Shanah Tovah, Here’s 36 Influential Jewish LGBTQ Women & Non-Binary Humans!

Last night marked the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which marks the start of the Jewish High Holiday Season, previously known to me as a child as “a very short time period in which I was forced to wear a dress and panty hose more than once.” Today we eat apples & honey, sound the shofar, and enjoy festive meals. The ten days that span the High Holidays are a time for reflection and introspection on the past year, particularly on all the things we did wrong that we need to repent for, as well as planning for the year ahead. Next week, for Yom Kippur, we eat absolutely nothing and then we eat a lot at once and also we think about how so many people we love are dead. So this week, I bring you a look at just some of the MANY incredible Jewish LGBTQ ladies & non-binary people who have done cool things in the world and will continue to. Next week, we’ll look at just some of the incredible Jewish LGBTQ ladies who did cool things in the world and then died. It all goes with the theme.

7.2% of U.S.-based Autostraddle readers (and 6% of all our readers) are Jewish, according to our most recent Reader Survey, which’s a lot — according to the Pew Research Center, only 2% of Americans overall are Jewish. (Even more surprising is that whereas Pew found 70.6% of Americans are Christian, only 14.4% of U.S. Autostraddle identify that way.) From Gertrude Stein to Ilene Chaiken and Anne Kronenberg to Roberta Achtenberg, Jewish women have been at the forefront of so many LGBTQ+ cultural and political movements and communities. Covering the breadth of our contributions would take endless volumes of books. Instead, I’ve made you what I might consider a leaflet.

My goal with this list is to showcase a range of Jewish-American LGBTQ women and non-binary people — people from a range of professions, ages, passions, backgrounds, denominations, political beliefs, fame levels and lifestyles. It’s not a list of the most famous, most important, most influential, or most inspirational. It’s not a “look which famous queers are Jewish!” list. (BUT if it was — did you know that Suze Orman and Peaches are Jewish? I did not!)

The requirements for this list were “public figures who have openly discussed their Judaism and their sexual orientation or gender identity in internet-accessible conversations” — requirements that were met by hundreds of people! So I just went for variety with a dash of the arbitrary. The inclusion of a person on this list should not be seen as  an endorsement of any political or other ideologies ever expressed by said person.

Okay, now that we’ve gone over the rules, let’s begin.

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Evelyn Torton Beck, 84 // Professor, Scholar & Activist

Beck, born in Austria, is a child survivor of the Holocaust and the editor of the groundbreaking book Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, published in 1982. As a founding member of the National Women’s Studies Association, she helped start its Jewish and lesbian caucuses. She’s written extensively about homoeroticism in Kafka’s work and Frida Kahlo’s bisexual identity. In The Disappearing L, Bonnie J. Morris writes:

“By 1981, I was well acquainted with Jewish feminists who talked about feminism and Jewish lesbians who talked about lesbianism — but where were the Jewish lesbians who actually referenced their Jewishness? And that is why Evi Beck’s book, Nice Jewish Girls, was like an explosion of chocolate. It was a sweetness. It was a luxury. And we couldn’t get enough of it. We had to have more.”

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Joan Nestle, 77 // Historian, Author & Activist

Joan Nestle’s seminal lesbian experience was with a girl named Roz, the daughter of a Kosher butcher in Queens. 55 years later, Joan Nestle is a living lesbian legend, best known for founding the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and for editing The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. In the preface to her 1987 anthology A Restricted Country, she wrote of her work as an activist and a historian:

“…my body made my history—all my histories. Strong and tough, it allowed me to start work at thirteen; wanting, it pushed me to find the lovers that I needed; vigorous and resilient, it carried me the fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery. Once desire had a fifties face; now it is more lined. But still when I walk the streets to protest our military bullying of Central America or the Meese Commission on Pornography or apartheid in South Africa and here, my breasts and hips shout their own slogans. As a woman, as a Lesbian, as a Jew, I know that much of what I call history others will not. But answering that challenge of exclusion is the work of a lifetime.”

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Lillian Faderman, 77 // Historian & Author

Surely the most widely read lesbian historian I can think of, Faderman’s Odd Girls & Twilight Lovers is just one of many queer retrospectives on American and European history. In My Mother’s Wars, Faderman aims to understand her mother’s life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York who had lost her family in the Holocaust.

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Barbra Casbar Siperstein, 75 // Businesswoman, Politician & Activist

In 2009, Siperstein became the first openly transgender member of the Democratic National Committee, appointed by then-chairman Tim Kaine. Siperstein changed her legal name to Barbara in 2007, and in 2008 participated in a ceremony at her New Jersey synagogue to change her Hebrew name, too, to Baila Chaya. Her Rabbi suggested the naming ceremony, citing the 2003 Conservative movement ruling on the status of transgender persons. She was a superdelegate for Hilary Clinton in 2016.

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Rachel Wahba, 71 // Writer &  Psychotherapist

Wahba, a Mizrahi/Sephardic Egyptian-Iraqi Jew who was born in India and grew up “stateless” in Japan, is a psychotherapist and writer who serves on the Advisory Board of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa). In the ’90s, she co-founded Olivia Travel with her then-partner and now ex-wife Judy Dlugacz, listed below. She’s now the director of Special Projects for Olivia. “Growing up a Stateless Arab Jew for over 20 years,” she writes, “I am compelled to tell the story of Jews from Arab lands, and our 3,000 year history in the regions that are now Jew-free…. I aim to demystify and integrate the history of Mizrahim (Jews from Arabia and North Africa), into not only the Middle Eastern narrative, but also to correct the European/Ashkenazi dominance of the Jewish People. It is my aim to teach that we are in fact a multicultural People.”

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Fran Lebowitz, 67 // Author, Public Speaker & Chain-Smoker

Lebowitz, the “modern-day Dorothy Parker,” has been an atheist since the age of seven, but describes her Jewish identity as “ethnic or cultural or whatever people call it now.” Her father wouldn’t let her get a Bat Mitzvah ’cause she was a girl, which Fran was cool with ’cause “if you’re asking me was there any time in my life I wanted to go to school more, I would have to say no.” In the same interview where she said that, she told the New Jersey Jewish News, “I don’t really know how to describe it, the idea of people thinking of themselves as Jews, calling themselves Jews, feeling Jewish their entire lives, without once believing in G-d or going to synagogue or practicing any part of the religion. I can’t think of another religion of which that is true… I think it’s strong in me the sense that I feel like a Jew. I think of myself as a Jew. But I am well aware there are many Jews who do not think of me as a Jew.”

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Rebecca T. Alpert, 67 // Professor, Writer & Rabbi

One of the first female congregational rabbis, Alpert says her beliefs were transformed when she read a Sabbath prayer book that referred to G-d as “She.” Books she has written or appear in include Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball, Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation and Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition. She contributed “Finding Our Past: A Lesbian Interpretation of the Book of Ruth” to Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story.

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Susan Freundlich, 65 // ASL Interpreter, Photographer, Performing Artist, Activist, Non-Profit Consultant

Freundlich is credited with pioneering the presence of American Sign Language Interpreters at music performances, starting with an event at Harvard in 1975. In 1983, People Magazine profiled Freundlich’s employment of a “combination of dance, mime and American Sign Language to open up the concert experience to the country’s nearly 20 million hearing-impaired.” The initiative to get ASL interpreters onstage at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival also began with Susan. She served on the board of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival as well as for her LGBTQ+ inclusive synagogue in Oakland.

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Judy Dlugacz, 64 // CEO of Olivia Travel

Bonnie J. Morris, in her book The Disappearing L, wrote that “this movement of woman-identified music began with Jewish leadership.” Young lesbian activist Judy Dlugacz founded Olivia Records in 1973, an independent record label that sold over one million albums by women artists for female fans, creating a network for lesbians to meet each other and bond over the soothing soul-sounds of lesbian folk-rock music. Jewish artists associated with Olivia include Alix Dobkin, who said during a set at Michfest, “Jews and lesbians have much in common: we were never meant to survive.”

In 1990, Olivia began its transition to Olivia Travel with a “concert on a cruise.” Now it’s the premier travel company for the lesbian community and the longest-running lesbian company in the world! Dlugacz is also a political activist and philanthropist who served on Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign’s LGBT Leadership Council.

