Book Review: Pretty Broken Punks by Martin Belk
I found it the way we often find the things we need. Not by seeking, but by straying. Wandering, a little unmoored, through Manhattan’s queer sanctuary, the one with the Keith Haring bathroom, those beating black and white walls that still hum with the aftershock of protest and pleasure. I ducked into the bookshop. You know the one. More altar than retail. Shelves like ribs of a half-remembered lover, each spine a talisman. And there it was. Pretty Broken Punks.
Martin Belk’s memoir. Manifesto. Elegy. Revolt. A book that doesn’t ask for permission to exist. It struts in, eyeliner smudged and gaze unflinching, and says: I was there. You weren’t, maybe. But now you are.
From the first page, Belk unzips the skin of the slickly packaged queer nostalgia machine and pulls out its guts. The late 90s and early 2000s East Village art punk scene, bruised, glittered, and snarling, isn’t remembered here so much as resurrected. Not embalmed. Not mythologised. Just brought back in its imperfect, intoxicated, incandescent entirety.
It’s messy. That’s the point.
Reading it, I couldn’t help but smell the ghost trail of my own youth. Thousands of miles away and a decade or so adrift, but kin just the same. Sydney in the 90s. Surry Hills and Darlinghurst before the rent got greedy. The old Flinders before its facelift. The Albury on Oxford Street with its drag queens who parented us between numbers. The graffiti-slicked bathrooms where sex, sanctuary, and survival blurred into one.
We didn’t have Warhol’s leftovers or punk royalty in our booths, but we had the virus at our backs like a siren that never stopped wailing. We danced anyway. Lipsticked our grief. Buried our friends. Became each other’s kin. Belk’s New York and my Sydney were two broken toothed cities cracking open with beauty and danger. And queers like us, we knew how to survive both.
There’s a strange comfort in recognising the notes of your own past in someone else’s chaos. It reminds you you’re not alone in having lived it. Or having survived it.
Belk writes like someone trying to outpace the forgetting. The prose moves like a body at 3AM. Staggering. Still dancing. There’s rhythm in its disarray. A sort of sacred sloppiness. He captures a time when nightlife wasn’t just nightlife. It was life. A place to be seen whole. To split the binary. To scream through eyeliner and volume and velvet and vulnerability.
And like our Sydney enclaves, there’s no shyness about what lived in the dark. Addiction. Exploitation. Predatory men in activist drag. The book doesn’t airbrush. It lets the rot sit beside the roses.
But underneath it all, there’s a pulse. Of chosen family. Of sacred misfit kinship. Of a queer aliveness too loud to be buried. That’s what I kept feeling in my chest, page after page. That throb. That knowing. That even in ruin, we build altars.
For those of us who came of age when the spectre of HIV wasn’t metaphor but mathematics, I mean, I can still name the men I never got to age with, this book doesn't just recall a scene. It remembers what it meant to keep going. Not in a heroic way. In a queer way. The kind of going that’s uneven. Unpretty. Unending.
In a world that tried to kill us, Belk and the punks he honours dared to create. To perform. To fuck. To feel. To fail spectacularly. To document.
That’s what struck me hardest. This is a book that understands the politics of remembering. That if we don’t write these things down, someone else will write over them. Turn our chaos into costume. Our defiance into digestible queer trivia. Belk doesn't let that happen. He names the names. Reminds us of the sweat, the glitter, the blood. And he does it not with reverence alone, but with rage.
Some passages will bruise you. Some will make you laugh like you’re back in a toilet stall mid-high, with a stranger telling you secrets they’ve never said aloud. And some, especially the reflections on Leee, will clutch your throat in that awful beautiful way only queer grief can. You’ll feel it. The kind of grief that’s not just for a person, but for a world. A possibility. A politics.
I read those pages like someone kneeling at a grave that’s also a mirror. Because isn’t that what grief does to us in the end? It folds time. It puts our youth, our future, our failures, all in the same fist. And says: Here. Hold this. It’s yours now.
If you’re looking for a tidy narrative, go elsewhere. If you want neat closure, you’ve come to the wrong altar.
But if you want a book that smells of sweat and cigarette ash and cheap cologne and ink. If you want a book that feels like rummaging through the pockets of your younger self and finding a phone number, a flyer, a forgotten scar. Then Pretty Broken Punks will meet you there.
Martin Belk doesn’t pretend to be an oracle. But he knows how to listen to ghosts. And in this book, he lets them speak. Unapologetically. Unfiltered. Undone.
In a world still trying to tidy up queer history. To sand off its calluses and repackage it as Pride™. This book is a blessing.
A bruise you press on. Just to remember it’s real.