Frankie Hucklenbroich’s “A Crystal Diary,” published in 1997, opens with a description of “bouncing baby butches, boiling and bursting with glands.” They stand outside of the lesbian bar they’re too young to frequent, studying the adult butches and femmes as they enter and exit in pairs, wondering what it would be like to be them, wondering what it would be like to fail:At sex, at intimacy, at everything. But most of all, at doing what Hucklenbroich’s narrator Nicky refers to as the trademark of every great butch: Eating out.
“What’s it taste like? What about germs? And how the heck are you gonna breathe? And if you don’t/won’t do It, then can you still be successfully gay?”
So begins Hucklenbroich’s painful, energetic tale of growing up butch in the ‘50s and ‘60s, bouncing from the heroine’s hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, to the three gay capitals of the country – New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles – and back around again.As with anything written from and about this era, the evidence of a painful coming of age are everywhere, from Nicky’s first love (an L.A. teen model named Jill) to her first arrest, to witnessing her first butch idol come back from war and get beat up for asking for a haircut at the men’s barbershop – a shop the narrator’s father happens to own.
Drawn from Hucklenbroich’s own experience growing up gay, “A Crystal Diary” is a fast, punk recounting of life lived in the margins, at times cringingly painful, at times exhilarating to read. The exhilarating parts, more often than not, take place in the L.A. of the 1950s, where “Diary’s” narrator lands after a period of searching. Nicky’s descriptions of posh L.A. are almost Gatsby-esque:
“I’d been to plenty of parties up in the Hollywood Hills – you know, the kind where the word and the address travel from bar to bar like a brush fire and everybody piles into cars and heads for the action – and they were all pretty much the same. Loud and raucous, packed with dancing, groping bodies, with the booze flowing and the grass blowing freely.”
As a young butch, she spends her unemployment “kill[ing] time sitting with the gay boys in Coffee Dan’s.”
Per researcher and writer Jan Whitaker, who writes the blog “Restaurant-ing Through History,” Coffee Dan’s had a revolutionary function similar to Cooper’s Donuts, the site of one of L.A.’s first gay revolutions. Started as a San Francisco speakeasy, by the late 40s: “Coffee Dan’s expanded into a small chain and the Hollywood location became something of a gay hangout in the 1950s, a role played by all-night cafeterias such as Stewart’s in NYC’s Greenwich Village.”
An incident in Hucklenbroich’s book, taking place in the late summer of 1958, shows the grittier side of Coffee Dan’s, where cops would hang out in the hopes of busting gays and lesbians who aren’t wearing the requisite three items of male or female clothing. NIcky avoids this by wearing female undergarments at all times in case of a stop n’ frisk.
In 1958 Los Angeles, Nicky pounds the pavement looking for a job. She’s too butch to get hired as anything but a door-to-door salesman (a job she soon quits) and even when femme’d up can’t quite manage to get hired by a sexist, homophobic society:
“Look, dear,” says Nicky’s caseworker at the employment agency. “Mr. Siebert called me back. He wanted to know why I’d sent him such a terrible tom girl.”
Against it all, there’s love, the hope that things can get better, and the idea of a great big beautiful, butch network stretching across this country of ours, making it sharper, better, and more civilized each day.
When Jill Soloway created TOPPLE Productions she did it to showcase LGBTQ+ and POC voices with shows like “Transparent,” which continues to represent the nuanced storylines of people from all backgrounds instead of silencing them. The multimedia brand is a tool to, as Soloway exclaimed during her 2016 Emmy win, “topple the patriarchy!”
Now, Soloway’s company continues to transcend in popular culture with Amazon Publishing’s new imprint, TOPPLE Books.The company will allow gender non-conforming, women of color, lesbian, bisexual and queer writers the opportunity to have an outlet specifically designed to spotlight their unique voices in storytelling. The imprint will focus on publishing narrative fiction and nonfiction pieces. TOPPLE Books will be an extension of TOPPLE Productions as well as an imprint for Amazon Publishing.
Launched in 2009, Amazon Publishing has 15 imprints, each focusing on different genres. TOPPLE Books, curated by Jill Soloway, is now a part of the company’s publishing empire. Little A Editorial Director Carmen Johnson will work with Soloway to pen introductions and select books for publishing. Little A is Amazon Publishing’s literary fiction and nonfiction imprint. Both imprints seek to uplift marginalized voices as a part of Amazon’s mission together with Soloway.
