During her first semester as a professor at the University of Mississippi, Jaime Harker read John Howard’s Men Like That and learned to recognize the open secret of rural queer networks. “I have lived in John Howard’s Mississippi ever since,” writes Harker, “and it has been as charming and welcoming as the man himself.” Part memoir, part cultural and literary history, The Lesbian South examines the lesbian feminist print culture that thrived in southern networks from the seventies to the nineties. Yet unlike Howard’s hidden, tolerated queerness, these southern lesbian writers and editors made plenty of noise. Naiad Press, purveyor of popular lesbian novels, reached its height in its Tallahassee location; Durham, NC, boasted a thriving and multiracial lesbian literary scene; and out in the country, the lesbian landyke movement reimagined the South as a utopia where women could freely live and love each other. That these networks seem hidden to us now has much more to do with historical amnesia than secrecy, and The Lesbian South fills in significant gaps in the work started by Howard.Harker’s methodology for holding together a coherent version of southern lesbianism begins with accumulation and ends in a distillation of voices grouped topically, if sometimes paradoxically. Florence King’s raunchy conservatism shares the page with June Arnold’s liberationist experimentalism, and Rita Mae Brown’s best sellers share a shelf with the lesser-known poetry of Pat Parker. Harker’s revised topography of the South is shaped by the diverse expressions of lesbianism it inventories, and it reads like a well-curated archive, assembling meaning from fragments–lines from poems, excerpts of fiction, snippets of letters, gossip, and personal anecdotes–to create a usable past.
Harker frames the key debates of the women in print (WIP) movement around the Barbara Grier and June Arnold, two key figures in bringing lesbian voices into the reading public. Arnold’s press, Daughter’s Inc., strove to carve out a new lesbian literary strain from writers who invented language, imagery, and narrative structure apart from the dominant trends. From her end, Grier imagined Naiad Press as a salve to literary elitism, and usually emphasized accessible, even pulpy voices. While these may seem like two very different camps, Harker is quick to demonstrate how they ultimately worked in tandem: “Though I discuss Arnold and Grier as antagonists, they were coconspirators as well. Both believed that literature could change the world and that feminist literature would not only create new ways to understand gender but also liberate women from patriarchy.” This tendency to continually contrast while simultaneously comparing resists both a monolithic and divisive narrative of southern lesbianism, and instead paints the South as a “palimpsest, its radicalism willfully forgotten yet essential” to the lives of the people who reimagined its contours.
This paradoxical radicalism is most apparent in Harker’s chapter on depictions of queer sex in the WIP movement, where she invokes the grotesque as a precursor to a provocative sexual politics of visibility that informed many southern lesbian feminists’ writing. From Alice Walker’s and Bertha Harris’ liberatory female incest to the “uncomfortable directness” of Dorothy Allison’s and Cris South’s portrayals of rape, Harker makes clear that the southern lesbian canon by and large valued representation over respectability. Yet the very next chapter theorizes the South as a queer contact zone, a borderland where public queer spaces and communities can appear and disappear in the blink of an eye. That Harker moves between recalcitrant sexualities and accommodating publics without contradicting herself attests to the careful complexity of her archive.
Though The Lesbian South begins by looking at the South through Howard’s lens, it ends it by looking through the eyes of Harker’s wife, Dixie Grimes, Mississippi native and beloved chef at Dixie Belle’s Cafe. Written under the specter of HB 1523, Mississippi’s virulently homophobic and transphobic “Religious Freedom Bill,” this historical survey of southern lesbianism could easily have veered toward nostalgic yearning for better days long-gone. Yet Dixie, who has spent her entire life in the belly of the Deep South, maintains a relentless optimism that inspires her wife to claim southerness with the kind of true love that comes with embracing nuance. Through a plurality voices, Harker gives us the most usable of pasts.
The Lesbian South By Jaime Harker The University of North Carolina Press Paperback, 9781469643359, 264 pp. December 2018
Theodosia Sullivan has the perfect life. She has a great relationship with her dad, she runs their surf shop in Hanalei Bay, has plenty of close friends in town, and gets all the no-strings sex she wants from tourists who are thrilled to be in Hawaii and away from their homes on the mainland. Best of all is Kini, her closest friend and confidante who also happens to be the best damn baker going, and owner of Queen’s Sweet Shop.
Theo isn’t interested in “the one” or anything resembling a long-term relationship, but she loves it when other people fall in love, so she’s appointed herself the local matchmaker. Her latest match has gone so well, with her former nanny Charlotte recently marrying the art gallery owner Jim, that she’s convinced it’s her calling. So, when Laurel Kim shows up at her store looking for a job, Theo treats the sweet, naive young woman as her own personal mission. She knows she can help Laurel find the perfect man, so long as Theo can steer her clear of Kini’s shop helper, Bobby, who clearly has zero prospects and isn’t even that good looking.
Laurel becomes almost a full-time job for Theo, since she has to also teach her how to surf, show her the ropes of working in the shop, and find all the best food in Hanalei Bay (including Queen’s, naturally). And Theo’s own life gets a little more complicated than usual when Jim’s son shows up and she starts to question whether she’s actually the 6 on the Kinsey scale that she always believed herself to be.
As much as Theo thinks she has a handle on everything, she soon learns that interfering in other people’s lives can have consequences. The gravest might be for Theo’s heart, when she understands how deeply she loves Kini just after unknowingly pushing her friend towards someone else.
If I Loved You Less is a contemporary reinterpretation of the classic Emma by Jane Austen. The village of highbury has been replaced by the sights, sounds, and tastes of the out-of-the-way Hanalei Bay (and be warned about those tastes—hearing about Kini’s baking will make you crave pastries). Theo is an excellent take on Emma Woodhouse, equal parts well-meaning and meddlesome, with the former not always managing to outweigh the latter. Kini is also a perfect gender-flipped Mr. Knightley, since she’s stoic, wise, warmer than might be expected at first sight, and significantly older than Theo.
