#queer your year

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 39: A Lambda Award finalist or winner

I had a lot of options to pick out for this prompt, but I ended up going with High Risk Homosexual by Edgar Gomez (any pronouns) because I’ve been getting more into nonfiction lately. Gomez’s writing first came to my attention through his essay “I Dedicated My Book to My Mother, But I Can’t Tell Her I Wrote It” published in Electric Literature. It’s about writing and publishing a deeply personal memoir while keeping that a secret from their family, an honest look at what it means to tell your story while stilling grappling with the complicated familial relationships that have shaped it. 

High Risk Homosexual, the debut memoir that is the topic of Gomez’s essay, is a witty, honest, and heartfelt account of coming-of-age as gay and Latine. Gomez writes about navigating the machismo of her family and the racism they encounter in the gay community in a voice that is equal parts dynamic and poignant, exploring intersections of identity and their journey to find his place in the world. From their first visits to gay clubs to their experience of being prescribed HIV-preventing medication, Gomez’s writing manages to be both frank and funny. (I personally enjoyed the chapter on Gomez’s time in a burlesque troupe a lot as someone who was part of my college’s burlesque troupe.) The chapter on Pulse is probably the stand-out of the memoir as Gomez writes with real vulnerability and grief about the Pulse shooting, contemplating both his relationship to the nightclub and the painful similarities between her life and that of the shooter’s.

Overall, High Risk Homosexual is a vivid, moving, and candid memoir that’s put Edgar Gomez on my list of authors to watch. 

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 23: South Asian author 

Alas! It is with a heavy heart that I come to instagram to report my first real disappointment of this reading challenge. The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave had been on my to-read list for quite a while on the recommendation of one of my professors, but I found that it didn’t quite hit the mark. Set in rural Noway at the start of the 17th century, Hargrave’s novel is inspired by the real history of the Vardø witch hunts. After a sudden storm claims the lives of most of the men in the remote fishing village of Vardø, the surviving women take it into their own hands to survive. Maren is one such woman, losing both her father and her husband-to-be, left floundering in her grief. Unfortunately, the storm is far from the final tragedy to strike Vardø, as a new preacher (accompanied by his young wife, Ursa) is sent to the village to put the fear of god in its inhabitants, stirring religious fervor to a boiling point.

Hargrave’s novel is a tale of the brutality of both nature and humankind. The bleak setting of Vardø is evocative and the exploration of persecution is tense and realistic. Unfortunately, despite The Mercies’s vivid atmosphere and unflinching exploration of historical witch hunts, I still found it far from a perfect narrative. The pacing is slow and tense until it erupts in the final thirty pages, the number of events unfolding in quick success making the pace of the novel feel oddly unbalanced. The novel also has a tendency to gloss over long tracts of time, which resulted in the budding romance between Maren and Ursa feeling somewhat underdeveloped to me as I felt like early scenes of their friendship were merely summarized. I also found myself at times far more interested in some of the side characters, such as pants-wearing Kirsten who steps up as leader of Vardø in absence of the men or Maren’s Sámi sister-in-law, Diina, who struggles to raise a fatherless child in a community that shuns her for her indigenous heritage and practices. Ultimately, while I admired this novel's immersive atmosphere and found the exploration of a lesser-known historical atrocity to be compelling, it wasn't a new favorite.

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 31: Caribbean Author 

I initially read The Confessions of Frannie Langton while doing research into contemporary gothic fiction, but it also counts for a prompt, which is handy! Collins’s novel begins with the eponymous narrator writing her life story in prison after being accused of murdering her employer and his wife, but it’s far more than just a murder mystery. It’s also a gothic love story, a searing subversion of traditional slave narratives, and a portrait of the complicated woman at the heart of it all. 

While the framing device of the novel is a murder trial, the story begins not in a jail cell, but on the Jamaican sugar plantation where she’s born into slavery. Frannie’s story starts as a kind of Frankenstein narrative, one inspired by the real history of medical racism, as she’s educated by her enslaver to assist him in his horrific “experiments”. Collins’s novel is set in the early 19th century between the end of the slave trade in the British Empire and the actually emancipation of all enslaved people, a distinction that makes a world of difference to someone like Frannie.

