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Boys Like Her: Transfictions
Boys Like Her is a provocative collection of fiction and images from Taste This, a queer performance group including Anna Camilleri, Ivan Coyote, Zoe Eakle and Lyndell Mongomery. Kate Bornstein provides an introduction.
Boys Like Her is a road movie of young queer life. Four distinct voices come together in a tag-team dialogue, interwoven with disturbingly beautiful photographs that echo their transformative energy.
Reading this book is like watching a circus troupe juggle a chainsaw, a grapefruit, a beach ball and a pocket watch without dropping a beat, With identities ranging from boy-girl to power-femme to borderline testosterone-enhanced, these talented upstarts explore and explode gender, sex and family. Gentleness is mixed with harsh honesty, as grandmother's good advice jostles with hormone therapy, surviving the psych ward, rough play and lost love. Each piece stands alone, together they are a conversation, a road movie of young queer life, rolling with the punches and taking the reader along for a ride to remember!
Boys Like Her is a road movie of young queer life. Four distinct voices come together in a tag-team dialogue, interwoven with disturbingly beautiful photographs that echo their transformative energy.
Reading this book is like watching a circus troupe juggle a chainsaw, a grapefruit, a beach ball and a pocket watch without dropping a beat, With identities ranging from boy-girl to power-femme to borderline testosterone-enhanced, these talented upstarts explore and explode gender, sex and family. Gentleness is mixed with harsh honesty, as grandmother's good advice jostles with hormone therapy, surviving the psych ward, rough play and lost love. Each piece stands alone, together they are a conversation, a road movie of young queer life, rolling with the punches and taking the reader along for a ride to remember!
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
6 people are currently reading
1837 people want to read
About the author
Taste This
1 book2 followersTaste This is a queer performance group including Anna Camilleri, Ivan Coyote, Zoe Eakle, and Lyndell Mongomery.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
November 26, 2007
This book is fantastic, beautiful and oh so rare. I read this as a stolen copy from a public library, sold on the internet and bought by my good friend Shannon who is the number one world advocate for this book and it's powers to make everything make sense.
At first I felt like a poser, like I shouldn't be reading these stories on gender ambiguity, but as I read on, I realized that the point of this book is to show the reader that there is a little bit of all these gender representations in all of us.
This book is amazing, in that it brings four different points of view to this incredibly empowering and powerful work. These four people are interconnected in relationships, performing and writing, and are so creative in so many forms that reading Boys Like Her could set off a chain of cultural opportunities from music to photography to other books and writing.
If this book were available to purchase I would buy a copy, and probably another couple of copies to give to people I love who need to read this, but can't because there are only a select number of copies available and we must find stolen library copies on the internet.
At first I felt like a poser, like I shouldn't be reading these stories on gender ambiguity, but as I read on, I realized that the point of this book is to show the reader that there is a little bit of all these gender representations in all of us.
This book is amazing, in that it brings four different points of view to this incredibly empowering and powerful work. These four people are interconnected in relationships, performing and writing, and are so creative in so many forms that reading Boys Like Her could set off a chain of cultural opportunities from music to photography to other books and writing.
If this book were available to purchase I would buy a copy, and probably another couple of copies to give to people I love who need to read this, but can't because there are only a select number of copies available and we must find stolen library copies on the internet.
February 28, 2008
I'll just say earnest. and leave it that.
August 29, 2014
I first read this book when it was originally published in 1998. I'm not one to reread books; once is usually enough. When I first read this, I absolutely loved it. And it got me thinking about gender and sexuality in ways I hadn't yet been able to verbalize.
I picked it up recently just to see what it would be like to read 15 years later. While it didn't blow open my world the way it did when I first read it, it did however remind what a quality book this is. To me, it speaks volumes that stories compiled from a performance and put into book format are still relevant. At the time it was written, "Boys Like Her" was a cultural snapshot. What I didn't expect, was that some of these snapshots have become timeless; feeling as relevant today as they did when the book was written.
I picked it up recently just to see what it would be like to read 15 years later. While it didn't blow open my world the way it did when I first read it, it did however remind what a quality book this is. To me, it speaks volumes that stories compiled from a performance and put into book format are still relevant. At the time it was written, "Boys Like Her" was a cultural snapshot. What I didn't expect, was that some of these snapshots have become timeless; feeling as relevant today as they did when the book was written.