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Susan Feniger, 64 // Chef, Restaurateur, Cookbook Author, Radio & TV Personality

Susan Feniger, along with her longtime collaborator Mary Sue Milliken, have opened numerous influential restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, most notably The Border Grill. Feniger starred in the cooking show Too Hot Tamales, appeared on Top Chef Masters, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the California Restaurant Association. She considers her Jewish upbringing central to her love of food and cooking, telling Tablet that she’s “not religious, but I love being Jewish.” Tablet continues, “Jewish holidays in particular have provided Feniger with the chance to hold on to her Jewish background, while reinterpreting time-honored foods through the lenses of other culinary cultures that inspire her,” hosting Seders, break-the-fasts and Rosh Hashanah meals at her restaurant Street.

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Lesléa Newman, 62 // Author

Lesléa Newman is best known as the author of Heather Has Two Mommies, a nice book for children about love and acceptance that has thoroughly terrified right-wing anti-gay lunatics since its publication in 1989. She’s actually written and edited over 70 books and anthologies, including October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepherd (2013) and Good Enough To Eat (1986).

“I always thought being raised as a Jew was a really good training ground for being a lesbian,” Lesléa Newman said at a Keshet event in Boston. “First of all, I was surrounded by strong Jewish women that really ruled the roost, community was very important, social justice was very important — not just for our community, but for the world — and I just felt like when I came out as a Lesbian, those were still my values.”

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Judith Butler, 61 // Writer, Philosopher & Gender Theorist

When Judith Butler, the most widely read and influential gender theorist in the world, was 14, she got in trouble at synagogue for being too talkative and her punishment was to take a private tutorial with the Rabbi. She was delighted by the opportunity, which turned out to be her introduction to the philosophical thinking that would guide the rest of her career. She even took after-school classes on Jewish ethics ’cause she loved the debates. Of Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish descent, most of Butler’s maternal grandmother’s family died in the Holocaust. Regarding her activism around the occupation of Palestine, Butler told Haaretz, “As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence.” She has been politically active in the LGBT, feminist and anti-war movements and is an executive member of the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

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Susan Gottlieb aka Phranc, 60 // Musician & Artist

Phranc, who introduces herself as “the All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger,” was a key figure in the 1970s/80s Los Angeles punk scene as well as the electropunk and Queercore movements. She was a founding member of That’s Nervous Gender, a proto-industrial synth-punk group comprised of two gay Chicanos and one androgynous Jewish lesbian, which she left to join post-punk new wave band Catholic Discipline. These days she’s doing more visual art and exhibits at the Craig Kull Gallery in Santa Monica.

In an interview with The Wisconsin Jewish Chroncile in 1989, Phranc said her religious practice was traditional — “I don’t go to temple a lot, but I light the Sabbath lights, I say my prayers, I say my Sh’ma.” Of visiting an LGBT synagogue while on tour, she said, “It was great, I felt a sense of family being away from my own family but singing the same tunes and saying the same prayers. You can be a Jew anywhere in the world — it’s great that you can find a community.”

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Robin Ochs, 59 // Bisexual Activist, Teacher, Professional Speaker and Workshop Leader

Robin Ochs is a bisexual superhero who says the diverse New York neighborhood she grew up in made her “aware of economic injustice, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism from a very early age.” She recalls seeing her best friend harassed for being Jewish while she was overlooked, “because they assumed, incorrectly, that I was not Jewish because I had blonde hair, blue eyes and a ski-slope nose.” She’s the editor of The Bisexual Resource Guide and the anthology Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the WorldHer interest in acting began when she was a child, doing Purim Plays at her Michigan synagogue. and he’s a founder of the Boston Bisexual Network and the Bisexual Resource Center and she’s gotten a billion awards for the work she does AND she identifies as “Jewish but not religious.”

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Sarah Schulman, 59 // Novelist, Playwright, Historian & Activist

I interviewed Sarah Schulman about her book Conflict is Not Abuse earlier this year and y’all liked it a lot ’cause it was so good! So go read that. If you already read it then you know that she’s the co-founder of MIX: NY LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, the US Coordinator of the first LGBT Delegation to Palestine, the Co-Director of the ACT UP Oral History Project and, in 1992,  was one of five co-founders of the legendary direct action organization Lesbian Avengers. She has published ten novels and six nonfiction books including Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012). Schulman was turned on to activism around the Israel/Palestine conflict by Judith Butler, who she’d reached out to for input after a friend told her to decline an invitation to speak a the University of Tel Aviv. Schulman is on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voices for Peace, which “opposes anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and oppression” and is “inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social justice, equality, human rights, respect for International Law and a U.S. Foreign policy basd on those ideals.”

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Chai Feldblum, 59 // Lawyer, Professor and a Commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Did you know that the lead drafter of the Americans with Disabilities Act was a Jewish lesbian named Chai Feldblum! Chai attended the Yeshiva High School for Girls and comes from a long line of Orthodox Jewish rabbis, once wanted to be a Talmudic scholar, but instead she went into law. She graduated from Harvard Law, taught at Georgetown and serving as the Legislative Counsel to the AIDS Project of the ACLU. Feldblum was the lead drafter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and under Obama became the first openly LGBT person to serve on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “My parents valued education and doing good,” she told The Washington Jewish Week. “I learned those commitments as a young Jewish girl.”

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Rabbi Debra Kolodny, 57 // Religious Leader & Activist

Kolodny came out as bisexual in 1984, and has been advocating for worker’s rights as well as women’s, environmental, peace, racial justice and LGBTQ causes since 1981, when she initially came out as a lesbian. “I thrive in complexity and multiplicity,” she told Tablet, “which is why I particularly love being in interfaith settings.” She is the editor of Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith and has served in directorial, executive and advisory positions at ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the National Religious Leadership Roundtable, Nehirim and Binet USA. Following the legalization of same-sex marriage, she carried the torch for queer faith leaders to use the resources gathered in that fight and devote them towards new struggles — specifically, towards Black Lives Matter. Along with Muslim and Christian leaders, she organized a queer clergy retreat in Portland in 2015 to tackle the isse, telling Tablet, “As an ally, I can’t think of another issue where my time and my energy and my resources need to be allocated.”

Currently, she’s leading Portland’s UnShul, an organization that “engages the Jewish soul with the best that Portland has to offer,” leading spiritual gatherings “on the hiking trail, the dance studio, and in the homes of its members…. we meet you where you want to be and celebrate an embodied approach to Judaism through dance, song, meditation and connecting with nature.”

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Lisa Kron, 56 // Actress & Playwright

Lisa Kron’s interest in acting began when she was a child, doing Purim Plays at her Michigan synagogue! In 2015, Kron and Jeanine Tesori became the first female writing team to win a Tony Award for Best Original Score, for Fun Home. Kron’s father is a Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed in a concentration camp. Her play 2.5 Minute Ride weaves together personal stories including one of her pilgrimage to Auschwitz with her father. Her story “Lesbians at Temple” appears in the anthology Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish: The Heeb Storytelling Collection.

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Joy Ladin, 56 // Professor, Poet, Scholar & Writer

Ladin is the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution and is now the head of Yeshiva University’s Writing Center. She has published five books of poetry and one memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders.

“What really drew me to Judaism was that, like many trans kids, I had an intense sense of G-d as a real, living, constant presence,” Ladin said in a 2014 interview. “And Judaism — not Jewishness as in ethnicity, but Judaism in general and the Torah in particular was really the only place in my world that there was any talk about G-d, representation of G-d, sense of G-d…. traditional Judaism is extremely gender divided. However, the Torah includes one really genderless character and that’s G-d.”

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Judy Gold, 54 // Comic, Writer & Actress

Emmy-award winning comic and TV writer Judy Gold is very lesbian and very Jewish and did an off-Broadway show called 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother. Regarding whether or not she feels more gay or more Jewish when she wakes up, Gold told Michael Musto:

“I always feel Jewish. I get up and my back hurts, I’ve got to go to the bathroom, I’ve got to have a coffee. I’m a Jew. I don’t wake up and go, “Oh, my G-d, that girl’s hot.” It’s “I gotta put some beans in the coffee thing. Should I make oatmeal? I need to go to the gym–no, I don’t feel like going.” I wake up like an elderly Jew in assisted living.”

