Lambda Literary https://www.lambdaliterary.org The leader in LGBT book reviews, author interviews, opinion and news since 1989 Wed, 09 Jun 2021 17:04:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.2 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/cropped-Favicon-32x32.png Lambda Literary https://www.lambdaliterary.org 32 32 June’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Literature https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/junes-most-anticipated-lgbtq-literature/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/junes-most-anticipated-lgbtq-literature/#respond Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:06:19 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104820 Happy Pride!  After not being able to celebrate in person last year, I know we are all eager to enjoy Pride and June’s month-long celebrations as safely and enthusiastically as we can. To prepare yourself for the approaching festivities, pick up some new reading material from June’s most anticipated LGBTQ literature.  Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: […]

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]]> Happy Pride! 

After not being able to celebrate in person last year, I know we are all eager to enjoy Pride and June’s month-long celebrations as safely and enthusiastically as we can. To prepare yourself for the approaching festivities, pick up some new reading material from June’s most anticipated LGBTQ literature. 

Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir is an illuminating account of storytelling, self, and survival. This bestselling fiction author invites readers into their own life through candid letters between friends, lovers, and family. Their story follows transformative decisions about their gender and body, how creative spirit takes power in the human world, and the turmoil of relationships to create a book that is both tender and brutal. 

For short story lovers, crack open Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor, a series of linked stories about young creatives in the American Midwest. If it’s a novel you want, try Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth, where the dream of a picture-perfect queer family falls apart and shows us just how delicate the fabric of family can be. 

You may have heard of John Paul Brammer from his advice column “¡Hola Papi!” In his new memoir Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons, JP shares what it was like to grow up closeted and biracial in America while acknowledging his unique place in the world, giving advice, and making the reader laugh all along the way. 

Take a look back on Emanuel Xavier’s poetry in his new collection, Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier. One of the first openly queer Nuyorican poets of the 1990s, Xavier’s work explores life as a gay man with evocative language and a fearless gaze. 

Travel to another dimension in Future Feeling by Joss Lake. After Penfield R. Henderson has an unfulfilling meeting with his trans celebrity crush Aiden Chase, Penfield and his friends place a hex on Aiden. However, the hex bypasses Aiden and sends another trans man to the dreaded Shadowlands. Penfield and Aiden then must team up to bring him back, learning lessons about family, human connection, and the trans community all along the way.

Remember to take time to celebrate yourself this month. Be loud, be brave, and be yourself. Whether you accomplish that through reading one of June’s most anticipated LGBTQ books or marching in full regalia, that’s up to you. Just know you are heard, you are seen, and you are supported.

As always, if you want to let us know about your forthcoming book, please email us.

June's Most Anticipated

Bio/Memoir

June's Most Anticipated

Fiction

June's Most Anticipated

Nonfiction

June's Most Anticipated

LGBTQ Studies

June's Most Anticipated

Romance

June's Most Anticipated

Mystery/Thriller

June's Most Anticipated

Fantasy/Horror

June's Most Anticipated

Young Adult Literature

June's Most Anticipated

Children’s/Middle Grade Literature

June's Most Anticipated

Poetry

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/junes-most-anticipated-lgbtq-literature/feed/ 0 The Sky Blues Is Your Next Favorite Teen Book Turned Movie https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/the-sky-blues/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/the-sky-blues/#respond Thu, 03 Jun 2021 15:14:58 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=105021 The Sky Blues, from debut author Robbie Couch, is a delightful queer, young adult romance that is satisfyingly familiar without sacrificing surprise. Sky Baker, the novel’s protagonist, is a relatable and decently authentic representation of the teenage queer experience. His favorite teacher is also a de facto parental figure, he’s trying his best to avoid […]

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]]> The Sky Blues, from debut author Robbie Couch, is a delightful queer, young adult romance that is satisfyingly familiar without sacrificing surprise. Sky Baker, the novel’s protagonist, is a relatable and decently authentic representation of the teenage queer experience. His favorite teacher is also a de facto parental figure, he’s trying his best to avoid making a fool out of himself, and his best friend Bree is a hypercompetent teenage girl.

