Frank Anthony Polito’s ‘Drama Queers!’

We first met Bradley Dayton in Frank Anthony Polito’s first novel Band Fags, which I read and wrote about here.   This book isn’t exactly a sequel to Band Fags because the two main characters (the Band Fag and the Drama Queer) have a b.f.f. breakup and these books take place during that time when they weren’t super close and involved in one anothers lives.

When I read Marc Acito’s How I Paid For College and the “sequel” Attack of the Theater People I found myself bored and tempted to skip sections at a time.  “I don’t need to know all of Character A’s backstory…I just read it in your other book,” I thought to myself.

And to be honest, if Daniel hadn’t bought me Drama Queers for Christmas, the fear of repeat boring backstory might have stopped me from picking this book up.  Luckily, Polito was wise enough to write Drama Queers as a stand-alone that compliments or supplements his first book.  Knowing what I know about Jack, Brad’s best friend since the 7th grade, only helped me enjoy the second book more.

High School isn’t really easy for anyone, and as Polito’s stories accurately point out, figuring out you’re a F-A-G just complicates things.  As a former Band Fag and Drama Queer, this book was a nice throw-back to those days that I’m so glad are over.

The pace of this book was much better than Band Fags, and Polito seemed to get a lot of his impress-them-with-vast-early-80s-pop-culture-knowledge out of the way in the first book.

While I only slightly recommend Band Fags, I’d fully recommend you read Drama Queers.

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Kensington; 1 edition (June 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0758231644
• Amazon Link

Were you a drama queer or band fag? Read this.