I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

A beloved memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature—whose graphic, funny, and caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. "[Indiana] becomes the connective tissue that binds together a diaspora of the beatnik-era experimental writing and happenings of downtown New York, the 1960s co-opted counterculture gone awry, the punk movement that followed, and the art and intellectual circles of the Reagan 80s, when the AIDS crisis was wiping out a generation of young gay men like him." —Los Angeles Times With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he lived and worked occasionally over the past decades. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Biography, Biography Memoir

230 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 8, 2015

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Andrew]

I first heard about Gary Indiana back when I was seeking new sources of fuck-you for my literary diet, back in my early 20s. What I got, when I actually read him, was a writer who, yes, had a lot of fuck-you in him, but was also elegant and perhaps even a bit sentimental at points. Which is a good balance.

And his memoir is just as gorgeous and cynical and hissing and heartbroken as I could hope. Yes, he's a cynic, but he also shows a true love and admiration for the fellow weirdos and freaks he meets along the way. Gary, you're one of the last true bohemians in a world of sanitized mediocrities, when even the word "bohemian" has passed from a lifestyle into a cliché into a term for how you dress at Coachella. May the god I've never believed in bless you.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This jumpy and unsettlingly unsentimental memoir will fascinate anyone interested in recent queer social history... or anyone who (like me) has a major crush on Indiana's brain. Why do I love him so? Not only does he write with keen political intelligence and great charm, his prose often strays into a sort of Raymond Chandler-inflected wittiness that leaves one stunned with bedazzlement.

[Conor Ahern · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't remember why I marked this as a "Want to Read," or whence the tip came. I finally got it on order from the Brooklyn Public Library, and really enjoyed it, sad as it was. It's part gonzo amphetamine-fueled gay sex romp, part tale of self-destruction, part coming to terms with the gradual attenuation of significant relationships in the author's past. There are amusing send ups of Susan Sontag, David Lynch, and Ernest Hemingway. But the title betrays the most significant and depressing takeaway from the book: that for all of the author's wild exploits and hedonistic excesses, anyone he ever loves either rejects him or abandons him until one day he wakes up outside the gates of a world he used to inhabit whose credentials require youth, wealth, or attractiveness, qualities that have leeched from him over time. I suspect this is the story of so many queer men, too many of whom succumbed to HIV/AIDS before their time, who inhabited a world of sexual liberation so profound and unlike the oppression that clouded the past that the pleasure and freedom overwhelmed the ability to comprehend and prioritize the humanity of others. I still think vestiges of these tendencies benight the gay world to some extent, but Gary Indiana's generation suffered the worst of it.

And the epilogue underscores the weary sadness that this book conveys. A page in front of a weathered, downcast, depleted-looking picture of the author's face, wrapped in a rainbow scarf, summarizes the gloom well:

The book... has turned out radically different than I expected. At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of "triumph over adversity" theme that gongs through much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist--which has not, in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity. I'm almost sixty-five, I still have practically nothing of my own, and could very well end up on the same trash heap where most old people in America get tossed, regardless of whatever "cultural capital" I've accumulated.

Poor Gary. I hope you find love after all.

[Brittany · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know if it's because I have never read any of his novels or if I have never seen any of his films but this "memoir" was so all over the place, I don't know how to even attempt to explain or review it. Perhaps this is how his writing style is? I'm used to stream of consciousness but this was just far too much. I finished the book and I can't even tell you what I read. I think most of my confusion has to do with the fact that Indiana is attempting to recall memories that he doesn't even have a clear recollection of. He was too doped up to recall a single event in his life and this was a way of him putting the pieces together. I'm all for different writing styles, and life experiences but this was just a bunch of words thrown on to a page. Nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe i have to read his novels to get a better understanding of what just happened here.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each of these individual tales are great, like hanging out with a slightly drunk old bon vivant at a bar or a party. Gary Indiana is a fearless writer, who had a fascinatingly edgy early life.

Together, they don't quite gel. There's the other part of hanging out with drunk old bon vivants - they way they drop people into the story with no (or very little) context and you're led thinking "Who the hell is Joey? Why do I care what he has to say here?"