Outside of being thrown out of his mother’s house on Christmas for coming out and moving into Bree’s much more receptive home, things seem to be going pretty well for Sky in his close-knit, gossipy Michigan town. That is until an Islamophobic, homophobic hacked yearbook email blast reveals his plans to ask his crush, Ali, to prom. His promposal designs leaked a month before the big ask, Sky and his friends launch a campaign to identify who sent the email blast—they have a good idea that, as a reader, feels too good to be true—and prove that you really can be gay for anything these days, in the best way. Teenage drama and an unexpected whodunnit follow, helped along by a well-written cast of functional adults and realistic teenagers. Sky, his friends, and his clear-from-launch secondary love interest survive their last year of high school. 

Like Love, Simon before it, alongside clear and crucial beats there is an overt inclusiveness mixed with the now classic queer trauma storyline, that can, when done wrong, feel heavy-handed, as if it were requested by an editor who said something along the lines of, “It’s a little white, isn’t it?” The crux of The Sky Blues’ narrative rests on the sole Iraqi American student at Sky’s school, and much of the story’s tension relies on issues involving race and sexual orientation in a small conservative, white town. While readers may come to their own conclusions on the book’s use of inclusivity as plot drivers, the inclusion of racially diverse characters came across as vital and deftly written. And while it might also be easy to suggest that the limited characterization of much of the cast of characters reflects a weak commitment to this diversity, Couch’s writing embraces the flippant and emotional vibe of many teenagers—sure, they care about their friends, but they care more about their plans for Saturday night.

This casualness about topics adults might find more serious and in need of attention rightly pervades the book. Sky and his friends, barring Bree, seem to never do homework, are always available for random, middle-of-the-week adventures to other towns, and their parents are mostly removed until they’re needed for the plot. Where a bulkier, more serious novel might suffer from a subsequent lack of detailed characterization, or feel weighed down by the less-than-subtle but appropriate discussions of pronouns and systemic racism, The Sky Blues hits all the right notes that could be covered by a class called “John Hughes Today: Writing Teenagers—What You Need to Know.” Nothing feels like it was written as part of a poorly conceptualized diversity, equity, and inclusion training…each character’s behavior feels genuine and consistent with classic teen behavior (although some of the references feel markedly more gay-man-in-their-thirties, and that’s okay).

The narrative craft most compelling in The Sky Blues is the parallel use of suspense and misdirection as Sky and his friends attempt to figure out who hacked the email blast, while Sky learns more about his family, his dead dad, and the loving community he didn’t know he had. If YA loses interest, Couch should consider writing mystery…the payoff at the end of the book was unexpected and charming. All in all, The Sky Blues is a solid, page-turning, tear-jerking debut that wonderfully merges the teen movie with YA romance, and has rightfully already been optioned for film.

The Sky Blues
Robbie Couch
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover
336 pages
ISBN: 978-1-5344-7785-8
$16.99

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/the-sky-blues/feed/ 0 “I’ve already said too much”: Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s Risking It and the Power of Poetic Compression https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/risking-it/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/risking-it/#respond Thu, 03 Jun 2021 13:21:41 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104642 A student asks why the typical call for poetry manuscripts is 48-64 pages, while the typical call for prose manuscripts—memoirs, novels, essay and story collections—is 150 pages minimum. “That’s three times as many!” she exclaims. “Why does prose take triple the number of pages to count as a book?” This strikes me as an excellent […]

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]]> A student asks why the typical call for poetry manuscripts is 48-64 pages, while the typical call for prose manuscripts—memoirs, novels, essay and story collections—is 150 pages minimum. “That’s three times as many!” she exclaims. “Why does prose take triple the number of pages to count as a book?”

This strikes me as an excellent question, one that Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s debut collection, Risking It, can help me answer. It seems to me there’s an assumption that poetry can do a comparable amount of work—travel a comparable distance, plumb a comparable depth—in significantly less space than prose requires to do the same thing. 

In other words, poetry fills us up faster and keeps us full longer. But how?

