Cowboy erotica meets Kathy Acker in this smart, raunchy look at a queer sexual awakening

Steacy Easton grew up Mormon, queer, and Autistic in the West. This book traces the people and spaces that made them who they are: the Mormon church, an Anglican boys’ boarding school where they were sent to be ‘reformed’ and where they were abused by a teacher, and then, later on, rodeos and bathhouses and mall bathrooms. The world Easton describes is one in which desire is complicated, where men – ‘daddies’ – can be loving and they can be abusive, and there isn’t always a clear distinction.

Easton explores the essential texts of their sexuality, from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Neil LaBute, Kip Moore to Lorelei James, and delves into their own encounters as they came of age. These daddy lessons are blunt about the pleasures of disobedience, slippery and difficult, revelling in the funk of memory and desire.

"In dangerous times, Daddy Lessons dares to complicate the question of what children desire, including things that they probably shouldn’t, and that adults must not exploit or manipulate. Except they do. Steacy Easton's meditations follow how such desires and disasters secrete an aesthetic and a self, and how something vivacious can spring from that muck, something like this book itself, smutty and shining and garlanded in jonquils." – Carl Wilson, author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

"Daddy Lessons is a cocky and tender reclamation of childhood and teenage wanting." – Vivek Shraya, author of I’m Afraid of Men and People Change

"Steacy writes about the queer pleasure-seeking body in ways both fresh and eminently familiar." – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners

Steacy Easton is a writer and visual artist, originally from Edmonton, who has lived in Hamilton for more than seven years. They have written on gender, sexuality, and country music for publications including Slate, NPR, and the Atlantic Online. Recent and upcoming books include Why Tammy Wynette Matters for University of Texas and a 33 ⅓ Volume for Bloomsbury. They were the 2022 Martha Street Artist Residence in Winnipeg.

Steacy Easton's profile page

"…[T]his is a moving and largely accessible dive into the thicket of human sexuality." – Publishers Weekly

"At its best, this pedagogy of fucking makes transgressive queer desire palpable." – H Felix Chau Bradley, Xtra

"In the way it draws on both high and low cultures—Sedgwick mixes with cowboy smut, hookups with theology—and its frank depictions of casual sex, Daddy Lessons is not a traditional memoir. It’s a cautious story about someone who didn’t fit into an assigned category and didn’t know how to express themselves but slowly figured it out through their experiences with various gay daddy figures." – Roz Milner, PRISM International

"The reality and fluidity of the body is at the heart of Daddy Lessons. The way bodies tangle and sweat and need and connect. The ways desire and power shapeshift and mingle." – Anuja Varghese, Plenitude Magazine