Once again, I’m a sucker for a good title, and Be Gay Do Crime got me immediately. It’s a short story collection edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, and I went in assuming that it’d be a series of riots. The name evokes the proud history of queer militancy to me — the anti-normative ethos of “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you.”
That’s mostly not it. Across the 16 stories collected here, there are many flavors of queerness (largely focused on cis and trans women and nonbinary folks), and the crimes are small-scale and intimate. Some aren’t even crimes: among others, there’s an adult’s submission of art entries to a children’s contest, the trashing of a lover’s lucky hat, the theft of a dog from an unsavory tech bro, and just one series of bank robberies.
These stories are more or less realist slices of life, taking place over a few hours, days, or weeks, among two, three, or four people. Rather than focusing on The Resistance writ large, we see a kaleidoscope of identities (across race, gender, class, ability, and nationality) drift together and apart, driven by desire for connection, understanding, and occasionally orgasms.
That intimacy of scale works both for and against the collection as a whole: since it includes sixteen different authors, there’s a lot of natural variation in terms of tone and quality across the entries. The loose themes of queerness and transgression aren’t enough to unite the stories or to put them clearly in communication with each other, so each snapshot has to live and die entirely on its own quality.
The stories I liked, I really liked — particular standouts included “The Meaning of Life,” by Miriam Lacroix; “Black Jesus,” by Venita Blackburn; and “Operation Hyacinth,” by Sam Cohen (that last one includes a grandmotherly ghost, so extra bonus points right there). But the ones that didn’t take off for me pulled down my overall assessment of the book’s quality.
If you’re in the mood for a series of anecdotes about contemporary life through the prism of queerness, this may be the book for you — but as you would expect when you’re meeting 16 new people, be prepared for some of these encounters to rub you the wrong way.