Because the reinterpretation is so faithful to the original, you’ll enjoy this best if you’re a fan of Emma, because much like Miss Woodhouse, Theo can be a lot to take. She’s impulsive, often judgy to the point of being shallow, occasionally manipulative, and prone to blurting her thoughts without consideration of the emotional wake she leaves behind her. Theo’s so much more than that, though, because she’s also warm, genuinely wants the best for others, and has a deep affinity for the people she’s closest to, like Kini, her father, and Charlotte. Because she’s so messy and real, Theo is a character that people will either love or hate, and if you love her, a lot of that affection and appreciation will come from watching her blossom into the kind of woman Kini’s known she could be all along.
Readers who have been on the lookout for f/f chicklit will also rejoice about If I Loved You Less. While it has a romance that’s lovely and satisfying, it’s secondary to the story, which is truly about Theo’s life and a period in which she goes through tremendous growth. Despite occasionally awkward or difficult scenes, the overall tone is light and Parker’s writing style is fun and engaging, making the book a great piece of escapism. Those who prefer or need audiobooks are also in for a treat, since Jill Smith does a spectacular job bringing Theo, Kini, and all the happenings of Hanalei Bay to life with her narration.
Anyone looking for a break for a few hours should consider If I Loved You Less, especially as we head into the long winter months. Just make sure you have snacks ready for your little virtual island getaway, because you’re definitely going to need them.
With one foot in historical fact and one foot beautifully in fiction, Christopher Castellini vividly reimagines one of the most fascinating partnerships of the gay literary world. The author has created a compelling narrative about the bonds of love and affection between two men: the playwright Tennessee Williams and his partner, the often overshadowed, Frank Merlo. Merlo, beloved by those closest to the celebrated Williams, still lived mostly in the playwright’s shadow. His own ambitions as an actor and dancer thwarted, Merlo functioned as William’s assistant, always getting the couple where they needed to be when they needed to be there. Leading Men is an accounting of Merlo’s time with Williams, a working-class man from New Jersey thrust onto the international stage of the mid-century’s jet set.
The novel opens in Portofino—one of the small, picturesque Italian resorts where the elite from the world of the arts, leaders of industry, and stars of the international film scene docked their yachts and gathered for pleasure by the seaside. Castellani captures this rarefied world at its louche heights. Everyone has descended on Portofino for a party thrown by Truman Capote, a friend and rival of Williams. Also introduced is the character Anja, a beautiful Swede of sixteen on the cusp of becoming a great actress. She and her ersatz mother befriend Merlo and Williams. Likewise, the mother and daughter meet another gay American author, John Horne (‘Jack’) Burns, and his lover, Sandro Nencini. All six are the victims of a mob of young vagrants intent on sexually assaulting the young Anja, a tragic incident, that they all carry in secret, until Williams writes of it as a plot device in one of his plays. But it’s Anja and Frank who remain most central to the book’s narrative as the timeline slips back and forth from the contemporary life of an elderly Anja, the early death of Merlo in the 1960s, and the height of William’s and Frank’s fifteen-year relationship in the 1950s.
A major plot point centers on Anja, in the sunset of her years, holding on to a legacy passed to her by Williams shortly before his death; it’s a final play dedicated to Merlo. The play was written in Williams’ decline, and she’s not sure of its artistic value; however, the young son of Jack Burn’s Italian lover, himself gay, finds her. An unlikely friendship blooms between the elderly and reclusive actress and the star-struck young medical student.
Leading Men is a finely-rendered narrative based upon some of the twentieth century’s most compelling artistic figures. It is broad in scope and lush in detail, without every tipping into sentimentality. It is a love story between two men—two men who existed in a rarefied world that accepted this relationship without judgment,at a time when the world-at-large most certainly did. The novel is also a fascinating examination of the early years of international celebrity culture. From Rome to Portofino, 1950s Italy comes to life again with its evocative landscapes and endless pleasures. Real life characters like Paul Bowles and Anna Magnani breathe again in theses pages, bringing back a time when to be famous was often coupled with great accomplishment. The novel is a compassionate snapshot of a bygone era and a beautiful, if tragic, story of love and remembrance.
In the cultural theory circles Julietta Singh traversed in grad school, “the archive” stood for the body of work one sought to claim as one’s unique site of study, from which one would ideally launch a dazzling academic career. Now a professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, Singh has remained in academia, but her new book No Archive Will Restore You takes stock of a different kind of archive: her own body and all that has traversed its shifting boundaries.
The tags on her publisher’s web-page for the book—birth, bulimia, cancer, desire, diaspora, pain, queer theory, race, robbery, sexuality, texting, the body, violence—give a sense of its range, but No Archive is less a catalog than a contemplative ramble, structured by the kind of inner logic that might guide the owner of a vast and apparently disorderly home library to any volume sought in seconds. Via email, Singh shared her thoughts on the eroticism of theory, the radical politics of hospitality, and her never-quite-finished writing process.
Contra the “born this way” narrative of queer sexuality and its quest to ground sexual difference in biology, you write at one point that “my engagements with queer theory had produced in me an unabashedly queer sexual desire.” That unexpected motion—theory producing rather than accounting for desire—to my ear faintly echoes the political lesbianism movement of the last century. I’m curious in what ways that might or might not resonate with you.
I’m in full support of the science of queer life, in and beyond human sexualities. I write in the book about a childhood experience of meeting my older queer cousin for the first time and feeling an immediate and profound desire, even while then I couldn’t quite understand it. It’s also true that this moment was caught up—as were many other moments that comprise my early life—in navigating the slippery politics of race and “racial mixing” in the Canada of my youth. In a sense, queerness felt less urgent for me as I was confronting the social struggles that were literally inscribed on my skin.
