THE QUEEN OF GAY STREET

A young lesbian looks for love in New York City in this bittersweet memoir.

In 2010, Mollica, who wrote the “Broads in the Big Apple” column for GRL Magazine, abandoned what she saw as the preachy counterculture of lesbian San Francisco for what she hoped would be the raffish glamour of lesbian New York. Unfortunately, the glamour proved elusive: Her Friday nights were given over to TV-watching with the elderly widow next door, and her dating life revolved around hookups that felt meaningless. She finally found the “femme and aggressive” person she longed for in Juliet, a charismatic blond editor who set her pulse racing; they enjoyed electrifying sex and racy repartee. However, Juliet’s energy also entailed relentless womanizing. Much of the book covers Mollica and Juliet’s testy relationship, probing their mutual infidelities and stormy breakups and makeups, which rolled on until Juliet spiraled into drugs and suicide attempts. In telling her story, the author also explores a dysfunctional, abusive childhood in which her mother spent child support checks on jewelry instead of food; she also writes of a devastating rupture with a woman she considered a soul mate. Mollica’s reminiscences are both a celebration of the promise of New York to a young woman hungry for connection and a plangent account of the pitfalls of bad relationships and isolation. Her depictions of lesbian life and dating are well observed and brimming with humor (“You lost track of how many people you’ve slept with?” “No! I, ah, I just mean that it’s more than twenty, and either at or less than thirty. I think”), but she also writes with penetrating subtlety about the pain of sputtering relationships: “This time, something in her touch and embrace had drawn me in deeper and shown more of her vulnerability than any time before, yet I felt something else fading and falling apart.” The result is an exhilarating ride on Gotham’s emotional roller coaster.

An entertaining, often poignant portrait of New York romance blending humor with heartache.