Lockpick Pornography

Lockpick Pornography #1

by Joey Comeau

I feel better than I have in days. I want to make bumper stickers for politicians and gay rights advocates. They'll read "My other pro-tolerance message is also condescending."

I want to destroy something.

I'm tired of the moral high ground. We've already got more than our share of gay Gandhis. We need a General Patton.

No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.

I feel the way bank robbers must feel just before they go out on that last big job that ends up getting them all killed.

That is to say, optimistic.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Canada, Humor, Novels, Adult Fiction

134 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Joey Comeau is a Canadian writer. He is best known for his novels Lockpick Pornography and Overqualified, and as co-creator of the webcomic A Softer World (with Emily Horne).

Comeau currently resides in Toronto, Ontario. He has a degree in linguistics.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unabashedly profane, explicitly sexual and incredibly funny. This book reads like a war cry, rallying the support of open-minded people everywhere against the social conventions of gender and sexuality. It also includes confusion and moral ambiguity expressed by the main character, making you question his stance on the issues at hand as well as your own.

One of the best books under 200 pages that I've ever read.

[Liv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words: Awesome. Inspiring. Sexy. Angry. Confused. Intense. Queer. Genderfucking. Anti-hero. Revolutionary. Hypocritical. Narcissistic. Childish. Honest. Lost. Rebellious. Temperamental. Violent. Criminal. Sweet. Stream of consciousness. Frenzied. Thought-provoking.

Phrases: I want to write this book a dirty love letter and leave it in its locker so we can meet up after class and put up anti-oppression graffiti all over town before watching, criticizing, and kind of enjoying, bad day time television.

The protagonist (do we ever learn his name?) has a pseudo-stream-of-consciousness narration that slips in and out of delicious, dirty, honest and understandble anger, with some thoughtfulness and questioning of himself thrown in occasionally.

The events that take place have no real consequence at first, which on the one hand breaks a lot of the spell of fiction, but slowly the Protagonist and his associates start at least recognizing their more awful actions are being enacted on other human beings, albeit heterosexual ones and some conscience kicks in. Sort of. Sometimes.

You want them to take the revolutionary actions they aspire to and then they sort of screw up, crossing even their own lines. (And is small-scale guerilla mind-warfare worthwhile?)

One of the best parts, for me, was that the Protagonist doesn't even fully buy into his own ideas about gender, and gender-deconstruction even as he's hell bent on shoving them down everyone else's throat. He's not a hypocrite. He wants to believe. But he can't. Maybe because Society? So weirdly wonderful.

Quotes: "Death the Cartoon Heterosexual Paradigm!" "This Coke made me gay."

[Punk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Queer Political Vigilantism. Comeau writes well, but most of the characters in this novella are assholes of one stripe or another and as soon as they did something endearing, they'd follow it up with something unforgivable. That's just not my thing. I prefer to like the characters I'm reading about. Or at least not actively despise them.

Lockpick Pornography is about being queer and angry and willing to do something about it. Unfortunately, the things this group chooses to do include: attempted sexual assault, kidnapping, vandalism, breaking and entering, theft, harassment, and regular old assault.

Two stars. This is aggressive and off-putting, but it is written well and the ideas for the gay kids' books were great.

[Mina Villalobos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the way the book challenges all notions of established sexuality, not only by making you question your own stances but by letting the characters be confused themselves, not knowing their real limits. What they think is right one moment they regret later, and then find ways to justify it again when they are angry or when they find a different side to it, though mostly this is a book about wilderness. There's.. no consequences, to anything, which makes this less stressing than it could have been -for which I'm glad, as I did get a bit stressed at times.

I liked the confusion and the blurring of lines. I'm not very sure how I felt about the consensual lines blurring, though mostly it made me feel uncomfortable, and that's okay, too. If you don't question your own lines you'll never know where they stand.

This was interesting, explicit, wild. It's a pretty quick good read.

[Christy Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book empowered me to punch skanks at the mall.

That's all I've ever wanted.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. Made me want to punch a straight person in the mouth.

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joey Comeau's explorations of gender and sexuality are my favourite things to read. I think he does a great job of exploring gender, but in doing so the novel is also totally entertaining and unexpected in terms of characters and plot.

[Joseph Burgess · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a novel, it's not great. As a radical queer work, it's a lot of fucking fun. Enjoyable, controversial (or it would be, if anyone had ever heard of it), and thought-provoking. Great for that republican queer in your life.

