Literature Archives

My Misspent Youth

I’ve read Meghan Daum’s essay collection My Misspent Youth at least three times since purchasing it in 2001. I like to give it to other people, too, and have them read it, so then they can talk to me about it as they read it, which gives me the experience of reading it for the first time all over again.

Today Daum’s title essay, My Misspent Youth, popped up on longform.org (A site which curates a feed of long-form journalism/essays, providing four or five stories a day — stories from any point in time covering a wide range of topics. I usually end up reading about 50% of the stories they post every day, which is a lot, and I love it.), and I thought — Oh! Fantastic! I love that essay by Meghan Daum! — and I figured someone had like, re-published it in The New Yorker for some reason (in my imagination, The New Yorker is a big fan of the repub).

But I clicked and it turns out that it’s right there on the Meghan Daum website and maybe it always has been! What a day!

Longform.org describes “My Misspent Youth” as “life and debt, in New York” which I think means it’s timely now (again). Now everybody is talking about money and debt, openly, but when I read this essay for the second time (in 2004, I believe) it resonated anew and seemed a big deal to me because I had a lot of debt and so did most of the creative-minded women I knew but it was more embarrassing than it is now. Women didn’t really write about it and so I rarely read about it, unless it was in retrospect — written by someone on a high horse who’d gotten that high by climbing themselves out of said debt. I think I still have trouble, now, talking about debt.

Anyhow, this is from My Misspent Youth:

“I’ve always been somebody who exerts a great deal of energy trying to get my realities to match my fantasies, even if the fantasies are made from materials that are no longer manufactured, even if some governmental agency has assessed my aspirations and pronounced them a health hazard… it wasn’t until recently that I began to realize that I wasn’t having quite as good a time here as I once did. I say this as someone who has had a very, very, very good time in New York. I say this as someone who has enjoyed a good deal of professional success here, particularly considering that I am so young and committed to a field that is notoriously low paying and unsteady. But low pay and unsteadiness never really bothered me all that much. I’ve historically been pretty good at getting by on what I have, especially if you apply the increasingly common definition of “getting by,” which has more to do with keeping up appearances than keeping things under control.

Like a social smoker whose supposedly endearing desire to emulate Marlene Dietrich has landed her in a cancer ward, I have recently woken up to the frightening fallout of my own romantic notions of life in the big city: I am completely over my head in debt. I have not made a life for myself in New York City. I have purchased a life for myself.“

Also on Meghan Daum’s website, I see, is an interview with Meghan Daum about her book My Misspent Youth. This is the part about the essay My Misspent Youth:

Let’s talk about some of the individual essays. The title piece, My Misspent Youth, caused quite a stir when it was first published in The New Yorker. You were very explicit about the debt you accrued while living in New York City. But you’ve said the piece ultimately isn’t about money. What is it about then?

MD: The chronicle of my debt was really a means of getting into a larger, more universal subject—not that debt isn’t fairly universal these days. The piece is really about my experience trying to live out a particular fantasy I had about being a New Yorker and being a writer in New York and how I was almost financially ruined by simply trying to live what used to be considered a modest lifestyle. Over the last twenty years, the economic situation in New York City, particularly as it’s reflected in the cost of real estate, created a situation where the very people who gave the city is creative and cultural cachet—the artists, the intellectuals, the bohemians—simply cannot afford to live there anymore. I find that immensely sad. The essay, to me, is really a valentine to New York. A sad valentine. Maybe even a “Dr. John” letter.

I thought about this essay a lot a little over a year ago when I left New York for California. I thought about this essay and about Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, which famously declared that New York City is a place for “the very rich” and “the very young.” In the interview I pulled from above, the questioner asks Daum about Didion (see, she thought of it too) —

You dumped New York for Nebraska. To that end, your essay is often compared to Joan Didion’s famous homage to New York “Goodbye to All That,” which she wrote right before she left the city and returned to California. Was her essay a starting point for you?

MD: I am flattered at the comparison. But most of my inspiration for my essay came from Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” which is about a young woman trying in vain to survive in turn-of-the-century New York in extremely class conscious circles. She dies at the end—guess she should have moved to Nebraska!

I still associate this essay with Goodbye to All That, no matter what she says. Here’s something from that:

“[W]hen you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

-Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

joan didion

I got into Meghan Daum in the first place because one of her essays appeared in a book called Personals: Dreams and Nightmares From the Lives of 20 Young Writers, which I bought when I was first getting into writing non-fiction and had already read all the Harpers feature stories available in our school library.

I used her essay to teach creative non-fiction writing to, I believe, high school freshmen in Grayling, Michigan. (In my copy of the book, a post-it note reading “20 copies” remains on the page where her essay begins.)

That essay was called “On the Fringes of The Physical World” and it was about an internet romance but you have to keep in mind that she wrote this in 1997, before everyone had internet romances, and what she was describing was so unique and specific and secret and like it wasn’t necessarily about me but it would be soon. (“I would stay up until 3:00 AM typing with him, smiling at the screen, getting so giddy that I couldn’t fall asleep. I was having difficulty recalling what I used to do at night. My phone was tied up for hours at a time. No one in the real world could reach me, and I didn’t really care.”) It still makes sense today, even though they chatted on America Online and she had no idea what he looked like until she met him.

“All the tangible stuff — the trees outside, my friends, the weather — fell away. I could physically feel my brain. My body did not exist. I had no skin, no hair, no bones; all desire had converted itself into a cerebral current that reached nothing but my frontal lobe. Lust was something not felt but thought. My brain was devouring all of my other organs and gaining speed with each swallow. There was no outdoors, the sky and wind were irrelevant. There was only the computer screen and the phone, my chair, and maybe a glass of water.”

Right? And look, it turns out that this essay, too, exists on the internet, in a place where you can read it, and maybe should.

They interviewed her about this one, too:

The first essay, On the Fringes of the Physical World is about an email relationship. In the wake of internet dating, this is something that’s become very common today. Has your perspective changed since you wrote the essay?

MD: On the Fringes was first published in The New Yorker in 1997 under the title “Virtual Love.” Now that internet dating seems to be the default mode of dating in general—no one looks up from their newspapers in the coffee shop anymore, they just run home to their computers—the essay seems quaint in a way. But it was never really a piece about dating. To me, the point of interest was how email communication, particularly when it involves romance or flirtation, is more akin to 18th century courtship than it is a form of post-modern malaise. The epistolary nature of it reveals our need to go back to a more traditional form of communication. The irony is that modern technology is fostering an old-fashioned tradition.

So there you have it: feelings about money and feelings about the internet, from over ten years ago, that will remind you of how you felt yesterday.

Emily Gould and Meghan Daum, just for funsies

And while we’re talking about class, anyhow, if you haven’t read Sady’s thing on class, you should do that immediately.

Lady Writers Win More Book Prizes, Take Leap In Right Direction

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

The National Book Award finalists, which were announced yesterday, include five authors in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and six authors in young people’s literature. Lady finalists outnumber or equal men in every category except poetry. Finally.

In fiction, four out of five finalists are women, including Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddah in the Attic, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.

In non-fiction, three out of five authors were women, including Deborah Baker’s The Convert, Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.

In poetry there were only two: Nikki Finney’s Head Off and Split and Adrienne Rich’s (!) Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. And in young people’s literature, there were another three: Debby Dahl Edwardson’s My Name is Not Easy,Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again, Lauren Myracle’s Shine, and Franny Billingsley’s Chime.

Earlier this year, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts published a series of charts comparing the gender of book reviewers and of the authors of the books being reviewed across several large publications, including The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, and the Times Literary Supplement. Only The Atlantic (in “Cover to Cover”) and Poetry (in terms of authors reviewed) had slim female majorities. At the time, VIDA wrote, “We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity.”

In Bitch‘s “The Ambition Condition: Women, Writing, and the Problem of Success,” Anna Clark writes that ambitious female authors are often told en masse that they have nothing — or nothing of worth — to say. Clark argues that as a result of gender bias in pop culture, in publishing, and in the recognition of women’s writing through literary awards, ambition is punished and has resulted in a lot of self-deprecation that the industry does little to correct:

“Anyone who’s stepped into a literary community — readings, performances, writing workshops, MFA programs — will testify to the disclaimers that issue regularly from the mouths of women writers in particular. ‘This is just something I thought I’d try,’ and ‘I’m not really a poet, but…’ are words regularly uttered even by those who made drastic life changes in order to carve out time to write. […]

Ambition is a slippery creature in the lives of writers of all genders; no one is safe from feeling uneasy about affirming one’s literary ambitions, and insecurity is the devil of anyone who faces a blank page. But the thing is, women are more likely to be justified in doubting themselves. Yes, a woman is less likely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: in 106 years of the prize, only 11 winners — about 10 percent of the total — have been female. In the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s 60-year history, female authors have snagged the award 27 times. Shaking out 57 years of the National Book Award for Fiction reveals a mere 15 female winners. As for journalists, the gender gap indicates that women are far less likely to land their stories in the nation’s top magazines and newspapers.”

The National Book Award is now in its 61st year, and only 16 of the fiction winners have been women (#16 was Jaimy Gordon, with Lord of Misrule, in 2010). Having a higher percentage of female finalists is no guarantee that the winner will also be female, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Last week, National Book Foundation announced the winners of its “5 Under 35” award. Four of them were women, too. Earlier this year, Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her (fantastic) novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad — a fact that upset some fans of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. (Speaking of Franzen, there was also Jodi Picoult’s white-male-literary-darling-gate, in which she repeatedly and justifiably criticized the New York Times for its love affair with writers who fall into that category almost exclusively.) Egan also won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, which she also beat Franzen for.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Egan said:

WSJ: Over the past year, there’s been a debate about female and male writers and how they come off in the press. Franzen made clear that “Freedom” was going to be important, while others say that Allegra Goodman was too quiet about “The Cookbook Collector.” Do you think female writers have to start proclaiming, “OK, my book is going to be the book of the century”?

JE: Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them. Look at “The Tiger’s Wife.” There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models? I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.

The winners of the National Book Award will be announced November 16. The results of one award, or even a handful of them, however prestigious, are not enough to alter the history of overlooked female authors, journalists, and writers. But it’s a damn good start.