Quick and fascinating read if you're into the counterculture and was a PERFECT read while on a work trip to San Francisco.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Can Give You Anything But Love, a memoir by actor, artist, critque and fiction writer Gary Indiana is a view into his life before he moved to New York. Born and raised in Boston he lived in Los Angeles, and on and off in Cuba. He was born in 1950, so much of this book takes place in the 1970s. Of his childhood he writes, “I’m not ashamed, but definitely embarrassed, and not entirely for myself; it wasn’t a believably written fantasy, and Momma’s credulity makes her seem stupid, as well as damningly prepared to think “the worst,” as she conceives it, about this child she’s molded in her image as much as she possibly could, with a certain palpable if unconscious resentment. This is the first said instance of our nurturing bond mutating into something unbearably oppressive and heartbreaking. In time it becomes a wretched spell I try to shatter by putting myself in extreme situations that would give her a heart attack if she knew about them. To break free of her personal force field, it finally becomes necessary to put the entire continent between us.”

He writes about those extreme situations and his sexual life. “In Los Angeles, I wasn’t ready for the stoicism my experience recommended to me. I couldn’t accept myself as a discrete being. I expected someone to mold me into something half me, half him. Later, it became clear that this blurred identity was only obtainable with people I never saw with their clothes on. In a related bolt from the blue, I realized that the only time I actually found melting together with anybody remotely pleasurable was when I had sex with them. I didn’t want it as a daily, domestic state of things at all. I couldn’t live with sexual lovers. I had, in fact, no real capacity for romance in that way. Only, now and then, with someone I cared about, felt tenderness for, could talk to, could sleep with at night if we first got sex permanently out of the way, and proceeded to have it exclusively with other people. By then I no longer viewed this as a terrible compromise with reality, It said nothing abject or horrible about me, either. Things were the way they were because, whether or not I acknowledged it, they were really how I wanted things to be.”

He makes reference to two rapes and the view on it at the time:
"I had never figured out what to feel about getting raped. Men were not supposed to be raped, and when it happened, nobody called it that. If you were male you were supposed to be immune to it, or strong and scrappy enough that nobody could really penetrate you without your cooperation. In my mind, the incident in San Francisco resembled the cemetery acid trip in Easy Rider, and it made me sad. But weird as it sounds, the fact is that I was raped a second time, by a male nurse, in the place where they put me after I flew home from San Francisco.
Two rapes seemed more ridiculous than tragic. Perhaps this sounds glib. But prevailing opinion that what happened to me was not even possible forced me to suck it up and keep my mouth shut about it. As it happens, I reported the second rape, with the consequence that the psychiatrist assigned to me filed an affidavit swearing I had admitted fantasizing the whole thing, while the hospital administration quietly transferred the rapist to a job at a different facility."

In the Epilogue he writes, The book: It has turned out radically different than I expected. At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of “triumph over adversity” theme that gongs through much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist—which has not in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity. I’m almost sixty-five, I still have practically nothing of my own, and could very well end up on the same trash heap where most old people in America get tossed, regardless of whatever “cultural capital” I’ve accumulated.

I like that he didn't do the “triumph over adversity” theme. The book is a running conversation that flows easily from one topic to another with references to sex and friends mixed in. He knew Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, movie directors, and interesting characters who were living day to day. It's an honest portrayal of a gay man, pre-AIDS, who lived his life fully himself in an art world that exposed is not glamorous, but gritty. He says of himself, "Events, or lack of them, have instilled in me an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance. I am too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone’s life, including my own. Even years later, when the idea that I exist can be asserted with external evidence—books I’ve published, films I’ve acted in, plays I’ve directed, friends who can confirm my physical reality, passport records of countries I’ve visited, bank statements, dental records, blood test results, psychiatric files, hotel registers, airline ticket stubs, old photos, bales of early writing archived at a major university, and other documentary proof—I will continue to register as a blurry human smudge in my mind’s eye.”

[Kaylee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gah

[Nellie Konopka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never read Gary Indiana before. This was good but I’m most likely never going to think about it again. Actually that’s not true I probably will.

[Charlie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was part of a 5-book-round-up at my blog, HereWeAreGoing, here: https://herewearegoing.wordpress.com/...

