Jamaican me lesbian: A Review of Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer… by Mari SanGiovanni

The protagonist of Mari SanGiovanni’s beach and booze themed comedy is a failed screenplay writer turned stalker who isn’t above faking car accidents and staking out the studio back door with binoculars while she hunts down her “subject”. Marie Santora wants the star of TV’s Razor Falls Lorn Elaine to take the lead role in her script Unguarded Love… “Kind of a Brokeback Mountain thing only with girls in a prison setting, without the western theme, and no horses, of course.” Marie also wants to do all manner of creatively naughty things with Lorn, but with script lines like “Let’s pretend we are in a playground together and not in a prison…these are just monkey bars between us…” and with a hugely insane Italian family gate crashing each gay encounter with announcements like “Attention, attention, Marie Santora is a lesbian! Marie Santora is a lesbian! This has been a public service announcement!” our protagonist has a steep sand dune to climb.
Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer follows a chaotic family vacation with more vices than virtues as Marie learns how to thwart ever present paparazzi while pursuing her closeted affair with Lorn, but the well-shaped conflicts lose some edge as the reader is taken in and out of hotel bedrooms with Marie leading a lusty Lorn down a path that has no apparent destination. The rule of the Homesick-Italian-Lesbian-Stalker or H.I.L.S. is finger first and ask questions of love later.
The narrative is somewhat heavy in the front. SanGiovanni chooses to open with more back story than the narrative truly merits. For instance the reader is given a number of hints at sub themes which are never fully explored. These range from the marijuana growing father to the lesbian-girl-next-door-to-our-summerhouse-in-Maine montage. Perhaps, these could be explained if other pieces fell into the narrative more naturally, but when Lorn Elaine appears without reason at the same resort in Jamaica as our protagonist, the reader and Marie are left a little dizzy.
The action picks up sometime around cocktail hour at an undisclosed all inclusive resort, and the story does offer plenty of humorous dialogues on everything from what a lesbian should pack while stalking her favorite TV actress to why Italians love meatballs and funerals so much. The cast of characters transcend their stereotypes as they hit the beach, and SanGiovanni gives the reader some very believable and heartfelt comedy between the story’s digressions.

Fingerloose: A Review of Dance in the Key of Love by Marianne K. Martin

The lesbian community of Ann Arbor needs Redemption: Capital R, learn to walk after being hit by a heterosexual drunk driver, eat pizza and watch Footloose with a gay dance chorographer, have dinner at Applebee’s with former lover Redemption. The crimes of a lost and wandering young bar dyke return to haunt her as she struggles to elevate her passion for dancing above the faux wood of the dance club floor. Finding herself forced to face the fall-out of a five minute fling in a bathroom stall; our heroine realizes the importance of cross-word puzzles and an alcoholic mother’s love.
In Marianne Martin’s sequel to Dawn of the Dance, we find a cast of lovably lesbian characters confronting life’s problems while attempting to assist a debilitated dyke with an interpretive dance production of Dirty Dancing. In parallel with this quirky romance, a somewhat two-dimensional detective spends a lot of time with his grandson while telling his daughter all the confidential stuff he is investigating.
Martin doesn’t exactly give any real substance to her straight characters. It is fair to say that in the world of Dance in the Key of Love all straight guys, with one exception, are violently abusive cops and all straight women are either battered recovering alcoholics or battered emerging alcoholics. While in the parallel story, real depth is given to the Ann Arbor crowd. This narrative dichotomy is perplexing in so far as at times it seems to unfairly represent a lesbian worldview.
Without divulging too much of the plot, this dichotomy comes to a highly symbolic boiling point in which we find our heroine handcuffed in the back of a cruiser eavesdropping on the detective as he is told that his daughter is in the hospital due to a mild to severe case of heterosexual battering.
Martin’s narrative lends itself to very revealing and beautiful moments in which friends relate painfully true feelings like “The families we make often offer us more love than the ones we are born into.” With skilled writing and attention to detail Martin opens the reader to the harsh difficulties of the lesbian world while seemingly undermining her character’s struggles by limiting the reader’s view of the world at large.