You Probably Want to Read Some Lesbian Pulp Fiction

The best part of reading lesbian pulp fiction is the tone, and the worst part is that everyone turns out straight, because the publishers had to get the books past censors somehow and the best way to do that was to portray the girls who went gay as either a. going back to boys in the end, b. drowning in their own misery or c. actually drowning or dying in some other way that was supposed to be cleansing/cathartic for everyone else in the cast, but especially the dudes and straight ladies who might have felt threatened by the bout of alternative lifestyle going around.

Titles not on this list include Her Raging Needs, Mama Dyke, Governed by Lust, Madame Butch, Another Kind of Love, In the Shadows, These Curious Pleasures, The Third Street, Her Lesbian Half, 21 Gay Street, Maid Service, Babes Behind Bars, Suburban Sexpots, Bisexual Beds, Midnight Orgy, Return to Lesbos, and The Beds of Lesbos. And those are just the ones I could find in five minutes on the Internet.

Women’s Barracks, by Tereska Torres (1950)

Women’s Barracks was published in 1950 and was the very first pulp with lesbians. It was also a fictionalized version of Torres’ own military history in WWII and was marketed as “the frank autobiography of a French girl soldier.” Also: the original cover featured partially naked girls in bustiers.

As a novel, completely separate from any of its historical or lesbian-pulp-fictional significance, Women’s Barracks falls on the rougher end of the five star spectrum. The first person narration is a little too Carrie Bradshaw voiceoveresque, and there is very little actual action, either of the plot-moving kind or the in-your-pants kind. But it was still one of the very first lesbian pulps, and what it says about the genre is far more interesting than what it says about military non-scandal.

Spring Fire, by Vin Packer (1953)

Spring Fire is widely recognized as the first real lesbian pulp fiction book, which basically just means it’s smuttier than Women’s Barracks (and also: was the first original paperback with all-lesbian content). It was only re-released in 2004 because the author (whose real name is Marijane Meaker) didn’t like the very tragic ending she was forced to give it — because the book had to be sent in the mail, positive portrayals of gay lifestyles would mean it wouldn’t pass the censors — and withheld the rights for years.

The story is based on Meaker’s actual experience. Mitch, whose main personality trait is “awkward,” is in her first year of college and meets Leda, a girl in her sorority who she becomes roommates with. They have an affair, and it does not end well.

Odd Girl Out, by Ann Bannon (1957)

Laura is just starting university when she meets Beth, who is outgoing, attractive, and in a sorority, which she convinces Laura to join. Here’s a hint about how this will end: Bannon was heavily influenced by Meaker, who she wrote to when she was trying to get published. And altering content so it could get through the post was very much still a thing.

The predecessor to I Am a Woman (and several of Bannon’s other novels), this novel introduces Laura and chronicles the love affair that drives her from college. Beth takes sorority sister Laura as her roommate-and more-then betrays Laura with a man. Laura ultimately thanks Beth for showing her “who she really is.”

Three Women, by March Hastings (1958)

Paula is beautiful but broke, and is planning to marry Phil, who is both wealthy and an excuse for her to escape her alcoholic father. Phil, who has had some thoughts in an entrepreneurial direction, goes to visit his aunt Byrne, who is incidentally a smokin’ hot ‘spinster,’ in the hopes that she will spot him a downpayment. Of course he brings Paula along. After Paula meets Bryne, who is stunning, silk-shirt-wearing, and oozing charm like it’s her job, she starts to stalk her and eventually they fall in love. Of course, Bryne has a dark secret from her past that threatens to destroy everything, which is pretty standard, as these books go.

There are actually two versions of Three Women: the original from 1958, and a slightly different one from the late 80s, in which Hastings rewrote part of the ending so it was less depressing.

Girls in 3-B, by Valerie Taylor (1959)

The Girls in 3-B is especially fun because rather than starting off with emotions and insecurities, it skips right to the deep personal struggles and drug hallucinations.

After graduating high school, Pat, Annice, and Barby move to Chicago, move in to an apartment (and, if the cover is any indication, spend a lot of the time in said apartment undressing in front of each other), and deal with narratives of sexism in the workplace, the emphasis on masculinity in alternative culture, and being a lesbian. Analysis of culture: this book has it. There are affairs, there is work place drama, at least one person gets knocked up. The only thing you’d need to turn this book into Mad Men is a few more shots of whisky and a reference to Lucky Strike. While there is less focus on the lesbian story line than elsewhere, the emphasis on watching characters subvert gender norms regardless of how they do it is what makes this book so great. Best of all, the lesbian story line is far less depressing than in, for instance, Spring Fire (though also, most lesbian story lines are less depressing than they are in Spring Fire).

Another Kind of Love, by Paula Christian (1961)

In Another Kind of Love, magazine writer Laura Garraway falls in love with the young starlet Ginny Adams. They kiss and it is magical and stays that way until Laura realizes Ginny will never leave her lover, Saundra, because Saundra can help her be more famous and Laura can’t. Heartbroken, Laura moves to New York, discovers the Village, and, in a pretty surprising twist, gets a happy ending.

Happy endings basically never happen in these books, so this is pretty awesome/uplifting.

… Comparatively.

Lesbo Lodge, by Harry Barstead (1963)

Lesbo Lodge, which is a title that I am not making up, is even worse than a lot of other lesbian pulp because it is, if possible, even trasher. The front cover reads, “A gripping story that sheds brutal light on the passions of unnatural love.” The back cover reads:

It was night…
They were alone…
She found herself beckoning urging her to calm the angry fires of her tortured soul.

Something happened to women when they came to love camp, the secluded summer resort with a sordid reputation.

The rest of it involves the idea that lesbians just need to have affairs with men, because it was the early 60s, which means this book is still pretty depressing. But also: hilarious.

Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher, by Monica Nolan (2010)

“This past summer it seemed like wedding invitations or engagement announcements arrived almost weekly from the girls Bobby had gotten especially friendly with at Elliott College. Sometimes she got a panicky feeling that the supply of young, nubile girls, which had seemed inexhaustible during her college days when a fresh batch arrived every fall, was inexplicably drying up.”

Published last year, Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher has all of the drama and most of the charm of the original pulps, with a lot more puns about which team everyone’s playing for.

After an injury forces her to leave the pro-field hockey world, Bobby gets at job at a girls’ boarding school and enters a world of drama, angst, and more love triangles than season two of The L Word. Plus, who doesn’t want to read about posture, married art mistresses, math teachers with natural eyes for figures, widowed housekeepers, murder investigations, or promising athletes interspersed with make out scenes and more campy references to the books above than I can reasonably reference? (Answer: no one). That said, satire works best when you know what it’s making fun of, so Bobby Blanchard probably shouldn’t be first on your list (Nolan has written two other books in this series and has at least one more coming, so it shouldn’t be last either).

On What We Owe Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg will always be icons to young literary hopefuls — for the queer ones, Allen Ginsberg especially. In fact, you might go so far as to say we’re indebted to him. In the newest issue of Longshot Magazine (which is submitted to, compiled, edited, and published all within the space of 48 hours), Steve Silberman discusses exactly how indebted, and why — as one of Ginsbergs’ “apprentices” back at age 19, he’s in a unique position to know.

Ginsberg was 29 when he first performed the poem Howl in San Francisco. When Silberman met him, Ginsberg was 51, and no longer the emblem of iconoclastic youth that he and the rest of the Beat generation had been:

At age 51, he was bald and professorial, sporting rumpled suits and ties from the Salvation Army, because his Buddhist teacher—a Tibetan reincarnate lama named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—told him to clean up his act. One side of his face was slackened by Bell’s palsy; Ginsberg’s right eye stared out through nearly immobile lids, and the right side of his distinctively fleshy lips twisted his wry smile into a grimace.

The differences between young, idealistic and controversial poet Allen Ginsberg and his middle-aged self weren’t just physical. Although a seriously practicing Buddhist, Ginsberg acknowledged by the end of his life that he hadn’t reached the level of enlightenment or been able to bring about the kind of global-scale peace that he had once imagined for himself; where he once wrote about rocking back and forth on late-night subway trains in a benzedrine haze, he now faithfully attended Al-Anon meetings to deal with his partner Peter Orlovsky’s chemical dependencies.

Most seriously of all, his art had changed — those who had originally fallen in love with the unhinged and uncensored nature of poems like Howl, which seemed to be inspired almost by a religious ecstasy, now found him writing much more traditional verse. It was measured and sober, and instead of a drugged-out hipster’s playground it focused on the small victories and defeats of everyday life — but mostly the defeats.

Ginsberg’s last books—all the veils trembling, doves descending of his early work gone—are populated by ordinary people with ordinary (not “cosmic”) problems: the former “hippie flower girl” who drank too much and smashed her jaw in the stairway of Ginsberg’s tenement on Avenue A, the composer a few doors down dying of AIDS, the poet himself dealing with aching bones, a landlord keen to evict him and piles of unread mail, and his elderly relatives, “door after door of Aunts and Uncles retired alive/ white haired, television bound seeing the doctor, eating/ delicatessen salad Sundays, reading best seller/ books, dusting furniture, cleaning kitchen floors, happily/ visiting Doctors for minor blood pressure, depression/ or hernias…”

Longshot Magazine’s whirlwind 48-hour process begins with the announcement of a theme, and this issue’s theme was debt. What did the author feel he owed to Ginsberg? Maybe surprisingly or maybe not, he locates his gratitude towards him not necessarily in his years as a pioneer of a new kind of poetry and a new standard of what art could be, but in his later years, his time of admitting his multitude of small personal failures.

