Read: Moby Dick, A Love Story, by Jim Jasper

I first met Herman Melville when I was in high school. I had not come out, would not for a few years, and I had been reading anything that felt like a road map. The authors I discovered, like Burroughs and Genet, were exciting in an underground way. But Melville was breezy, salty, simultaneously half-hidden and completely open, funny and serious. And very sexy. I was certain at the time that the secret of Moby-Dick, that Ishmael and Queequeg were lovers, was something only I had managed to decode. Their love was tangible to me and very reassuring. I read Moby-Dick as a queer love story. Decades later, having left New York for the Berkshires, as Melville did when he was working on Moby-Dick, I decided to make a drawing for each chapter of the book.