Category Archives: GLBTQ

May 3, 2013 · 4:57 PM

Queer Library: New Additions

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Queer Library is a new feature on Bonjour, Cass! On Fridays I’ll write about a queer book on my shelves, an upcoming book I’m looking forward to reading, a review, or anything else related to LGBTQ books.

I don’t buy a lot of books anymore; partly because, as you may understand, I have quite the reading habit and buying all the books I want to read would be devastating to my bank account; but mostly because I decided, after moving for the third time in as many years, that maybe now was the time for my personal library to be a bit more selective. The only books I really buy these days (that don’t exclusively come from used bookstores or thrift stores) are LGBTQ books, fiction and non-, because, well, I just can’t help myself. Here are three books I’ve recently added to my library: two new releases and one soon-to-be-rereleased novel.

TheEndofSanFrancisco

The End of San Francisco by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Blurb from Amazon:

The End of San Francisco breaks apart the conventions of memoir to reveal the passions and perils of a life that refuses to conform to the rules of straight or gay normalcy. A budding queer activist escapes to San Francisco, in search of a world more politically charged, sexually saturated, and ethically consistent—this is the person who evolves into Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, infamous radical queer troublemaker, organizer and agitator, community builder, and anti-assimilationist commentator. Here is the tender, provocative, and exuberant story of the formation of one of the contemporary queer movement’s most savvy and outrageous writers and spokespersons.

Using an unrestrained associative style to move kaleidoscopically between past, present, and future, Sycamore conjures the untidy push and pull of memory, exposing the tensions between idealism and critical engagement, trauma and self-actualization, inspiration and loss. Part memoir, part social history, and part elegy, The End of San Francisco explores and explodes the dream of a radical queer community and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it.

Why I Bought It: How could I resist? I own (and have read almost) all of the anthologies Sycamore edited, so how could I resist this memoir?

thebeautifullyworthless The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Liebegott

Blurb from Amazon:

A runaway waitress leaves her lover, grabs her dog, and hits the highway. Ali Liebegott maps her travels in a series of hilarious and heartbreaking letters to the girl she left behind, and some of the most exquisite poetry written about love, heartache, and madness.

Why I Bought It: Liebegott’s previous novel The IHOP Papers still has a special place in my heart because a) I remember where I bought it and where I read it and how it felt and b) I really love the cover.

afterdelores After Delores by Sarah Schulman

Blurb from Amazon:

[...] A noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. After Delores is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side’s lesbian subculture in the 1980s.

Why I Bought It: This book is being re-released by Arsenal Pulp Press in September and I didn’t even know it until I started writing this blog post! I bought the 1989 version, used, from the LGBT specialty bookstore Calamus Bookstore here in Boston, a few weeks ago. After I read Schulman’s memoir The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, I’ve been busily hunting down her previous work. 

 

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March 3, 2013 · 8:21 PM

2013 and the Emergence of the Disgruntled Reader

I am mad at books…all of the books. All of the books that have come my way in the past couple of months, at the very least. I’m sick of the recycling of plots and surprise! graphic rape scenes and surprise! mom deaths and surprise! the villain is a crazed homosexual even though this book was published in 2008 and maybe we could get over that trope and straight authors who include gay characters getting more attention for their books than gay authors who write about gay people.

It’s March third and I’ve only been able to finish fourteen books, an absurdly low-number for someone who has read over or nearly 200 books every year since 2008. Every book I read in January was incredibly disappointing. Every book I read in February, all three of them, were “safe” books for me: one re-read, one by an acclaimed historian, and one queer theory book. I can’t bear the idea of picking up yet another book only to be disappointed by its inability to capture my interest or avoid some basic rules of decency or its eagerness to assail my community in the name of “political incorrectness” or “cutting-edge criticism.”

I’m sick of bad or mediocre young adult books getting overwhelming amounts of praise just because they include a trans character, even if they do it in a way that dehumanizes a real group of people, characters who are a lot like my friends, people that I love. I’m sick of not being able to go to the bookstore and easily find a love story that bears any resemblance to either my actual love life or my dreamed of love life. Why is it that even gay or lesbian romance novels are so often tragic? Where’s my escape?

I love books, and I know that there are many books out there that I will love once I find them, but sometimes it’s hard to feel so passionately about something that refuses to acknowledge the existence of people like me.

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December 9, 2012 · 8:15 PM

ANNOUNCEMENT: 1970s Gay & Lesbian YA Read-a-Long

Image courtesy of federico stevanin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of federico stevanin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last month I read The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004 (Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature) by Michael Cart and Christine Jenkins, a book that, as you may have guessed from its subtitle, examines young adult books with LGBTQ content published between 1969 and 2004. The authors list EVERY YA book published between the years 1969 and 2004, and I decided that I would take it upon myself to read as many books as possible that are listed in its pages.

