Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
— Frank Bidart, in the poem Queer, written 1939
Books
Super/Natural
These queer YA fantasies will transport you to realms you never imagined.
It’s nearly the weekend, and the rain is hitting the skylight in its familiar and comforting way. It’s the perfect time for reading, and I have a pseudo-confession to make:
Sometimes I read YA fiction.
Because it can be amazing. And who, exactly, decides which books are just for children anyway? I’ve never been one to read within the lines. When I was six or seven, my father read me A Confederacy of Dunces — a book very definitely not written for children — and I loved it. And now at thirty, with no children of my own, I still enjoy reading a really good children’s picture book. The secret is this: any story can transport you, if it’s well-told.
These Friends of Mine
Six smart women whose memoirs make me feel like maybe I can do this grown-up thing after all.
Here’s the thing: I have spent a lot of my adult life feeling incompetent, insecure, unsuccessful. I have worried about so many things.
I have been neurotic and self-absorbed, and then become obsessed with how self-absorbed I was, berating myself for it until I didn’t have any time or energy for anyone else.
Wide Open Spaces
These books set on the queer frontier will leave you yearning for a wagon train (or a petticoated damsel) to call your own.
The old days kind of terrify me. No antibiotics, no equality for women, everyone dying in childbirth…but at the same time, they’re kind of fascinating, too. I love it when queer stories are set in the past. There’s just something so freeing about the landscape.
For the Last Time, No One is “Born a Man”
It’s 2014. It’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. For the last time, can the media please stop telling people they were “born men?”
You know who is “born a man?” This ugly Renaissance baby. He may be small, but I’m pretty sure he’s a tiny adult male.
You know who isn’t “born a man?” A trans woman. If we must insist on using this terrible grammar, she is actually “born a baby.”
What Happened, Sarah Waters?
Has everyone’s favorite gothic lesbian author lost her mojo?
Once upon a time, I wrote a writer’s love letter to Sarah Waters. It was terribly overwrought. “You have rewritten the past with me in it,” I gushed. Perhaps that wasn’t quite true; after all, I wouldn’t last an hour as a rent boy in London in 1890. But Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were queer answers to the books I
It Finally Happened: I ❤ Lena Dunham
What can the self-proclaimed “Voice of our Generation” teach us about sex and consent?
My roommate and I watched parts of the first season of Girls with our mouths hanging open and our heads cocked to one side. Sometimes it seemed to cut into the deep truth of coming of age as a millennial in America, and sometimes it seemed to be no more than a collection of awkward sexual encounters (TBD if
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