July 8, 2008
Boys Like Her is a pretty awesome book. It was my first introduction to the world of butches and masculine minds in female bodies - and to Ivan Coyote's writing.
The stories, poetry and photography in the book are in general very good. The ones I treasured most were the glimpses into their lives and relationships, the stories where they talked about themselves and each other.
The stories, poetry and photography in the book are in general very good. The ones I treasured most were the glimpses into their lives and relationships, the stories where they talked about themselves and each other.
December 3, 2014
These are my people.
April 10, 2018
These are some of the most sincere voices in any book I have ever read-- a frankness on gender and gender ambiguity that is rare, including refreshing honesty about the confusion that most gender non-normative folks face, and how to live and love with integrity despite that-- they may not always know who they are, but they sure as hell know what they are not, and what they like, and how they feel when someone looks at them a certain way, or addresses them in a particular manner. This book is an intimate portrait of a group of misfits crossing to and fro across the Canada-US border, terrifying and unpleasant encounters with border guards (including a terrifying body search), and a sense of humour despite everything.
Books like these remind me of how much of our daily lives are ordered-- cookie cutter lives in cookie cutter neighbourhoods with cookie cutter people, all falling neatly into templates that are rarely if ever deviated from. While this lifestyle provides a sense of stability, real or imagined, the interpersonal relationships and intimate connections that we have with people and places and ways of living remain vague and prone to fragility.
In contrast, while these folks may often be broke, or may not always know where they will sleep the next night, and so on, theirs is a tight knit family that is almost unthinkable in a modern or pre-modern mainstream. These fun-loving often-quarrelling sometimes-disappearing individuals laugh together, share experiences and habits and personal needs and quirks and eccentricities, look out for each other and balance each other out. There have been innumerable moments when I have felt fairly envious of this life, the sense of security that may not be material but is much more flesh and blood.'
Overall, the book is extremely readable, and pushes at boundaries of acceptability without being particularly transgressive or shocking (very Canadian-- everyone is just so polite!) Recommended reading for anyone who wants to vicariously experience lives different from their own.
Books like these remind me of how much of our daily lives are ordered-- cookie cutter lives in cookie cutter neighbourhoods with cookie cutter people, all falling neatly into templates that are rarely if ever deviated from. While this lifestyle provides a sense of stability, real or imagined, the interpersonal relationships and intimate connections that we have with people and places and ways of living remain vague and prone to fragility.
In contrast, while these folks may often be broke, or may not always know where they will sleep the next night, and so on, theirs is a tight knit family that is almost unthinkable in a modern or pre-modern mainstream. These fun-loving often-quarrelling sometimes-disappearing individuals laugh together, share experiences and habits and personal needs and quirks and eccentricities, look out for each other and balance each other out. There have been innumerable moments when I have felt fairly envious of this life, the sense of security that may not be material but is much more flesh and blood.'
Overall, the book is extremely readable, and pushes at boundaries of acceptability without being particularly transgressive or shocking (very Canadian-- everyone is just so polite!) Recommended reading for anyone who wants to vicariously experience lives different from their own.
October 7, 2017
4.5 stars.
I’m definitely too young to remember this era of queer lit and culture, but I loved the style of this anthology: it’s full of explorations and take-downs of gender concepts, both straightforward and ambiguous, prosaic and poetic. I will be honest and say that Ivan is my favourite writer (and pretty much my favourite living writer in general) but none of the other three let down the standard at all – though they might seem to be coming from alike perspectives on the surface, in practice they all had unique perspectives to contribute. They also bring them together in the comparison of gender ‘crossing’ (hence the ‘trans-' prefix so ubiquitous today) and physical border crossing (which takes up a significant middle portion of the book, and provides its own ‘crossing’ between the more colloquial, anecdotal first half and the emotionally-heightened, bordering on avant-garde second half. The crossing challenges the validity of these categories – after all, both gender and national ‘borders’ are social constructs at their hearts.
On top of that, book mixes humour, sorrow, and rage, lightening and weighting the tone and mood and bringing the reader into their particular atmosphere as though you’re really watching a performance. I loved that Kate Bornstein’s Foreword made a serious point but was still so funny about it – after all, how many books start “Hi there, and welcome to the book”? I like to think it signposts a new approach to the book as a format for storytelling, since it’s pretty unusual to see performance art adapted for paper.