Pithy epiphanies

Risking It opens with Pollack’s title poem. It’s a sensory reverie from page one as we encounter “this large orange // mushroom glistening in rain / beside a Galiano Island trail.” The couplets here are both spare and succulent as the reader studies the mushroom, speculates about “this lush / fungus” before them. Then, volta—which always reminds me of voila, and for good reason: 

In the last four lines of this first brief poem, our speaker pans out for perspective, to reveal the mushroom as more-than-mushroom—the mushroom as a repository for many meanings. The epiphany here also tunes the reader’s attention to meanings that grow (in that capacious, fungal way!) across all the poems that follow: “These are the questions/ faced every day: who to trust, // what to eat, how to prepare / for death.

The image and the afterimage

Images are poetic protein, the macronutrients that make any writing memorable. Poems seem to use more images per capita than much of the prose we read(most, not all). But an image isn’t just about a sensory experience. If the image is already familiar, then the impact won’t be as lasting, as substantial, as the kind that makes us see/hear/smell/taste/touch anew.  An image that makes an afterimage—one that lingers once direct exposure to the sensor has ended—is the rare gift of a well-made poem.

Here are some images that became afterimages for me in Pollack’s collection. I won’t soon forget those “trellised tomatoes” growing “so boisterously” after it rains that their “skins split like opened zippers.” Nor will I forget this intimate inspection of language: “how the words mossy limb feel in my mouth / dropped jaw of moss, then a slight smile as limb / lifts from my lips, mirroring Mona Lisa.” Nor this landscape imbued with a profound and unexpected interpretation: “twisted pines on the cliff / welcome housekeeper winds, tidying / these early hours into a new day.” 

Traditional forms revisited

I tell my students “free verse is never free.” We either borrow the harness, or we leash the lines with our own invented restraints. A poem is made, and all made things require pattern, an attention to design. By analogy: If we don’t tie the shoes, we’ll trip on the laces. 

Every one of Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s poems found in Risking It is impeccably made, but her inclusion of “Ghazal for Birdseed and Poetry” and the villanelle “Honeyed Days” shows a deep respect for poetic heritage, reaching for a seventh-century Arabic form and a seventeenth-century French form and folding these into a decidedly twenty-first century collection. 

The ghazal, with its taut couplets and repeating end word, makes a sonic afterimage that lingers like the reverberation of a gong. In Pollack’s ghazal, that word is “future,” struck seven times. We can’t help looking to it, thinking of it—that future which includes death, inevitably, but also more than death. 

The villanelle, with its repeating rhymed couplet split across stanzas like the two jump ropes in Double Dutch, likewise reverberates long after the poem concludes. In Pollack’s villanelle, these partner lines are “I used to believe old age was absurd. / How astounding I’m [writing/ humming/ thinking / singing] these words.” Her shifting verb choice compresses years of life into four linguistic pivots. In 19 lines, the reader travels a lifetime with this speaker, who sings at last of her own singing , the poet she always was but finally became.

Sylvia Byrne Pollack published Risking It at age 80, after a long, distinguished career as a research scientist and professor. The book contains fewer pages than the years of its author’s life—yet that life is inscribed here, fully, abundantly. It’s embodied in tender love poems to the speaker’s wife that reveal their long history together. It’s documented in lyric recursions of progressive hearing loss, which consider philosophically what listening truly means. It’s evoked in the scientific lexicon that shimmers in juxtaposition to domestic and artistic kinds of diction.

Yes, it’s remarkable and inspiring to publish a first collection of poems at Pollack’s age—a new passion, vocation, and skill cultivated in later life. Why not lead with this fact? you may wonder. Because the pithy epiphanies, resonant afterimages, and deft adoptions of traditional forms, purely on their own terms, make Risking It remarkable and inspiring. They are, like the words that populate these pages, enough.

Risking It 
By Sylvia Byrne Pollack
Red Mountain Press
Paperback, 9781952204098, 68pp.
April 2021

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/risking-it/feed/ 0 Permanent Volta by Rosie Stockton: the Queer Poems of Intimacy We’ve all Needed https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/permanent-volta/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/permanent-volta/#respond Thu, 03 Jun 2021 12:53:52 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104593 And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we’ve all needed—even if we didn’t realize we needed them.  Rosie Stockton’s collection, Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books, May 2021) is equal parts lamentation and psalms: “[W]here I grind the language / out of myself,” they write, and “everyone is invited / to my / biggest storm.” […]

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]]> And here they are: the queer poems of intimacy we’ve all needed—even if we didn’t realize we needed them. 