[Kitty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish to god I hadn’t read this awful, woman-hating, Lesbian-hating book when I was 15 years old. I still have the same copy of it. How was I able to hold onto this piece of queer rape culture garbage for over a decade when I lost so much other stuff. I’m gonna ritually burn this shit.

[Amanda King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profane, stark, slightly nonsensical wandering plot with some amazingly affecting prose. LOVE it.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A young gay man and his friends try to make a statement about gender constructs and sexuality, only to find they don't really have a clue what they believe or why they believe it, either.

I liked the differentiation between tolerance and understanding, and the way almost none of his feelings had to make sense.

Offensive? Definitely. This book was a distasteful trainwreck, but I was glued to it from page 1.

www.lockpickbook.net - the author has made it available to download for free.

[Matthew Sarookanian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. It's a gay version of Project Mayhem. The anger and violence mixed with hilairty works so well in this book that I found things that normally are tasteless to be extremely engrossing. It also is the first book to ever accomplish the feat of making me laugh till it hurts. At the ending its touching in its own way, and very thought provoking. LOVED IT!!

[Josie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I liked Mrs Hubert and the scene in the mall where they coo over the baby dressed in pink like it's a boy, but I got tired of the same issues being raised over and over again. Overall I thought this book tried too hard to shock.

[Black Heart Magazine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this one in digital format on my iPod. A quick read, some hilarious moments, some interesting ideas about gender and sexuality. Is gender really just a construct? Read Lockpick Pornography and find out.

[Ray (user2637) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Joey's work. It's unique and refreshing.

[Jamie R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[beentsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just don't know how to review this one or even how many stars I want to give it. It's so outside my normal reading sphere that it's going to take me awhile to process it, I think.

[Eamon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just fantastic. I've re-read it numerous times, and loaded the book out to so many other people. Loved it.

[Krystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've fallen in love with Joey Comeau's writing over and over and over and over and over again. This book sealed the deal.

*re-read 11/15-11/16

[Merope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about gender and adventure and that it can be really fun to read about a fiction person being a dick.

[Levi · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book to make me question what I considered a personal truth in a long time. Amazing...and free

[Dalice · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most complicated looks as that line between political theory and personal belief. Push yourself to enjoy the paradox.

[Gen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to have this book and thought it was so awesome I loaned it out...and never got it back...I definitely need a new copy.

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The queer novel I've been waiting my entire life to read.

[Matthew McKenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this delightful. It reminded me a lot of The Fuck Up.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love it.

Makes me want to kiss people and destroy things.

[B. Lee-Harrison Aultman · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a sense among more than literary formalists that some (perhaps all) books can only be read one way. Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography certainly had the appeal of this certainty. It was queer. It felt from even its title to speak from a place of irreverence. Like most readers I flipped book around to see what’s on the back—for the blubs, the writers who liked the thing. (The novel ends at a whopping 121 pages and I felt like this was the least, but still important, aspect of any text I consume.) “It’s impossible to talk about a book like [this] without first considering the way things like terror, gender, family values, and even the publishing industry are currently constructed, because every page in this grenade of a novel is written to blow them to bit.” That’s what the blurb on the back of the limited print edition of Joey Comeau’s novel, Lockpick Pornography. Grenade is right, if only in the sense that from the point of view of genre distinctions there is no way of making a solid claim about where the story belongs.

The book itself received mixed reviews and is hardly a classic in queer/trans literature. In fact, I remember that my first hearing about the book was the first time physically receiving a copy of it. My friend and co-worker at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (one of those mainstream LGBTQIA organizations that get ripped apart as easy targets). Being one of the few Black trans men working at the organization, M. offered me the book and suggested it shared our misanthropy. Not lent me—but gave me this book. And I think it was because M. could sense in me the same kind of identitarian ambivalence that works as effective narrative force for Lockpick. It’s the kind of ambivalence of identity one might anticipate from what it is to live in relation to, say, the fantasy that the world is going to turn with or without you. And you, the queer, the deviant, the transsexual, aren’t welcome it making anything normative out of that world. “Don’t exist,” is all the imperative you have received. And yet, flickering throughout the life that gets its shortened narration in Lockpick, there is the optimistic hope that something changes that isn’t just inward or interior. Something in the world changes that feels tangible and worth waking up to, again and again—even if it’s just to confirm. This is, I think, what makes Lockpick a complicated addition to the genre of queer/trans literature. It's neither comedy nor tragedy. It’s at best a tragicomic autofiction. To call it a novel is to feed into its ambulant confusions. Comeau means to mix genres and do to so without either awareness or the affective shame. Comeau’s text is therefore an inter-generic attempt to resolve the crisis of queer/trans affect, of the bad feelings so far read reparatively.