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Jill Soloway, 52 // Writer, Director and Producer

Jill Soloway, a co-founder of the East Side Jews Collective, created the groundbreaking Emmy-winning show Transparent, which centers on a super-queer Jewish family in Los Angeles and will debut its fourth season TOMORROW. Every season has a big Jewish holiday at its center and Soloway told Hadassah Magazine that Season 4 will center Succot and joked that “by Season 8 we’ll be big into Lag B’omer, I guess, and season 11, Shemini Atzeret.”

Prior to Transparent, they worked on Six Feet Under, Grey’s Anatomy, and The United States of Tara. I Love Dick, a co-creation of Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins, based on the book by Jewish author Chris Kraus, was released on Amazon this year.

“This TV show allows me to take my dreams about unlikable Jewish people, queer folk, trans folk and make them heroes,” Soloway said of Transparent in her Emmy acceptance speech.

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Paula Vogel, 65 // Playwright & Professor

Indecent, Paula Vogel’s play about the controversy surrounding the Yiddish play God of Vengeance, a love story between two women, earned Jewish director Rebecca Taichman a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. It also spurred a journey of self-discovery for Vogel, who I (and perhaps also you) know best from her Pulitzer-Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive. “More and more my Jewish identity is emerging and I think in a way that I don’t want to see happen for young children,” she told Playbill in a video interview. “My Jewish identity has been formed from anti-Semitism in my childhood. That isn’t the way we should be identifying ourselves… we should be proud and proclaiming our identity as Jewish Americans and as immigrant Americans. I’ve spent an incredible seven years working on this and it’s been a privilege to be in touch with that part of my family.” She then goes on to do a “dayenu” situation to describe Indecent‘s road to Broadway and it made me cry. You should watch the video, maybe it will make you cry too.

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Rebecca Walker, 48 // Writer, Activist & Speaker

The daughter of legendary writer Alice Walker and New York lawyer Mel Leventhal, Walker is the author of the NY Times Bestseller Black, White and Jewish as well as Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence and has published extensively in magazines. At 22, she introduced the concept of Third Wave Feminism to the world in an article for Ms. Magazine. She told Kveller that although she’s been a Buddhist for about 15 years, “I feel that my Jewishness is so much more cultural than religious.” She says she peppers her conversations with her son with Yiddish words, continuing, “I feel like I’m bridging an old world connection there, because my grandmother’s mother was from Kiev, and she always used — from mentsch to tuchus to meshugeneh — a breadth of Yiddish words.”

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Sandra Lawson, 47 // Personal Trainer, Future Rabbi & Songwriter

Sandra Lawson, a former military police officer turned personal trainer, has big plans for 2018: she hopes to be ordained as one of the few (if not the only) Black openly lesbian Rabbis. She was turned on to Judaism through a personal training client, who invited her to his Restrictionist Synagogue, where she immediately felt at home — much like she’d felt attending holiday gatherings with a Jewish girlfriend in Atlanta many years back. In 2011, with the help of a GoFundMe campaign, she became the first LGBTQ person of African-American descent to enroll at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Pennsylvania.

She told Forward about her morning running routine: “I have the Bee Gees on my iPod, and the next thing is Modeh Ani. I’m being chased by zombies and the Shema would come on. It’s Saturday morning, [I’m] wearing a Superman shirt, running, being chased by zombies, and I sing along.”

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Julie Goldman, 45 // Actress, Comic, Writer

Julie Goldman is a wildly successful Jewish butch lesbian comedian whose work addresses the intersections of all those identities. She’s the co-host of Dumb Gay Politics, a podcast she hosts with her writing partner Brandy Howard, with whom she starred on Bravo’s The People’s Couch, Autostraddle’s In Your Box Office and Johnny McGovern’s Gay Pimpin’ podcast. She starred in The Big Gay Sketch Show on Logo and has appeared in Faking It, The Mindy Project, The New Normal, Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos.

“I think that when you’re a member of a community that is historically oppressed, or on the fringe, or maybe just not the majority, I think that offers you a really good sense of humor,” she told Get Out Mag. “I think that especially with Jews, all you are doing is questioning, complaining, talking and yelling and everything, and getting picked apart, and nothing is good enough, and it’s negative, but it’s positive. Everything is crazy, and I think that makes for a really good sense of humor.”

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Sally Kohn, 40 // Journalist, Community Organizer & CEO of Movement Vision Lab

Sally Kohn is a persistent target of right wing trolls and anti-semites for existing squarely at a number of contested intersections: Jewish, liberal, lesbian, butch, outspoken. She was Fox News’s token liberal for several years and now appears on CNN and MSNBC and writes for outlets like The Washington Post and USA Today. Her grassroots think tank, Movement Vision Lab, aims to “make the world safe for liberal ideas.”

“I was raised in a fairly anti-religion family so the extent to which I embrace or distance myself from my faith isn’t an act of reflex but choice,” Kohn wrote in The Daily Beast. “I choose Judaism to the extent I feel it is a force for good and justice in the world.”

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Rebecca Kling, 33 // Artist, Activist & Educator

Kling explores gender and identity through solo performance pieces and educational workshops and believes that “sharing accessible queer narratives with a wide audience is a form of activism, and that understanding combats bigotry.” In “Uncovering the Mirrors,” she explored her relationship with Judaism and ritual and ceremony, broadly speaking, telling The Heroines, “How we think of ourselves comes in part from all these ceremonies in our lives: Birthday celebrations, graduations, and — in Judaism — Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I wanted to look at the ways in which ritual can negatively impose identity, but also the ways in which it can allow us to choose our identity or explore it more organically.” Her writing has been published all over the damn place and she published her first book, No Gender Left Behind, in 2013. Currently, she’s the National Center for Transgender Equality’s Community Storytelling Advocate.

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Monica Raymund, 31 // Actress

In 2016, the bisexual actress tweeted, “my father is white & Jewish. My mother is brown & Dominican. I’m proud of my heritage on both sides. Their love inspired me.” Raymund, who was raised Jewish and had a Bat Mitzvah, grew up in Florida, went to Julliard, did a lot of theater work and now is best known for her roles on TV shows The Good Wife, Chicago Fire and Lie To Me.

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Rebecca Sugar, 31 // Animator, Director, Screenwriter, Producer & Songwriter

Rebecca Sugar became the first woman to independently create a series for Cartoon Network when she brought the incredible Steven Universe into our collective lives, thus setting off a rapid torrent of emails to Autostraddle about if we were going to write about Steven Universe. (We do!) Previously she worked on the series Adventure Time, which was also kinda queer. She was Bat Mitzvah’ed at Temple Micah in Washington DC, and still lights Hannukah candles with her family over Skype.

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Sarah Hymanson, 30 // Chef

Sarah Hymanson and Chef Sara Kramer both grew up in Secular Jewish families and met at Kramer’s restaurant Glasserie in Brooklyn, which Hymanson landed at after opening the NY outpost of Mission Chinese with Danny Bowien. Together, they moved to Los Angeles and started Madcapra, a casual falafel shop in Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, which generated enough buzz to lead into a second Middle Eastern-influenced restaurant, Kismet, which opened last year in Los Feliz. They’ve appeared in literally every food magazine and website ever within the past year, including making The Jewish Journal’s 30 Under 30. They did a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood earlier this year, and Hymanson told The Miami Herald she’d always been impressed with PP’s outreach to LGBT people.

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Denise Frohman, 31 // Poet, Writer, Performer and Educator

Self-declared ” NuyoJewricanqueer” Denice Frohman is the is the 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, 2014 CantoMundo Fellow, 2013 Hispanic Choice Award winner, and 2012 Leeway Transformation Award recipient. Her work has appeared on ESPN, in the Huffington Post, and garnered over 7.5 million views online. She has a Master’s in Education and works with The Philly Youth Poetry Movement and has been featured at over 200 colleges and universities; hundreds of high schools, non-profits, and cultural arts spaces; and performed at The White House in 2016. Her work looks at intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality and the “in-betweeness” that exists in us all, drawing from her experience as a queer woman from a Puerto Rican and Jewish background, in an aim to “disrupt traditional notions of power, and celebrate the parts of ourselves deemed unworthy.”

