A review by laura_sackton
Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney

“An elder is like a map.” 

I loved the structure of this book, a book-length essay, about Whitney’s breakup with their wife and longtime domme partner, their divorce, and the wide empty expanse of what happens next. They decide to go on a storm chasing tour, and the book is kind of a travel diary of the tour through the plains and south. They use what happens on the tour, their interactions with other people, and their reflections on their ongoing obsession with weather, to think about queerness, sex, aging, bodies, family, childhood, moving on, growing up. 

This book is described as a memoir about the end of a relationship, but I think at heart it is about aging and childhood and how hard it is to age in a society that is not built for queer and trans lives. So much of it is about Whitney's tough childhood, having to become very responsible very young, and then falling into this relationship in their early 20s, and having that become their center. It's about how amazing and incredible it felt to be in a D/s relationship, how it was what they wanted and needed, and then how disorienting it was to discover, nine years later, that they no longer wanted it, and to have to go through this reckoning process about how to be an adult. 

I love what they say about markers of adulthood and how we find them—not just queer folks, but also cis folks who hit those presumed markers but haven’t done any interrogation of themselves. They write a lot about this, how from the outside they had this adult life with this woman, they’d hit the marker, and yes it was queer and kinky but even still—marriage, partnership, house, wrote a book. But when their desires change, when they are no longer in love, they realize they never did all the thinking and pondering and grappling to get to adulthood. They just vaulted into the relationship instead. So the book feels like this gorgeous reckoning of: okay, then what do you do? 

This feels so poignant to me because I think this happens to so many people even when we don’t realize it. Because we live in this world that values the markers but not the substance, that values the surfaces of things, and so it’s so easy to just allow yourself to believe you’re an adult when you’ve got the surface thing, when in reality you haven’t hit a marker, an internal marker, that means anything. 

I love the idea that aging is an immense thing that happens and changes everything and starts earlier in some ways than these prescribed ideas about life and timelines allow. So much of this book is about thinking about queer timelines, what they have to offer, where they hurt, and a lot of it is about Whitney wrestling with how their own queer timeline didn’t always serve them. 

There are so beautiful meditations on family, too, and also storms and weather. Whitney reminds me of Eli Clare in some ways, in that he puts down a lot of ideas on the page: observations about their family, dad, ex-wife, gender, body—and just sort of leaves them there. The book feels very unresolved. There’s no pressure to make their life into a legible timeline for the sake of the book. 

At one point Whitney says the problem is with masculine and feminine being tied to gender and not energy. They also talk about hormones as a way to play, and how people should be to play allowed to play, which I loved. I love their playing with gender, their understanding of themself as changing and in flux. It made me think a lot about trans elders. At one point they talk about Miss Major and how she refuses to be narrowed down and pinned down. I’m thinking, too, about Kate Bornstein who also talks about play. There is something really sacred in this trans writing of play, in these trans stories that aren’t about fixed journeys but circular ones, spiral ones.