From Booklife –PUBLISHER’s WEEKLY
Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children
By Felice Picano
Trailblazing novelist and poet Picano (author of Like People in History and The Lure, and co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex) shares, in this resurfaced memoir, a subversive, lubricious tale of his experience as a young boy in the 1950s with “most sinful of childhood crimes—precocious sexuality” and his wayward assembly of identity. Originally published in 1985 by Gay Presses of New York, and “destroyed by immolation” upon arrival in the UK, Picano’s controversial memoir-as-novel is, in this publication round, unedited, inviting readers into a proudly graphic coming-of-age, a revealing burst of sexual samizdat in incandescent prose.
Ambidextrous offers singularly vivid testimony of a queer child’s abrupt entrance to adulthood, plus some insight into the challenges of writing and publishing one’s truth in a “Puritan” America. Picano divides the memoir into three parts, set between fifth and seventh grade, corresponding to three different homosexual and heterosexual romantic situations and simultaneous intellectual and philosophical inflection points in the young author’s life. Picano the child is just as deeply affected by his premature sexual experiences as he is the works of Homer, Huxley, and Yeats, and in the concluding section, literature and sex combine to shocking effect. Scenes of troublemaking, school discipline, and disappointed parents all boast power, wit, and Picano’s brisk, assured storytelling and electric portraiture. Throughout, he captures each moment with striking detail—neighborhood gardens with “blue heads of flowers the size of a tricycle wheel”—and insights.
Picano does not shelter the reader from childhood sexual experiences, detailing adolescent encounters and “basement games” with candid precision but without judgment. Rather, Picano reveals the hidden story of how sex manifested in his early life and the lives of children in his vicinity in the mid ‘50s. His memoir offers visibility to this secret part of his upbringing and of human experience, and in doing so, builds a more complete picture of the human condition.
Takeaway: Memoir of a queer man’s intellectually and sexually active childhood