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Michelle Chamuel, 30 // Singer, Songwriter & Producer

Michelle Chamuel, who was a working musician with a few albums under her belt before rising to fame on season four of The Voice, was raised by Jewish parents who came to the US as refugees from Egypt in 1967. In an interview last year, her girlfriend Mary Lambert talked about celebrating both Jewish holidays and Christmas, and said that “it’s been neat to have an interfaith household.” It’s pretty neat to imagine, too!

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Gaby Dunn, 29 // Writer, Actress, Comic

Gaby Dunn is a writer, journalist, YouTuber, actress, and comedian who just released a book, I Hate Everyone But You, with her comedy partner, Allison Raskin, who is also Jewish! So they make a lot of Jewish jokes and Jewish-themed or adjacent videos. However, in a sharp departure from Jewish stereotypes, Gaby hosts a podcast called BAD WITH MONEY. Everybody loves it! In addition to publishing everywhere including New York Magazine, Playboy, Women’s Health, Glamour and Jezebel; Gaby’s got a story in The Jewish Daughter Diaries, an anthology about being loved too much by your mother. Gaby’s Bat Mitzvah theme was Outer Space and she entered the party in a rocket ship constructed out of paper mache, wearing her Space Camp astronaut jumpsuit.

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Mal Blum, 29 // Musician & Writer

Mal Blum has released six albums, is currently on tour with Mary Lambert, and is the unofficial A-Camp mascot. Their last album, You Look A Lot Like Me, was “mostly just first-person narratives about depression set to punk music,” released by Don Giovanni records. One time, Marissa Paternoster called them “the Jewish James Dean.”

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Hari Nef, 25 // Actress & Model

Nef played Gittel in Transparent and Bex in Assassination Nation, was the first openly transgender model signed to IMG Models, walked the New York Fashion Week runway, appeared on the cover of Elle Magazine and in commercials for L’Oreal Paris True Match AND was a spokesmodel for Everlane’s 100% Human Campaign. When asked by Interview Magazine in 2015 if she “identifies herself with any group,” Nef responded, “I identify with anyone who logged online in elementary school and never logged off. I identify with American Jewish kids who never knew what it was like to be persecuted for their religion. I identify with transgender women. I identify with Sad Girls.”

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Bex Taylor-Klaus, 23 // Actor

Bex is a rising star who has played regular and recurring roles on The Killing, Arrow, House of Lies and Scream. Their mother told the Atlanta Jewish Times that Bex got involved with LGBT rights advocacy “right around her Bat Mitzvah,” which was held at Camp Barney, the Jewish summer camp Bex attended as a kid. “On Fridays, I can be with my family by Skype or FaceTime for Shabbat,” Bex told The AJT in 2014 about her life in Los Angeles. “I have my siddur on my desk, my tallis on my shelf, and on the High Holidays, I go to be with friends of the family.”

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Jazz Jennings, 16 // TV Personality & Activist

Jennings, the youngest person to become a national transgender figure when she came out on an ABC News Interview at the age of six, is an honorary co-founder of the TransKids Purple Rainbow Foundation and a founder of the Purple Rainbow Tales. Her YouTube series “I Am Jazz” got her a TLC show by the same name. She’s also been a spokesmodel for Clean & Clear. “Jennings” was a psuedonym chosen by her family to keep their privacy guarded. “Our last name is a very Jewish, very long last name,” her mother told The Miami Herald in 2015.

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Please note that we are not qualified for and do not have the time to host or moderate a safe and constructive debate or conversation regarding Zionism and/or the Israel/Palestine conflict in the Autostraddle comments, an issue that is often raised by readers on posts relating to Judaism. All comments attempting to initiate said debate from any standpoint, or any comments equating Judaism with Zionism, will be deleted. 

In Conversation With Sarah Schulman: “They’re Being Taught That Control Is Freedom”

Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair landed in my mailbox last winter, sent by the publisher, and I promptly shelved it, asserting that the last thing I needed in my life was somebody telling me that any abuse I’d personally experienced in my relationships or community was merely conflict. But Autostraddle readers kept recommending it, so in March, I picked it up. And couldn’t put it down.

Conflict Is Not Abuse is the 18th book published by lesbian activist Sarah Schulman — a novelist, playwright, AIDS historian and, currently, a distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the College of Staten Island. She is the co-founder of MIX: NY LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, the US Coordinator of the first LGBT Delegation to Palestine, and the Co-Director of the ACT UP Oral History Project, having joined the organization in 1987 and been one of many lesbians who took on political, activist and care-taking work at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1992, she was one of five co-founders of the legendary direct action organization Lesbian Avengers, responsible for planning the US’s first Dyke March, which took place in Washington DC in April 1993. Her published books include the novels After Delores (1989), Rat Bohemia (1993) and The Cosmopolitans (2016); non-fiction works Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009), The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012) and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (2012). Her novel People in Trouble (1990) was the uncredited inspiration for the musical RENT, a situation she chronicles in Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998). Awards under her belt include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Kessler Prize for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies, a Stonewall Book Award and multiple Lambda nominations.

Conflict Is Not Abuse is a discussion of how inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability, and she traces this phenomenon as it applies from interpersonal relationships to global politics. For the latter, she looks specifically at HIV criminalization in Canada and the occupation of Palestine. The book opens with the example of the police officers who saw Michael Brown and Eric Garner as “threatening” when they were doing literally nothing, and how any kind of difference, resistance or anxiety can be seen as an attack when it’s not. The book has generated heaps of conversation online and off, is blurbed by bell hooks and Claudia Rankine, is the winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction and a nominee for a Lambda Literary Award.

Of course, it was the interpersonal and local community focused sections at the front that really drew me in, because I am basic like that. Her investigation of shunning and group dynamics, especially within groups heavily populated by those who’ve experienced personal trauma or inherited generational trauma, is particularly interesting from the perspective of a queer community organizer.

I became, quite quickly, obsessed. I sent copies to ten of my friends, and we eagerly texted each other snapshots of our favorite passages. Everybody connected to it (or didn’t) in their own way, based on our relative experiences with shunning, with re-examining the degrees to which we allow past trauma to impair present relationships and interrogating how the overstatement of harm has squashed so much potentially enlightening online discourse and torn so many queer communities apart.

See, since approximately early November, I’ve been questioning everything. How my friends and I treat each other, how my workplace operates, and most of all, how us queer feminist progressives handle ourselves. How do we communicate with each other, with our enemies, and with our potential allies? This has meant confronting material that used to scare me — because it seemed like too much, ’cause I was scared of what it’d make me have to confront within myself and what it would bring into focus about my work. It feels like we’ve hit a wall with callout culture and language policing and problematic-fave-destroying where we’re forced to acknowledge that a lot of how we do things just isn’t working. We’re not achieving consensus or winning politically, either.

Critical response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive or at least invigorated. The main line of criticism that’s come out against this book speaks to my initial reservation: my fear that Schulman would re-frame legitimate abuse as conflict. My read accounted for this discrepancy — I simply assumed experiences that I knew were straightforward abuse were not the types of experiences Schulman was asking us to re-name. But perhaps my own specific background enables this type of comfortable disassociation because the only people who’ve ever denied abuse I’ve experienced have been the me and the abuser — my friends, family and psychiatric professionals have generally been the ones to name it, not the ones to discredit it. (The police didn’t believe me either, but unfortunately that’s exactly what I expected from them, so.) That also has given me room to interrogate my own role in abusive situations without feeling like I have to accept shame or blame, too. Furthermore, the book itself does not seem to speak to abuse within families or parent-child relationships, which I believe exist on a different paradigm altogether.

