It's #PrideMonth! #Pride
To celebrate June, I'm going to recommend 1 #queer book every day, one that I liked and would love to have more appreciation for out there in the world!
REFUSING COMPULSORY SEXUALITY: A BLACK ASEXUAL LENS ON OUR SEX-OBSESSED CULTURE by Sherronda J. Brown
Thorough, insightful, and honestly life-changing. This book comes from a #queer, #asexual perspective with clear analyses of what we consider "normal" amounts of sex and formulations of romance, and why, and how that's enforced by straight culture.
Hugo Award winner in 1967 and deserved it. Enthusiastic, energetic, and joyfully imaginative, it takes #linguistics ideas Delany clearly thoight were So Cool and absolutely runs with them.
Captain Rydra Wong is #bisexual, #polyamorous, Asian, autistic, and the greatest and most famous linguist, poet, and codebreaker in the galaxy. And she’s great I love her.
(also all starship pilots are 10-foot-tall furries)
I tend to be lukewarm on YA books, so I can say with my whole heart this one was really good when I say I really liked Elatsoe.
Ellie is a teen girl in a magical-modern world, our-world-but-different; she can call ghosts, her best friend is descended from fae... and her cousin's ghost urges her to solve his murder. An #asexual MC with strong friendships and a Lipan Apache worldview and approach to magic.
I've been thinking about how to organize this #QueerBooks list - there are so many to choose from, I can't highlight them all, and just throwing a new rec out each day as I think of them? They would get kinda jumbled up!
So I decided to do a different theme each week, starting today! Sunday-Saturday, this means:
Week 1, June 4-10: SCIENCE FICTION
Week 2, June 11-17: SHORT STORY AND POETRY COLLECTIONS
Week 3, June 18-24: HISTORY AND NONFICTION
Week 4, June 25-30: MY PERSONAL ALL-TIME FAVORITES
Day 4: TROUBLE AND HER FRIENDS by Melissa Scott @blueterraplane
Classic 90s #cyberpunk! Like a western set in the glittering VR shadow-nets of the environmentally-ravaged high-tech future, pitting dubiously legal hackers against corporate powers and reactionary laws, starring #lesbian hackers reconnecting after an awkward breakup. Beautiful, stylish, artistic-neon-bright cyberspace with a real (& relatable) emotional core.
This book was breathtaking. Blew me away. Space empire, brain-ghosts, and ancient massacres about to be repeated. The worldbuilding is so cool, and so fascinatingly done, and Yoon Ha Lee is so, SO good at writing minor characters and giving just enough information about them that you care, you're gutted, when they die in the brutal space wars.
Also, the main character has a lightsaber. I love Kel Cheris.
Nuns! In space!
Elegant, thoughtful, and bittersweet novella about an order of Catholic nuns in a living spaceship and the moral dilemma they face from their orders from Earth.
Got both a lesbian nun leaving the order to be with another woman, with support from her sisters, and an aroace atheist nun who advocates killing a priest. This book's got it all.
Like a sci-fi B-movie in book form. Deliciously dramatic, often cheesy, and I had a blast reading it.
A 153-year-old #lesbian scientist insists that the sun is dying, and the solution is to launch a nuke into the sun to start it up again, and she wonders why no one believes her (and her three proteges are too busy having a love triangle to pay much attention). The only F/F/F love triangle I've ever read.
@ClH2OArs actually posted this one yesterday, haha - but I enjoyed it and wanted to highlight it! Zany, quirky, humorous but biting at points, about shapeshifters... accidentally clashing with an alien invasion. The most realistic depiction of having to give The #Aroace 101 Talk (The MC to their new roommates like, [sigh] "I'm #asexual and #aromantic. That means...") subverted in the best way, haha.
Ohhhh I loved this book. Listened to it as an audiobook and there was something delightful about being able to hear everything and see none of it, the way the main character does.
Sci-fi cave horror, about one woman descending deep into an alien cave in the dark, connected to the outside world only through radio contact with her handler... who is not telling her the whole truth.
Captures the angst of being a depressed queer millennial working a stupid minimum wage job and yearning for something more meaningful in life Really Well. This is just, in an IKEA that has a tendency to rip holes into other universes and accidentally bring furniture to life. The usual. Lots of fun, love them. Each stand-alone companion novellas.
Week 2 of #QueerBooks - short stories and poetry anthologies!
Short stories are a perennial place for authors to explore new, groundbreaking, genre-twisting, or funky ideas, or to cut straight to the heart of a feeling. Poetry is all about cutting straight to the heart of a feeling. These collections of short works use the format to bring queer feelings and queer sensibilities to their writing in interesting ways.
Day 11: EVERYONE ON THE MOON IS ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL by Julian K. Jarboe
This collection made me go !!! WHOA. WHOA!!! This!!! I've never read anything like it and it made me want to WRITE again. Creative in a way that confuses you, grips you, awes you, shames you, makes no apologies for itself. Some fantasy, some sci-fi, some surreal, all with themes about being trans and autistic and Catholic and out of sync in a world that doesn't make room.
Day 12: PORTLAND DIARY: SHORT STORIES 2016/2017 by Jamie Berrout
7 rare, unpolished gems of short stories - some sci-fi, some fantastical, some bitterly realistic - about #trans women facing impossible choices, where any choices are difficult ones and sometimes you don't really have any choice at all.
Jamie Berrout has gone off the grid & scrubbed her internet presence, but these stories still really deserve to be read.