I have to say I felt it got saucier and more explicit as it went on, and I found myself a bit out of my element (I don’t read erotica, though arguably I sort of just did), but artistically these were some of the most evocative parts of a generally great read. The power-play aspects played in to the questions of gender dynamics in a very challenging way, and, though sexual content in books tends to get dated quickly, it still remains daring and provocative. The aesthetic charm of the time marks it out as ‘of its era’, but the contents are just as pressing and relevant as if they were written today. (It made me want to see the performances they describe, too, but I don’t think they’ve been recorded.) I think the most telling thing in all this is that the authors didn’t have to pull out all the stops for a book only meant to correspond to their live performances, but even flicking through this book and glancing at all the effort put into the photographs, formatting, and written content demonstrates what a labour of love this must have been.
I’m definitely too young to remember this era of queer lit and culture, but I loved the style of this anthology: it’s full of explorations and take-downs of gender concepts, both straightforward and ambiguous, prosaic and poetic. I will be honest and say that Ivan is my favourite writer (and pretty much my favourite living writer in general) but none of the other three let down the standard at all – though they might seem to be coming from alike perspectives on the surface, in practice they all had unique perspectives to contribute. They also bring them together in the comparison of gender ‘crossing’ (hence the ‘trans-' prefix so ubiquitous today) and physical border crossing (which takes up a significant middle portion of the book, and provides its own ‘crossing’ between the more colloquial, anecdotal first half and the emotionally-heightened, bordering on avant-garde second half. The crossing challenges the validity of these categories – after all, both gender and national ‘borders’ are social constructs at their hearts.
On top of that, book mixes humour, sorrow, and rage, lightening and weighting the tone and mood and bringing the reader into their particular atmosphere as though you’re really watching a performance. I loved that Kate Bornstein’s Foreword made a serious point but was still so funny about it – after all, how many books start “Hi there, and welcome to the book”? I like to think it signposts a new approach to the book as a format for storytelling, since it’s pretty unusual to see performance art adapted for paper.
I have to say I felt it got saucier and more explicit as it went on, and I found myself a bit out of my element (I don’t read erotica, though arguably I sort of just did), but artistically these were some of the most evocative parts of a generally great read. The power-play aspects played in to the questions of gender dynamics in a very challenging way, and, though sexual content in books tends to get dated quickly, it still remains daring and provocative. The aesthetic charm of the time marks it out as ‘of its era’, but the contents are just as pressing and relevant as if they were written today. (It made me want to see the performances they describe, too, but I don’t think they’ve been recorded.) I think the most telling thing in all this is that the authors didn’t have to pull out all the stops for a book only meant to correspond to their live performances, but even flicking through this book and glancing at all the effort put into the photographs, formatting, and written content demonstrates what a labour of love this must have been.
June 17, 2018
a mix of true stories, poems and performance pieces, revelatory and celebratory, insightful and humorous at times. the photos were also a great contribution to the work. glad i finally read this book.
January 6, 2023
Fan-freaking-tastic. One of my first queer books read many many years ago. This is my second copy, lost the 1st in a number of moves. I would recommend this to anyone in my community, always.
January 9, 2026
As always: I love gay people. There's some very 90s poetry, and the butch-femme stuff isn't really my cup of tea, but. I love gay people, and I do love very 90s gender fuckery.
August 25, 2023
my favorite book when i was 18--- hadn't read in many years
July 26, 2019
The writing is perfectly serviceable, though without any distinguishing characteristics. It's like those MFA bores all are.
March 1, 2018
If you didn't like this book honestly please don't tell me about it because every story in here got like under my skin in a way that when I had read everything I felt like I was saying goodbye to friends.
May 31, 2015
Boys Like Her: Transfictions (1998) is, above all, a collection concerned with border crossings, both literal and figurative. In fact, what Boys Like Her really made me understand is that literal crossings are always figurative in some way and that, perhaps, figurative journeys can be understood in a unique way by thinking of them as literal. The event that Boys Like Her begins with and keeps coming back to is the literal Canada-U.S. border crossing that the troupe Taste This (comprised of Anna Camilleri, Ivan E. Coyote, Zoë Eakle, and Lyndell Montgomery) undertakes on their multi-disciplinary performance tour. This initial border crossing repeats and reinvents itself throughout the book, particularly in terms of gender and genre—word suspiciously similar, don’t you think?...
see the rest of my review here: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wor...
see the rest of my review here: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wor...
