As the cultural, political, and social climate for queer people living openly on the rainbow in North America worsens, shining a light on both moments of queer progress and anti-queer backlash is more important than ever. My literary memoir, Crying in a Foreign Language, offers readers much more than just a coming-out story (as important as those are). A hybrid memoir, the book contains flash-like vignettes interspersed with excerpts from cultural, medical, literary, and historical sources on the AIDS pandemic and gay history. Unlike other coming-of-age memoirs set during the AIDS epidemic, the stories in Crying in a Foreign Language take place in Japan and contain fascinating insights into Japanese history and culture.
Crying in a Foreign Language deserves a place among the much-needed second wave of coming out and AIDS memoirs that readers are craving, such as How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones, Stay True by Hua Hsu, Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton, The Loves of My Life by Edmund White, and Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin. Yet Crying in a Foreign Language offers even more—social and cultural context to enrich and ground the narrative in the multitude of same sex loving humans who have existed throughout history.