#bi lit

[nakedinashes]

books cristina read in 2019: the devouring gray - christine lynn hermann

“Being invisible when you used to be seen...it's like being dead, but no one mourns you.”

[theloveandthehorror]

A FREE GHOST STORY FOR WLW! 

*for the record I’ve already started the sequel on this one*

[the-horizontal-poet]

New York Peeps! My poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone made finalist in the Bi Book Awards, so I'll read from it with other bi poets and writers at the awards ceremony Saturday, June 1, 2019, 7-10 PM, 55 Bethune St. in the West Village, New York, NY, USA. Sheela Lambert is your host. Tickets are $15 at the door, or you can reserve yours via PayPal to biwritersassoc at gmail dot com. Deets at https://www.meetup.com/bisexual-nyc/events/260877958/

[loveisofthebody-blog]

Review: Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour

What’s it about?

Emi, our protagonist, lives in LA and has just graduated high school. She’s just been dumped by her on-again off-again girlfriend, with whom she works as a set designer. While treasure hunting at the estate sale of a recently deceased film icon, she comes across a letter proving that he had a secret daughter. Emi’s detective work leads her to Ava, a beautiful actor living in difficult circumstances without any real support network. The two young women work to find out more about Ava’s past, and help each other find a future they can build together in Hollywood.

How is it?

Everything Leads to You is such a wonderfully fluffy pleasure to read. It never takes itself too seriously: it’s a Hollywood rags-to-riches romance, and it’s done very well. LaCour has a light touch, and her writing never gets in the way of a very sweet story. I loved the sleuthing storyline and would have been happy to read much more of it, in favor of the Hollywood plot that picks up later in the book, but that’s more a matter of my own taste than anything else. The girls live in a well-developed network of very specific worlds, and I appreciate LaCour’s attention to the details of their lives.

How are young queer readers going to feel about it, assuming they like this sort of thing?

They’ll eat it up. There aren’t a lot of realistic fiction titles out there featuring queer teens in stories that don’t deal directly with their sexuality. It’s so nice to jump into a book knowing that the protagonist dates girls and not have to trudge through the self-discovery>coming out>it gets better plotline. LaCour is so matter of fact about sexuality that she never tells us how Emi and Ava identify: we know they’ve both dated women, and that Emi has dated a boy in the past, but nothing’s stated explicitly. On the other hand, Ava does experience intolerance and rejection. It’s not the focal point of the book, but it’s not brushed off casually either.

LaCour shows, rather than tells, about race and class as well. As the novel progresses it becomes clear through contextual cues that Emi is biracial* (her mother is white and her father is African American) and Ava is white. Similarly, while Emi is never called out as a wealthy character, and we’re not told directly that Ava grew up in poverty, we learn those facts as we get to know both girls, and get to see how their respective backgrounds have shaped who they are and how they’ve been able to move through the world.

* ...and the cover model appears to be a blonde white girl, but whitewashing is a publisher’s decision and I won’t hold it against the author

Find Everything Leads to You here

[somethingsqueerinthelibrary]

I am against categorization for a hundred reasons, not the least of which is: as soon as you make a list of the possibilities, you're guaranteed to have left someone off the list, which will either piss them off or make them feel invisible, or both.

The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You by S Bear Bergman

[queerbookclub]

Review: Pantomime by Laura Lam

In Pantomime, young Micah Grey is running away from his old life, determined to live on his own terms. He finds a new home at R.H. Ragona’s Magic Circus as an aerialist in training. But he’s only safe as long as his past doesn’t catch up with him - and he soon discovers everyone at the circus has secrets of their own.

Minor spoilers ahead. I knew the big spoiler going in, which I don’t think is actually a big spoiler: Micah is intersex, or in his world's terms, a Kedi. I don't know what it's like to go into this book not knowing that, but I think it ought to have been printed on the back cover. I'm going to use the name Micah and the pronoun "he" to refer to the protagonist, as that's what he preferred through most of the book, though his identity may be more fluid than that. I went into this read with mixed expectations and ended up with a lot of mixed feelings. I've heard some great, gushing reviews, but I got immediately skeptical when, in the opening chapters, Micah expresses awe at the "exotic" circus people. The circus setting is a difficult one to pull off, especially when your main character is a person whose body is considered "freakish". For the most part, I think Lam succeeds at balancing the charming, magical elements with the more realistic, exploitative reality of circus life. This is not a light read - weighing in at nearly 400 pages, heavy with world-building and feeling slow to start - but I found myself getting more invested and excited the longer I stuck with it. Some elements still rub me the wrong way - I grew concerned when I realized Micah has magic powers attributed to his body. We don't get the full story on that in this first installment, but it has the potential of transforming the meaning of these books in a way I'm not quite comfortable with. I also found the ending incredibly jarring, to the point that it soured the experience. A cliffhanger is one thing, but the humiliation and graphic violence that characters endure in the last forty pages made it feel like a different book, tonally, from the previous three-hundred-plus. Here's what the book does right: in an intimate scene with one of his love interests, Aenea, she asks Micah if he's shy about his body because he's been hurt. Rather than thinking back to his old crush, who recoiled after touching Micah in an earlier scene, Micah thinks about the many invasive medical tests that he's endured. Abuse at the hands of physicians and trauma related to medical invasion are a very real, very relatable aspect of Micah's story.