Book About Futuristic SciFi Lesbian Romance from 1906 Exists

Rachel’s Team Pick:

Based on your comments in general on this fine website — and “you” here represents the collective readership — you are into books in general, often scifi/fantasy in specific, and stuff about lesbians. If this is indeed the case, this may be relevant to your interests.

io9 has helpfully unearthed something which they are calling “the first lesbian science fiction novel.” It was written in 1906 by a Turkish Armenian who emigrated to America in 1877 and apparently worked at least some time as “photoengraver.” Neat! His scifi lesbian book, The Anglo-American Alliance, appears to be the only book he’s ever written, and even without the lesbians it sounds neat (minus the clearly and blatantly racist and colonialist parts, which are not neat, even if they are unsurprising given the time period):

The Anglo-American Alliance, set in the future of 1960, has two plots. The first is a detailed history of a 20th century in which the United States and the United Kingdom are the major powers on Earth, colonialism is still in force (Great Britain having colonized central Africa in the 1920s), and technology has advanced in a limited fashion: prenatal sex determination and suspended animation are now possible, a germicide for laziness has been developed, benefitting “the negroes of the Southern States” [sic], and an enormous telescope has discovered “vegetation and moving objects” on Mars and Venus. A Persian astronomer, Abou Shimshek, has found an “ice lens” which allowed him to discover a new planet on which live a race of telepathic, furred, electric-wheel-riding aliens.

I think my favorite part is “set in the future of 1960.”

THIS IMAGE MOSTLY TOTALLY UNRELATED, IS IN FACT A STILL FROM THE FILM "LA NAVE DE LOS MONSTRUOS"

But also: lesbians! Check out:

…the romance between Aurora Cunningham, the daughter of Great Britain’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs,” and Margaret MacDonald, the daughter of an American senator. Aurora is beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, gentle, and has a speech impediment: “a typical English maiden.” Margaret is Aurora’s “very antithesis. She was somewhat taller, with sparkling black eyes and raven hair, of imposing dignity and carriage, but withal the equal of Aurora in the matter of natural gifts and accomplishments. She had, moreover, a captivating frivolity and aggressiveness which almost bordered on masculinity.”

Spoiler alert: Margaret and Aurora are madly in love, but well aware that their romance is too dangerous to carry on publicly. At some point they have to part for some reasons involving graduating from school, and swear to never have an “alliance” with a man but to love each other for ever and ever. UNLESS they can find a “Vivisectionist and Re-Incarnator” and turn one of them (obviously Margaret, were you even reading up above) into a man so they can be married. Which, duh, is what happens. So! The Anglo-American Alliance becomes the “first science fiction novel with a pair of lesbian lovers as heroines, one of whom becomes science fiction’s first transgender hero,” as io9 puts it. Fascinating, no? And this is the first I’ve heard about it! What have you learned today? I learned that I want to see La Nave de los Monstruos.

*feature image also largely unrelated, is in fact still from The Queens of Outer Space.

Marcel the Shell Has Shoes On, Also New Children’s Book

Intern Grace’s Team Pick

About a year ago, this video happened, and unto us a new arsenal of quotes was born:

[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF9-sEbqDvU’]

“Well, you know what they say: Lint is a shell’s best friend.” If I ever get a dog, I’m naming him Alan.

Recently, Jezebel did a super cute interview with co-creators Dean Fleischer-Camp and SNL veteran Jenny Slate, who confirmed a rumor that had been circulating for a while now: There is going to be a Marcel the Shell children’s book. Holy jeez.

Illustrated in photorealistic oil paintings by Amy Lind, the Marcel book promises pearls of wisdom that sometimes kind of remind me of Autowin, to be honest. It has the same sense of sincerity and timing, anyway. I think you’ll like it. You can preview pages on Jezebel or Buzzfeed.

via Jezebel.com

BUT WAIT, there’s more. There’s going to be an audiobook (because let’s be honest, you’ll read it in Marcel’s voice in your head), more children’s books, and a TV show. I will watch the shit out of that. Also, at some point, Marcel is going to sing. According to Jenny, “Marcel is really a good singer, but he doesn’t think he’s a good singer. He he knows that he’s good for his shell but he doesn’t think that he’s good for, like, a person. He makes up a ton of songs.”

The book is available November 1, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon.

Be Still My Heart: Eileen Myles Tackles the Female Life; Black Lesbian Poets Hit the Road

Sometimes there is so much poetry in the world that there’s really nothing left to do but write about it online, y’know? But this one isn’t for my secret tumblr — this one is for you.

The first thing we should talk about is definitely this thing Eileen Myles wrote where she opened up about a book that she read not once, but twice. Kind of like that time I read Skies twice in one night (you should, too). And she comes away from it repeating “in gray there is multiplicity.” It’s a lot to gnaw on, and so she does, in this really lengthy but totally worth it piece for the Poetry Foundation. The book is It Is Almost That, a collection of image + text work by women artists and writers that is edited by Lisa Pearson.

Eileen feels like this book allowed her to “have her own experience” reading it – not a guided read, where someone holds your hand and guides you to a conclusion, but an unguided experience through everyone else’s compiled experiences where in the end, you put the book down and you go into your room and you sit very still and think, “did this even happen? Be still my heart, I have been moved.”

I am convinced that something Eileen Myles loves is something I will love. That is, if I don’t love it already. And we spoke way back about Eileen and her feelings about women writers, and about being one:

…a woman is someone who grew up observing that a whole lot more was being imagined by everyone for her brother and the boys around her in school. If she’s a talented artist she’s told that she could probably teach art to children when she grows up and then she hears the boy who’s good in art get told by the same teacher that one day he could grow up to be a commercial artist. The adult doing the talking in these kinds of exchanges is most often female. And the woman who is still a child begins to wonder if her childhood is already gone because she has been already replaced in the future by a woman who will be teaching children like herself. And will she tell them that they too will not so much fail but vanish before their lives can even begin.

from it is almost that

Eileen Myles is a very strong woman and it’s significant to note that she believes, like she said right there, in the singular experience of being a woman in this place we live in — whatever place that is. And there is a singularity that means when you read Eileen Myles you think “how did this happen to both of us, this life, this thing,” and there is a singularity that means when you read It Is Almost That you will think, “who is this woman and when did we meet?” Eileen feels that way:

So many women live so much of their lives in this other language. Is this fact known? The hands are indeed the major organ. Hands are the truest organ of exchange. The morning in my life I knew I had grown up was when I woke up from a dream and sat in bed looking at mine. What will I do. … More than art is represented here. It seems I know her life.

It is almost that.

But what she loves about It Is Almost That is that there is a singular art of being female, but it is not expressed the same by any two women. It is not a singular word or poem or line or movie or painting or story or set of tears or hand held. It is a multiplicity of how that singular experience lives out in our individual ones. Does any of this make sense? She makes more sense than I do:

Its organization makes the point that a book that gathers female art doesn’t need to be explained away as feminist. It’s something else. Just tell us about female lives and female art careers all in one place, and it’s more like we’re having tea with Pema Chödrön. The inspiration (and the desolation) of the female artist is vibrantly there. Because the frame is image+text, we’re reminded that all of us generally do more. Female artists don’t just stay in their disciplines; we experience, we forage, we play.

We are all different people and we are all different artists. Like snowflakes: no one is the same. There is no other Carmen Rios. There is no other Eileen Myles. It’s tragic, but it’s mostly beautiful.

From It is almost that

But while you’re glimpsing over that article with glossy eyes and a big heart, you might want to also move to Washington, DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and/or Brooklyn for THE REVIVAL, a tour of music, libation, and poetry. It’s brought to you by Cereus Arts — an arts initiative that promotes the visibility of queer women of color through media, literature and community events. Also the tagline on their tumblr is “PAPER OVER PUSSY,” so however that makes you feel.

The tour, composed of black lesbian poets, is described as “salon style.” That means it happens in private residences and you get up-close and personal with real women who wrote your life story and probably will always. Time is running out to buy tickets. So buy your tickets here.

Add these dates to your black book:

+ Thursday October 6 in DC
+ Friday October 7 in Brooklyn
+ Saturday October 8 in Philadelphia
+ Friday October 14 in Chicago

And lastly, I want to leave you with a takeaway from LOVE, the poet, about the tour from last year:

“Last year’s tour was awesome, a really tremendous experience. It was really interactive—the audience was just as much a part of the stage as we were. It was a give and take process that allowed for something different to happen. I think lives were definitely changed.”

Banned Books Week: The Conspiracy to Shield Queer Books From Your Eyes

Feature image via thewheelercentre.com

In the fourth grade, my elementary school become one of the numerous schools around the United States that removed the Harry Potter books from the school’s library. It started when my teacher began reading the first book to the class, and one girl complained that her parents didn’t want her to read it, so the teacher had to put it aside. Fair enough… except that her parents didn’t stop there. Instead they rounded up a group of like-minded parents and complained that the books were so abhorrent they needed to be removed from the school library so that no kid could read it. Even though most parents did not share their opinion, they were loud enough that the school caved, and while the book remained in the library for some reason, we were not allowed to check it out. It seemed so strange to me — that somebody else’s parents, people whose values my parents did not share in the slightest (in fact, my parents found their values completely abhorrent), got to make the choice about what I could and could not read.

Of course, it didn’t matter to most of the kids at my school, whose parents bought them the books anyway. They knew better than to think a book about a fictional wizarding school would lead to kiddie covens, and actually appreciated the way they got previously-disinterested kids reading. But for kids in a household with no books, or no extra money to spend on them, the absence of a book from the library or curriculum means that they might never get to experience that book at all. And that’s unfortunate enough when it’s just a matter of kids being denied the exhilarating experience of reading great works of literature. (The American Library Association’s list of the most frequently-challenged books of the past decade includes almost all of the books that I adored as a teenager.) But when it’s a kid who needs answers about his/her sexuality, or to know that they’re not alone, a school library is an essential resource.

Unfortunately, some of the most challenged books of the past few years have been about LGBT issues. Two of the books on the ALA’s top 10 most-challenged list for 2010, And Tango Makes Three (an adorable picture book about gay penguins) and Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, had “homosexuality” cited as a reason for the parents’ objections. The Advocate has their own list of frequently-challenged gay books for Banned Books Week, including Tango along with two other picture books — King and King and the iconic Heather Has Two Mommies, the first lesbian-themed children’s book — among others. The books of YA author Francesca Lia Block, who frequently addresses gay and trans* themes, have also been challenged in Florida and Arkansas.

via Gothamist.com

In a way, anyone who is familiar with the history of book-banning would not be surprised that parents are up in arms about books that are pro-gay. A quick glance at any of these lists would show you that even 100% heterosexual sex scenes in books can get them challenged, especially if they’re aimed at teenagers, and even if they’re far from titillating. In fact, pretty much every “controversial” topic — from drugs to divorce, religion to politics — is reflected on the list of books that have been challenged in schools. (For example, lest you think that book-banning only comes from those on the right, books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are frequently challenged due to their use of racist language.) Indeed, one argument against censors is that if all of them had their way, there would be hardly anything left — or at least, hardly anything interesting.

