Daddy Lessons

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.