Rosie Stockton’s collection, Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books, May 2021) is equal parts lamentation and psalms: “[W]here I grind the language / out of myself,” they write, and “everyone is invited / to my / biggest storm.” The poems contained in Permanent Volta take on many forms (sestinas, bent sonnets, fragments, prose, etc.) in which readers can find themselves as individuals: “look at how my worlds / want your worlds / look at our worlds / wanting other worlds / porous the mist we / love by.” Readers will further find themselves in Stockton’s syntax, in which the language of poetry is artfully and self-consciously considered. The poems are intentional in their grammar and refuse to bend to the will of the workshop. The effect of Stockton’s language—fragmented and lovely and conscious of construction—invites us to consider poetry as an industry itself. If we, as readers and poets, decide to create our own grammar, what does this say about language as a tool of conquest? What does this say about our own unwillingness to be conquered?

Permanent Volta is not only a meditation on poetry. It is in its meditations on queerness, on body, and on the very throughline of emotionality—a manifestation of the collection’s namesake. As a concept, “permanent volta” implies a perpetual moment of shifting, suspended in time. In a sonnet, this occurs when the tone changes—when the lover leaves, when morning comes, when the plate falls from the hand and shatters. In Stockton’s collection, as in the title, Permanent Volta is the very way of writing. 

This is perhaps one of the many blessings of Stockton’s words: the insistence on poetry as a place for recreation. They write, “is my boundary exquisite to you? / is it / knowable? / isn’t this having?” And, “that’s a metaphor for my anguish. / Can you see my head against the window? / I’ve never believed in the forever of anything / except the wretched present.” The very nature of this insistence is in and of itself a queer thing. Even when we sit still, we are scrutinized.

What could be more clever than conflating the form and stuff of poems with the form and stuff of eternal volta? In Stockton’s words, “I’m ending this poem now, yes it’s over / a hungry ghost, / nothing has changed.”

Permanent Volta
By Rosie Stockton
Nightboat Books
Paperback, 9781643620756, 120 pages 
May 2021

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/permanent-volta/feed/ 0 2021 Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/2021-lambda-literary-award-winners/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/2021-lambda-literary-award-winners/#respond Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:28:21 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104800 The winners for the 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards have been announced

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]]> New York, NY, June 1, 2021 – Lambda Literary, the nation’s premier LGBTQ literary organization, announced the winners of the 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards (a.k.a. the “Lammys”) this evening at a live Zoom ceremony hosted by Rakesh Satyal, who won a Lambda Literary Award for his debut novel, Blue Boy.

As they have done for over three decades, this year’s Lammys again celebrate powerful, necessary writing that centers the LGBTQ experience. With last year’s award ceremony cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s virtual celebration was a welcome return for an organization dedicated to honoring the very best in LGBTQ literature. Throughout the evening, presenters and winners highlighted the impact the Lammys have had in uplifting queer voices. Novelist Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby, kicked off the festivities speaking of her joy to be presenting for “an organization for which trans writing and trans authors aren’t an afterthought.” Alex Gino, who won a Lammy in 2016 for their middle grade debut, George, highlighted the importance of the explosion of books featuring queer characters for young people while noting that across the country just one in five queer students experience course work that includes positive representations of LGBTQ people and history. John Paul Brammer, author of Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons, began his presentation by noting, “As a gay person from rural America, books were some of the only community I had growing up,” while Ryan O’Connell, creator and star of Special, joked, “I love books and I love gay, and I love it when books and gay go together.”