Even after Frannie is brought to London, where she is ostensibly a free woman, she’s gifted against her will into a new household as a maid. It’s there that Frannie encounters Marguerite, the lady of the house, and finds herself caught up in a forbidden romance. Marguerite is eccentric and beautiful, scandalous and selfish, and Frannie falls for her quickly. 

Frannie as a narrator is keenly aware of the boxes the world wishes to place her and her story into–the blood-soaked tale a depraved murderess or a miserable story of enslavement. But she pushes back against that, determined to write her own story in all its complexity, one with both horrors and joys. The result is a novel that is riveting and rich in detail. Frannie a a truly layered, complex character–angry. loving, with plenty of secrets. The setting feels well-researched and evocative, from the sinister laboratory of Frannie’s childhood to the streets of Georgian London. While it’s more than just a murder mystery, the final couple chapters had my eyes utterly glued to the page with the need to know the truth. 

The Confessions of Frannie Langton is a brilliant novel–a gothic story that plumbs the depths of both passion and brutality, a murder mystery and a tragedy, and, above all, the story of a woman who is determined to tell her tale in a world that would see her silenced.  

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 15: An essay collection

The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I’ve Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance by Matt Ortile is a witty, insightful collection of essays by a gay Filipino immigrant about race, sex, power. I honestly don’t remember how this essay collection ended up on my radar, but I’m glad that it did because I really enjoyed it and found it to be a smart, politically engaged, and entertaining collection.

Born in the Philippines, Matt Ortile moved from Manila to Las Vegas at a young age and immediately found himself an outsider. While Ortile realized he was gay pretty early on, it was his identity as a Filipino immigrant that he spent more time grappling with. Throughout the collection, he unpacks his experiences with assimilation, tokenization, and fetishization that he’s faced as a gay, Asian American man. 

What Ortile really excels at in this essay collection is understanding and examining his life within broader world and history. This book really encapsulates “the personal is political” as Ortile explores personal experiences such as dual citizenship or attending a prestigious but predominantly white college, but also manages to examine broader issues like colonization in the Philippines and the model minority myth and explore how his life has been shaped by them.

I tend to read memoirs pretty fast, but I found that reading this collection essay by essay instead of blowing straight through at my usual quick speed was a good change of pace. Ortile’s essays aren’t dense–they’re actually quite conversational and entertaining–but I found that my reading experience was improved by giving myself time to really think over and digest each essay. Ortile is now definitely on my radar as an author to watch and I’ll be keeping an eye out for any of his future works!

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 14: A book set on a continent you don’t live on

In another example of reading a book and retroactively realizing it also works for QYY, I picked If You Still Recognise Me by Cynthia So, a young adult novel set in England. Elsie Lo is a Chinese British teenager in her final summer before university who has been nursing a crush on her long-distance American internet friend, Ada. Elsie is determined to finally confess her feelings to Elsie this summer through the grand romantic gesture of tracking down Ada’s grandmother’s British childhood friend (and possible secret love). Things are complicated further, however, when Elsie’s childhood friend Joan moves back to England for university and reconnects with Elsie. Over the course of one life-changing summer, Elsie finds herself navigating a complex web of family, friendship, and first love while trying to figure out who she is and what she wants.

I loved this novel! I’d been reading a lot of gothic literature this year and was in the mood for something less gloomy/sinister and Cynthia So’s novel absolutely hit the spot. Elsie is a well-rounded main character who’s very easy to root for (despite her convoluted plan to woo Ada) and I really enjoyed how flesh-out all the relationships in her life felt, from the different generations and types of queer people she interacts with over the course of the novel to her tangle of romance/friendship to her complex relationship with her family, who doesn’t know she’s bisexual. So’s writing is a perfect mix of engaging and thoughtful, balancing Elsie’s search for Ada’s grandmother’s lost left with character growth and insights into identity. 

If You Still Recognise Me has recently been published in the US (with a new cover and an Americanized spelling of the title) and I hope the new edition will find it’s deserving fans here. I’d especially recommend it to fans of Alice Oseman or Malinda Lo and I look forward to seeing what else Cynthia So writes next!

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 44: A book published by Arsenal Pulp Press

I’m not super familiar with Arsenal Pulp Press’s catalogue, so I picked up Kimiko Does Cancer by Kimiko Tobimatsu and Keet Geniza largely because it was available at my local library and I enjoy works of graphic nonfiction. Written by Tobimatsu and illustrated by Geniza, it’s a memoir charting Kimiko’s experience with breast cancer after being diagnosed at age 25. 

