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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The Metro Times
Drama Queers!
by Frank Anthony Polito
Kensington Press, $15, 352 pp. (direct link to review)
Written with biting humor and girlish enthusiasm, Polito's Drama Queers! gives readers a thoroughly detailed and equally enjoyable account of growing up gay in Detroit's own "Hazeltucky" circa the '80s.
It's senior year, Class of '88, and Bradley James Dayton, the reigning king of the "Drama Queers" and "Band Fags" (also the title of Polito's first novel) has high expectations for his last year at Hazel Park High. It's a time when brand names and Aqua Net hair were a must for any self-respecting teen. Butt-enhancing Guess jeans, GASS loafers (sans socks, of course) and crisply pressed button-up Polos, these — and hot jocks and thespians — are but a few of Bradley's favorite things. "Calvins or Jordache? … Fuck those! I like Sergio Valentes better because they make your ass look hot!"
Distraught at the loss of his best friend, at losing out the starring role of the Christmas play to the frustratingly hot sophomore, at his crappy Big Boy job, at being poor, attending "Hillbilly High" and living in Ferndale — "we do not (repeat, do not) live in Hazeltucky" — Bradley, the "Drama Queen," is forced to re-evaluate life as he knows it and the result plays out like the performance of a lifetime.
Drama Queers! delivers a multi-scoped microcosm of Americana and '80s pop culture in a neatly packaged time-capsule, complete with witty dialog interspersed with era-appropriate slang (remember "Bum Fuck"?), quaint localisms and every TV show and movie that shaped the lives of every teenager of the '80s.
—Christa Buchanan