Representing the diversity of the LGBTQ experience, this year’s Lammy winners once again highlight Lambda Literary’s reputation for recognizing queer literature in all of its many forms, and many winners acknowledged that diversity in their speeches. In accepting the Lammy for Transgender Nonfiction for The Black Trans Prayer Book, J Mase III & Dane Figueroa Edidi said, “We hope that this work is a tool that helps to celebrate and heal our community.” Mohsin Zaidi, whose A Dutiful Boy: A Memoir of a Gay Muslim’s Journey to Acceptance won the Lammy for Gay Memoir/Biography, noted that he had been told there wouldn’t be much interest for his book in the U.S., but continued, “Stories don’t have a nationality and I think that’s even more true of our stories, of stories from the queer community.” Joshua Whitehead, winner of the LGBTQ Anthology Lammy for Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, ended his speech with a joyous, “welcome to the Two-Spirit Indigiqueer, fem glittery, fantastic, trans, Indigenous future we deserve,” while Mike Curato, winner of the LGBTQ Young Adult Lammy for Flamer claimed his award for “all the sissies, all the queers, all the Pinoy boys who feel unseen, I see you. And for anyone who has dwelt in darkness, there is light inside you even if you can’t see it.”

The evening’s celebration, which has always doubled as a fundraiser to help support Lambda Literary’s programs, concluded with a performance by Grammy Award nominated artist and lesbian icon, Meshell Ndegeocello. “This year’s ceremony was a true celebration for us after what has been an unimaginably difficult year for so many,” said Sue Landers, executive director of Lambda Literary. “While we couldn’t be together in person again this year, we are so excited to be back honoring LGBTQ literature and all of the wonderful writers who make up our community.  Congratulations to all of this year’s winners.”The Lammys are the most prestigious award in LGBTQ publishing. Please join us in celebrating the following authors and their literary accomplishments.

 Lesbian Fiction

Gay Fiction

Bisexual Fiction

Transgender Fiction 

Bisexual Nonfiction

Transgender Nonfiction

LGBTQ Nonfiction

 Lesbian Poetry

Gay Poetry 

Bisexual Poetry

Transgender Poetry

 Lesbian Memoir/Biography

 Gay Memoir/Biography

Lesbian Romance

Gay Romance

 LGBTQ Anthology

LGBTQ Children’s/Middle Grade 

LGBTQ Young Adult 

  • Flamer, Mike Curato, Henry Holt Books for Young Readers

LGBTQ Comics

 LGBTQ Drama

LGBTQ Erotica

LGBTQ Mystery

LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror

LGBTQ Studies 

During this year’s ceremony, Lambda Literary announced a new honorary award, the Randall Kenan Prize for Black LGBTQ Fiction. Kenan, who won a Lambda Literary Award in 1992 for his novel Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, passed away in August of 2020 and the prize bearing his name honors writers whose work explores themes of Black LGBTQ life, culture, and history, with its winner receiving a $3,000 cash prize. Ana-Maurine Lara is the inaugural recipient of the prize. Other special prizes announced throughout the evening included Brontez Purnell and Sarah Gerard winning the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, a $5,000 prize given annually to two LGBTQ-identified authors who have published multiple novels and show promise to continue publishing high quality work for years to come. Nancy Agabian won the $2,500 Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, granted to a writer committed to nonfiction work that captures the depth and complexity of lesbian and queer life, culture, and history. The Judith Markowitz Award recognizes two writers whose work demonstrates exceptional potential, and T Kira Madden and Taylor Johnson were awarded this year’s $1,000 prizes. More information on these winners and their prizes is available here.

Lambda Literary thanks the following sponsors for their support of the Lammys.

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/06/2021-lambda-literary-award-winners/feed/ 0 In Memoriam https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/in-memoriam-2021/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/in-memoriam-2021/#respond Sun, 30 May 2021 17:46:56 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104777 Please join us in remembering those in our community we've lost in the past year

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]]> At each year’s Lammys, we take a moment to remember those in our community we’ve lost in the past year. The video below represents those who have passed in the year since our last Lambda Literary Awards on June 1, 2020. Please join us in celebrating their lives and accomplishments.

