UNMASKING OF OUR INTERIORS

A queer interior designer recounts a traumatic childhood in Ontario and its lingering influence on his adult life in this debut memoir.

This more-bitter-than-sweet remembrance starts at the beginning, with the two-month premature birth of Plasse-Taylor in Toronto in 1954. He spent his first weeks of life in an incubator in the hospital’s newborn intensive care unit, and the author expresses his belief that the lack of physical bonding with his mother, Edna Taylor, set the tone for their lifelong strained relationship, which included physical abuse. He notes that his mother was clinically depressed and anxious and that she raised 12 children, mostly alone; she ran away from her home at a rural Ontario farm at the age of 13. The author, before coming out as gay in his late teens, found solace in his older sister, Janet, and the arts, including choir, theater, and interior design. At 15, he attempted suicide, after which he filed papers to be emancipated from his mother, and he moved in with his neighbors. He attended two Canadian universities before enrolling at Pratt Institute in Manhattan in 1981, where he thrived within the queer community; he ran in the same circles as famed gay-liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson. Readers will find it a relief, after the book’s harrowing beginning, to see that Plasse-Taylor later found and accepted various forms of love and pursued a successful career in design and as a professor and activist, although the first two-thirds of the memoir are the most engrossing. The author’s prose is earnest and introspective, weaving the darkest moments of his upbringing with joyous passages about New York City’s 1980s queer nightlife scene and, later, about his students. The memoir makes the case that, just as the interior of a space must be revealed to be designed, so must we uncover ourselves and accept the flawed humans we are: “It took me a hell of a lot of years to look in the mirror and not see a mask, reflected, back.”

A moving examination of personal trauma and the healing power of queer community.