The first published works by the thirty-five-year-old writer and artist Ariel Schrag were earnestly, painfully, sometimes astonishingly honest autobiographical comics, begun in ninth grade, self-published by tenth grade, and picked up (while Schrag was in eleventh grade) by the prestigious indie publisher Slave Labor Graphics. Each of the four graphic novels—“Awkward and Definition” (1997), “Potential” (1999), and “Likewise” (2000, collected 2009) records one year of high school; each is longer than the last. The comics follow Schrag’s struggles in A.P. chemistry, her parents’ divorce, and her love for the band No Doubt, but they keep coming back to sex, and to sexual identity. She comes out as probably lesbian in tenth grade, then spends much of senior year pining after—and masturbating while thinking about—a girlfriend who’s moved away.
Schrag majored in English at Columbia University, then went on to write for TV, first on HBO’s “How to Make It in America” and then on two seasons of “The L Word.” Between the discipline and sense of audience imposed by commercial TV and the sure grasp of teen-age embarrassment and polymorphous, still-figuring-it-out sexuality that the graphic novels show, Schrag seems to have prepared herself almost perfectly to write “Adam,” a comic novel about a bewildered teen-ager suddenly immersed in New York’s post-collegiate lesbian and queer hipster scene. And it is, in its way, an almost perfect comedy, the kind that’s hard to praise enthusiastically without giving away the last slice of the plot.
I can, however, give away the setup. Adam Freedman isn’t enjoying the summer before his senior year of high school—his friends are pairing up, and he’s left out; he’s also in search of sexual experience (he’s had almost none) and coolness (also none), and he’d like to see the world. Adam’s sister, Casey, who identifies as lesbian, has just graduated from Columbia and found an apartment in Brooklyn with a Columbia friend (also lesbian) and a guy they found on Craigslist. (It’s hard not to think that Casey’s life may echo Schrag’s.)
Adam moves in with Casey; her acquaintances think he’s adorable. Some of them also think he’s a trans man. He’s a young-looking guy who keeps turning up at parties and clubs run by and for twenty-something queer women: How else would he end up there? It’s confusing, for Adam, but it’s also awesome, since it makes him an object of sexual pursuit. Soon he has what he wanted—a cool life and a hot girlfriend—but only so long as she thinks he’s trans. It’s a cute reversal of the learning curve that many trans people face after transition, and of the uncomfortable masquerade that many trans people face before it: Adam, who feels like a boy and was born and raised male, has to find out how to pass as trans, what a trans man in his twenties would and would not, could and could not, say and do: “As a solution to the problem of his erections, every time [Adam] hung out with Gillian he preemptively ACE-bandaged his penis up against his stomach, so that when it got hard, it wouldn’t stick out.”
The seed of the novel, the germ of its comic moments, is the observation (far from Schrag’s alone) that some trans men who have recently transitioned (that is, begun to live as men) can look, or act, like teen-age boys. That analogy fuels its serious moments too. “There were elements of being trans that Adam related to,” Schrag explains. “Trans people often saw transition as the start of the real life … and this was exactly how Adam felt.” The old Adam, that high-school misfit, “was dead to him.” When he goes on a date, he feels that he is “transforming … into the perfect version of himself.” Between the depictions of teen-age yearning (erotic and otherwise) and the practical lessons about sex, it’s a novel that many teens really ought to read, though it could not be promoted as Y.A.
It is, however, being promoted—aggressively—as mainstream literary fiction: the book trailer looks like a clip from an indie film. Schrag’s novel—and the publicity behind it—represents a giant step forward from the times when trans people were portrayed as objects of pity, or serial killers, or symbols of dreamlike weirdness, when we were portrayed at all. (Yes, we: I identify as trans, though I present myself as male most of the time; I’m a cross-dresser, often feel like a woman inside, and have written about it elsewhere.)
Adam’s perspective is the reader’s own, both formally (third-person limited, all the way though) and in terms of what Schrag arranges to explain. He’s as naïve as they get, and Schrag has fun with it: “ ‘Hola,’ said a lesbian, opening the door.” “Adam” thus serves—seems almost meant to serve—as a cisgendered reader’s introduction to Casey’s milieu. Though most of the novel hops around New York, a climactic scene takes place at Camp Trans, the annual event held next to—and in protest of—the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, whose admissions policy excludes trans women (and excludes men). There Schrag’s heroes and heroines meet the real-life trans activist Julia Serano, who performs (that is, Schrag quotes at length) her inspiring monologue “cocky.” Adam also visits a sex party for L.G.B.T.Q. women, third-gender folks, and trans men. He expects to find it arousing. Instead, it’s baffling and educational: there’s a blowjob contest with dildos. Who knew?
Schrag’s comics have clear story arcs, and they won’t baffle their readers. (If you want to read them, start with “Definition.”) But the comics also feel unfiltered, sometimes repetitive, almost scary in their willingness to say exactly what the fifteen- or eighteen-year-old Schrag was feeling. She cares whether her friends like the comic, but she’s making it for herself: she draws and writes what she wants to see and read. (In “Likewise,” she records a message to her future self: “If you’re in college now, and you’re listening to this, I’m really curious how the hell you’re managing it.… I wonder if you have a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend.” )
“Adam,” on the other hand, feels like good TV: it aims to entertain, and it tries hard not to lose in the middle the readers it attracts at the beginning. In particular, it tries not to lose readers unfamiliar with the complicated labels and the sometimes surprising bodies of the gender-variant people Adam meets: he’s learning about them, and from them, and (the novel assumes) so are we. In many ways, it’s a conventional teen sex comedy with an unconventional setting; Adam has misadventures, tough moments, crises of self-definition, and learns how to be—wait for it—a man. That’s not a bad thing about Schrag’s novel; that’s just the kind of novel it is.
But there are other kinds of novels. Imogen Binnie, a columnist for Maximum Rocknroll, describes her first novel, “Nevada,” as “a story about trans women that was intended for an audience of trans women”; while she was writing it, “having a specific audience in mind—trans women—was probably the main thing that kept me on track.” Published in 2013 by Topside (a new press devoted to trans and genderqueer writing), “Nevada” follows a young, depressive, impulsive trans woman named Maria who flees her bad bookstore job and her Brooklyn bohemia to drive across America in her ex-girlfriend’s car. It’s raw, serious, asymmetrically and inconclusively (some would say barely) plotted, and closely observed, not just in what Binnie’s characters see and wear and hear but in how Maria thinks: she says, or admits, what other trans writers won’t. In Nevada, Maria meets—and tries to enlighten—a constantly stoned teen cross-dresser who may or may not be coming out as trans. Here she is in his apartment:
Binnie’s humor is not the wink of a comic plot but the difficult smile of self-recognition. And it turns out that non-trans-identified people also see something in it, whether or not they see themselves. Earlier this summer, I taught “Nevada” alongside novels by Jane Austen and James Baldwin. My students—most of whom are probably not transgender—said they loved it.
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Stephen Burt is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books, among them “Belmont,” a book of poems (Graywolf, 2013). “The Cambridge History of American Poetry,” co-edited with Alfred Bendixen, will be published this year.
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Photograph by Chloe Aftel.