Taste This, photos by C. Brushwood Rose (1998)
Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers

Boys Like Her is an adrenaline-rush road movie of young queer life and transformation. First stop, the Canada-U.S. border, four young queers in a borrowed car pulled over, notebooks, make-up, clothes, and violin flung out on the concrete. The car is checked for drugs, contraband, fruit-and declared clean, but they are indeed smuggling dangerous goods. But what they’re carrying can’t be sniffed out, pawed through, or seized. They’re smuggling stories, poetry, scripts; words they’ve sold in performance on stage. Felons, all of them, they’ve memorized their act and now are speeding away from the border, and definitely up to no good. In the world and truth of Boys Like Her, stories have no hard and fast boundaries and transgression is often the way to the most delightful of transformations.

Taste This is a queer performance troupe that was founded in 1995 by Anna Camilleri, Ivan Coyote, Zoe Eakle and Lyndell Montgomery and co-authored Boys Like Her. The book features photographs by Chloë Brushwood Rose and Tala Brandeis.

“It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a book comes at exactly the right time and ushers in an era. Boys Like Her is just such a book. . . the writing is sensitive, genuine, and unflinching. This is the first of many important books to come from this generation.”
– Lambda Book Report