Love Story – Afsana Mousavi

This gorgeous debut follows a young transsexual’s feverish passage through the envies and dreams that lace her initiation into New York City’s underground nightlife as she attempts to reconcile its predatory yet deeply salvational euphorias.

She moves to New York for whatever reasons. Then she starts hormones and steps out at night. Everything else falls away. How had it never not been this?

Quickly, Io—freshly feminized and hardly clothed—is yanked into the glamor and vagaries of her times by her obsessive parasocial relationship with a fellow trans woman and renowned DJ. In nightlife she quickly discovers the stakes of living so close to cultural production—fashion, art, literature, it all flashes and dies as her bank account stays empty and her health waxes and wanes.

The lines between transition and cultural capital begin to blur and the currency of femininity demands to sell or be sold. Io must decide how far she will go to attain the dreams of upward mobility free-wheeling through the cloaca of the City.