Welcome to queereads-brackets, a tournament blog where queer books face-off by genre! May your to-read list expand to unwieldy levels
Full spreadsheet of all submitted books from all tournaments and bonus Storygraph challenge of submitted books
The current tournament is: Queer Nonfiction (vote in current polls here)
Past winners:
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Prachett
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (x3)
Mrs. Victoria buys a Brothel by TalhĂ Briones
Tournament categories are:
Queer fantasy
Queer adult SFF spotlight
Queer fiction free-for-all
Queer historical fiction
Older queer works
Queer nonfiction
Seeding: Seeding is done numerically. Books are ordered based on the number of people who've read them on Goodreads (as that's the most easily accessed quantitative metric), and then seeded March-madness style (1-vs-32, 2-vs-31, etc)
Inspired by some other book poll blogs I really enjoy (check them out!) @haveyoureadthisqueerbook @haveyoureadthistransbook @queer-book-character-tournament @book--brackets
Bracket Details and FAQ
Bracket structure and Seeding
Submissions: Brackets will be submission-based via google form. Submissions will run for one week before we start the bracket. You may submit as many qualifying books as your heart desires. Brackets will be as long and as large as they need based on number of submissions. (unless submissions get TOO intense and I regret saying this and need to come up with a Plan B so that a single tournament doesnât take a year)
Seeding: Brackets will be seeded according to how many people have marked it read on Goodreads (as it's the most easily measurable quantitative metric). For a series, I will use the read number only on the first book in the series, so that it wonât be impacted based on length of series vs a standalone book etc. Then, I use challonge.com to seed that list according to March Madness format (1-vs-32, 2-vs-31, etc)
I chose to take the read numbers from Goodreads instead of Storygraph because a. Goodreads simply has larger numbers and b. I noticed a recency bias on Storygraph, where books over 10 years old drastically dropped in seed order if I used Storygraph numbers, whereas year of publication isn't a significant factor if I take the numbers from Goodreads
Polls will always run for one week
Explain the tournament categories!
Queer fiction free-for-all: any and all queer fiction, regardless of genre, year of publication, or age category (e.g., adult, YA, middle-grade)
Queer nonfiction: any and all queer nonfiction (including memoir, history, etc)
Queer fantasy: any queer fiction in the fantasy genre includes any fantasy subgenre (secondary world, primary world, etc) and any age category (adult, YA, middle-grade, etc)
Queer historical fiction: queer fiction by a modern author set in a historical time period may include intersecting genres (e.g., historical romance, historical fantasy that isnât secondary world, alternate history) and any age category
Queer books from history: any work that was not written in the last several decades but that contains queer elements by necessity, what âcountsâ as a queer book in this category is more broad and includes subtext or texts with notable queer interpretations
Queer adult SFF spotlight: any queer scifi or fantasy book in the adult publishing category (i.e., not YA or middle-grade)
What âcountsâ as a queer book?
Iâm not going to get overly prescriptive, but: For modern books, something that features queer characters/perspectives/themes in a significant or substantive way. For older texts, something that has queer subtext or a notable queer interpretation.
My guiding principle is: if someone is looking for queer books in a particular genre, would they be satisfied with this book as actually fulfilling that promise?
What about [insert] identity?
Yes. This blog is fully and broadly inclusive of all queerness, including ace- and arospec, polyamory, the spectrum of nonbinary and trans identities, and so forth.
The only thing not welcome is policing or dictating othersâ identities
Can a book be submitted to multiple brackets?
Yes! A book can be submitted to as many different tournament categories as you like, as long as it fits the criteria.
If a tournament is running for the (second, third, etc) time, books that were previously submitted may be submitted again.
Can the same book win multiple brackets?
A book can win multiple tournament categories, but it can only win each tournament category once.
For example, if a book wins the fiction free-for-all tournament, it is still eligible to compete and win the fantasy bracket.
However, if weâre running the fiction free-for-all tournament again, then the previous winners of the fiction free-for-all tournament are ineligible for that category only.
What about a book series? Do we submit the series as a whole or the individual books?
Generally speaking, please submit the series as a whole (e.g., âthe [ ] seriesâ) rather than submitting book 1, book 2, etc separately.
However, there are times when books are published/listed as a âseriesâ but the books are not at all interconnected and do not have an overarching plot or follow the same general characters (eg, some romance âseriesâ). In these cases, it may make more sense to submit individual books.
Why these specific categories/will you do [other genre] tournaments?