The sad side of it is that for every parent who insists that books about drugs, violence or sex are inappropriate for schools, there are many more kids who need those books because those “hot-button issues” are more than issues to them — they’re daily realities. And for LGBT kids awash in a sea of hate at home, in church, at school and even online, libraries are often the one place where they can discover themselves judgment-free. No one but the librarian behind the desk has to know what you’re checking out — and that’s assuming you decide to check it out, anyway. In the fight against anti-gay harassment in schools, we can’t just focus on the bullies in the halls and the cafeteria — but also the adult bullies who want to deny LGBT kids the information that might save their lives.

via American Library Association

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t matter why a book is being banned or what benefit (or lack thereof) might come from reading it. I despise the Twilight books, I think they send a terrible message to young girls, and I’m still dismayed to see that people are trying to get them removed from schools. I still think students should have the right to decide for themselves whether those books — or any books — are worth reading. In my opinion, if you can’t handle different points of view, it shows that you aren’t that secure in your own beliefs – if you were, you’d think they could withstand criticism. It also shows a real lack of respect for — or misunderstanding of — freedom of speech and the press. To quote Noam Chomsky:

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

Chomsky isn’t the only author who has spoken out against censorship. Judy Blume has been an anti-censorship activist ever since her books were first challenged in the 1970s, and she has a great deal of information on her website, including how you can respond to censorship in your community. She also compiled an anthology of works by censored children’s and YA authors, called Places I Never Meant to Be; proceeds from the book help the National Coalition Against Censorship. (If you can’t get the book, at least check out her great introduction to it online.) Also, John Green of the popular YouTube show Vlogbrothers recorded this video when his book, Looking for Alaska, was challenged in a high school in New York State:

But perhaps my favorite quote on the subject is courtesy of my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, another common target of censors. He had this to say about them:

Here is how I propose to end book-banning in this country once and for all: Every candidate for school committee should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked this question: “Have you read a book from start to finish since high school?” or “Did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?” If the truthful answer is “No,” then the candidate should be told politely that he cannot get on the school committee and blow off his big bazoo about how books make children crazy.

If you’re looking for ways to take the fight for freedom to read into your own hands, the National Coalition Against Censorship has a list of things you can do to fight censorship. Of course, the place to start is by reading the banned books yourself. In addition to the aforementioned lists, check out the ALA’s Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century (which also details international challenges and bans) as well as the full map of challenges in the U.S. from the Banned Books Week website. You can upload a video of yourself reading your favorite banned book for this week’s Virtual Read-Out, and have it featured on the Banned Books Week YouTube channel.

What have you done to celebrate Banned Books Week? What does it mean to you?

Autostraddle Book Club #4: We’re Reading Fun Home!

Hey, remember Summer Book Club? Did you read a lot of books? Did you win a prize? (If so, it’s on its way to you!) Summer Book Club was very magical and special but now it’s over. This means that we’re going back to picking a book and all reading it together, and also that the book will turn out to be sort of heartbreaking because it’s becoming apparent that that’s something of, I don’t know, a theme in queer literature? Or maybe it’s just me, la la la! Next time if you want we can read a cookbook or something. Cat Cora probably has one.

Anyways, this is all to say that via a very rigorous scientific process, it has been determined that the next stop on this extra special adventure over the reading rainbow will be Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home! Probably you know about Alison Bechdel! She’s also the author of Dykes to Watch Out For, which you (and I!) obviously love, and responsible for the Bechdel Test, which maybe you’ve heard of?

If Dykes to Watch Out For is an important milestone in representations of queer women and their relationships and families, Fun Home is a representation of Bechdel herself. It’s a graphic novel memoir about growing up with a cold, distant father who’s also a closeted gay. Which complicates the fact that Bechdel herself is, you know, also gay. Also, you can look forward to “challenging references to Albert Camus, James Joyce, and classical mythology” according to Bookmarks Magazine! Here it is in the publisher’s words:

This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It’s a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel’s sweetly gothic drawings and — like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis — a story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic memoir form.

Meet Alison’s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter’s complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned “fun home,” as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift…graphic…and redemptive.

This will be the first graphic novel we’ve read for Book Club, which will be exciting and novel. (See what I did there?) If you haven’t gotten into Bechdel before now, this is a great place to start! Find a copy! We will meet back here to discuss our thoughts and feelings during the first week of November. Synchronize your watches now!

(Un)Official Declaration of Visit Your Local Independent Bookstore Day

Borders is in the process of no longer existing and it’s banned books week. Get thee to a(n independent) bookstore!

photo via flickr.com/saucestin

This morning, Amazon announced its new Kindle Fire Color Tablet and new versions of the Kindle and Kindle touch that are cheaper and shinier than the old versions! (The Fire Color is being called an iPad killer across the Internet, and people probably use iPads for things other than books and magazine subscriptions, but let’s ignore that for a moment.) There are lots of new things to buy that can let you buy books, so why not cut out the middle-electronic-device and celebrate Visit Your Independent Bookstore Day.*

According to the New York Times:

“‘The problem with bookstores is that the margins are pretty small compared to other retailers,’ said Oren Teicher, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a trade group of independent bookstores. ‘That’s why you don’t see lots of our members in big national malls. The rents just don’t make it work.’

Most successful independents occupy spaces that are less than 10,000 square feet, Mr. Teicher said, and do not pay rents that exceed 10 percent of annual sales.”

And, of course, Borders is gone, and even large bookstores are increasingly stocking non-book items to stay afloat, and sometimes you just don’t want to deal with a love-hate Amazon relationship (sample internal monologue: I want the Kindle! Except I can’t get any of the books/magazines I want in Canada. Yet! Also look how cheap this book is! Except that mailing it might have made someone pass out. Also: the DRM thing. But also: shiny!)

It might not be possible to buy every single thing in your life from an independently owned company, because who has the time. But bookstores are fun, and they are even more fun when you don’t have to wade through 12 miles of glorified “homeware” to get to the good parts.

*I just made this up.

**Also ebooks are lovely! This is not an anti-ebook thing, this is a pro-adorable-tiny-bookstores-with-possibly-scowly-owners-and-large-queer-sections-thing.

Photos via Bookshelfporn.tumblr.com.

Missed Connections Might Be The Best Thing About Monday

Rachel’s Team Pick:

There are some really great things on the internet and some really terrible things. Oftentimes, one of the nicer things is Craigslists’ Missed Connections. They’re not perfect; it’s hard to feel really inspired or reassured about the state of the world by “you were smiley and shoe shopping. want to hook up?” (That one is real!) But there are some gems, and there are some things that aren’t gems necessarily but are sweet and earnest and are a nice reminder that sometimes humans notice other humans in a nice way, in a way that says “I wish I knew more about you, girl with the broken strap on her messenger bag, but I didn’t want to bother you, so I’m writing about it instead, very unobtrusively.” It’s how you know that someone, somewhere, maybe really does notice your new haircut and your pretty smile and your sweet-ass sneakers.

But they can be very ephemeral, these missed connections! They age out and disappear, and the fact that someone going to see a Pink Floyd cover band noticed a cute girl looking sad and smoking a cigarette outside a Chipotle and wished they could ask her what was going on is gone forever. Until now, when an enterprising and admirable person named Sophie Blackall decided to put at least some of them into a book, with BEAUTIFUL illustrations.

There are some romances — Cleopatra and Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Bette and Tina — that are momentous enough to be immortalized throughout the ages in art and collective memory. For each of those there are thousands more that never actually come to pass. But there’s something kind of beautiful about those, too. Isn’t it time someone immortalized them?

Blackall’s book is ridiculously cheap on Amazon right now — I seriously feel like you would regret missing this one.

Hot Authors Have a Way With Words, Are Also Really Hot

I’d like to start with this picture of Michelle Tea:

Photographed by BJ & Richeille Formento

I know! This is part of Canteen’s Hot Authors series, for Issue Seven of their magazine. Their premise? Writing is sexy. Writers are sexy. Why don’t we treat them the way we treat other sexy people?

Writers have lost their place as cultural heroes. Instead, we celebrate a numbing parade of overpaid and undertalented actors, musicians, and athletes. Ridiculous amounts of money, publication real estate, and TV time are squandered to promote The Bachelors and the Kardashians and whoever will soon rise vapidly to take their place. Writers don’t traditionally get such crass and ubiquitous promotion. But why can’t they at least try to compete with pop-culture stars on the same terms? Let’s promote novelists as sexy and fabulous! Insist that the PEN Award require a turn on the catwalk! Hold the National Book Awards on a sliver of sand populated by buxom models in horn-rimmed shades; let the champagne pop for the cameras, as Oxford tweed gets wet on Temptation Island!

It’s definitely possible (and sort of fun!) to debate whether talking about writers in terms of their physical appearance is really elevating them to a status they deserve or whether it’s negative attention that writers should be glad they can (at least sometimes) avoid. (Minus the soft-focus cleavage-y jacket photo that female authors are so often blessed with.) But also fun is looking at photos of pretty people and talking about books! Current authors featured on Canteen’s site include Michelle Tea (!!!), Tao Lin, and someone named Porochista Khakpour whom I’ve honestly never heard of but is cute as hell and I think you would really like based on her answer to “what’s the hottest thing you’ve ever read?” There are more authors coming up soon, including one whose book I am coincidentally in the middle of right now, shoutout Rivka Galchen!

I can’t really decide why I’m so into this — looking at mildly to extremely sexy photos of people on the internet has been around for as long as the internet has. But those of us for whom writers are the epitome of smoldering attractiveness, and whose first unrealized fantasy crushes were in YA books instead of 90210, this is like the world finally looking like the inside of our heads already do. And because really that’s the question I secretly always want to ask everyone: what’s the hottest thing you’ve ever read?

What authors do you wanna see making sexy eyes at you? Who would you put in your Hot Authors issue? What’s the hottest thing you’ve ever read?