Gary Indiana’s use of sometimes pejorative terms for gay men in his memoir also gave me pause. I don’t know, perhaps I am the duddiest of fuddies, but the phrase “buxom giddy queen” is the sort of thing meant to cut and harm and I just would rather not live in that or read about it. That said, otherwise, I loved LOVED LOVED this book. Perhaps it is because Mr. Indiana and I are long-distance contemporaries belonging to a cohort of shared experience if not geography, and at this crepuscular state in my life, finding resonance and kind — even at the remove of hardcover pages — is a comfort. Mr. Indiana’s writing is compelling, evocative, and eviscerating in its honesty; he spares no one, including himself. My (bought) copy is festooned with sticky-notes and scribbled marginalia. Here, just a few lines I marked:

Time is glacially slow in this country, but my face races on, across all the mirrors, en route to the eternity of nothingness behind the finish line. [page 12]

I’m told I think too much, and have too many emotions. For some reason this terrifies people. In my own estimation, I’m emotionally blocked, stupid in practical matters, and cursed with an isolating intelligence that’s worthless, . . . I can be whatever somebody wants temporarily, if I glean a clear intuition of what it might be. I’m so solitary that roles I try playing for other people seem contrived and arbitrary. I’m uncertain enough of my existence to absorb nearby tastes and opinions, as if claiming them as my own will bring me into clearer focus. . . . I don’t fit with anyone I meet, except in a lubricious, sweaty, transient junction of organs and holes, a fusion of raw desires that discharge themselves with two spurts of jism. The guys I pick up are impervious to emotional complications, . . . What I look for is an abridged version of what I want: a no-fault fuck in the parking lot of time between last call and the morning reality principle, and a modicum of cordiality. [page 81-82]

I had the sense of always standing a little apart from the narrative, of missing the point, of nothing ever being quite enough or never adding up. Life was a choppy sequence of images unfolding in several worlds whose only connection was the fact that I slipped into one after another like an actor performing several plays in the same twenty-four-hour span. [page 170]

And this, story of my life:

It sounds ridiculous now, but his sexual indifference embarrassed me for years after this whole period was finished, as a high point of humiliation. It was a purely willful, physical attraction, but I had fastened on Don as the person I wanted to love me back, imagining my desire could make this person I didn’t really know into the person I wanted him to be. [page 172]

And one-offs aplenty, like, “At least with an ex-convict, there’s a little damaged tenderness.” [page 228] and, “…the inbred assurance of an upper-middle-class Eagle Scout, a wide-eyed, impervious optimism that only needed a dusting of freckles and a few amphetamines to turn him into Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.” [page 199] and, “. . . Ferd sighed, with an oracular exhaustion I can still hear after thirty-five years.” [page 205]

I share an exhaustion with Mr. Indiana, if not quite as oracular, at least as weary, and brought on more than a little by having come of age in an age where a coming out like Mr. Carver’s would have meant the end of many possibilities and opportunities, and so we internalized our self-hatred and fear, the disgust with ourselves into which we’d been brainwashed and acculturated, seeking lovers and tricks and John Rechy-esque numbers for partners, those men who were but were not what we were and were afraid of being, reflections of our own rejections of self.

Damn it’s been a freaking long road. And Bowie has died. On the day Charlie Carver came out. And there are echoes and connections there. And I am feeling ancient. And Mr. Indiana’s book echoes and ruminates on all of the angst and agita that brought him to this same place, from where we were, who we were, what we have been, to here, where we are, going.

[Sherrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feeling foolish I never got around to Gary Indiana until I heard of his recent passing. He wrote like everything hurt and nothing mattered but tomorrow was always another day. He went through "the shit" (San Francisco in the 60s, Los Angeles in the 70s) and kept on observing and flailing and failing only to come out on the other side with one of the most crystalline writing voices I have ever had the pleasure to consume.

This is hardcore.

[Gareth Schweitzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indiana's views on Susan Sontag, David Lynch and Ernest Hemingway are hilarious... and refreshing...and who, knew Kathy Acker was a trust fund kid!

A nice easy, entertaining read.

[ra · Rating 4 out of 5]

i tried reading this on my 8am flight to berlin in november but i'm really glad i didn't.. i haven't read that much indiana but his disposition is so specific and coarse that it would've been disaster to read it at the wrong time. that being said i did come to really enjoy his 'fuck you' attitude because i think he was always doing it in pursuit of the true and beautiful, in his own way, and i loved that enough to clock out of work early today just to read this

— "I must have pretended life was a novel or a movie I was narrating as it went along, as if I had control of it and decided what direction it took. I see now that at the time I've been writing about, there was no coherent point to me at all."

