I Said What I Said

Intemperate Observations about Politics, Pop Culture, AIDS, Art, Sex, the Expat Life in Italy, the Craft of Writing, and the Great Awokening—A Queer Collectanea & a Memoir of Four Decades

As a witness to—and survivor of—some of the most turbulent years in recent American (and queer) history, Wendell Ricketts brings together four decades of his published and unpublished writing in I Said What I Said: dispatches from Italy, Morocco, the Deep South, San Francisco, Hawai‘i, Cuba, Mexico, and other spots around the globe; diaries, journalism, letters, reviews, and satires; and candid observations about the “AIDS years” of the ‘80s and ‘90s, sex, the culture wars, bad art, suicide, “representation” in literature, safe spaces, incompetent translators, performative word- and thought-policing, Olympic athletes, marriage equality, life as an expat, beloved gay writers and celebrities, Italians, InstaWriters, and neopronouns, to name a few of his topics. Intimate and outrageous, smart and funny, raunchy and radical, bitchy and astute. I Said What I Said is an honest chronicle of one queer life and an impassioned (and occasionally savage) ballad to the power of thinking and writing for yourself.

“Everybody will find something to hate here.”

“The book is long, the title a mouthful, but the vast majority of the pieces in I Said What I Said are no more than a few pages in length, and readers can dip in and out, as leisurely as they like, while being whisked across time, space, and—not to put too fine a point on it—a life.”

by Wendell Ricketts