At Certain Points We Touch

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On the way to breakfast at an all-night taqueria, the two get lost, “stumbling out of the crumbling residential streets” and wandering “onto a massive six-lane highway which [tells] us we [have] gone too far. Because there is something about Lauren John Joseph that has always resonated with me: a combination of superficial similarities—like being born in the north and (over)educated in the south—coupled with their profound capacity to articulate queerness, a sense of queerness, that feels both specific and universal. It’s like that sad scene in ‘The Blue Angel’ where the once-dignified Emil Jennings serves Marlene Dietrich as her handmaid, testing the temperature of her curling tongs on the pages of a wall calendar. It’s a novel of moments and of memory, the ultimate unreliability of both, and the pain of incomplete connection: whether that’s because of gender, or class, or geography, or, y’know, actual death. In a story about a dead man, everyone becomes a ghost, and the title of the book does reflect its self-conscious ephemerality.

Neither identifying as trans at the time nor a gay man and entangled with men who identify as gay but not queer, often. The narrator describes Leapling’s photography as “an experiment in seeing the world,” carried out with old cameras and even older film, such that the images might either come out beautifully or result in a series of completely black frames, streaked with red. Therefore, should you have come upon my little review sent into the void of the inter-webs, please note that my sentiments are purely subjective. But he’s brought to life so three-dimensionally that — even as a reader who knows as well as the narrator does that it would be better to stay away from this “handsome bastard” — it’s hard not to see his deadpan appeal.At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York – a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. Ten years earlier, our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation.

At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York – a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent. They travel the trash/queer underground circuit from London to San Francisco to New York, Berlin and Mexico City with a crew of equally engaged marginalized survivors who read the best books and meet the best people, while go-go dancing, tricking, eating the most romantic cheap French fries and looking for their places in the world. Their descriptions of love, identity, trauma, sex and death are deeply graphic, tragic and yet tender, and will resonate with any reader.The romance was doomed, not least because Thomas, though charismatic, appears to have been a pretty toxic character. Capability Brown, Humphry Repton, Gertrude Jekyll: peer back in time and the nation’s most celebrated gardeners invariably hail from the upper classes. And while Joseph’s narrator appears to reach closure come the end of the novel, the reader is sent into shock with the reality of Thomas’s dramatic death. There was no middle ground with you, which makes your own endless moral ambivalence all the more frustrating now I come to review it.