A glittering gay metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, who flee toward sanctuary. But is there a place for them in the deeply divided city?
Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district—not until she and her family are trapped in a queer riot. With her husband Howard plunging into religious paranoia, she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.
Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much of ourselves we need to sacrifice in order to find identity and community.
I picked up this book at a fellow writers bookstore, Dandelion Books, while visiting various friend near Chicago. (If you’re in the Oak Park area, check it out! Such a great spot. And they ship orders too if you’d like to support an awesome small business.) I bought Proud Pink Sky mostly because the cover was cool, despite having already purchased enough books to hit Dandelion’s reward points discount in one day.
I’m so glad I grabbed this book—and lugged it along with ten others through multiple trains/ubers all around Chicago—because it was so interesting the way Barrett rooted queerness in a geographical place. The concept of an all queer city and the way it was divided out by different types (or more accurately, stereotypes) of queerness created a fascinating playground for Barrett to explore how even queerness can dissolve into “us vs them” mentalities when fear and hate expand through communities.
In the connection between queerness and place, my brain made a jump to the idea of hospitality, specifically emotional hospitality. How does hospitality relate to place and how may queerness fit into that? Hospitality requires openness—sometimes literally to open your door and let someone into your home—which requires trust. How does a marginalized community trust enough to be hospitable? Proud Pink Sky engages in a question of creating safe spaces to welcome people in—to be open and to trust—against a backdrop of people who are unwelcoming, inhospitable, and distrusting. In a word: defensive. Sound familiar?
This book made me think too about the Bible story of Lot and Sodom in Genesis 19. Lot opened his home to two travelers, but the men of Sodom demanded that Lot hand over the travelers so that they may “know” them (not in a hospitable way). Lot offers his daughters—deeply problematic, but let’s be real, what isn’t deeply problematic in much of the Bible?—but the men want the male travelers. God destroys Sodom because of this, sparing only Lot and his family.
This story has often been used as an argument against queerness. It’s behind the negative term “sodomy,” which has been historically used to shame queer love. But queer theologists have pointed out the story is less about the act of male-male relations, and more a critique of the Sodomites’ lack of hospitality. Gang rape is not a very nice thing to do to visitors, regardless of gender of the perpetrators and victims. Queer theology suggests Lot and his family are spared because of their virtue of hospitality, not because they thought same-sex acts were bad.
Why is hospitality so important to be exemplified in such an extreme (and problematic) story?
What is our responsibility to be hospitable?
What is the benefit of hospitality?
How might the expectation of hospitality apply to a marginalized community? Where do we see the negative consequences of inhospitality, from the majority and also the marginalized?
What leads to inhospitality? What are the consequences?
For me, Proud Pink Sky engages those questions. The character Cissie finds herself helping in the slum to fix damage done by bigoted vandalism. She considers the work she’s been doing: “But she’d not been making; this was never an act of creation. She’d been repairing. It was a distinction she hadn’t noticed before, but now the difference was clear as journo and menge. To build was bona, but to rebuild, well that was something else entirely. Something precious.” (Page 215 in Proud Pink Sky by Redfern Jon Barrett, using Polari words, the queer language used in the novel from historical queer culture).
Is there a relationship between hospitality—openness and trust—and rebuilding? How can rebuilding places, culture, relationships, be precious?
Amy C. Lutz 