Cowboy erotica meets Kathy Acker in this smart, raunchy look at a queer sexual awakening

Part memoir, part literary study, part formalist exercise in excitement, Daddy Lessons is a transgressive text of pleasure, bodies, the Lord, and the West.

In this post-gender, post-sexuality, queer prairie Decameron, Steacy Easton’s sexual anxiety becomes textual anxiety. This is a messy history of Mormon missionaries, bathhouses, Anglican boarding schools, the back rooms of prairie bars, Montreal classrooms, and the many religious spaces that have tried to snuff out queer desire while turning a blind eye to abuse. These are provocative tales to turn on, offend, and sentimentalize. Easton explores the seminal texts of their sexuality, from Frank O’Hara to Neil LaBute, Kip Moore to Lorelei James, and delves into their own encounters as they came of age. These daddy lessons are blunt about the ambivalences of trauma and the pleasures of disobedience, slippery and difficult, reveling in the funk of memory and desire.

"In dangerous times, Daddy Lessons dares to complicate the question of what children desire, including things that they probably shouldn’t, and that adults must not exploit or manipulate. Except they do. Steacy Easton's meditations follow how such desires and disasters secrete an aesthetic and a self, and how something vivacious can spring from that muck, something like this book itself, smutty and shining and garlanded in jonquils." – Carl Wilson, author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

"Steacy writes about the queer pleasure-seeking body in ways both fresh and eminently familiar. What is a young faggot to do with such feral and ungovernable desires? Read, of course! And fuck. Daddy Lessons feels like doing the best of both at once." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners

"Daddy Lessons is a cocky and tender reclamation of childhood and teenage wanting." – Vivek Shraya, author of I’m Afraid of Men and People Change