Hilton Als: "could my queer heart ever forgive him?"
My Pinup is 7.3 x 4.5 x 0.2 inches and 48 sultry, sulky pages.
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Oh, I’ll follow Hilton Als anywhere, and this time, we follow him right into Prince’s dressing room. My heart skips a beat.
My Pinup is Als’ new memoir-essay, mostly set during Prince’s Musicology tour in the early 2000s. Als meets Prince backstage in St. Louis. It’s the full festoon: candles, fruit, cheese, tables draped in black and purple fabrics. And Prince himself, before the show: “shoeless, dressed in dark tropical wool trousers.”
My Pinup is structured like a diptych and provocatively short. I wish I could whisper, but could we even say it’s almost too slender? As if in spite of its length, the book luxuriates. It overflows. Prince is theme and subject; but also a refractive disco ball highlighting flashes of Black queerness, desire and betrayal. My Pinup is as plush, unexpected, and hip-swiveling as any Prince album. There are lovers, heartbreakers, and the most extraordinary uneaten peach pie.
Als also makes an insistent recommendation of the Prince album Lovesexy, a squealing and chatty album that feels like it’s keeping you company. There’s nothing like knowing precisely the right music to listen to for a book. I played Lovesexy while reading for a sensory-overload and very briefly, I felt positively draped in Prince.
“Very Briefly, Prince” is the dream of My Pinup, I think. It’s about many things, but also holding an ecstatic flash so so fleetingly that you spend much more time yearning it and mourning it, so that you’re not even sure if you ever really had it or just almost. In any case, if you’re lucky, at least the feeling comes with delicious music alongside.