Unmasking Family Secrets and Fierce Truths: Jackie Domenus’s Raw, Unfiltered Memoir Challenges Everything You Think You Know
And although Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jesse Helms might be (gratefully) dead, Jackie painfully reminds us, against the backdrop of present cruelty and bigotry, of the panic queer people knew, the panic I knew, too, in a series of essays that travel, mainly chronologically, from Jackie’s childhood to their twenties.
The first essay, “Tomboy,” ricochets through different childhood vignettes, providing a pointillistic portrait, made all the more vivid with the use of the present tense, of Jackie’s understanding of their self, contrasted against how women are perceived by society, a perception Jackie calls attention to as they write, “this feeling of inferiority will only become more familiar — when they walk down city streets and are whistled at like dogs or when they start their first full-time job and wonder why they earn less than their male counterparts who do the exact same work.”
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