The House of Impossible Beauties

It took me some time to relate to this book but then I was affected by the sadness of misguided youth and the despair of AIDS taking their lovers. The setting is well judged and the characters feel real. It is unlikely to appeal to a wide readership but those who persist will be rewarded by the sensitivity and waste it portrays.

Joseph Cassara has written a heart wrenching paean to the LGBT community, a blend of fact and fiction based on the critically acclaimed documentary on the House of Xtravaganza in the 1980s and 1990, Paris Is Burning. Set in New York, it tells of young gay and transgender characters, facing the trauma and rejection of their actual families and their efforts to set up their own chosen close knit and supportive 'family' circle that faces up to the challenges of identity, murder, abuse, brutality, the horrors of the Aids crisis, hatred, prejudice and tragedy. The character driven story unfolds with verve, humour, wit, anger, and colour as it follows its inevitable trajectory with the complications of life in this era in LGBT New York. It does not shirk from the grittiness of life as a sex worker, the perils of addiction and in its depiction of the never ending abuse. 

17 year old Angel, has been traumatised by the way her family has treated her. She is transfixed by the glamour and vitality of the drag scene, and hones in on the legendary drag queen, Dorian. She meets and falls for Hector, a professional dancer, but yearns to create a form of family and home for others, who like her, now have none that they can fall back on. With this in mind, Angel and Hector set up the first ever latino House of Xtravanganza within the Harlem Ball circle. Tragedy beckons as Hector faces serious health issues. Angel brings in Venus who searches for the rich man to protect and look after her, the introvert transgender Juanita who obsesses over design and fabrics and Daniel. You cannot help falling for this cast of characters and their unflinching determination to be there for each other against all that the world throws at them. 

I loved the humanity and courage portrayed in a lyrical narrative bursting with fizz and life affirming energy. This is a novel that is destined to leave a trail of tears and heartbreak in its wake. A wonderfully ambitious book that evokes an era, a place, a community and its history. Many thanks to Oneworld publications for an ARC.

A wonderful story, sometimes hopeful and sometimes harrowing. I did get confused sometimes about what was biographical and what wasn't - but the fact that it sent me off to Google and read more about the real story is no bad thing, and is perhaps what the author intended. Also very beautifully written. I would certainly read more by Cassara.

It’s difficult writing a fictionalised account of real people. You have to do them justice, and I don’t know how historically accurate this book is but I do know that it’s heartbreakingly moving. Centred around the legendary House of Xtravaganza made famous in Paris Is Burning this book follows the lives of Venus and Angel, two transgender teenagers in NYC in the mid-80s. (You rarely read the word transgender however - the term in ball culture was “fem queen”) If you’ve seen the film you know there’s no happy ending - stories centred around gay lives in the 1980s rarely have a happy ending - but the love and friendships are pure and real. A fitting tribute to a wonderful and fascinating group of people. I loved it.

RuPaul's Drag Race has found a global audience in recent years and I've been a huge follower of it since the third season. It's still one of the highlights of my life hearing RuPaul praise my blog on his podcast. (You can listen to the audio of this at the bottom of my intro page here.) The widespread fandom of this show has popularised drag as an art form again so it seems like the right time to look back at some of the most significant drag movements of recent history. The documentary 'Paris is Burning' captured instances of the fiercely outrageous ball culture in NYC in the mid-to-late 1980s. One of the figures memorialised on film was a drag queen named Venus from the house of Xtravaganza, the city's first Latino drag house. In his debut novel “The House of Impossible Beauties”, Joseph Cassara fictionally recreates Venus' story as well as tales about some of the other queens who were central to this drag family. It sympathetically follows the way these marginalized individuals were often ostracised by their families, but found sisterhood and support from fellow queens. Together they created and defined a sub-culture all their own. There are many moments of high drama and camp fun, but Cassara also emphasizes the hard gritty reality of their lives which involved prostitution, habitual drug use and AIDS. The novel skilfully invokes the aesthetic and feel of the era with a language and dialogue heavily inflected with Spanish phrases and drag lingo that totally draws the reader into this bygone world.

Part of the motivation behind creating the Xtravaganza drag house was that queer Hispanic individuals didn't feel like they could belong in the other drag houses at the time. A character named Hector notes in letter to a choreographer he admires “someone told me that you can’t join if you’re not black. I thought, Well, gee, I’m not black – but I certainly ain’t white. Especially if I’m talking Spanish, all the white people in Manhattan look at me like I might as well be black.” It's dismaying how a lot of queer culture that often satirizes and separates itself from mainstream straight culture still carries many reactionary prejudices within it. So some individuals within these drag houses exhibit signs of racial segregation, sexism and homophobia. As a result, Hector and drag queen Angel dream up and form a Latino drag house all of their own. The novel charts sections of this House's history from the early 80s to the early 90s.