It’s a dangerous thing for us whenever a hero — an artist, a writer, a celebrity, a teacher, a friend — chooses to step off the pedestal we’ve put them on (or worse, is pushed off it). By definition, the process of idolizing demands an idol, not a person. But Silberman’s essay is a way of looking at what we owe to those people who push us to see them as people, who refuse to let us celebrate their successes while pretending their failures don’t exist. If he had remained committed to a (relatively) fearless and cocky young Ginsberg who thought that heartfelt poetry could save the world, Silberman says he would have found himself completely devastated by the catastrophes later in his own life that are the direct result of a decidedly un-saved world. Without the lessons of an older,  humbler, wiser Ginsberg, he says, “I would have thought I was entitled to a more excellent universe than the one we find ourselves in.”

Ginsberg isn’t the only beloved artist whose life has been less perfect than his art says he wanted it to be. Because of course that’s true for everyone. We read poetry, or novels, or watch movies, or go to see art as a way to respond to our own flaws and inconsistencies and tiny failures and betrayals of the self, but it can be tempting to pretend that the people whose work we consume have none of them – or if they do, they are huge and sweeping and grand, they are art in and of themselves. Allen Ginsbergs’ father was buried “in the shadow of a huge Anheuser-Busch plant near Newark Airport.” The real tragedies of life are the opposite of grand. But when we’re able to see this and want to keep looking, keep watching, keep reading even after the fact, then we are able to appreciate something maybe more important even than Howl (which really is saying a lot). We are not entitled to an excellent universe; we do not live in one. But there are excellent people in it, and the point here, of Silberman’s, of Ginsberg’s, of poetry’s, is that even when it is not good or great it can be beautiful.

Writing and Eating and Drinking

Riese’s Team Pick:

Artist Wendy MacNaughton has a delightful cartoon situation illustrating what some of the world’s greatest writers liked to eat while they write. Lord Byron apparently drank vinegar (as an appetite suppressant) and Joyce Maynard should be my roommate because the lime popsicles are always my least favorite part of the Edy’s Fruit Bar Variety Packs and that’s what she eats when she writes.

What about food writers? Cook/writer Kathleen Finn says she snacks on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, ak-Mak sesame whole wheat crackers, iced coffee with milk and Ramen in miso soup. At her blog, Finn asks her food-writer colleagues for details on what they eat while writing and the answers vary from cereal to bing cherries to bourbon. On a slightly related note, Cosmo Australia asked the question to Health Writers to find out what they actually eat when they’re not telling you what to eat.

It is a commonly accepted truth that writers are often really heavy drinkers, and in Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide for Great American Writers, author Mark Bailey and illustrator Edward Hemingway provide recipes, book passages, direct testimony from writers themselves and a bit of historical research to reveal the habits and proclivities of, as the title suggests, Great American Writers. NPR has a look at their favorite passages and recipes from the book, like William Faulkner‘s Mint Julep. Did you know that sexually-ambiguous Carson McCullers enjoyed drinking Long Island Iced Tea served hot mixed with sherry in a thermos. She called it “sonnie boy” and would drink it all day claiming it was just tea, not gallons of alcohol.

The book is actually pretty rad and would make a good gift for the writer/drinker on your Labor Day List.

For desert, here’s NPR giving Amy Sedaris a Literary Drinking Quiz:

“Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
-Raymond Chandler

If you’re a writer/artist/musician person, what do you eat/drink while writing?

Some Weird and Not So Weird Habits of Famous Authors

Intern Bren’s Team Pick:

Here’s the thing. Writers are weirdos. If there’s one thing I love, it’s weirdos. It’s the reason I love San Francisco over my own city. It’s the reason I ever so slightly favor my nephew over my niece. It’s the reason I, a fully adult human with a “real” job, choose to hang out with college kids who smoke things they shouldn’t and are almost half my age. They’re interesting and evolving and alive!

As if reading my mind Flavorwire has complied a list of weirdos and the weird things they do that make/made them iconic literary figures. Unfortunately, they’ve put each author on a separate page to force you click through 10 pages to read the entire thing – SO ANNOYING. I’ll just give you the highlights.

The Drinkers:

William Faulkner “drank a lot of whiskey when he was writing.” My kinda man.

Truman Capote would supposedly write supine, with a glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another.

“I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”

The Blogger Predecessors:

John Cheever wrote in his underoos.

“To publish a definitive collection of short stories in one’s late 60s seems to me, as an American writer, a traditional and a dignified occasion, eclipsed in no way by the fact that a great many of the stories in my current collection were written in my underwear.”

Francine Prose writes facing a wall and wearing “red and black checked flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt.” What do you think I’m wearing right now?

Masters of the Quota System:

Thomas Wolfe was a taskmaster.

”I set myself a quota — ten pages a day, triple-spaced, which means about eighteen hundred words. If I can finish that in three hours, then I’m through for the day. I just close up the lunch box and go home — that’s the way I think of it anyway. If it takes me twelve hours, that’s too bad, I’ve got to do it.”

Ernest Hemingway famously said he wrote 500 words a day, mostly in the mornings, to avoid the heat.

Folks with a touch of OCD:

Vladimir Nabokov – Most of his novels were written on handy 3 x 5 inch cards, which would be paper-clipped and stored in slim boxes.

“My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.”

Eudora Welty – Back in 1953, Welty wrote to her friend William Maxwell that she straight-pins her stories together as she goes.

“I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance — helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that’s when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction . . . I like pins.”

And the Winning Weirdo:

Really the only one that is truly weird (misleading title much, Flavorwire?) has to be T.S. Eliot, who made everybody refer to him as “Captain” and powdered his face green “to look cadaverous.” WTF!? Now THAT’S weird.

What are your weird habits?

Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” Belongs to Lovers, Artists and Outcasts

Just Kids is the first book to ever make me cry. Not just shed a little tear, but to leave me sobbing and shaking on a crowded Sydney bus before I even reached the first chapter. The foreword was intense!

In said foreword, Patti Smith recounts the moment she discovered her former lover and collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe had passed away from AIDS-related complications.

“I was asleep when he died. I had called the hospital to say one more goodnight, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again. Later I quietly straightened my things, my notebook and fountain pen. The cobalt inkwell that had been his. My Persian cup, my purple heart, a tray of baby teeth. I slowly ascended the stairs, counting them, fourteen of them, one after the other. I drew a blanket over the baby in her crib, kissed my son as he slept, then lay down beside my husband and said my prayers. He is still alive, I remember whispering. Then I slept.”

On March 8, 1989, the day before he passed, Robert asked Patti to tell the world their story. That’s what Just Kids is: an account of Patti’s and Robert’s life in New York during the late 60s and early 70s, a time when everyone worshipped Andy Warhol and listened to the Velvet Underground. It’s about the evolution of two young outsiders, both as artists and humans, who struggled between the need to eat and create and who strived to build the world they wanted to live in.

Just Kids made me feel similar to how I felt when I read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road for the first time. I was quickly sucked in to the romance of young artists trying to find themselves and their place in a world that labeled them eccentrics and outcasts.

There are moments when Just Kids reads like a roll call for 60s and 70s music, art and literary legends. It’s peppered with anecdotes featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin to Salvadore Dali. At one point, Patti recounts how Allen Ginsberg bought her a sandwich because he’d mistaken her for a pretty boy. It’s a tale that would probably seem far-fetched if it weren’t described so vividly that you could have been there.

Just Kids opens with Patti’s teenage years, detailing how she fell pregnant out of wedlock and put the child up for adoption. Her mother encouraged her to become a waitress. However, having spent her teen years immersing herself in art and poetry volumes, Patti knew her calling:

“I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: the hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers. I’d brag that I was going to become an artist’s mistress one day. Nothing seemed more romantic to my young mind. I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.”

It was 1967 when Patti left Philadelphia for New York, a “real city, shifty and sexual.” She was only 20 years old. She had few friends and no money. She found shelter on park benches, in subways and in graveyards, and she relied on strangers for food. Observing that “Romanticism could not quench my need for food. Even Baudelaire needed to eat,” Patti found work at a bookstore. It was there that she met Robert Mapplethorpe.

Robert and Patti moved into a Brooklyn dive, and with no radio or television or money for entertainment, they spent long hours sitting side by side, sketching or telling stories. When they weren’t out earning money, they were at home creating. They would take turns at being the breadwinner: One would go out and find work so that the other could stay home and hone their art. Robert and Patti were poor but deliriously happy. They didn’t need anyone or anything but each other.

“We would visit art museums. There was only enough money for one ticket, so one of us would go in, look at the exhibits, and report back to the other.”

