A sci-fi audio drama. Jane and Sophie, a scientist & a soldier, not-quite-friends on a mission. Now complete and ready for your enjoyment! 🚀🌈 Website: pasitheapowder.com, Twitter: @PasitheaPowder Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/thepasitheapowder
On a faraway world, Captain Sophie Green is recovering from a war that ripped her planet apart and left her personal relationships for dead. Among the many atrocities committed on both sides was the invention of Pasithea Powder, a drug with memory altering properties. Thankfully, the drug has been eradicated and only a handful of scientists—now political prisoners—know how to recreate it. When Sophie sees one of those scientists walking free, she has no choice but to turn to an estranged friend for help...
What?
Epistolary thrills. Alien chills. Identity porn. Mind control. Plucky reporters. Love triangles gone wrong. The evils of capitalism. Fake news. World War I. Our own high school trauma.
It's easily one of the greatest pieces of audio fiction out there.
Please, if you've posted on tumblr about how you wanted your sapphic relationships to involve unethical medical experiments and a bit of light treason, you should absolutely give The Pasithea Powder a listen.
Hi there, Jackie here, with a story some of you may enjoy!
So I've been hatching a plan to propose to Molly. I've got the ring. I've got the location (her favorite park bench). We have plans to meet up at the park, so I get there like an hour early to be sure the bench is available. It is! Now I get to sit there and not totally spin out. I know fundamentally that it'll go well, but I am still, absolutely, metaphorically shitting myself.
I look at the trees, I look at the water, and eventually she arrives. Yay! My plan is to chat about our days for a while before smoothly segueing into a situation where I can feel around in my purse for the ring box and simultaneously drop to one knee, but it becomes immediately obvious that any second now she's going to notice that I'm shaking like a leaf. Fuck it, I think, let's do this thing. Knee goes down. Ring comes out. I ask her to marry me. She says, "Aaahhhh!" She says, "Yes."
I scramble up and put it on her finger and we go "Aaahhhh!" some more, and then! She's reaching for her bag!
Me, delighted: "Are you fucking serious!"
Her, pulling out a ring box: "Yes."
Inside is the most beautiful ring! I say yes preemptively and jam it on my finger. We scream a little longer and then she says, "Look at what's written inside."
This high school reunion has everything! Alien goo, long-lost BFFs, and terrible bosses! And stay tuned to see who wound up going to jail. The answer may surprise you.
We've been waiting so long to say this: IF YOU'RE A SUBSCRIBER OR KICKSTARTER BACKER, ISSUE 1 IS IN YOUR INBOX! Thank you for reading OTHERSIDE and thank you for your support of queer art, now more than ever.
The issue will be on our website later this month, but if you can't wait, you can get your hands on it RIGHT NOW!
Peruse the full TOC or snag a copy for only $4.99 via Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/othersidespec/shop
Or you can subscribe to our Patreon for only $2/month, which comes with BTS content and access to our staggeringly wonderful Discord community! Paperbacks coming soon, and digital versions coming soon to more retailers too!
The five poems, nine stories, and one essay that comprise this issue are fifteen of the best pieces we have ever read... and they total more than 28,000 words, which means this issue should keep you busy. These pieces are heartbreaking and hopeful and tender and angry and raw and brave and unapologetic, and even after reading this issue countless times during the production process, reading the whole thing still makes us cry. We hope you love every word. 🪐🗡️🌈
Strongly suspect that there's a giant overlap between people who like The Pasithea Powder and people who should be reading OTHERSIDE! Plus, Jackie's got a speculative essay in the first issue, now live for free on the website! Check it out!
btw @munchiezxx and i are relistening to the pasithea powder in advance of the 3 year finaleversary on april 12th according to the following schedule if anyone wants to join us!!:
What’s your favourite audio drama quote from a female character?
I love advertising female-led fiction podcasts, but what’s the one line that stands out in your favourite podcast? (Mine might be “That's right when you'll find me waiting for you. With a goddamn harpoon.”)
hello!! some of us have been celebrating sophie green's birthday on june 15th bc that's the day "happy birthday lieutenant green" was posted but jane deserves equal celebration, could we have a non-canonical date for jane's birthday festivities? :)
Split-second decision coming in hot from Molly: April 27th
It’s a type of post that goes around every time a popular mainstream show/franchise does something disappointing: urging people to try indie queer media. Which I think is a great thing to do! But it so often gets framed as a binary: high quality, high production value straight movies/TV vs. low quality low production value poorly drawn indie webcomics or VNs. Which is a shame, because that framing does everyone a disservice. There is a huge range of indie queer media out there—webcomics and visual novels, as well as movies, books, music, and pretty much any medium you can imagine. And just like mainstream media versions of all of these, you’ll like some and you won’t like others. It’s not about lowering your standards or getting into a medium you don’t like, it’s about expanding where you have available to look at the stuff you do like.