Possibly. These categories are the genres that I read most, so these are the brackets that will be most enjoyable for me to run. I may consider other genres or themed brackets, but I may also keep it to my preferred genres to make the behind-the-scenes work worthwhile to me personally
(also if you feel inspired and want to run a tournament for another genre/category, that's awesome, please @ me so I can reblog and boost it!)
Thoughts on propaganda?
There will be an optional text box on the submission form where you can add propaganda if you choose
If you want to add propaganda DURING the poll itself, please feel free to reblog or reply to comment your thoughts!
Commenting or replying directly on the post is preferable to sending me an ask with propaganda for two reasons: 1. I may not be rigorously checking this blog while each round is in progress and 2. this keeps all the info/propaganda together in one place, which I think makes it easier for voters to peruse and consider
Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution by Susan Stryker
Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known by George M. Johnson
Remaining time: 2 days 21 hours
Book summaries below:
Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution by Susan Stryker
Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s.
Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.
Nonfiction, history
Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known by George M. Johnson
From the New York Timesâbestselling author of All Boys Arenât Blue comes an empowering set of essays about Black and Queer icons from the Harlem Renaissance.
In Flamboyants, George M. Johnson celebrates writers, performers, and activists from 1920s Black America whose sexualities have been obscured throughout history. Through 14 essays, Johnson reveals how American culture has been shaped by icons who are both Black and Queer â and whose stories deserve to be celebrated in their entirety.
Interspersed with personal narrative, powerful poetry, and illustrations by award-winning illustrator Charly Palmer, Flamboyants looks to the past for understanding as to how Black and Queer culture has defined the present and will continue to impact the future. With candid prose and an unflinching lens towards truth and hope, George M. Johnson brings young adult readers an inspiring collection of biographies that will encourage teens today to be unabashed in their layered identities.
Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia by Francesca Stella
Remaining time: 2 days 21 hours
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones
From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.
âPeople donât just happen,â writes Saeed Jones. âWe sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The âIâ it seems doesnât exist until we are able to say, âI am no longer yours.â â
Haunted and haunting, Jonesâs memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescenceâinto tumultuous relationships with his mother and grandmother, into passing flings with lovers, friends and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one anotherâand to one anotherâas we fight to become ourselves.
Blending poetry and prose, Jones has developed a style that is equal parts sensual, beautiful, and powerfulâa voice thatâs by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one of a kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.
Nonfiction, memoir
Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities by Francesca Stella
Endorsement from submitter: "Really interesting look at the lives of queer women both in the USSR and after its fall. Kind of academic but still very accessible."
This book explores the everyday lives of 'lesbian' women in urban Russia. It explores changes and continuities by examining generational differences, and attends to regional variation by considering what 'lesbian' life looks like in different locations, problematising essentialist accounts of Russian sexualities and western-centric theorizations.
From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.
Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on âgenderâ that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed âanti-gender ideology movementsâ that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilizationâand even âmanâ himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.
The aim of Whoâs Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how âgenderâ has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of âgenderâ collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of âcritical race theoryâ and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.
An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Whoâs Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timelessâa book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.
Nonfiction, politics
Fieldwork: A Forager's Memoir by Iliana Regan
From National Book Award-nominee Iliana Regan, a new memoir of her life and heritage as a forager, spanning her ancestry in Eastern Europe, her childhood in rural Indiana, and her new life set in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Fieldwork explores how Regan's complex gender identity informs her acclaimed work as a chef and her profound experience of the natural world.
Not long after Iliana Regan's celebrated debut, Burn the Place, became the first food-related title in four decades to become a National Book Award nominee in 2019, her career as a Michelin star-winning chef took a sharp turn north. Long based in Chicago, she and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regan's move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that she'd long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.
On her family's farm in rural Indiana, Regan was the beloved youngest in a family with three much older sisters. From a very early age, her relationship with her mother and father was shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Her father treated her like the son he never had, and together they foraged for mushrooms, berries, herbs, and other wild food in the surrounding countryside--especially her grandfather's nearby farm, where they also fished in its pond and young Iliana explored the accumulated family treasures stored in its dusty barn. Her father would share stories of his own grandmother, Busia, who'd helped run a family inn while growing up in eastern Europe, from which she imported her own wild legends of her native forests, before settling in Gary, Indiana, and opening Jennie's Caf , a restaurant that fed generations of local steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp knives and--as she got older--guns.
Iliana's mother had family stories as well--not only of her own years marrying young, raising headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennie's, but also of her father, Wayne, who spent much of his boyhood hunting with the men of his family in the frozen reaches of rural Canada. The stories from this side of Regan's family are darker, riven with alcoholism and domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and otherwise, perpetrated by men--harm men do to women and families, and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy.