This interview took place in March, but I’ve been mulling over this introduction ever since, as her ideas have continued percolating. I’ve doubled down on some and reconsidered others. For example, this book and Sarah’s other work and related materials have already profoundly impacted how I approach queer community-building here and at A-Camp. Namely, we’ve committed to deliberately pivoting away from punitive justice towards a more restorative model. We’ve pushed back against demands for further unilaterally-enforced rules and regulations as the best methods of ensuring safe and productive communities, and confronted how we ourselves demand state-level regulations when we should know, by now, to take uneven and biased enforcement into consideration before making such demands. Yes, often predators and abusers are simply that, and must be removed from a group to ensure group health, or required to seek professional psychological help in order to return. But we have an obligation to engage and de-escalate and restore, not to punish, whenever possible — and it’s possible a lot more often than we think. Often we are all clumsy animals, making hurtful mistakes, full of room for improvement. Moving forward in Trump’s America, it’s never been more important that we harness the empathy and understanding I’ve found very unique to queer women’s communities in order to build our own care-taking networks and institutions. We have to figure out how to take care of each other better. Nobody else will.

Engaging with Conflict Is Not Abuse jump-started a kind of re-entry, for me, into the world of ideas and theory, and to remembering the importance of engaging intellectually with broad-level interrogations of how we talk and operate. Even the process of considering and ultimately landing on disagreeing with an idea of Schulman’s strengthened my own understanding of my own convictions. On the internet, there’s not much room for nuance. Within social justice communities, there’s this sense that there are bad guys and good guys, and we’re the good guys, and it’s our job to inform the entirety of “good guys” the Right Way To Think and Act. Reading Schulman and other authors since has been enlightening ’cause there are, even within the queer feminist left, so many different approaches to things, and we should be able to engage with them and consider them and even disagree vehemently about them without resorting to shunning, lashing-out, taking material out of context and wielding it like a weapon, name-calling, massive overstatements of harm and projecting our anger at the world onto each other because well, underneath all that is a lot of love.

If you’ve not read Conflict Is Not Abuse but want some sense of it before reading this interview, I highly recommend reading this transcript of Schulman’s recent conversation with trans writer Morgan M Page on “Queer Suicidality, Conflict and Repair,” in which book-related concepts enter the conversation midway. But do read the book, it changed my life. Also, reading People in Trouble and then Stagestruck and thus finding out the real story behind RENT totally ruined my life, but that’s another article for another day, so.

This interview took place on the phone on March 21, 2017. It has been edited for length and clarity.

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Riese: First of all, thanks for talking to me and thank you for this book — and for the six or seven books of yours I’ve now read in total, actually. I’ve bought Conflict Is Not Abuse now for about 15 people I work with, and as a fellow feminist Jewish lesbian writer who works in queer community building, it really articulated and brought into focus a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time —

Sarah: That’s great!

Riese: I know from reading other interviews that you’ve been surprised that most people wanted to talk about callout culture, which wasn’t your intention when writing the book, so I’m gonna try not to be too predictable in that regard.

One of the things that resonated with me from Conflict Is Not Abuse was your indictment of text-based communication as insufficient for true conflict resolution, which you talk about in terms of text and email. How do you see those kinds of conversations playing out in spaces like Facebook and post comments, and how does performativity fit in when these conversations are happening in public? What do you think the benefits and drawbacks are to having those kinds of conversations on social media?

Sarah: Well, the advantage of Facebook is that there’s a record. So like, if I say “the sky is blue!” and the other person says HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT THE SKY IS GREEN?!!!, I can actually show them that I said it was blue. So that’s a big advantage. But I think that there’s nothing better than actually talking to somebody, getting their affect, being able to go back and forth. It’s just a more sharing experience and it’s deeper and it’s more humanizing.

Riese: Do you think that when someone is having an argument on social media or on a website of some kind that the fact that they’re sort of being observed and watched by other people plays into how they handle conflict?

Sarah: No, weirdly.

Riese: Ha! I totally do, so that’s interesting.

Sarah: I think that people act like they’re not being observed.

Riese: So, you don’t think that people sometimes call people out because they think it makes them look a certain way?

Sarah: That may be… but if the other person was actually right in front of them and there were other people there as well, they might be a little more flexible. As you know, I ground the solution in other people, so that if somebody is escalating when they have an opportunity to make peace, hopefully the other people around them will help them negotiate and let them know that they’re not serving themselves or that they’re causing division. When the other people don’t do that — when they egg them on or they’re standing by passively — I call that “the negative group.” It’s a group that’s constructed through negative bonds.

Riese: What makes you choose sometimes to talk about things on Facebook as opposed to when you’re in front of people? Is it just the convenience?

Sarah: For example, today somebody posted that they were upset that mentors and teachers of theirs were favoring trans men over trans women. So I said, “Why don’t you just contact that person and ask them if you can talk to them?” And they were like, “No no no I could never do that.” I can understand that there’s a frustration that gets expressed by putting something on Facebook, but if it’s a way to avoid the responsibility of actually talking to someone, then it’s not necessarily a positive action.

Riese: I think some would argue that the trans woman in question shouldn’t have to do this work herself — that simply surviving consumes all the emotional energy she has and she might not have it in her to advocate against her own oppression, especially if in the past those conversations have been more disheartening than productive, or if she’s worried that speaking out could negatively impact these relationships she needs in order to progress academically? And obviously also time is a finite resource. How do we decide which of these conflicts are worth the time and emotional energy? Does venting, in and of itself, ever serve a purpose?

Sarah: In this case, the teachers were already supportive of trans men, but over-emphasizing them in relation to trans women, so it seemed to be a question of expanding their understandings. If the authority figure was hostile or negative it might be a different story. Also, the speaker described the people as “mentors” and that implies an intimate and positive relationship. It would be awful to give up on someone that we have shared with and learned from without first trying to speak to them directly.

Riese: Where do you think the instinct comes from to sort of vent instead of address something?

Sarah: Sara Ahmed talks about this in The Promise of Happiness, the one where she comes up with the idea of the feminist killjoy. She talks about how there’s this idea in entitled societies that people have the right to always be comfortable. But that’s actually not a right, because the only way you can always be comfortable is at other people’s expense. And that actually, we have a responsibility to be uncomfortable. The expectation that one should always be comfortable is an expectation of supremacy. It’s unreasonable, and it’s overly entitled.

Sometimes people don’t want to talk to other people because they would be uncomfortable, because they might have to rethink things about themselves or change, but it’s for the general good to rethink things and change. So I think that that’s not an appropriate expectation.

Riese: Do you think that when people are asking for safe space, criticizing its lack, or telling people how to make one, that what they’re getting at is a space that’s 100% comfortable?

Sarah: You’d have to look at the specifics. You can’t really generalize.

Riese: Okay, well, what do you think qualifies as a “safe space”? And is that something that we should really be looking for?

Sarah: It really depends on the situation. I mean, safety from violence, of course, is a completely desirable and necessary thing. But safety from criticism or safety from truth or safety from having to look at yourself? Those are negative desires that I think are detrimental and divisive.

Riese: With Autostraddle, we’ve started to experience this phenomenon where people that we don’t know reach out to us to let us know that someone who writes for us or works for us is a “known abuser” or was allegedly emotionally abusive in a past relationship. They demand that we remove the person from Autostraddle, that we don’t let them write anymore, that we eliminate them from our group, and if we don’t do that they’ll say that we don’t really care about safe spaces or queer community, or that we are complicit in abuse. We’re commanded to enact these extreme punishments against accused people who are being accused, again, by people we don’t know, and ordered that we should do so without interrogating any of their claims. Usually we don’t even know the accused person — like we’ve never met them in person. And it feels like this is part of a larger trend in queer and feminist circles —

Sarah: It’s even larger than that. This is a phenomenon that exists in the intimate as well as in the broader social and even in the geopolitical. It’s like when a government tells people to denounce people who are HIV+ under HIV criminalization or when the Israeli government builds a wall to keep out Palestinians. This wholesale group exclusion of a person based on an accusation that they are somehow dangerous without any opportunity for that person to describe why they think this charge is happening or how they are experiencing it, or for anyone to look at the order of events that produced this accusation or the history of the person accusing — I mean, this is the definition of injustice. I’m amazed at how often I’m asked to hurt people, you know? People are constantly saying, “why are you talking to her, why did you invite him, why are you working with them,” they want people to be hurt. This past fall in Montreal, I co-hosted a community town hall on trans and queer suicidality with Morgan Page, who is a trans woman writer from Montreal. One of the things that kept coming up is that when people are shunned by their cliques and by their families, they feel like killing themselves. [ED NOTE: You can read the transcript of that panel here.]