I'm not intersex, but I have some sex characteristics that aren't typical. I've been poked at by presumptuous doctors and I've organized my dress and activities around shame. Even as a relatively well-adjusted adult, reading about Micah's experiences - feeling anger and disgust at the doctors and others who dared to make him feel bad about his body - made me feel better about mine. That all said, I don't know if I'm going to read the second book. Lam has created a engaging bisexual intersex protagonist in an intriguing magical world. I want to find out what happens to Micah, but the ending of Pantomime totally turned me off. I might prefer to scope out summaries and spoilers before diving into the next tome-length installment. You can purchase Pantomime here or find it at your local library.

[somethingsqueerinthelibrary]

"Do I really have to find a word for it?" Kyle interrupts. "Can't it just be what it is?" "Of course," I say, even though in the bigger world I'm not so sure. The world loves stupid labels. I wish we got to choose our own.

Boy Meets Boy, Davis Levithan

[queerbookclub]

Hi!! I was wondering if you know of any comics/graphic novels with queer ladies? I've been having a hard time finding any. Thanks!!

HECK YES ANON.

Some of my personal favorites include Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and the Lumberjanes series, which just got its first paperback volume.

But there are plenty more - what kind of comics are you interested in?

Superheroes? Batwoman: Elegy serves as the origin story of the current Batwoman, a gay woman named Kate Kane. The original team of the Runaways series includes a extraterrestrial lesbian named Karolina Dean, and the current team (Runaways: Secret Wars) features at least two queer women. Kieron Gillen’s run on Young Avengers introduced the instantly beloved America Chavez. Supercakes by Kate Leyh is a super-adorable story of super-powered girlfriends. I don’t know much about Sophie Campbell’s Shadoweyes, but it appears to be a darker take on superheroics with a cast of queer and trans teens.

Fantasy or science fiction? For sword fights and sorcery, try The Legend of Bold Riley, Rat Queens, or the brand new Princeless spin-off which just saw its first issue released this week, Raven: The Pirate Princess. I love YU+ME=Dream, a webcomic which starts as a high school drama then takes a turn towards surreal - you can read it online or buy the limited edition omnibus. There’s a whole world of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer comics - some better than others - featuring Willow Rosenberg and other queer ladies. The new queer-inclusive take on Jem & The Holograms is on comics store shelves now. Another pop-music themed comic - The Wicked & The Divine - features a pantheon of reincarnated gods plus lots of queer representation. Bitch Planet, a feminist satire in space, is getting its first paperback volume next month.

Manga? I grew up reading Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, which were maybe my first exposure to queer people in fiction. I haven’t kept up with manga in a long time, but here’s a list of highly-rated yuri manga available in English, which includes a wide range of genres and intended audiences.

Memoir? There’s Spit and Passion by Cristy C. Road, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag by AK Summers, Shadow Manifesto by Annie Mok, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me by Ellen Forney, Calling Dr. Laura by Nicole J. Georges, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me by Sarah Leavitt, and On Loving Women by Diane Obomsawin. Alison Bechdel also did a follow-up to the aforementioned Fun Home called Are You My Mother?

Or maybe just a slice of life? For something fictional but realistic, there’s the long-running Love and Rockets series by Jaime Hernandez and Gilbert Hernandez - I’m not entirely clear on how Locas relates to the original series, but it seems to isolate the storyline of Maggie Chascarrillo, a bisexual, Mexican-American punk. There’s also Blue Is the Warmest Color, the graphic novel by Julie Maroh on which the film was based. While Rude Girls and Dangerous Women by Jennifer Camper might be as much wish-fulfillment as it is realistic, it’s a great example of early underground lesbian comics.Happy reading!