Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today is not just a memoir, it’s a glitter grenade hurled into the rigid constructs of gender, faith, family, and identity. It is disarming in its honesty, charming in its wit, and unapologetically strange in all the ways that make it unforgettable. Through the eyes of one of the most iconic gender theorists of our time, this book takes readers on a high-wire act of reinvention: from a devout Scientologist and husband to a gender outlaw who dances between binaries and lives to tell the tale with a wink and a flourish.
Bornstein, born in 1948 into an upper middle-class Conservative Jewish family in New Jersey, doesn’t offer us the familiar transition narrative. There is no clean before-and-after, no comfortable labels to pin down the “true self.” From the outset, A Queer and Pleasant Danger makes clear that Bornstein’s story defies linearity, both structurally and philosophically. The memoir zigzags through time and identity, moving from their early days as Al, the dutiful Jewish boy with Broadway dreams, to their transformation into a high-ranking officer in the Church of Scientology’s Sea Org, where obedience was salvation and doubt was punishable. And yet, doubt persisted. The book chronicles how that same inner questioning that drew Bornstein to Scientology’s promise of clarity eventually became the wedge that cracked it all open.
Bornstein left the Church in 1981, a departure that came with lasting consequences, including losing contact with their daughter due to Scientology’s policy of disconnection. But A Queer and Pleasant Danger doesn’t dwell in bitterness. Instead, it becomes a survival manual wrapped in a kiss, offering readers the lessons of a life lived on the margins. Bornstein’s path didn’t lead directly from manhood to womanhood but spiraled into an identity beyond the binary. “I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man,” they’ve said, and in this memoir, that refusal becomes an act of spiritual resistance and radical self-love.
In a two-part 2017 interview with The Heroines blog, Bornstein reflected on what it meant to write A Queer and Pleasant Danger after decades of performing and theorizing about gender. The conversation adds layers of poignancy and rawness to the memoir, especially when Bornstein discusses their survival instincts and their need to "make life more worth living." They speak of writing as a way to hold space for contradictions. “I’m terrified of people, but I love them,” they say. “That’s my sweet spot.” That paradox runs throughout the book. They are at once a renegade and a reconciler, craving connection while navigating a world that doesn’t always want to connect with someone like them.
And then there’s the writing itself, lilting, conversational, often structured like a confession whispered across a bar table. Bornstein’s theatrical background is evident on every page, as they inject their prose with breathless monologues and fourth-wall-breaking asides. It’s impossible not to hear their voice, mischievous and mischievously wise, guiding the reader through stories that are by turns absurd, erotic, horrifying, and deeply moving.
Gender isn’t the only construct they delight in dismantling; power, religion, marriage, sanity, even memoir itself, all come under the scalpel.
Bornstein underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1986, but A Queer and Pleasant Danger resists the trope of “becoming a woman” as a neat ending. By that point, Bornstein already knew she wasn’t just “a woman,” at least not in the ways society recognized. She settled into the lesbian community in San Francisco, only to find that even there, her refusal to adhere to binary identities made her something of an outsider. So she began performing again, solo shows about Herculine Barbin, gender fluidity, and survival. Performance was the one arena where all the paradoxes could co-exist.
The memoir also touches briefly but powerfully on Bornstein’s mental health. She has written openly about her experiences with anorexia, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder. Later in life, she authored Hello, Cruel World, a lifesaving book aimed at teens, freaks, and other outlaws, filled with 101 alternatives to suicide. “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living,” she writes, “just don’t be mean.” That ethos, of radical compassion and fierce, defiant survival, permeates A Queer and Pleasant Danger. There is no room for shame here, only authenticity and glitter.
Bornstein's later years have not dulled her spark. In 2012, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, which returned a year later, only to go into remission by 2015. She continued working, eventually making her Broadway debut in Straight White Men in 2018 and appearing on the reality show I Am Cait. Through it all, she remained irreverent and deeply introspective.
Speaking in a 2021 podcast, she reflected on aging and gender: “Gender became inconsequential to me while I was in quarantine and grappling with old age... I’m letting go of the ability to be cute, in certain ways. My face is sagging, my boobs are sagging... and you let go of that as being necessary to your gender.” Her words are a gift to those still wrestling with the tyranny of appearances, expectations, and neat definitions.
In the end, A Queer and Pleasant Danger isn’t just the story of a nice Jewish boy or a trans woman or a gender outlaw. It’s the story of becoming, in all its messiness, missteps, revelations, and rebellion. Kate Bornstein gives readers permission to be strange, to question, to survive. This isn’t a book that ends with closure. It ends with a wink, an invitation, and a dare: Be who you are, even if who you are keeps changing.
Available via Amazon
Photo via Heroines of My Life
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