IMAGE VIA WEHEARTIT

Little Girl, Big City: The Kit

Welcome to Autostraddle Kits, a new series where we tell you all the stuff you need to be/do a thing you want to be/do. Lesbian Activist? Heartbreaking DJ? Wanton Sex Goddess? Food Historian? Sort of like if Amazon’s Listmania and Amazon’s “So You’d Like to Be A…” had a same-sex marriage and then had a baby.

It’s like a playlist, but for all of your senses!

Got a request for a kit? ASS me!

Little Girl, Big City, (No Car) : The Kit

Look at you all grown up with your cute/squalid apartment in a major urban area! Do you have friends? Are they like these friends or are they like these friends? Whether you have no friends, eighteen girlfriends or a pet squirrel, you still need a motherfucking backpack, among other things/ideas. This starter kit will help you get on your way.

“Everything is faster here. There are too many people, jammed on to a tiny island where buildings and streets are crumbling and everyone is in a hurry. Often I hate it here. In the summer the city is sweltering, the air is stale and used up, recycled millions of times by others who have gotten to use it first. Only the poor or left in the city in the summer: anyone with money tries to escape. But in some ways the hard core of humanity who stay behind are the most interesting.”

-Tama Janowitz, Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights

+

Introduction

Felicity

Once upon a time, I was a little girl in a big city called New York and I wrote about it a lot. New York City isn’t the only big city you might be living in — for example, I currently live just outside of San Francisco, though I’m not sure I’m such a little girl anymore. Besides New York, most of my friends live in Los Angeles. I have friends who live in other places too: Portland, Sydney, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Montreal, London and so forth.

This kit is for girls moving to cities where you’re unlikely to drive your car very much, if ever — cities where you can’t avoid other people in your face all the time.

Natalie Portman in "Closer"

“Big city, hmm? Live. Work, huh? But. Only peoples. Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatos, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?”

– Pete, The Muppets Take Manhattan

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1. Handle Your Head

In order to deal with the often overpriced and physically uncomfortable reality of Life in the Big City, one must arm oneself with lots of Impossible Dreams and Great Expectations. These Dreams don’t just fall out of thin air, however, they come from things like Annie Hall or Joan Didion.

And they come from books. As most young women writers will, at some point, live in a city and try to write in that city, there are lots of books about young women living in cities and writing about it.

Here’s some of my (admittedly hyper-New York centric) favorite books to stoke the fire of your city dreams. (Share your own in the comments!)

+ And the Heart Says Whatever, by Emily Gould (2010)

“They smiled at me, I poured myself a glass of the champagne I’d bought and took it over to the window where I stood, not even feeling awkward standing by myself. I could stand by myself at a party. I could decide who I wanted to talk to and when. I had made it this far; it felt like I’d scaled something. In a way I had, and in a way I was at the bottom. But I would climb, and fall, and climb.”

+ Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill (2005)

“I said I’d gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college… I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.”

+ From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E. L. Konigsburg (1967)

Claudia kew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a kpasack o her back… therefore, she decided that leaving home would not jut be running from somewhere but woud be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiul place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

+ The Slaves of New York, by Tama Janowitz (1991) (New York City)
+ Valencia, by Michelle Tea (2002) (San Francisco) (gay)
+ The IHOP Papers, by Ali Liebegott (2006) (San Francisco) (gay)
+ Cool For You, by Eileen Myles (2000) (Boston) (gay)
+ Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, various authors (2009) (Portland) (gay)
+ The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath (1963) (New York City)
+ Manhattan, When I Was Young, by Mary Cantwell (1995) (New York City)

2. Handle Your Shit, Part One

Get a Magic Wallet. It fits in your pocket and, in many ways, its low capacity capability will inspire you to pare down your essentials to your actual essentials.

In addition to the traditional gadgetry (phone, ipod), I recommend a Kindle. Obviously you’ll be using public transportation a lot because you care so much about the environment (just kidding, it’s because you’re poor) and flipping pages AND holding on to a pole is difficult if not impossible.

Kindles don’t come with cases, so you should either get a case or do what I do, which is stick it inside a fuzzy purple sock.

+

3. Getting Around: Bicycle

If you like the phrase “it’s like riding a bike,” then you’ll really enjoy riding a bike! Here are 50 examples.

4. Handle Your Shit, Part Two:

I’m not 100% sure if it’s fair for me to tell you to wear a backpack with your cute outfit. But if your outfit isn’t really that cute, you might as well wear a motherfucking backpack.

via edithpalermo.tumblr.com

I’ve enjoyed the aesthetics of this Puma Bag as well as my Timbuk2 laptop/messenger bag.

But my body (muscles, bones, etc) HATES those bags and it’s always asking me, “hey, you know someone invented backpacks, right?” Then I’m like, “But I’m almost 30 fucking years old!” and then it’s like, “exactly.”

via fcukyall.tumblr.com

Backpacks are especially handy for grocery shopping. Sometimes, if I’m really hungry, I take my hiking backpack to the grocery store.

Quick Trick to Avoid Burglary: In New York, I’d always swing the backpack around like a baby carrier when I was on the subway, because I have PTSD from the graphing calculator stealing bullies in high school. I never wanted to get robbed.

Honestly, I pick a backpack based on what’s on sale at Marshall’s, but if I was a more sophisticated shopper, I’d go for any number of these beautiful backpacks:

Fjäll Räven, Skullcandy, Hurley, Timbuk2, Rick Steves

Backpacks by Skullcandy
Teen Girls’ Clothes by Roxy

Also (and this is especially important if you plan on using a trendy shoulder bag instead of a backpack) my ex-roommate Lo introduced me to the value of bags-within-a-bag, to prevent that pesky “digging in my bag” feeling. These bags can be makeup cases, pencil pockets, whatever. I like to divide by context — things you put in your mouth (gum, pills, granola bars), things you put on your body (makeup, lotion, hairspray) and things you would die without (wallet, phone, keys).

I also got into the habit of carrying around a cheap Nike/Puma/Adidas gymsack within my larger bag — so that I could take a book and a wallet on my lunch break or cart a magazine/ipod/phone around the gym without having to take my entire backpack with me. Similarly, I could put a change of clothing in it.

Or you know, just get this:

I+

5. Friends

Lesbians love cities. Not as much as they love sea mammals, but still a lot. If you’re looking for queer friends in your area, there’s probably an ASS group for that. Apparently there are meet-ups happening all over the world all the time!

6. Drink

Sofia Coppola came out with her own line of champagne a few years back. It’s called Sofia Blanc de Blancs and I’m telling you about it because it looks a lot like Red Bull, therefore enabling you to drink champagne in public places like streetcorners and subways without attracting attention or open container violations.

7. Keeping Track

Get a journal and if you’re really serious about it, you’ll travel with double-sided tape and/or gluestick to easily paste memorable things into the multi-media experience of your journal.

Finally, if you live in New York City and you think it might be time to leave, read Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That and assess the situation like an ADULT. In the meantime, I suggest eating the faces of everyone you see until you explode from it.

“Straightening” Gay Characters in Young Adult Fiction: Are YA Books Keeping You a Secret?

ETA: This post has been updated at 2pm PST to reflect new information regarding the veracity of The Publisher’s Weekly piece.

Once upon a time I lived in New York City and worked at a literary agency where I read a lot of query letters and manuscript submissions. Most of them sucked. We even made a Query Letter Drinking Game to quantify and celebrate the myriad of ways in which a manuscript was capable of sucking.

Consequently, there were lots of reasons to reject a proposal or request a complete overhaul. But “too gay” was never one of them.

So, I was surprised to read in Publisher’s Weekly about two YA novelists (Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith) who’d been told by a prospective agent that s/he’d take on their manuscript “on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.”

Brown and Smith were, unsurprisingly, unimpressed with the offer:

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.

We knew this was a pie-in-the-sky offer—who knew if there would even be sequels?—and didn’t solve the moral issue. When you refuse to allow major characters in YA novels to be gay, you are telling gay teenagers that they are so utterly horrible that people like them can’t even be allowed to exist in fiction.

The authors go on to say that this was not an isolated incident, that other agents had similar reactions.

Any gay person working in media or entertainment might wonder what all the fuss is about — the fact that People With Money don’t think they can sell Our Gay Art is simply a fundamental truth of the creative industries we work in. Your lesbian screenplay remains far more likely to find support on Kickstarter than at The William Morris Agency and gay actors are still told that remaining closeted is necessary to advance their career. As a freelance writer, I got a taste of the journalism industry’s inherent fear of queer content and as CEO of a lesbian website, I’ve ingested an all-you-can eat Old Country Buffet of that ish.

But we expect more from books, don’t we? Due to a number of factors including low overhead, books have always been where minority groups have a voice — they may be hard to find, but they’re out there. Movies need millions of viewers to earn out, books can get by on mere tens of thousands.

Furthermore, Young Adult fiction, generally defined as fiction written for or marketed towards kids between the ages of 12 and 20, is notorious for pushing the boundaries of social acceptability and tackling controversial issues like cutting, drug abuse, incest, teen pregnancy and, of course, homosexuality.

In 1982, young budding lesbians were treated to Nancy Garden‘s oft-censored legendary lesbian YA novel Annie on my Mind, which featured not only a physical and emotional lesbian relationship between two teenage girls, but also a happy ending. It took twenty more years for a primetime television series to feature its first lesbian high school character — Evan Rachel Wood as Jessie on Once and Again. Presently it’s remarkably easy to find a gay teenager on television — Degrassi, Glee, Pretty Little Liars, Skins, 90210 — but that’s a very very recent phenomenon. In fact, the legendary Chuck Bass was gay in the Gossip Girl books and from what I’ve heard of the show, that element of his character never made the full transition from page to stage.

Needless to say, Smith & Brown’s case seems out of step with visible industry trends and my own anecdotal experiences.

I talked to Foundry Media Literary Agent Stephen Barbara, who represents leading YA authors including Lauren Oliver and Lisa Graff, about the PW piece. He pointed out: “It is actually quite fascinating to see the YA world attacked as a stronghold of mainstream conformity when only recently, Megan Cox Gurdon in the Wall Street Journal famously (or infamously) decried YA novels as “So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things.”

Of course, there’s a difference between controversial material and diversity (although LGBT characters are lucky enough to come up in conversations about both) to which Barbara posits: “Are the same editors who publish such edgy material also systematically forcing their authors to make their characters white, straight, and non-disabled? It’s a good question, perhaps more asserted than proved, and it would be interesting if someone were to find an objective way to answer it.”

