Boys Keep Swinging: A Memoir

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That was how we found San Juan Island, a tranquil, tucked-away rock in Washington State about five miles across the water from Vancouver. One night, spilled battery acid ate through his pants, which he had to keep wearing until he found another pair. As it turns out, Boys Keep Swinging doesn’t deal at all with the band’s lengthy hiatus, or “Tales of the City”—it stops around the time he’s about to start working on the Scissor Sisters’ second album.

I have been a fan of the Scissor Sister since they first made it big and had the pleasure of seeing Jake live 3 times this month when he was supporting Kylie Minogue on her Golden Tour in Australia. Taking the two-hour ferry ride from the mainland, gliding over the calm ocean, was like being in a placid purgatory. New businesses seemed exciting only until the last of the grand-opening balloons popped, the dust wearing the sheen of the signs to scratched plastic. This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. This is an enjoyable bio that sometimes reads like a racy diary, other times like a hard walk down memory lane.As plain-speaking on the page as in his songs, Wainwright lays everything bare in this hilarious and heartfelt memoir of music and family. He skins over everything so quickly that it almost like your reading a summary of his life and not an autobiography. The band was performing at PS1 for a summer Warm Up party—the same party that had started when I lived at the Cake Factory, where I first saw Fischerspooner, where I spent so many wild and sweltering afternoons, slugging back beer and dancing. Boys Keep Swinging is no ghostwritten autobiography; Shears studied creative writing at Eugene Lang College in New York.

Fortunately, Shears today seems like he’s in a pretty good place: he’s starring in Broadway’s “Kinky Boots” and he has a solo album due out later this year (“some of the best music I’ve made,” he notes in the epilogue to his book).

He tells of friendships made and those lost, sometimes because of his own actions, and his desire to find someone to love. My dad, as if he believed the barber were serious, tapped his shoulder and said, “Just a regular cut is fine. The lines of his rugged complexion, the result of years in the desert without sunscreen, pointed to a perpetual scowl. He tells his story very matter of fact but with plenty of wit and humour about what he’s been through. He seized opportunity by the balls and made things happen, dancing on bartops to make some extra cash and struggling to fucking do something—to leave his mark on the world while grappling with an almost crippling self-loathing.

Earnest and at times impish, Shears is an engaging narrator whose courage to pursue his passions led him to love and heartbreak. Although it isn't a tawdry gay tell-all some would wish for, it certain is a book this generation needs. The island was isolated but active enough not to feel sleepy, especially in the summer, when the tourists on their bicycles poured out of the ferry like spilled club soda on a fancy rug: The vacationers were a temporary wet spot, but one that was cleaned up and had disappeared completely by fall. The time he spent in NYC in the late 1990s-early 2000s, when the city was rapidly gentrifying, was a cool look at the culture at the time as well. The stage was set up at the top of the front museum stairs, but behind a railing, so I spent most of the performance climbing it and standing on the edge, singing.When a book has already been blurbed by the likes of Armistead Maupin and Sir Elton John and reviewed by Lambda Literary, there isn’t much that my two cents is going to add to the buzz. Especially during a scary time for gay people and seeing how that affected his coming out process and coming of age.

He must have been perplexed when I suddenly vanished on weekend afternoons, choosing to be inside the house reading rather than tinkering with him on projects. The peaty smell of books and their filmy, lacquered library covers incited a Pavlovian response, to browse and thumb, inspect and comb through bookshelves I’d already looked through many times. Jake Shears lays bare his youthful angst, the misfit years, family and school life and his path to pop stardom and being taken under the nurturing wing of Sir Elton John. Candid and courageous, Shears's writing sings with the same powerful, spirited presence that he brings to his live performances.Starting with his life in Arizona, to his youth in Portland, we follow young Jason as he struggles with his sexuality, his family life and his own self worth. I imagined he would make a perfect husband, and wouldn’t it be great to be able to wrap my arms around his shoulders? When I Google the first line of the epilogue (“Writing about your life is panning your imagination for shiny bits”), it looks like it was quoted in a few reviews. Ana had some great lines like “If you holler loud enough, a big sunny rainbow is going to shoot out of Jake’s ass!