BookBrowse Reviews So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis

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A powerful oral history of the lives of trans and nonbinary elders of color.

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Caro de Robertis' So Many Stars shares the personal stories of 20 trans and nonbinary people of color over age 50 who, through their activism, art, and courage, have helped pave the way for the LGBTQ+ community as we know it today. The book is divided into four sections. The first, "Emergence," focuses on childhood, family, and coming of age. This section highlights the interviewees' wide range of backgrounds and hometowns, from Cuba to Oklahoma to New York and elsewhere. It begins with the narrators sharing their earliest memories of their gender, such as Yoseñio Lewis, who knew he was a boy, "from Day One, the moment of consciousness," and the excitement and curiosity felt by Nicky Calma (see Beyond the Book) at a chance meeting with a trans musician when she was eight years old. The section further explores how the narrators' gender affected their relationships with their birth families, and their first forays into the LGBTQ+ community.

The second section, "Forging Lives," is about finding one's place and building a satisfying life. Several of the interviewees are immigrants, who recall moving to the United States and the challenges they faced in doing so, both as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Though more tolerant attitudes in the US were often a factor in the decision to immigrate, the benefits were very much relative—it took ten years for Nelson D'Alerta Pérez to get a green card after she made the mistake of admitting she was homosexual in an interview. This section also delves into sexuality, emotional intimacy, and the process of transitioning.

The third section, "Being the Change," covers activism and the effects of AIDS on the LGBTQ+ community, as well as self-expression and storytelling through art in general and drag specifically. The chapter on the AIDS crisis is unsurprisingly difficult to read, but still contains moments of warmth, and the chapters discussing art and drag are very community-focused. The interviewees discuss not only what their art means to them in terms of self-expression, but how it honors those who came before and connects them to those they share it with. As Donna Personna says of the play she co-wrote and produced about a now famous moment of trans resistance to police brutality: "I wasn't there, at the historic Compton's Cafeteria riot, but I knew these women's stories…this story was buried and hidden for almost fifty years. What if it had never emerged? It impassions me now. This story is not going to die. Every word I wrote, and we wrote, in the play, is the truth."

The fourth and final section, "Horizons," focuses on the present and future, rather than the past. It covers the interviewees' experiences with aging and the ways in which their understanding of gender has changed, their advice for the younger generations, and their hopes for the future. So much discussion in and around the LGBTQ+ community is focused on the experiences of young people, so it is wonderful to see the joy and wisdom the narrators have found in old age.

Issues pertaining to how gender interacts with race are woven throughout the book, as the interviewees share both the happiness they have found in their communities, such as Landa Lakes' excitement at cofounding the first two-spirit Pow Wows, and the pain of enduring racism from both society at large and within the LGBTQ+ community. KB Boyce and Fresh "Lev" White both discuss how stereotypes about Black men have affected their transitions. As White puts it: "Once I was being seen as masculine, I remember having a white trans male friend say to me, 'Isn't the privilege amazing?' My immediate response was, 'If you mean I'm even more likely to get pulled over and shot, I'm not feeling it.'"

My main critique is that the structure of the book makes it challenging to trace each narrator's individual story. At the end there is a section called "About the Narrators"; I would recommend readers start here rather than simply opening the book to the first page. With 20 different speakers and interviews cut together with varying lengths of text only prefaced with the name of the subject, keeping track of who is who takes a lot of flipping back and forth between the biographies and the chapters. In fact, aside from the introduction, de Robertis allows the interviewees' words to stand entirely on their own. In some ways this is a powerful choice, but I feel the stories might have been more effectively communicated through a documentary or audio recording as opposed to text, as these media allow one to more easily identify the speaker. The introduction, by contrast, includes a brief but vivid account of de Robertis' first meeting with Adela Vázquez—I would have appreciated similar descriptions of the other narrators.

Given the current political backlash against gains in LGBTQ+ rights, with trans rights being targeted in particular, this book is timely and essential. It demonstrates that trans and nonbinary people of color have a long history of fighting for the right to exist and live authentically as themselves. Some stories collected here are joyful, some heartbreaking, and everything in between. Shining through all of them is the warmth, resiliency, and hard-earned wisdom of 20 remarkable people. In taking in the words of these elders, readers will gain not only an appreciation for what those before them overcame, but hope for their own futures.

This review first ran in the June 18, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.