Selected obituaries and remembrances:

Randall Kenan
Writer and Teacher Randall Kenan, 57, has Died

Joan Drury
Remembering Writer and Publisher Joan Drury

Anthony Veasna So
In Remembrance: Anthony Veasna So

Christina Crosby
Remembering Writer and Teacher Christina Crosby

Jerry Douglas
Playwriting & Pornography: Remembering Jerry Douglas

Richard McCann
What He Lived For: Remembering Richard McCann

Lambda Literary thanks FesliyanStudios for the use of their royalty-free music in the video.

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/in-memoriam-2021/feed/ 0 May We Present… Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, The Swarm https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/muriel-leung/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/muriel-leung/#respond Sat, 29 May 2021 14:00:00 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104735 Welcome to May We Present…, a column from Lambda Literary that highlights authors with recent or forthcoming publications. This May, we’re presenting (see what I did there?) Muriel Leung and her newest work, Imagine Us, The Swarm, published on May 25th from Nightboat Books. Imagine Us, The Swarm transformed from a single essay too capacious […]

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]]> Welcome to May We Present…, a column from Lambda Literary that highlights authors with recent or forthcoming publications. This May, we’re presenting (see what I did there?) Muriel Leung and her newest work, Imagine Us, The Swarm, published on May 25th from Nightboat Books. Imagine Us, The Swarm transformed from a single essay too capacious for the limits of the form into an eclectic, genre-bending collection of essays written in verse.

Centering themes of Asian American, queer, and gendered experiences, Imagine Us, The Swarm is as thoughtfully crafted as it is thought-provoking. The collection masterfully brings together Leung’s various artistic influences, including the autobiographical, traditional scholarship, the poetic form, and theory as embodied knowledge.

Below, Muriel Leung shares how she uses grammatical elements to reframe our notions of silence, her favorite podcast-related memory, and some of the many queer BIPOC writers and theorists who keep her inspired.

When did you realize you had to write Imagine Us, The Swarm? 

I don’t think I set out to write a book at all. Imagine Us, The Swarm started as an essay that had to be disassembled. I wanted to write about grief, my father’s death and the impact of China’s Cultural Revolution on his life, racialized labor, the inevitable failure of the model minority myth, the inheritance of trauma, and the process of writing as a type of labor too. It was a bloated essay that became more of its true self when I broke it apart, and something new emerged from the white space, the ellipses, the brackets, and the fragments of the text. This would become the opening essay of the book, “This is to live several lives.” I realized that even though the contents of this work spilled out, was overflowing, it was still not the end. And so, I wrote on, realizing I could write a book of these, and then I just kept going until I felt in my heart that I had said all I could say.

Imagine Us The Swarm

Your book makes dynamic use of space: dots fill pages, brackets are left empty, and words remain unsaid. How do you see space functioning in the collection? 

The use of grammatical elements, like ellipses and brackets, functions as a way of saying that silence is never just silence. In Imagine Us, The Swarm, the text is guided by voices of gendered Asian American experiences, and so silence, as we collectively know it, is very much racialized and gendered. But silence to whom? I want to reframe this and say, “We were never silent; we were just silenced.” The ellipses and brackets are devices that operate like static, little trickles of noise through what would otherwise be perceived as silence; it is enough to distort the mainstream sentiment, slight as it is, and in this way, it is quietly subversive (or so I hope).

Imagine Us, The Swarm is one of the first published texts I have read that mentions the Coronavirus pandemic. In what ways did the virus influence this work, especially considering that it already engages significantly with broader themes of death and disease?

The essay-in-verse you’re referring to, “The Plural Circuits of Tell,” which appears mid-way through Imagine Us, The Swarm, was originally published in the Jaded Ibis blog with the same title. In this earlier version, there wasn’t any mention of the Coronavirus pandemic because it was 2018, two years before Coronavirus came to the U.S. However, once the manuscript was selected by Nightboat Books for publication, there weren’t really many new edits to this work beyond explicit mention of the virus. In the essay, I wanted to emphasize the connection between the racialization of diseases like the SARS pandemic and xenophobic panic, which is exactly what took place with the Coronavirus—the attribution of a disease to a race of people, such that many would justify violence against Asians because of this racist and xenophobic perception. I could have easily left out explicit mention of Coronavirus and the essay would be just as relevant to what is happening in the years 2020 and 2021. That’s the terrifying part, how the history of racism and xenophobia can continue to accrue power like that if there isn’t an intervention. In short, it was not an essay that began with the racism and xenophobia surrounding the Coronavirus, and it won’t end with it either if we don’t interrogate this violence.

