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I won't tell a soul, no one has to know / If you want to be�� totally discreet / I'll be at your side, if only for one night (If Only For One Night �� Luther Vandross).

Excuse me for a moment, I’m just taking this chance to marvel at the sheer number of amazing books there are out there in the world. Wow, so many! It’s a little staggering! You know how people love to say ��this is the bad timeline�� or several other variations of the sentiment? Yeah well, this is the timeline where I read a wonderful little story called The Doctor’s Discretion that made me embarrassingly choked up, so it can’t be all bad. Seriously, I’m not being snarky, because it’s wild for me to think about all these fantastic books that I might not have read had I not randomly stumbled across them one day. Emotionally devastating, effortlessly powerful, and satisfyingly (if a little belatedly) optimistic, The Doctor’s Discretion is one of those books that you don’t want to read in public unless you don’t mind everybody seeing you break down in tears. Nah, you’ve got to find somewhere quiet, somewhere you can read this with discretion, an empty, wide open space�� like at a screening for Captain American: Brave New World! Zing nobody watched that movie ha ha! Anyway, the story goes that we follow Doctor Blackwood and Doctor Hill as they attempt to save a transgender man from being made a humiliating and dehumanizing spectacle by the medical community at large by initiating a jailbreak and getting him the hell out of dodge. It’s all very exciting and nail-biting at the same time, because on one hand you don’t want anything bad to happen to these characters, while on the other, without this conflict there would be no book for us to read. I guess that's kind of obvious, huh? I think this story handles the subject matter as well as it possibly can because it never shies away from the mistreatment and constant danger that queer people of the time were victim to, and yet it also never makes queer trauma the sole focus of book in some kind of show of horrifying shock value. The story is laced with tension, sure, and the profound danger trans people are always in for just existing is never sidestepped or ignored, but The Doctor’s Discretion never uses traumatic experiences as a simple story beat or even worse�� torture porn disguised as a misguided “lesson�� about how terrible the times were. Let’s be real, all times were and are terrible, queer people hardly need the constant reminder of stories being all like, "Hey, you deal with this awful bigotry, you know that, right?" and it's like, yeah dude, we know. Anyway, I wasn’t too sure if I’d like this book at first due to its depiction of period accurate mindsets of the times (the 1830’s? Yikes!) and I was worried that I’d come out the other end not liking any of the characters. The thing is, normally in historical-fiction the main characters are unusually forward thinking for the time, and I know that a lot of people hate this because it’s “unrealistic�� or whatever, but I usually don’t mind it. In fact, I kind of count on it, because the truth is that if a character is throwing out slurs left and right, then I’m just not going to like them. The end.

My problem is that even despite all that, I just know that it doesn’t actually take too much for me to turn on the stuff that I’m currently engaging in, even if I'm into it. I didn’t like The Weeknd’s “final�� album, “Hurry Up Tomorrow�� as much as I’d hoped due in no small part to his garbage show The Idol, I stopped listening to HAIM specifically because of the choreography to “I Know Alone,�� and I have an unnecessarily strong dislike of the “Hot Ones�� host because he sucks and I don’t like him. Like, I've blocked people who leave bad reviews of The Song of Achilles, that’s just how I am and I'm sorry. Going into this book, I had to actively turn the switch on my Negative Nancy mindset in order to avoid randomly turning on it. ��It’s all a part of the process of story-telling! It’s all a part of the process of story-telling!�� Besides, I know disliking unlikable characters is hardly a good reason to disengage from the story, because only using art as an escape from reality isn’t the most productive way of consuming literature, so I’m definitely trying to unlearn that base instinct of mine. Please excuse this moment of clarity, but I'm having one right now! I mean, I liked I Am Legend, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and The Mist despite the fact that I didn’t particularly like anybody in them. Also, I have to remind myself that a lot of authors who write books featuring queer folks or folks of color (or both) often write like they're walking on a tightrope because they feel like readers can be excessively critical whenever they don't fit the "wholesome" mold. Like, our stories have to be "good" representation and can't have characters who are a little bit mean and rude and they sometimes can't even learn a valuable lesson throughout the story or else you risk people turning on the book or the movie or the whatever. And I think it's notable how E.E. Ottoman completely disregarded the notion that queer characters of color have to come out the gate fully formed and completely enlightened, that he didn't write these characters infantilized and respected the reader enough to allow us to make our own minds up about them and judge accordingly. And if nothing else, I just think we should always thank authors who avoid Michael Schur's overly self-indulgent yet guiltily eager-to-please prose. Thanks authors! I’m glad I gave this book a chance because it was a delight to find that this isn’t a book about bigotry towards queer folks, it isn’t even a book about survival and fear, but rather it’s a book about companionship and happiness that can be found when allowing yourself a moment of vulnerability. There’s a lot of fear in what might happen if things go wrong, but what if it goes right? What then, huh? What then!?!? Sorry, that was a little aggressive. The Doctor’s Discretion is a beautiful story that serves as a reminder, maybe not a gentle one, mind you, but a reminder nonetheless that when it comes to solidarity, there is no such thing as picking and choosing. We’re in this together and we’ll get through it together.

“I’m doing this because there is a better chance than you might think of me ending up where you were, and I would like to think; if that happened, that someone would do the same for me.��