Flame - A Life On The Game

An early, and frank, account of a trans life. In fact the book’s trans dimension is located in an early set of adventures when Flame extends a life of casual sex into prostitution by dressing as a girl. After that the story of a particular period in the 70’s is about sex, and sex-work at all sorts of levels, and in many countries, but all gay, outrageous and camp and unpretentious. It’s a good read, but don’t expect a lot of development. Men come and go, and friends and enemies come and go, and eventually Flame’s mother, the real love of his life, dies, and tomorrow has to be another day. Along the way the period when homosexual legality was still something of a novelty comes over in its seedy splendour. This is the authentic “picaresque”, almost as random as an 18th Century novel like “Moll Flanders”. What does feel a challenge to our ideas is the clear connection between a certain kind of gay and a particular kind of transgender. The overlap of male desire and female personation has always been notable, all the way back to “molly-houses” of the 18th and 19th centuries and “Fanny and Stella” and probably earlier than both. Something about gay sex and Male-to-Female crossing and a highly-developed dress-sense and subcultures all coalescing into something which is more “business” than “drag”, more Life than Art, asks us to consider trans as not just an equally distributed set of identities or choices but, in this era at least, a social “complex”. We may be, at the very least, a corrective spasm in the development of the human psyche. Grand theory to one side, though, “Flame – A Life On The Game” will get you thinking about many of the same things as Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” does from an academic angle. How do we identify the “feminine”? Where is the continuity in our lives? And what’s love got to do with it?