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Boychick
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 28, 2025
This was a solidly OK short novel that i found in the treasure trove of Bolerium Books in San Francisco. I was captivated by the unique dust jacket and it sounded like something I like - a slice of life gay novel in 70s NYC about a young Jewish man. The lack of action on goodreads made me excited to read the book. The premise is the narrator’s obsessive love for a 16 year old he picks up at the pool. The pedophilia was expected but what shocked me was the narrator’s friends’ approval and encouragement of Leo’s crush on and sexual relationship with Boychick. These were heterosexual normies (and a few beats including Allen Ginsburg) who didn’t bat an eye at him screwing and lusting after a youth, or at least in the narrators telling. It was a slightly more sexual and equally depressing Death in Venice. I would say this was an extremely lonely book, both in the maddening persistence of Leo’s search for “love” and in the mundanity of the other events, and should make a reader glad to be living a different life entirely.
August 6, 2025
"In BOYCHICK, Mr. Skir gives a novel of emotional self-destruction - the story of Leo, a graduate student and homosexual, who solicits with astonishing enthusiasm his own emotional defeat.
"In his totally infeasible (see my footnote *1 below) to win and hold 'boychick' - a teenage tergiversator (see my footnote *2 below) without name, morals, or emotions - Leo structures for himself a world in which the only reality is fantasy and self-obstruction is the norm. He lives secure in the knowledge that even the worst of dreams, too, can come true.
"Mr. Skir's style is precise and his hand is accurate as he describes what it means to be human and therefore vulnerable - not only to the designs of others but to one's own self. BOYCHICK is a novel about those who have never grown up - but it is not for children." From the jacket flyleaf of the 1971 hardback edition of the novel.
That is how the novel was described on publication but aside from the bizarrely obscure word use (I've never felt it necessary to provide meanings to words in a publishers blurb before) it also is inaccurate, the 'boychick' of the novel is not unnamed. At the very beginning of the novel he is introduced as and referred to as 'Leroy'. It is only in the intervening pages that he becomes 'boychick' because in the novel Leo always thinks of him by that name. Why? well the answer is there on page 127:
"And then they sit. They are drinking tea from glasses surely and then - this I know - my grandfather Leo whom I was never to know, this other Leo, was telling my grandmother of the daughters who have already come to America.
"'And Lea,' he said, 'Lea already has a boychick!'
"But the word boychick, a compound of the English word 'boy' and 'chick', the Russian diminutive for 'little' is of course an American Yiddish word unfamiliar to my grandmother her first day in America. And hearing the word 'boy' she associated it with the word 'goy' and leapt to the conclusion (erroneous, it would seem) that Esther had found herself not simply a little boy but a little goy."
And in this excerpt you learn that Jewishness is at its core (see: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/co...) and, though long forgotten Leo Skir was, long before "Dancing on Tisha B'Av" by Lev Raphael, blazing a trail in writing about being Jewish and gay. Jewishness comes into play later when Leo is about to go to bed with someone he has met in a bar:
"'I shouldn't have drunk this...I'm allergic. I've probably broken out all over my back. My skin's probably a mess.' And I, very dizzy, smiled at him, thinking how really odd it was that in this world of sex your flesh suddenly became an object to be presented. Almost, it seemed, as strange and distant to me as the flesh sacrifices of the Temple of Jerusalem."
'Boy Chick' is also not a novel about the post Stonewall gay world. Leo Skir, born 1932, had more in common with authors like Sandford Friedman (author of Totempole, born 1928) then post Stonewall writers like Edmund White (born 1940). His youth was the 1950s, the Mattachine society and the setting of 'Boychick' is that world and this, in part, explains some of the negative responses to the novel on publication. It was out-of-step with the zeitgeist (see footnote *3 below).
What made novel the interesting for me was that it wasn't some pederastic novel of love found then lost and it definitely wasn't about falling in love/lust for a 16 year old boy in particular or 16 year old boys in general, that was all just trope for exploring what really interested Leo Skir which can be found in the middle section of the novel which deals with Leo and his graduate studies of 'The Faerie Queen' by Edmund Spenser. As he says on page 107:
"...That was the trouble...Spencer's time had gone...It was an admission that had to be made if one was going to gain an honest appreciation of Spenser. His art, resembling in some ways that of the late Italian Renaissance, was one that depended on a certain atmosphere. It was as if there had been a party and one was now picking up the costumes and paper horns and candy containers. They were of interest, the objects, but the party was over."
In a sense by 1971 the time and 'party' described in 'Boy Chick' was gone, vanished. A new world was being born and it didn't think it owed anything to the past (see some of the stories in 'I've A Feeling Were not in Kansas Anymore' by Ethan Mordden). That would change but by then 'Boy Chick' a small novel from a small press would be forgotten.
'Boy Chick' is a far more interesting novel than I expected. It is also a beautiful example of 20th century small press book production. I have no hesitation in recommending it.