Day 13: LOVE AND COMETS AND OTHER STORIES and HOMEWARD BOUND AND OTHER STORIES by Gillian Ybabez
Collections of #SelfPub#IndieAuthor flash fiction, ranging from sci-fi to fantasy to surreal to memoir vignettes, all creative and quirky and full of interesting ideas captured in a single moment. "Love and Comets" is more complete, but "Homeward Bound" is my favorite collection.
A collection of three novelettes, #aromantic Chinese fairy tales, set in loosely the same fairytale world and centering the development of platonic and #queerplatonic relationships with the same love and portent that fairytales traditionally give falling in love. Dragons and phoenixes, foxes and celestial maidens, a magic peach grove... "East Flows the River" was my favorite.
Day 15: TWO-SPIRITS BELONG HERE: An Anthology of Works by Two-Spirit #Transgender, #Intersex, & Gender Non-Conforming Native American Artists, edited by Xemiyulu Manibusan Tapepechul
Stories, essays, poems, visual art, one-act plays, a little bit of everything. A lot of them are about diverse & deeply personal experiences of what it's like to be 2-spirit in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico, with recurring themes of love, abuse, and resistance.
In high school we were assigned a project, to choose a contemporary, living poet, talk about them, and analyze some of their poetry. I chose Kay Ryan because her poetry resonated with me, and only later found out why that might have been, hah.
Her poetry is usually very short, tight, elegant, deceptively simple, plain but in a strange & fascinating way, often full of wonder and quiet bitterness at once.
This is emblematic of Kay Ryan's #poetry, and has stuck with me for a decade:
THE NIAGARA RIVER
As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.
Day 17: NATURE HELD ME CLOSE: A Zine About Gender Dysphoria and the Great Outdoors
There are THREE volumes of this now! Collections of personal essays, poetry, and artwork about being #trans, #queer, #NonBinary, #GenderNonConforming, #butch, or otherwise gender-complicated, and the ways that nature trips, nature studies, and being outdoors helped people connect with or otherwise re-assess their relationship with their bodies & identities.
Fiction is fun. It can be deeply moving, it can examine cool new speculative ideas and what-ifs, it can tell stories. But reading the stories of real queer life and history has a distinct power that fiction can’t: knowing the often difficult, often complicated and contradictory, real lives and experiences and theory of other queer people like us.
These are some books I’ve liked of queer history and other non-fiction through a lens of queerness.
IF NOT, WINTER: Fragments of Sappho
Translated by Anne Carson
A book compiling all of the surviving writing of the famed ancient poet #Sappho of Lesbos. With translation and history notes. (I wish there had been even more translation and history notes, honestly. Every fragment was interesting.) When I picked up the book, I thought, there’s no way these are as gay as people say. I was surprised to discover they really are.
Day 19: WAKE: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF WOMEN-LED SLAVE REVOLTS
Written by Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martínez
A graphic-novel adaptation of Hall's PhD thesis on women's participation in slave revolts and rebellions, depicting both the history and her personal process of researching, uncovering, and reconstructing it. Linking the past and the present. Hall is a lesbian and takes a queer-inflected approach to the place of gender in slavery.
Day 20: MY LESBIAN EXPERIENCE WITH LONELINESS by Nagata Kabi, translated by Jocelyne Allen
A powerful manga memoir about Nagata coming to terms with her sexuality as a lesbian in Japan. This was really transformative for me when I read it in college - the exploration & personal experience with sexuality, and even more than hat, the exploration & personal experience with depression and alienation in society.
Day 21: ANCIENTS IN ACTION: SAPPHO by Marguerite Johnson
More Sappho! I have a theme I like, what can I say.
This is a perfect companion to "If Not, Winter": a clearly-written, even-handed, respectably nuanced account of Sappho's life, context, and writing, including desire & eroticism. Johnson explains what we know, what we don't know, what her contemporaries said, and what other biographers & writers said in the centuries and millennia after.
Day 22: FROM FEMALE TO MALE: The Life of Jack Bee Garland, by Lou Sullivan
I picked this one up for Pride Month and I'm still reading it. It's an archival biography project about gender rebel and trans man Babe Bean / Jack Bee Garland, newspaper reporter and sailor in the Spanish-American War. Drawing from contemporary newspaper reports mostly, in can be a dry read, but the subject is fascinating. Free download too!
Okay I’ve been doing a lot of packing and planning and travelling this weekend. Jumping ahead because I lost the plot a little and shuffled some entires and am tired and wanna get back on track.
Some books are just. They’re Favorites. The books where I felt seen, or felt emotionally compelled, or books that imagined a different world that lit up my imagination too. Beautiful, lyrical, brilliantly imaginative, and/or giving me characters I want to return to again and again. And making space for queerness, or investigating and thinking about how worlds and genders and relationships could be different. (They’re mostly sci-fi again)
💜💜💜 I love them. I love to go back and reread. Quick to read (hard to make myself STOP reading, I have stayed up way too late on multiple occasions going “just one more chapter…”)
The queerness is expansive in this spacefuture. There’s difference in what is considered the/a norm—and Murderbot’s aversion to romance & sex at all is portrayed as completely real and accepted by its friends.
@moonspider@marthawells queer and poly folk abound in the world of Murderbot, and it’s never (okay, once) a point of confusion for any characters. This dystopian world where people are built to be slaves and implanted with control devices has better gender equality than our own. And a communist world where everything is just great, except for when the capitalists come to try and scare things up.
I love Murderbot (no grabby-hands).
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