'Tramps Like Us' by Joe Westmoreland

Tramps Like Us

Author: Joe Westmoreland

Rating: A

Vibe: A scrappy, lusty, deeply alive coming-of-age road novel about the generation between gay liberation and AIDS—anchored by characters that feel like actual people and an ending that earns every tear it gets.

Joe graduates from high school in Kansas City in 1974, escapes an abusive father, and hits the road. He reconnects with Ali—the only other gay kid he knew growing up—and the two of them drift toward New Orleans, then San Francisco, through years of acid trips and disco bars and bathhouses and shitty apartments and lifelong friendships made in three sweaty nights. Joe falls in love. Joe falls out of love. Joe does too many drugs. Joe finds a chosen family and a paycheck and an apartment of his own. Then, slowly at first and then all at once, the people around him start getting sick.

Tramps Like Us, Joe Westmoreland's autofictional 1970s-and-80s road novel was originally published in 2001 and recently reissued with an introduction by Eileen Myles. It's been called a minor classic. I think that undersells it.

What I loved most about this book is exactly what makes autofiction work when it works: the people feel like people. Not types. Not stand-ins. Not authorial mouthpieces. Joe is occasionally passive, occasionally banal, sometimes annoyingly horny, sometimes shockingly wise. Ali is messy in the way real best friends are messy. The men Joe falls for are vivid and flawed and entirely themselves. The friends he makes in New Orleans and San Francisco arrive on the page already fully formed, the way actual people do when you meet them at a bar and they become important to you. Westmoreland isn't crafting characters—he's introducing you to people he loved. You can feel the difference.

The prose is unadorned, almost diaristic, and it works because it doesn't get in the way. Westmoreland isn't trying to dazzle you. He's trying to take you with him. The rhythm of the novel mirrors the rhythm of being young and broke and free—loose, episodic, propulsive, occasionally too long at the bar.

And then there's the ending. I won't spoil specifics, but if you know anything about the gay 70s and 80s, you can feel the shape of what's coming. What's remarkable is how Westmoreland handles it. He doesn't reach for the heart-string-pulling AIDS-novel mode. The horror just slowly accumulates—a friend who's not feeling well, then a hospital visit, then a goodbye, then another, then another. The gut punch comes from the pile-up, not the dramatic beats. By the last fifty pages, the carefree voice of the early book has gone quiet, and the silence does more work than any rhetoric could. The original title of the manuscript was How I Got HIV. That should tell you everything.

This book gets an A. Tramps Like Us isn't a perfect novel, and Joe-the-narrator can drift into passivity in stretches. But it's an essential book about a generation we owe more attention than we give. The characters feel real. The ending lands. And the friendships at the heart of it are the kind that change a life.