Frank Anthony Polito is a Brooklyn-based actor and playwright. He can be seen in the films One Angry Man with Jackie Mason, One True Thing with Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger, and Hitch with Will Smith.. ...read more!.
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Follow up to Band Fags resonates with readers.
Written by Sherri Rase Thursday, 18 June 2009
Putting the Drama in Drama Queers
Frank Anthony Polito has an amazing facility for capturing the flavor of young queer youth. Speaking from enough autobiography to resonate with people who had some sentient awareness of where our paths might lead, the angst that at high school age seems nearly more than we can bear only prepares us for the struggles to come. Drama Queers is the follow up in some ways to Band Fags and it's a variation on the Mean Girls type of struggle.
Bradley Dayton is our hero. He's got a self-awareness of the specific nature of his difference from an early age - he's the lone boy in a house with three sisters and his mother and eagerly plays dress up games and make up with the large Barbie head he shares with his oldest sister. His parents are divorced, which in the mid-80s was difficult for children, but not insurmountable. Brad feels uniquely qualified to be a Drama Queer.
We all know how difficult high school is when you are attending it - everything that happens is so important and so not, all at the same time. Yet the seeds of whom we become are sewn at that time.
Brad's adventures and misadventures will bring back those hazy crazy days. This is a great book for your summer reading - get a copy in time for Memorial Day when you'll be hearing a lot of the songs Polito uses as chapter titles and the echoes that reverberate for you will be sympathetic with the book and also spark lots of conversations in days to come. Drama Queers is available from Kensington Books, ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-3164-2, $15.00.