Steven Pfau’s expansive memoir, Say Nephew: On Boyhood, Unclehood, and Queer Mentorship, tells layered stories from his life and pays homage to his singular uncle Bruce, while also offering something more wide-ranging and complex: a theoretical meditation on the mentorship of uncles in the gay community.
Pfau’s prose is characterized by acute self-awareness and a daring willingness to disclose. Whether analyzing photographs of himself as a child wearing cowboy boots, describing the experience of posing nude as an adult, exploring the delicate dance of finding a partner in Idaho or detailing a heady sexual encounter in a bathhouse, Pfau’s lens is both wide-ranging and intimate, and the memoir’s essayistic form enables him to draw together numerous moments into a complex self-portrait. Pfau likewise carefully memorializes Bruce, who dropped out of college but remained intellectually curious—he recommended a 2009 biography of John Cheever in language both colorful and revealing: “We all are multi-faceted individuals and it illuminated for me my own modest but odd, crazed history and persona.”
Bruce had a spellbinding charisma, carefully rendered by Pfau. “It takes a lot of gas to run this Cadillac!” was one of his favorite phrases, which, Pfau reports, could be “both flirtatious and menacing, both bombastic and self-mocking” and was deployed before activities as varied as taking an afternoon nap in the bathtub or pouring vodka. It is, though, Bruce’s deep love for Pfau that shines through the memoir like a beacon. Bruce recommends literature and movies, receives his nephew’s coming out without surprise and teaches him the hidden meanings of gay culture, including the now-dated practice of hanky-flagging and other codes that queer people have used to make themselves known to each other.
Bruce was Pfau’s first and best uncle, and Pfau—an introverted writer type—began to imagine the books he could write about Bruce decades ago. This one arrives after Bruce has departed, and the book is about Bruce, but it’s also about so much more: the uncles that Pfau has had since Bruce, Pfau’s desire to establish himself as less of a nephew and more of an uncle as he heads into middle age and, critically, the role of uncles in gay culture overall. A detailed, layered exploration of one man’s life and a tradition of mentorship within the gay community, Say Nephew is not to be missed.