“How do I find indie queer media?” is really two questions: “how do I find out what’s out there?” and “Where do I access it?”
This is a rundown of answers to both questions in various media!
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This list focuses on independent queer original fiction. Media produced by major production companies and Big Five publishing companies are valuable and definitely exist, but aren’t included here. Neither is fanfiction (I assume you know where to find that) or nonfiction, the same techniques can apply to find documentaries and memoirs and such.
It also includes a variety of non-English language media because I am writing from a USAmerican perspective and don’t know how to judge other countries’ publishing landscapes very well.
This (mostly) isn’t a list of recommendations. You know what you like better than I do. This is a list of places and techniques to find the kind of stuff you might like.
Movies
Major streaming services like Netflix let you filter and browse shows and movies by LGBTQ, but if you want to branch out, I highly recommend Kanopy! Kanopy is a streaming service that many libraries offer for free with your library card. See if your library or university has a Kanopy subscription. Because of licensing fees for access to the catalogue, Kanopy doesn’t have major blockbusters or most popular movies. Instead, it has lots and lots of indie and small studio movies. Also lots of documentaries, old classics, and PBS/BBC productions. But we’re mostly talking about the indie movies. Use Kanopy’s search features to filter for LGBTQ+ Cinema, and you will definitely find films you had never heard of before.
If your library doesn’t have Kanopy, you can look into getting library cards with other systems, as described here.
If you have a local library system, see what kind of DVD collection they have! Libraries often have DVD collections, and they can be quite extensive! You can use your library’s online catalog to sort for “movies” or “DVD or VCD” and search within that. Libraries in the US will typically apply Library of Congress subject tags that act like AO3 tags—you can click on them to search what else in the system has been assigned that subject. (Sometimes these are kind of hidden under “additional details” or the like.) Try something like “Queer films” or “Lesbians -- Drama” or “Gay men -- Drama” or “LGBTQ+ people.” I just did to make sure this worked and pulled up a French sci-fi/fantasy film about a lesbian adventurer who reincarnates through time, another about queer rodeo performers, and another about a romance between Vietnamese coal miners, none of which I hd ever heard of before. Some libraries even have a “library of things” where you can borrow a DVD player as well. Of course the selection will vary widely by library, but take a look!
If you’re just looking for inspiration and intend to acquire the films on your own, Wikipedia has articles that are just “List of LGBTQ-Related Films of [year]” (2025, 2024, 2023, etc…)
Some recommendations: I Saw the TV Glow, Wild Nights With Emily, Une nouvelle amie, Neptune Frost
TV
I’m not a big TV watcher so I don’t know a whole lot about any indie TV scene. Possibly webseries like Carmilla and that team’s other productions belong here.
However, there are people who know a lot about non-English-language queer TV. I’ll throw this one to bloggers like The BL Watcher who reviews and recommends gay TV, including extensive lists of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Thai BL. Anime Feminist is a good reference for anime—and you can filter their articles by LGBTQ topics.
Some recommendations: idk watch Revolutionary Girl Utena and Sarazanmai
Books
Books are my medium and I have LOTS of experience finding and reading queer ones. The first thing I’ll say is that traditional publishing (tradpub) is absolutely full of queer books and characters in recent years! Large publishers and small presses alike. Indie and self-pub are just part of the queer book landscape.
If you want to know what people have decided the best queer books of the year are, the Lambda Literary Awards name winners in a whole variety of categories. The books they nominate are pretty much all tradpub, but often represent small, independent, and queer-focused presses.
Other resources with specific themes include The Transfeminine Review (books by and about trans women and transfeminine people), Trans Book Reviews (reviews books with trans main characters), and the Queer SFF Database (something in the header broke and made it look horrible and janky and suspicious, but if you scroll past the massive wall of error codes I swear the search function still works and is great). These will all include a mix of books by major publishers, books by small publishers, and self-published books.
Some small presses I like that emphasize queer books are Lethe Press, Neon Hemlock, Duck Prints Press, Atthis Arts, and Small Beer Press. Outside the US there are also ones like Cipher Press, Arsenal Pulp Press, Metonymy Press, and Vira Letra. Improbable Press started out doing gay Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Truly there are a bunch. Trawl the catalogs of some of these presses and see if there’s anything you’d like to read!
Self-pub platforms I really like are Smashwords and itch.io. Smashwords is one of the best self-pub ebook platforms out there. A lot of it is romance novels and erotica, so if you like those there are TONS of options, but you can find a little bit of everything on there if you look. While itch.io is most associated with video games, there are a lot of people who self-publish stories and books on there too! And in my experience itch.io has a much higher percentage of Queer Stuff.