What I was trying to resist in No Archive was the formulation that I had been in the proverbial “closet.” Instead, I wanted to emphasize the ways that theory—so often presumed to be entirely intellectual and removed from embodiment—could ignite passionate desires for other forms of intimate and collective relation. I have been made, unmade, and remade by theory in countless ways. For me, theory has never been something that simply accounts for the world, but a form of active engagement that gives rise to other ways of inhabiting and imaging this and other worlds.
It’s cool that you hear faint echoes of radical lesbianism here! The brown and black lesbian movement of the last century—Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and their collectives—are all indispensable to contemporary queer of color critique. Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” in which she moves eroticism out of a purely sexual realm and into everyday acts of making and moving (she cites the act of building a bookshelf!) is a really provocative way to connect with our bodies, to feel in and with them against the socially proscribed sites of eroticism.
You situate No Archive partly within a recent tradition of feminist new materialism. I think it’s also fair to say we’re somewhere in the middle of a long, rich wave of works by feminist writers (both academic and popular) examining bodily female experience. I’m excited by these works—there is still so much to be said—while also sometimes wondering how they sit en masse against the age-old cultural imperative for women, in particular, to devote obsessional attention to the body. Does this ever register as tension for you?
This is a provocative question, and I understand completely why you feel some tension around what may seem like an endless return to the female body. Part of why I think the body is so exhausting for women is because we’re locked into very rigid conceptions of what the body is, and how we should or must be in relation to it. There are, of course, long traditions of being embodied that do not require an unrelenting subjugation or obsession with the body. There are traditions of being in the body that are not disciplinary, that do not police your gender, your size, your sexuality. And perhaps for me even more excitingly, there may be ways of invoking other relations to our bodies that have not yet been played out historically. We might, in other words, invent new styles and tradition of being embodied.
The feminist writing that engages me most—across intellectual and popular spheres—shares a mutual reach toward alternative ways of reading and abiding by the body. If the body has been a source of profound struggle for many women, this for me is not a reason to abandon it. In a feminist deconstructive frame, I could say that I don’t want to flip the binary of women being “all body” by moving us to be “all mind.” I want to displace this binary altogether. We are, all of us, body-minds. I’m interested in that tangled play of the psychic and the material. I don’t want to do away with the body; I want to let it ring and echo in registers that do not align with patriarchal capitalism. I want to bring our bodies into a full, messy, and unabashed embrace.
You had another book come out last year, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. One could see No Archive as a companion volume, exploring what it might mean to inhabit a body that neither masters nor is mastered by itself or others—a body that’s more permeable and less bounded. What might happen at a broader political level if more of us were to reconceive of our bodies in this way?
I love the idea of No Archive as a “companion volume” to Unthinking Mastery, and it makes me realize that everything I write in some sense comes back to this primordial formulation: how can we be together in less coercive ways by reconceiving who and what we are?
One of the things I’ve written about beyond these two books, and that lingers palpably in both, is the ethical and political question of hospitality. A critical engagement with hospitality necessitates that we reimagine what is “ours,” and this requires us to rethink how we come into belonging, and why some are not eligible to belong. If we are to understand ourselves as embodied subjects that are fundamentally and infinitely bound up with the world at large, it becomes very hard to forget the refugee at the border. It becomes hard not to fight against a system that wants to wall out, or shoot, or arrest and detain the refugee. It also becomes very hard to turn away from those who are already here, and those who were here first as stewards of this place, who are excised from the systems that support healthy, sustainable life. It becomes impossible to continue to comply with an extractive capitalism that is maniacally destroying the conditions of possibility for life on this planet.
In other words, a radical re-conception of ourselves—of what and who we are—might open us to the prospect of giving up some of the things we have held as “rightfully” ours, and might urge us toward forms of living that refuse outright the very terms of exclusion and exploitation that drive contemporary geopolitics.
You end with the image of the burning book, which in a literal sense seems profoundly anti-archival. But there’s also something liberating in the image. It made me wonder: has writing this book put anything to rest for you? Or does the idea of the archive remain as fraught as ever?
Mulling over this question just made me realize for the first time that No Archive both begins and ends with the act of study! The image of the burnt book at the end marks a desire to turn toward those ideas that have been stamped out from above, that have been prohibited and destroyed. The act of burning books is certainly anti-archival, but the act of gathering up and studying the ashes of the burnt book can be said to be anarchival—demarcating a willingness to take up the partial, the fragmented, the destroyed, without needing to seek out something whole and complete, without needing to recreate the ashes into an “original” form.
No Archive itself falls apart by the end of the book, becoming somewhat fragmented in its form. Now that it’s making its way into the world, I’m still here studying, still desiring to gather up those scattered ashes, to think and feel with them. Much more than putting things to rest, I feel energized toward gathering, distributing, and holding together against the force of what burns us.
Gale Massey, Kelly J. Ford, and I have quite a few things in common. We’re debut crime novelists. We’re queer. We’re Southern.
Growing up gay in the Bible Belt undeniably shaped us, but how deep do Southern roots penetrate our fiction as adults? How do we reconcile identities that are often in conflict with one another? And, importantly, which of us are cousins and how far removed?
Y’all best believe we have Things to Say™, and we’re grateful to Lambda Literary for the opportunity to say ‘em. Pour a little Coke in that bourbon, and buckle your biscuits ‘cause this unflinching roundtable’s heading South. Literally.
And possibly metaphorically.
–P.J. Vernon
P.J.: Everyone’s South is different; these are simply ours. Let us introduce ourselves, and describe our relationship with home in three words.
