Love the band, love the boy. Great fun reading about both. Highly recommend. Fun, campy, and full of gossip.

Honest and revealing look at what it takes to be successful in the music business. As a gay youth, Jake exposes the struggle to come to terms with one's sexuality early in life during the late 80's-early 90's and the myth of the ease of coming out for this x generation. Enjoyed the honesty of Spears revelations of drugs and sex during this time. Thought it was interesting on how other successful people (a community of talented individuals) assisted and looked out for him.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.

I have to admit that although I had heard of the Scissor Sisters I certainly can't say I'd heard any of their music until I began reading "Boys Keep Swinging." Jake Shears lays bare his youthful angst, the misfit years, family and school life and his path to pop stardom and being taken under the nurturing wing of Sir Elton John.

There are selfish, bratty scenes and yet I commend Shears for often recognizing that had his parents not been able and willing to help and give support when needed he likely would not have been able to position himself to successfully pursue his career in music.

Scissor Sisters videos became my soundtrack for reading "Boys Keep Swinging" while I kept wondering what ignorance or music snobbery prevented my indulgence in this brilliant and energizing dance music while the rest of the world was singing and dancing along!

The book is a ride with your new best friend.

It was interesting to see this through the eyes of Jake Shears. I enjoyed the book. It is definitely not a book I can see everyone in my life enjoying, but the right audience will truly enjoy.

Jake Shears writing is funny and smart. Growing up in the SW USA, it was hard to come out as gay in a community so conservative and religious. He suffered bullying and injustice before making his way to NY where he became an artist. This is an enjoyable bio that sometimes reads like a racy diary, other times like a hard walk down memory lane.

A beautifully written and gripping memoir that held me captive from beginning to end. Very enjoyable and highly recommendable.

I wanted to LOVE this, but for some reason just had a hard time getting through it. I always find reading about other people's lives are so fascinating, but with this I just found it meh. The cover is what originally drew me to this book. It's interesting for sure, just not captivating. The read is just not for me.

I was enjoying this book up until the halfway point. I made the mistake of putting it down for a couple weeks and by the time I was able to come back to it, I only got through a couple pages before realizing I was no longer interested. The way Jake Shears talks about his childhood and upbringing got me hooked, but he lost me soon after coming to NYC. There were far too many off-hand mentions of people and places that he never really gave reason for that it just began to feel like name dropping for the sake of it. I hope others enjoy this more than I did.

To be honest, I ended up skimming most of the book. I've been a huge fan of Scissor Sisters and Jake Shears since my teenage years so I was really looking forward to his memoir but...it was just meh.

I picked up Jake Shears’ memoir Boys Keep Swinging because I was a fan of his glam-rock/disco band the Scissor Sisters, who have been M.I.A. over the past few years. Shears also wrote songs for the “Tales of the City” musical that I loved so much back in 2011; I still nurture a hope that it’ll go on to have a second life someday.

As it turns out, Boys Keep Swinging doesn’t deal at all with the band’s lengthy hiatus, or “Tales of the City”—it stops around the time he’s about to start working on the Scissor Sisters’ second album. So this is really a book about how a kid named Jason Sellards, who grew up feeling like an outcast, became the platinum-selling rock star Jake Shears, and hints at why he had to walk away from it all for a while.

I’ve seen Shears on Dan Savage’s husband Terry Miller’s social media, but until I read Boys Keep Swinging, I had no idea that Shears was a frequent caller to Savage’s radio call-in show when he was a high school student. Savage became something of a mentor to Shears after telling him on air that he should come out as gay to his parents; he took the advice, but it didn’t go very well, unfortunately. Savage even brought young Jason to the funeral of someone who had died of AIDS to demonstrate the importance of staying safe.

Eventually, Shears moved to New York and studied fiction writing at the New School, picking up gigs as a go-go dancer at clubs and writing for the fashionably hip Paper magazine. (He also dated Anderson Cooper back when the future CNN newsman was hosting a TV game show!) In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Shears and his pal Scott Hoffman made their first appearance as the Scissor Sisters—”People were sad,” he writes. “They needed to be entertained.” Performing a goofy song called “Bicycle of the Devil,” while wearing nothing but a kimono plus “a leather G-string, combat boots, and a harness,” a star was born. “When the number ended, people clapped and hooted. I felt like my heart was going to explode out of my body.”

