'Last Night at the Telegraph Club': Historical queer romance

Malinda Lo's novel is a coming-of-age story set in 1950s San Francisco.

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Spin the prize wheel, the friendly library staffers said. You could win a book. I spun. The pointer stopped on “Book.” I may have squealed.

As I looked over the books splayed across the table — all by Asian American authors, in a nod to Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month — Malinda Lo’s “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” jumped out. I hadn’t heard of the book. But the cover bristled with award logos, including that of the National Book Awards, whose picks I’ve always enjoyed. Sold.

“Last Night at the Telegraph Club” turned out to be a wonderful blend of coming-of-age story, historical fiction and queer romance. Lily Hu faces some universal challenges: senior year pressure to figure out what comes after high school, a best friend whose interests are diverging from hers, parents who expect her to stay within their slightly suffocating definition of a “good Chinese girl.” She also lives in a tight-knit community, 1950s San Francisco Chinatown, where any move outside the norm is immediately noticed.

So when Lily comes across a newspaper ad with a photograph of Tommy Andrews, a male impersonator at the Telegraph Club near Chinatown, she knows she can’t reveal her instant fascination to anyone. She tears out the picture and hides it inside a book, from which it naturally makes a most inopportune escape, fluttering out of a restroom stall to land at the feet of … someone.

The person who picks up the clipping, her classmate Kathleen, is willing not only to keep Lily’s secret but also to take her to the Telegraph. Suddenly, the “good Chinese girl” is waiting until her parents have gone to sleep, then sneaking out of the house with a fake ID to get into a lesbian bar where she sees that the newspaper photo didn’t do Tommy justice.

It had given no sense, Lily now realized, of Tommy’s physicality. The way she stood, the way she moved — her swagger — so like a man and yet —

It was that yet that made Lily’s skin flush warm. The knowledge that despite the clothes Tommy wore, despite the attitude that invited everyone in the room to gaze at her, she was not a man. It felt unspeakably charged, as if all of Lily’s most secret desires had been laid bare onstage.

Lily and Kathleen have gone to school together for years, but they’re noticing each other now as the only girls in their advanced math class and the only girls who seem interested in space (Lily) and aviation (Kathleen). Having been a high school girl who took advanced math and loved science and computers, I questioned why Lo was apparently equating such interests with lesbianism.

Then I remembered the girls I knew in high school who downplayed their math and science aptitude so as not to intimidate the boys they dated or wanted to date. And I read Lo’s author’s note, in which she said Lily’s story was partly inspired by Nathalia Holt’s “Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.” Maybe the math and science thing wasn’t so much about being gay as it was about being marginalized.

Lily’s story, after all, is one of marginalization: by her family, which insists she cleave to their expectations of how she should live her life; by her friends and classmates, who take unflattering note of her seemingly unfeminine tendencies; even by the women she meets at the Telegraph Club, which seems like a haven where she can finally be herself until her new acquaintances, all white, comment on how good her English is and objectify her, calling her “China doll” or “the Oriental.”

Lo expertly evokes Lily’s whirl of emotions as she slowly realizes her attraction to other girls, particularly Kathleen, and then acts on it, all while knowing it’s unlikely her family and community will ever accept her true identity. While not getting the happy ending that a character in 2023 might enjoy, Lily does find a way forward, and “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” closes on a note of hope.