#mickeyqtl

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The Queer History of the Little Mermaid (Jen Campbell)

Jen Campbell is an author and a Youtuber with a deep love for fairy and folk tales, and she has a great series of videos on the histories of some of the more popular ones. I had no idea about the history of the Little Mermaid story or Hans Christian Anderson, and it turns out that it is queerer than you were probably expecting. A wonderful surprise, and a great video - check it out!

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Orphan Black

Format: TV Series Created by: John Fawcett and Graeme Manson Run: 2013-2017 (BBC America) Accessibility: English CC Short: Orphan Black is a show unlike any other. It’s phenomenally written and is progressive in a lot of ways, from the technology used to create it to its subject matter and representation of women. It’s one of my favorite shows and has fan-loved lesbian characters. The premise is that an illegal human cloning operation has created an unknown number of clones, most of which do not know they are clones. It tells the story of Sarah (a clone) seeing her doppelganger commit suicide, then go down the rabbit hole to discover her true origins. Come for the lesbians, stay for literally everything else about it.

CW: suicide (by train, first episode), sex on screen, gory violence, drug addiction, drug use, pregnancy and giving birth, a lot to do with controlling the bodily autonomy of women, a cop accidentally shooting a civilian dead, murder, genetic experimentation on humans, life-threatening illness.

(there is a trans clone, and I will make a separate review about that later when I rewatch that episode)

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LGBT Photography Book Series by The New Press

Format: Photography Book Series By: Various photographers Published: The New Press Summary: The New Press is a small publishing house that has a series of photography books documenting the everyday lives of LGBT people all over the world, especially in countries where being queer is not protected by law or is criminalized. Projects like these are important to our community, as they give us a look at what life is like for our queer family all over the world, and prove that we exist everywhere and always have. Pictured are books about LGBT communities in Japan, Serbia, East Africa, and Russia.

Find the whole series at: thenewpress(.)com(/)search(/)Emerson%2C%20Wajdowicz%20Studios

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Let’s Talk About Love (Review)

Format: novel By: Claire Kann Published: 2018 (Swoon Reads) Accessibility: Audiobook available Short: a ya romance with a college-age asexual lead, figuring out how to navigate relationships where her asexuality could be a deal breaker, including debating whether she should bother at all. Good rep for a biromantic, asexual, Black woman, but overall I wished I liked it more.

Rating: 3/5 (can’t decide whether I’d recommend or not)

Liked:

Cover points for the purple and the ace jokes (the tagline is “Alice is about to ace this whole dating thing,” and there are some ace of spades cards on the spine).

The asexual rep. It went past asexuality 101 and got into those nitty-gritty debates over “what kind of attraction is this?” and “if I feel x way am I really ace?”. Most of the book Alice is wondering if she will ever have a romantic relationship that won’t end because she doesn’t want to have sex. Near the end of the book she finally comes out to her love interest and gets to explain how she feels, what she wants, and how they can make a relationship work. Those conversations were very realistic, and I really enjoyed them.

Nice relationships? There were good, healthy, and loving relationships between Alice, her friends, and the love interest - at least they were in theory. The way it was written kind of took away some of that by telling instead of showing, more on that below.

More books about black queer people in YA please! Especially #ownvoices!  Plus, it’s (to my knowledge) the first “issue book” about being asexual, and the main character isn’t white! A “issue book” with intersectionality is rare for the first one of its kind, so this is great to see!

Very realistic depiction of therapy, what it feels like, the way therapists interact with you, and how it can be very nerve-wracking the first session or two. Scenes like this can normalize therapy and encourage young people to give it a try even if they’re nervous to.

Unsure:

The dialogue around money. Alice is in college and her parents are rich, so she doesn’t pay tuition or student loans. However, she works full time to pay her rent during the summer, so she’s the typical “broke college student,” and at a few points she calls herself “poor.” I don’t know, it just stuck out as a little tone-deaf to me. I’m sure real people have this exact money situation in their families, and I don’t want to say that they need to shut up about their struggles, but there was just no other point of view in the discussion. I’d have empathized a lot more if Alice was confronted with the privileges she had, like how her education and upbringing were a result of her parents having money, regardless of how much she’s on her own now. There was even a part where she is about to go into a rant to her therapist about her position in her family as “Not Black Enough to be the Black Sheep of Black Excellence.” I thought this was great and wanted to read more about it, but the chapter cut off right there and the topic was never really revisited. Overall the money thing wasn’t a huge issue, but it did stick out to me as being weird and comes up multiple times.