Pointing out that it’s difficult to draw conclusions from a piece that’s “anecdotal rather than statistics-based,” Barbara told me: “If there is systemic effort to make all YA “straight white,” we should see it reflected in the books published each year. Yet the same article at PW links to a page with a long list of major authors with LGBTQ characters and themes in their novels, and the comments section of the page is full of supportive stories from agents and writers who, encouragingly, have sold or are selling books which do not fit a ‘straight white mold.'”

Malinda Lo, award-winning YA novelist and co-founder of the Diversity in YA blog, didn’t have any trouble selling her lesbian YA novel, Ash, a lesbian take on the Cinderella story: “Commercial publishing in the United States is so gay-friendly it’s practically Gay Utopia. I mean, children’s book editors are, frankly, notoriously liberal! (Or else, open secret, they’re gay!) And they live and work in New York City, which is second only to San Francisco in Gay Utopicness.”

But to see how typical or atypical her experience was, Lo did some number-crunching after reading the Publisher’s Weekly post, and what she found wasn’t great or terrible.

Lo’s graph of the LGBT YA novels published every year from 1969 ’til 2011:

(Sidenote: Due to the two-year publishing cycle, the 2010 downturn is almost certainly a result of the 2008 economic crash)

However, Lo points out that relative to the entire YA market (and its ambiguous numbers), LGBT YA still accounts for less than 1% of the marketplace. To be fair, the percentage of Young Adults identifying as LGBT is probably not much higher.

Literary Agent Cameron McClure of the Donald Maas Literary Agency represents LGBT material by authors including me, John Pitts, Brian Francis Slattery and Elizabeth Sims. She says that “in the adult world, selling gay and lesbians hasn’t been an issue for me. I have an urban fantasy series that features a sword wielding lesbian blacksmith, and a few SFF [Science Fiction/Fantasy] novels that have male gay protagonists, and an old lesbian crime series.”

Brown & Smith’s YA novel was a Sci-Fi/Fantasy post-apocalyptic novel, and McClure notes that at least for adults, “the SFF genre is generally more open to this material than mainstream publishing.”

It’s clear that book publishing is not inherently an unfriendly space, but perhaps it’s just as susceptible to market pressures as other forms of media. Ultimately, it would be irresponsible and counterintuitive for an agent to take on a book s/he knew s/he was unable to sell.

As McClure points out: “YA publishers do have legitimate sales reasons for not publishing books with LGBTQ characters. Agents know this, and know that finding a publisher for this material is harder, and the economy sucks, and everyone just wants to eat and be able to buy shit, so sure, there are going to be agents and other “gatekeepers” who don’t want to bother with this material. Because it will be harder to sell and will sell for less money.”

McClure added that this is true for any minority character, not just LGBTQs. As described in How To Make YA Fiction More Diverse, from The Atlantic Monthly: “Conventional wisdom assumes that white kids won’t pick up a book that has a picture of a person of color on the cover, and there have been controversial incidents of YA covers being “whitewashed” in recent years.”

The LGBTQ minority has some specific challenges, too — many libraries/bookstores won’t stock LGBT YA books, and when much of your target audience is hiding their identity from friends & family, it’s hard to pave a direct route to their wallets or nightstands.

via http://serialcunt.tumblr.com/

Brown & Smith‘s story has now been picked up by tons of LGBT websites as well as The Guardian UK. Needless to say, the story has now made its way to the desk of the unnamed agency in question.

Joanna Stampfel-Volpe works at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation, and says the experience described in the PW piece is “completely untrue... we never asked that the authors change any LGBTQ character to a straight character.” (I recommend you read her entire post explaining what happened, as well as this post from another agent who passed on the manuscript in question for reasons unrelated to sexual orientation.)

She goes on to say:

One of our agents is being used as a springboard for these authors to gain attention for their project. She is being exploited. But even worse, by basing their entire article on untruths, these authors have exploited the topic. By doing that, they’ve chipped away at the validity of the resulting conversation.

And it’s a conversation that should be had.

So let’s continue this conversation, and let’s base it on the truth, which is:

There are not enough mainstream books that depict characters of diverse race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and physical and/or mental disabilities.

Regardless of veracity, the conversation has indeed begun, and perhaps there’s still time for it to be redirected. Gay teens are more visible on television than ever before, and a large reason for that is how vocal the LGBT community has been about needing that representation. Can we make the same change for LGBT literature? I think we can.

I predict, based on nothing besides my own psychic instincts, we’re going to see the numbers of LGBT-identifying high schoolers skyrocket over the next five years and this is a huge opportunity for the LGBT YA market.

Despite Lo’s conclusion that only 25% of LGBT YA books were about girls, I’ve personally found tracking down lesbian themes in YA fiction relatively easy, and there are several websites dedicated to the genre, including Daisy Porter‘s Queer YA and Lee Wind‘s I’m Here, I’m Queer, What the Hell Do I Read? which was very useful for Laneia and I when we put together our two-part series on lesbian young adult fiction for this website.

In another reaction piece to the Brown & Smith debacle, gay YA author Scott Tracey suggests:

If you want more books with LGBT content, buy the ones that are already out there. Show publishers that there’s profit to be made by investing in these books.

I’d add to that to seek out especially books with female protagonists or lead characters. Although we’ve done several features on LGBT YA books already, I’m going to make a concerted effort to amp up that coverage on this website, especially YA novels featuring women of color.

So, all you young adults and appreciators of young adult fiction — buy that shit! Brittany/Santana fan-fic is not the only way to get your literary lesbian on. Here’s a starter list:

Young Adult Fiction

+ Annie on My Mind, by Nancy Garden
+ Keeping You a Secret, by Julie Anne Peters
+ Down to the Bone, by Mayra Lazara Dole
+ Gravel Queen, by Tea Benduhn
+ Empress of the World, by Sara Ryan
+ Ash, by Malinda Lo
+ Pages for You: A Novel, by Sylvia Brownrigg
+ Girl Walking Backwards, by Bett Williams

Happy reading!

Top Ten Fantasy Novels That Have Gay People In Them

There are basically several ways authors can address gayness in fantasy novels. They are as follows:

1. No one is gay, ever.

2. Someone goes through a classic coming out story arc. In the case of fantasy novels, probably they get magic powers in there somewhere. Glitter and fairies, etc.

3. Someone says, “So I like this lady now.” All her friends shrug, and then maybe yell at her for making out with her girlfriend during the zombie apocalypse.

Guess which one happens most frequently.

The following is a list of fantasy novels* that fall somewhere between tangentially gay and really, really gay. They all fall under “read this immediately.”

Santa Olivia, by Jacqueline Carey

Santa Olivia is basically a combination of werewolves and comic book heroes and adorable young gay girl love and vandalism and genetic engineering and government conspiracies and unlikely outcomes and boxing. Also the writing is superb, and if you usually shy away from YA because you don’t like the tone or whatever, you still have no excuse for not reading this book. It is number one on this list for a reason.

Carey is also the author of the Kushiel’s Legacy series, which is definitely not YA, and which is extraordinarily well-written epic fantasy that takes place in an alternate Europe. While the main character’s love interest for most of the series (so far) is a dude, her antagonist / lover / the person who is actually equal to her is a woman. Oh yes: this book also has female characters as both pro- and antagonist. How do you feel about that, Bechdel test.

Ash and Huntress, by Malinda Lo

I’ve written about Malinda Lo before and guess what, she’s still awesome. Here’s why: gay retellings of classic fairy tales that incorporate non-exoticized Asian cultural elements. For instance, here’s what Ash is about:

“In the wake of her father’s death, Ash is left at the mercy of her cruel stepmother. Consumed with grief, her only joy comes by the light of the dying hearth fire, re-reading the fairy tales her mother once told her. In her dreams, someday the fairies will steal her away, as they are said to do. When she meets the dark and dangerous fairy Sidhean, she believes that her wish may be granted.

The day that Ash meets Kaisa, the King’s Huntress, her heart begins to change. Instead of chasing fairies, Ash learns to hunt with Kaisa. Though their friendship is as delicate as a new bloom, it reawakens Ash’s capacity for love—and her desire to live. But Sidhean has already claimed Ash for his own, and she must make a choice between fairy tale dreams and true love.”

China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen F. McHugh

In the world of China Mountain Zhang, the United States has had a communist revolution following an economic crisis and China rules the world. You could describe it as being on the “scifi” end of “scifi/fantasy.” It also won the Lambda, the Hugo, the Tiptree, and the Locus awards, and was nominated for several other things that it probably should have won as well. Goodreads says:

“We enter a postrevolution America, moving from the hyperurbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars. The overlapping lives of cyberkite fliers, lonely colonists, illicit neural-pressball players, and organic engineers blend into a powerful, taut story of a young man’s journey of discovery. This is a macroscopic world of microscopic intensity, one of the most brilliant visions of modern SF.”

Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith

This book is a planet of all women and they are somehow able to reproduce without men (sort of in the vein of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland but without the random essentialization of gender traits and pre-first wave feminism utopian setting). Also, it’s really good, and it won a Lambda Award. From Amazon:

“In Ammonite, the 1994 James Tiptree Jr. Award winner, the attempts to colonize the planet Jeep have uncovered a selective virus that kills all men and all but a few women. The remaining women undergo changes that enable them to communicate with one another and the planet itself, and give to birth to healthy, genetically diverse children. Marguerite Angelica Taishan is an anthropologist who realizes this phenomena and makes the decision to give herself up to the planet to uncover its mysteries.”

The Will of the Empress, by Tamora Pierce

Most of Tamora Pierce’s books are gender-bending rather than gay, and Pierce has basically created a sub-genre of girls dressing up as boys to join the military and/or go on adventures and/or generally kick ass (see also: Eon, by Alison Goodman; Graceling, by Kristin Cashore; Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett, which parodies books like Eon and Graceling; the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld, etc). But there is a gay character in The Will of the Empress, and it’s absolutely not a big deal. She just ends up with this woman, and all of her friends are like, “why didn’t you tell us you liked girls,” and she’s all, “I didn’t really know,” and then they say “ok,” and that’s that. In other words: this is the future of gay in YA, the rest of the world just needs to catch up.

