The Creamsickle

by Rhiannon Argo

Meet The Crew. Georgie--a hopeless romantic with a weakness for punk-rock-girls even if they consistently trample her heart. Cruzer--a Mexican-American photographer, the tough kid, who chases love all the way to the East Coast. Soda--a gender queer heartthrob from the Midwest, who dreams of pirate ships, moustaches and femme foxes. Welcome to The Creamsickle, the ultimate bachelor pad, a lopsided Victorian in the Mission District, home to this rascally crew of charming skater bois who hop from one bed to another in pursuit of sex, love or just the next new thrill. This is a San Francisco you have never seen, an eclectic landscape of dyke clubs and dyke havens, along with the exotic Minxy, a wonderland where baby butch Georgie enters the femme-centric world of strippers for the most comical gender-bending education of all. Discover today's world of young queers, a world where personal identity is in constant flux, where gender exploration can be performance--or a life saving transition. Beneath the sex, music, drugs and drama, you'll find something true and a search for love, for queer family, for meaning, for connection, and affirmation.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Lesbian, Queer Lit, Graphic Novels, Gay

287 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 17, 2009

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pros:
-a person of color who isn't an obnoxious racist stereotype
-mentions of queer history through the house
-commentary on gentrification, cops, and other things Gay Inc and the HRC set don't want queers to talk about

Cons:
-dyke drama and sexcapade navel gazing (I could have just gotten that for free from my friends and roommates)
-butch bois unironically doing the same misogynistic shit as hetero dudebros without any serious critique or challenges to their behavior (even when the author provides the opportunities)
-static and shallow main character
-the only character who points out that trans men are men gets shot down

I would have liked the book better had Argo focused more on the house and the history of the people who lived there through the decades but I realize that would have been a very different book. I just couldn't get invested enough in these characters to enjoy the book.

[Ciara · Rating 2 out of 5]

to be fair, this is probably more of a 2.5, & my rating is extremely subjective. as far as my personal tastes go, this book was just okay, because i am not especially interested in the life & times of queer skater "bois" living in a ramshackle victorian in san francisco at some indeterminate time period in the fairly recent past. the characters are exactly the kind of people i have to put up with all the time in my everyday life by virture of hanging out with punk queers, & they're exactly the kind of people i'd rather not spend my time on. so reading a book about their romantic/financial woes wasn't really something that appealed to me. but for punk rock queers with a high tolerance for romantic drama, this is probably an awesome book.

how did this book come into my possession if it featured characters i didn't really want to read about? i told a friend i wanted to write something that basically amounted to punk rock YA serial fiction for weirdo anarcha-feminist ex-riot grrrl grown-ups such as myself, & she suggested we do a book trade. she swapped me her copy of the creamsickle in exchange for bottle rocket hearts. in all fairness, i think i got the better deal. i did think the creamsickle was better than bottle rocket hearts, & it was also better than i expected. but considering that all it did was surpass a bar so low it may as well have been in the basement, this isn't exactly luxurious praise.

the whole time i was reading, i was thinking that you could basically put the entire michelle tea oeuvre into a blender & this book would pop out. we've got drugs, dramatic ex-girlfriends, gender trouble, san francisco, sex work, & an essentially plotless "narrative". seeing as i don't care for michelle tea's books at all, this obviously wasn't something i was going to enjoy. someone who does like michelle tea would probably feel differently. & this book does have somewhat more plot than the average michelle tea book--it follows the events that transpire between the three primary roommates of the creamsickle, from the time that the main character, georgie, moves in, until the house is evicted because it's been sold for re-development into high-end luxury condos. during this time, georgie gets over a girl & starts dating a new girl, only to lose her when the old girl comes back into town. she also starts working at a very thinly-veiled version of the lusty lady. her roommate soda breaks some hearts & starts T. her other roommate, cruzer, moves to philly for a girl. there's not a whole hell of a lot happening in the terms of character growth & development.

my primary aggravation with this book, however, was the horrifying copyediting. every sentence was all, "hey fuck you!" said cruzer. "i wouldn't do that if i were you soda," i said. "man i don't know what to do about this problem georgie." do you see what i'm talking about? it's like proper punctuation took a serious fucking holiday. i doubt it was actually a stylistic choice, because it's so jarring, & there are so many commas sprinkled everywhere they don't need to be. i couldn't wait to finish the book & return to a land where commas are not so horrifically abused. i also found the font completely objectionable. how much either of these things can actually be blamed on the author, & how much was the choice of the publisher--who knows? but you can't say you weren't warned.