— "I wanted to scream from pain but didn't. I looked at the baby and saw a future of scrapes and bruises. Life is short and full of pain and always beautiful, besides."

[Micaela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Gary Indiana, but not too much. I often felt like I didn’t really want to read this book, but every time I nearly quit it, I realized that I was actually having quite a bit of fun. The vastness of his vocabulary continues to impress me. Good gossip—Susan Sontag, formidable phony; Kathy Acker, trust fund baby; David Lynch, insufferable Mr. Potato Head; Joan Didion, slightly better female Ernest Hemingway; Ernest Hemingway, go to hell; Charles Bukowski, go to hell.

—

“Okay, I was wondering. Have you ever had sex with a dead person?”

I assumed a blasé expression. It crossed my mind that the dead person in question might be Lester’s idea of himself, but it seemed that a mate of his working for a mortician was having fun with bodies he embalmed and had offered to let Lester in on the action.

“I think it’s against the law,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Lester said. “But I mean, what isn’t?”

[Alex Abbott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir that's very moving yet unsentimental. I probably should have read some of Indiana's fiction or criticism first to get a larger scope of his life, but I enjoyed this nonetheless. I found a few of his potshots throughout a little offputting-- he has some rude words for David Lynch and Susan Sontag-- but nothing that soured me on the whole.

The final portion discussing Indiana's time in late 70s Los Angeles right before the AIDS crisis, in particular, is spellbinding, leaving the reader with such a powerful mood of melancholy.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

To heap praise on actors or storytellers, you say that you could listen to them read the phone book. Well, I would love to read Gary Indiana’s rewriting of that text.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining memoir by a writer who I feel some affinity towards (his grouchy negativity and sense of humor seem almost attuned to my own, this book sways back and forth between present day Cuba and 70's Los Angeles in a way that doesn't always strike me as very meaningful. However, Indiana's snarky anecdotes are both funny and hideously sad, and reading about the punk era in LA is interesting to me, as I'm more accustomed to people writing about New York at that time, and the differences between the two are pretty vast.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I Can Give You Anything But Love” is basically a memoir, but it is also part travelogue, diary entries, fragments and insanely dishy portraits of a variety of noteworthy people.
The first part of each chapter deals with the near present. Each contains a vivid, atmospheric and personal recollection of raw sexuality and a sordid sub-culture in Havana, Cuba, where Indiana occasionally lived and worked for fifteen years. The second part of each chapter narrates an episode from first three decades of Indiana’s life (50’s, 60’s & 70’s). The result is an entertaining and engrossing read.

[Jennifer Blowdryer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it because it's him - weak parts is padding about Cuba, and having to guess some chunks of who people actually were because the author is not going to blow everything up with subjects who are alive, kicking, and not so bad in the long run. What a truely horrible peerage and family, though - I've got a socio significant family member too, but I can't write like this - Indiana is a genuistic tuning fork for psychotic reaction, boring drug dealers, and malignant narcissism.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Can Give You Anything But Love is a memoir in sixteen chapters. The opening pages of each chapter describe Indiana's situation as he is drafting the book: on an extended visit to Havana, where he devotes a lot of the time when he is not working to Havana's pingueros. Although these passages were not the main draw of the book, they were brisk, vivid, and clear-eyed, not at all steeped in romanticism about the revolution or about Havana's pre-revolutionary bacchanal days.

Indiana generally keeps romanticization at arm's length, whatever the topic, as you might guess from his title. Chapter 5 provides a good overview of why Indiana never went in for partnering-up, monogamy, fidelity, or any of our culture's most heavily-promoted versions of love.

He devotes a chapter to his teenage years in New Hampshire and a chapter to his escape to San Francisco (he drops out of Berkeley just in time for the Summer of Love), but he writes mainly of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was in Los Angeles and New York City. The book is reminiscent of Henri Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: motley crews with big plans in theater, music, literature, or radical politics who are scraping by on various ill-paid work while devoting themselves to sex, drugs, and talk.