Relentless hard work and self-promotion paid off with a record deal and enormous success in England, where the band’s self-titled debut became the best-selling album of 2004. However, Shears’ self-doubt, personality clashes within the band and the physical and mental grind of constant touring took its toll. Shears was forced to come to terms with the fact that he was suffering from depression. Of course, this is a rock star’s memoir, so that process was a little bit different than it is for the average guy: “It was Elton [John] who finally had the talk with me about going on antidepressants,” he writes, going on to quote Sir Elton: “‘David [Furnish, John’s husband] and I are very worried about you. If you don’t like them, then just get off them. But you have to at least try it.”

Fortunately, Shears today seems like he’s in a pretty good place: he’s starring in Broadway’s “Kinky Boots” and he has a solo album due out later this year (“some of the best music I’ve made,” he notes in the epilogue to his book). Boys Keep Swinging does a great job of capturing the highs and lows of rock stardom, as well as providing a moving coming-of-age story.

“I knew in my heart that we were losing our lives as we knew them, but I also knew that the trade-off was going to be a singular experience that few people get.” – Jake Shears

Before there was Jake Shears and Scissor Sisters and kikis to be having, there was Jason Sellards, a self-professed born showman who, even as a kid, knew he was destined for greater things. Boys Keep Swinging is his story, and it’s a brilliant one that begins with his childhood in Mesa, Arizona, and eventually leads us to New York City—“the place that people went and fucking did something.” This is a story of drive, determination, and summoning the courage to live out loud.

Shears may be a born showman, but he’s nothing if not a natural born storyteller who picks at the threads of memory and weaves them into a compelling novel. With a voice that is by turns engaging and amiable, introspective and moving, passionate and unfailingly honest—even when he doesn’t come off well for it—he lays bare his journey from a precocious boy who always knew he was different, to a teenager coming to terms with his sexuality, and on into adulthood where he embraced his self-expression through writing, performing, go-go dancing, and, eventually, through music.

Action is the difference between those who dream of making art and those who then go on to make it. Shears was a one-man sexual revolution, dreaming big and tripping on the rush of conjuring his muse and realizing those dreams. He didn’t wait for opportunity to knock. He seized opportunity by the balls and made things happen, dancing on bartops to make some extra cash and struggling to fucking do something—to leave his mark on the world while grappling with an almost crippling self-loathing. Shears plucks up the names of people who were significant to his evolution and rise, and shares them with his readers, and, of course, as Scissor Sisters evolved from a concept to a major influencer on the indie rock scene, the list of celebrities he encountered along the way becomes all the more impressive. Yes, there’s some name dropping, but why wouldn’t there be? Shears worked hard, paid his dues and earned the right to brag about it a little—when Bono comes down from the mountain with advice for you, you listen and then pass it on. And as Scissor Sisters’ international star rose and peaked, we play witness in an intimate way to the rigorous schedule of touring and the steep emotional and physical toll it exacted on not only Shears but the band as a whole.

Raw and often poignant, Shears is unflinching as he recounts his struggles with loneliness in spite of a life full of people, with the weight of depression after realizing that he’d accomplished everything he’d set out to do, and with no greater mountain to conquer, that coming off the high of the success he’d yearned for and achieved was more a hurtling plummet back to reality than a gentle fall. As he grieves the loss of freedom, the loss of friends, Shears is also overcome by the realization that the city that never sleeps didn’t enter a stasis, time didn’t freeze while he was gone, and we witness the contrast between Jason Sellards and Jake Shears and the difficulty of his coexisting with feet in two different worlds.

Earnest and at times impish, Shears is an engaging narrator whose courage to pursue his passions led him to love and heartbreak. He shares the good, the bad, the ugly with us, and did something so many of us fail to do—he didn’t quit. You can’t spell success without suck, you’ve got to push through the difficult stuff, and Shears did that, which is what made this memoir possible. Shears lived fierce and hungry in his first thirty-nine years, became a star in his own right for it, and is once again inspired, has begun a new chapter in his life and is making more dreams come true. I’m now waiting for the next iteration of Jake Shears to appear in narrative form.

When a book has already been blurbed by the likes of Armistead Maupin and Sir Elton John and reviewed by Lambda Literary, there isn’t much that my two cents is going to add to the buzz. All I can say is that I was a little sad when I reached the end of this one. Shears leaves us on a note of melancholy and hope. Here’s to the next leg of his journey. May it be as passionate and fulfilling as the first.