Gale Massey: I’ve been told my family goes back seven generations in Florida but it’s a proven fact I come from a long line of horse thieves and liars, so who really knows? My debut novel is The Girl From Blind River(Crooked Lane Books). My relationship with the South can be summed up in one word: Conflicted.
Kelly J. Ford: I’m based in Boston, but my family’s been lodged in the South for generations. My hometown is nicknamed Hell on the Border and considered a “Top Ten True Western Town.” But it’s also in the foothills of the Ozarks. It’s a weird mix of cultures. My debut Cottonmouths (Skyhorse Publishing) is more focused on those hills, a great place to commit and hide your crimes. At least for a little while. Like many exiles, there’s a lot I love about the South, but much that is deeply disappointing. So, how ‘bout two words: love/hate.
P.J.: I’m a suspense author, and When You Find Me (Crooked Lane Books) is my Southern Gothic debut. It’s dark. It’s twisty. The pages sweat sweet tea and gin in equal measure. I live in Canada (brrr), but I’m an expat from Florence, South Carolina. Nestled in the state’s swampy coastal plains, it’s both had an atomic bomb dropped on it and is vital for drug trafficking as it’s equidistant from Miami and NYC via I-95. Three words that capture my relationship with home: It. Is. Complicated.
Gale Massey
Gale: My father was born and raised near Florence. We might be cousins.
P.J.: Dear Reader, this is such a typical occurrence for Southerners. My first question to Gale upon seeing mutual connections on Facebook was literally: Do you know my cousinso and so?
Kelly: I assume I’m a 4th or 6th cousin to everyone in the South because my kinfolk got around.
Gale: I recently learned of a distant, openly gay cousin who was vice-president in 1853. Yay, pride moment! Then I learned he also owned five hundred slaves and a plantation. Ugh. it’s so typical of the South to offer up equal amounts of shame and pride in a single serving.
P.J.: Neither Kelly nor I reside in the South, but set our books there. Gale still calls the South home, but chose New York for her novel to unfold. A coincidence? Or were our story settings influenced by where we live?
Gale: The question of why I didn’t set my novel in the South keeps coming up. It seemed any story I told would be overshadowed by the complexity and quirkiness of the South and that setting the novel here would overtake the story I wanted to tell. So, I headed north and created a small town as a simple backdrop. I guess setting it up north was a way of gaining distance and space from where I’ve spent my whole life.
P.J.: I’m uncertain I’d set my novel in South Carolina if I still lived there. Residing in Canada liberated me to return in my writing. It’s like a bad break-up: distance deceives memory. You constantly remind yourself why the relationship didn’t work out. But traveling there for the book was cathartic. In fictional Elizabeth, SC, I exert complete control.
Kelly: Almost everything I’ve written has been based in or referenced Arkansas. I can’t seem to separate my upbringing from my work. I spent 22 years in Arkansas before I said yes to a free ride to Boston with a coworker from Walmart. That’s a lot of living during formative years to toss off so easily. All I wanted was to get out of Arkansas, but now that I’m gone, my head goes there whenever I sit down to write.
P.J.: One thing we all agree is that this conversation is challenging. Are our relationships to the South so complex that they’re difficult to write about?
Gale: Growing up in a culture that actively persecutes their minorities makes it difficult to come to terms with the fact that you are a member of an invisible minority. Witnessing bigotry and racism and segregation is scary for most children (unless they’re sociopaths), and being a part of a pack is key to survival. So coming out or even coming to terms with being queer can be or at least feel like a life-threatening proposition. This has made it difficult to have a healthy relationship with my birthplace and my ancestry. Add writing to the mix and it means you are processing these things in a way that is very public.
Kelly J. Ford
Kelly: It’s easier to write about Arkansas now that I have distance, both in miles and maturity. But it remains complicated.
For me, the South is inextricably tied to a difficult relationship with my mother. The issues she dealt with are issues you see all too often in the South and rural areas, and in our fiction: neglect, mental illness, alcohol and substance abuse, poor health, and housing and food insecurity. Just overall deterioration of body, mind, and soul. Time and again, I’ve tried to put that relationship into words via essays or even a memoir. But it’s not something I can touch with any emotion unless I channel it through fiction. I put up a defensive wall for protection years ago, and I’m so used to its comforting presence.
P.J.: It’s been challenging for my therapist[s] to get outta me, too. Growing up, I lived for the day I’d hop on I-95 and head north for a life of fame and gay fortune. I left South Carolina, but it changed me far less than I’d hoped. I was still insecure, still carrying wounds. You can’t escape the South any more than you can crawl outta your own skin. One day, I stopped trying. That was an inflection point. Home evolved from a monster to be fled to something layered and begging to be understood. I’m still deep into that part of the journey.
The South doesn’t make it easy to be different, and all that baggage makes talking about it candidly tougher than we expected.
The South also yields an impressive repertoire of literary greats like Frederick Douglass, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, and Britney Spears (kidding, maybe).How did growing up queer in a region wrapped in a Bible Belt inform our writing?
Gale: Yes, voicing our collective experience is challenging. It seems we have many issues in common. I also grew up bearing witness to the profound impact of poverty on women. You never shake that off. As a child I also saw a lot of duality. Allegedly good men doing hateful things to POC, their wives, and children. Deacons sipping grain alcohol out of brown paper bags before Wednesday night prayer meetings. The closeted choir leader not being true to his nature. But I also saw good men and women helping out impoverished families. The South taught me all about human complexity.
Kelly: I didn’t even realize I was queer until I was in my mid-twenties in Boston. Lord knows there were signs before that. I was madly in love with Dale Arden and Princess Aura from Flash Gordon, Andromeda from Clash of the Titans, Maggie from Escape from New York. Not to mention all the neighborhood girls with whom I developed deeply felt, close friendships. I even had an out gay cousin. But it didn’t even occur to me that women could love women. Gay men? Sure. Anything else on the queer spectrum was not part of my lexicon. I always felt different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was also hit in the head with a metal bar while working at the Hardee’s at 16, so that could explain it.
