The Gratifying Unpredictability of Short Stories: A Review of Drew Pisarra’s You’re Pretty Gay

Izzy Peroni

There’s an unbelievable relief that comes from not knowing where a story is taking you, and how it’s going to end. In a culture where every tale follows age-old formulas for basic narrative success— every YA novel gives its Chosen One their happy ending, every murder mystery implicates the ex-wife, every scary moment in any horror movie is preceded by the same panicked flock of violas— being unable to perfectly predict what the narrator will do or say next is nothing short of a blessing. In Drew Pisarra’s short story collection, You’re Pretty Gay, releasing June 25th, 2021 from Chaffinch Press, there is rarely a predictable moment or trite choice of words; a consistent narrative voice, eternally raunchy and heartfelt, paves its way through each unique moment of this collection. It’s filled with moments that have surely been lived many times, but never so succinctly and fantastically written about— moments of difficult grieving, of sexual exploration and regret. Above all, however, there is one preemptive guarantee— every moment is pretty fucking gay.

The abject queerness of it all is what prompted me to review this collection in the first place, besides my personal enjoyment of Pisarra’s poetry. I was not, in any shape or form, disappointed— and to my absolute joy, I was at times disturbed, startled, endlessly amused, and devastated. Every labyrinthine twist in narrative is accompanied by the kind of queer experiences that keep you grounded in decades’ worth of sharp and unrelenting reality. A stand out story on the subject  is ‘Arctic Chill,’ where our narrator takes us from the moment in 1995 where he blessedly tests negative for HIV, to half a page downward, him eating cookies with Mrs. Claus in the North Pole. It makes perfect sense as you’re reading it, then the story concludes, and you feel like you were very briefly out of your mind. It’s an incredible relief to lose that control, as Pisarra’s narrator pulls you through as many gay experiences as he can conjure up from memory— gay yearning, gay curiosity, gay sex, with as much or as little shame as needed. They’re memories from an era before commercialized Pride parades and gay teen movies— an era where everyone in gum ads was heterosexual and National HIV Testing Day was a thing. It should be humbling for young queers to remember where we came from, and that despite a decade or two, we are still, in fact, a ‘we.’

I would recommend You’re Pretty Gay to those who love ambiguity in prose— poetic-like ambiguity, where you feel comfortably that you’ve gleaned every possibly meaning from every line as best you can, but you’re not completely sure. If you’re a reader who can take in mountains of precisely detailed, reality-bending events, then be satisfied when the story ends with “Maybe. Maybe not”— maybe these fantastical things happened exactly as the narrator said, or maybe they didn’t— then this is a collection that will excite you. I think, perhaps, above all, I would recommend You’re Pretty Gay to my fellow young queers, my age or even younger. The 80s and 90s barely feel like decades that could hold any sort of traditionally-defined history, but for the LGBTQ community, change has come rapidly in a short amount of time, and it’s easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come. Young queers deserve stories that aren’t straight-washed or sanitized; we deserve everything startling, sexual, abrasive, embarrassing, and raw that comes with coming out, in the 90s and now. You’re Pretty Gay supplies with ease, and takes absolute pleasure in doing so.