Aside from writing for hit TV shows like “Six Feet Under” and “I Love Dick,” Soloway herself has published an erotic novella as a part of an anthology series, “Jodi K.,” as well as a memoir titled “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants,” both published in 2005.
Amazon announced on February 27 that “TOPPLE Books will use the power of literature and storytelling to ignite discussion and affect change.” Soloway has taken on the role of Editor-at-Large to “introduce readers to an important and diverse canon of authors and experiences.”
Amidst the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, Soloway understands the importance of representation. “We live in a complicated, messy world where every day we have to proactively re-center our own experiences by challenging privilege. With TOPPLE Books we’re looking for those undeniably compelling essential voices so often not heard,” Soloway said in a statement.
Authors of fiction do something for us that goes far beyond the mechanics of plot. They create, or recreate, a time and a place drawn from both their own experiences and their imaginations. Few authors do that with the skill and dexterity of Alan Hollinghurst. He can imagine wholly fleshed characters as complex and detailed as an individual artist as well as his oeuvre—not only the vagaries of their personality, but the whole body of their work—as he did so effectively in his earlier masterpiece, The Folding Star. This understanding of an artist’s skills extends to his own work. He, in fact, paints a world in more vivid detail than any visual artist can and lets us, the reader, dwell there for a time until we, with much regret, turn the last page. Many authors aspire to this, a lucky few have the skill necessary, and a mere handful, living and working today, do it as well as Hollinghurst.
In The Sparsholt Affair, Hollinghurst brings alive a generational tale that begins at the dawn of WWII in the storied world of Oxford University. An early manifestation of gay culture exists here and the men who people it are enraptured by a young oarsman of great beauty, aspiring RAF pilot David Sparsholt. It is Sparsholt, although he makes only brief appearances himself, that this narrative revolves around via his notorious reputation and later the life of his son, Johnny, an out portrait artist living in London. A fascinating group of academics, artists, and scholars who are those originally enthralled by Sparsholt provide a fascinating supporting cast as they live, create, and age through the decades that follow. Many of them befriend Johnny Sparsholt as a young artist, and we are taught something about aging with dignity, especially in gay culture where youth and beauty are worshipped and the march of time fought, until it is ultimately ignored. Characters such as Evert, a poet and art collector who loved Sparsholt in those Oxford years, age with grace and on their own terms and in Evert’s case, with the love and companionship of an attractive younger man. This theme carries over into Johnny’s life as we come to the present day and he hits his sixties finding himself single for the first time in years.
The Sparsholt Affair is a novel in five pieces—five places in time lovingly brought to life by Hollinghurst, as is his strength. The eponymous “Affair” is one that will be slowly revealed to the reader. Once we feel this world fully, he brings to life this unforgettable cast. They live in our minds—some until their decline and death—and a plot of complex twists and turns is never needed. This may be fiction, but it is an authentic story of fully-drawn personalities that are often flawed, in their very human way, but never boring. This is another device that Hollinghurst uses effectively here, better than any working author today, he tells real stories about characters he’s realized so fully, you’d swear that they lived and drew breath. Hollinghurst has been long and short listed for all the major awards, winning several, and no less can be expected of this extraordinary new effort.
The Sparsholt Affair
By Alan Hollinghurst
Knopf
Hardcover, 9781101874561, 464 pp.
March 2018
Isaac Butler and Dan Kois have crafted an extensive oral history of the making of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America that is ingenious by design. Much like a play script itself, the book is structured in a series of “Acts” with chapters more like titled scenes and a cast of characters listed at the end, and documents through diverse interviews–edited in such a way as to create an on-going dialogue–the genesis, history, themes and reception of this queer masterwork. The “cast” for this metanarrative includes Kushner, the actors, directors, producers, and production team, as well as the scholars, historians, critics, and fellow playwrights who helped not only shape the work but also provide context for its continued influence. This ongoing conversation captures all the twists and turns of fate that went into the two-part epic’s creation with a sense of suspense and drama–from the joy and exuberance to the heartache. And just like the play, Butler and Kois allow the rich complexity of the story to unfold through the conversations, discussions, and critiques of those involved. The book shows the sweeping scope of the production, as well as the range of deliberation and interpretation that went into it, with personal accounts that are fascinating to read.
