Testosterone by James Robert Baker

Title: Testosterone
Author: James Robert Baker
Genre: Literary Fiction, Transgressional Fiction
URL: Amazon
Price: Varies by third party sellers (Out of Print)

Other Information/warnings: Extreme violence, bad language, racism,  drug use, animal cruelty
Summary [from the publisher]:  A package from Dean Seagrave has arrived in James Robert Baker’s mailbox.  Baker was expecting a bootleg of the Bad Religion show at the Palace. But instead of Bad Religion he got bad religion: Palo Mayombe, to be exact.  Seagrave, it seems, has spent the day tooling around Los Angeles in a rental car with a hand-held tape recorder, searching for his sexy ex-lover Pablo Ortega, who went out one night for cigarettes and never came back.  The police are on Dean’s trail for assaulting an old woman outside a grocery store, or so he has been told by the man in a wheelchair he attacked at Venice Beach.

Seagrave explains his frenzied quest by saying he believes Pablo is “an emotional serial killer.”  Every stop on the trail brings to light more disturbing information about Pablo Ortega. Pablo, it turns out, is into Palo Mayombe, an ultraviolent form of Santeria involving animal and possibly human sacrifice. Pablo may even have been in government-sanctioned torture in his native Chile. Furthermore, Pablo has placed a curse on Dean Seagrave–a curse that can be broken only through a ritual involving the severed head of Pablo.

The problem is, Dean might be crazy. Or everyone might be lying.  Either way, Dean has a machete–because the chainsaw was too loud–and he’s just found Pablo.

My Review: The late James Robert Baker is definitely an acquired taste and, while a cult author, he has certainly had his fair share of detractors.  A self-described anarchist, Baker’s literary career was deeply informed by his Long Beach, California, roots, the rise of the AIDS pandemic, and the staunch Republican refusal to react–let alone accept–the devastating reality of that disease.  Baker has been called “The Last Angry Gay Man,” a racist and an irresponsible writer, claims some still hold to be true.  While I can certainly see where the claims come from, when one looks deeper into his body of work and his background one has to question the negative assertions and affirm the former.  Baker was an Angry Gay Man and his fiction reflects it in its brutality, dark humor and deeply satirical nature. If one simply looks at the surface of his works one would see why he was called irresponsible and a racist and one might even believe it.   But what one could never call Baker was “safe.”

Testosterone was published posthumously–Baker committed suicide in 1997 at the age of 51–and is a bit of departure.  Instead of his usual prose style, Baker employed the literary conceit of having the narrator, Dean Seagrave, dictate the entire story into a hand-held tape recorder as he travels around Los Angeles in search of his former lover, Pablo Ortega.  Each of the extended chapters is one cassette tape, and as the story progresses we see Seagrave descend into madness….or do we?


Seagrave is looking for the man who jilted him, a lover who simply vanished one night without a word.  He’s wounded and pissed off and on a mission:  “I’m not Jesus. I’m not a magician. I’m just a f*g with a gun who needs a chainsaw.”  Who hasn’t been jilted?  Who hasn’t wondered why they were left behind when the lover hasn’t given you a clue?  Who hasn’t begun to discover little secrets about their former lover, the things they never wanted or needed to know?  That’s the question, and as Seagrave is told little bits and pieces about Pablo from others he encounters on his journey, a picture of a completely different man emerges.

While some have criticized the use of the tape-recorder device in the narration, for me it works perfectly.  We get a stream of consciousness narration, sometimes rambling and sometime succinct and to the point.  We are easily transported into Seagrave’s mind.  We like him because we are him, his mind working as our minds often do, jumping from topic to topic, influenced by the things we see and hear and smell. We quite easily identify with this man; we feel the pain that is driving him.  We want the answers he wants.  And as piece by piece the stories of Pablo are  told, we believe right along with him.  Because believing is easier than admitting we might have been naive, that we ourselves are responsible for our own choices and actions in life, that we are victims.

What Baker also does brilliantly with this conceit is take us along with Seagrave’s descent.  What starts off as a deep desire just to want to know the truth quickly turns into a dark obsession.  The things were learn about Pablo are extreme, unbelievable.  But because Baker has ensconced us in  Seagrave’s mind, we want to believe.  We need to.  The result is a delicious dichotomy…Pablo can’t be all these things…but it certainly explains a lot if he was.  It is, really, quite brilliant because we as the reader can’t tell is Seagrave is slowly going insane, or if Pablo really is the heinous man.

Now, Seagrave also uses some hateful, racist language in his search.  It is uncomfortable and brutal language, and here is where one can see why Baker was sometimes labeled a racist.  But here also is where, if one really looks at it, we can find Baker actually examining racism in a way.  He skewers the hypocrisy in Los Angeles’ multi-culturalism. Everyone in LA has a gay friend, or a black co-worker or a Latino lover.  Sometime in the LA–as well as the LA gay community–multi-culturalism is sometimes wielded like a medal, a bragging right for the white majority so that they can feel good about themselves.  “Oh, I have a ____ lover.”  As if that gives one a free pass out of institutionalized racism.  Here we have Seagrave, a man who had a Latino lover, who says hateful, racist things about the man he supposedly loved simply because he was hurt by this man. And as Seagrave chooses to believe the worst about this man, the racist language and actions is ratcheted up.   Baker is peeling back the facade of muticulturalism and exposing the rotten flesh of racism underneath it.  That’s what Bakers’ work to me is usually all about…ripping what seems to be apart to show us what is really beneath it all.  This works especially well in this novel, because other than a few fleeting moments, Pablo Ortiz is a character we never really meet.  He has been reduced to an object.  A stereotype.   The stereotype he apparently always was in Seagrave’s real eyes.

Most of all, Testosterone–for me anyway–is a fascinating study of obsesssion, about how we sometimes make ourselves so willing to believe, how we want to jump at being the victim because being the victim is sometimes comfortable, easier than examining ourselves.  Testosterone is angry and brutal and horrific and hateful and deeply, darkly funny.  It is not a book for the faint of heart.  It is not a book that goes down easily.  It is bold and brash and unapologetic in every respect.  But for me, it is essential gay literature. And it is literature with unending layers to wade through.