[Ruby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a genuine affection for this book and its characters. There are few representations of queers like the ones I know and love in literature, and all too often I find them breezy and smug. Georgie and the Crew display the requisite jadedness that pervades the culture, but Argo slowly cracks open their facades to expose the love on which the culture is built.

Particularly good: the in-stride handling of gender change and the depiction of Georgie in love.

[Elaine Burnes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disclosure: I got this free from the Lambda Literary Foundation. I guess I made a big enough donation. It won a Lammy for debut novel. The writing is quite good and it would make an interesting companion piece to Stone Butch Blues. Set in today's San Francisco, it tells the story of three bois and the ice cream colored house of the title that they live in. It might be what SBB would have been if set today. On the other hand, it pales by comparison. It's almost like the author liked her characters too much to have anything really bad happen to them. While I learned a lot about boi/femme culture (yeah, butch/femme is alive and well, just queered), skate culture, and stripping, overall, nothing happens. There's no arc to the story. Most of the characters do not change from beginning to end. One does rather dramatically, but that's not the point of the story. There isn't really a point. And many scenes end abruptly and next thing you now Georgie, the narrator, is waking up with a hangover or a girl in her bed, or something and we've missed the details. It feels superficial, like skateboarding down a hill--you fly along and everything blurs. Maybe that's her point. She narrates in present tense with very long backstories in past tense--well enough written not to be info dumps, but still way too long.

This is one year in the life of a 22-year-old who drinks too much, takes drugs that don't seem to have any major consequences in her life, flits from job to job, loves to skate and f**k women and that's about it. I found myself quite frustrated and finally skipped to the end to see if I had anything to look forward to. Nope. (I did go back and read the rest.) If the story had been of the house, which had quite a storied history, that would have been one thing, but really it's just the place they crash and their attachment to it says more about their immaturity than about the iconography of the house. It seemed there were a lot of themes that could have been explored but weren't. The kids come from dysfunctional homes, which probably explains their lost state. But they made me cringe to think this is the generation that's going to take over for us. Part of what made SBB so good was that it took us across so many years and through so much. This is one year in the lives of these kids and my 22nd year wouldn't have been any more interesting. But this is fiction, so it should have been.

One reviewer implies you'd best be under 40 to appreciate this. So maybe that's my problem.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fun love letter to a decrepit collective home and a crew of three sk8r bois. i particularly appreciated the relationship between the narrator, georgie, and their fellow crew member soda. georgie looks at soda going on T with care and sometimes jealousy. georgie goes from disliking and being threatened by soda to crawling into his bed every night, talking and holding one another. desire flits between the two bois — never actualized, often flirted with. it’s not the point of the story, it’s just there. i’ve never read a novel depicting that kind of relationship before, kinship between transmasciline folks, queer bois, and butches — and it shows the beauty of those relationships without explaining them away or capitulating them to the straight gaze.

[Anina · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's kind of a punk beach read. Like teen fiction for people who just stopped being teens. Or for people who are 30 like me but forget they aren't 21. Anyhow, loved it, very well written and the characters are adorable and well rounded.

[Daniel Levesque · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story transcends demographics, time and space. Argo's style is immediate and smart, full of the poetry of being alive.

[Faith Reidenbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s unusual to encounter literary lesbian fiction that's also a guilty pleasure, but both terms apply fairly to this book. The Creamsickle itself is full of trash--it's an unheated, lopsided flophouse in the Mission district of San Francisco that has an "ever-revolving door." Over the years, it’s been occupied by revolutionaries, "hippie fags and fairies," grunge lesbians, and now The Crew, three 20-something skateboarding bois who have made the house their "ultimate bachelor pad." Their procession of lovers are not mere lipsticks lesbians but "fierce girls," the "tough bunch of femmes with razor heels and sharp tongues" who can handle the neighborhood. The novel is more about queer family--creating it and maintaining it--than about individual relationships, and the house plays a Mansfield Park-like role in the story.