Accordingly, the book might remind you of Rent (or La Bohème) save that it ends somewhat before AIDS began its ravages and, as mentioned already, Indiana is allergic to sentimentality.

It ends, too, before Indiana has become a well known writer, as he subsequently did. This is a common pattern. Goethe, Yeats, André Gide, and Philip Roth all wrote autobiographies that wrap up right at the point where they are about to hit it big and become famous. Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth is the clearest example--it ends just when his writing career hits an absolute nadir.

Indiana is a much better writer than Murger, though--definitely more in the Gide or Auster class. Take this account of driving up to look at the famous Hollywood sign from behind:

"I often found myself driving on an unpaved access road that slithered along ridges hemmed with pines and juniper bushes to a flat, dusty plateau right below the observatory on Mount Lee. There was an outcrop of jagged travertine with caves woven through it. Sometimes I walked around in the caves, through puddles of bat guano, wary of rattlesnakes. Around a bend in the road, the reverse of the Hollywood sign came into view, the letters, held up on charred diagonal pylons, a bricolage of white-painted metal sheets pocked with bullet holes. The ledge the sign perched on revealed a startling panorama, the city spread out like an endless construction site sprinkled with talcum power."

Damn. That is good writing, and also indicative of Indiana's skepticism about façades, whether of structures or of institutions or of people. Some unnamed-but-recognizable folks get some venomous dismissals--William Vollman ("Nothing he wrote could possibly interest an adult for longer than ten minutes") or Joyce Carol Oates ("a twaddle factory"), and some named ones (Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, David Lynch) fare only a little better. Hemingway comes in for some cudgeling, and The Great Gatsby "is often mistaken for a great novel because it can be read in a few hours and its characters are rich people who come to a bad end." (I might point out that the novel's richest people, the Buchanans, seem to get off lightly.)

[Alyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

When he died recently, a favorite author of mine posted her memorial to him on the Insta, and I realized that although the interest still accrues on my English major education, I have never read anything by him. Reading a chapter or two each day helped me digest the stories, and his disdain for a few a artists and writers I love and respect really entertained me. He also helped me see why some people hate Boston--a city I consider one of the two where I have felt at ease being uneasy in cities--New York City is the other. The rest of America's cities have baffled me. Loved the photographs with no captions or explanation.

He describes the NYC I was lucky to see 8 years after he wrote this:
"Maybe the human race, the white part of it anyway had run out of things to be original about. The Manhattan makeover into a sterile tourist resort was encroaching, one neighbothood at a time, building by building, block by block, assisted by the art world, which planted itself in various neighborhoods that quickly became unaffordable by ordinary people and unlivable for even well-off adults. I arrived at the tail end of an era when New York had remained basically unchanged for thirty years—a real city, a dangerous one for the unwary transient, feared and detested by the rest of America. The ersatz, provincial, "post 9/11" New York is a holiday camp for university students and a pied-à-terre for Chinese billionaires, a place any young painter, writer, or musician would be wise to avoid, since it's no longer possible to live there on slender means."