Medical memoirs aren’t an area I’ve particularly read in and I genuinely think the last cancer-focused work I read might have been The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (now THAT’S a throwback), so I came into this memoir without a ton of background in cancer narratives. Kimiko Does Cancer follows the author’s experience through her initial diagnosis, treatment, and the aftermath as she negotiates how cancer has altered her body and interpersonal relationships.

Tobimatsu intentionally sets her memoir apart from other cancer stories and their relentless focus on positivity and healing. Instead, she’s candid about the toll that treatment took on her body and her relationships, especially the side effects she’s left dealing with even after her treatment ends. Tobimatsu, who is also a masculine-present Japanese Canadian lesbian, also didn’t see herself in mainstream cancer stories and found herself alienated as a queer, mixed-race person navigating her diagnosis, doctors’s assumptions, and cancer support groups. Geniza’s art is a good match to the story, the muted color palate palate and expressive figures that compliment Tobimatsu’s writing.

Kimiko Does Cancer is quite a short graphic memoir (106 pages), but it packs a lot into those pages, as Tobimatsu is frank and reflective on her experience with cancer. While I likely wouldn’t have picked this graphic memoir up without QYY to encourage me, I found it a thoughtful and worthwhile read.

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 30: A middle grade book featuring a queer family

It makes me happy to see more queer books for middle schoolers being published lately (there weren’t a ton when I was that age even though I knew people who were looking for that kind of representation in media), so I was happy to see this prompt in QYY! 

Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston by Esme Symes-Smith is a middle grade fantasy novel (the first in a series) starring twelve-year-old nonbinary aspiring knight. Callie dreams of being a knight like their father despite being told they should focus on training their magic like a girl, so when their father is summoned to the royal capital to train the shy young prince, they accompany him with hopes of proving themself a worthy knight-in-training. In Helston, Callie finds themself facing strict gender roles, political scheming, and the threat of dangerous magic.

Sir Callie reminded me a lot of Tamora Pierce’s books (anyone else read books like the Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small when they were younger?), but with a nonbinary narrator. Callie knows they don’t feel like a girl or a boy and want to become a knight, but the strict gender roles of their world dictate they should train in magic instead. Symes-Smith’s novel is a good example of how fantasy literature isn’t the same thing as escapist literature, as the villains Callie faces are just as much thee face of abuse, transphobia, and gender roles as much as magical foes. Still, it’s a story of growth and empowerment, as Callie is sure of their identity and refuses to bow to those who tell them who they should be. Callie also has the support sister of their two loving fathers (who also have their own distinct personalities and character arcs, which I loved). 

For a middle grade novel, it is definitely on the long side (almost four hundred pages) and not quite as action-packed as the cover might indicate, so I’m not sure if younger readers would find it a bit on the slow side or not. Still, it’s really lovely to know that young readers have a hero like Callie to look up to and that there will be more of their adventures to come. 

[neverthetwinsshallmeet]

#QueerYourYear prompt 33. Weird Queer!

I was tossing around a few titles for this prompt when I read Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante and I realized it could fit well. Plante’s novel is told in the form of a fake encyclopedia for a TV show that doesn’t exist, which is a weird enough format that I figured it could work for this broad prompt. 

LBEFV follows a queer trans woman mourning her best friend and secret love, a straight trans woman (the titular Vivian), who decides to compile an encyclopedia based on the cult-class TV show Little Blue to work through her grief. Plante weaves together story-within-a-story of Little Blue, an obscure show about the quirky inhabitants of a small Canadian island, and the narrator’s  memories of Vivian as she mourns her best friend. 

Clocking in at 200 pages, LBEFV is a short novel, but I was blown away by the depth and complexity of emotion Plante packed into it. There’s the love and grief the narrator feels for Vivian and the joy they both received from watching Little Blue, but also the more tense, complicated aspects, like Vivian’s flaws as a friend and the troubled production behind Little Blue. 

LBEFV is many things–a love letter to pop culture and trans communities, an elegy for lost love, a quirky portrait of fandoms, and, above all, a novel that I won’t forget about soon.