Originally published in 2001, Tramps Like Us follows a young gay man traveling throughout America in the 1970s and '80s, meeting and losing friends and lovers, and coming into himself.
An epic, moving and ebullient gay road-trip novel, set in the 1970s and early ’80s, that doesn’t have a pretentious bone in its body. It reads like an avid, feverishly detailed letter that the author wrote and mailed directly to readers, the way Lou Reed spoke to him over that radio. Over the course of the book, those readers become his friends ... Its reissue is one of this summer’s earliest literary tent poles. A book this perceptive but amiably unpolished, that pops as if in Kodachrome colors, that deals out tablespoons of American simplicity and horniness and delight, might seem like a small thing to look for, but it’s a big thing to find. It made me feel I had my left hand on the wheel of a car, and the right on the radio dial ... I began this review with music because it floods the novel in a particularly credible manner ... Tramps Like Us is a young person’s novel, a beautiful one that took me back to a time in my life when I read to learn about the world ... An approachable minor classic, one that packs in vastly more life than many more serious novels do. You end up wishing that it existed as a mass-market paperback, so that you could sneak-read it under a desk at school or try to carry it in your back pocket ... It is a novel that tastes life at first hand; it’s a palate cleanser for jaded appetites.
Searing and breathless ... Engaged in symbolic battle with much of the world around him, Joe’s rebellious spirit distills the queer resentment that exploded after the Gay Liberation of the sixties ... Westmoreland’s mellow prose tempers the more heartrending scenes. When describing the cascading horror of the AIDS crisis, his unassuming style makes the most crushing moments feel tender and raw ... Westmoreland’s clear-eyed observations portray a unique and mercurial odyssey ... Redolent of its era without ever being a relic of it, Tramps Like Us holds its own among queer road classics like Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal or Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. Though Tramps is more conventional and naturalistic than those books, it moves with the same delinquent stride. Westmoreland’s blend of noise and sights, romance and friendship, render a portrait of queer joy as a hard-earned victory of survival.
Grafts roughly a quarter century of gay existence—from casual pre-Stonewall hedonism to the ghastly depredations of the AIDS crisis—onto the shaggy armature of a road novel. Thematically, this form suggests how impermanent queer self-discovery is, a constant jaws-of-life procedure attended by losses, reversals, cliff-hangers, and narrow escapes ... Tramps Like Us demonstrates the extent to which queer life in America is bound up in migration and the urban demimonde ... Joe’s interlude in the 'elsewhere' of New Orleans exemplifies the novel’s charms and shortcomings ... There’s a sweetness to some of the vignettes here ... But the prose also has a flatness that accentuates the tedium of playing bystander to someone else’s buzz ... The pages describing the piecemeal disintegration of Joe’s friends—the hospitalizations, the vigils, the denials, the fumbled goodbyes—are the book’s most gutting. Here, the simplicity of the prose matches the quotidian anguish of the moment ... As a narrator, Joe can often be too banal and passive for my taste, but he can also be vulnerable, and sympathetic, and appealingly horny. His story is a valentine to queer friendship, which saves his life and breaks his heart, the way love always does in the end.
