A Crystal Diary by Frankie Hucklenbroich

The history of gay and lesbian lives is written not only in tales of gay politics or legislative amendments, but in the sounds and the stories of the streets. Frankie Hucklenbroich's A Crystal Diary is a beautifully sculpted and finely wrought autobiography about a working class stone butch making her way up from the meat-packing ghettos of St. Louis, Missouri, through the haze of Hollywood night-life in the 1960s and ending up in the wild, drug culture of San Francisco in the 1970s. A street-smart con artist who could have fallen out of a William Burroughs novel, Hucklenbroich and her memoirs are a testament to wit, survival, and sheer extraordinary talent.

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Hucklenbroich's novel takes its name from the portion of its lesbian narrator-protagonist's life during which she and a girlfriend were shooting speed and hiding out from the law. There and throughout, Nicky breezily shoots the bull and hides out from the truth that her tough butch facade belies a lonely need for a relationship free of games and artifice. Disdained by her family as a 'baby butch' in 1957, Nicky lives as a young throwaway for a while and learns to con and hustle her way through life. Surviving the heart-shattering loss of a first love, she goes from femme to femme, honing her 'butchilinity.' Only occasionally taking a job, rarely settling down, always aiming to be a swaggering butch with a woman on each arm, she prostitutes her femmes to support herself. Only at the end is her cry of pain clearly heard, and by then, some readers may have wearied of the role-playing others will find fascinating.