Riese: Right.

Sarah: It’s the most cruel — it’s so cruel! And it produces no positive outcome. If you think through that action, you end up with what we have now, which is mass incarceration. This idea of removing people instead of trying to resolve conflict.

Riese: One thing that sort of struck me about it when you look at how often people end up being shunned with minimal evidence because they belong to a demographic group that we think “had it coming” all along, which can even be the less oppressed group in certain social justice circles — was thinking about on the flipside, how the mass incarceration of black men has been enabled by things like the Three Strikes rule where judges and juries are often putting someone in jail not because they can prove what they did, or that what they did should be rectified with incarceration, but because a racist jury or judge figures, “well, even if they didn’t do this, they’ll probably do SOMETHING wrong, let’s get them off the streets.” Which is… terrifying.

Sarah: And also first of all did they actually do this specific thing and if they did do it, why? I mean, most crime is caused by poverty, except white-collar crime which is caused by greed. So when someone says so-and-so did something, so if they did do it, what were the actions that led to it? That always has to be understood, and in order for that to be understood, people must communicate.

Riese: How do you think it works within communities? I mean, all of our writers who’ve been accused of abuse have been trans or Black or both, which is unsurprising. I think subconsciously, or not, a lot of people who consider themselves very politically aware still end up feeling more comfortable levying accusations against those with less institutional power.

Sarah: In my book I cite the National Anti-Violence hotline 2013 report where they found that when the police were called for same-sex domestic abuse, over half of the time the police arrested the wrong person. Because when people are the same gender, instead of trying to figure out if it was conflict or abuse, they would arrest the person who was of color, or who was not a mother, or was butch, or was not a citizen, or was HIV-positive. With these stigmas there’s an assumption that a person is dangerous, but actually it’s most likely that that person is endangered.

Riese: When I read that statistic I immediately sent it to my editors and was like, “see, we were right to be wary of acting on those accusations!” The State has this tendency not to believe victims of abuse or assault, and many liberal feminists have decided to remedy this by believing every victim without hearing both sides or asking additional questions, and if we’re not believing these accusations at face value, we’re participating in rape culture. When really the best remedy is to listen to both sides with an open mind, which the State doesn’t do.

Sarah: Right. But of course some people do lie, but there are also other reasons for people to inflate charges and one of the things that I point to is that where we are now is that our entire focus is on figuring out who is the perpetrator so that they can be punished. But if our focus is on trying to understand what happened, which I think is the healthy and appropriate focus, then people would not be encouraged to escalate charges. Right now the standard is that you are only eligible for compassion if you are a pure victim. If you in any way participate in creating a conflict you are no longer eligible for compassion. But every person should be eligible for compassion.

Riese: Yes, exactly — people think they won’t be heard or given compassion unless they can label their experience “abuse,” and they’re not wrong.

Sarah: We’re making it impossible for people to look at their own participation in creating conflict.

Lez Liberty Lit #29: Against Stupidity, Apathy, And Zombification

by carolyn & riese

Books! They are really great. You just won’t believe how great they are. You may think that the Internet’s great, but that’s just peanuts compared to books. Welcome to Lez Liberty Lit, our column about literary shit that’s happening that you should probably care about.

The name “Liberty Lit” was inspired by the short-lived literary journal produced by Angela Chase at Liberty High School in 1994.

Lit Links

Sarah Schulman’s After Delores, an acclaimed 1988 novel about an unnamed New York waitress recovering after her girlfriend, Delores, leaves her, is being republished by Arsenal Pulp Press. In the new introduction, Schulman writes,

“Today, literally twenty-five years after the book’s initial publication, it would be impossible for a novel with a lesbian protagonist who is as honest, irreverent, eccentric, and alone as After Delores’s is, to be published by a mainstream press. And yet we must keep writing these novels, because it is only by presenting innovative material that gatekeepers become accustomed to it and eventually let down their guard. I don’t want to live in a world in which the majority of lesbian representations are family-oriented, celebrity-focused or (shudder), cutesy.”

VIDA is trying to be more inclusive of trans* and genderqueer writers, and is asking for help.

Everyone keeps explaining why adults are reading young adult books. Malinda Lo writes about sociology, media reception studies and why YA readers aren’t just in it for the nostalgia.

This year’s National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” are all women – Molly Antopol, NoViolet Bulawayo, Amanda Coplin, Daisy Hildyard and Merritt Tierce.

Roxane Gay is currently blogging at the Nation about new work by writers of color. Though her first post discusses the numbers (which are grim), Gay focuses on critical engagement with the books themselves.

The “Netflix for books” has arrived, presumably because not enough people realize that “libraries,” magical places where you get books for free, exist.

Tumblr has launched the Reblog Book Club.

It’s weird being a researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you have some time this weekend, why not build a book scanner out of Legos?

You can become a slam poet in five steps.

A book-free public library has opened in Texas. The library has 10,000 ebooks for area residents to access instead.

Gloria Steinem has her own comic book.

Writers’ pet words reflect their world views.

The Emily Books Club at the Toast discussed Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker.

If you lie about reading classic novels like 62% British people, this guide can help you get better at it.

The Paris Review did an ask me anything, and editors answered questions about the slush pile, the problem with creative writing programs, whether or not they started as a CIA front, Nabokov and more.

Elissa Bassist interviewed Michelle Orange, author of the excellent collection of essays This is Running for Your Life, and calls her essays “tools against stupidity, apathy, and zombification.”

At the Rumpus, Catherine Brady reviewed Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, calling it “intimate and moving.”

We are living in the golden age of internet newsletters.

Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian reviewed Hood, a novel by Emma Donogue.

At the Lesbrary, Erica Gillingham reviewed Annie on my Mind, by Nancy Garden. Jill reviewed the first volume of Strangers in Paradise, a compilation of comics by Terry Moore. Carol reviewed Women Float, by Maureen Foley. Karelia Stetz-Waters reviewed The Stranger You Seek, by Amanda Kyle Williams. Danika reviewed Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith C. Brown. Tag reviewed On the Edge of Space: Lesbian Erotic Science Fiction Stories, edited by Cecilia Tan and Danielle Bodnar.

At Lambda Literary, Cathy Camper reviewed Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf: A Sex Education Comic Book, by Saiya Miller and Liza Bley. Rita Salner reviewed Taken by the Wind, a mystery by Ellen Hart. Howard G. Williams reviewed A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956-1984, by Glenway Wescott. Ellis Avery shared her Stonewall Fiction Award acceptance speech.

Don’t forget to check out all the awesome book-related things we published recently: Mey wrote about the Batwoman creative team quitting after editors prohibited her planned lesbian marriage. Cara wrote about the implicitly gendered elements of language. Fikri reviewed Laurie Penny’s Cybersexism. Maggie wrote about finding the perfect journal in the inaugural post of Dear Queer Diary.

Events To Watch Out For:

September 16–22, Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Book Festival runs this week, though most events are on the 22nd. See Racialicious’s picks, or visit the entire schedule.

September 18, Toronto: Queer author and performer Rae Spoon will be at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St W.), 8 p.m.

September 19–22, New York: Filip Noterdaeme presents The Stein Shrine, a celebration of Gertrude Stein and the 80th anniversary of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in a basement project room in MoMA-PS1 (22–24 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City).

September 22, Toronto: Toronto’s Word on the Street book festival runs all day today (Queen’s Park Circle), 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

September 24, New York: The Women’s/Trans’ Poetry Jam & Open Mic night hosted by Vittoria Repetto returns to Bluestockings, 7 p.m.

October 6, New York: Bluestockings’ feminist book club is reading Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2:30 p.m.

October 19, Toronto: Toronto is getting its first queer zine fest!

Know of a queer event with literary merit? Send it to us!

What We’ve Been Reading:

Riese: I’m still reading Quiet: The Power Of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking! That’s all. Just chipping away at it. Crystal and I are gonna talk about it in the Introvert Pride activity we’re doing at A-Camp!

Carolyn: Last week I read Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins, which is a short story collection so good I don’t actually feel comfortable talking about it. I also read Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, because I’m rather obsessed with vintage Penguins and also book design, and because I will read almost anything Maria Popova recommends.