The narrative plot of Lockpick recurs; the anti-protagonist, Prag, must make a decision to do something political. Michelle, Alex, Richard, and Prag create a queer DIY anarchy project. All join in the construction of a cartoon book filled with trans and genderqueer characters in order distribute them, illegally, inside the libraries of public schools. Prag declares that “[t]he education of little children is too important to leave in the hands of their parents” (p. 55). Children have meaning-making symbolic power in this narrative. Their meaning displaces the universal imperative of training “good adults.” Instead, children should learn about the ruptures and disparities called human differences. Prag is interested in training “the Child” in whom Edelman placed very little hope. The cartoon book’s title is Johnny’s a Girl, Sometimes. And it is through the gathering of materials needed that readers are introduced to something more critically thematic than the genius DIY aesthetic. Prag finally opens up to the group (to readers) about what lockpicking means: “‘Picking locks is a lot like being queer, [he] say. [He’s] on my knees in front of the door. ‘Taking the world as you see it, and not how you’re told to see it. There’s no real difference between turning the knob and picking the lock’” (p. 54). The situation itself provides a rare glimpse into Prag’s character with sentimental tones. Readers venture into how the world works for Prag not through an interpretative act of analyzing sexual habits or drinking addictions. The ordinary scope of being with others is enough for Prag to open reflectively. The relation to another is neither direct nor is it clear. Prag’s relations are always (in some fashion) nondominant. Prag expects very little. Zie continues: “‘[b]oth [queer and lockpicking] are a series of mechanical actions by which you gain access to the room beyond, and both are within your ability. Fuck anyone who tries to tell me what I can and can’t do’” (p. 54). This is, of course, paradoxical. Lockpicking was taught to Prag. It implies a sociality imparted to ensure future queer/trans practices. Queerness is, in this instance, the breaking through and moving into new and sometimes fraught spaces. Without the relational value of lockpicking there would be no material meaning. Just a pointless doing without the value of being called a deed. Meaningful story told and materials gathered brings the DIY anarchy to its pitch. They break into a school and distribute the materials, all while wearing the masks of famous cartoon characters.

But the entire DIY enterprise ends up being, to Prag’s mind, as impotent as he had been during Prag’s sexual encounter with Alex. Sure, the act makes local news. But the police were called to the school shortly after the books were discovered. They were all promptly removed. Some members of the team were ebullient. But that wasn’t the point for Prag. The books were meant to be in the hands of children so they might learn. Prag’s sense of meaning shifts from the “now” of gratification to the pleasures of knowing change (however far away) is happening. The aesthetic scene was at best stuplimity (a kind of resonant effect, a self-absorption vibrating inward from the act’s worldly effects) but at worst was the continuation of nothing at all. And so another plan is concocted and this time the stakes are raised. Prag decides to kidnap David, the son of a prominent figure who had been espousing anti-gay rhetoric on TV. In the course of what can only be described in terms of tragicomic relief,, David embarks with his captors while Prag gives David lessons in genderqueer studies. Readers suspend the question of the ethical for a moment. The absurd situation brings even Prag to realize that these pedagogical moments amount to criminality. Prag once again rationalizes the intensity of the episode. David was a prop for his father, an object for a larger television audience, a metonymic link in a chain condemning queers. David is “the Child” of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. But Prag desires to transform David. David is put in a dress as a disguise. Prag wants David to learn what queer life is through the actions of his body. He wants David to know that in many ways queerness and transness is born out of violence. But that it is open. Queer life seeks vantage points beyond the limits of feeling by extending and learning how to feel anew. In one of the last scenes of the story, Prag sees a green light hitting the underside of the clouds. He and David get out, fascinated, and wonder at the light’s origins. They are outside the safety of a car. As they walk and talk together, David warns Prag that a boy wearing a dress will likely catch unwanted attention. It does. A group of young men begin heckling the two. The group calls Prag a pedophile. They make fun of David for palling around with a faggot. At one point they threaten the two with violence and force them to find cover. It’s only after they hide and find a nearby house that David and Prag break with the reality of a kidnap. The context calls for a new relation. Just outside of someone’s home, Prag tells David that zie can pick locks. To David’s disbelief Prag successfully gains entry to the house. Both enter and are faced with one of their attackers in the kitchen. Prag is attacked. But David intervenes. Removing a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket he stabs the man. They both run. The sky is still beaming with lasers. The green flickers and floods portions of the clouds above them. And the two now head toward the possibility of safety.