As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan's boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna's efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that's suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land's different mushroom species appear--even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area's birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of COVID, but also with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsession--all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.
With Burn the Place, Regan announced herself as a writer whose extravagant, unconventional talents matched her abilities as a lauded chef. In Fieldwork, she digs even deeper to express the meaning and beauty we seek in the landscapes, and stories, that reveal the forces which inform, shape, and nurture our lives.
The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun
Remaining time: 2 days 20 hours
Book summaries below:
Crush by Richard Siken
Richard Sikenâs Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by panic and obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise GlĂŒck hails the âcumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessnessâ of Sikenâs poems. She notes, âBooks of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.â
Poetry
The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun
The Shape of Sex is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200â1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define âthe humanâ so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex.
The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkersâtheologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemistsâwho used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of âmonstrous racesâ in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical âcorrectionâ of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.
In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, femaleâand human.
Better Living Through Birding: A Black Man in Natural World by Christian Cooper
Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miner's Strike by Tim Tate
Remaining time: 2 days 20 hours
Book summaries below:
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper
Christian Cooper is a self-described âBlerdâ (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooperâs viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.
In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.
Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooperâs story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooperâs journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.
Nonfiction, memoir, travelogue, nature
Pride: The Unlikely Story of the True Heroes of the Miner's Strike by Tim Tate
In 1984, a small group of gay men and lesbian women stepped away from Londonâs vibrant gay scene to support a beleaguered mining community in the remote valleys of South Wales. They did so in the midst of the 1984 minersâ strikeâthe most bitter and divisive dispute for more than half a century. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcherâs social and fiscal policies devastated Britainâs traditional industries, as AIDS began to claim lives across the nation. As the government and police battled "the enemy within" in communities across the land and newspapers whipped up fear of the gay "perverts" who were supposedly responsible for inflicting this disease, miners and homosexuals unexpectedly made a stand together and forged a lasting friendship. It was an alliance which helped keep an entire valley clothed and fed during the darkest months of the strike. And it led directly to unions and the Labour Party accepting gay equality as a cause to be championed. Pride tells the inspiring true story of how two very different communitiesâeach struggling to overcome its own bitter internal arguments, as well as facing the power of a hostile government and pressâfound common cause against overwhelming odds. And how this one simple but unlikely act of friendship would, in time, help change life in Britainâforever. This is the true story that inspired the Golden Globe Award-nominated, GLAAD-nominated, BAFTA-winning film Pride.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer
Remaining time: 2 days 20 hours
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, edited by Alice Wong
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparentâbut all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.
From Harriet McBryde Johnsonâs account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer
Endorsement from submitter: "Really phenomenal (and foundational!) work about the intersections of queer theory and disability studies."
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.
Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.
Moby Dyke: A Quest to Track the Last Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton
Remaining time: 2 days 20 hours
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
Nature Poem by Tommy "Teebs" Pico
A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer canât bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet.
A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview , and more. Nature Poem follows Teebsâa young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poetâwho canât bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. Heâd slap a tree across the face. Heâd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; heâd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While heâs adamantâbratty, evenâabout his distaste for the word ânatural,â over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the ânatural world,â he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Poetry
Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton
Endorsement from submitter: "First off, the title is the best wordplay I've ever seen. Second off, this book has it all: queer explorations, funny annecdotes, serious questions, travelogues, lesbian bar culture, karaoke songs by The ChicksâŠ. if you want thought-provoking AND humorous, this one's ur ticket."
A former Rookie contributor and creator of the popular blog Effing Dykes investigates the disappearance of Americaâs lesbian bars by visiting the last few in existence.
Lesbian bars have always been treasured safe spaces for their customers, providing not only a good time but a shelter from societal alienation and outright persecution. In 1987, there were 206 of them in America. Today, only a couple dozen remain. How and why did this happen? What has been lostâor possibly gainedâby such a decline? What transpires when marginalized communities become more accepted and mainstream?
In Moby Dyke, Krista Burton attempts to answer these questions firsthand, venturing on an epic cross-country pilgrimage to the last few remaining dyke bars. Her pilgrimage includes taking in her first drag show since the onset of the pandemic at The Back Door in Bloomington, Indiana; competing in dildo races at Houstonâs Pearl Bar; and, despite her deep-seated hatred of karaoke, joining a group serenade at Nashvilleâs Lipstick Lounge and enjoying the dreaded pastime for the first time in her life. While Burton sets out on the excursion to assess the current state of lesbian bars, she also winds up examining her own personal journey, from coming out to her Mormon parents to recently marrying her husband, a trans man whose presence on the trip underscores the important conversation about who precisely is welcome in certain queer spacesâand how they and their occupants continue to evolve.