*1 'Infeasible things are impossible, or too complicated to actually be done. Your idea of staging a city-wide game of Capture the Flag is probably infeasible.'
*2 'A tergiversator is a person who evades giving a clear, direct answer, often by equivocating or hedging. It can also refer to a defector, turncoat, or someone who changes sides or loyalties. In essence, a tergiversator is someone who is not straightforward and honest.'
*3 It is worth checking out the Wikipedia entry for 'Boy Chick' and following the links in the references to reviews in gay publications in 1971 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boychic...
"In his totally infeasible (see my footnote *1 below) to win and hold 'boychick' - a teenage tergiversator (see my footnote *2 below) without name, morals, or emotions - Leo structures for himself a world in which the only reality is fantasy and self-obstruction is the norm. He lives secure in the knowledge that even the worst of dreams, too, can come true.
"Mr. Skir's style is precise and his hand is accurate as he describes what it means to be human and therefore vulnerable - not only to the designs of others but to one's own self. BOYCHICK is a novel about those who have never grown up - but it is not for children." From the jacket flyleaf of the 1971 hardback edition of the novel.
That is how the novel was described on publication but aside from the bizarrely obscure word use (I've never felt it necessary to provide meanings to words in a publishers blurb before) it also is inaccurate, the 'boychick' of the novel is not unnamed. At the very beginning of the novel he is introduced as and referred to as 'Leroy'. It is only in the intervening pages that he becomes 'boychick' because in the novel Leo always thinks of him by that name. Why? well the answer is there on page 127:
"And then they sit. They are drinking tea from glasses surely and then - this I know - my grandfather Leo whom I was never to know, this other Leo, was telling my grandmother of the daughters who have already come to America.
"'And Lea,' he said, 'Lea already has a boychick!'
"But the word boychick, a compound of the English word 'boy' and 'chick', the Russian diminutive for 'little' is of course an American Yiddish word unfamiliar to my grandmother her first day in America. And hearing the word 'boy' she associated it with the word 'goy' and leapt to the conclusion (erroneous, it would seem) that Esther had found herself not simply a little boy but a little goy."
And in this excerpt you learn that Jewishness is at its core (see: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/co...) and, though long forgotten Leo Skir was, long before "Dancing on Tisha B'Av" by Lev Raphael, blazing a trail in writing about being Jewish and gay. Jewishness comes into play later when Leo is about to go to bed with someone he has met in a bar:
"'I shouldn't have drunk this...I'm allergic. I've probably broken out all over my back. My skin's probably a mess.' And I, very dizzy, smiled at him, thinking how really odd it was that in this world of sex your flesh suddenly became an object to be presented. Almost, it seemed, as strange and distant to me as the flesh sacrifices of the Temple of Jerusalem."
'Boy Chick' is also not a novel about the post Stonewall gay world. Leo Skir, born 1932, had more in common with authors like Sandford Friedman (author of Totempole, born 1928) then post Stonewall writers like Edmund White (born 1940). His youth was the 1950s, the Mattachine society and the setting of 'Boychick' is that world and this, in part, explains some of the negative responses to the novel on publication. It was out-of-step with the zeitgeist (see footnote *3 below).
What made novel the interesting for me was that it wasn't some pederastic novel of love found then lost and it definitely wasn't about falling in love/lust for a 16 year old boy in particular or 16 year old boys in general, that was all just trope for exploring what really interested Leo Skir which can be found in the middle section of the novel which deals with Leo and his graduate studies of 'The Faerie Queen' by Edmund Spenser. As he says on page 107:
"...That was the trouble...Spencer's time had gone...It was an admission that had to be made if one was going to gain an honest appreciation of Spenser. His art, resembling in some ways that of the late Italian Renaissance, was one that depended on a certain atmosphere. It was as if there had been a party and one was now picking up the costumes and paper horns and candy containers. They were of interest, the objects, but the party was over."
In a sense by 1971 the time and 'party' described in 'Boy Chick' was gone, vanished. A new world was being born and it didn't think it owed anything to the past (see some of the stories in 'I've A Feeling Were not in Kansas Anymore' by Ethan Mordden). That would change but by then 'Boy Chick' a small novel from a small press would be forgotten.
'Boy Chick' is a far more interesting novel than I expected. It is also a beautiful example of 20th century small press book production. I have no hesitation in recommending it.
*1 'Infeasible things are impossible, or too complicated to actually be done. Your idea of staging a city-wide game of Capture the Flag is probably infeasible.'
*2 'A tergiversator is a person who evades giving a clear, direct answer, often by equivocating or hedging. It can also refer to a defector, turncoat, or someone who changes sides or loyalties. In essence, a tergiversator is someone who is not straightforward and honest.'
*3 It is worth checking out the Wikipedia entry for 'Boy Chick' and following the links in the references to reviews in gay publications in 1971 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boychic...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews