“I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Traveling from Iowa to Wisconsin as a child with her family, Kadlec was sure that college was her “ticket out…a guarantee I wouldn’t end up like my mom: stuck in a nowhere town, financially trapped in a no-good marriage with a man who provided for you but didn’t appreciate you.” However, the author discovered that higher education was “only another example of liberal America’s and academia’s own cruel optimism, where what is given financially, energetically, emotionally, and even physically, so overwhelmingly, and so often, exceeds the actuality of what is received.” Ultimately, Kadlec found peace in Brooklyn and acknowledgement of her true identity as a queer woman.īoth memoir and thesis, this book highlights a cultural, social, and spiritual journey that will resonate with many.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters.
She grew up and out of evangelicalism but not before she was taught to hate her body, endured a disastrous marriage, and found her relationship with Jesus much more fraught than her younger self would have thought possible. The researched pieces-about the origins of evangelicalism, the 1990s explosion of purity culture, and the roots of misogyny and racism in the church-are fascinating, but more interesting is Kadlec’s personal journey. This approach along with accounts of her childhood that never seem to go as deep as they could combines in a narrative technique that sometimes feels like it is meant to keep readers at arm’s length. Instead, Kadlec tells us the story of her life so far in bits and pieces, interspersed with graduate-level research. Opening with her trip to the county courthouse where she filed her divorce papers, the author doesn’t try to surprise us with shocking twists or turns. Veering from scholarly and self-assured to angry and doubtful, Kadlec chronicles her experiences being raised by evangelical Christians and her subsequent deconstruction and rebuilding of everything she thought she knew about herself.
In a memoir of discovery and unlearning, a Midwest girl finds religious freedom on the East Coast.
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