Patti and Robert formed an enviable partnership, one built wholly on trust and acceptance. They inspired each other and encouraged each other’s artistic and personal growth. Even years later, when Robert had come out as a homosexual and started hustling, they loved each other unconditionally and vowed to spend the rest of their lives creating and collaborating.

“Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” Robert said. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was as if we were the only two people in the world.”

In the summer of 1968, Patti moved out. Robert had become distant and irritable (“He never ceased to be affectionate to me, but he seemed troubled.”), and he informed her that he was going to San Francisco to find out who he was. If Patti didn’t travel with him, he threatened he would “turn homosexual.”

“There was nothing in our relationship that had prepared me for such a revelation. All of the signs that he had obliquely imparted I had interpreted as the evolution of his art. Not of his self. I was less than compassionate, a fact I came to regret… I felt I had failed him. I had thought a man turned homosexual when there was not the right woman to save him.”

Not long after Robert returned from San Francisco, they moved into the Chelsea Hotel, which Patti refers to as her ‘university.’ At the time, it was a community of poets and musicians and painters who had bartered their work for cheaper rent. Patti and Robert lived and learned alongside eccentrics who “had written, conversed and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many transient souls had espoused, made a mark, and succumbed here.”

The Chelsea Hotel is only the beginning of Patti and Robert’s story. While Robert’s homosexuality eventually forced him and Patti to cease their sexual relationship and redefine their love, their creative partnership grew stronger than ever. They opened up their world to let other characters in and unknowingly created legends. As Patti recounts how she sat on the floor of Janis Joplin’s Chelsea Hotel suite, watching Kris Kristofferson serenade her with “Me and Bobby McGee”, she reflects:

“I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied by my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.”

She has now, and she’s recounted them so beautifully and vividly. Have you read Just Kids? Did you like it? Love it? You can buy the book here.

Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe

Bookstore Customers Say the Darndest Things

Intern Bren’s Team Pick:

via jen-campbell.blogspot.com

If you’ve ever thought of opening your own business, this blog may change that. Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops is written by Jen Campbell, a London based writer and the manager of Ripping Yarns bookstore. She amuses herself, and all of us really, by chronicling the oblivious, rude and down right weird things that her patrons say.

How weird, you ask? This weird:

Customer: Hi, do you have any new books?
Me: We’re an antiquarian bookshop – our stock is out of print books.
Customer: So other people have touched them?
Me: Presumably, yes.
Customer: I don’t think I’ll bother, thanks.
Me: OK.

(NOTE: I totally had to look up “antiquarian.” I thought it had something to do with aquariums. For the record it means “relating to or dealing with antiques or antiquities, especially rare and old books.” Nothing about the fishes.)

Customer: Do you have brown eyes? *peers over at me*
Me: Yes, I do.
Customer: My mother told me never to trust anyone with brown eyes.
Me: You have brown eyes.
Customer: ……….

via jen-campbell.blogspot.com

Customer: If one wanted to steal your most expensive book, where would one look?

Here’s one relevant to your interests:

Customer: *holding up a Harry Potter book* This doesn’t have anything weird in it… does it?
Me: You mean, like, werewolves?
Customer: No – gays.
Me: …right.

Seems like Cori and/or Kacy from the Real L Word even stopped in:

Customer: Hi, do you have that sperm cookbook?
Me: No.
Customer: That’s a shame; I really wanted to try it. Have you tried it?
Me: I have not.

And there is something super special about a woman who has this much immediate knowledge of Charles Dickens:

Customer: I have The Pickwick Papers, 1st edition. How much will you buy them for?
Me: *examines book* Sorry, this was printed in 1910.
Customer: Yes.
Me: The Pickwick Papers was first printed in 1837; this isn’t a first edition.
Customer: No it was definitely first printed in 1910.
Me: Dickens was dead in 1910.
Customer: I don’t think so. You’re trying to con me.
Me: I promise you, I’m not.
Customer: *glares for a while, then picks the book back up quickly* I’m taking them to the Sotheby’s Auction! *storms out*

via jen-campbell.blogspot.com

And just when you think that Britons must be the craziest people on the planet the Americans one-up everybody:

A customer in America, who ordered a very very old book, then claimed it was in terrible condition [which it wasn’t], sent the book back to us in only a paper bag, with pieces of paper stuck on the pages where there were photographs. The spine was broken, as though she’d put said book on a photocopier, had copied the images and posted it back to us – never intending to keep it in the first place. We reported this to ABE, who gave us the money to repair this book, and refunded her with a warning. We then got several very rude emails with choice phrases such as:

Customer: You will not forget this transaction. Every time an event goes wrong in your life, you will remember karma… I am a prophet and I bring you this message in the name of Jesus.

Amazing. And THEN, a few weeks later, we received an A4 envelope stuffed with pamphlets on how to recognise the devil within ourselves. Awesome.

But I think my favorite is simply:

Customer: Do you have any old porn magazines?

Also there’s has lots of British spellings and references, so I highly recommend reading the entire blog with an English accent.

Sidenote: Once I tried to do a British accent and a friend told me that it sounded like a Confederate soldier had moved to Australia for 2 years and THEN tried to do a SCOTTISH accent. So what I’m saying is maybe your British accent is better than mine. Hey maybe you’re even British. Win/win.

Agustina Woodgate Brings Poetry to a Thrift Store Near You

Carmen’s Team Pick:

There’s just something about a girl who makes art.

Agustina Woodgate is an artist born and trained in Argentina and transplanted in Miami. Her work encompasses a variety of mediums and styles, but focuses on interaction. Woodgate wants people to interact — with each other, and with her art. She wants a communal response. She wants something more than you standing in a museum and gaping at a large painting or one of her exhibitions. Agustina Woodgate wants to interact with you. Are you nervous yet?

Woodgate was recently highlighted on the series O, MIAMI for her latest project: Poetry Tags. The project entails Woodgate sneaking around Miami thrift stores to sew new labels in the clothing inside. But this isn’t just a clothing label. It’s Agustina Woodgate’s Special Poetry Label That Says:

Life is a huge dream
why work so hard?

-Li Po

Her O, MIAMI segment reveals not only her strategy but her accent:

Woodgate’s Poetry Tags project is about memories, and the little pieces of ourselves we store in our clothing. (I remember each moment in my lace-up leather boots so vividly that she need not elaborate on what she means.) Woodgate wanted to highlight that relationship. Woodgate’s art focuses on interaction because she believes interactions are art. Get it?

But this project also focuses specifically on how clothing can be a medium to bring poetry into our lives if we bring the two together. She describes it better in her own words:

Sewing poems in clothes is a way of bringing poetry to everyday life just by displacing it, by removing it from a paper to integrate it and fuse it with our lives. Sometimes little details are stronger when they are separated from where they are expected to be.

Woodgate’s art is strong because it’s not where you expect it to be.

Oh My God I love few things more than poetry, or clothes, or thrift stores, or Agustina Woodgate.

I’m sharing this with you even though the line of poetry Woodgate uses isn’t from an Eileen Myles poem, or even from an anthology she edited, and I don’t live in Miami, and Agustina Woodgate makes tons of art and has tons of projects and this is just one of them.

I’m sharing this with you because being able to touch, and relate to, and be a part of art, is a beautiful experience. I’m sharing this with you because I find it really, really incredible when artists don’t think of their work as something to gawk at and be in awe of, but something to feel connected to and comfortable around.

But mostly, I’m sharing this with you because there really is something about a girl who makes art, and it’s kind of like poetry and the perfect shirt.

Reading Rainbow Flash Mob with LeVar Burton

In case you weren’t convinced that the entire pop culture world exists in a constant state of waiting for the latest new Autostraddle idea with bated breath: LeVar Burton’s new Reading Rainbow Flash Mob. I know, really shameless shoutout to Autostraddle’s Summer Book Club. It’s cool though, we’re totally into it, and book imitation is the sincerest form of book flattery/book love. Obviously all of us are already signed up forever and ever, and whenever more information becomes available, we are going to flash the shit out of that mob. What about you?

Top 10 Lesbian Romance Novels (Currently on My Kindle)

When I was gifted a Kindle for my birthday this year, I did something that I admit, shamefully, I’ve never done in a bookstore: I perused titles in the “lesbian” category. After sifting through pages of poorly titled erotica, I stumbled across a terrible/AWESOME genre: lesbian romance.

The first lesbian romance novel I purchased was for a laugh; it had some spectacularly tragic cover art and a synopsis that sounded awesome but in the “so bad it’s …” way. But then after burning through three of these books in just one weekend, I was forced to admit that I’d become legit hooked. Lesbian romance novels are my new pastry crack.

The Lesbian Romance Formula

Lesbian romance novels are typically will-they-or-won’t-they slow burners loosely based on the following premise: Girl A meets Girl B and thinks she’s cocky / reckless / mysterious / looking very Shane today. An often work-related situation forces the girls to spend every waking moment together, and Girl A realizes that there’s more to Girl B than nice arms and a smokin’ hot swagger.

