On Luke Ransom's Leather & Queer Masculinity
A little part of Exquisite Corpse (spoilers ahead!) that I love is how much of Luke’s story is about his relationship with his jacket and boots. It really gets at the parts of queer & alternative masculinity that I think are easy for people to overlook. How ragged, boxy, grimy clothes can bring as much joy & comfort to their wearers as pretty things can, how a good jacket or pair of boots lives with you and becomes a closer friend than a person can be, how masc & punk clothing functions as both physical and emotional armor.
“A good pair of boots was a friend forever, till death do us part. Idly he wondered whether this pair would outlast him. One of the soles was beginning to crack and peel, but then so was his.” -p 89
I adore the parallel drawn between the boot’s sole and Luke’s soul, the feeling that to look at his leather is to look at his life, to see him more than you could by looking at his face. My own boots are spattered with paint from years of art practice, scuffed from getting on & off of trains to see my friends, have dirt from all my favorite places caked into their treads. I can picture Luke’s boots so clearly- peeling from years of walking long city streets, water-damaged from time on the WHIV boat, stained with tobacco and maybe blood, faded from resting on a dashboard, a few stubborn flakes of glitter from Tran dragging him along to clubs. They're unequivocally a piece of his soul, an external catalog of his life just invisible enough to still keep his secrets.
"Luke always kept a razor in his boot. After he got sick, he said if anyone fucked with him, he'd slash his wrist and throw blood in their eyes." -p 113
The first mention of Luke's boots being offense as much as defense, used to conceal an emergency weapon. I'm reminded of how many punk women & queers I've heard talk about their leather feeling like armor, or how spiked cuffs & boots can double as self-defense weapons. The archetypal image of the leather-clad greaser calls to mind the switchblade concealed in the jacket or boot. There's a scrappy, improvised kind of power in that. This line also plays into how fucking good this book is at foreshadowing & weaving characters' perspectives together - we ultimately get Luke pulling the razor from his boot to kill Jay by slitting his throat, which subverts the original plan by having Luke be the one who gets an eyeful of blood from somebody else.
“His leather jacket creaked softly, familiar as the sound of a lover’s breathing. The bulk of it reminded him what it felt like to be strong.” - p 137
Suck it, Andrew's whinging about being known or whatever the fuck, I think this is my favorite line in the book. It's just such a gorgeous little bit of writing, and it's one of the moments I remember the most clearly from my first reading. Luke is a wildly complex and very flawed person, but even before we get his self-reflection and redemption in the later chapters, there are bits like this that make him deeply sympathetic. Under all the prickly rage, there's a person who is just deeply sad that his past is gone and can never come back. His jacket is one of the little bits of that past he has left, a home built for his old body and life that he can still live in despite it all, a place to hear a lover's breathing even when he feels unlovable. I'm reminded of times I've closed leather cuffs around fresh cuts to put them out of mind, of stomping as hard as I can in my boots on bad days just to know that I can still make noise. There's no other words for moments like that - they remind you what it feels like to be strong.
"He took off his leather jacket and swung it over his head, trying to snag its lining on the iron spikes[...]He pulled himself up as quickly as he could, grabbing onto the ironwork, easing himself over the top of the gate, using the heavy leather to protect his hands and his crotch from the spikes." - p 231
"Luke wrapped his jacket around his head and shoulders and hurled himself at one of the black-painted windows. He felt glass and ancient wood splintering; then he was kicking the frame away, clawing his way in, throwing the jacket aside and staring at the impossible scene that confronted him." -p 232
"Luke saw all this in the split-second it took him to regain his footing and slide his fingers into the top of his right boot. His momentum carried him toward Jay. He was already flicking open the silver V of the straight razor." -p 233
In the climax, Luke's jacket and boots are as much a hero as he is. I guess it's ultimately futile as far as Tran is concerned (sobbing and throwing things across the room), but in a book that's partly about manifestations of love and violence in the name of love, what matters is the sheer courage and determination of Luke's trying; the fact that he risks his life just to get to Tran for that tiny sliver of a chance that things could be okay. And without his leather he wouldn't have gotten as heartbreakingly close as he did. If he didn't have his jacket he wouldn't have climbed that fence without getting stabbed in the gut or gotten through the window of the shed without shredding his face. If he didn't have his boots with a razor tucked inside, he wouldn't have killed Jay, avenging Tran's death and saving the lives of probably dozens of runaways and Quarter brats. Looking back at the first time they're mentioned, Luke's boots and jacket get the same character arc he does - from a cynical, crumbling soul to an unstoppable force of determination to save someone.
To conclude, I love that Luke doesn't get visually softer as he emotionally softens throughout the book. It's easy to imagine that if this story were written by someone else or visually adapted, they might be tempted to have him shuck his rough edges as a symbol for his internal growth, clean him up like the much-reviled makeover Ally Sheedy gets in The Breakfast Club. Any punk, goth, or other such creature knows the frustration of their self-expression being looked at in fiction as a character flaw to be improved upon, a symbol of some internal ugliness. I'm so glad that doesn't happen with Luke. Luke's jacket and boots were with him before the bitter, vindictive, abusive part of him was born, and they are there with him as he lets it die. Even in his most tender, sensitive, sympathetic, loving, and lovable moments, he's one ugly son-of-a-bitch in a baggy motorcycle jacket and peeling cowboy boots. And my butchfag ass wouldn't want it any other way.