August 18, 2011
This book...it's a mixed bag. Well, no. My reaction to it is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it feels like a period piece, a little encapsulation of mid-90s queer politics and performance, so it's got this weird feeling of The Past to me (which is likely just my idiosyncrasies, but still colors my reaction).
All that aside, though? This book is the real deal. Hilarious, heart-rending, angering, inspirational, and above all: hot, which I mean in the best way possible. These writers and performers know their craft, they know what they and their bodies like, and they're overjoyed to write about sex. And politics, and family, and love, and entanglements. No matter what part of the alphabet soup you hail from, it's great ride.
All that aside, though? This book is the real deal. Hilarious, heart-rending, angering, inspirational, and above all: hot, which I mean in the best way possible. These writers and performers know their craft, they know what they and their bodies like, and they're overjoyed to write about sex. And politics, and family, and love, and entanglements. No matter what part of the alphabet soup you hail from, it's great ride.
November 28, 2011
2.5 I would have liked to have found this book not long after it came out. Instead, reading it was simply like being brought back to just after high school, when I was holding hands with my girlfriend underneath our coast at the movie theatre, reading Holly Hughes and taking women's studies classes and watching performance pieces in which fellow undergraduates gave long monologues in the nude. The design of the book was painful to my contemporary eyes, but it is set up like a zine, something you might find on the back of a bus, take pleasure in sneaking a look at and certainly part of its mid-90s appeal.
June 17, 2010
A sweet, passionate, occasionally brilliant road trip through gender. If you've ever loved anyone who didn't fit within neatly defined categories, this book will make you fall in love just a little bit more. I might be too jaded for it now, but there was a time when I slept with this next to my head and close to my heart.
February 17, 2013
Recently became smitten with Ivan E. Coyote, one of the writers in this collection, but am not feeling the same love for this troop in its entirety. Unlike sweet Ivan's, their stories were repetitive and not so much from the heart, seeming more to want to shock and separate from their readers than connect.
April 27, 2014
Awesome, awesome, awesome! I bought a copy and gave it the local Gay Youth group, but it should be available in every library. Loved Ivan Coyote and Lindell Montgomery's sections, but none of the writers/performers are second rate here. Photos are as thought provoking as the text. I only wish I had the opportunity to see Taste This live.
September 2, 2016
So so so good!!! I've always loved Ivan and they've always been great - I fell in love all over again through this book. Has a distinctly 90s feel, and the queer scene they describe is sort of familiar even though I've never experienced it - it's part shock performance part heartfelt confessional, and really nice. Definitely recommend!!!
August 28, 2008
this was one of my first adventures into gay lit, so my rating might be a bit skewed. to be honest, i don't really remember most of the stories, so perhaps this rating should just be ignored all together. or maybe i should re-read it.
December 1, 2010
Roommate let me borrow this title after she found me reading one of Ivans book. Didnt really want to give it back though its somewhat comforting to know its still in the house. Im sure the public library where I work had a copy until somebody stole it...
Im just saying
August 29, 2012
oh, SWOON. this fucking book. it's porn, the whole thing - smart and subtle and fiery and tough and angry and sexy and gut-wrenching and awesome. it's even better if you know what the authors look like and you can picture them while you read it. yum.
August 20, 2013
This book introduced me to the work of Ivan Coyote, and I've been hooked on her ever since. It's been a long time since I read it, so I can't speak specifically to the content, I just remember loving what I read when I did.
October 3, 2016
This is maybe the most 1998 thing I've ever seen. I got it for the stories which were good (I'd give them maybe a 3.5 overall), but I couldn't really get past the 90s styling. And yes, I do know that I am hopelessly shallow.
August 26, 2007
Four amazing queers took their stage show and made it a book, essentially. Mostly short stories. Made me laugh and cry.
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March 16, 2008Photography, poetry, memoirs. very good.
June 13, 2009
A great book of short stories of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and other artistic forms that bend gender and sexuality.
August 11, 2009
very sweet and earnest, almost too earnest for me to relate to but interesting for historical context. as in, slight go fish/spoken word flav.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews