Ziggy, Stardust & Me finally did it!!! (It = got read)

Today I’m talking about Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon, a book which I’m fairly certain that I saw on Amazon one time as a recommended purchase but didn’t buy. I did end up buying it when I ended up going to a queer shop in the nearest big city to me.

So, a few content warnings for this book: Homophobia, racism, one character tries to assault a minor.

The blurb says that the year in 1973. The Watergate hearing are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying time is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid who, aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbour and friend Starla, is completely alone. To cope, Jonathan escapes to the safe haven of his imagination, where his hero David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and dead relatives, including his mother, guide him through the rough terrain of his life. In his alternate reality, Jonathan can be anything: a superhero, an astronaut, Ziggy Stardust, himself or a completely “normal” and not a boy who like other boys. When he completes his treatments, he will be normal – at least he hopes. But before that can happen, Web, a Lakota boy, stumbles into his life. Web is everything Jonathan wishes he could be: fearless, fearsome and, most importantly, not ashamed of being gay.

Jonathan doesn’t want to like brooding Web, who has secrets all his own. Jonathan wants nothing more than to be “fixed” once and for all. But he’s drawn to Web anyway. Web is the first person in the real world to see Jonathan completely and think he’s perfect. Web is a kind of escape from his life. He may finally feel free enough to love and accept himself as he is.

We open on Jonathan with his friend Starla, in her bedroom, waiting for their church, which is the show, Soul Train. He also sees the phrase “Gay is good” in the magazine he’s reading and immediately thinks that the people he’s seeing would immediately be jailed or thrown in the looney bin (exact phrasing of the book) but then ends up having a daydream about partying with the muscly men. We then find out Starla is leaving for the summer and that Jonathan can’t go with her because he has these “treatments” meant to “fix” him that he can’t miss. The second chapter has Jonathan getting bullied by this guy, Scott(y), that he used to be friends with. I won’t lie, the bullying wasn’t very nice to read. Although saying that, it means that Brandon did a good job of making it seem bad. Chapter three, the chapters are all pretty short, by the way, but chapter three has Jonathan run into Web in a bathroom and think he’s pretty weird.

There’s this event that sort of gets held over the readers as the book goes on that Jonathan refers to as “it” or “IT” that I presumed was some kind of gay encounter that maybe he got caught in, especially since he’s having “treatment”. It seemed like one of those things where Jonathan was like, “If I don’t name it, it can’t hurt me”. Ooh, but then at about 150 pages in, you find out exactly what happened. Like I said, I already figured I knew what it was, but you find out who it was with. And let me just say, I was gagged when I read it. Jonathan is already going through enough crap in this book, he’s already trying to suppress his sexuality, and then when you find out who he kissed in “it”. That’s a minor spoiler, but given what happens in this book, it’s obvious that’s what it was.

It might have been the way this book was written, or how hard the last book I read was to get through, but even with the heavy topics, the racism, and homophobia in this book, it didn’t feel hard to read, and by that, I mean that it didn’t feel like a slog to get through. At no point did I think that I didn’t want to read any more. Yes, there were exceptionally heavy things that happened in the book, things that I feel like some other authors might shy away from, but even with them, I didn’t feel as though I was struggling to read what was there.

It was nice to see a weak protagonist. I mean that as a positive, not a drag on Jonathan. Like, yes, he’s fighting against all of these things in the world, in his head, but it often feels like they win since he doesn’t feel like he’s strong enough. He’s very up in his head. He has a picture, or photo, of his dead mother that he talks to in this secret room in his closet – like he’s literally in the closet – that he uses to help him figure out just about everything.

And with that, something I realised once I was most of the way through the book was that you never actually find out Web’s surname. You just get Web. Web Astronaut. Astronaut isn’t his surname, it’s just one he gives when he’s in Jonathan’s room. In not finding out Web’s last name, despite everything that both Jonathan and Web go through, that’s what made me realise that the romance in this book wasn’t the main point, or the focus. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to have it there, and I enjoyed it. I just realised that the romance wasn’t the point of the book; the point being Jonathan’s self-discovery, and acceptance of who he is as a person.

Going further on from that, sticking with Web, I think the fact that you don’t find all that much out about him, while I could see that as a negative for someone, is also the point. He’s sort of meant to serve as this almost unreal figure in Jonathan’s life. While he was a main character, in a way, he was also sort of a side character. It was like Jonathan was the main character and everyone else was sort of a side. But you got to learn what you needed to about him, like enough about him for him to be fleshed out, but not so much that you knew everything about who he was and his past.

I think the ending was just about everything that I could have hoped it to be while still remaining realistic. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved the perfect, everybody gets their fantasy ending, but I don’t think that would have served the book well. The fact that the book ended the way it did, that some of the characters ended up hurt, that not everything got resolved, to me, was the best way the book could have ended. Granted, I would have liked it if the book went on a little bit longer, so I could have seen Jonathan’s next step, but I’m not upset with where it ended.

Okay, bye!