However! Despite their sexual tension, Girl A keeps Girl B at arm’s length as she undergoes a brief but intense struggle to overcome her deep dark secret and/or crippling emotional baggage. The tide changes when a confusing figure from either girl’s past shows up and/or a tragic accident forces Girl A to consider life without Girl B in it. They say “I love you” and have “earth-shattering” sex. The End.

With their dark and mysterious protagonists and their “devil may care” grins, these stories have, for better or worse, replaced films starring Anne Hathaway and movies with dance-offs as my preferred method of escapism. So now, at the risk of damaging my street cred, let’s talk romance novels!

Top 10 Lesbian Romance Novels

(Currently on Crystal’s Kindle)

Fated Love by Radclyffe [2005]

Twenty-eight-year-old Quinn Maguire is a “dashing young trauma surgeon” who transfers from a top tier New York hospital to Philadelphia Medical College, a hospital that only seems to hire homos. Her new boss, ER Chief Honor Blake, believes that Quinn is hiding a deep dark secret because apparently there could be no other reason for someone to want to work at this particular hospital.

The sexual tension between Quinn and Honor is sparkish from the get-go. However, there are numerous obstacles on the path to make-out town.

Tags: work-related circumstance, near-fatal illness, tragic accident, deceased lover, raunch

And Playing the Role of Herself by K. E. Lane [2007]

Actress Caidence Harris plays a lead detective on 9th Precinct, a new police television drama that is reminiscent of Law & Order. Her co-star, Robyn Ward, is a tall, husky-voiced lady with an angular face and slightly cleft chin who is reminiscent of every actress who has ever starred in Law & Order. These are their stories. DUN DUN.

Caidence, a closeted lesbian who has not yet acted upon her sapphic impulses, is infatuated with Robyn but keeps it under lock out of respect for Robyn’s perceived-hetero relationship with tennis star Josh Riley. When the producers make Caid and Robyn’s characters hook up on screen, the shoot goes swell. Will Caid and Robyn confess their feelings before some sort of conflict or near death tragedy tears them apart forever?

*SPOILER ALERT* yes.

Tags: work-related circumstance, tragic accident, hot lady cop, confusing figure from the past

Above All, Honor (The Honor Series) by Radclyffe [2004]

I thoroughly enjoy any story featuring a smokin’ hot lady protagonist who wears a tailored suit and holds a position of authority. Luckily, so does every writer in this particular genre.

Cameron Roberts is a Secret Service agent who is charged with leading the task force that is assigned to protect Blair Powell, the promiscuous and rebellious lesbian daughter of the President of the United States. Blair pursues Cameron like a tiger. However, Cam, who is carrying the unbearable weight of a deep personal tragedy, has no time for privileged brats who sneak off to gay bars to have meaningless sex with leather-clad butches, no matter how cute or misunderstood they may be. That is, until a series of life-threatening situations compel these ladies to admit that they want to tear each other’s clothes off.

Tags: work-related circumstance, lesbian power suits, tragic accident, raunch, hot lady cop, deceased lover

Thief of Always (Elite Operatives series) by Kim Baldwin and Xenia Alexiou [2009]

Mishael Taylor, alias “Allegro,” is a race car driver by day and secret spy by night. Allegro is one of the Elite Operative Organization’s top agents, a danger-loving lady who chases thrills and women as a way of distracting herself from flashbacks and other psychological effects associated with being an assassin.

Allegro is tasked with stealing the Blue Star Diamond from a cute Dutch countess, Kristine Marie van der Jagt. Unfortunately Afghani terrorists and German Neo-Nazis are also on the hunt for this diamond, and so, in an effort to locate it first, Allegro takes a job at Kristine’s mansion as a live-in construction worker. Cue porn music.

There are several novels in the Elite Operatives series, each one focuses on a different operative with a really cute code name.

Tags: work-related circumstance, tragic accident, hot girl has swagger

High Risk by Jlee Meyer [2010]

Kate Hoffman, a famous actress, takes some time out from her flashy Hollywood lifestyle to help her queer sister launch a new hotel in San Francisco that caters exclusively to womyn. Enter Dasher, an out A-list Hollywood agent who coincidentally is also taking time out to help with the launch of this hotel.

Kate and Dasher do not get along, mostly because Kate is a straight lady with queer fear who gets flustered at the sight of Dasher in a power suit. But team work is dream work, and they need to get along for the sake of the hotel. This novel has some sort of secret society sub-plot but I can’t tell you about it because curiosity got the best of me and I skipped ahead to all of the Kate/Dasher scenes.

If you want to know more about this womyn’s hotel then you should read Hotel Liaison. It’s not nearly as dull as the Amazon summary may lead you to believe.

Tags: work-related circumstance, lesbian power suits, confusing figure from the past

It Should be a Crime by Carson Taite [2009]

When celebrity defense attorney Morgan Bradley’s long-term girlfriend strays, Morgan f*cks the pain away with the help of a smokin’ hot bartender whom she meets in an alley behind a queer club.

Weeks later, Morgan starts her new job as a guest lecturer at the local university and discovers that the hot bartender is Parker Casy, one of her law students. Awkward. Morgan and Parker are forced to work closely together in order to get an innocent man freed from prison, and while neither lady can forget about their hot one night stand, they try really hard for at least 50 pages.

Tags: work-related circumstance, lesbian power suits, tragic accident, confusing figure from the past, hot girl has swagger

Wasted Heart by Lynn Galli [2010]

After spending years pining for her married best friend, Austy Nunziata decides that the best way to move on is to become the new Assistant US Attorney for Washington, which is 3,000 miles away. It’s there that Austy meets Elise Bridie, an attractive FBI agent with whom she partners on a case that just so happens to also involve the woman that Austy moved interstate to avoid. It’s complicated, okay?

Lynn Galli has written several novels focusing on a posse of Virginian lesbians and their love interests. If you like this you’ll also like Imagining Reality, Blessed Twice, Finally, and Uncommon Emotions.

Tags: work-related circumstance, lesbian power suits, hot lady cop, confusing figure from the past

Trauma Alert by Radclyffe [2010]

Beau Cross is a cowboy firefighter who leaps into dangerous situations at every given chance. Dr. Ali Torveau is a widow with a strong appreciation for human life, so she rejects Beau’s advances. Beau is my brother’s name, and I feel weird using it in this context, so I’m just gonna cut-paste the synopsis.

“Firefighter Beau Cross shows up in Dr. Ali Torveau’s ER and sets her carefully ordered world aflame”.

Boom.

Tags: work-related circumstance, near-fatal illness, tragic accident, raunch, hot girl has swagger

Death by the Riverside (Micky Night series) by J.M. Reddman [2001]

Micky Knight is a private detective who enjoys casual sex and drinking bourbon until she blacks out. It’s the only way she can deal with the deep dark secret that haunts her from her childhood. Mickey is not a romantic or overly likable character; she’s a hot mess on a good day and a bit of an asshole to the people in her life including Cordelia, a pretty lady doctor who Micky meets on a case.

Death By The Riverside isn’t really a romance novel. It’s more crime fiction featuring lots of lesbian sex. While there’s a definite will-they-or-won’t-they question hanging over Micky and Cordelia, most of the suspense in this novel stems from the question of whether Micky will get her shit together.

Tags: work-related circumstance, tragic accident, hot lady cop, raunch, hot girl has swagger

Gun Shy (Gun series) by Lori L. Lake [2006]

When police officer Dez Reilly saves Jaylynn and her housemate from a vicious home invasion, Jaylynn is inspired by Dez’ butch gallantry, and decides to take up a career with the St. Paul Police Academy. As fate would have it, Dez is assigned as Jay’s training officer. Jay wants Dez to train her in how to have hot lady sex. Dez refuses because she is noble and also because the Academy does not permit trainers to have steamy affairs with their protégés. Sad face.

Tags: work-related circumstance, hot lady cop, tragic accident.

Are you a fan of the lesbian romance genre? Do you know what book I should read next? Fess up in the comments below.

Non-Required Reading from Byliner.com and Longform.org

Riese’s Team Pick:

When I’m not writing excessively lengthy articles, I enjoy reading them, and the stacks of magazines on all available surfaces of my studio apartment testify to this passion. There’s so much online though these days, where do we even begin?

Well, this week Byliner launched, which aims to “discover and discuss great reads by great writers.”

In addition to publishing Byliner Press original stories by writers like Jon Krakauer and Tad Friend, Byliner accepts member-submitted links to great things they read on other sites — like lesbian writer Ariel Levy’s “My First Time, Twice” from Guernica (which is actually about sex with a dude) and Oliver Miller’s “AOL Hell: An AOL Content Slave Speaks Out” from The Faster Times.

Much like longform, which I’ve been visiting daily ever since that time they posted all the American Magazine Awards finalists, Byliner presents thematically curated lists of articles (to celebrate their launch, Byliner has a “How to Launch a Business” list). Byliner also is a social network for writers.

So what about longform?

Longform.org posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.

We recommend enjoying them using read later services like Instapaper and Read It Later and feature buttons to save articles with one click.

Launched in April 2010, Longform.org has been featured by Slate, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and others.