Honestly, I was so desperate for love and nurturing from anyone who offered it to me. That mix of emotions—confusion, desperation, anxiety, love, hypocrisy—are mental scars. That confusion about who I was and what I meant to people bleeds into my work.
P.J. Vernon
P.J.: The duality was stark, sometimes traumatizing, and is omnipresent in my writing. The religious hypocrisy, victimhood, and substance abuse were as pervasive as the mosquitos. Generational cycles of abuse thread every society, but Southern families seem to bear these burdens frequently. Just my perception, but unsurprising given the income inequality, religious dogma, and marginalization of communities. Hostility thrives in those conditions. Times are changing as cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville experience cultural renaissances, but deep stains don’t wash out easy.
Enter the pathological preoccupation with veneers in my fiction which mirrors life. Patient secrets, toxic relationships, and deceptive masks abound in both. This penchant to hide behind facades is fertile ground for fiction. Writing allows me to vent frustrations with injustice, garish hypocrisy, and the futility of denial. But my pages are also for celebrating the Southern warriors. Like my best friend, Sheri Ard, who was an ally before gay best friends were cosmopolitan. She took heat for her gay friends, and continues the fight. She recently implemented gender nonbinary inclusion in our hometown hospital’s paperwork.
In the end, no one wants a book about well-adjusted adults practicing healthy conflict resolution, and South Carolina makes a hell of a setting.
Must queerness and Southernness coexist in conflict with one another?
Kelly: I don’t see how it can’t when you’ve got people out there that will fight tooth and nail to try to kill us: either through legislation or a thousand microaggressive cuts. God bless the queer folks who can live in the South and tolerate it. They’re made of tougher stuff than I am.
Gale: I agree with Kelly. A thick skin is required to live down here.
P.J.: I want to say no, but I want to be honest. My sexuality and my roots have always been in conflict.
When I came out, I received a letter from an important relative. It contained the most hurtful words I’d ever read. A laundry list of willfully ignorant vitriol to frighten me from a lifestyle. I was fated to AIDS. I received a jarring account of gay sexual practices. Choosing hell made victims of my loved ones. How could I be so selfish? It was written with guidance from our pastor–an educated and articulate man who remains a community pillar. He wouldn’t remember me, but his profound lack of empathy shaped my family relationships for years. It stoked an internal conflict that I still struggle to reconcile. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I do know I’ve let take too much from me.
Gale: Holy shit, P.J. I am so sorry you had this experience. My mother tossed me out of the house when I was eighteen claiming God would not want her to house a homosexual. I carried that wound for years but eventually I began to surround myself with friendships that were healthier and stronger than family of origin bonds.
Kelly: It’s awful to hear these stories and unfortunately all too common. Luckily, I grew up around sinners and didn’t have Bible beaters quoting scripture at me. I had a positive experience coming out. My dad said, “I don’t care as long as you’re happy. I love you.” I’m not sure my mom knew about my sexuality before she died. She was a piece of work, but I don’t believe she would’ve have kicked me out. None of us were so high on our horse that we didn’t fear our own fall and the helping hand we’d need once we were down there.
P.J.: Folks often point to the rapid progress society’s made, but we have to remember our scars. Complacency is fraught with danger.
We might be writing what we know, but Southern Gothic & Grit Lit are having a moment. How do we balance reader expectations and reality?What has the reception been from Southern versus non-Southerner readers?
For me, the difference was stark. Early readers in South Carolina focused on plot holes, narrative disjointedness, and craft stuff. But Canadian critique partners? They wanted the “South” of their imaginations. Where were the race riots and burning crosses? Turnip-eating Scarlett O’Hara swearing never to go hungry again? To them, the South is eccentric and bizarre, and they wanted it on every page. After the book was acquired, my editor helped me craft a balance. You try your best to be true, but at the end of the day, my job is to deliver an entertaining product with wide appeal.
Kelly: A woman at a reading in Boston didn’t have a question but a comment (we’ve all been there): “Arkansas sounds so backwards, so awful.” I felt defensive because yeah, it is in some ways. But it’s also my roots and it made me who I am. It’s been heartening to hear from southern readers—and those who enjoy southern lit. The thing I’ve heard most often from those readers is that Cottonmouths felt real. That’s the best compliment I could receive: they saw themselves, whether they’re from small towns or are in the closet and desperate for the love of that one person who’s awfully bad for them. It might not be a great image, but it’s an accurate reflection for a lot of folks. I feel like I’m doing my job as a writer if I can help others feel a little less invisible, flaws and all.
Gale: Most people commenting on the location simply ask me to set my next book in Florida, and I am doing that. Maybe I needed to start somewhere else in order to come home.
P.J.: The South is storied and complex, and we all experience it differently – especially as queer. What messages should readers take from this roundtable?
Gale: I’ve been out in the South for over four decades and while its ways have left scars on many of us, it’s also brought us wisdom. To quote RuPaul (who, by the way, worked the Georgia club circuits before conquering queer NYC), “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
Kelly: Many people are interested in the South as a concept, or as history. They’re less interested in the New South, the one that exists outside of the litany of straight white male authors and Flannery. Every time I see an article with that typical list, I could spit. I couldn’t believe it when I spoke to a professor who taught southern literature and they’d never heard of Jesmyn Ward. I mean, come on. She’s won two National Book Awards for books set in Mississippi. If she can’t get their attention, what chance do southern queer writers have? There has to be an active effort to diversify the reading lists in Southern Lit classes across the board. That would be a good start.