Although I am not generally an avid reader of young adult books, I’m continuously fascinated by and interested in the portrayal of LGBTQ youth (and adults) within young adult books. And, as a reader who is predisposed to reading entire series of books, the fact that, due to the unfortunately low number of books published, reading every young adult book with LGBTQ content (at least until the 2000s) is actually a goal within my grasp, I am excited by the challenge.

I am using the terms gay and lesbian (as opposed to the more inclusive LGBTQ) for this challenge because these books are very binary and only feature gay or lesbian characters. (Per book. Seriously, the first YA book to feature both gay and lesbian characters was My Life As a Body by Norma Klein in 1987. The first to mention bisexuality was “Hello,” I Lied. by M.E. Kerr in 1998, and the first major transgender character wasn’t featured until 2004 in Julie Ann Peters’ Luna.)

I asked around on Twitter last week if anyone was interested in joining me for this read-a-long, and so far Amy, Jodie, and Carina have signed on to read at least a few with me. I plan on posting about the books sometime during the last week of each month. Some of these books are harder to find than others (especially David Rees’ In the Tent), but I’m hopeful I’ll be able to find them all.

2013 Schedule (all links lead to the book’s Goodreads page)

ETA: This is a complete list of all the YA books with LGBT characters published between 1969-1979. Ten books in eleven years.

January: I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip by John Donovan (1969)
February: The Man Without a Face by Isabelle Holland (1972)
March: Trying Hard to Hear You by Sandra Scoppettone (1974)
April: Ruby by Rosa Guy (1976)
May: What’s This About Pete? by Mary Sullivan (1976)
June: Sticks and Stones by Lynn Hall (1977)
July: I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me by ME Kerr (1977)
August: Hey, Dollface by Deborah Hautzig (1978)
September: Happy Endings Are All Alike by Sandra Scoppettone (1978)
October: In the Tent by David Rees (1979)

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December 6, 2012 · 5:49 PM

Thoughts: Carry the One by Carol Anshaw (Green Carnation Prize Project)

Carry the One by Carol AnshawCarry the One
by Carry Anshaw
Published 2012 by Simon & Schuster
Read December 2012
253 pages

When Jodie contacted me about her idea to have a group of bloggers read the Green Carnation Prize* short-list, I didn’t hesitate before choosing Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One. Mostly because I had attempted to read the novel before, but I ended up setting it aside when I realized it just wasn’t the right time to read the book. The Green Carnation Prize project was a good excuse to give it another chance.

Warning: This post contains discussion of actual events in the novel. Some might call them spoilers. 

The Plot: After Carmen and Matt’s wedding, Olivia, Nick, Maude, Alice, and Jim drive off a little drunk and a little stoned. The car hits and kills a child, and Olivia, who was driving, is sent to jail. The book follows the characters’ lives over the next few decades of their lives.

Some thoughts:

  • Carry the One starts off with an epigram, a quote from a Gillian Welch song, as if to say, “Hello, this book is going to be very gay.”
  • I was struck by how the violence that occurs in the novel was connected to conservative arguments. The little girl is killed because Olivia is high on drugs. Message: drugs are bad. Nick’s nose is broken because “Everyone was tacitly deferring to some universal law that, while his daughter lay in the hospital morgue, a father was allowed to punch out the guy lounging around in the wedding dress” (p 18). Message: variant gender expression is bad. Carmen’s ear is destroyed while volunteering to help women safely access a clinic that performs abortions. Message: abortion is bad. Maybe this wasn’t the author’s intent, but it happened enough that I started to pay attention.
  • Also, by including the tragic car accident right after Alice and Maude have sex, Anshaw continues an unfortunate tradition of tragic car accidents “coincidentally” occurring after same-sex partners have sex. (Including the first YA book with LGBT content, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip by John Donovan, wherein the main character’s dog is hit by a car after the MC has sex with his male friend.)
  • I’m interested in how Alice is the only character whose intimate moments are detailed for the reader. She is presented as a sexual object in a way that none of the other characters are.
  • I loved the relationship Carmen had with her sister Alice. This quote is probably my favorite in the entire book and definitely makes a top ten list somewhere: Carmen was always a little startled (and titillated) when Alice said things like this. She wasn’t sure if this was her sister’s way of being shocking, or if lesbians all talked this way among themselves. It always tripped her up. She used to imagine love between women as a languid extension of friendship. Something Virginia Woolf-ish involving tea and conversation and sofas and afternoon eliding into evening, a small lamp needing to be turned on, but left unlit. And so she was brought up short by Alice’s exhausting–even just to witness–passion for Maude, her desolation since Maude walked out of her life. (p. 63)
  • Carmen works in a women’s shelter and I was pleasantly surprised that one of the women had been abused by her female partner. Representations of survivors of same-sex violence are so rare, and the inclusion here didn’t seem forced, as if included just to make a point.
  • This is the second novel, after John Green’s fantastic The Fault in Our Stars, I’ve read this year where a character visits the Anne Frank House.
  • Time goes by quickly, with each chapter beginning without a note as to just how much time has passed. Usually this bothers me in books, but I found it easy enough to keep track based on the pop culture references and, more directly, characters’ mentions of time.
  • Alice gets mono–which the text frequently refers to as the KISSING DISEASE. Cause y’all know who she’d be kissing, amiright? It’s telling that in the same chapter, Alice tells Carmen she’s “reading all these cheesy dyke novels from the forties and fifties,” which she loves because “[t]hey’re like Greek tragedies. Everyone gets horribly punished in the end. Or they hang themselves with a belt over the steam pipe” (p. 152). Since Alice, Carmen, and Nick are named after tragic Opera characters…I got kind of nervous about where this was going.
  • And then, oh God, their mother dies right after Alice has sex. Alice, you should never have sex apparently because you KILL PEOPLE WITH YOUR LADY LOVE.

Grade: B-

Recommended: Despite some of the things I’ve said above, Carry the One is an engaging, well-written story that just so happens to use several tropes of LGBT fiction.

Green Carnation Prize Project participants:

*The Green Carnation Prize recognizes the best book of the year by a LGBT-identified author. 

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December 4, 2012 · 3:29 PM

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’m Hoping to See Under the Tree

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish. This week we’re sharing ten books we “wouldn’t mind” getting for Christmas. 

You might notice that this list is, um, all non-fiction. I am weird with the books I keep on my bookshelves: favorite novels, non-fiction about politics or biographies, and LGBT/queer books of any kind. When it comes to gifts, though, I’m open to most things, particularly books other people enjoyed that I might not have picked up on my own.

While writing this post, I purchased The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw, a book that was originally included in this list, from Audible. I couldn’t resist.

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November 3, 2012 · 8:29 PM

In Between: How to Be Gay by David M. Halperin

Just as straight readers have always done with mainstream literature, I could finally read fictional works to see my own life reflected, explored, analyzed and re-imagined  Through gay literature I could come to understand my place in the world. (425)

– from How To Be Gay by David M Halperin

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November 2, 2012 · 6:18 PM

Queer Library: Thornton Wilder and Samuel Steward

Queer Library is a new feature on Bonjour, Cass! Every Friday I’ll write about a queer book on my shelves, an upcoming book I’m looking forward to reading, a review, or anything else related to LGBTQ books.

There’s a new biography of Thornton Wilder out, written by Penelope Niven and published by Harper. When I went to read the New York Times review of the book I was astonished to read this:

Ms. Niven, the author of books about Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen, has dug deeply into the copiously documented life of her subject, drawing on access to substantial troves of previously undisclosed family papers. And yet, setting aside the dubious testimony of a single man who claims to have gone to bed with Wilder,“Thornton Wilder: A Life” tells of a life lived without the sexual relationships and romantic attachments that we sometimes falsely assume to be the most momentous passages in an artist’s — or anyone’s — life.

That “dubious testimony” was from Samuel Steward: author, tattoo artist, and friend of Gertrude Stein, who himself was the subject of an award-winning biography by Justin Spring. While Spring acknowledges that it is not 100% provable that Wilder and Steward had an affair, he presents a strong case based on the papers of Steward and letters from Wilder, Stein, and Alice B. Toklas.

What gets me about this whole situation isn’t that the NY Times refuses to acknowledge Steward by name or that Wilder is presented by Niven as a man without “sexual relationships and romantic attachments” (although that bugs me plenty), it’s the implication that acknowledging even the possibility that a beloved historical figure may have had homosexual entanglements will be offensive. Especially given that Wilder wrote “Our Town,”the most New Englandy of all New Englander plays, and a perfect example of the tendency toward repressed emotions of my fellow New Englanders.

If Wilder had written less famous or less popular plays, I don’t think Steward’s “dubious testimony” would be dismissed so easily. There is a major gap between modern society’s willingness to acknowledge the effeminate Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality and our discomfort in assuming the sexual orientation or desires of a less flamboyant, more traditionally masculine artist like Wilder.