Butler and Kois give the reader access to the entire creative process: from the moment Kushner stumbled upon his title to his voluminous notes, script pages and copious revisions, to the dedicated early directors and actors that supplied his inspiration and helped realize his vision.
It is the 25th anniversary of the 1993 Broadway premier, and the 2017 London production of the show is preparing to move to New York this spring, so the timing couldn’t be more perfect. As Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton and In the Heights, puts it:
The notion of a country in political, physical, and spiritual crisis is very relatable, very applicable to today. The notion that there are indigenous spirits and they’re pissed at us is very relatable. I think the metaphysical stuff couldn’t be more relevant. The spiritual crisis that’s suffusing the play feels very of the moment.
Oskar Eustis, dramaturge and director, goes on:
Now, twenty-five years later, it’s Tony’s vision of the Right that looks so prescient. When Tony wrote Roy Cohn, he was a larger-than-life, demonic figure. Now his pupil is the president of the United States. My God. Talk about the return of the repressed! Here he is, in all his glory. Trump’s America is Roy Cohn’s America: sharply divided between winners and losers, hatred of the powerless used as a cynical tool to enrich the privileged…
But it is in the emphasis the book places on the play’s transformative stature as a work of queer cultural history–both milestone and touchstone–where it ultimately succeeds. We are brought back to the play’s genesis: its origin in an age of relentless calamity and death with the AIDS crisis, an indifferent president Ronald Reagan, and a religious fanaticism that looked the other way while preaching intolerance and hatred.
The book follows the play from the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco in 1991 to the Royal National Theatre, London in 1992, to the Mark Taper Forum in LA the same year, to Broadway from 1993–1994. It is a ringside seat to the Culture Wars of the nineties. We learn of an early overture to Robert Altman to direct a film version of the play and his quirky and odd “courtship” (the Altman film never materialized). We also get a behind-the-scenes account of the events which led to the HBO film of 2003 directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. And there is discussion of the 2004 Peter Eötvös opera, which was performed in 2017 by New York City Opera.
Butler and Kois place us on intimate terms with the play’s characters, ideas, and humanity–and their book, a prescient reminder of the need to follow one’s truth in the face of oppression and intolerance, will be an invaluable text for years to come.
Guess who just managed to pull a best-selling book out of their hat? That’s right: it’s John Oliver and the staff of Last Week Tonight—specifically, writer Jill Twiss—whose picture book, the somewhat cumbersomely titled Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, is, as of this writing, the No. 1 best-selling book on Amazon. It’s a sweet victory, made even sweeter by the book that’s currently down at fourth place: Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, a picture book written by Mike Pence’s 24-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and illustrated by his wife, Second Lady Karen Pence.
Proceeds from Oliver’s book go to the Trevor Project and AIDS United. The audio version is narrated by Jim Parsons, John Lithgow, RuPaul, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
In his new memoir, The Rest of It: Hustlers, Cocaine, Depression, and Then Some, 1976-1988, Martin Duberman meditates on an era that, perhaps more than any other, proved pivotal for queer life, political, cultural, and otherwise. “Although most gay people did share the prescribed values and aspirations of mainstream culture,” Duberman writes, “a radical minority… firmly rejected the liberal view that our national institutions were basically sound and that a little tinkering here and there around the edges would make them better still.” As homosexuals serve openly in the military and get married from coast to coast, as the divide between mainstream gay and radical queer becomes a wider gulf, as activists and academics and business fags continue to enrage each other, reading Duberman’s reflection on the period that made this all possible seems one of the most personally and politically important readings one could take on.
Duberman is perhaps best known as a historical biographer. In his lustrous lifetime in letters, he has published quintessential biographies on fireside poet James Russell Lowell (1966), politician Charles Francis Adams (1968), arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (2008), and social activist Howard Zinn (2012). The crowning jewel of his biographical work, however, is the 1989 biography of actor-turned-radical-Black-Marxist Paul Robeson. In a New York Times review of the Robeson biography, critic John Patrick Diggins writes of Duberman’s sage ability, “his astute knowledge of dramaturgy and music, his feeling for character and its complexities and, not least, his understanding that love may express itself, as it did in Robeson’s romantic adventures, in defiance of conventional monogamy, [which] makes Mr. Duberman the ideal biographer of a man who was both prince and pariah.” Much of The Rest of It is devoted to Duberman’s writing of the Robeson biography, which seemed to change his life, and by proxy, the future of queer studies as an intersectional endeavor itself.
