Wanderlust

Tramps Like Us

by Joe Westmoreland

(2001, 2025) Macmillan

First published to little fanfare in 2001 (unfortunately, the date of its original release party was September 11th) but reissued earlier this year with a new introduction by Eileen Myles, Joe Westmoreland's Tramps Like Us is often called a "road novel." Yes, its episodes take place in multiple locations throughout the United States, and the novel´s changing scenery and adrenalized youthful spirit certainly echoes 1957´s Beat Bible, On the Road. Like Jack Kerouac, Westmoreland has a gift for capturing the flavor and the temperament of people one meets when one is wandering with one´s thumb out. But the book is also a candid and unsentimental look at a period of gay life that doesn't exist anymore, and a part of queer history that may feel less familiar to many contemporary readers. So, while many of the Beat movement´s key figures were queer (Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, as well as the bisexual alcoholic "King of the Beats"), Tramps Like Us bears a closer kinship with John Rechy´s City of Night (1963). These travelogues are personal chronicles of an earlier generation of gay life.

The semi-autobiographical novel opens in Missouri. Our narrator, also named Joe, is born into an exceptionally abusive household, his father spewing shame and hatred towards everyone in the family by day, before regularly committing incest by night with Joe´s oldest sister. As puberty approaches and now that his sister has moved out of the house, Joe fears that he will be the next to withstand his father´s unwanted advances , so he decides to hit the road. The time is the early 1970s, and his episodic adventures initially take him to brief jaunts in Florida and New York, until spending more time in New Orleans and finally San Francisco.

But Joe's odyssey explores more than mere geography; each city provides him with a greater understanding of himself and his sexuality. As he hitchhikes coast to coast, Joe learns to satisfy and explore his homosexuality with multiple guys. He has sex in cars and bath houses, hooks up with strangers in fleabag hotels, and goes home with guys he met earlier at the Stud. Throughout, our narrator wears his heart on his sleeve, someone who feels different than the other "clones" he and his friends encounter in the Castro or the Tederloin. True, he enjoys cruising and going out, but he´s also seeking someone who is "marrying material." Often he is left disappointed and with hurt feelings in Tramps Like Us, such as when Eddie leaves him (because he goes to prison), or when he gets dumped by Matthew (who is seeing other people, and doesn't want to hurt him because Joe is "too sweet"). Our narrator always bounces back, though,  bolstering his spirits with marathon dance parties at his apartment, copious amounts of booze and speed, and repeated listening to his favorite records (especially Blondie, but also Talking Heads and Joy Division).

Westmoreland´s novel has the immediacy and the swiftness of a personal diary, and reading the novel is like a time-machine taking one back to an earlier era of gay liberation. While most of Tramps Like Us unfolds during the 1970s, providing new details about Joe´s friends and lovers, readers know where the story is headed, especially once we enter the eighties. When Joe first hears about the "gay plague",  Westmoreland reminds us how little was known about HIV at that time, including its cause and means of transmission. The initial response by him and his friends is to ignore it, to just drown out the fear with more sex and more drugs; at one point, he and his friends discuss ways of killing themselves "as painlessly as possible" should any of them test positive. Such frankness about how people responded back then to HIV may be jarring to some readers, but Westmoreland articulates these and other realities clear-eyed. Tramps Like Us reminds us that many gay men came to their activism gradually, and at first, definitely wanted to keep the party going. I mean, considering where Joe came from, how can you blame him?

Fans of Christopher Isherwood´s Berlin Stories (1945) will enjoy Westmoreland´s spare writing style. Throughout the description of these kaleidoscopic adventures, populated with a huge cast of mostly gay male characters, the narrator remains largely detached. The prose evokes Isherwood´s infamous "I am a camera" phrase, and the novel sometimes feels like a documentary film observing without judgment what is happening. Each reader is left to decide the emotional impact of Tramps Like Us, but I felt that it grows as each scene accumulated, and as I got to see the lives of these men change over time. While Joe may not reveal much of his inner life through dialogue, I definitely felt his longing and his heartache, especially when his friends Ali and Felipe are diagnosed with AIDS in the latter chapters of the novel. Even after he has settled into a particular place and put down roots for a few years, Joe still finds himself searching for home.

Support your local LGBTQ bookstore: purchase Tramps Like Us at the Bureau for General Services - Queer Division.