Dead Witch Walking, by Kim Harrison

Harrison’s series, of which Dead Witch Walking is the first book, is just generally fantastic. And the main character’s roommate is a lady vampire who’s in love with her (the vampire, like all the best not Twilight-y vampires, is bisexual). From Amazon:

“Rachel Morgan, witch and bounty hunter with the Inderland Runner Services, is one of the best at apprehending supernatural lawbreakers throughout Cincinnati, but when it comes to following the rules, she falls desperately short. Determined to buck the system, she quits and takes off on the run with an I.S. contract on her head and is reluctantly forced to team up with Ivy, Inderland’s best runner … and a living vampire. But this witch is way out of her league, and to clear her name, Rachel must evade shape-changing assassins, outwit a powerful businessman/crime lord, and survive a vicious underground fight-to-the-death … not to mention her own roommate.”

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins, by Emma Donoghue

This book is a collection of classic fairy tales, retold with a queer or feminist (or both) perspective. Cinderella, with lesbians! Donkeyskin, with feminism! Beauty and the Beast, with lesbians! (Actually, Beauty and the Beast with lesbians is my absolute favourite). You really need to read this.

A Companion to Wolves, by Elizabeth Bear

This book does really interesting things with gender and masculinity of a gay-dude kind. It is also one of the books on this list that is definitively not YA, for those of you keeping track at home. From Publisher’s Weekly:

“The inhabitants of a cold and perilous world grounded in Norse/Germanic mythology depend upon the brutally violent wolfcarls, men who bond telepathically with huge fighting trellwolves, to protect them from monstrous trolls and wyverns from further north. When the northern threat suddenly intensifies, Isolfr, a young wolfcarl, and his wolf-sister, Viradechtis, a Queen wolf destined to rule her own pack, are thrust into key roles in their civilization’s desperate fight to survive. The meticulously crafted setting and powerful, often moving rendition of characters and relationships — human and nonhuman alike — result in a brutal and beautiful novel about the meaning of honor. Never blushing as they consider the ultimate sociological, sexual and moral underpinnings of a what-if often treated as coy wish-fulfillment fantasy, the authors have boldly created a fascinating world that begs further exploration.”

The Last Herald-Mage Series, by Mercedes Lackey

There’s an old series called Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, and Magic’s Price by Mercedes Lackey (her books in general are pretty gay-friendly, and there’s a gay lady couple in one of her other early series, set in the same world. Those books are Arrows of the Queen, Arrow’s Flight, and Arrow’s Fall, but those characters are in supporting roles) that has a gay male main character. He’s a great character and all three books deal with his horrible relationship with his father, as his father had suspected he was gay, hidden its very existence from him, and then disowned him (meanwhile, he’s one of the most powerful mages EVER and works for the king/government). From Amazon:

“Vanyel’s disdain for swordsmanship earns him an unexpected exile — at the High Court of Valdemar under the guardianship of his stern and implacable Aunt Savil, one of the legendary Herald-Mages. A young man’s painful discovery of his own immense talents and his true nature form the core of this richly detailed fantasy, the first in a new series set in the same world as “The Heroes of Valdemar.” Lackey’s talent for characterization lends depth to this coming-of-age adventure that will appeal to most fantasy readers.”

Anything Ever by Tanya Huff (and specifically the Keeper series)

Tanya Huff is a gay Canadian author and I could love her just for that. But that would be a waste, because there are so many other reasons to love her! For instance: lots and lots of kick-ass ladies. Yes, Tanya Huff is a tiny bit fluffy, but she’s really delightful. The first two books of the series focus on Claire, but in Long, Hot Summoning (Seriously! That’s the title!) the focus shifts to her younger and more powerful gay sister, Diana. From Amazon.com:

“Being one of the Earth’s protectors is never easy, but when Claire the Keeper and Austin the cat find themselves in charge of the Elysian Fields Guesthouse Bed and Breakfast, all Hell breaks loose in the form of a gateway residing in the basement.”

*This was originally going to be a list of gay YA fantasy novels, but guess what, there aren’t that many of them.

**Extra special thanks to Jenna for book recommendations.

***Did I miss your favourite gay fantasy novel? Probably! Discuss.

Nina Katchadourian Sorts Books, Makes Them Even More Awesome

Rachel’s Team Pick

In my opinion, one of the best things the Internet brings us, paradoxically, is a way to find out what people are doing and thinking w/r/t the Internet’s predecessor and superior — books. For instance, don’t tell me you didn’t love Better Book Titles, or that you aren’t grateful for the existence of Pottermore. And now, via the internet, I have found out about this super-cool real-world project that artist Nina Katchadourian is doing!

Katchadourian is an artist whose work spans a lot of genres, including but not limited to photography, installation art, and pet taxidermy, and addresses topics such as “confusing animals,” “maps,” and “uninvited collaborations with nature.” But my favorite so far is Sorting Books, where Katchadourian visits libraries and rearranges book titles strategically to recreate new messages. “Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library’s holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.” She began sorting in 1993. We are better off for it.

Nina Katchadourian - Composition from the Sorted Books project C-prints, each 12.5 x 19 inches, 1993

Broad! A Literary Zine For Broads Both Classy and Otherwise

Rachel’s Team Pick:

Hi! I’m not going to pretend like I have, you know, a LOT of friends in real life, but the ones I do have are great, and so I’m going to plug one of them on the Internet. Heather is one of my bestest friends for ever ever, and she has just started a new literary ‘zine that I’m really excited about. It’s called Broad!, and it’s run by and compiled of pieces created by female-identified people. Because “women writers are severely underrepresented in literary publications today, and we here at Broad! think, well… that sucks.” Here’s their manifesto, in case it helps make the point:

A manifesto because we say it is, because stories by women are printed in other magazines less often than men’s, because in the past women have had to publish under male pseudonyms or under no name at all and from what we’re seeing, literary culture in 2011 is less equitable than we’d hoped. Because we write about ghosts, or families, or love, or other implausible things. Because our art is considered “domestic fiction” instead of “the Great American Novel.” This is a manifesto for women writers, for speculative fiction writers, essayists, prose poets, slam poets, people whose work can’t seem to find an audience because the higher powers decided that audience doesn’t exist. People who use pens as if they were syringes.

It does suck! It does. So contribute something! Do it right now! Actually it doesn’t have to be right now, it can be now through October 1, which is the submission deadline. Read a little more about what Broad! is looking for here, and then send it to broadzine [at] gmail [dot] com. But first you have to make something! Are you doing it? Say yes.

Preview Of Laurie Weeks’ Zipper Mouth: Gay, Obsessed, Addicted

Zipper Mouth, a debut novel from Laurie Weeks, is about being gay, obsessed, and addicted within the 90s New York art scene.

According to Goodreads:

“In this extraordinary, often hilarious debut novel, a portion of which was selected by Dave Eggers for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, an unnamed girl struggles on desperately limited means to show up for the demands of doing laundry, recreational drug abuse, and battling the obsession of an unrequited love in the lurid downtown New York City art scene of the 90s. With comic randomness, an alternating erotic current pulls the reader through the semi-autobiographical boredom of temp job scenarios, painful hangovers, ranting letters to celebrities like Judy Davis and Sylvia Plath, and nightclubbing epiphanies, all shot through with glimpses of a small-town childhood, its isolation fraught with an intense crush on Vivien Leigh and night terrors featuring The Crazy Dad. A doomed fixation on a straight friend, with its attendant frustration and humiliation, forms the structuring theme running through this unforgettable novel.”

Sounds good, right? That depends. Most of Zipper Mouth revolves around two things: obsession and drugs. The parts about obsession are almost endearing and definitely a fairly good depiction of being youngish and in love with a straight girl. The parts about drugs read like a purposefully obtuse laundry list of pharmaceuticals. While it is admittedly refreshing to read a story of addiction that doesn’t focus mainly on eventual redemption, the unnamed protagonist’s complete lack of self-awareness and reflection seems tiresome, not to mention forced and false, since there are plenty of both of those things in other parts of the book.

Weeks’ work has previously appeared in Vice, The Baffler, Nest, Index, Art on Paper, Out, LA Weekly, and Mirage/period[ical], and in the anthologies The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008. She also contributed to the screenplay for Boys Don’t Cry, which you may have heard of.

Zipper Mouth has also received mostly positive critical praise. Eileen Myles, author of Inferno, said that, “Laurie Weeks’s Zipper Mouth is a short tome of infinitesimal reach, a tiny star to light the land.” Michelle Tea, who co-founded Sister Spit (which Laurie Weeks has toured with) and writes poetry, said that, “Zipper Mouth is a brilliant rabbit hole of pitch-black hilarity, undead obsession, the horror of the everyday, and drugs drugs drugs.” It may or may not go without saying that if you like Michelle Tea, you might like this book (and that if you don’t, you wont). And Publishers Weekly called it “brash, exuberant … Dreamy, impressionistic, and rapturous, this brief volume is an ecstatic love story.”

Zipper Mouth is really, really sweet in places and really, really obnoxious in others. It’s coming out from Feminist Press this October. And if you can’t wait that long to have opinions about it, here are two of my favourite parts:

Excerpt 1:

“I decided I was in love with this girl so I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I smoked cigarettes and lay on the bed. I wanted her to drop by in the afternoon for a nap. It didn’t seem likely and this was part of my pleasure, like the agony of fixating on a dead movie star the way I’d become obsessed at age fifteen with the long-decomposed actress Vivien Leigh, a.k.a. Scarlett O’Hara, and her later, more bummed-out incarnation, Blanche DuBois. Instead of rock stars, I had pictures of Vivien all over my room, glossy publicity shots and film stills I’d ordered or simply received in the mail, gifts from sad obsessives who advertised, as I did, in the back pages of Nostalgia, Illustrated, a creepy classic-movie magazine for shut-ins and losers that I’d stumbled across on the racks at Consumer’s Supermarket while leafing through Seventeen and holding my breath against the stench from the sugar beet factory reigning over adjacent fields. At night I lay awake in sadness, grieving that Vivien had died alone, coughing herself to death consumptively long before I was old enough to intervene. “She was a great actress,” I said morosely to my friends, trying to visualize her having sex with Laurence Olivier, an image not so easy, really, to wrap your mind around. Part of her allure was the fact that she spelled “Vivien” with an e, not an a, the e more refined and seductive, the a somehow thudding and crude, witness the barbarian Vivian Vance.”

Excerpt 2:

TIMES YOU HAVE TOUCHED ME

1. You were showing me how to do a yoga stretch. I was standing up and you placed your palm on the back of my neck, the tip of your finger at the end of my tailbone. Imagine my surprise. “It’s okay,” you murmured. Just relax.” I held my breath. “It’s just a technique,” I told myself, “not an emotion.” Gently you bent my spine forward and my vertebrae sizzled and went up in a puff of smoke where you touched it.

