FLAMBOYANCE

Living out loud.

“Before it meant anything else, the word flamboyant simply meant flaming,” writes Parlett (Fire Island, 2022) in this wide-ranging survey that recalls books like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and Imani Perry’s Black in Blues. Today, the author notes, flamboyance has come to signify “an embrace of your inner child, an unruly love of the colorful and ridiculous, a recall to the defiance of a teenage self.” But he begins with those flames, “wavy undulating, S-shaped curves” seen in the stonework of 15th- and 16th-century Gothic churches in Europe and later dubbed the Flamboyant style; their extravagance may have inspired holiness but also, in the words of Victorian critic John Ruskin, “ceased to be earnest, and ceased to be sincere.” The tension between excess and authenticity animates the book’s many explorations, which include In Search of Lost Time, Lil Nas X, flamenco, flamingos, Oscar Wilde, William Morris wallpaper, and Quentin Crisp, as well as lesser-known figures such as Harriet Monroe, an early 20th-century writer and vagabond for whom flamboyance was “at least the beginning of art.” Flamboyance can be a form of resistance, too, as in the theatrical protests of ACT UP and the Lesbian Avengers. Braided through these aesthetic and political ruminations is the author’s own story: a wary gay boy growing up in the U.K. in the late 1990s, later drinking and partying to extremes in New York, and ultimately finding sobriety. “I have had my moments,” he writes, “loud outfits here and there, flashes of self-belief on a stage, uninhibited movements on a dance floor, loosened by chemicals. In reality, my instinct most of the time is to move toward the background.” That instinct serves him as a writer; if his prose is not, well, flamboyant, it is perceptive and probing.

A vibrant study of self-expression and self-assertion.