Book Review: Through the eyes of a bookish and sensitive boy
Jill Mandrake, The Peak

Before anything else, I'll say read this first work of George K. Ilsley. His book of twelve stories, Random Acts of Hatred, is an excellent summation of how it feels growing up in a marginal world that the social revolution took a while to reach. You can sure tell that Ilsley was a teenager in the seventies - early seventies, specifically.

Half this book is about growing up gay. The other six stories are about being there - grown up and gay, I mean. The growing up stories are far more arresting; the ones with adult protagonists are almost anti-climactic. You might say that the intensified, first-time experiences you have as a kid are uniquely yours, while the adult stuff is all too tired and predictable - within a short story, anyway.

Consider the all-knowing, childlike observation from "The Boy Who Wore Leotards," a tale in which the hero's mother buys him a pair of leotards one winter, thinking maybe they're really long johns: "Back when straight boys had the gaydar, there was a boy who wore blue leotards to school and things did not go well. As soon as his underwear was uncovered, before gym, word spread fast."

Apart from the jolting information that straight boys ever possessed gaydar, what a well chosen bit of description this paragraph is - it connotes the whole elementary school dynamic in only a few words.

Some of this poor guy's repetitive, clouded experience could be called dreamlike, except that it's all too real. Like his headshrinker asks in "The Boy Who Does His Age in Minutes": "Do you really remember that boy... or are you just telling me stories about him?"

Good question, Doc, but perhaps unanswerable. It brings to mind the bigger question of how to rewrite personal history. We have to find a bit of sense in there someplace, particularly in episodes such as this, from the title story: Our hero is having anonymous sex in the big city, re-enacting all the secret exchanges from his hypocritical hometown: "Couldn't they just unbuckle and drop their drawers? Noooo. That would be too much of a commitment."

I sure wish our hero could have more of a shared experience now and then, rather than the emptiness infusing the title story. Speaking of titles, Random Acts of Hatred is not the most accurate way to describe the events this protagonist encounters. These acts are not random; they're routine, or even systematic. We already know how the system works; when you don't fit into the acceptable pigeonholes, you're the object of derision, or worse. But on a happier note, consider how the state of affairs has improved in the last three decades.

Which brings us to the cover graphic of this book of short stories. It shows a boy peeking through what looks like a compressed little closet. We're tempted to say, in a random act of kindness, "Come on out, kid, lots of people have paved the way for you." If not, books like this wouldn't get out there.

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