Such an endeavor, Duberman illustrates, is not always a harmonious balance. Of taking on the monumental Robeson biography during the 1980s, he explains how “the demands of scholarship (and of my hermit instincts) have always compromised my counter impulse to engage more consistently in direct political activism.” In the words of RuPaul, can I get an amen (from all my fellow queer scholars / writers / progressives)? Such a split self is exhausting, and exhaustion is central to Duberman’s memoir. His historian identity shines throughout The Rest of It, an exhaustive encyclopedic documentation of his own life — its loves and losses, from his mother to his lovers and friends — and of the gay movement itself, both in the streets and in the academy between 1976 and 1988.
The love child of Eve Sedgwick and Oscar Wilde, Duberman does not dumb down the complex era or issues of which he writes; rather, he asks us, his readers, to rise to the occasion. Moving swiftly from the analytical to the confessional mode, The Rest of It is comfortable in its innate inbetweenness, its queerness of form and tone. And thankfully, at a time of such cultural and personal darkness, this is a book also full of queer optimism. “It isn’t all pain and lamentation,” Duberman writes in the book’s preface, ultimately concluding, “at the end of the eighties I’d very much learned to count my many blessings, though, as I wrote one day in my diary, ‘I loathe the ungrateful bastard in me who manages so continually to lose sight of them.’” What a lesson we lucky academics might benefit from learning: that even in a world of political turmoil, we have jobs that allow us time to read and write and ponder. To teach the next generations of readers, writers, and thinkers.
Here Duberman humbly explores a life central to queer studies and activism in the United States. In fact, he may be one of the most important queers readers know little about. He almost always writes about others: in the many biographies, yes, but also his award-winning plays (most notably “In White America,” a 1964 play revived many times over, documenting the quest of racial equality from the nation’s founding to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, a play all-too-relevant today); novels (such as the recent Jews Queers Germans, a breathtaking chronicle of Germany’s homosexual elites between the late 19th century and the start of World War II); and edited collections (particularly the 1989 landmark collection Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, an anthology collecting together writers who would become luminaries in the then nascent world of gay and lesbian studies, such as John D’Emilio, Esther Newton, and David Halperin). Just after the decade chronicled in The Rest of It, Duberman founded CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in 1991, “the first university-based research center in the United States dedicated to the study of historical, cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals and communities.” His contribution to the activism of gay revolution in the academy is paramount; in fact, we may not have queer studies at all without him, a history all-too-often and sadly erased.
But here, Duberman turns that historicist’s eye upon himself, and to much success, for both chronicling his own life and changing the way many of us think, research, and write. “Although I was reinhabiting my historian’s role, I was doing it in a new way,” he looks back, “helping to foster a field of inquiry — gender and sexuality studies — of more than academic interest… [providing] the gay and feminist movements with fresh data for challenging old assumptions and stereotypes.” We queers are better off, better informed and better empowered, for Duberman’s astute, engaged lifetime of work. We are also better off for reading The Rest of It: Hustlers, Cocaine, Depression, and Then Some, 1976-1988, for understanding the beautifully written history of one man, yes, but in effect, a part of the history of us all.
Clayton Delery’s previous book, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, was named Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in 2015. His new book is Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice. It tells the story of an anti-gay hate crime that took place in New Orleans in 1958 and chronicles a time and place in American history where such a crime was inevitable. In addition, Delery is a contributor to collections such as My Gay New Orleans and Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi, and Trans Men who Came Out Later in Life. Clayton Delery lives in New Orleans, where he is currently working on a book which does not involve autopsies or homicide.
Tell me briefly about how Mr. Fernando Rios was killed.
In September of 1958, three young men who were students at Tulane University didn’t have anything to do one night, so they decided to “roll a queer.” They were going to beat up and rob a gay man, simply because he was gay. Today this might be described as a gay bashing, and the crime might be described as a hate crime.
One of the students, a man named John Farrell, went inside a gay bar known as Café Lafitte. He started talking to Fernando Rios, who was a professional tour guide visiting the city. Farrell and Fernando Rios spoke for somewhere between a half hour and an hour. Then Farrell offered Rios a ride back to his hotel. When Farrell and Rios left the bar, Farrell’s two friends joined them from across the street. Farrell led Rios into an alley, where he was beaten so badly that he died of his injuries.