Some tradpub recommendations from small presses: Planet Sickness by Kat Giles, the Elemental Logic series by Laurie J. Marks, And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed
Some selfpub author recommendations: Verse Atoui/versegm, Derin Edala, Claudie Arseneault, Jamie Berrout
Short Stories
Sci-fi and fantasy is full of queerness these days and has been full of short stories always. General SFF short story magazines like Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and The Translunar Travelers Lounge very often feature queer works. There are also literary magazines whose whole theme is queer work—here’s a list of some. Here’s another. Here’s clavmag which doesn’t appear on either of those.
There are also tons and tons of themed anthologies of queer short stories, or short story collections by queer authors. Neon Hemlock and Duck Prints Press particularly specialize in those, but pretty much all of the small presses discussed above have some.
There are also lots of such anthologies happening on Kickstarter, like, all the time. Go to Kickstarter, sort by “publishing,” and you will definitely find some.
Some recommendations: Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe, Common Bonds: An Aromantic Speculative Anthology edited by Claudie Arseneault et al., Love After The End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead, Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction with various editors in various years.
Podcasts/Audio Drama
This is my other medium of choice! There is SO much great stuff happening in the indie audio drama space. And most indie audio drama podcasts, or actual-play TTRPG podcasts, are queer in some manner. And Tumblr is probably the best place for word-pf-mouth narrative podcast discovery. And most shows can be listened to on most major podcast apps or platforms, like Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Pocketcast. A few are available on Bandcamp as well.
@boombox-fuckboy is one of the best curators of podcast information, discussion, recs, and posting. Give their blog a look; they reblog lots of requests-for-recommendations and podcast fans on tumblr are always happy to oblige. They’ve given recs and done writeups. Their blog is my recommended hub for finding out more! @podcastgirlsweek is an event blog, but if you want to see which podcasts have female characters that people love, it’s a good one to scroll through too. But also if you just make a post onto tumblr asking for recs, people will jump to give them.
Some of my favorites: The Pasithea Powder, Arden, ars PARADOXICA, InCo, The Silt Verses, The Last Show.
Music
Many if not most musicians are on Spotify these days, but I truly recommend looking around Bandcamp when looking for new artists. They have daily discovery playlists (and articles/interviews!) on the front page if you want to be surprised by something new, but they’re also really good for searching for stuff you want to find. Bandcamp also uses searchable tags—mostly for music genres, unsurprisingly, but artists also sometimes use it for their location (are you looking for music from Boston? Mississippi? Mexico City? Brazil?) and some also use the tag “queer,” “gay,” “lgbtq,” “trans,” or “transgender.” You can refine these searches by adding genre tags for the kind of music you like. This is a great way to find indie music by queer creators who would never get picked up by Spotify’s algorithms!
On my sideblog @nonlovesongoftheday I also have tags for “asexual spectrum artist” and “aromantic spectrum artist.”
Some recommendations of mine: Anjimile for soulful singer/songwriter, Astrisoni for upbeat storytelling filk, Jessica Levine/quine for cyberpunk synthwave, Reiyo the Giant for R&B, a stick and a stone for weird ethereal music, lich echosoul for electronic/industrial ambient.
Video Games
While there are certainly tons of indie games on Steam, itch.io is THE hub for weird and interesting (and queer) indie games. I’m not much of a Gamer these days, idk what’s up in the gaming world and I’m running out of steam, but visual novels, puzzle games, horror games, 2D RPGs, and platformers are popular types of games for small queer creators to make. That said, you can find indie queer games in all sorts of forms and genres.
Some recommendations: Gone Home, Tacoma, We Know The Devil, Heaven Will Be Mine, Open Sorcery, The Bekeeper’s Picnic, I haven’t personally played In Stars And Time or I Was a Teenage Exocolonist but I’ve heard good things about them. Also there’s Undertale and Deltarune.
Comics
Back in my day (yells at cloud), webcomics were hosted on people's individual sites and they were weird. You found them from links on other people's webcomics. Now the webcomic central platform is webtoons and it's not the same. Anyway there are a ton of queer comics on Webtoon. Self-hosted comics also still exist, like On A Sunbeam, Tiger Tiger, and Kill Six Billion Demons. I've heard good things about O Human Star and Widdershins too. Also there's Homestuck. Read Homestuck
There's a huge indie comics scene that I know very little about. E. M. Carroll is a classic. Independent Comics Expo/Festival events happen periodically; MICE in Boston is one I’m familiar with, but they happen in many North American cities.
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There is so much out there! You could read/watch/listen to one piece of indie queer media every day for the rest of your life and never run out. My 2026 challenge to everyone is pick up something from one of these categories and try it!
"High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee: Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
"The Heart asks Pleasure--first" by Emily Dickinson: The Heart asks Pleasure -- first --/And then -- Excuse from Pain --
"Why I Loved Him" by Camoghne Felix: When you/Are a child, you know only/The kind of love your little/Life lacked
"At a Window" by Carl Sandburg: Give me hunger,/O you gods that sit and give/The world its orders.
"How to Tell a True War Story" from The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien (prose): If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