Didn’t like:

Really the only thing I didn’t like about this book was this thing about the writing that was hard to pin down, but just kind of made the book altogether a bit of a let down. It was partially a bit too much tell and not enough show (in terms of the relationships developing), and partially weird tension, like it didn’t flow the way I was expecting it to. It was the author’s first published novel, and maybe it’s just a case of less practiced writing. Nevertheless, it was my main qualm with the book. It was a good enough story, I just think the execution made it less than.

Also there was a scene with sexual harassment that felt like it didn’t belong. It did nothing for the plot and was not addressed after at all, so it felt like I was just made super uncomfortable for like a page and a half for no reason (and with no tw, of course).

Conclusion:

I liked the ace parts, I wasn’t too into the rest. But it’s a book about the main character being asexual, and it ends hopeful about her relationships! This is all good! I acknowledge that romance isn’t my typical genre (I’m aromantic and I get bored), and I am getting a little bit old for this style of YA (even though I’m not much older than Alice), but overall I just wanted to like it more than I did. If you’re asexual and curious to give it a try, I would recommend you do - it might just be more your taste than mine.

CW:

The sexual harassment mentioned above (Chapter 15, at the party). A lot of discussion of food and eating. A scene where the love interest is very drunk (Chapter 21), other scenes of casual drinking and drinking to avoid feelings. Microaggressions towards Black people, addressed as such. Acephobia in a relationship, causing it to end (first chapter).

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Good Omens

Format: TV miniseries Based on the book by: Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett Released: 2019 (Amazon Prime) Accessibility: English CC and AD Short: This is one of those ones that’s not explicitly queer per say, but like, go watch it and tell me it’s not. The tv adaptation of Good Omens that came out earlier this year tells the story of an angel and a demon who are meant to be on opposing sides, but who are trying to save the world from the apocalypse together because they love it too much. Apparently in the book the relationship between said angel and demon, Aziraphael and Crowley, is platonic, but in the show it is much more queer coded, though still left open to interpretation. I welcome it as a mainstream depiction of an aromantic-asexual queerplatonic relationship, because personally, I really need that representation in my life, and this show honestly really helped me confront my own aroace-ness. Good Omens is a quirky little show that stole my heart and might just do the same for you.

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Long Exposure

Format: webcomic By: Mars Heyward Published: 2016 - present (independently published) Short: a enemies-to-lovers BL webcomic that’s been ongoing for quite some time now, with a great story and a classic comic art style that everyone should check out. Mitch and Jonas, two high school boys having a hard time for opposite reasons (Jonas is being bullied, and Mitch is picking on him, but mostly because he has a crush on him that he doesn’t know how to process), accidentally acquire superpowers while working on a school project in the woods, and grow closer as they learn about their powers and what could have caused them together. 

TW are announced in-comic before they appear, but major ones include abusive foster parents, sexually abusive foster parents (happened in the past, and not to MC, but referenced), sex (not explicit), and drug/alcohol use.

Available to read from the beginning at longexposurecomic (.) com or on Tapas, and print bind-ups are availible on their shop!

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Brooklyn 99

Format: TV show Created by: Dan Goor and Michael Schur Aired: 2013-2017 (Fox), 2018 - Present (NBC) Accessibility: English CC and AD on cable Summary: This show deserves a spot on this blog for a couple different reasons:

First there’s Captain Holt, head of the aforementioned 99th NYPD precinct in which this comedy takes place. He’s a proudly out gay, Black man. He is revealed to be gay in the first episode, has a husband, and his sexuality and race are not glossed over in regards to how he’s been treated because of them and how hard he’s had to work to get to where he is. He has a personality distinctly his own (which has turned into one of my favorite running jokes in the later seasons), and he’s held in great respect by the officers working under him, becoming a mentor and/or father figure to many.

Then we have Detective Rosa Diaz, a Latina woman who, in season five, comes out as bisexual when she starts dating a woman (and the actress is bi as well, which is double points). Her coming out is not glossed over either, and there is a whole episode dedicated to how hard it is for her to come out to her parents - they don’t take it all that well. It illustrated that it’s still hard to be queer, even when you’re an adult, even in the modern day, even living in a place like New York City.