You can pick stories by tags, eras, topics, writers — and they have stuff that goes all the way back to like last century as well as things published yesterday. Curated thematic lists have topics like Commencement Addresses 1979-2011 or A Requiem for Glenn Beck. There’s just so much there, it’s like all the best parts of magazines organized for you. I print them out and read them and feel happy all day.

Gabby’s Team Pick: xQsi Magazine – Queer Latin@s

xQsi (Porque Si) Magazine is a brand new online media publication that embraces the diversity of interests in the Latin@ LGBTQ community.  Bottom line: this site is f*cking rad.

For instance, xQsi Magazine recently interviewed The Sirens, a super hot all queer Latina punk band about their music, involvement in the AIDS Walks Los Angeles and their thoughts on teen bullying.

AND THEN xQsi sat down with the awesome queer couple, Ivette Alé and Crystal González , who are creators of  Marimacho the Brooklyn-based masculine clothing line for female and transgender bodies.

xQsi also posts news from its own site and others in order to provide up-to-date queer news from  The Caribbean, Latin America, The U.S. and everywhere else queerios live.  Por ejemplo, I didn’t know Puerto Rico was awash in a wave of trans and queer murders, but a blurb on xQsi sent me to that article at The New Civil Rights movement.

Media, fashion and queer politics from all around the world, yes, todo el mundo mi gente.  Oh and one other thing: xQsi Magazine is bilingual.  I’m actually jealous of them for that one.  (I try reading the articles en español and then I give up and just read the ones in English. )

Check out xQsimagazine.com and make friends with xQsi on Facebook! Unicorns of color, all colors, unite!

(Don’t worry Dora, whenever you’re ready to come out we’ll all be here waiting for you…)

Crystal’s Team Pick: 25 Lessons For Creatives In Patti Smith’s ‘Just Kids’

At the moment I’m reading Just Kids, a book of prose penned by Patti Smith documenting her time in New York during the late sixties and early seventies. It’s a remarkable story that focuses on Patti’s relationship and creative partnership with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their growth as artists. I highly recommend it, even/especially to those who’ve never heard these names before.

Just Kids offers up many inspiring insights into the creative process and lifestyle, and they’re compiled in this wonderful article by Nextness: ‘What Matters Is The Work: 25 Lessons for Creatives in Patti Smith’s Just Kids’.

A few highlights:

1.  Never apologise for being an artist.
No one would see what [Robert] had seen, no one would understand. He’d had it all his life, but in the past he tried to make up for it, as if it were his fault. He compensated for this with a sweet nature, seeking approval from his father, from his teachers, from his peers. He wasn’t certain whether he was a good or bad person… But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologise.

11.  Delight in a trusting creative partnership.
Both of us [Patti and Robert] had given ourselves to others. We vacillated and lost everyone, but we had found each other again. We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet free.

21.  If you miss a beat, create another.
When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say anything,” he [Sam Shephard] said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

Lily’s Team Pick: Better Book Titles

I’m sure many of you internet and Tumblr savvy people have come across a tumblr called Better Book Titles but I, until very recently, had not. So when I happened across it the other day I just assumed I had “discovered” it–much like Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas and Oprah “discovered” The Secret. Anywho, it is exactly what it sounds like—a collection of “better” titles for famous books.

Here are some of my favs:

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Judy Blume: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Win a Signed Copy of ‘ThxThxThx’ and Obliterate Your Ingratitude

One of you lucky little heathens is going to win a SIGNED copy of Leah Dieterich’s new book, thxthxthx, and we’re all pretty excited about it! You’re probably familiar with thxthxthx the website, where Leah’s grateful for everything from continuums to bras to girls who wear high tops. This one’s probably our favorite, extremely relevant thank-you note:

Copyright Andrews McMeel 2011

A little bit on Leah’s concept:

There’s always something to be thankful for. From the important things like Songs You’re Embarrassed to Like, and Heavy Eyelids that Tell You When You Need to Sleep, to friends and family, love and loneliness, light and darkness, Leah Dieterich sets out to acknowledge them all. thxthxthx is her daily exercise in gratitude.

How lovely is that? Yes, it’s very lovely. But you know what else thxthxthx is? Clever and affirming! Here’s something else Leah’s thankful for:

Copyright Andrews McMeel 2011

Win a Signed Copy of thxthxthx!

+ Write your very own “thank you” note in the comments. You can thank anything, anyone, anywhere: your dog, your lucky underpants, George Bush. Get creative. You do you, is what I’m saying.

+ Leah Dieterich herself will choose a favorite. Based on what? Who knows! Don’t even worry about that.

+ We’ll announce the winner next Tuesday!

If you don’t win the signed copy, there’s no need to fret, kittens. You can you can pickup your very own copy whenever your heart desires.

Let’s end this as we do most days here at Autostraddle, with a “thank you” to bourbon:

Copyright Andrews McMeel 2011

Leave your thank you notes in the comments! I promised her you guys would come up with some good ones, so, no pressure or anything.

Carolyn’s Team Pick: Responses to Esquire’s List of “75 Books Every Man Should Read”

Edith F*cking Wharton

Esquire releases a slideshow (usually the same slideshow, actually) of “75 books every man should read” every year or so, and they have a habit of being flawed the same way — nearly every author is white, and all but one are dudes (the only woman in the list is Flannery O’Connor, with A Good Man is Hard to Find).

Yes, most classic reading lists are full of old straight white dudes, because for a long time classic literature was full of old straight white dudes (though not exclusively. See also: Victorian sensation novels; post-sensation gothic writing; Eliza Haywood; Frances Burney; female authors writing under male pen-names — and all of that falls before you even end the 18th century). And yes, Esquire caters to an old straight white dude-friendly audience.

But also, seriously?

+ At HTMLgiant, Roxane Gay responds to this list and to gender binaries in reading and genre more generally:

“Yesterday, Esquire released a list of 75 books every man should read. They make such lists regularly so the list, in and of itself, is not remarkable. There are some really great books included like Lolita and Call of the Wild and The Things They Carried and Winter’s Bone and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The list offers a nice blend of contemporary and classic fiction. I was particularly pleased to see Edward P. Jones’s outstanding The Known World mentioned. I cannot say there’s a book on that list that doesn’t deserve the recognition. The list is certainly very masculine in tone, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Great books are great books and there’s something to be said for muscular prose. My list would probably look somewhat different but so would yours. Reading is personal and taste is subjective.

It is curious, though, that out of all 75 books every man should read, only one, not two or five or seventeen, but one of those books, A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, is written by a woman. I should be surprised by this imbalance but I’m not.”

+ At Joyland, there’s a much-improved list of 250 books by female authors, including Zadie Smith, Aline Munro, Chris Kraus, George Eliot (because hello, Middlemarch!), and Mary Shelley.

+ And at the Atlantic, there’s this:

“This is not a favor to feminists. This is not about how to pick up chicks. This is about hunger, greed and acquisition. Do not read books by women to murder your inner sexist pig. Do it because Edith Wharton can fucking write. It’s that simple.”

Feature image from Things Organized Neatly.

Mary Gray Knows What it Feels Like For Gay Kids in Rural America

Mary Gray, the queer author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America and In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth,sat down for an Autostraddle interview about the lives of rural LGBT teens. Out in The Country shatters some stereotypes about life in a small town and reinforces others. I first discovered Gray’s work in a gender studies class and was excited to meet her when she visited Tulane University. In person Gray is warm, engaging, and incredibly intelligent— and um, really attractive! During our interview Gray discussed rural realities, queer identity claim making, violence, and the girls she couldn’t put in the book. In addition to research and writing, Mary Gray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. You can buy Out in the Country HERE

Chloe: Tell me how and why you conceived the idea of Out in the Country?

Mary Gray: I grew up in a small town and I was really curious by the time I grew what it would be like to stay put. I didn’t like it, I didn’t hate it, but I definitely got a sense that if I wanted my life to look different than what was around me I’d have to leave and go to school. I wanted to imagine what politics could happen in a hometown like mine.

What was the age range and socioeconomic status of the people you interviewed for Out in The Country?

I focused on folks who were 14 to 24. I wanted to mostly focus on people who were under 18 and didn’t have the means to leave. Most of the people I worked with were working class, working poor, either on social security insurance or they have service jobs.

How would you say the experience of female sex LGBT youth differed from male sex LGBT youth?

The young men who were gay identifying had a little more room to be fairly open about their identities. Several of them commented that it was something they had always been told they were, so it was no surprise to anyone when they came out. The men were always “the gay kid,” but I didn’t meet any women who said “I was always the lesbian.” I would argue a lot of that is because in terms of representative and visibility a lot of the representations we have are of gay, white men, which isn’t true for women. We really don’t have a consistent representation of what kind of room one makes for a lesbian or bi identifying women in popular culture. The biggest difference is that there’s an accessible public identity that was always pinned on young men but wasn’t available for young women.

Does that seem like a negative or positive to you?

Both. I think women weren’t constantly pressured to make claims about their identity. While the young men would often comment about being the one gay kid, they were also consistently harassed from a very young age. That wasn’t the case with women. People didn’t assume they were gay for being a tomboy or athletic. So women certainly talked about being able to fly under the radar. At the same time, most women in their communities the step after high school was getting married and they didn’t want that either. I don’t think they had the room to say, as part of their identity, this was or was not about being a specific guy. Particularly for women who really wanted to be with other women I think they felt conflicted about the lack of ability of settling down.