Moby Dyke is an insightful and hilarious travelogue that celebrates the kind of community that can only be found in windowless rooms soundtracked by Britney Spears-heavy playlists and illuminated by overhead holiday lights no matter the time of year.
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell
Remaining time: 2 days 19 hours
Book summaries below:
Pageboy by Elliot Page
'Can I kiss you?' It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. The unthinkable. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he'd carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back.
With Juno's massive success, Elliot became one of the world's most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do. Until enough was enough.
The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his story in a groundbreaking and inspiring memoir about love, family, fame - and stepping into who we truly are with strength, joy and connection.
Nonfiction, memoir
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell
Reading Silent Spring as an outgrowth of Rachel Carson's love with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell argues for the power of queer love now in the fight against climate change.
There is something major missing from most accounts of Silent Spring and its impact: namely, Dorothy Freeman, with whom Rachel Carson had a love relationship for over a decade. Freeman had a summer house with her husband, Stan, on the island of Southport, Maine, where Carson settled after the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us. Correspondence shows the women developing strong feelings as they connect over their shared pleasure in the rocky coast.
In this moving new book, political theorist Lida Maxwell offers close readings that suggest Carson's relationship with Freeman was central to her writing of Silent Springâa work whose defense of vibrant nonhuman nature allowed Carson and Freeman's love to flourish and for the pair to become their most authentic selves. What Maxwell calls Carson and Freeman's "queer love" unsettled their heteronormative ideas of the good life as based in bourgeois private life, and led Carson to an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike. From these women's experience Maxwell compellingly makes the case for an alternative democratic climate politics based on learning how to tune into authentic desire. Read through this lens, Carson's work begins to look different and shows us not that the human incursion into nature is dangerous, but that a particular relationship is: the loveless using up of nature for capitalism. When Carson and Freeman correspond in excited detail about the algae, anemones, and veery thrushes of the Maine coast, they give us a glimpse of a different, more loving use of nature.
Inspired by Carson and Freeman's deep care for one another, Maxwell reveals how a form of loving available to all of us can help reshape political desire amidst contemporary environmental crises.
The T in LGBT: everything you need to know about being trans by Jamie Raines
Remaining time: 2 days 19 hours
Book summaries below:
The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde's testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.
Nonfiction, memoir
The T in LGBT: everything you need to know about being trans by Jamie Raines
Hey, I'm Jamie, a 29-year-old trans guy from the UK. I've been transitioning for 12 years now after realising I was trans (by accident!) at sixteen years old. I knew I was a boy since the age of four, but realised whilst growing up that I was different. It was only in my teens that I found the words to express who I was and what I needed to do. Since then, I've been on testosterone for more than a decade - I know, I can't believe it either - I've also had top and bottom surgery and legally changed my sex, so I know a few things about the transitioning process and being trans!I want to welcome you to The T in LGBT where you can explore and learn about so many topics surrounding gender realising you're trans, starting hormones, considering surgery, and everything in between. Whether you're questioning your own identity and are looking for advice on certain stages of transition, or whether you're wanting to learn about the trans experience to support someone or understand allyship, I hope this book can be your one-stop guide to everything trans related. And don't just take my word for it either - this book is packed full of advice, tips, and the personal stories of a range of trans voices, because no one journey is the same.
Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa
Remaining time: 2 days 19 hours
Book summaries below:
This Much is True by Miriam Margolyes
BAFTA-winning actor, voice of everything from Monkey to the Cadbury's Caramel Rabbit, creator of a myriad of unforgettable characters from Lady Whiteadder to Professor Sprout, Miriam Margolyes, OBE, is the nation's favourite (and naughtiest) treasure. Find out how being conceived in an air-raid gave her curly hair; what pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had; how she ended up posing nude for Augustus John as a teenager; why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she's ever had; and what happened next after Warren Beatty asked 'Do you fuck?'
From declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave to being told to be quiet by the Queen, this book is packed with hilarious stories. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much Is True is as full of life and surprises, as its inimitable author.