Shorter: I really wish you’d read Secret Historian instead.

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October 29, 2012 · 8:19 PM

ANNOUNCEMENT: LGBTQ Book Blogger Directory

This is a sticky post. To see new content, please scroll down. Thanks!

I have been dreaming about a directory of blogs that review LGBTQ books for pretty much the entire time I’ve been blogging. In the past few months, however, I started to realize that hey, maybe instead of waiting around for this magical unicorn of a project to spontaneously happen, perhaps I could MAKE it happen.

So I am.

While the LGBTQ Book Blogger Directory is still in its very, very early stages, it now actually exists as a (granted, very empty) blog. To help me get everything up the ground, I hope you’ll sign up via the embedded Google form.

To be eligible to be listed, you must:

  1. Have a blog.
  2. Read and review LGBTQ books.

That’s it. As long as you read and review books containing LGBTQ characters or topics/themes, the niche of your blog does not matter.

Any questions, comments, ideas, or concerns can be left on this post or emailed to bonjourcass at gmail dot com or lgbtqbookblogs at gmail dot com.

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October 26, 2012 · 3:37 PM

Queer Library: It’s My Birthday and I’ll Add to My Library If I Want To

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Today is my birthday and I am busy being glamorous and day-dreaming about all of the books I should treat myself to.

Any suggestions?

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October 16, 2012 · 9:01 AM

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite LGBTQ Authors

top tenTop Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish. I will entirely admit that I narrowed down today’s list based on the projection of how loudly I would squeal excited I would be if one of the authors had a new book coming out. 

Top Ten Favorite LGBTQ Authors

  1. Patrick Califia: The first Califia book I read was Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex,which I borrowed on a whim from my college library. It ended up changing the way I see myself, the way I think about sex, and the way I identify with the LGBT community. Later on I read Sex Changes: Transgender Politics, a book that I still use as my go-to recommendation for anyone interested in learning more about transgender folks. There’s even an essay in Sex Changes where Califia analyzes Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues in relation to Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/He(the book I love most ever) and I pretty much had a brain explosion because of the awesomeness. And in case you doubt me, I just counted my bookshelf and it turns out I own fifteen Califia books, including a couple first editions. He’s kind of a big deal.
  2. Jack Halberstam: Female Masculinity is one of the most important non-fiction LGBT books ever published. Every time I read a book by Halberstam I know I am going to have capital-t Thoughts and actually have to use my brain and it makes me so very happy.
  3. Zoe Whittall: I’ve written about how much I loved Holding Still For As Long As Possible and Bottle Rocket Hearts. What I like most about Whittall is that she doesn’t write about Issues, she writes about people. I feel like I know all of her characters, that they could be friends of mine, and after reading dozens of novels with LGBTQ characters that were all about the Issues instead of the actual people those Issues affect, nothing is more welcome.
  4. Patrick Ryan: His YA novel Gemini Bites, about twins (a boy and a girl) who fall for the same maybe-vampire, was the most original novel I read in 2011. His other YA novel, In Mike We Trust, surprised me by avoiding usual coming-out tropes. It sometimes feels that all YA novels featuring LGBTQ characters follow the same plot (oh no I might be gay! OH NO I MIGHT BE GAY! Fight/homophobic attack/outing followed by careful tolerance by others) and Ryan’s novels stand out for avoiding that plot.
  5. Leslie Feinberg: Stone Butch Blues: A Novel should be (and in some places is) required reading. If you are afraid you might be a robot, try reading this book: if you don’t tear up even a little, you are indeed a robot. I also highly recommend Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, a great look at the complexities of gender throughout history.
  6. Dorothy Allison: You’ve probably know her for her award-winning novel Bastard Out of Carolina: A Novel, an examination of class and violence and strength. I’m also a big fan of her non-fiction work Skin: Talking About Sex, Class And Literature.
  7. Emma Donnoghue: I appreciate any author who can write sweet romance novels like Landing, a non-fiction examination of love between women in literature, and a mainstream work like Room. I’m always excited to see what direction she’s going to take next.
  8. Sarah Waters: I don’t love every Waters book the way some people do, but I do appreciate that she is a literary author pretty much writing literary lesbian romance novels. I’m glad she’s around.
  9. Michelle Tea: I felt Valencia changing me while I was reading it.
  10. Helen Boyd: There aren’t a lot of non-exploitative books by cis partners of trans folks, so Boyd’s books seemed like a special gift to me when I found them.

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