Cassara's style of storytelling is somewhat choppy in how it portrays scenes from a particular time period, often introducing readers to new characters and then tunnelling back to give his characters' backstories. Significant scenes or events are often left out and only referred to and this usually strengthens the impact of the tale. For instance, one character's death from AIDS is only brought up in dialogue and the immediate aftermath of the death is shown in very brief flashes. It would have been entirely unnecessary to show the full journey of this character's death from diagnosis to the funeral. His death is felt all the more keenly because it's only a part of a tapestry of loss from this time period. The persistent and pernicious presence of the disease in the characters' lives is handled very well as is the near universal rejection the queens feel by their families (with the notable exceptions of Angel's supportive brother and Juanito's grandmother who indulges his penchant for dressing up.) However, it feels like there are one too many backstories of how male characters are rejected by their families because of their femininity. Instead, it would have been good if there were more scenes showing the drag balls themselves as there is only one instance of a competition portrayed in the narrative despite multiple trophies that adorn the shelves of the House of Xtravaganza.

This novel is a striking tribute to those who endeavour to create and inhabit beauty as a way of transcending the gruelling reality of life. It would have been easy to make it about over-the-top fabulousness and girrrlish ki ki. I admire how Cassara portrays the real dangers and precariousness of these drag queens' lives and pays tribute to their strength and artistry, but also acknowledges their occasional flaws and superficiality. There are many instances of humour from the challenges of wearing a snake as an accessory to how one queen notes that “The biggest shame in the whole world was that coke wasn’t a vegetable.” But, although the novel is true to life in representing how the majority of these queens' hard lives came to bleak ends, the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in the harshness of their persistent suffering in a way that felt very reminiscent of Yanagihara's “A Little Life”. It's difficult to imagine how lives marked by such tragedy could be told otherwise, yet I was left longing for some more levity towards the end. Nevertheless, it's an enthralling experience following these queens' powerful stories and I love how Cassara has dynamically brought them to life.

New York's underground drag ball scene flourished in the early 1980s. These glitzy, elaborately-themed events rose with meteoric intensity from the Harlem district, bringing with them an immense euphoria and camaraderie among the area's prominent GLBT population. 

The House of Impossible Beauties follows the often complicated lives of several homogeneous characters from their confused, abused, traumatic childhoods to the magnificent heydays of their in-your-face draggery and wild expressionism.

New Jersey born author, Joseph Cassara, readily acknowledges that several of his novel's characters are based on historical figures (Venus Xtravaganza, Pepper LaBeija and Dorian Corey may be familiar to some readers), and locations in which much of his narrative is set, such as Christopher Street Pier - a once vibrant cruising spot, which is still a popular gathering place for young gay people - are now legendary landmarks.

The House of Xtravaganza is one of the most famous and enduring 'houses' (a sort of surrogate family for individuals of mixed gender identities), brought to prominence in the groundbreaking 1990 film documentary, Paris is Burning. Cassara's protagonist, Angel – the founding member and 'Mother' of this all-Latino collective – is quite obviously based on Angie Xtravaganza, the very real transgender star of the Harlem ball scene. Her drag daughter, Venus, and other members of the group are adopted 'house children', a close-knit coterie who engage in sex work in order to survive. They strive to defend, dignify and elevate one another, but are heartbreakingly vulnerable and can do nothing to protect their beloved hermanas from a mysterious sickness, often referred to by the predominantly unsympathetic and scaremongering media as a 'gay plague'. 

Cassara's Hispanic trans-women and butch queens are sassy, charismatic and brave, and his exceptional debut novel is a humane microhistory of their uninhibited but precarious lives on the drag circuit of a bygone era.

Sorry to fall into the trap of identifying the writer with their characters, but I was blown away when I discovered that author Joseph Cassara is far too young to have observed New York City in the 1980's. This is a compliment, as I was in NYC for that decade, and while I didn't participate in the social milieu described, the details of place, fashion and language ring so true. A discussion by two young hustlers of the watches of rich people so obviously referred to the Movado fashionable then, that I was laughing aloud. I feel privileged to read about some people I wasn't able to know at the time.
Anyway, this is really a side point. The House of Impossible Beauties is a  humane and funny novel about children becoming adults and discovering their trans/gender identity and their way in the world against very tough circumstances. Each character has her own spark of intelligence, sass, creativity or kindness and you'll be hoping that somehow everyone will get a happy ending, despite the book being set at the height of the AIDS epidemic in NYC. This could be a very depressing book, with prostitution, violence, family abandonment and more, but the people who live in the House try to see themselves as stars, winners of prizes and divas, and so will you. Lots of hispanic words thrown into the mix- that is the way NYC rolls, so author Cassara is authentic one more time...  highly recommend

A stunning picture of all that glittered in New York in the 1980s. Anyone who wishes to learn more about LGBTQ+ lives will find themselves fully immersed; fans of Pose know what to expect. Parts of this book are written in Spanish, so if you're monolingual (like me!) I recommend reading on Kindle or any platform that allows you to highlight and define words.