What sparked your interest in Mr. Rios? Was your interest in this case purely academic or historical? Was “rolling a queer” a popular hobby for the youths of the day?
I thought my interest was purely academic, but late in the process, I realized that I had always identified with Fernando Rios. In high school, I was bullied fairly regularly. Some of the bullying consisted of verbal taunts, but some of it was physical. Things like being pushed from behind, or having my face shoved into lockers. I was always afraid it would escalate.
Those kinds of events—rolling queers, or harassing the gay kid at school—may not happen as often as they used to, but they haven’t gone away.
Mr. Rios was only a visitor to New Orleans. Was his family, if any, present for the trial?
His family lived in Mexico City, and they couldn’t afford to come to New Orleans for the trial. The defendants packed the courtroom with their relatives. Especially their mothers, sisters, and aunts. It had the effect of creating sympathy for the defendants, and the fact that Rios had neither friends nor relatives in the room allowed the defense attorneys to create any picture of him that they chose.
After the assailants were arrested and tried, they were acquitted by a sympathetic jury, and when the verdict for acquittal was announced, the courtroom erupted into loud and sustained cheers. Were you surprised by this spirited applause?
I was not at all surprised. City Hall and both the daily newspapers were on the side of the defendants. The men who killed Rios were being portrayed as the real victims, and Rios was portrayed as a foreign pervert who had threatened them. The killing was self-defense—their attorneys said—because he had made an “indecent advance.” The fact that Rios was Mexican made it even easier to turn him into the villain, because it was a period of intense anti-Mexican prejudice. In fact, there are even newspaper articles in which Rios is not mentioned by name. Instead, he is identified as “the Mexican.”
Please describe the process of retrieving and examining courtroom documents from the case. Were they easily accessible? What document(s) provided you with the most details? Did you have access to everything you desired?
I had access to a good number of documents. The case report filed by the New Orleans Police, for example, detailed what happened when Rios was found in the alley. Their report contained the statements made by the three defendants upon their arrest. The pre-trial documents filed by both the prosecution and defense teams were available, and so was Fernando Rios’s autopsy report.
Unfortunately, the transcripts from the actual trial were lost when the city flooded after Hurricane Katrina. Fortunately, both of the New Orleans daily papers covered the trial in detail, so it was fairly easy to reconstruct what happened in the courtroom.
Were you able to locate any of Mr. Rios’s family? If so, what was their response?
He would be eighty-six today if he hadn’t died. It’s possible there are surviving siblings, or maybe some nieces and nephews, but I was never able to locate any. I would love it, though, if one day I were to get an email or a letter from somebody who had known him.
Out For Queer Blood delves into the connections between anti-Latino prejudices, homophobia, and societal norms in 1950s America regarding “operation wetback.” How does that parallel with today’s society and the Trump Administration’s stance on immigration? While writing your book and watching the evening news or reading newspapers, how did it make you feel?
I spent several months reading newspapers from the 1950s, and then I would come home and watch the news and realize that many of the stories were the same. In the 1950s, newspapers described Mexican immigrants as sources of poverty, crime, and disease. I would read that, and then come home and see Donald Trump on television describing them as murderers, rapists, and drug dealers.
But the parallels went beyond the issue of immigration. In the 1950s, newspapers warned people that gay men were a threat, because they would molest young children in public restrooms. While I was writing this book, many politicians on the political right were claiming that transgender people were a threat, because they would molest children in public restrooms. In the 1950s, conservative politicians were trying to disenfranchise black voters through literacy tests. Today, conservative politicians are trying to pass voter I.D. requirements. They claim this is to prevent voter fraud, but on-site voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. The voter I.D. laws would, however, make it difficult for poorer people to vote, and those poorer people are disproportionately people of color.
Was there any difficulty writing this book compared to writing The Up Stairs Lounge?
The difficulty was emotional. As horrible as the story of The Up Stairs Lounge was, there were at least a few people courageous enough to speak out publicly on behalf of the dead and injured. When Fernando Rios was murdered, there was nobody to speak out for him. That left the press and the defense team free to describe him as a pervert and a potential rapist, and to claim that the three men who killed him had done absolutely nothing wrong. Indeed, it was implied that they had done a public service. And I found dealing with that part of the story very painful.
