I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear

Sean DeLears’s raw and honest fragments about “crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn,” encapsulate a moment in L.A. underground and queer history when—as his friend and one of the book’s editors Cesar Padilla notes—“it wasn’t cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren’t even in the vocabulary.” DeLear would go on to become a cultural boundary-breaker, shape-shifting into numerous versions of himself, continuously transcending sexuality & race, genres & scenes.

2023; paperback; 5 x 8 inches; 216 pages, 2 b&w ills; ISBN: 9781635901832.