This is such a strange book, but after three reads it does mostly hold up. The main weird thing is that it's very hard to place what age group this book was written for. It's barely 100 pages long, and short pages at that, making it the length of an easy reader. But the main characters are young adults dealing with love, rejection, bad hookups, and heartbreak. There are mentions of drug abuse and of the growing severity of the AIDS crisis (the book was published in 1989). I first read it at age 12 or 13 and absolutely fell in love with with its rich dreamy language. It paints a Los Angeles that is built out of glitter, leather, fake feathers, and old Hollywood glamour. It felt like pure magic, and the matter-of-fact inclusion of queer characters and non-normative family structures made a deep impression. I still love all those things, but now I also wince at the frequent cultural stereotypes that pop up. This book contains a white character named Cherokee, a Native character named Coyote, a Jamaican man named Valentine Jah-Love and a Chinese-American woman named Ping Chong. Do we give it a pass because the other lead characters are named Weetzie Bat, Dirk, Duck, and My Secret Agent Lover Man...?