"I've spent a lifetime feeling drawn to gay men," Kelly Foster Lundquist writes in her riveting debut memoir, Beard. Her brother and best friend are gay; she loves musical theater and considers Judy Garland a patron saint. So it's all the more ironic that she didn't realize for years that her first husband was homosexual.
Lundquist met Devin during college, when they were counselors at a Christian summer camp in Mississippi. She knew he'd been bullied in adolescence for being effeminate but only later learned he'd been subjected to counseling that fell just short of conversion therapy. When Lundquist started a PhD, the couple relocated to Chicago--to Boystown, a historically gay neighborhood. Descriptions of food and fashion create a neat context for their early-2000s courtship and marriage. She tracks her disordered eating and Devin's growing alcohol dependency with sensitivity, and she convincingly re-creates her naïve confusion over finding gay images and chat room discussions on their shared computer.
The scenes and dialogue sparkle. That's especially true of the pivotal sequence in which Lundquist dresses as Liza Minnelli for Halloween and, days afterward, the truth emerges about Devin's affairs with men. Lundquist explores the history of the "beard" stereotype common to 1950s Hollywood films and TV sitcoms. The language of deconstruction and queer literary theory, gleaned from her doctoral research, pairs with a newfound affirming theology. With that fresh perspective, Lundquist looks back--two decades on, a remarried English professor and mother--with compassion for her ex-husband as well as her younger self. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck