The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Best Best Dressed of 2024

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This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2024, and shares a new selection from each.

content warning for homophobia and slurs

Of Band Fags and Hate Mail

In the eighties when I taught high school in the burgers-
and-beer suburbs of the New Jersey Pine Barrens,
Air Force brats and professors’ kids interbred
a miasma of shame and fear. I was newly thirty
and confused about how to dress, walk in heels,
and wear my hair, how not to appear too queer.

I taught freshman English, coached 3 sports (and dance),
advised the literary magazine. So many late days
bled into the flagrant dusk to wait outside with the freshly
showered, hooded bodies. If they were slow to emerge
from the locker room, the threat was always the same:
you’ll have to ride the last bus with the band fags.

Mornings, I’d arrive before homeroom with the kids
who had jobs and worked half days. The boys would hide
in the lav, halls empty, echoing with shouts of DYKE
while I clicked my way to the staff room. I’d like to say
they were better, my peers, who spread rumors that I
was dating the gay girl athlete who’d attached herself to me.

When I escaped high school for community college, hate
was delivered to my mailbox after hours: Crystal Bacon,
you worthless piece of shit. You’re so ugly you can’t get a man
so you do unnatural things with women. I read it out loud
in class to look for the guilty: young woman, back row,
failing Comp, who slid out early and never returned.

Ask me, I might write from out here on the left coast
in the youth of the twenty-first century, what difference
their strongest love or hate has made. I’ll tell you:
freedom from fear; wholeness is what they gave.

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