P.J.: I love the South, and I hate the South. I never want to live there again, and I want to breathe my last breath in South Carolina. I am a collection of contradictions. Accomplished and insecure. Self-less and selfish. Queer and Southern. I’m the natural product of a place where paradoxes thrive and reinvention is always possible.
The undeniable truth? The South is me. It’s Gale. It’s Kelly. And whether it likes it or not, it’s pretty queer.
A South Carolina transplant in Canada, P. J. Vernon abandoned gainful employment to write When You Find Me, his critically acclaimed Southern Gothic suspense debut.
Gale Massey’s debut novel, The Girl From Blind River, is a coming of age story of family dysfunction, illegal gambling and small-town corruption. Massey lives in St. Petersburg and is a Florida native.
Kelly J. Ford is the author of Cottonmouths, named one of 2017’s best books of the year by the Los Angeles Review. Kelly is Arkansas bred and Boston based.
In October 2015, at age 57, having lived in New York City for 35 years, I followed my husband to his new job at a Midwestern university. We joked about young men everywhere, and how the sight might make us long for our lost youth. Indeed, when we first visited, the summer before moving, the youth factor was a bit overwhelming. Would the young men view us old guys with distain, as irrelevant or out-of-touch?
In Manhattan, achievement, including youthful achievement, is everywhere, but diluted. New York City is actually occupied by many ordinary Joes and Janes, and that’s mostly who I saw and spoke to. But I imagined this small college town being wall-to-wall young people with bright futures, all of them of course bound to succeed where I once failed, of course fit and beautiful as I wasn’t, of course barely recognizing me.
But I got there and I took a few deep breaths and I (re)learned a few things. Young people, in fact, don’t automatically regard middle-aged people as old and out-of-touch. They roll their eyes about parents or professors in real life, college kids do not continually cut older people with ageist slurs. I now have some real and true friends under 25. They are warm, sympathetic and devoted. I asked one of them about the stereotype of youthful contempt for middle age, and she agreed that this is more a media trope than a real thing. Similarly, us older people don’t go around in thrall to youthful good looks and talent, fantasizing that those beautiful, disdainful kids will all win Nobels and Pulitzers and have perfect lives. Young people are people, even the most talented of them, and every life has twists and turns. By age 60, we have learned this.
John Boyne’s melodrama, A Ladder to the Sky, asks us to accept a number of clichés, chief among them youth’s cutting disdain for middle age and the sighing of middle age over perfect, beautiful, bound-for-glory youth. As a corollary, Boyne also suggests that the most dogged pursuit of writers and writing students—more dogged than writing itself—is gleefully dismemberment of one another using gossip, harsh judgement, invidious comparisons, and plain meanness. The writers in Ladder to the Sky, the old and the young, don’t seem to derive much joy from writing, but give them a colleague to vivisect, and they bring every ounce of wit and energy to the task.
The novel begins in West Berlin, in 1988. Erich Ackerman, German-born, a successful but perhaps not great writer, who passed his youth as a Wehrmacht functionary, is now in his sixties and needs an assistant. Enter Maurice Swift, a young writer just making his start. Ackerman, who is gay, sighs over the young man’s beauty and the promise presumed to go with it, but he keeps some distance. It is hinted that Swift could be queer, if it would get him ahead. Over the months, Ackerman confides to Swift the story of the love he bore a straight friend during the War. The friend became engaged to a Jewish girl, and Ackerman, in order to hang on to the friend, betrayed the fiancée and her family to the Gestapo.
Before we know it, Swift has produced his first novel—Two Germans—the publication of which ruins Ackermann. So, we must buy another cliché: those who are ever so young-beautiful-promising are all sociopaths, even as they go on being breathtakingly, frustratingly young-beautiful-promising. But then Swift’s second novel fails. For his third, he justifies stealing the work of his novelist wife and passing it off as his own. She discovers the deception and then dies “accidentally.” Swift takes up editing a literary magazine and steals from rejected stories in order to piece together novels four and five. He has a son with a surrogate. The son dies at thirteen but seems eerily resurrected a few years later in the person of one Theo Field, an undergrad who engages in an epic pub crawl with the alcoholic Swift, the hook being, he’s writing a thesis on him. (Take note: “Field” in German is “Acker.”) Field’s and Swift’s interactions lead to yet another series of sociopathic set pieces, with the young, yet again, trying to destroy the old.
The great pleasure of Boyne’s novel is the schadenfreude. If you like to see bad guys get comeuppance, you will be more than satisfied when Swift is brought low, repeatedly. Unfortunately, as a sociopath, Swift can learn nothing. He justifies every offense and just keeps offending. He does not gain our sympathy, nor do those who fall for his good looks and great promise. They are as addicted to Swift as Swift is to serving his ego. Creating (and destroying) Swift must have been great fun for the author, and occasionally it is fun for the reader, too, but the lack of genuine humanizing elements makes those dark joys short lived.
UK-based LGBTI rights group Stonewall has reinforced the need for LGBTI-themed books for children.
The group says that books highlighting LGBTI issues are essential for LGBTI youths exploring their sexuality and gender identity.
The group made the statement at a time when LGBTI themed children’s books have faced considerable opposition in numerous countries, including the US and Canada.
Sidonie Bertrand-Shelton, Stonewall’s head of education programmes, said that including LGBTI themes in children’s books is not only important for the development of LGBTI youths but in ‘[helping] all pupils develop an understanding of difference,’ the Guardian reports.
‘Celebrating difference is an important step toward building inclusive learning environments where all young people can be supported to reach their full potential,’ Bertrand-Shelton added.
‘[This] makes representations of LGBT people in books and education materials vital for young people who might be questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity.’
A 2017 School Report by Stonewall found that only 20% of LGBT students had been taught about same-sex relationships at school.
The report also found that 77% had not learned about trans people or gender identity.