Poetry-loving Georgie is the most romantic and also the most sensible of the three bois. We meet her when she’s lovesick over a heroin-addicted girl, but she’s smart and strong enough to move on soon. She makes wise-beyond-her-years observations about herself and her friends, often wry or hilarious, like this one that made me LOL heartily in recognition (of myself and a previous partner): "Soda was the ultimate subletter of hearts......the first three months Soda was the best live-in lover a girl could possibly have. She usually didn’t have a job so whatever girl she was currently fucking became her part-time employment. Girls would try to promote her to full time or permanent status, but she made sure to keep herself at entry level." Georgie’s literal transformation in the novel comes when, unemployed and broke, she adopts an outwardly femme identity and warily takes a job dancing in a strip club.

People in my demographic (50-ish, suburbanite) may need to read this novel with a cyberdictionary of urban slang and a cyberglossary of skateboarding terms at hand. The effort was worth it to me in order to get inside a world of young queer women who divide themselves into bois and girls, tops and bottoms—except when they don’t. Georgie sets a good example for readers in acknowledging that she doesn’t understand all the family dynamics, notably the feelings of my favorite character, a friend of hers who is considering transitioning (becoming more fully biologically male). I appreciated her discussions with that friend and from other characters who have conversations along the lines of "I don’t get dating a transboy. I mean, what’s the difference from a man?"

Most of these characters are working poor and are just getting launched in life. For example, the official end of Georgie’s relationships is simply "the divvying up of the sex toys," and in an 8-speaker argument about same-sex marriage, no one comes close to imagining why most older couples want it. But the only thing that made me feel apart from the characters was their constant alcohol and drug abuse, which after a while just seems sad and boring. Georgie is not an addict, though, and she relieves the irritation with self-aware comments like "I find a direct link to the amount of coke everyone is doing to how dramatic they all are being."

Argo avoids all the mistakes that too many lesbian writers make with regard to sex—-saving it for one or two dramatic scenes, only alluding to it, describing it almost clinically, or ignoring it altogether. References to sex start on page 1, and Argo often covers a lot of ground in a single sentence that contains the verb fuck. The book’s only major flaw is disjointedness. Some of it reads like performance pieces or stories strung together, with characters appearing on the scene and leaving again with no strong narrative thread. However, this didn’t keep me from staying keenly interested in what happens to the 3 main characters and to the house.

[Caty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Derivative, but I really enjoyed it.

[Katy]

ugh I loved this! certainly not the most reflective work but that's not really the point!

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this super entertaining and trashy and grungy. I don't personally know any lesbians like this, even when I was in my early twenties, and I hope I never do. All of the characters acted like gross straight men in butch bodies, which is so not how the real butch women I know act.

But, alas, this is fiction, and I had fun with it. The writing is spare but colorful. I loved the parts about Georgie's forays into sex work and how she interacted with that world, and I loved Soda's character development.

It won't be for everyone, but it fits a very specific, delectable niche of "young, horny, drugged-up, skinny lesbian who can't hold a job or a relationship and lives in a squat-house and still somehow gets the hottest girls" reading that thrilled many of us in our early days of coming out.

[Timothy · Rating 3 out of 5]

so 2004 it hurts.

[Mersini · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect of this book, since I impulse bought it off book depository ages and ages ago, but I really enjoyed it. It took a little bit to get into, with a large chunk of the beginning becoming irrelevant to the rest of the book, but then the middle and end were great.

The characters stand out so vividly, and I can believe that they are real people. I imagine that they are somewhat based on real people. And I like the way the book explores gender and the expression of it. Of course, sexuality and queer identity is central to the novel.

I can say that it might've needed a bit more editing work. But nothing too major. Just misgendering of the trans character a couple of times, which I think were probably typos. Or at least, that's what I will choose to believe.