I am not a fan of reviewing memoirs, biographies or autobiographies. I like to read them but ask me to review them, no thank you. So, how did I end up with Boys Keep Swinging? A mistake. I didn’t read the blurb before I decided to push the Read Now button on NetGalley. I was multitasking, which is pretty common. Plus, I loved the cover. Anyways, I will do my best not to bore you guys with this review.

Boys Keep Swinging is about Jake Shears. From his childhood on an island to finding fame with The Scissor Sisters, you can’t help but be drawn into the book. I was captivated from the first chapter and couldn’t put the book down. There were parts where I was giggling and other parts had me in tears.

Jake’s sense of humor came through strongly in this book. The humor in this book is a dry sort of humor, which I like. The snark is strong with this book and I loved it!!

I am going to admit, I have never heard of The Scissor Sisters before this book. But, they have made a new convert. Researching videos for this blog post, I came across the above YouTube video. Loved it. My 4-year-old daughter also loved it. She danced her little butt off for the entire hour and 8 minutes that the video played. She also has demanded that the “Skisser Sisters” be played on our Alexa/Echo. Nonstop….lol.

There are serious moments in the book. It wasn’t all humor. One of the sadder scenes was Jake coming out to his parents. I wanted to reach through the book and hug him. I am roughly the same age as Jake and sadly the attitude that his parents were the norm. I had a friend who crossdressed. He didn’t fully start doing it until I was a senior in high school, so 94-95. The day he wore a skirt to school, he was sent home. He showed up the next day in a dress and got beat up after school. He was supposed to go with us in our limo for prom as my friend’s “date“. I was pulled aside by the captain of the football team the day before and was threatened. “So and so better not show up. You, him and your friends will regret it“. I did stand up for him and told the captain to take his ego and shove it up his butt, but still. My friend didn’t go to the prom. He didn’t want anything to happen to us. I never saw him after high school and I often wonder what has happened to him :(.

I have read earlier reviews that have complained about the name dropping in the book. Honestly, it didn’t bother me. He was an up and coming musician that happened to befriend some famous people <shrug>. Didn’t affect my view of the book or the content that was written. Those people happened into his life and he chose to write about them. Hell, if I was friends with Elton John, I would be name dropping too…lol.

The end of the book was a bit melancholy. I can’t describe why but I did get a little sad reading it.

I am giving Boys Keep Swinging an Adult rating. I would recommend this book to anyone over the age of 21. There is sex (lots and lots of sex), language, some mild violence, and drug use. The drug use might trigger some people. Saying that I would recommend this book to family and friends but with a warning. I would read this again.

I would like to thank Atria Books for allowing me to read and review Boys Keep Swinging.

All opinions stated in this review of Boys Keep Swinging are mine.

**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**

I've read a ton of music memoirs. From The Dirt to Neon Angel, from Just Kids to Scar Tissue....they remain some of my favorite books to read. It's a look at the creative influence and process behind people who have put their soul on the line.

Jake Shears is, above all things, a talented wordsmith. It's not wonder that he studied creative writing. Starting with his life in Arizona, to his youth in Portland, we follow young Jason as he struggles with his sexuality, his family life and his own self worth. The New York years are full of drugs, men and dingy apartments, but in the end....Jason becomes Jake and ends up living the dreams that he had as a child, hanging off the footboard of his bed.

Another review complained about the name dropping....but really, what's the point of reading a celebrity memoir if not for the celebrity stories?

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a rarity: a celebrity memoir with a distinct, necessary voice. Jake Shears is frank and open about all aspects of his sexuality, and he celebrates it. You'd be hard-pressed to find many mainstream memoirs by popular musicians, let alone gay ones, that are as honest as this.

Thank you for the chance in reviewing this title! Full review to come!

Good book but it felt a little boring. He skins over everything so quickly that it almost like your reading a summary of his life and not an autobiography. It was an interesting life and I would like to read more like how he got involved with kinky Boots and what life is like after Scissor Sisters

Boy, was this book an adventure! It was funny and meaningful. I loved the glimpse of what life was like for Jake in New York in the 90's. Parts 1 and 2 covered childhood,high school, and college. Once the book transitioned to the Scissor Sisters, I felt there was a lot more name dropping than was quite needed. Aside from that I love this book.