How did the community reaction differ for women?

Because women were not assumed to be hiding something nor did they have the pressure to come out, I think that affected how they were harassed. The young women who were the most gender nonconforming were the ones who got harassed the most. If there was the level physical violence that men discussed, they weren’t willing to talk about it. It’s tough to know what kind of violence happens to young women, who constantly have to prove something about their gender through their sexuality. Being physically available to men was a way of coping. I definitely know that some young women felt remaining sexually available to young men was a way of keeping the peace. That’s pretty violent. It’s tough to say in terms of harassment because young men talked about more stories of physical abuse but I think young women experienced a different kind of abuse.

That’s a good point because I think media representations of gay women and men are so different. Girls are ok as long as ultimately they’re performing for men, and that’s equally toxic.

Absolutely, I totally agree… And I think that’s precisely why there was some room given to homoeroticism between women, but only up to a point. The mentality is as long as it’s contained and has nothing to do with a relationship, we’re good here. I think that’s one of the places women struggled the most was, “how do I lay claim to specific identities and be part of a broader queer nation of women if I’m expected to act like a lady, marry, and be a mother”? I think things will really shift in the next decade or so because people won’t find it contradictory to be a queer women and a mom. It’s really rocking people’s world right now that it’s an option.

What factors do you think influenced the level of visibility?

I think the things that limited someone’s visibility were precisely the things that enabled it. The expectation that they’re going to be visible, out, loud, and proud was a testament to them. There was a group of guys who had a car with a rainbow sticker on it. Whenever they went through a specific county, they would peel off the rainbow sticker. I asked, ”Don’t you feel like your closeting yourself, doesn’t that feel demeaning that you can’t have your rainbow sticker on all the time?” One of them responded “I’m not less gay when I take the rainbow sticker off my car. I just know that if I have that in my car, I’m going to piss off people who are already angry at me.”

How did religion play LGBT experiences?

Many were ambivalent towards organized religion, but still felt a deep spirituality. Not too many of them seemed to be too broken up about not being in their church because I don’t think they necessarily associated their church with their sense of spirituality or religion… For the parents, I was surprised by how many of them turned to faith as a source of support for their children. One of my favorite families included a young person transitioning from female to male, whose mom was amazingly supportive woman. When I asked, “Where did your support for your child come from?” she replied, “You know, I’m a very religious person. God doesn’t make trash. So my child is not trash.”

What stereotypes or preconceptions about LGBT life in rural areas did you find most inaccurate?

The idea that everyone is going to be a hater. More often than not I found folks were either neutral or positive, and just didn’t have the forum to say they were absolutely fine with LGBT identifying people.

What negative stereotypes or preconceptions about LGBT life in rural areas were true?

Substance abuse. One of the things I didn’t write about in the book that I wish I had more courage to write about was recognizing how much of a problem methamphetamines and prescription pill abuse were, particularly in this age group. There are definitely folks getting no support that would give them the option of feeling hopeful. So that was pretty hard.

You said there were 7 girls that withdrew from the book. Is there anything in particular about their experiences that wish you could have written about?

If there was one thing I wish I would have been able to say, it was that young women in rural places carry a lot of weight and responsibility on their shoulders. I think they really have needs and in particular advocacy that we are woefully unable to provide, and I think sex and sexuality was a way for them to feel powerful and in control.

For more about Mary Gray visit her blog.

Read a F*cking Book, Lesbo: This Summer’s Newest Bestest Books

There are so many good-looking books coming out now and in the next few months that I can’t even think of a “coming out” pun to make about them. Here are some of the most interesting-looking books related to queer people released from March to May and beyond, in any genre your hearts desire (as long as they’re the ones below):

+

If you want fiction:

If You Follow Me: A Novel (P.S.), by Melena Watrous
(Harper Perennial)

If You Follow Me: A Novel is Watrous’ debut novel. Marina, a character who hopefully never had to see the L Word, moves to rural Japan with her girlfriend to teach English for a year. While she’s there, she deals with culture shock, facing her father’s death, facing the fact that her father’s death set her up with her girlfriend, and refrigerator disposal. It’s already won the Michener-Copernicus Award, and is highly recommended by Heather Aimee O’Neill from AfterEllen.

+

The Wide Road, by Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian
(Belladonna*)

The Wide Road mixes poetry and fiction to answer the eternal question: what woul d have happened if Thelma and Louise hadn’t driven off a cliff? Seriously, this looks like a cross between speculative literature and fanfiction and it seems like the authors had a great time writing it (even if it took 20 years) and you might have a great time reading it.

+

Sing You Home: A Novel, by Jodi Picoult
(Atria Books)

Sing You Home is about what happens when you divorce your husband, fall in love with a woman, try to have a child with that woman, and get sued by your alcoholic evangelical ex-husband for custody of the embryos you were going to use to have your child. It also comes with a CD of folk songs, which Picoult wrote with Ellen Wilber, reflecting main character Zoe Baxter’s feelings. I strongly suspect that this will be the sort of book your mom/ older maternal-esque parental unit casually mentions they’ve read at dinner one day, but that sounds like a bad thing, so let’s go with this: Jodi Picoult is a good writer, and not a white male literary darling besides, and maybe you should read her work.

+

Gingerbread Girl, by Colleen Coover & Paul Tobin
(Top Shelf)

Guess what kids, graphic novels are fiction too! This one is about Annah, a cutie bisexual girl with a mysterious lost sister. Or a disappeared mad scientist father. Or trauma from a horrific divorce during her childhood. Or all of them? It’s confusing. Let Annah’s date, along with virtually every other person in the city, try to convince you of their version of the story while you follow this crazy girl around the city. Also, the pictures are pretty! There’s a talking pigeon!

+

If you love young adult lit or want to impress someone who does:

Huntress, by Malinda Lo
(Little, Brown)

Malinda Lo’s first novel, Ash, was a lesbian retelling of Cinderella which is both well-written and compelling. Huntress is set in the same world as Ash, but centuries earlier, and incorporates elements of the I Ching. Like Ash, it avoids stereotyping gay characters and falling into the traditional plotlines of gay YA (ie, not just a coming out narrative), which probably has a lot to do with the fact that Lo used to write for AfterEllen. It’s really refreshing to read a story about the intricacies of a gay relationship in a world where the primary conflict isn’t just being gay, the end. On her website, Lo writes:

“I knew that I wanted certain things in the story: A girl having an adventure. A romance with sexual tension. A world on the verge of dying (I’m a big fan of dystopians). Powerful, creepy fairies. Weapons. And I wanted it to be a hero’s quest. As I noted in my writing journal back in October 2008 when I was figuring out what would happen, “The point of the quest is to bring order and harmony back to the mortal world.” Putting all those things together, the book that came out was Huntress.”

You can also read excerpts from the first three chapters here.

+

If you were completely seduced by Pure Poetry Week:

15 Ways to Stay Alive, by Daphne Gottleib
(Manic D Press)

15 Ways to Stay Alive is a collection of poems on heartbreak, postpunk politics, and dreams. With modern cut-up collages. While some of them talk about tragedy, death, and absurdity, all of them have a personal perspective on talking about the intersection of life and contemporary culture. Here is an excerpt, from “I Have Always Confused Desire with Apocalypse”:

We met over a small
earthquake. Now, my knees

shake whenever
you come around

and I’ve noticed your hand
has a slight tremor.

+

Spark Before Dark, by Laura Hershey
(Finishing Line Press)

Spark Before Dark is a posthumous anthology of poems about “life and language through sharply focused multiple lenses of disability, feminism, and queerness.” Hershley was a 2010 Lambda Fellow in Poetry so this will probably be excellent. So far, it’s only available from pre-order.

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If you want more memoir:

Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, by Signid Nunez
(Atlas)

Sempre Susan is written by Sigrid Nunez, a novelist who met Susan, met her son, and moved in with both of them. “Nunez gives a sharp sense of the charged, polarizing atmosphere that enveloped Sontag whenever she published a book, gave a lecture, or simply walked into a room. […] Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.”

Kiss & Tell, by Marinaomi
(Harper Perennial)

Kiss & Tell is an illustrated “romantic resume” slash graphic novel memoir, chronologically exploring the author’s early sexual experience, romance, and tragedy. Each chapter deals with a different relationship, including a sweet first love, her exes, and her conservative parents, and while each remains separate from the others, the disconnect makes them feel more true to life.

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Transparent, by Don Lemon
(Farrah Gray Foundation)

Emmy-winning CNN anchor Don Lemon digs beneath the surface for the true story — on himself. Lemon came out as gay while doing press for this book, which he dedicates to Tyler Clementi. Lemon talks about his childhood and the painful family secrets he stores, colorism and racism and the ambition that brought him to the top. He also takes the reader behind-the-scenes of some of the most compelling news stories he covered, such as September 11th, Barack Obama’s election, Micheal Jackson’s death and the DC Snipers.