Lastly, never once have I seen a show say the word “transphobia,” yet in one episode there was a joke about not liking a movie because it was “a little transphobic at the end.” This was just a one-off joke, the kind that are constant in this series, but to this day I still remember it because I was genuinely shocked, in the best way possible. There’s more than just this one example of this show being trans allied. B99 is able to illustrate how to be funny without “punching down,” which people in the younger generations like myself are making a priority more and more. Call it “sensitive” if you want, I call it not wanting me or my friends to be dehumanized in casual tv I’m trying to watch for fun. It’s a progressive show disguised as a mainstream cable-tv comedy, and there’s a reason it has a massive fanbase and was picked up by NBC immediately after it was dropped by Fox. 

One final note - this was a show that definitely grew on me. In my opinion the first season or so were just ok, but 1) I’m very picky and 2) as of now I’m on the fifth season and it’s one of my favorites. So just, maybe give it a chance!

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The Raven Cycle Series (Review)

Format: novel quartet By: Maggie Stiefvater Published: 2012-2016 (Scholastic) Accessibility: Audiobooks available Short: one of my all-time favorite series. Beautiful writing, unique fantasy elements, and deeply personal character development. The m/m subplot that starts in the second book is really nice, and while it is one of those books that doesn’t really use the “g” word (as in “gay,” or even “bi”), the struggles of identity and self-acceptance are still there and are tastefully depicted.

My Rating: 5/5 (must read!)

Long: This series is phenomenally written and a beautiful experience all the way through.  It’s light and funny, it’s dark and twisted, it’s dreamlike and enchanting. Maggie Stiefvater is a fantastic writer, and if you haven’t read anything of hers this is a great place to start. The Raven Cycle is notoriously hard to pitch, but I think it can be summed up as being about a group of friends finding each other while looking for magic - and being amazed when they find it for real. I’m talking peak found-family right here. Class and socioeconomic division are also huge themes in this series, and are given a good treatment.

I have to point out that this series does an amazing job of making the character who is gay, Ronan Lynch, More Than His Sexuality™. I joke because for ownvoices writers this isn’t usually a problem, but for a mainstream YA writer who is a cishet woman, this is genuniely an accomplishment. Ronan is introduced as a complicated, multi-layered person who has trouble expressing a lot of his emotions, one of them being his sexuality. He is loyal and aggressive and defensive and protective and caring. He feels a lot of things but can’t let anyone know, and he comes across as rude and dismissive as a shield. He’s a very relatable gay teenager. I particularly liked that for a whole book he had a crush on this guy, and even though he never called it that in his POV because he didn’t recognize it as such, it was clearly a crush from the subtle ways he acted. Maggie writes crushes really well, I’ve noticed. Ronan is objectively the most interesting character in this series (objectively in my opinion, lol), and I’m excited for the upcoming trilogy that centers on him and his family.

I do think there could have been more internal discussion in regards to the character who is bi, Adam, and this is what I mean when I say the book doesn’t say the “g” word. It lives in this fuzzy gray space between the ideal fantasy and reality when it comes to real life issues: race and sexuality are never really talked about outright, whereas class is very explicitly discussed. While Adam’s bisexuality is demonstrated in a way that really validates it, and I have no problems with what was on the page, I do wonder about what was left off of the page.

It’s crazy for me to remember that when I initially read the first book I really didn’t like it, but then I missed the characters and picked up the second book, only to fall head over heels in love with it and the series as a whole. I think Stiefvater’s writing style is just idiosyncratic, and so it takes some getting used to. If you’re finding it hard to get through the first book, maybe keep that in mind. Also, while there is one (1) Gay Joke in the first book, the actual gay themes don’t come in until the second one. The Dream Thieves is where it’s at - on its own it’s one of my favorite books of all time. 

If you like history, cars, dream magic, psychic magic, gay crushes, straight crushes, ravens, or Virginia, pick up this series.

TW: parental physical abuse for one character, a few characters get killed every book, a side character that is addicted to cocaine, internalized classism, parental death and grief, ambiguous suicide attempt in the past, ambiguous suicide of side character