Otherwise, really enjoyable, with a strong voice and a strong sense of world.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read The Creamsicle on a three day road trip. It was perfect for car reading and for killing time in the hotel. The story is full of characters who make more drama than most people do in their entire lives, but it makes for a good read. And it's nice to read about 1) lesbians and bisexual women, because a lot of books with gay themes are about guys, 2) a gay-related book that's in no way a romance, 3) a book about genderqueer and transsexual characters, and 4) a book with gay characters who aren't painfully good people.
The characters are solid people though and the narrator's confusion, sincerity, and frustration make her relate-able.

[Amy D.P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author does such a great job with writing a compelling story. She leaves enough of the plot to imagination that makes you fill in the story for these lovable, queer and sometimes dysfunctional characters. Argo creates a realistic queer family that many queers can relate to at sometime in their life. The story highlights the complexity of a small dating pool and the troubles that gender queers, queers, and other LGBTQ identified people often face, especially when biological families disown them and new families are created by choice.

[Skylar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it’s just pandemic loneliness talking, but turning the last page of this book was like saying good bye to old friends. That being said, Georgie and the Crew are total assholes and I would be embarrassed to be associated with them.

The subject matter might have lent itself to some provocative gender-theorizing, but the author keeps things extraordinarily shallow. 2.5 stars.

Edit: idk I’ve been thinking about this book for 4 years now and I think there’s a good chance my younger self didn’t know how to interpret literature that well. Definitely deserves a second chance.

[malic · Rating 5 out of 5]

i'm totally crushed out on the Creamsickle bois.

a part of me wants to give this book to my mom because it's such a great representation of our QUEER culture, particularly that of the genderqueer/fluid/radical gender/sex posi/poly/traveling experience, and it's so rare to have representations of that in media.

but mostly i just want all my friends to read it cause Rhiannon Argo knows exactly how to write a killer story of heartbreak.

[Larry-bob Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative of the churn of dot-com era queer San Francisco, the book focuses on the lives of queer skate punks (originally dyke-identified, though in some cases that changes) moving through a house in the Mission. The main point of view character undergoes a transformation from butch skater to reluctantly femme stripper. Though the names have been changed for the most part, a San Franciscan familiar with the milieu can recognize the bars and strip clubs mentioned.

[Woebbelchen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Urch.
Neee.
Hatte mich vor ein paar Jahren so gefreut, mal ein nicht allzu tiefgründiges, queeres Buch mit trans* Charas zu lesen... aber dann war es nicht nur sterbenslangweilig, sondern primär misogyn und femme-/femininitätsfeindlich, dass ich zwischendurch meinen Augen nicht traute. Nee, mit Feminismus hat das nichts zu tun und Bois, die ihre maskuline Identität nur durch Abwertung von Femininität leben können, braucht auch wirklich kein Mensch.

[kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

the first time i picked this up i was a little put off by the green pallor of the cover's illustration & the prevalence of the word "boi," which i kind of hate. i started it again last night & finished it today & turns out it was exactly what i was craving -- sweet, hilarious, & so, so trashy. perfect.

[Queen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was only interesting because of the original characters that are not often portrayed in literature and the strange plot. Besides this, it was too long and the events didn't really have a link between them. I feel like I read a troubled young woman's diary and didn't really get anything out of it.

[Arielle Burgdorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Argo is a really great writer, with a gift for shining light on moments and fractions of moments. The characters in the Creamsickle are all lovable and interesting, and the story was very enjoyable. Particularly the Georgie/Mia relationship seemed very real and palpable. Recommended.

[Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting story but just not my sort story. makes me think of books like the catcher and the rye. messed up coming of age stories like that. I read half and then took a few week break before I finished it.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charming, sexy, kept me up all night, made me miss San Francisco. Ah youth culture!

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

such a fun lesbian romp through punky san francisco. i loved it.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

didn't read the whole thing...was interested in the content but couldn't go so much for the lack of plot. if i'd been in a different mood maybe

[Mills College Library]

Fiction A693c 2009

[Lauren Fulner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute, a little bit trashy, this was candy reading that went down easily. I can't get enough books about 20 something queers though :)

[Christeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solidly written guilty-pleasure fun, and no one gets sent to conversion therapy.

[Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soda <3

Hasta ganas de ir de nuevo a SF.