Stonewall’s statement comes after a Catholic school board in Canada earlier this week removed an acclaimed graphic novel which includes two boys kissing.
The Ottawa Catholic School Board said the book’s removal was ‘not necessarily’ because of the LGBTI content, but for ‘the actual relationship content … It is not a book we really need younger kids reading without guidance.’
However, the book was reinstated into primary schools following protests over the decision.
This week also saw a group of parents in Kansas protesting to have books with transgender content removed from school shelves.
The group claimed that a book such as I Am Jazz contained a ‘sexual revolution agenda, indoctrination of children’.
Other high-profile instances have seen disputes over LGBTI themed books throughout the world.
Last year in Hong Kong, the Sexual Orientation Ordinance Concern Group successfully lobbied to have a number of LGBTI themed children’s books removed from the shelves of public libraries.
The group – which claim they have no political or religious affiliations – said they were concerned that LGBTI inclusive content in schools might lead to ‘alternate brainwashing education’.
LGBTI rights in Singapore remain a contentious issue. LGBTI rights activists often meet with considerable opposition from both political and religious groups, and male homosexual sex is still criminalized in the city-state.
Spotlight on New Queer Literature is a monthly series highlighting publications that are LGBTQIA owned, promote queer and trans writers, or publish work on LGBTQIA themes, seeking to connect Lambda’s readership with contemporary queer publishers and authors.
To ring in the new year, Lambda spoke with César Ramos, founder and editor of Raspa Magazine, a print magazine dedicated to queer Latinx literature. We spoke about Raspa‘s dedication to artistic innovation, representation, and community building.
Tell us a little bit about Raspa and its mission.
Raspa Magazine is a response to paucity of queer Latinx literature readily available to readers. Through the creation of a print publication my goal was to exhibit the experiences of the queer Latinx, thereby providing a better understanding for our selves as peers and for those outside of our community. It was founded on the values of equal representation, dedication to the arts, community building, and exemplifying Latinx leadership. These values stem from my own personal beliefs of equality, healing through creation, and community service. My decisions, as editor, are guided by these values. Every issue, every visual artist selected, every creative piece is carefully curated to demonstrate the talent and the diversity within our own Latinx community. These same values grant me the freedom to promote work that may not be accepted in conventional literary circles but are important for what they represent to us; that our voice matter, and that our experiences are valid.
How long has Raspa been around? How has it developed or changed since it began?
Raspa Magazine was established in 2012. Since its inception, it was intended to serve as a literary based initiative to assist marginalized communities increase representation, improve accessibility, and achieve greater artistic merit in the literary arts. In the beginning, my team and I worked toward this goal solely through the publication of the magazine. Over time, with gained professional experience, overwhelming community support, and some difficult conversations, we have been able to expand on our original efforts and develop programming that helps us become a more impactful platform. The magazine itself, now boast contributors from the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, with an increase in Spanish language works. Raspa Magazine also organizes Rough Nights: A Reading Series. A yearly reading event that connects audiences and featured authors in a way that expands past the page. It is an effort to foster deep and meaningful conversations for better understanding through increased visibility and access. Raspa also develops community collaborations with community members who identify as queer, or as Latinx, but not both. The intended goal is to explore the intersectionality of identities through in depth creative written work that
What kind of work do you publish?
Raspa Magazine publishes creative written work and visual art that narrates the queer Latinx experience. We do not focus on genre or form, but on artistic merit, innovativeness, and potential cultural impact. Raspa Magazine serves as a sustainable space for queer Latinx artist to share work without the fear of being tokenized, with liberty to experiment, and create work with the knowledge that it will be treated with dignity and respect. Our intent is to cultivate an environment that empowers art makers to push boundaries in their process, redefine the literary canon, and reshape art to be more representative and inclusive.
How would you describe Raspa’s aesthetic?
The queer, Latinx experience is diverse. We encourage contributors to embody their own experience through their work, how they see fit. We do not expect contributors to adhere to a tone, style, form, or genre. What we do expect is artistic excellence, quality and innovative creative written work, and thoughtful story telling. Each issue has no theme. It is a cross section of work being created at the moment, with varying conversations occurring within a single issue. We believe this allows for a more accurate representation of the queer, Latinx community.
Can you highlight some of the work Raspa publishes?
“After Citlalli Died” and “Following Alfonsina” by mónica teresa ortiz are two poems that were published in our inaugural issue. mónica’s language manages to express genuine sentimentality through powerful imagery without becoming cliché. mónica is a skilled poet that manages to convey universal experiences in a few stanzas, if not in a single one, that offer magnetic and beautiful perspectives. After working with her as contributor on the first issue, I immediately recognized a social conscious, skilled writer and asked her to join our team as poetry editor.
“To Kill a Mariposa” by Juliana Delgado Lopera is an intense short story about a queer and gender non-conforming Mario. The story takes us through several humiliating acts of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his parents, and his final act of defiance before escaping his turbulent home. I appreciate this story because Mario, the protagonist, is unapologetically queer. He remains true to himself despite the abusive attempts by his parents to challenge his behavior. Mario, is also flawed and his misguided decisions lead to an aggressive and violent confrontation. The story illustrates the importance of allowing queer youth to express themselves and it serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of repressing queer youth.
“Three Scenes Explaining a Theory of Restraint” by Marcos Santiago Gonsalez is an essay written in three sections, with each section discussing a significant person in the author’s life. Collectively they offer insight on how interpersonal relationship can shape our identities, and how those relationships can impact our own relationship with ourselves. I appreciate a good essay, and even more when I can relate to the topic on multiple levels. Marcos pulls from his personal history to create writings that are intimate and vulnerable but speak to the Latinx experience, writing about topics seldomly discussed in our community.
What would you like writers and artists interested in submitting to Raspa to know?