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book wasn't quite what I expected, but perhaps neither was it what Indiana had planned upon when he began. On the last page he writes "At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of 'triumph over adversity' theme that gongs through much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist--which has not, in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity." For a writer so identified with New York, this memoir alternates between Cuba, presumably in the present moment where he is writing this book, and California, where he spent some formative years as a queer bohemian. What is recounted is sex and drugs, longing for love and a career as a writer. What he doesn't prune away is the richly described squalor of San Francisco in the late 1960s and LA in the 1970s, when it was kind of a backwater, and full of difficulty. Indiana recounts a couple of instances of horrific assault that caught me off guard, and some honest (bitchy) takes his acquaintances with Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker, both brilliant and difficult. A lot like Indiana. The worldview is rough and pessimistic, even in the youthful period of his life that is recounted here. But who ever said that optimism was the be all and end all? No one turns to this writer for that. He delivers on such a vivid description of a world view.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Gary Indiana many tears ago in the pages of the Village Voice where he was a funny and acerbic art critic. Later on I read and enjoyed a couple of his novels.Indiana reminds me of the novelist Bruce Wagner but with a trashy, flashy queer sensibility.
In this memoir Indiana ricochets between modern Havana and his younger years. The constants are lots of drugs, lots of anal sex and lots of weird and bizzaro characters. Indiana grew up in New Hampshire but left during the Summer of Love to journey to San Francisco for the demise of peace and love into drug induced violence and paranoia.
Indiana subsequently travels to Los Angeles and NYC where he continues to live in scroungy conditions and with a lifestyle that makes Keith Richards seem like a Buddhist monk. Indiana is withering in his contempt for most people including such famous names as David Lynch and Susan Sontag. He is also brutal in confronting his own shortcomings.
I enjoyed this funny well written and angry book. Indiana is a wild crazy who refuses to take the road more traveled . The book is entertaining and his courage is admirable.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the time I was reading this, Mr. Indiana passed. Curiously his passing was within a few days of my commenting - upon recommending "Horse Crazy" to a friend who had not until then known of Indiana - that he was in my opinion America's greatest living author. How displaced I felt then while finishing this book, that my thoughts of the brilliant author would from then on be couched in the position of this displacement rather than as one would consider otherwise. In other words, that the artist is still present, amongst 'us,' and was somewhere still regarding the world we were sharing, and in doing so, in turn formulating a response I could look forward to being counseled and guided by through their future work. This of course, was not to be any further. Apart from this, in this book, I found myself not just transported into a space of Indiana's path, but within his path, navigating the world of discovery-through the writing as guidepost enabling self-excavation. This is what he has brought to the table in his work, and why I will continue to recommend reading just about anything he penned.

[Zach]

No star rating because I have legitimately no idea how to rate it. This is a memoir of sex and drugs, with a side of eccentric characters and struggling to fit in. Most of these sides revolve around the aforementioned drugs and sex. It does not make for a very compelling read. On the other hand, parts of it provide insight into life as a queer person in San Francisco/Los Angeles before HIV, and that perspective is rare to read because so many people who would have written it were taken too young by AIDS. You also get some fairly raw reflections on being in your 20s and trying to figure out who you are and what you want, though it is quite bleak in its perspective and outlook. If you are familiar with the author (I was not), it may be more interesting to read this book, but I would generally not recommend it.

[Anthony Holliday · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars: I Can Give You Anything But Love was my first time reading Gary Indiana and I really enjoyed my time reading it. I will say it is a tough one to recommend because it could be triggering to some more sensitive readers because the author does not seem to care about some of the connotations of what he is saying. I did find it immensely funny at points and it made me excited to explore more of Indiana's work. I think if you think his work is for you than you will enjoy this book but will add the caveat of you should check some trigger warnings before reading.

[mar]

Feels impossible and unfair to rate this book. Made me think about unintended cruelty, death, and irreparable change. All these places that are precious only because they're threatened. How to reconcile with your own lack of power.

In that vein, I just learned that Gary's library was destroyed in the Eaton fire in an almost freakishly unlucky timeline: the books arrived the morning of Tuesday January 7th and burnt by midnight that same day. So horrible it almost makes you laugh. I wonder what he'd say about it.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book surprised me for a number of reasons. I really had no idea about the significance of Gary Indiana as an author, writer, actor, critic. This book did little to share those skills with the reader. It did, however, describe his difficult life. Raped as a youngster, confused about his sexuality, uncomfortable with his skills he roamed from place to place and didn’t seem to belong anywhere. Fascinating. I did have to do some additional reading to catch up.

[CJ Opal · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I hadn't read this. I usually go easy on memoirs because they're someone's life, but Gary Indiana purposefully tries to make you dislike him, and I do. It's not fun, it's not enlightening, it's honestly really sad and uncomfortable without purpose. RIP Gary, I hope you got the reaction you were looking for.

[Kevin Vargas · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was everything I love about Gary’s novels with the added layer of it being his life story and not a work of fiction. there is no emotion or sentiment as with his other work when telling hard or impactful stories and this beautifully captures the calloused approach queer people have to adopt to deal with coming of age in a not always accepting world.

[iamazoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

gary indiana understands america and culture in such a piercing way as no one else ever did or perhaps ever will. and he’s so funny even when he’s being mean…or especially when he’s being mean (sorry to susan sontag / joyce carol oates / hemingway / david lynch), which at least sets his criticism a notch above all other criticism.