The Disappearers
The Disappearers
Author: Marlon James
Rating: A
Vibe: 1988 Kingston, eight gay actors and a mob. Brutal, many-voiced and worth it.
Between the ages of 15 and 17, Marlon James said he spoke maybe nine words at school. In 1980s Kingston, that's how a gay kid survived: by disappearing in plain sight. "The Disappearers" is about the men who couldn't, or wouldn’t.
It's 1988, and eight gay men, strangers to one another, are rehearsing "Fortune and Men's Eyes," a 1967 drama about young men in prison. One night, a mob attacks the rehearsal, and one of the men is killed. The book follows what comes after, mainly through Jordan, a survivor whose parents rejected him for being gay, and Eddy, a white-passing student who arrived too late to be hurt but is haunted by what happened. Some of the men try to move on. Some want revenge. Some just vanish.
I'll be honest: this book is hard to read. The violence is a lot, and James doesn't soften any of it. He has said he wants readers to come away thinking "damage happened here," not cheering like it's an action movie. But it's also written with such grace, even at its ugliest.
The moment I keep replaying comes early, before the attack. The actors go around the room and share what life has been like for them as queer men. Some of the stories are absolutely horrific. Others felt a little more familiar to me, but they're still devastating. The way James handles that scene, and the foreshadowing in it, is something else. By the time it's over, you know these men are in danger, and you care about every one of them.
Years later, Jordan and Eddy team up to find two of the men who vanished, and for a stretch the book turns into a kind of detective story. The two of them bicker constantly, which brings some dark humor to a very heavy book, and their search opens up Kingston's hidden gay world in the early years of AIDS, when the clubs went underground and churches called the disease a punishment from God.
If you read "A Brief History of Seven Killings," which won James the Booker in 2015, you'll hear its echo here: another Kingston story told by a chorus of voices, each one fighting to be heard. The book is built out of diaries, interviews, letters and long monologues, with plenty of Jamaican slang.
James left Jamaica himself in 2007 to escape the kind of homophobia this book is about, and you can feel how personal this one is for him. He based the attack on a story he heard growing up, about a mob breaking into a gathering of gay men and beating everyone inside. For years he couldn't prove it. Then he talked to someone who had been granted asylum in Canada and could confirm it, and a note at the end of the book says plainly that it happened.
For a lot of gay men in America, myself included, it's easy to think of stories like this as history. This book was a good reminder of how far we've come, and of how many people are still living some version of it today.
One thing to know going in: the book changes viewpoints and forms, sometimes without much warning, and between that and the slang, it was a heavier lift than most books for me, but so worth the effort. It pulls you right into that world. It's a feature, not a bug. Just something to be aware of before you start.
Even with that learning curve, I'd give it an A. James builds 1988 Kingston voice by voice, in all its danger and desire, until it surrounds you completely. And he finally gives the men that city tried to erase a chance to be heard.