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If you want to be smarter:

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock
( Beacon Press)

Queer (In)justice is an accessible look at queer experiences as suspects, defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime: “The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes — like “gleeful gay killers,” “lethal lesbians,” “disease spreaders,” and “deceptive gender benders” — to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.”

Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, by Kristen Schilt
(University of Chicago Press)

There are conscious and unconscious gender biases everywhere, and even in places lucky enough to have excellent equality legislation, bias exists in the workplace. Just One of the Guys? talks about pressure to be “just one of the guys” or to work as women or be marganialized for being openly transgender, and shows that appearance-based discrimination is everywhere. It’s also been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution, by Benjamin Shepard
(Routledge)

This is a hard-core sociology book on playful protest and change that argues “despite the contention that such activities are counterproductive, movements continue to put the right to party on the table as a part of a larger process of social change, as humor and pleasure disrupt monotony, while disarming systems of power.” Plus references to boas. If you understand that sentence this book is probably relevant to your interests.

What books are you waiting to read this spring/summer?

How Will We Save LGBTQ Bookstores?

Have you ever been to a gay bookstore? If the answer is “no” then YOU BETTER GO NOW because probably it’ll get shut down within the next two minutes/years. Seriously! Strap on your Chucks and bike on over to your local Pink Triangle Book Shop of Homo-Homo-Love and buy four copies of The Best Lesbian Erotica of 2010, a first-edition of Gender Outlaw, the complete works of JD Glass, Fun Home and a used book of lesbian love poems from the 70s (worth it for the cover art alone). Bonus points for digging up anything published by semio[text]e!

God I LOVE QUEER BOOKSTORES. But really I like all bookstores except the big ones, which I also like, but not as much. I’m basically addicted. When I spot a bookstore across the street it sucks me in via Jedi Bookstore Mind Control, causing me to unconsciously abandon my traveling companion who will inevitably find me squatting in some back shelf-alley, intently staring at spines as if I’m searching for something specific, but I never am. I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT ALL THE BOOKS!

Anyone who’s walked past a bookstore with me does a knee-jerk “Do you wanna go in?” before I can even start passive-aggressively announcing my desire to enter. David Bowie reads, and is bisexual:

But, says the news, GAY BOOKSTORES ARE DYING. The most recent death is here in The Bay Area — San Francisco’s Different Light bookstore closed recently, for which the patrons blame many things but mostly the internet.

2010 saw the death of Toronto’s Glad Days Bookshop, which had become the oldest LGBT bookstore in North America after New York City’s Oscar Wilde Bookstore shut its doors in 2009.  Lambda Rising in Washington DC closed in 2009. OutLOUD Bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee closed in 2010. The Word is Out, in Denver, Colorado, went online-only in 2009.

In Philadelphia, residents wonder if this fad will reach their very special Giovanni’s Room. Owner Ed Hermance told Philly Mag that, “For many people, the LGBT bookstore was their original ‘safe space,’ a place in which one might begin to come out to oneself.”

The article about Giovanni’s Room asks if “younger gays and lesbians” are not visiting LGBT bookstores because they have “mainstream acceptance” or are busy at “monthly circuit parties” and “dive bars around town and indie music venues.” They ask:

…when it comes to a “gay bookstore,” are more people heading to the web now? Or are they not heading anywhere at all, opting instead to take a more mainstream route when it comes to getting the information they want?

These are valid questions/concerns and they are coincidentally close to my heart. I’m a 29-year-old queer which means I’m still young (more or less). I’ve been to gay bookstores in New York City, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Halifax, Washington DC, Ann Arbor, Seattle, somewhere in Australia and also in San Francisco. I spend a lot of time day-dreaming about owning my own bookstore one day, like a lesbian/feminist thing (this will never happen I realize), and therefore I read a lot of articles about how independent bookstores are finding ways to get creative in order to survive the recession.

I don’t want GLBT bookstores to die. But I’ve got no nostalgia about it, and nostalgia seems to be the primary source of sadness for much of the bookstore-mourning community. These bookstores changed lives and their legacy is important. But it’s possible to respect and pay homage to the gay bookstores’ historical social function while transitioning to a new business model, reliant on unique services and products and events rather than the original “safe space.”

I don’t like GLBT bookstores for “community” — to be honest, I’m one of those shoppers frequently mistaken for a potential shoplifter because I don’t acknowledge salespeople or make eye contact with anyone. I just like ALL THE BOOKS!!!

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Running this website for the last two years has given me a fairly comprehensive view of a certain generation of book-reading lesbians. Therefore I’m fully ready to do that obnoxious thing over-entitled twentysomething web-brats do where I tell you what I like and dislike about the world you’ve put decades of blood/sweat/tears into.

Let’s begin!

Ideas Regarding the Future of Gay Bookstores

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LGBT Bookstores Will Never Win the Price Wars on New Books

Brett Serwalt of Obelisk Bookstore in San Diego: “We need to be realistic. The writing is on the wall: people LOVE the Internet, and apparently no brick & mortar store can ever compete on price. Not Borders, not Obelisk. At the same time, I still see a market for boutique book selling.”

Indeed. Despite my addiction to bookstores and stated preference for radical lesbian socialist shitheadism over corporate monarchy — I buy almost all my books online. It’s cheaper/faster. Furthermore, without Amazon, I don’t think I would’ve bought most of the books I do buy. I would’ve perhaps boarded the BART to pick up Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl, but I wouldn’t have last-minute shipped Michelle Tea’s The Beautiful to a writer who needed it ASAP for a Pure Poetry piece. Furthermore, I decided to bring Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl on my 14-hour train ride to Palm Springs about an hour before leaving — I downloaded it for my kindle. Also, Autostraddle’s Amazon Associates Account is one of our primary revenue streams, so I encourage others to do the same.

But most indies sell online now, and can even sell ebooks from their websites. Used books are actually cheaper IRL. Stocking tons of magazines works, too, like this independent bookstore in Tulsa. I would’ve gone anywhere to find Frankie on DIVA UK. I did, actually.

Amazon’s #1 Weakness: It’s a Robot

Amazon’s placed a Sense & Sensibility e-book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Women’s Bible (a 19th century feminist classic) in its Top Ten Bestselling Gay & Lesbian Books. Also, apparently Amazon thinks Augusten Burroughs is the only gay author ever — but LGBT bookstores know better. Those clean, well-organized spaces can work wonders. The Listmania! feature on Amazon is super popular but it also works on the shelves.

Can you imagine a bookstore organized by ideas rather than technical categories? The 5,000 girls who constantly ask me for book recommendations could benefit from sections labeled like “Coming Out” “Books to Give Your Mom” “Feminism 101” “Bisexuality/Sexual Fluidity.”

Which leads me to…

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Buy The Children

I think a lot of youngsters would walk through the door if you paid them — and by that I mean “hire them.” Hire a trans person or a queer person of color so their peers can feel as welcome in your store as you did when you were a babygay and you saw the nice gay man at the counter and felt safe. Hire one social dyke and you’ll get her entire Chart in there before long.

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Porn or Lesbians – Pick One.

Sometimes the “L” in “LGBT bookstore” seems superficial.

A Different Light is a good example of this. In the SF Appeal, writer Thomas Roche shares the “parallel sentiments” he’s heard expressed about A Different Light‘s closing:

“The first one, in public, is always pretty much the same story. It’s that A Different Light has for years been a landmark and a centerpiece of SF’s gay community.”

But other complaints he’s heard regard stock:

“Too many straight books.”

“Unfriendly to radicalism.”

“Caters to bourgeois gay white men.”

“The gay porn is boring and gross.”

“Not enough lesbian porn.”

Last time I visited A Different Light, it felt like half the store was stocked with gay male porn and, along with the two dykes I entered with, we quickly felt like we weren’t supposed to be there and subsequently left.

secret spycam photo of a different light as it was going out of business

Maybe gay men are different but the one item I’ll never ever ever buy anywhere but online? PORN. I’m sure it helped keep ADL in business, but meanwhile I couldn’t find Eileen Miles or our book club pick, Ali Liebagott’s IHOP Papers, anywhere in San Francisco!

Lots of gay porn and no Eileen Myles? It seems like it’d be more budget friendly to give up the facade and just focus entirely on gay men or you know, stock lesbian shit.

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Work With the Internet

It’s convenient that, despite other untraceable locales of abandonment, we know precisely where people who leave you for the internet are: on the internet. They’re not in caves, they’re reading Effing Dykes!

Seems like there must be a way to develop partnerships/ad swaps with LGBT blogs, ask websites like ours to coordinate our book club with your store, host monthly reading series with online writers, or advertise in magazines like bitch and Stud. We have your target market for online or even IRL sales right here and some of them are shy so they basically need an invitation. Just chase your audience and put up a sign in their new locale to remind them of you. Many net junkies really would like to go out and participate in the world, we just don’t know how/where/when and we need to feel welcome.

[Also a lot of bookstore websites could use a redesign!]

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Build New Community

Guerrilla Girls on Tour at Bluestockings in New York City

There’s something to learn from what happened to feminist bookstores — between 1993 and 1998 (before the internet became a viable gathering place!), we lost 80 feminist bookstores, and then another 30 between 1998 and 2000. Chain bookstores and the “mainstreaming” of feminism were blamed.

