Bi Book Club: The Best Bad Things

Hello again, bi-bliophiles. I don’t know about you, but I was a big, big fan of that HBO western Deadwood. It was like Shakespeare with swear words! What’s not to love? So, when this came my way, and it was described as a “queer Deadwood”, I snapped up a copy as soon as the library got it in. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of poetic grime that David Milch’s “America as a small town” epic does, but it’s pretty great, nonetheless. It won the LAMBDA, after all. So, let’s dig in.

The story takes place in Port Townsend, Washington in 1887. Alma Rosales, a disgraced former member of the Pinkerton’s Women’s Bureau, comes to town at the behest of her friend Delphine, a madam with a sideline in helping the Pinkertons bust smugglers, and a romantic history with Alma that’s... complicated to say the least.

She wants Alma, under the guise of dockworker Jack Camp, to infiltrate the smuggling operation of Sam Wheeler, a man she has complex feelings for, and vice versa. He’s one of the few in town who knows that Camp is Rosales and recruits her in his battle against crime lord Barnaby Sloan for control of the docks, and the lucrative heroin trade going on there. What follows is a series of double-triple-and-quadruple crosses, gender identity questions, political maneuverings, and explosive violence, to say nothing of some pretty hot sex scenes for Alma and the sexy prostitute Nell. Everything culminates in a final scene that leaves things open for further adventures, and I for one look forward to Alma’s eventual return, even though very little has happened in the years since the book came out. One hopes Carrasco’s hard at work on a follow up.

Alma/Camp is a spectacular guide through this world, simultaneously hard-bitten, loyal, and deeply entrenched in several worlds at once. What’s really nice here, considering the time period it takes place in, is that her queerness is never seen as any sort of big deal, just kind of part and parcel of the character. Granted, she has to tread carefully and maintain her disguise around the men she works with, but with both Delphine and Wheeler, to say nothing of the alluring and resourceful in her own right Nell, she’s able to be her true self without any kind of uncertainty or angst, unlike how bisexuality is treated in more contemporary stories. Her desires are also made plain, in terms of both Delphine and Nell, and Wheeler. I will say at first that the dichotomy between how the heterosexual and queer sex scenes were treated (sex with women all soft and delicious and erotic, sex with men mostly violent, surprisingly punch-heavy) seemed a bit odd to me, but the conclusion sort of serves to explain why it’s written that way. If it makes you uncomfortable, you can always skip those parts. The lean, propulsive writing will carry you through the rest of the story.

If I had to pick a fictional corollary to Alma, it’d be, to return once again to Deadwood, Calamity Jane. She’s a woman in a man’s world, equally comfortable to be seen as either, and yet has a rich, deep emotional seam underneath. Her desires are her own, she is most comfortable bucking expectations of what a “woman” of her time should be and do, and she is defiantly ahead of her time in terms of both actions and outlook. The genderbending that occurs in the book is a fascinating, if somewhat fanciful element. It’s to be assumed such things happened, because the degree of historical research Carrasco has done in so many other areas, from racial politics to geographic realities of the time, means that she’s obviously done her homework here as well. The amount of damage Rosales takes is a little bit cartoonish at times, with shootings, stabbings, fistfights, and poisonings seemingly slept off in a matter of hours, or recovery achieved through sex with a sultry prostitute (that’s how I prefer to recover from my severe beatings, don’t we all?). 

But at their core, the characters are still innately human, flawed, heroic, fascinating and root-for-able. Additionally, Alma’s connections with women are a lot more emotionally rooted than her feelings for men, who she sees in more pugilistic terms than romantic. However, this seems more a character attribute than a flaw, so I’m willing to give it a pass.

Historical queerness is a deeply fascinating subject, and one that has come up more and more frequently, as writers feel more empowered to write their truths. The pulpy, sexy, slightly punch-drunk adventures of Alma Rosales and Jack Camp are a worthy, multilayered and exciting addition to an area of fiction with a deep well to explore. Here’s hoping Carrasco, and more writers like her, make it back to the Pacific Northwest or similar environs soon.