2. There are no other times. Except for that incident where you applied some cherry colour to my lips. We were dressed in matching outfits for some trip to the disco and I’d forgotten my lipstick. “Here,” you said. “Try this new color.” You wore black eyeliner and leaned in. Impulsively I said, “Put your whole hand inside my mouth.” You laughed. You held my head and stroked the red stick against my lips.

3. That’s a lie. I was sliding lipstick across another girl’s lips at some dance thing, a sexy girl to be sure. I liked flirting though she made me nervous. “Put your whole hand inside,” she said, and I laughed. Do I wish I’d said that to Jane or not?

Eileen Myles Believes In Evil But Not Witch Hunts

Rachel’s Team Pick

Sometimes Eileen Myles writes a thing and you can’t explain it or even talk about it very intelligently because she already used all the words that you would want to say. Sometimes I think Eileen Myles is the smartest person I (don’t) know. Sometimes Eileen Myles sounds like a total wingnut which is good because so do all of my favorite people.

All this is my way of telling you that Eileen has written a thing, it’s not poetry, it’s like an essay I guess and it’s called “School for Witch Burners.” It is about, in no particular order, 1) Harvard 2) Elizabeth Warren, a teacher at Harvard and one of the creators of the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau 3) the 2011 Anthony Hopkins film The Rite 5) the 2010 film The Social Network 6) witch hunts.

Maybe it won’t change your life, whatever, I didn’t even see The Social Network, but I guess I just felt really dumb upon reading this for not knowing it needed to be written, but also really glad it was. I don’t know what part to quote, so I’m just going to pick the part I liked the best:

I wanted to see The Rite because I miss my simple beliefs in exorcism. I believed in exorcism as a child and I also feared that I would tip unwittingly towards the side of Satan. Consuming The Rite the other night in my artist colony single bed I thought to myself quietly that perhaps I am Satan. I have lazily and simply made room for him and this is my life. Placidly evil. Eating peanuts, farting and drinking tea in bed… The Social Network is not frank about evil. It really doesn’t know. Do you? Is there evil in the world. Well just watch a government divided between those who want to heap more opportunity on the rich and openly sabotage the middle class, the “working people” (is any one? Working, I mean) in America and the poor—and the poor and the working people by and large do not know their true names. Most of them except for the most frankly indigent and drug dealers will proudly call themselves middle class—isn’t that in fact a big part of the problem. So bear in mind that in The Rite we learn that to destroy evil—and Satan, we must learn his name. The Catholics still have that down at least.

So if you were wondering on a Thursday afternoon if any smart women still have smart things to say about other smart women, if poets still have anything relevant to say, or just what Eileen Myles watches on Netflix, hey, this one’s for you.

100 Awesome Magazine Covers Starring Lesbians

So, as a magazine junkie, I’m a sucker for those “50 Most Iconic/Controversial/Well-Designed Magazine Covers” lists that seem to come out near-monthly. I don’t know why I click on them every time, as it’s always the same magazines, it’s not like one day I’ll wake up and be like, OH MY GOD JOHN AND YOKO IN ROLLING STONE I DIDN’T SEE THAT ONE COMING.

So I thought I’d make a list of the 50 Most Iconic GLBTQ Magazine Covers.

The problem is, it turns out, that people really don’t like to put ladies on magazine covers and finding 50 ICONIC covers was hard! Turns out that by “gay,” everyone means “dudes.” I know this comes as a giant surprise to you, my friends of all genders and sexual orientations — but literally every major mainstream-magazine’s BIG STORY about gay people had DUDES on the cover with a special emphasis on white dudes. Whether it was published in 1977 or 2011, stories about gay people in genreal are illustrated by dudes.

On top of that, so many of the iconic “celebrity” covers that sprang to mind — Adam Lambert in Rolling Stone, Clay Aiken/Lance Bass in People, Neil Patrick Harris in New York Magazine — were gay guys. And the last thing I wanted to do was make an OUT magazine-esque list (read: 80% men) for this fine lesbian publication.

Consequentially, I decided to leave men out of it altogether and just focus on Lesbian-Containing magazine covers from all over the newsstand, whether iconic or just emblematic of the times or just good-looking. This process took me literally ten days.

And I am proud to present:

+

100 Lesbian Magazine Covers

criteria: all of these magazine covers are from print magazines AND every cover, if it includes recognizable people, contains at least one woman who identifies as gay/bi/queer/lesbian or did so at the time of the magazine’s printing. except michelle rodriguez, but we had to include that cover b/c that’s the one where everyone thought she came out even though she didn’t come out.

Check yourselves out, you crazy diamonds! [Click to enlarge/see the gallery. There are two 50-photo galleries below for your delight.]

: Time, 1933

: GO!, 2007

: Cherrie, 2007

: The Advocate, 2007

: Diva, 2007

: Go, 2006

: The Advocate, 2006

: Curve, 2006

: The Advocate, 2005

: Velvetpark, 2005

: City Paper, 2005

: The Advocate, 2005

: New York Magazine, 2004

: The Advocate, 2004

: City Paper, 2004

: The Advocate, 2003

: On Our Backs, 2003

: Girlfriends, 2003

: People, 2002

: Curve, 2001

: Out, 2000

: Curve, 1999

: Girlfriends, 1999

: Entertainment Weekly, 1998

: Out, 1998

: Los Angeles Magazine, 1998

: Out, 1998

: Time, 1997

: The Advocate, 1997

: The Advocate, 1997

: Out, 1996

: The Advocate, 1996

: New York Magazine, 1995

: Advocate, 1994

: Vanity Fair, 1993

: Newsweek, 1993

: OUT, 1993

: Outweek, 1991

: Sports Illustrated, 1990

: OUTweek, 1990

: New York Magazine, 1979

: Newsweek, 1977

: Musica, 1977

: Time, 1977

: Amazon Quarterly, 1973

: The Furies, 1972

: Motive, 1972

: The Ladder, 1963

: Jet, 1964

: Velvetpark, 2007

: Diva, 2008

: People, 2008

: GO, 2008

: Girls Like Us, 2008

: GO, 2008

: GO, 2008

: Jane and Jane, 2008

: GO, 2008

: LOVE, 2009

: Out, 2009

: She, 2009

: Diva, 2009

: Diva, 2009

: Diva, 2009, Clementine Ford comes out

: Marie Claire, 2009

: Gay Times, 2009

: FlawLes, 2009

: Jane and Jane, 2009

: US Weekly, 2009

: Curve, 2009

: The Village Voice, 2009

: g3, 2009

: Ebony, 2009

: Bust, 2010

: Working Mother, 2010

: Curve, 2010 – Chely Wright comes out

: GO, 2010

: Bostone Globe, 2010

: Ladie’s Home Journal, 2010 – Jillian Michaels Comes Out

: Julie Goldman, 2010

: LOTL, 2010

: Q Magazine, 2010 – Lady Gaga wearing a strap-on

: Riverfront Times, 2010

: Sass, 2010

: SF Weekly, 2010

: Diva, 2010 – Lady Sovereign Comes Out

: The Stranger, 2010

: Alice, 2011

: Angeleno, 2011

: Curve, 2011

: Dirty Queer, 2011

: g3, 2011

: Ikons, 2011

: Out Northwest, 2011

: Maui Time, 2011

: Bound, 2011

: The New Yorker, 2011

: The Stranger, 2011

: Q Notes, 2011

Magazines Featured in this Gallery:
+ GO! Mag
+ DIVA UK
+ Curve
+ The Advocate
+ OUT
+ LOTL
+ She
+ FlawLes
+ Alice
+ g3 mag
+ Dirty Queer
+ Maui Time
+ The Stranger – Seattle
+ qNotes
+ Girls Like Us Magazine
+ Out Northwest
+ Velvet Park
+ Cherrie
+ IKONS
+ Riverfront Times
+ SF Weekly
+ Boston Globe
+ People

Out of Print:
+ Vintage lesbian magazines including The Furies can be found at rainbowhistory.org
+ Outweek
+ Girlfriends
+ Jane and Jane
+ BOUND
+ On Our Backs

For more magazine cover fun, visit Newmanology!

On “Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels”

via www.feministpress.org

I started reading Justin Vivian Bond’s Tango on the BART en route to San Francisco Pride and I can’t remember if I finished it that day or the next day but it was one of those books where reading it felt like eating it. It was tiny, I swallowed it whole. It felt meta, almost, V writing about ADD while I remarked to myself how easy it had been to maintain focus while reading this book. I liked it. I related to it, unexpectedly. There’s some kind of universal “growing up queer” sentiment V touched on and rolled around in, that specific way we perceive the world as children who know they are different and often aren’t entirely sure why.

But before we get more into the book — at which point I will turn over this post to Annika and Sebastian — a little background —

Justin Vivian Bond is a transgender actor, performance artist, singer-songwriter and “a fixture of the New York avant garde,” best known for playing Kiki in the drag cabaret act Kiki and Herb, which ran for nearly 14 years. If you feel like you’ve seen V before, it may have been in Short Bus. V was nominated for a Tony in 2007 and has won an Obie Award, Bessie Award and Ehtyl Eichelberger Award. Bond retired Kiki — “an elderly alcoholic woman who would perform covers of pre-existing songs in her own distinct style” — in 2004 and went on to a prosperous solo career, eventually releasing a solo album called Dendrophile in 2011. V’s book Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels, comes out this September.

(-Riese)

ANNIKA: Let me first just say that I have so much respect for Justin Vivian Bond. I struggled enough with coming out as a binary-identified trans girl in San Francisco in 2011; I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like to be a gender-variant child in a small town in the late 1960’s, especially since V’s gender identity and expression don’t fit neatly into the societal categories of male or female. As a trans* activist, I tend to get so focused on the current struggles for equality that I often forget how much progress has been made in the past few decades. We are truly indebted to an older generation of queers like Mx. Bond, for fighting the battles that helped pave the way for where we are today.

In the final pages of Tango, Mx. Bond imagines what childhood would have been like if V had never been the target of transphobia or homophobia. V recalls a recent dream V had “that a time will come when queer children can be themselves without any questions, able to experience the same dramas, heartaches, and joys that any other kids would have to go through, no more and no less.” This “luxury of normality,” as V describes it, really resonated with me. As a trans girl, I feel like I missed out on a “normal” childhood and adolescence. I sometimes feel sad when I see a young girl in a cute dress and bows in her hair, because she is enjoying a simple pleasure that I wanted so badly as a child but couldn’t have (of course, it is possible that this presentation is not in line with their true gender).

sometimes feel sad when I see a young girl in a cute dress and bows in her hair, because she is enjoying a simple pleasure that I wanted so badly as a child but couldn’t have.