(2) I asked for this upload thinking I was getting into another musical memoir. I ended up with the gay man's guide to the universe. Lots of sex, lots of realationship descriptions and a window to a lifestyle that I am not familiar with (I am not sure many are familiar with the wildness of this one) and strains the edges of civility on many occasions. We finally get to music about 2/3 of the way through, but it is mostly about some of the creative process, a little recording stuff and lots of concert reports. Shears made lots of big name friends, and it appears he was especially close with Elton John. This book is not for the conservative or prissy sort. Interesting at times, it is written in a comfortable style.

Wow. I don't usually gravitate to music autobiographies, but this one caught my eye with a fun title, bright cover, and an author whose music was the soundtrack to a very specific time in my life. Jake Shears knows how to tell a story, and he skillfully weaves together both the fantastic and the mundane events and experiences that lead up to the Scissor Sisters. The book can sometimes feel like a series of events rather than one narrative, but as a whole the book works. As a reader, I laughed, cried, and felt a connection with a man whose life is both amazing and the story of love, heartache, failure, and success that we all have to some degree (although, my successes have, sadly, never included Elton John). And as a fan, after over a decade of not thinking about his music, I had a great time listening, dancing, and reminiscing.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Jake Shears, aka Jason Sellards, is a founding member of Scissor Sisters and while I'm not a huge fan of the band, I do like some of their music, in particular, I Can't Decide (the third track on their second album, Ta-Dah), which I think is brilliant, and deliciously bitchy. I'm rather interested in how people go from an everyday life to a stage performer in a band, so I was initially interested to read this, but I found it to be a real disappointment. I read it to fifty percent, and then skimmed to about 70% and gave up on it after that.

The band part of this memoir doesn't appear until the halfway mark and it's very thin. That part of the story doesn't truly get underway until about 70% and even then it's not as interesting as I'd hoped. The first half is taken up with the author's childhood and his college days. This part was slightly depressing. He went through a lot and had a lot to put up with, but that said, there really was nothing here that scores of other men and women haven't had to face, particularly if they're in the LGBTQIA community, so this didn't bring anything new to the table.

What bothered me about this, apart from the author never really seeming to want for money!) was that he appeared to have learned nothing from these events, or if he did, he sure wasn't interested in sharing his insights and thoughts on the topic. This was one problem with the book - it read less like a diary even, than it did a daily planner, with a litany of events and people trotted out, yet none of it had any depth, resonance, introspection or observation.

I never felt like I really got to know the author. We were kept largely at arm's length (as indeed was his "best friend" Mary, it would seem), and learned of him only through what he obsessed on or what seemed important as measured by how much space and repetition he gave to it. Judged by that latter criterion, casual sex and partying are his greatest loves. This second-hand perspective delivered an impression of shallowness and inconstancy, as though we were reading about the natural history of a gadfly rather than a person's life. As the New York City portion of the story ever unfurled, things only deteriorated. It felt like the story became even more shallow.

He was there to pursue a degree, but even when he got it, he did nothing with it. Admittedly the job market wasn't great, but what was the point fo the college education? From what we're told here, he was far more interested in dressing up, dancing, partying, and picking up guys than ever he was in a career.

His musical forays happened pretty much by accident and in a very desultory way to begin with, like he couldn't be bothered unless it fell into his lap, as it actually did in effect - at least that's the impression he left. I know the author has no control over the blurb their book gets, but this blurb mentions "...a confusing and confining time in high school as his classmates bullied him and teachers showed little sympathy." That kind of thing is entirely inappropriate and all-too-common, but what the blurb doesn't mention is what the author tells us, about how he liked to dress out even though he hadn't yet come out. This must have attracted entirely the wrong kind of attention.

And if you think a person ought to be able to dress how they wish, then I completely agree with you, but we don't live in a perfect world. In the world we do inhabit, one populated with ignorant jackasses and moronic dicks, this freedom brings a price and that price is exactly what the author suffered: bullying and little sympathy. A bit more attention to the wisdom of certain modes of dress and certain behaviors might have saved him a lot of this hassle. But the real problem here is that he doesn't talk about this in any detail, or offer any thoughts or insights here any more than he does on any other such topic. Maybe how he behaved and dressed would have made no difference, but we'll never know because it's one more important discussion we don't get from the author; one more cogent observation we're denied.

