Creeps are everywhere.
CREEP
Cover of CREEP.
It all began with CREEP, the first book in the trilogy. In this provocative and engaging book, Jonathan Alexander interweaves personal narrative and cultural analyses to explore what it means to be a creep. Calling this work a critical memoir, he draws on his own experiences growing up gay in the deep south, while also interrogating examples from literature and popular film and media, to approach the figure of the creep with some sympathy. Ultimately, Alexander argues, a study of creepiness might offer us critical insight into the fundamental perversity of how we live.
BULLIED
Cover of BULLIED.
BULLIED continues the story started in CREEP by recounting — and confronting — a painful dimension of Alexander’s self-narration. He describes how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he had been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” — a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men — that is, to understand his creepiness, and even to battle his queerness. Now, a man in middle-age, having largely accepted his queerness, Alexander asks some difficult questions: What happens when what you thought was the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination?
Forthcoming fall 2021.
DEAR QUEER SELF
Cover oDEAR QUEER SELF.
DEAR QUEER SELF is an unvarnished accounting of one man’s struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity. In this unconventional memoir, Alexander, who grew up in the Deep South during the 1970s and ’80s, addresses wry and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years—1989, 1993, and 1996—the book follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humor and wit afforded by hindsight, Alexander relives his closeted college years, his experiments with his sexuality in graduate school, his first marriage (to a woman), and his budding career as a college professor. As he moves from tortured self-denial to hard-won self-acceptance, the author confronts the deeply uncomfortable ways he’s implicated in his own story, grappling with the fact that he not only rejected his erotic interests but convinced himself (and others) that his uncle had sexually abused him, a lie that explained his attraction to men.
DEAR QUEER SELF also has a set of playlists on YouTube; check them out:
Published by Acre Books.
Forthcoming in 2022.
And, in addition to The Creep Trilogy, check out —
STROKE BOOK: The Diary of a Blindspot
This book emerged out of a health crisis in the summer of 2019, and a need to think and feel that crisis through sexuality, a changing sense of dis/ability, and an altered experience of time. At a basic level, the book, initially drafted in the immediate aftermath of the crisis (a minor stroke), chronicles a very mortal encounter with time, with Alexander’s recognition that we are never not beholden to time, even as we often refuse opportunities to confront the feelings and realities of our beholdenness. But it is also a recognition that queer time has its own rhythms, fluctuations, and perversities. Alexander recounts how he experienced — and continues to experience — his health crisis in very particular ways, ways that he cannot disentangle from his experiences in this culture as a queer person. This book is a refusal to engage in such disentanglement.
Out now! Available everywhere. Order from Fordham UP.