I found Tango very engaging because it allowed me to compare my experiences as a trans child with Justin Bond’s. For V, being denied the “luxury of normality” as a child meant that V was the target of homophobic and transmisogynistic ridicule, as well as a source of parental anxiety, because of V’s overtly feminine presentation. For me, it meant withdrawal and suppression of my true nature. I can’t pinpoint a specific incident that made me realize that I needed to hide who I really was, but I had definitely learned it by the time I was in first grade- the same age that V was proudly wearing V’s mother’s lipstick to school. I loved lipstick too, but I only indulged when I had the house to myself, making sure to wipe all traces of this forbidden pleasure from my lips by the time my parents got home. When I finally came out to my family earlier this year, the near-universal reaction from my relatives was “We had absolutely no idea.” My father even tried to use the fact that I hid it so well as proof that I couldn’t have possibly felt this way since childhood.

When reading Tango, I found myself wondering, “Why did I withdraw when V did not?” To be honest I’m not really sure. Maybe it comes down to differences in our personalities. I tend to be rather demure and soft-spoken, whereas Justin often found vself at the center of attention as a child. Maybe I just didn’t have the courage V did to be myself. I don’t think I would have been able to handle walking down the hallway in 8th grade like V did while other students jeered and hurled insults like “faggot” at me. I much preferred the safety of invisibility, even if it meant that I was miserable inside. Maybe the difference was circumstantial. Justin writes that as a child “I was my mother’s most glamorous accessory…I was mostly surrounded by women and girls…I was raised by girls and I liked it.” The opposite was true for me. Most of my preschool friends were girls, but I didn’t have any sisters or female cousins to look up to, and my mother wasn’t the least bit interested in anything you would describe as “glamorous”. My father was eager to teach me, his first-born child, how to be a man. When my family moved to suburbia when I was 8, my female friends at school were replaced by the neighborhood boys, who wasted no time in socializing me to not be “such a pansy.”

Or perhaps the difference between the way Mx. Bond and I experienced our respective trans* childhoods lies in sexual attraction. Tango is rife with V’s intimate escapades with boys V’s age, which are often described in graphic detail. By acting on V’s sexual urges, Justin was already engaging in “deviant” behavior, and it’s possible that this transgression of societal rules allowed V to do the same with regard to V’s gender expression. By contrast, my sexuality fit neatly into the heteronormative narrative that everyone expected for me. I was allowed, even encouraged, to express my attraction for women, since everyone viewed me as a good straight boy. As a teenager, this societal reinforcement made it a lot harder for me to come to terms with the fact that I was both attracted to girls and felt like one inside. Once again, I chose suppression where Justin did not.

So while Mx. Bond and I often dealt with being trans* in very different ways, there are a few common themes found in both of our experiences of childhood- something that all queer kids can probably relate to to some extent: feelings of confusion and isolation, of not fitting in, of wondering we why aren’t “normal” like everyone else. I recall walking to school at age 14 on a particularly dreary Seattle morning, and feeling like my entire existence was a façade. Like my life was a movie and I had to act out the role in which I had been cast, even if everything felt fake and meaningless. I wondered, “Is this all there is to life?” Ten years later, I can thankfully say that the answer is no. Now that I am no longer pretending to be something I’m not, I am able to feel truly alive and authentic for the first time. Justin’s story has a happy ending as well. V now tours the world as a successful performer and cabaret artist. For both of us, things really did get better. Hopefully though, one day Mx. Bond’s dream will become reality, and the next generation of queer kids won’t have to wait until adulthood to feel happy and loved as themselves.

Photo by Amos Mac

SEBASTIAN:I admittedly am lacking expertise in the area of queer memoirs. Keep that in mind when you read my next statement:

I have never before read something that so resonated with not only my desire to be seen as normal but also my experiences with the homophobia, transphobia, and gender policing that tried to mold me into what was seen as normal.

At the conclusion of the book, Justin Vivian Bond recounts a dream V had in which V sat at a neighborhood picnic, with long hair (noting that V was not a girl in this dream, just allowed to express V’s natural femininity), next to the boy V had been having a sexual relationship with. In the dream no one was passing judgment or telling Justin Vivian how to look or act. V could just be – a normal teenager, “nothing more nothing less.” V called it “the luxury of normality” – what V’s experience would have been like sans the homophobia and transphobia.

In adolescence, as I was first exploring the concept of identity and what mine might be, I discovered two intense themes. The first was my distaste for conformity. The second was my desire to not be different. It was confusing because a) it seems paradoxical and b) I didn’t have any sense of my gender identity to help give this some meaning.

What I think I was seeking was a way (or place) to truly be myself but have that be normal. And in the heteronormative, cis-centric world we live in, I think that most trans and queer people can relate to this (too often unfulfilled) desire. I was seeking “the luxury of normality.”

The book reads sort of like one side of a conversation – if you’re used to having conversations with nostalgic people seriously suffering from attention deficit disorder.

So Tango is the story of a kid who isn’t normal and struggles because of it. Not only is Justin’s struggle external (battling with parents, facing threats in hallways), but it is also internal, as V is trying to figure out who V is, what V likes, what V wants to become without any sort of model narrative or even language to serve as a guide.

Before I go on about how great this book is, I want to be honest: the first time I read it, I didn’t like it that much. I think I went into it hoping that as a memoir from Justin Vivian Bond, someone who has navigated the world “between” genders with grace and poise, and even glamour, that Tango would offer some real insight into gender and gender identity. One friend who read the first half or so said it seemed like “a lot of regurgitation without reflection.” And that’s how I initially felt – I wanted V to tell us what it all meant, damnit! Plus I had a hard time wading through the stories of sexual rendezvous between teenage boys.

But then I read it again. And I realized my expectations of the book were all wrong. It’s not a memoir of Mx. Bond’s life or career or a study of how V bends gender– it’s a memoir of V’s childhood. It’s not supposed to be some insightful reflection or an educational piece.

It’s a story (well lots of stories) about a kid who is still trying to figure shit out… without the luxury of normality.

And Mx. Bond is really good at telling stories. The book reads sort of like one side of a conversation – if you’re used to having conversations with nostalgic people seriously suffering from attention deficit disorder. One of my favorite quotes illustrates this style:

“There was a lot to think about. First of all, if I had ADD it would mean I would have to get a prescription. I hadn’t had a prescription for anything other than antibiotics for an occasional strep throat or passing gonorrhea since I was a child. Even then I didn’t have to take any anything for an undetermined period of time. Could I afford ADD medication? Perhaps ADD was an affliction to be indulged in by people of a higher economic bracket than mine. Maybe I was just telling my friend’s father these things because I wanted to keep taking Adderall. Maybe I was unwittingly becoming a speed freak. Maybe the romance of being like so many of my fallen idols – Judy Garland, Edie Sedgwick, Neely O’Hara – was getting the best of me.”

It bounces around, loosely following a narrative path from V’s early childhood dabbles with femininity (and ultimately punishment and restrictions following those), through pre-adolescent friendships and sexual exploration with boys, through school life and authority figures that offered no guidance or refuge, to adolescent sexual relationships (with a young man and a young woman) that provided both confusion and enlightenment.

I think the brilliance behind this is Justin’s ability to express the thoughts V had at the time the stories were taking place. At one point early in the book Justin goes on a tangent about Sandy Duncan (V’s favorite TV star at the time), writing, “I wanted glasses too. I wanted to be just like Sandy Duncan and survive a brain tumor so that everyone would know what I was made of.” I felt like Mx. Bond’s 10-year-old self had written this. And we see the narration mature throughout V’s memoir. Observations and expressed desires become less childlike. Justin also loses some of V’s fantasy. In the beginning Justin talks of waiting until V’s breasts come in, or how V will dress upon reaching womanhood. Though there is no story depicting when V realized this would not happen naturally, there is a turning point in the narration, as V later just dreams of waking up with breasts or long hair or a closet full of glamorous dresses.

But this isn’t a book report is it? So I should stop getting into so much detail. It’s just the more I think about it the more I really like this.

In the first Chapter, Mx. Bond states that V “was attracted to outsiders” and that is where most of the book’s entertainment comes from. Justin Vivian seemed to find (or perhaps attract) all the eccentric characters in V’s small world, and in Tango, V manages to relay all their quirks and the eccentricities of their encounters and situations so well. It reminded me of a David Lynch film where everybody under the surface is a total weirdo and Justin Vivian Bond could see through whatever veil they were wearing, see them for the characters they really were. This is one of the things that makes the book so easy to read – the characters (who are real) draw you in.

A couple of times in the memoir, Justin Vivian mentions that V is 46. What you might not know about Mx. Bond is that V is a cabaret star and musician, had a major role [playing my favorite character – V’s self, really] in Shortbus, and has collaborated/is collaborating with some of the greatest minds in art and performance. So Tango becomes a survival story to a certain degree. You read this knowing that not only has V survived, but Justin Vivian Bond has thrived. Interestingly, though, V’s story is paired with another narrative – the story of V’s ex teenage lover, David, whom Justin recently learned had gone crazy and was arrested multiple times, the latest under the assumed identity of “Tango.”

I think it is really significant that the title of the book is an homage to V’s lover. By using the title Tango, Mx. Bond is saying that David’s story, that of a confused kid seeking normality and comfort but never finding it, never finding himself, ending up truly lost under false identities and criminal charges, is just as significant as V’s own.

“Our parents were aspiring toward safe, secure, middle-class normality… As much as I despised David at the time and as difficult as it was for me then, I realize now that because he and I were so different from what our parents had hoped for and what society had expected, we became targets, lightning rods for the dissatisfaction of those around us. We were the victims of people who felt the shifting sands of identity and sexuality, and who were sure they could manipulate, cajole, and torture their children into being what they thought was necessary for the survival of some misguided social contract that we are all supposed to sign on to.”
They both start out in the same battle against (and for) normality. And there was/is something in Justin Vivian’s spirit that made V victorious where many others (like David/Tango) fall. I think that “something” comes out in the pages of Tango.

I’ve written too much. But really, this book is worth your time. I recommend reading it at least twice.

PHOTO BY LIZ LIGOURI