The casual sex was rife and disturbing. At first we're told it was oral only, which isn't exactly safe sex, but then we're not told anything about it other than it happens - frequently, and with a variety of one night stands and some dating in between. There is nary a mention of safe sex even though AIDS is mentioned. Even here though, the topic is dealt with so cursorily that it was like the ongoing AIDs problem never really happened or if it did, it impinged very little on his life or on the life of anyone he knew. I didn't expect the author to keep harping on it (or on any other topics for that matter), but I did expect to feel something of the impact of it and how it was dealt with, and how he felt about it all, but again we;re denied that.

There's really no mention of disease concerns or risks from casual sex, and there ought to have been, even if the author never had any such problems himself. As it is, it looks like not only the author, but no one he knew ever had any issues. Maybe that was the case, but it's hard to believe. As it is, the author plays right into homophobic stereotypes of the gay community and that's never a good course to follow, especially from the pen of someone who liked to plow his own furrow, so to speak.

One issue with memoirs for me is: how can someone recall events and conversations with such clarity from years before? I know some people can, and I know some people conflate several events into one for the sake of brevity and moving the story along, and this is fine, but nowhere are we told whether these particular recollections are amalgamations, or if they happened word for word (or close enough), or if they're simply impressions with some dramatic license taken. It would have been nice had a word been said about that. There are some events which feel like they would leave an indelible impression such that recall, even if a bit vague, would be authentic, but most of what we're told here wasn't of that nature, so I have to wonder how reliable some of this is, and I guess I found out. More on this later.

Starting with New York, the name-dropping became so rife in this book that the din from it was a distraction from the actual story, and it seems to serve little purpose except for the author to say, "Hey, look at all these people I know!" It felt so pretentious, and there were so many repeated mentions of going to parties and spending the night with guys he just met that the whole thing quickly began to feel sickeningly self-indulgent, shallow, thoughtless, tedious, and even dangerous.

This shallowness really came to the fore when the events of 9/11 were related. He was in New York City when the planes hit the towers, but none of that seemed to make any impact on him, because all we got was a brief paragraph sandwiched in between a night he spent with three other guys and a complaint that because of the fall of the towers, it was hard to party in the city and parties had to move out to the suburbs! The author didn't specifically say that himself; someone else did, but his lack of any sort of commentary on that attitude appalled me.

The shallowness he displayed over this entire thing was sickening. He was living within a few blocks of the event and saw part of it happen from the roof of his apartment block, and this one short paragraph and a couple of mentions later was it. I didn't expect him to agonize over it and put ashes in his hair and rend his clothes or anything like that, but his mention of it was so fleeting and cursory that it seemed like it was just another party in a long line of parties he attended - or perhaps more accurately another hangover after one such party. It's almost like he said, "Oh well, that's that, let's get dressed for the next fancy dress party!" This really turned me off the author. Another such incident was the New York blackout. That turned out to be just another opportunity to party, pick up a guy he didn't even really like for a one-night-stand, and that was it. Even then we got more about that than we did about 9/11!

I was ready to quit reading this memoir at the halfway point, but I still had read nothing about the band as such, so I pressed on. It was right around this point that it looked like the forming of the band was about to get going, but even then the story about it was awfully thin and sketchy, lacking any depth or insights, and it was still riven with never-ending tales of casual sex and partying. The monotony of it all made me uncomfortably numb, and I started skipping everything that didn't touch directly on the band from then onward. It was this that I was interested in, and I honestly felt cheated out of it by this point.

In the end I simply gave up on it. I honestly did not care about this shallow life I was seeing stretch-out meaninglessly across screen after screen. I cared about the music and the band and the dynamic and the energy, and we got so little of that, and almost nothing about the other band members. In the end it was a Scissor Sister, in the singular, and it was disappointing because it seemed to suggest that the very thing he had been heading towards since page one meant so little to the author that he could barely bring himself to write about it.

It was around this time that I read, "I hadn't had a boyfriend since Dominick" and this was just a screen or two after he'd told us he was dating a guy named Mark. Was Mark a girlfriend then, or is dating someone not the same as having a boyfriend?! What this confirmed for me was how unreliable this book was: something I touched on earlier in this review. One of the many names dropped in the book was Amanda Lepore, and I read her memoir some time ago and found it to be just as shallow as this one was. I'm now really soured on celebrity memoirs! Maybe if Ana Matronic wrote one I might be tempted to read it, but other than that, I'm done with this kind of thing. I wish the Scissor Sisters all the best in their career, but I cannot in good faith recommend a book like this.