Prag thinks back on the scene of David’s violent act. Between the action itself and the virtuality of it, Prag wonders “[w]ould it be worse to have him grow up afraid of his own ability to be violent?” (p. 119). Comeau ends Lockpick in an affective resonance with its opening. The banal violence of the previous scene is settled through the question of hunger, of wanting McDonalds, and the urgent need to take David somewhere safe. Prag and Richard take the child to a nearby home. It is Mrs. Hubert’s. She answers the door with a flattened interrogation: “Is he the boy that’s gone missing?” (p. 120). She knew who it was. Prag gives David his lockpick and an instruction manual. He tells David to keep the lot a secret because his father would take it away. He wants David to know that nonnormative life might be surveilled but it carries on. “What about you,” Mrs. Hubert asks Prag. “You look tired” (p. 120). The narrative suspends its present for that moment. The suspension seems to indicate a surprise. Prag’s surprise, perhaps, because Mrs. Hubert turns and asks the once-caller/harasser, the kidnapper, the queer, whether he was tired. In a future exchange, Prag imagines how Richard would recall the events of the night. Where the kidnapped child of a public bigot stabbed a redneck in his own defense. What of Mrs. Hubert in that story? “[Richard will] probably have her say something trite and expected and designed to make us look like heroes” (p. 120). Then, returned to the present, Prag smiled at Mrs. Hubert. “I am tired,” he responds (p. 121). But he keeps that to himself. He keeps the fact that David gave Prag a hug. He relays two incidents. First, Mrs. Hubert gave them thirty minutes before she called the cops. Second, he told Richard Mrs. Hubert gave him a hug. The story ends on this suspended note as the group drives away. Prag has been transformed and yet the reader can only infer the cause. He is decidedly quiet and unwilling to deliver a criticism of the events that transpired. Instead, there is a solace in the moment that opens upon the possibility of many more transformative ones.

The kinds of ordinary interaction that turn on the reflexive energies for each character in Prag’s dictum about lockpicking is an allegory for transness as much as it is for queerness. [Prag is the protagonist.] It speaks to a relation of affect, of breaking into spaces that normativity withholds. It is a breaking in so that one might break down. It isn’t a promise that one will find what it is one is looking for. That is fantasy. Finding points of resistance and tending to them; building upon that it means to care; drawing upon the “this side” of being in the world marks the contours of a politics of ordinary life. Even queer anarchism thrives within the normative. Prag lives with Richard. Zie replaces that which is not his own (the TV) and seeks ethical absolution through the brief intervention into actual pedagogy. Prag likewise speaks to the capacity to find simple mysteries in the world. Lockpick’s end seems to allegorize the potentiality of venturing into the dark. Finding the source of the distant light enabled the process of building a relation between two characters whose lives would have (and may never again) cross. Prag defies commitment throughout their narrative. They sit astride an affective ambivalence toward social constructions zie consistently under-describes. Like any of our theories, those that keep the plot moving in Lockpick are in tension with their object. The desire to open a door, to fall in love, to make a nondominant relationship a reality is being open to the possibility of disappointment. It means allowing for the revision of our objects (and their revising us in the process). Consider, for example, that through the act that saves Prag, David stabs at the figurative world that is indeed violent for people like Prag. David, once a hostage of the queer marauder, is now that marauder’s savior. That textual moment reflects the taxonomies of the trans ordinary. Remaining open to the world so that attachments may grow or wither under scrutiny. It is a politics that mobilizes the energy of sense; a sense for using energy; describes an ethical relation that feels more urgent for the nonnormative. More urgent now than ever before.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joey Comeau, Lockpick Pornography (Loose Teeth Press, 2005)

Joey Comeau's name sat in the back of my head for years before I actually got round to reading his work. A number of friends revere his work, and a particular online literary review zine, which must remain nameless or the review gets redlined at Amazon, championed his stuff as long as I read them. And given a title like Lockpick Pornography, I figured, how can you go wrong? Now, the book and its sequel are slated to be published in an omnibus volume from ECW Press, so what better time to write this review? (I actually finished the blessed thing last summer while on a roadtrip to visit relatives.)