Your book launch was this past November and was hosted at Cafe Lafitte which is the bar where Mr. Rios met his attackers. Describe the night of your book launch.
It was a great night. The current management knew about the Fernando Rios murder, and that he had been in the bar right before he died. They were delighted to host the event. In the 1950s, the mayor was engaged in an official effort known as “the drive against the deviates.” He wanted to eliminate homosexuality from the city of New Orleans. Instead, New Orleans is now internationally recognized as one of the nation’s capitals of LGBT life. Rios was a victim of the drive against the deviates, but clearly the city’s LGBT community is winning the war.
In 2016, we were cohorts through the Lambda Literary writing workshop and studied nonfiction with Sarah Schulman. You workshopped Out For Queer Blood. What impact did that have on your book? How did you find your publisher?
Sarah Schulman is a remarkable woman and a very gifted teacher, so just being in a room with her, and with other talented writers, was a real blessing. She also was gracious enough to read my manuscript and comment upon it while I was getting it ready to send to the publisher. You and the other students in the workshop helped me realize what parts of the story—and New Orleans history—were common knowledge, and where I had to fill in background information.
As for how I found my publisher—well, my publisher found me. For years, I was writing one version or another of the Great American Gay Novel, and nobody was ever particularly interested. Then I started writing a nonfiction account of the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge, and an editor at McFarland heard about what I was doing and sought me out. Later, when I was nearing completion of a nonfiction account of the Fernando Rios killing, McFarland came looking again. So my advice to young writers who have a difficult time getting published might be to put the novel on hold for now, and consider writing nonfiction. There are lots of true stories out there that need to be told.
There are dozens of new books to choose from each month if you’re a fan of f/f or m/m romance, never mind the m/f romance that’s been booming for decades. But what if you want to read a “happily ever after” or “happy for now” story that includes a trans person? Or someone who is asexual and/or aromantic? Those are much harder to find, especially if you want stories that don’t fling themselves (sometimes willfully, it seems) into the pitfalls of stereotypes and damaging, or even triggering, representation.
Queerly Loving (Volume 1) is a short story collection that gives happy endings to a range of LGBTQA+ characters, by authors who themselves are from across the LGBTQA+ spectrum. The nine stories are so varied in style and content that there is sure to be something for everyone. Want to read a fluffy contemporary YA story with a Jewish trans boy and his crush? It’s in there and it’s called “Miss Me With That Gay Shit (Please Don’t)” by Sacha Lamb. How about a science fiction story with lesbians, nonbinary people and a trans woman, that features a poly triad rescuing their friend’s girlfriend? It’s in there too, and it’s called “A Gallant Rescue” by A.P. Raymond! Best of all, because the stories celebrate queer love in many of its possible forms, nobody dies or gets their heart broken, and it’s glorious.
Unless you’re particularly interested in the theme of an anthology, it can be hard to know whether you’re likely to enjoy one or not. It’s not unusual to pick up a collection only to find one or two excellent stories, a few very good ones, one terrible story, and the rest falling somewhere in between. Not so with Queerly Loving, where all of the stories are engaging and interesting, and many of them warm and lovely.
The writing style and genres vary from story to story. In addition to the contemporary YA and science fiction stories I just mentioned, readers are treated to fantasy worlds with magic and dragons, teen girls in the 80s who bond over typing tournaments, a short one-act play about young girls in 1879, and a grad student and a park ranger finding lust and possibly more in the mountains of contemporary Colorado. No two stories are alike, even when they share the same genre—except, of course, that they all deliver a happy sigh by the end—because they each explore queerness in different ways.
Particular standouts include “First Light at Dawn” by Nyri Bakkalian, told in email form from one trans veteran to another, sharing how her life has changed since they were in the service together; “Dragons Do Not” by Evelyn Deshane, about a woman who learns that not everything she’s been told about her companion dragon is as true as she was led to believe; and “Birthday Landscapes” by E H Timms, about an aromantic warrior with magical powers and his family as he comes home to celebrate his twins’ birthday.
Because the stories aren’t connected by anything except that they all provide a happy ending, no matter the characters’ sexual orientation or gender presentation, the shift from genre to genre can sometimes be jarring. Readers are moved between contemporary, historical, and futuristic settings, with a third of the stories being fantasy. Starting a new story requires finding your feet each time in a way that’s different than it might be when reading an anthology with a tighter theme, but each story is so lovely that discovering them is a delight. The heat level in the stories also varies, with many of them having no sex and a couple with explicit sex on the page, always in a way that’s fitting for the each story being told.
