Book Reviews: "SoMa" by Kemble Scott

My favorite book of last year was the memoir I Am Not Myself These Days, Joshua Kilmer-Purcell's harrowing/hilarious account of his former life as an alcoholic drag queen and his ill-faited love affair with a meth-addicted hustler. In many ways, it's everything I hate about "serious" gay fiction: yet another self-indulgent, self-destructive protagonist on the road to yet another completely avoidable, and, as a result not all that tragic, tragedy. And yet, Kilmer-Purcell found the heart, the humanity, and even, incredibly, the humor in his story. The book works on literally every level.

I was reminded of Joshua's book while reading the new novel SoMA, by Scott Kemble (Kensington Books, $15.00). Already apparently a best-seller in San Francisco, the novel purports to expose the seamy sexual underside of that city's South of Market area. You're a "disillusioned hipster" looking for or attracted to extreme thrills? This is the place to go.

"Scott Kemble" is the pseudonym for a local journalist and, frankly, his book reads like it. I Am Not Myself These Day is all about indelible characters who, despite being so different from me, were also so familiar to me. How is the story of an alcoholic drag queen and his meth-addicted hustler boyfriend a "universal" love story? Well, read the book and find out.

SoMA, meanwhile, isn't about characters so much as it's about, well, enemas, gloryholes, and "booty bumps." It's all well-documented and detailed. And if that's your interest, this is a well-written book.

Incidentally, I know this is all supposed to be terribly "shocking." But is anyone really shocked by this stuff anymore? Gay fiction and gay cinema has spent so much time "exposing" these "shocking" practices that I confess that my eyebrows were barely raised. I was kinda bored by it all.

Yikes! I've become a disillusioned hipster just from reading these books! Maybe if I run off to the sex club for another meth-induced frenzy...

Or, better still, maybe I could just try paint-ball.