The Brooklyn Rail

In 1977, conceptual photographer Hal Fischer made “Gay Semiotics,” a series of photo-text works enumerating the “hanky code” that gay men used to signal their affinities in San Francisco’s Castro district. Not dissimilar from Roland Barthes, Fischer illuminates the mythical qualities that restructure the symbolic order, like the way a leather jacket suggests its wearer’s non-conformity, or how a red handkerchief in someone’s back pocket connotes sexual passivity. For all the drawbacks of commodity fetishism, queer people have always been adept reconfigurers of aesthetic hierarchies. Coding as gay means excavating and repurposing, a recurring theme of Joe Westmoreland’s searing and breathless auto-fictional road story Tramps Like Us.

Initially published in 2001, Westmoreland’s first and only novel captures the rapidly transforming cultural landscape of the mid-seventies and eighties through protagonist Joe’s road adventures. The vinyls, clothes, books, and porn magazines that Joe accumulates and disposes of on his travels are more than just sumptuous details—they coalesce and pulsate, forming a web of charged memories that ensnare him and his social circle. Westmoreland employs a candid style that makes his constellation of people and things appear ingenuous, even as the final chapters turn more grim as AIDS devastates the LGBTQ community. Westmoreland quickly endears us to Joe’s vibrant crew, showing how gay relationships can be a messy harmony of superficiality and profundity.

Raised in suburban Missouri, Joe’s abusive father and his town’s endless monotony force him to leave home. He sheds the isolation of his youth in Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, and New York, hitchhiking solo or crashing with lovers. After briefly returning home, Ali, his best friend and one of the few other queer people he knows, joins him and they embark to New Orleans and eventually San Francisco. The lingering trauma that his father inflicted follows Joe wherever he goes, and the spectre of abuse clings on despite the distance he puts between himself and his dad.

New Orleans provides the first blast of release for Joe and the sporadic, puckish Ali. Following the lonely chapters of Joe’s solo journey, their stay in the Big Easy is a picaresque trip through sweaty orgies, lip synch contests, and Southern Decadence (a gay parade in New Orleans that Joe digresses is “really just an excuse for an all-day drink-a-thon”). Here, Joe’s inchoate queerness becomes a full-fledged identity. Popular culture refracts his subjectivity—he likes “punk rock and some New Wave much more than disco,” revealing his need for music to be jagged, raw and cathartic, not just celebratory.

Joe imbues books, music, and films with meaning, and art reciprocally infuses him with life. Given that he spent most of his childhood in domestic isolation, Joe reacts to events and places with genuine awe. “At the Talking Heads concert David Byrne stepped on my toe when he was climbing up onto the stage,” he recounts excitedly. “I was that close to one of my rock idols.” Whether starstruck or in thrall to the Mississippi River’s magnitude, he passionately embraces the world. This mentality delivers Joe from misery. Despite being subjected to cruelty—both domestically and societally—he seizes beauty as though it’s an emphatic need.

When he moves to San Francisco and goes to the bar Stud, he discovers a world of queer punks similar to Fischer’s edgy Leather archetypes. Joe likes to contrast himself from the stock gays, whom he calls “Castro clones,” writing, “I hated it that everyone had mustaches, so I grew sideburns because no one else wore them. The clones wore tight blue jeans so I wore perma-press slacks … I waged my own personal war for individualism.” Throughout the novel, Joe’s resistance to conformity is an earnest response to America’s violent conservatism. Engaged in symbolic battle with much of the world around him, Joe’s rebellious spirit distills the queer resentment that exploded after the Gay Liberation of the sixties and congealed into “a perfect rage,” as David Wojnarowicz once called it, during the AIDS crisis.

Despite Joe’s anger, Westmoreland’s mellow prose tempers the more heartrending scenes. When describing the cascading horror of the AIDS crisis, his unassuming style makes the most crushing moments feel tender and raw. At an AIDS march, Joe witnesses the stoic crowd, reflecting that “San Francisco had been such a party town, such a playground, and now everyone was so serious. Dead serious. People were hugging each other. Some were crying. A lot of people looked scared.”

As the disease closes in on his circle, covering them in near-total darkness, Westmoreland reminds us how fleeting queer joy is. Only five years earlier, Joe had found euphoria “being with my friends, being so high, and being surrounded by so many sexy men … was the closest thing to heaven I’d ever experienced.” Westmoreland’s pacing and the way he depicts Joe with his chosen family resembles the momentum of living. Their perpetual motion through cities, social milieus, jobs, celebrations, and tragedies resonates as an honest reflection of life’s ceaseless velocity.

Tramps Like Us focuses on characters who find meaning in the trivial and light amidst despair. In some sense, this is what Fischer’s photographs teach us beyond the mere description of clothes and objects as signifiers. The surfeit of fixations, idiosyncrasies, and postures is a means of eluding a toxic dominant culture and negotiating with symbolic structures of power. Joe’s evolution from a nervous, closeted teenager into a sensitive yet defiant gay adult is a passage known to so many queer people, but Westmoreland’s clear-eyed observations portray a unique and mercurial odyssey. Redolent of its era without ever being a relic of it, Tramps Like Us holds its own among queer road classics like Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal or Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. Though Tramps is more conventional and naturalistic than those books, it moves with the same delinquent stride. Westmoreland’s blend of noise and sights, romance and friendship, render a portrait of queer joy as a hard-earned victory of survival.