Gen X Tropes: Dale Corvino (BONDS & BOUNDARIES) & Cesar Padilla (I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT) 

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Launch event for BONDS & BOUNDARIES, the debut short story collection by Dale Corvino, from Rebel Satori Press. Dale is in conversation with Cesar Padilla, co-editor of I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT: THE 1979 DIARIES OF SEAN DELEAR from Semoitext(e). They will discuss the queer Gen X tropes raised by each work, followed by readings of select excerpts and a Q&A. Both titles will be available for sale 

I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT 

When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his

Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds,

blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn. DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes,“It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary.” I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, “is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself.

In his review, Dale Corvino wrote: "For me—a fellow rebellious queer Gen Xer, having navigated a homophobic, white flight context—reading DeLear’s diaries had me reflecting upon my suppressed adolescent longings and marveling at DeLear’s self-assured, libidinous joy so intensely it summoned a braver teen self as if out of the metaverse, who has since replaced the one that was nearly flattened in suburban estrangement.

A 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in nonfiction, Dale Corvino found his confessional voice at the East Village queer underground literary salon “Dean Johnson’s Reading for Filth,” recounting his youth as an object of longing and later interactions with sex work. In 2018, he won the Gertrude Press Fiction contest, judged by Whiting Award recipient Brontez Purnell. Recent nonfiction includes a profile of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel for the Gay & Lesbian Review, an essay on queer longing in the digital era for Matt Keegan’s 1996, and a chapter on sex worker representation for the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society.