The blurb for Queerly Loving says “Get ready for your queer adventure,” which is an apt catchphrase. Each story is sure to make your heart happy and full of hope that everyone can have a happily ever after. You won’t be able to read these stories without a smile and many of them will stick with you long after you’ve finished reading them.
Queerly Loving (Volume 1)
Edited by G Benson and Astrid Ohletz
Queer Pack
Paperback, 9783955339517, 190 pp.
November 2017
Colfax police Captain Alex Ryan arrives home to find a thug barring her door and an unwelcome visitor inside their apartment with her wife, CJ St. Clair. The uninvited guest turns out to be CJ’s snobby, fractious mother, Lydia. She estranged CJ years before when CJ came out to her. Now, she’s shown up demanding her daughter come to the aid of the family using her skills as a police investigator to find the killer of her brother’s ex-wife. Otherwise, her brother, Clayton, may end up going to jail for the murder.
After some mental gymnastics, CJ finally decides to travel to her Savannah childhood haunts to prove who killed Amy St. Clair, leaving Alex in Colorado. While she’s away, Alex finds herself confronted with a mystery of her own and a decision she knows she can’t make without CJ.
While CJ slogs through her informal investigation, trying to clear her brother, she finds herself no closer to discovering who the killer is than we are, yet she’s determined to get to the bottom of it all. She also tries to get to know her niece—not an easy task with a teen who’s recently been through the trauma of her mother’s death.
Taken In is a story with an abundance of red herrings, all swimming upstream, while CJ stands with a dangerous current pounding at her back. She needs to snag the right fish, but if her timing is off, she could find herself in serious trouble. That little fish she’s after could turn out to be a shark.
At home, Alex is followed by a wraith and she has no idea who the woman is or why she’s doing it. It’s a simple matter to discover the identity of the woman, and what’s driving her quickly comes to light. However, once it does, Alex is confronted with old memories, old pain, and a moral dilemma.
More than a mystery, this story is also about relationships and choices. When Alex is forced to reveal what she knows about the stranger who’s been following her to family, she and her sister must choose how to go forward with their lives. Alex must determine if the promotion she’s encouraged to pursue is something she wants and, given the circumstances, that decision will have to be postponed until she can discuss it with her wife. Once CJ gets to the bottom of her investigation, she must resolve how she will deal with her mother and her long held rejection of her. Finally, CJ must decide what to do about her rebellious teenage niece, should her brother end up in prison.
CJ and Alex’s devotion to one another makes them easy to like. As they traverse the story trying to solve their own mysteries, information revealed through narration and their own inner dialogue help us determine who they are. The different pieces of the story are well integrated, interesting, and they move the tale along quickly to conclusion.
Characters like Lydia St. Clair push CJ to get to the bottom of the story, all the while acting as a thorn in her side, forcing CJ to confront long buried emotions concerning the woman. Her brother, Clayton, is both a player and a buffoon, contributing to his own problems and possibly his own downfall, begging the question: Is he the killer? Or is it someone else in the long string of suspects?
Abbott has skillfully portrayed the characters in this tale. A bit of a “cozy” with a little “thriller” thrown in for good measure, the story makes us feel as if we’re walking alongside CJ and Alex, discovering answers and experiencing how each revelation affects them. This story is an easy read—delightfully entertaining, jam-packed with baffling suspects and a surprising twist, all leading us to its satisfying end. A great read for the couch or the beach.
Friday, January 19th, 7-9 pm. Occidental Center for the Arts Book Launch Series presents recently published A Circle of Elephants, by beloved local author Michael David Fels. A heartfelt collection of poignant and humorous tales of life in Los Angeles during the period from 1948-1957, these stories continue to follow the life of Charlotte Evelyn Albert and her family first depicted in The Queen of Kansas. Fels touches on the struggles America encountered as it transitioned from pre-modern to modern at the end of the end of World War II. Free event, donations invited. Q&A, book sales and signing. Refreshments for sale. 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, at the corner of Bohemian and Graton Rds. For more information, call 707-874-9392, or go to occidentalcenterforthearts.org. OCA is accessible to people with disabilities.