Telling a tale of gay culture in the ’90s

“I think about how sometimes I feel so lonely talking to the people I love, and sometimes I feel so lonely talking to the people I hate,” thinks Alexa, the young, queer narrator of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new novel. “And sometimes I just feel so lonely.”

“Sketchtasy” follows Alexa and her friends as they navigate the Boston gay nightclub scene in the 1990s. Their lives are focused on drinking and doing just about every drug in the book; they’re all trying desperately to forget their own traumas, and the pain of being queer in a city that’s hostile to their very existence.

Sycamore, who lives in Seattle, spoke to The Times via telephone from Baltimore, where she’s researching her next book. This interview has been edited.

Can you talk about the origins of “Sketchtasy,” set in the queer scene in Boston in the 1990s?

that the novel takes place. I was really living inside gay culture, in terms of all of the hypocrisy, and all of the mimicry of the worst aspects of straight, normative culture In a way, it started from my own personal memories of that time period. I started with these over-the-top stories of late-night club culture, but what came through for me was the trauma: the trauma of living in a city, Boston, that was rabidly afraid of difference; the trauma of growing up in an abusive family and trying to escape; and the trauma of a gay culture that doesn’t really do anything to nurture. And also the trauma of growing up with AIDS defusing your desires, and not being able to imagine a way out.

The ’90s were kind of an odd time in gay culture, because there was this greater acceptance by the mainstream community, but it was still very much a homophobic time.

kind of politics, and a more assimilationist politics. I think the ’90s really marked the time when the assimilationist politics triumphed. And that did allow for more visibility, but it also put a clampdown on all of the radical, challenging and transformative aspects of gay and queer culture. Alexa and some of the other characters in the book are unapologetic in their queerness, and the ’90s were a time when a lot of gay men put a premium on being “straight-acting.”

I think everyone in the book, especially the queens, are intensely damaged by the insistence on adhering to backward norms of masculinity. And they all either resist or fall into that, in whatever ways possible. Part of that is the lure of gay club culture, because you go out, you’re up when everyone else is asleep, you’re putting on elaborate outfits and living in your own world. And it is a world almost entirely bonded by drugs, but the drugs offer an escape from all the pressures of conformity, and unfortunately, mainstream gay culture is very insistent on those norms. So queers and queens and transfeminine people really take the brunt of violence both inside gay culture and outside in the dominant world. In the passages where Alexa and her friends are using drugs, and there are a lot of them, you mimic through your prose what it feels like to be high, a sort of manic feeling. Was that a difficult thing to write?

No, I loved it. [Laughs] For me, basically it got me high, and I wanted to show how the drugs change the language. I wanted, through the changing of the language, to really create that disorientation, and that feeling of floating 5 feet above the ground. I think it gave a certain kind of glow to the narrative, and it shaped the prose and shifted not just the perception of the characters, but also my perceptions of what I wanted to happen in the book.