Published in 2011, The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt by Jon-Jon Goulian is the first [*] memoir by an Armenian-American who describes himself as an “androgynous neurotic.”
Goulian was born in 1968 and grew up in La Jolla, California. After attending Columbia College and the New York University School of Law, he worked as a law clerk for a federal judge in North Carolina, and then as an assistant to Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books.
For the great bulk of my adult life, beginning roughly when I was sixteen and continuing, off and on, until now, at the age of forty, I have fallen short, sometimes dangerously short, of the conventional ideal of masculinity.
The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, Jon-Jon Goulian
While Goulian identifies as heterosexual, his memoir reads, and is, queer. From the first page of the introduction, he is forthright about his gender expression. The entire book is organized around his androgyny.
Goulian’s Granny Shammy was born in Diyarbakir in 1899. She moved, along with her family, to Baghdad in 1910 and then escaped to America in 1920. His grandfather (Dicran Goulian) met Shammy at a U.S. hospital.
While Goulian takes you on a journey of contradictions (party boy, law clerk for a federal judge, grandson of the political philosopher Sidney Hook, a one-time assistant for Robert Silvers) he also presents himself as the person you want to talk to at a cocktail party, as he twists and ties the idea of gender presentation like one ties a knot out of a cherry stem with just one’s tongue.
If available, please consider buying a copy at Abril Books. This book may also be available for purchase through the Queer Armenian Library’s shop at Bookshop.org. If you purchase a copy through Bookshop.org we will receive a commission.
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ISBN: 978-1-4000-6811-1. Published by Random House.