As you may be able to surmise from the opening paragraph, I wanted to like this book. I wanted a good deal to like this book. But somehow I never got round to it. I didn't dislike it, mind you, but it never reached out and grabbed me. Normally, I'd give the writer of such a thing the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not going to in this case; I'm pretty sure the problem doesn't lie with me here. Comeau has a lot of big ideas, and it's really quite commendable that he's going to attempt to tackle them. The problem is, he never actually does. I'm not sure whether he's just throwing stuff out there with the belief that “if you're reading this book, you probably feel the same way I do about these things, so I really don't need to go into any detail” (which, at best, would be hopelessly naïve), simply using this stuff as plot device (which, at best, would be exploitative), or throwing it in simply for shock value (in which case, this would be bizarro fiction, but not as accomplished as the better bizarro authors). I toyed around with possibility #3 for about a week after finishing the book before throwing it out; there's enough passion in the places where Comeau makes an attempt at addressing all this stuff—the raging anti-capitalism, the gender dysphoria (and inventive ways his characters have of dealing with that), the sometimes-irresistable urge to take your experimental novel and turn it into a genre noir thriller—that I'm pretty sure he's not just trolling. And #2 doesn't quite feel right, either, and for much the same reason; I'm not sure someone using gender dysphoria solely as a plot device would be able to handle it with Comeau's sardonic-but-not-cruel take.

Which leaves me with choice #1, but I kind of feel like a heel employing it, no matter how naïve the resulting novel turns out to be.

The unfortunate part about it is that author naïvete turns into character shallowness, as no one in the novel ever gives even the most passing thought to why they're all doing this. In his defense, I should say that it seems Comeau either attempts and fails, or had thought about attempting and then abandoned the idea, to rectify this in the book's climactic sequence; I was planning on going on with that statement, but then realized we'd be well into spoiler alert territory, so trust me on this one.

I haven't yet read any of Comeau's more recent, and much more popular novels (my local public library, which is notorious for carrying very little other than Stephen King and Danielle Steel, even has a copy of One Bloody Thing After Another!), so I can't just pop out some sort of wry comment about how Lockpick Pornography is a rough early example of the style of etc., and yet for some reason I want to; that's what it feels like, anyway. It's very much a style-over-substance book, and I'd imagine it will have a great deal of appeal to the twenty-first-century version of the disaffected youth who flocked to see movies like Been Down So Long It Feels Like Up to Me back in the seventies. Be aware, however, you will have to fill in a number of wide, unbridged gaps that it doesn't seem to me you should have to. ** ½

[Soren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should mention that I did not go looking for a book about lockpicks or pornography on my own; I'm not into books about romance or sex. Also, this book isn't about pornography, it just happens to have a character who is very crazy and sexual. I found this book because I happened to be reading the webcomic "A Softer World" one day and saw that one of the writers for it had written some books. "A Softer World" has a kind of drama and style that can be seen in this book. It's not my favorite webcomic, but its melancholy-ness gets to me sometimes.

Anyways, onto the book:
There were a lot of horrible, stupid things going on in this story. The main character is an asshole. In fact, all the characters are kind of stupid. I think the main character had to be that broken of a person, though. This story had a kind of vague ending to me, but it also felt right. It wasn't an end plot-wise (which is probably why it felt vague), but a sort of understanding on the protagonist's part that brought this story to a close.

A very vulgar, queer story, and also a short read. Steer away if you get put off by excessive slurs, sex (particularly between males), and infuriating characters. Might be worth reading if you can put up with those things and are interested in LGBTQA issues, because the characters go crazy about them. Might be. It's not something I would describe as good or bad. More like interesting.

[Jana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very readable, but the characters are all horrendous people. The narrator can't work out his own gender issues, so he (with the help of his equally immoral friends) runs around messing with people to make himself feel better. I think Comeau has some good ideas, but presenting them through the eyes of a character with a tentative grasp of how the world works is probably not the best way to get people to listen to what you have to say. I will admit that I rather liked the Mrs Hubert storyline, but I also felt bad for this poor woman who did nothing to deserve the narrator's abuse. I just feel really unsettled about the whole story, but maybe that was the point.