I am often asked if submissions need to be about Latinidad and/or queerness to be considered for publication, to which I answer no! We would like for potential contributors to submit work about anything and everything they feel is important to them. Raspa Magazine is a queer, Latinx literary magazine, which means we will consider work by anyone who self-identifies as queer and Latinx. We, as a community of marginalized artist, already face an oppressive arts industry that supports and props up work that aligns with their pre-conceived notions of our cultural and sexual identity, and we are here to undermine those efforts.
Raspa Magazine is currently a print publication only. Historically, print media has been inaccessible to marginalized communities. It was difficult for queer artist of color to be included in literary magazines, anthologies, and art catalogs. We feel it is important that queer writers of colors be able to experience the joy of seeing their work manifest itself in a very real and tangible form. My team and I work diligently to produce a publication with high production value to not only match the quality content entrusted to Raspa, but as a sign of respect for the contributors selected.
Amalia Andrade sets high goals for herself: in a recent interview, she said she wants to be the Adele and Beyoncé of books. You Always Change the Love of Your Life (For Another Love or Another Life) performed well in its original Spanish version (Penguin Books released the English translation of the book in December), and it’s plain to see why. Her book–mostly handwritten, with many illustrations–is accessible and easygoing. It’s an eclectic mix of advice, fiction, short creative nonfiction pieces, mixtapes, and recipes, with plenty of guided writing and drawing exercises for her readers.
Andrade entered herself into a rehab program in her hometown of Cali, Colombia after a particularly heinous breakup, where she learned to “die and be reborn,” and she draws heavily on this experience in You Always Change. She admits from time to time that she doesn’t have a piece of advice for a particular situation and asks her readers to send her an email with their own ideas. She doesn’t go into detail about the breakup that inspired the book, only teasing us with one or two pages about her feelings at the beginning of a few chapters.
In the chapter titled “Crying,” Andrade provides examples of celebrities who have a good handle on emotions as well as those who have it worse than you. (Telling people to measure their pain against others, especially to diminish what they’re feeling, is a troublesome concept, but I take her point.) She talks about the medical side of heartbreak: broken heart syndrome, where, in response to intense emotional duress, part of the heart literally stops working, causing a heart attack-like effect.
In “Self-Destruction,” she starts by telling us that she can’t write about the woman who broke her heart (“I can’t write her name without feeling my hand burn. I can’t think of her body without feeling regret”). She shares some words of wisdom from her therapist–self-destruction doesn’t just take place when you intentionally injure yourself, but also when you try to distance yourself from yourself, “self-sabotaging your happiness.” (She also includes the national Suicide Prevention Hotline, which, in case you need it, is 1-800-237-8255.)
There’s also a glossary of passive aggressive terms, a set of bills from the “Bank of Emotional Intelligence” for when you successfully avoid acting out of anger, and a listicle of “Why it’s not a good idea to stay friends with your ex and sabotage his/her life from the inside” in the anger section, and a wonderful vignette at the start of the depression section (“It wasn’t the things that we lost. It was not realizing that we were losing them”). More questionable is her assigning normal vs. abnormal labels to types of grief, such as not crying being an abnormal type of grief.
The rest of the book is more upbeat, with topics like “finding well-being and satisfaction in life no matter the circumstances,” reinventing yourself, “finding love after heartbreak,” a short piece of fiction, and several recipes. She makes some strange assertions, like using whether or not you can make rice and eggs as a measure of your mental well-being.
Overall, the book does have some helpful advice, even if there are a number of problematic things inside. Honestly, I could’ve used some of this book in my last breakup, especially the parts about not trying to be best friends with your ex in the immediate aftermath. There are a lot–a lot–of pop culture references, which vary between helpful and distracting. The assignments she gives, such as listing types of magical thinking, do seem like they would be helpful, and also seem like they probably came from her time spent at the rehab in Cali. The process of metaphorically dying and being reborn, something that she talks about in an interview as a large part of her time in rehab, is something that most of us could stand to do more of in our lives, and I appreciate her focus on it in the book.
Does she meet her standard of being Adele or Beyoncé for books? For me, not quite. After reading, Andrade feels like one of your friends, but not like she’s got it all figured out, the way that Adele and Beyoncé seem to through their lyrics. That’s not to say that the book isn’t helpful; she does share some pieces of wisdom from her own journey through pain, and through her thoughtful, poignant vignettes and more casually voiced, often humorous tips and lists, it’s easy to believe that she knows what true heartbreak feels like, and that she can truly empathize with your pain.
All in all, You Always Change will probably help you through your current or next breakup, if only by knowing someone else shares your pain.
Marvel has revealed its first ever drag queen superhero in an X-Men series.
Shade is a mutant who is also a drag queen, and she’s already a big hit with the fandom.
The superhero sashayed her way into the world with a single panel appearance in last month’s Iceman #4.
Fans are already creating fan art of Shade | Photo: Twitter
But many Marvel fans wondered whether it was just a drag queen posing as a mutant or not?
Writer Sina Grace, who’s out, has now revealed that Shade is a mutant and will be appearing in future issues of the comic.
‘I really wanted this series to push readers to new and better stories about the whole queer experience and how it applies to being both a mutant and a superhero,’ Grace told The Advocate.
‘There’s a million different queer perspectives and we’re only scratching the surface.’
Who wants a Shade action figure? | Photo: Twitter
Iceman is Marvel’s only solo series featuring a queer lead. Bobby Drake, the character, came out in 2015 and had his own solo series in 2017. However, this was canceled due to poor sales.
But due to fan demand, a new monthly comic was created in 2018.
‘My goal with this new Iceman series is for for everyone, myself, the readers, the characters involved in the comic book, to have fun,’ declares Grac
Shade’s mutant power is teleport. She can open pocked voids that allows her to step into and out of her handheld folding fan.