Read All Of The Books: The Fall 2013 Queer Books Preview

feature image via Shutterstock

by Carolyn & Mey

The fall is looking good for queer reading! Books look out for include new work from Jeanette Winterson, S. Bear Bergman, Nicola Griffith, Malinda Lo, Julia Serano, Radclyffe, Kathleen Warnock and a ton of other heavy hitters. With forthcoming history and historical fiction, erotica and academic analysis, literature and genre fiction, and Buffy and Batwoman, you won’t have any problems finding something new to read.

August

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, by Lucy Corin: The series of short stories in this new collection explore endings and new beginnings, whether of relationships or of the world. Corin uses an experimental style, varying lengths, type size and tone, to muse “not just on the end of the world, but the rapture of existence.”

Love in the Time of Global Warming, by Francesca Lia Block: Block’s writing has a dream-like quality and her unique voice — best known in her queer-friendly children’s book, Weetzie Bat, is at full force in her latest YA novel. When Penelope’s family are swept away in a flood, she embarks on an Odyssey-like quest to find them and encounters sirens, witches, magic and love.

Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-War Britain 1945–71, by Rebecca Jennings: Jennings explores lesbian identity and culture in post-war Britain. Using oral histories and archival sources, she illuminates Britain’s lesbian social scene, both in London nightclubs and also in magazines and organizations across the country, in contrast to the conventional picture of post-war austerity.

September

Fairytales for Lost Children, by Diriye Osman: A series of narrators — young lesbian and gay Somalis on the edge of self-revelation — navigate family, identity and place in this collection of short stories that defy categorization. Alison Bechdel writes of the collection, “The characters in these fairy tales are displaced in multiple, complicated ways. But Osman’s storytelling creates a shelter for them; a warm place which is both real and imaginary, in which they find political, sexual, and ultimately psychic liberation.”

Girls I’ve Run Away With, by Rhiannon Argo: Sister Spit’s Rhiannon Argo (who Laneia once interviewed) founded Moonshine Press through an Indiegogo campaign in order to publish Girls I’ve Run Away With. Lo Flynn falls in love with rebellious Savannah Blanco and they go on the run while facing coming out, dysfunctional families, being kicked out, mental health issues and more.

Strangers In Paradise Omnibus, by Terry Moore: This is the ultimate collection for any fan of one of the most groundbreaking series for lovers of lesbian and queer characters in comic books. This edition contains all 107 issues of the series, including all of the spin offs. Moore’s masterful art and storytelling are at their highest levels in this two-book package.

Willow Volume 1: Wonderland, by Jeff Parker, Christos Gage and Brian Ching: Everyone’s favorite lesbian witch from Buffy is back in her own title, setting off on her own on a quest that will lead her to finding old allies and new battles. Magic has disappeared from the world and Willow is determined to get it back, no matter how dangerous the journey might be or where it might take her.

Blue is the Warmest Color, by Julie Maroh: First published in French as Le bleu est une couleur chaude, Blue is the Warmest Color is the English translation of the graphic novel recently adapted into the film that won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Clementine discovers the power of love when she meets the blue-haired Emma in a lesbian bar. Their relationship challenges Clementine’s ideas about herself and her identity.

Viral, by Suzanne Parker: Parker’s slim book of poetry offers a response to Tyler Clementi‘s tragic suicide that explores sexuality, masculinity and shame. Carol Muske-Dukes calls the poems “relentlessly tender, impossibly empathetic […] which echo and clarify the body of grief.”

After Delores, by Sarah Schulman: Schulman’s acclaimed 1988 novel about an unnamed New York waitress recovering after her girlfriend, Delores, leaves her appears in a new edition from Arsenal Pulp Press. After Delores is as much a sexy novel about heartbreak as it is a look into the Lower East Side’s lesbian culture in the 1980s.

Web of Obsessions, by Diane Wood: Jordan Mackenzie is a social worker in a women’s prison when she meets assistant superintendent Danielle Veillard. Her ex-girlfriend and Danielle’s ex-husband stand in their way as begin a romance, and a prison drug ring and mysterious death make the stakes even higher.

Show of Force, by A.J. Quinn: Correspondent Tate McKenna brings navy pilot Lieutenant Commander Evan Kane home after an embassy dinner and the two can’t imagine separating again — even if it means risking their lives. Following Quinn’s romantic suspense novel Hostage Moon, Show of Force promises to be a one-sitting read.

Inheritance, by Malinda Lo: The sequel to Adaptation, Lo’s young adult contemporary sci-fi thriller, continues to follow Reese Holloway as she deals with being implanted with alien DNA, government conspiracy and her feeling for her ex-girlfriend Amber and her best friend David. Inheritance explores sexuality, adolescence and “the other.” (Read Autostraddle’s interview with Lo on Adaptation.)

Batwoman Vol. 3: World’s Finest, by J.H. Williams III: The only lesbian superhero to have her own title at one of the major comic book publishers is back in action as she partners up with the most iconic of all lady superheroes, Wonder Woman. Not only do you get to see two of DC’s coolest ladies teaming up to fight mythological monsters, but also Batwoman takes some serious steps forward in her relationship with a fellow crime fighter.

Fairy Tale Comics: Classic Tales Told by Extraordinary Cartoonists, edited by Chris Duffy: This book features classic fairy tales, some familiar and some new, retold in comic book form by a super talented group of people including queer comic-maker Emily Carrol, Love and Rockets creators Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and Jillian Tamaki, the illustrator of Skim.

Queer Jihad: LGBT Muslims on Coming Out, Activism, and the Faith, by Afdhere Jama: Jama, author of Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives in the Muslim World, explores individual and group efforts to reconcile sexuality and faith. He discusses the post-9/11 West, law in the East, the new generation of queer Muslims, voice, change and rights.

October

Excluded: Making Feminist Movements More Inclusive, by Julia Serano: “Julia Serano is a careful and astute critic of the ways that trans women have been stereotyped and dismissed in popular culture, feminism, and psychology,” says Patrick Califia on the back of Whipping Girl. In Serano’s newest book, Excluded, she details how feminist and queer movements police gender and sexuality at the same time as challenging sexism, and how to foster inclusivity.

The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson: Lambda-Award-winning author Winterson is best known for Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body. Her new novel, set in seventeenth-century England, centers on the 1612 witch trials and a dark, paranoid moment in history.

Rookie Yearbook Two, edited by Tavi Gevinson: The second book from Rookie, an online magazine for teenage girls, isn’t just for those of us still in high school. Contributors include Judy Blume, Grimes and Mindy Kaling as well as interviews with people like Emma Watson and Carrie Brownstein. Yearbook Two collects the best of the website from its second year and is perfect for teens or anyone who remembers being one.

X-Files Classics Vol. 2, by Charlie Adlard and others: Although it’s not explicitly queer, it’s hard not to have a special spot in our hearts for FBI agent and medical doctor Dana Scully. This book features stories that were not featured in the TV show or movie and can only be found in the comics, including “Feelings of Unreality,” “Home of the Brave” and “Night Lights.”

Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives, by Verónica Reyes: “Reyes resurrects old-time shops and hangouts. They memorialize the land alongside edifices of refuse, sterile towers, man-made deserts and rivers, machines that suffocate the sky, fields locked in the historical cycle churning out the fieldworker’s woe. Queers, dandies, cholos, mariachis the same as ‘Chumash, Pomo, Modoc’ ramble these streets,” writes Kristin Naca of Reyes’s new collection of poetry, which captures the lives of immigrants, Mexican Americans, Chicanas/os and la jotería.

Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, by Lynne Huffer: Balancing current debates around both queer and feminist theories, Huffer — also the author of Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory — looks at queer sex, sodomy laws, interracial love, porn and work-life balance to rethink ethics and sexual morality.

Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter, by S. Bear Bergman: Bergman’s earlier books — Butch is a Noun, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (co-edited with Kate Bornstein) — are all seminal texts on gender and trans* life and issues. In Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter, Bergman considers different ideas of family from all perspectives with a voice that is both honest and hilarious.

Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake, by Natasha Allegri: This is the first trade paperback of comics based on the fantastic genderbent Adventure Time episodes. Fans of the show will love this comic illustrated and written by storyboard artist and Fionna & Cake creator Allegri.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 Vol. 4: Welcome to the Team, by Andrew Chambliss, Georges Jeanty, Karl Moline, Dexter Vines and Andy Owens: The second comic book-only season of the series that helped a lot of us figure out our queer feelings continues with Buffy fighting off a horde of zombies before being recruited to join a team that’s planning on taking down one of the most powerful enemies she’ll have to face — the Siphon.

First Love, by C.J. Harte: Harte’s novels thrive equally on romance and drama. In her latest, Jordan Thomson, daughter of the president of the United States, hires Drew Hamilton, once and future rancher and current medical student, as a tutor. Both women learn more than they expected.

Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, Citizenship, edited by S.N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht: The contributors in this volume of essays discuss contemporary debates on and issues around sexuality and gender identity. Same-sex networks, ex-gays, pseudo-scientific gay “cures,” the “kill the gays” bill in Uganda, relationship dynamics between women who sleep with women, Caster Semenya and nationalism all show the problems with oversimplified discussions of heterosexuality and homosexuality, Africa and the West and the closet and being out.

A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, edited by Valerie Steele: As the director and chief curator for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Steele has been called one of “Fashion’s 50 Most Powerful” by the New York Daily News. Her new book talks about gay designers, fashion and style within the queer community and more to show the impact of gay culture on modern fashion.

Batgirl Vol. 3: Death of the Family, by Gail Simone and Ed Benes: Collecting issues #14 to 19 of Batgirl, as well as Batman #17, Batgirl Annual #1 and a story from Young Romance #1, this run features Batgirl facing off against not only the Joker, but also against her dangerous brother. This is also the run of the series where Batgirl’s roommate Alysia Yeoh comes out as transgender.

Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened, by Allie Brosh: The long-awaited book from acclaimed graphic humor blog Hyperbole and a Half includes half unpublished content and all hilarity. The book chronicles cake eating, owning one neurotic dog and one mentally challenged one, depression, anxiety and more, all illustrated in MS Paint in Brosh’s signature style.

Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique, by Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters: There is often a troubled relationship between pop culture, feminism and post-feminism. Munford and Waters discuss Mad Men, Homeland, The Stepford Wives, American Horror Story and more to highlight the characters within the postfeminist landscape. They show how pop culture relates to feminist debates and explore the implications for the future.

November

Homestead, by Radclyffe: Best-selling lesbian author Radclyffe is nothing if not prolific. In her latest, Tess Rogers learns her to-be-inherited six hundred acres of farmland has been leased to an oil and gas company. Tess resists the takeover, much to the chagrin of R. Clayton Sutter, who is in charge of making the new refinery operational.

Love and Rockets: New Stories, Vol. 6, by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez: One of the forerunners in the alternative comics revolution and one of the earliest comic series to feature queer women of color, Love and Rockets continues with more stories of the several generations of Latina characters that we’ve come to know. Los Bros Hernadez’s distinctive stylized illustration and magical realism storytelling style is showcased once more in their latest graphic novel.

Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Megan Milks and Karli June Cerankowski: “I also wish I’d known that it’s totally okay to feel passion and desire and pleasure in ways that don’t appear sexual. To feed other parts of yourself,” says Eliot in an interview with the Hairpin. This first-ever collection of critical essays on asexuality looks at its feminist and queer politics. Authors consider gender, race, disability and medical discourse to challenge ideas about gender and sexuality as they relate to desire, bodies and sexual practice.

Hild, by Nicola Griffith: “Hild is not just one of the best historical novels I have ever read — I think it’s one of the best novels, period,” says Dorothy Allison, author of Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Hild is set in seventh-century Britain and focuses on the girl who would become St. Hilda of Whitby, who establishes herself as the seer to a ruthless king who finds her indispensable — until he doesn’t.

Moonin’s Desert Island and Moonin and the Golden Tail, by Tove Jansson: From Swedish-speaking Finnish lesbian author Tove Jansson, these comics in the beloved series are being released fully colored for the first time. Jansson’s fantastical and heartfelt story telling combines with her simple yet whimsical illustrations in these stories of a group of trolls and their friends on various adventures.

Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States, by Katrina Kimport: Legal same-sex marriage is often seen as either a challenge to heterosexual privilege or as a way to preserve that privilege through assimilation. Using a series of interviews with queer spouses, Kimport reconciles both views to show how gay marriage and reinforce and disrupt traditional ideas about marriage and sexuality.

Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, edited by Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas: Gentile’s first co-written Canadian queer history book, The Canadian War on Queers, explored sexuality and gender identity — and oppression — in Canada during the Cold War. Now, Gentile and Nicholas explore the history of the body as a site of contestation in Canada. Contributors address health and medicine, consumerism and fashion, citizenship, work and more.

Bandette Volume 1: Presto!, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover: Illustrated by the amazing bisexual artist Colleen Coover, this Eisner-nominated series is about costumed teen thief Bandette and her adventures in Paris. She and her friends can be found dodging the police, pulling off major heists and having fun while fighting for justice. That is, before Bandette finds out that an international criminal organization wants her dead.

Lesbian Sex Positions: 100 Passionate Positions from Intimate and Sensual to Wild and Naughty, by Shanna Katz: Sexologist and sex educator Katz is a self-described queer kinky disabled feisty femme and “professional pervert” involved with numerous sex-positive organizations and equality and social justice work. In this full-color guide, Katz explores old and new ways to make sex fun, step by step.

Under the Rainbow: A Primer on Queer Issues in Canada, by Jeanette Auger and Kate Krug: Canada has long been known as a generally queer friendly society. Auger and Krug discuss its social and political history and contemporary issues in queer Canadians’ lives. They also talk about social constructions of identities, law and politics, Quebec and queerness, trans* issues, education, sports, aging, health, end-of-life decisions and more.

Quivering Land, by Roewan Crowe: Among other projects, Crowe is involved in an ongoing collaboration with Michelle Meagher that explores new feminist art practices. In her literary debut, Crowe conducts a queer literary experiment in which she questions what it means to be a queer feminist artist and settler in a landscape reminiscent of the Hollywood Western.

December

Rhetorical Secrets: Mapping Gay Identity and Queer Resistance in Contemporary America, by Davin Allen Grindstaff: Looking at language and rhetoric, Grindstaff looks at persuasion and gay identity construction. He chronicles sexual identity as a secret as a strategy of heteronormative discourse before examining issues related to contemporary identity.

Pretty in Ink: American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013, by Trina Robbins: Tracing more than 100 years back into the history of cartoons and comics, this new book from Trina Robbins covers artists from Rose O’Neill at the end of the 19th century, to a Native American women cartoonist in the 40s, to alternative comic creator Lyda Barry to modern women in comics like Alison Bechdel and Kate Beaton. This book is full of incredible stories and beautiful art.

Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, by Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle: In Living Out Islam, Kugle uses interviews with gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims living in secular democratic countries to demonstrate the importance of support groups and solidarity in changing social relationships. He goes beyond the idea of the closet to show interviewees’ ways of living out Islam with integrity; reconciling faith, gender and sexuality; and reclaiming Islam for their themselves.

Love Burns Bright: A Lifetime of Lesbian Romance, edited by Radclyffe: A new collection compiled by Radclyffe looks at lesbian love from the first kiss to the first night to the love that goes on many years later. Contributors include Andrea Dale and many more.

Best Lesbian Erotica 2014, edited by Kathleen Warnock: Cleis Press’s annual erotica collection returns with an introduction by Sarah Schulman, co-founder of the Lesbian Avengers.

After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics, by James Penney: Penney, author of The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire, has written extensively on queer theory. However, in his latest book, he says it’s dead. Using a critical look at Marxism and psychoanalysis, Penney argues that the best way to include sexuality in political antagonism is to toss aside the idea of politicized sexuality.

Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran, by Afsaneh Najmabadi: “Najmabadi brings her nuanced understanding of multiple discourses and institutions in Iran to bear on the recent and remarkable visibility of transsexuality in that country. Professing Selves […] will be the definitive text on its topic for a long time to come,” writes Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History. In what promises to become a crucial text, Najmabadi uses history and ethnography to discuss the post-revolutionary era, law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, biomedicine, and transsexual and homosexual categories in contemporary Iran.