Nonfiction, memoir
Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa, edited by Emma Barnes and Chris Tse
A remarkable anthology of queer New Zealand voices. We became teenagers in the nineties when New Zealand felt a lot less cool about queerness and gender felt much more rigid. We knew instinctively that hiding was the safest strategy. But how to find your community if youâre hidden? Aotearoa is a land of extraordinary queer writers, many of whom have contributed to our rich literary history. But you wouldnât know it. Decades of erasure and homophobia have rendered some of our most powerful writing invisible. Out Here will change that. This landmark book brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and much, much more. From established names to electrifying newcomers, the cacophony of voices brought together in Out Here sing out loud and proud, ensuring that future generations of queers are afforded the space to tell their stories and be themselves without fear of retribution or harm.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
The Race to Be Myself: A Memoir by Caster Semenya
Remaining time: 2 days 18 hours
Book summaries below:
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds--past, present, and future. Choi's third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples and calls us to imagine what will persist in the aftermaths.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time. They look into the collective psyche of our years in the pandemic and in the throes of anti-racist uprisings, while imagining other vectors, directions, and futures. Stories of survival collide across space and time--from Korean comfort women during World War II to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Throughout, Choi grapples with where the individual fits within the strange landscapes of this apocalyptic world, with its violent and many-layered histories. In the process, she imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest--could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope.
Poetry
The Race to Be Myself: A Memoir by Caster Semenya
World champion runner Caster Semenya offers an empowering account of her extraordinary life and career, and her trailblazing battle to compete on her own terms.
Banned from the sport she loved because she was labelled 'different', Olympic and World Champion Caster Semenya is finally ready to share the vivid and blisteringly honest story of how the world came to know her name. Thrust into the spotlight after winning the 2009 World Championships Caster Semenya quickly became the centre of a debate which still continues today about gender in sports, and the right to compete as you are.
Told with blistering candour and captivating speed, The Race To Be Myself is a journey through innocence, ambition, defiance, and acceptance. From her rural beginnings running in the dust, to crushing her opponents on the track. To the falsehoods spread about her name, and the many trials she has been forced to endure publicly and privately. This is Caster's time to set the record straight and share her story of how she became a defiant champion.
Throughout it all Caster has found triumph in her strong will, her community and her family. Caster's story is our story, and testimony to anyone forced to stop doing what they love.
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture to the Mainstream by Jon Savage
Remaining time: 2 days 18 hours
Book summaries below:
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
A graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be.
Alison Bechdelâs Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdelâs own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Motherâto a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
Nonfiction, graphic novel, memoir
The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream by Jon Savage
The legendary author of Englandâs Dreaming presents a monumental history of the queer influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.
In his kaleidoscopic new book, Jon Savage, the legendary author of Englandâs Dreaming, shows how music has been the key medium through which homosexuality was expressed for the last century. Depicting nothing less than the birth of rock and roll, the narrative begins in the mid-1950s with Little Richard, whose music possessed secret codes of the gay underworld and whose magnetism attracted millions of white teenagers. As Savage engagingly proceeds through the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with evocations of, among others, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Donna Summer, Sylvester, and the disco-era Bee Gees, he demonstrates that it was mostly musicâwith supporting roles from cinema, literature, and fashionâthat broke the dam that led to the widespread acceptance of LGBTQ culture today. The Secret Public, with its âpancake and pompadourâ descriptions of a generation in revolt, provides an electrifying look at the key moments in music and entertainment that changed pop culture forever.
The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures by ND Stevenson
Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or GreyAce byEris Young
Remaining time: 2 days 18 hours
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures by ND Stevenson
Endorsement from submitter: "a book about having something in you that wants out, that is never satisfied, that demands you change and change and change"
From N.D. Stevenson, the New York Times bestselling author-illustrator of Nimona, comes a captivating, honest illustrated memoir that finds his turning an important corner in his creative journeyâand inviting readers along for the ride.
In a collection of essays and personal mini-comics that span eight years of his young adult life, author-illustrator N.D. Stevenson charts the highs and lows of being a creative human in the world. Whether itâs hearing the wrong name called at his art school graduation ceremony or becoming a National Book Award finalist for his debut graphic novel, Nimona, N.D. captures the little and big moments that make up a real life, with a wit, wisdom, and vulnerability that are all his own.
Nonfiction, graphic novel, memoir
Ace Voices: What it Means to Be Asexual, Aromantic, Demi or Grey-Ace by Eris Young
How do we experience attraction?
What does love mean to us?
When did you realise you were ace?
This is the ace community in their own words.
Drawing upon interviews with a wide range of people across the asexual spectrum, Eris Young is here to take you on an empowering, enriching journey through the rich multitudes of asexual life.
With chapters spanning everything from dating, relationships and sex, to mental and emotional health, family, community and joy, the inspirational stories and personal experiences within these pages speak to aces living and loving in unique ways. Find support amongst the diverse narratives of aces sex-repulsed and sex-favourable, alongside voices exploring what it means to be black and ace, to be queer and ace, or ace and multi-partnered - and use it as a springboard for your own ace growth.