Bluestockings, which survived, says:

“To expect us to compete with large corporations at their own game misses the entire point of our existence, which is precisely to offer an alternative to the value system and economic structure they represent. The needs we meet (or try to meet) are mutually exclusive to those met by the big chains, and are in fact their antidote.”

Building on that point, I was interested in this quote from The Bay Citizen from a former employee of A Different Light (1991-2000) who said he left the job when Bill Barker, the present owner, took over:

I didn’t like the change in focus from a community-oriented bookstore that nourished queer writers and even held writers conferences each year to a store that featured coffee table soft porn and only popular titles. We were a community space in the 90s, we allowed groups like ACT UP to meet in the office upstairs and in the yard, we sponsored open mics, we carried literature and magazines from around the world and in many languages. Even if it only sold one copy or never sold at all, we stocked it because it was queer.

Independent Bookstores who survived the recession have done so by getting creative with how they involve themselves in the community. I’m always hearing about Bluestockings or Rock Paper Scissors Collective events but never once an LGBT bookstore event. This indie bookstore in Ridgewood survives by hosting super-popular events and readings! We want Michelle Tea and Sister Spit. Screen Bi the Way. Host poetry slams. Bluestockings invites scholars and authors to speak on pressing topics like “Obama and the Gays” and hosts events like “Women’s/Trans Poetry Jam & Open Mike.”

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Queer The Space

Obviously a cafe w/free wi-fi is key — these girls are fucking petrified of bars but want to meet each other and what if you knew everyone drinking coffee at the bookstore — THE BOOKSTORE! — was a lesbian? RIGHT?

Also? Space. We’re no less desperate for space than we were in the 70s. We have book clubs, activist groups and blog meet-ups and no place to hold them. And so many indie bookstores have survived by getting creative with events and meetings:

London Review Bookshop: “More than anything, the LRB’s defining achievement of the last five years, if I may modestly boast, has been the events programme.”

The Raconteur (New Jersey): “Dawson holds about 80 events a year in the bookstore — author appearances, readings, musical performances (everyone from chamber music to hard-core punk), and film screenings. And let’s not forget the annual arm-wrestling competition…”

The Book Seller (Chicago): “The March lineup at the Book Cellar, a popular store in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood, includes speed dating, a Mom’s Read Aloud Recommendation Party, comedy performance by the Kates, and “a glorious glimpse into the Chicago underground poster scene.”

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Get a Makeover

One last thing. This is going to make me sound like a pretentious elitist jerkoff squarely centered in the Generation Me mentality — but rainbows everywhere are kitschy, right?

Like let’s just cut it out. The rainbows.

There are only two good rainbows: Double Rainbow Oh My God and the Lucky Charms Rainbow.

I understand rainbows indicate homosexuality is welcome inside, but please. Be tasteful.

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THE RIGHT WAY TO DO A RAINBOW:

(yes this bookstore still closed, but whatever)

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THE WRONG WAY TO DO A RAINBOW

(I have blacked out any names to protect the decency of those storefronts)

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I love the feeling of being in a room which contains all our histories and futures within it. It makes you feel like you’re a part of something big and complicated and VISIBLE. It’s not “all new” like the LGBT Community Center or “all old” like in a museum. It’s new and old, from Giovanni’s Room to Valenica and back. Please don’t go, I’m addicted to you.

Do y’all shop at gay bookstores? How has your local gay bookstore stayed afloat? What cool things are happening in your neck of the literary woods? What would make you wanna visit a gay bookstore?

Autostraddle Read a F*cking Book Club #3 – Bastard Out Of Carolina

It’s Book Club #3 — Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. I hope you read it. That will help you to participate.

It’s so funny, because you guys all have told me you have so much to talk about with this book, and I’m having a hard time finding anything to say at all. To me it feels like showing up to a wake, except without the sadness, grief and irreparable sense of loss; there’s this thing that everyone can see has happened, and you’re all in it together, but there’s nothing to say that will make it make sense, or sum it up, or wrap it up neatly so that everyone can put it in the past and move on.

Anyways! I thought this book was really good, how about you?

I guess the truth is that it’s hard to talk about this book without talking about myself, and I don’t want to do that here? Somehow this book is so personal – I don’t know if that’s just me, but honestly I suspect it’s not. Her experience is very specific (and I think before we go any farther we do have to acknowledge that this is more or less her experience, and fictionalized lightly I think if at all) in the details, but kind of universal in that it’s about the point at which you realize people who are supposed to love you can hurt you, that people who DO love you can hurt you, and that the people you trust most sometimes let you down in the most absolute and devastating way possible.

That is what saves this from being a YA novel, I think. I used to intern at a literary agency, and we got literally a few manuscripts a WEEK that were thinly veiled accounts of horrific childhood abuse. This is not that. There is a kind of pitiless distance there; Allison acknowledges all the feelings and pain that Bone has, and they’re real and not downplayed or blunted, but there’s no kind of cushion given to her in the narrative to ease them, either. In your standard paperback about Troubled Young People, there would be a kind guidance counselor or charitable neighbor or tough-love aunt that saves her. We sort of get close there for a while with Raylene, but Bone goes to Raylene’s house herself, and ultimately, nothing that her aunt does is enough to rescue her.

It doesn’t seem like a stretch to see Raylene as the author, as Dorothy Allison allowing her literary alter ego to comfort a younger version of herself, and to be the supportive shoulder that she may not have had in real life. But that’s what makes this book the thing it is: Allison doesn’t let herself change the story. No one saves Bone; no one rescues her. She has to learn the hard lesson that love isn’t enough, and that the people who love you will hurt you worst of all. This will maybe be a controversial statement, but I’m going to argue that this book isn’t ‘about’ abuse or its aftermath; it’s about this moment:

“You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” Mama sounded like she wanted to cry. I bent forward and pressed my mouth to the blanket edge. “Not gonna tell me anything?”

One of the cows moaned out in the dark pasture. I swallowed again. “I’m waiting for you to go home,” I said. “I’m waiting for you to go back to Daddy Glen.”

There was a long silence. “You think I’m going to?” Mama whispered finally.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

There are a lot of scenes one could spend a lot of time discussing; for instance, the brutal rape, or the birth certificate. For some reason I was really fixated on Alma’s breakdown; she’s not the protagonist, but the image of her kneeling in a field of broken glass is a haunting one, and I come back to it again and again. I feel like if there’s something this book is trying to say about love and heartbreak and the burdens that both of them make us bear, it’s in that scene.

“Oh, but that’s why I got to cut his throat,” she said plainly. “If I didn’t love the son of a bitch, I’d let him live forever.”

And in the end, of course, what stays with you (or at least me) is just Bone, in a rocking chair by herself. Someone with her, but ultimately on her own.

I don’t know. That’s all I’ve got. What do you think?

Riese’s Team Pick: Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender & Sexual Orientation

Usually when somebody tweets at Autostraddle about a book we should download, I prepare myself for the almost certain possibility of a self-published lesbian romance novel with unfortunate computer-created cover art and at least four grammatical errors on the first page. But this wasn’t that, thank the Lord. This was something much better!

Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation was released last year by Derald Wing Sue, Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation is about the damaging consequences of everyday prejudice, bias, and discrimination upon marginalized groups in our society. The experience of racial, gender, and sexual-orientation microaggressions is not new to people of color, women, and LGBTs. It is the constant and continuing everyday reality of slights, insults, invalidations, and indignities visited upon marginalized groups by well-intentioned, moral, and decent family members, friends, neighbors, cow- orkers, students, teachers, clerks, waiters and waitresses, employers, health care professionals, and educators. The power of microaggressions lies in their invisibility to the perpetrator, who is unaware that he or she has engaged in a behavior that threatens and demeans the recipient of such a communication.

While hate crimes and racial, gender, and sexual-orientation harassment continue to be committed by overt racists, sexists, and homophobes, the thesis of this book is that the greatest harm to persons of color, women, and LGBTs does not come from these conscious perpetrators. It is not the White suprema- cists, Ku Klux Klan members, or Skinheads, for example, who pose the greatest threat to people of color, but instead well-intentioned people, who are strongly motivated by egalitarian values, believe in their own morality, and experience themselves as fair-minded and decent people who would never consciously discriminate. Because no one is immune from inheriting the biases of the society, all citizens are exposed to a social conditioning process that imbues within them prejudices, stereotypes, and beliefs that lie outside their level of awareness. On a conscious level they may endorse egalitarian values, but on an unconscious level, they harbor antiminority feelings.

Although I’d honestly like to spend the rest of the week reading this and then interviewing Derald Wing Sue for Autostraddle, I’m too f-cking busy. So I’d like to open this up to you — are you interested in reading this entire book and then interviewing Derald Wing Sue for Autostraddle? We’d give you a month and send you the book. You’ll need to be a self-starter comfortable with all aspects of soliciting and executing an interview. You need a strong background in this kind of material and experience writing outside of an academic context — in other words, you need to be able to write conversationally, not like it’s a thesis.

If this sounds like a thing you want to do, email autostraddle [at] gmail dot com.