes without saying a word! The outré fashion sense! Star quality. A total delight. That person was, alas, not the author of these diaries.

These are the writings of a sexually precocious outlaw wild child. They're annoyingly repetitive as well as completely lacking in physical description, clarity of style, and explanatory context. What they do have is raw honesty - naked id on the page. That makes them psychologically interesting. They also exemplify a non-untypical queer coming-of-age during that strange era between Stonewall and AIDS when polymorphous perversity was blossoming in the cities, but the suburbs were still bastions of squareness. That makes them historically interesting. Ultimately, they left me feeling wistful because the world Sean De (and I) grew up in is Gone with The Wind.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was honestly shocked at how sexually active DeLear was at such a young age - and how dangerously he lived. He has his brushes with the law, but how did he not contract a horrible STD? (Unless this wasn't revealed in the diary.)

If you're looking for more of a fictional narrative here - complete with a character arc - this book will disappoint you. It DOES convey a truly lost soul, though, and that moved me. I also appreciated the specific shoutouts to buying disco records, roller skating and velour shirts!

3.5 stars.

[James H · Rating 3 out of 5]

For what this book was, a posthumously published diary of the 14 year old Sean Delear, it was an interesting insight into the nascient person who became the humongous personality and presence that Sean Delear was. As a read is was a redundant and mundane experience of a very sexual, horn 14 year old.

[Edward Amato · Rating 4 out of 5]

I meant to review this as it was very different. First off; a warning! This book is as shocking as Anne Rice's Beauty series with outrageous sexual escapades. For a complete review of content I do not think is the proper venue and, instead, refer to Pornhub. This is definitely not a book for everyone given the content. It was also written by a 14–15-year-old, who probably never intended it to be published.
What I appreciated about this book, especially after reading the epilog by his friends who published this is that it reveals the voice of a gay generation that not just decimated but annihilated by HIV. Truly, it is a miracle that Sean DeLear survived to be as old as he was before his death of cancer in Vienna.
I am intrigued by his performance art and am looking forward to researching it more.

[Tamara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think the issue of sex addiction should be ignored merely in the face of queer acceptance

[Josh Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somebody give this kid a waterbed!

[KearaReads · Rating 1 out of 5]

I simply had to dnf this book .. idk I wanted to like it but it just was not for me at all…

[Siggy · Rating 2 out of 5]

im glad this out there as a resource. Did I enjoy reading this not really