In a landscape drowning in clickbait and corporate rainbow-washing, Shaun Ponsonby‘s Rainbows in the Rough: The Unlikely Queer Icons That Shaped a Closeted Queen lands like a gut-punch: sharp, funny, and unapologetically queer. This isn’t just an anthology of LGBTQIA+ essays. It’s a cultural force, a joyous riot of lived experience, unlikely love, and critical brilliance that makes you laugh, ache, and rewire your cultural compass.
Penned by Ponsonby, a working-class, cis-gay writer with a razor-wit and a heart the size of a Bruce Springsteen chorus — this book doesn’t just explore queer pop culture. No, it queers it, inside out. It’s personal. It’s political. It’s packed with the kind of smart, opinionated writing that makes you pause mid-sentence and mutter, “Jesus Christ, that’s good.”
Let me be clear: I never had any doubt this book needed to exist. From one drunken conversation in August 2023, I was all in. I backed it, championed it, and believed in it — long before the first draft ever landed in my inbox. Shaun and I go back years. He’s been a kind, funny, and endlessly thoughtful presence in my life. A friend. And that kindness, that care, bleeds through every page of this book, even when he’s eviscerating lazy pop culture takes or ripping open received wisdom with a grin.
These essays are not detached think-pieces. They’re full-body experiences. In “Wonderous Stories: Notes on ‘Prog’”, Shaun doesn’t just argue that prog rock is camp; he proves it with a hilarious and surprisingly rigorous reading of Peter Gabriel’s floral costumes, Rick Wakeman’s King Arthur On Ice, and Emerson Lake & Palmer’s flying piano excess. His link to Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp isn’t performative either; it’s revelatory. “The music may have been considered more serious… but the inherent queerness of 1970s prog is born out of the artists’ utter willingness to look and sound completely ridiculous”. You’ll never look at Yes the same again, and that’s the point.
In “The Alienation of Mr. Hardy’s Affections”, Shaun queers Laurel and Hardy. Not as a joke, but as a sincere reading of homosocial intimacy. “They behave like a married couple,” he writes, and then shows you, line by line, how the slapstick turns tender, how the jokes hurt. His reading of Their First Mistake is filthy, sure, but it’s also devastating. That’s the rhythm of this book: from laughter to lump-in-throat in a heartbeat.
And then there’s the knockout: “The Boss on the Backstreets”, a queer analysis of Bruce Springsteen that walks the line between fandom and scholarship. Shaun doesn’t just look at lyrics, he brings the weight of growing up closeted, of loving things you weren’t supposed to, of finding queerness in the margins of macho Americana. “Your dad liked him, so how could he be gay?” Shaun asks. And then he dares to answer, with references to drag queens, sweaty gigs, and songs that sound suspiciously like longing.
This is LGBTQIA+ criticism with teeth.
What makes this book sing in a crowded field of queer pop culture writing is how it threads humour with heart, theory with filth, intellect with instinct. It’s not afraid to get messy. To contradict itself. To take the piss and then take it seriously again. And that, frankly, is what queerness is: complicated, brilliant, and defiant.
Some will call it niche. They’re wrong. This book belongs in classrooms, in libraries, in queer bookshops, and on the nightstands of anyone who’s ever felt like “barely a peg,” as Shaun puts it in the opening line. This is cultural criticism not just about queerness, but doing queerness: structurally, emotionally, and unapologetically.
For those searching for the best new LGBTQIA+ nonfiction in 2025, or for fresh, funny queer voices in pop culture criticism, Rainbows in the Rough is it. It deserves a place alongside Maggie Nelson, Hilton Als, and Riese Bernard, but it brings its own musical nerdery, sharp camp sensibility, and northern grit to the table.
Whether you’re a Drag Race junkie, a Bruce Springsteen die-hard, or a closeted emo kid who didn’t get what all the Britney fuss was about, this book sees you!
Rainbows in the Rough launches this June alongside out.skirts: An Anthology of LGBTQIA+ Writing, this book arrives not just as a standalone, but as part of a bold, necessary intervention in queer literary culture from The Broken Spine. Together, these two works carve space, shift the narrative, and remind us that queer writing isn’t a genre; it’s a force!
