Reclaiming Queer Youthhood in James Brandon’s Ziggy, Stardust & Me

Justyna Metrak, University of Wroclaw

Set in 1973, James Brandon’s debut novel Ziggy, Stardust & Me (2019) follows the story of sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a David Bowie fan, who undergoes the inhumane practice of conversion therapy in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Nearly 1000 miles apart from New York City, the aftermath of the Stonewall riots has not reached the west St. Louis county. While Jonathan dreams of getting “fixed,” the painful electroconvulsive therapy does not stop him from falling for a recently met Indigenous Lakota boy, Web. Brandon successfully brings a new voice into Young Adult literature by highlighting the tough upbringing of a gay teenager raised by a single father abusing alcohol just a few months before a crucial change in the psychiatric approach to queerness. Neither the time nor place of the novel’s action are coincidental, as the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. However, to this day, Missouri remains one of the twenty-six states with no law or policy against conversion therapy for minors. Following the novel’s release in August 2019, St. Louis joined Columbia and Kansas City and prohibited the pseudoscientific practice of traumatizing LGBTQ+ youth in December 2019. This presentation aims at analyzing Brandon’s novel’s potential in the intergenerational transfer of queer memory and reclamation of queer youthhood affected by the trauma of conversion therapy, still practiced in 2021.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 64. Talking about My Generation: Youth Crisis and Conflict