[bookkwots]

Reading goal 2022

Read 24 books

Books read so far this year:

1. Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture - Amelia Abraham

2. Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry - Richard Flanagan

3. Migration: Exploring the Remarkable Journeys of Birds - Melissa Mayntz

4. Amazing Facts about Australian Birds - Steve Parish

5. Dark Emu - Bruce Pascoe

6. We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[gatheringbones]

[“On December 10, 1989, for the first time in history, the world—and the world literally watched this event—saw homosexuals with AIDS and women wanting the right to abortion interrupt a Sunday mass in a world-famous cathedral to assert their power and insist on the sanctity of our lives. There had long been pickets and demonstrations outside St. Patrick’s. And about a year before ACT UP’s founding I participated in a small demonstration inside the cathedral when some gay activists stood quietly and calmly turned our backs on the cardinal in response to him expelling Dignity, the gay Catholic organization, from meeting on church property. But going inside with significance, instead of deference, was brand-new. And to dare do this as despised outcasts with AIDS was the paradigm shift. Ironically, Stop the Church made palatable the future assimilationist agenda of the gay rights movement, which uplifts pro-natalism, nuclear family, monogamy, and marriage. Because when the world saw women wanting abortion rights and homosexuals and people with AIDS refusing to adhere to the boundaries of Catholic Church property, the prospect of the much more controllable, integrationist concept of gay marriage suddenly seemed reasonable and, in fact, desirable.”]

Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993, by Sarah Schulman

[thefictionalqueer-deactivated20]

You can love books without owning a million of them.

Please, support public libraries.

[gatheringbones]

Book Recommendations

Testimonies: Lesbian Coming Out Stories, edited by Karen Barber

Old Dyke Tales, by Lee Lynch

Garden Variety Dykes: Lesbian Traditions in Gardening, edited by Irene Reti

The Persistent Desire, edited by Joan Nestle

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, edited by Ivan Coyote and Zena Sharman

Gender Failure, by Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon

One In Every Crowd/The Slow Fix/Tomboy Survival Guide/Rebent Sinner/Care Of, by Ivan Coyote

S/He, by Minnie Bruce Pratt

The Faggots and Their Friends In Between Revolutions, by Larry Mitchell

Zami, a New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, by Lillian Faderman

Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, edited by Rosemary Curb

His Hands, His Tools, His Sex, His Dress: Lesbian Writers on their Fathers, edited by Catherine Reid

Every Woman I've Ever Loved: Lesbians Write On Their Mothers, edited by Catherine Reid

Finding The Lesbians: Personal Accounts From Around The World, edited by Julia Penelope

Hidden From History: Reclaiming The Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Duberman

When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution, by Jeanne Cordova

Bushfire/Afterglow, edited by Karen Barber

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

The Swasbuckler/Beggar of Love/The Morton River Valley Trilogy, by Lee Lynch

Happy Endings: Lesbian Writers Talk About Their Lives and Work, by Kate Brandt

Dagger: On Butch Women, edited by Roxxie, Lily Burana, and Linnea Due

The Gay Revolution: The Story of The Struggle, By Lillian Faderman

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, by Eli Clare

Confessions of the Fox, by Jordy Rosenberg

Genderqueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary, edited by Riki Anne Wilchins

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, edited by Micah Rajunov

Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, by Sarah Schulman

Memoir Of A Race Traitor, by Mab Segrest

That's Revolting! Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

[bookkwots]

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf - John Muir

[bookkwots]

Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir - John Muir

[bookkwots]

In an article entitled, ‘Living Without Men’, published in Camp Ink in May 1972, Susan Williamson argued:

“So there has developed a conspiracy of silence and lies with regard to Lesbians. The church calls her a sinner, the law makes her a criminal, and psychiatry tells her she is sick.

Because a Lesbian is raised like everyone else, she will have deep-seated anti-homosexual prejudices. This will be her first obstacle as she struggles to achieve her identity. There is often a period of denial, when she tries desperately to convince herself that she is not ‘like them’.

This is one of the worst things this society does to gay people. It breeds guilt, self-hatred, lack of confidence.

This is the significance of the emphasis on gay pride in the gay liberation movement. It is changing the ‘coming out’ process from an agonising, terrifying, individual experience, into a beautiful, self-affirmative, social process.”

Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History - Rebecca Jennings

[bookkwots]

In 1971, Mim and Sue contributed an article to Camp Ink describing their experience of holding hands in public and their motivations for doing so.

“I feel people have to come to recognise the existence of lesbianism… the sooner these people see with their own eyes that it exists the sooner it will be accepted, the more people start seeing homosexuality the more likely they are going to get educated.

Holding hands in public is a step towards educating the public, towards having lesbianism recognised as something that exists. After people realise that it exists, perhaps the next generation, they will accept it.”

Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History - Rebecca Jennings

[bookkwots]

Sandra explained:

“There was an idea that women needed to have women-only spaces because we’d never had that and we saw it like, if men were supportive of us, and understood feminism, then they would be happy enough to stay out of those women only spaces because they would understand our need for it!”

Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History - Rebecca Jennings

[bookkwots]

What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be.

My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy

[bookkwots]

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living

My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy

[moon1ike]

sometimes you just want to lie down and read a book

david hettinger, jacques chapiro, cecil higgs, isaac israels, xue jiye, willard leroy metcalf, joseph lorusso, alejandra caballero, belinda del pesco

[natreads]

Autumn my beloved

[bookkwots]

“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle:“nine the next, and so on.”

“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.

“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.”

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

[listentothestories]

“Because that is what one does in a bookstore: One loses track of time.”

— Steven A Rigolosi, The Outsmarting of Criminals

[bookkwots]

Migration can be triggered by the angle of the sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

[bookkwots]

Reading goal 2021

read 24 books (2 per month)

Books read in 2021

The Miseducation of Cameron Post - Emily Danforth

End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World’s Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals - Ross MacPhee

Plant Names: A Guide to Botanical Nomenclature - Roger Spencer

Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s Journey to Marriage Equality - Alex Greenwich

Fire Country - Victor Steffensen

Pride: The Unlikely Story of the Unsung Heroes of the Miner’s Strike - Tim Tate

Populism - Benjamin Moffitt

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Peter Wohlleben

Equus - Peter Shaffer

Twelve Angry Men - Reginald Rose

The Joy of Doing Just Enough - Jennifer McCartney

I’m Afraid of Men - Vivek Shraya

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli

The New Sociology for Australians - Margaret Sargent

To be a Gay Man - Will Young

Around the World in 80 Trees - Jonathan Drori

The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World - Amanda Little

The Secret Life of Cows - Rosamund Young

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History - Rebecca Jennings

What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses - Daniel Chamovitz

Holding the Man - Timothy Conigrave