The collection is striking in its blending of the poetic and the academic; it includes footnotes and quotes from other writers. As a Ph.D. student, how does academia, and specifically theory, condition your poetry?

As a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature, I occupy both minds where I’m trained in certain ideas about traditional scholarship, which includes proper citations and footnotes following specified formats, and the constant rule-defying properties of poetry and genre-bending. My artistic process involves a lot of crossing over into multiple territories, and the common goal underlying every piece of work is that it must honor the intellectual and artistic labor of Black women and women of color who came before me and who have directly or indirectly informed my work. Another rule I try to follow is that I don’t replicate certain paradigms of power when I utilize any of these traditions.

I think academic processes, especially when complex theory is concerned, are often considered inaccessible or elitist, but they are only so when the people behind them hoard knowledge and use it to prevent others from accessing them. In truth, I think theory, particularly those that examine the depths and richness of queer, trans, BIPOC, and disabled lives, offer so much to the way we shape our worldview and how we move through the world. I am very much moved by theory in that way, as embodied knowledge and exercise in affinity with those identities that are not mine, but which live in this world with me. This is what sways my art and intellectual pursuits.

The body is quite clearly a site of interest for you in your writing. How do you conceive of the relationship between written language and the material body? 

In writing Imagine Us, The Swarm, I kept thinking about the body as oceanic. It probably has something to do with the fact that my parents crossed an ocean to come to the U.S., and there are so many instances of water throughout the book. I suppose I want the writing to feel oceanic too—expansive but also defined by geographic time and place. So, in other words, written language as oceanic text, the material body also as text, wide as water.

You’re the cohost of the podcast The Blood-Jet Radio. What is a favorite podcast-related memory of yours?

I have so many! I loved talking to Sally Wen Mao about her first book, Mad Honey Symposium, and we went on a wonderful tangent where she told me about men feeding her grapes in Greece. I don’t even remember what we were talking about, but I remember thinking, “Oh, we’re going to be friends after this.” There’s also a yet-to-be broadcasted episode that took place during the New Orleans Poetry Festival for a panel entitled “Are We There Yet?” with Ching-In Chen, Tiana Nobile, and Jacquelyn Brown. It was the first time I tried live podcasting, but the opportunity to do a live show somewhere was too hard to pass up. We’re taking a hiatus now but hoping to be more active soon.

Under what circumstance do you feel most creative? What does creativity feel like to you?

I don’t really wait for creativity to magically arrive nor am I someone who does well with a strict writing routine. I am most successful when I think in terms of projects, which allows me to chunk up time, and how much space I can devote to writing. Somehow, if I can see the end, abstract as it can be at times, it allows the constellation of its many pieces to fall into place, and I just work steadily towards it on my own time. I love giving myself prompts, setting up constraints that provide a creative challenge, and even getting feedback on work from close friends sometimes inspires new direction. I love when there’s dynamism and a big open road ahead. The project has to feel possible for the writing to happen.

Who are some queer writers and theorists that keep you inspired?

Wow, there are too many to list here! I’m definitely indebted to queer and trans theorists like José Esteban Muñoz, Dean Spade, Sara Ahmed, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Mel Y. Chen, Rachel C. Lee, Eve Sedgewick, Karen Tongson, and Riley Snorton. There are also theorists who are creative writers as well like Saretta Morgan, SA Smythe, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Vickie Vertiz, Angela Peñaredondo, Joey De Jesus. And those writers who produce theory through their organizing and activism in addition to their literary work like Kay Ulanday Barrett, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Wo Chan, jayy dodd, Dan Lau, and so many more.

Lastly, what’s the one line from Imagine Us, The Swarm that you just can’t get out of your head?

“I surrendered, and I loved them all.”

Buy Imagine Us, The Swarm

The post May We Present… Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, The Swarm appeared first on Lambda Literary.

]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/muriel-leung/feed/ 0 From Physique Pictoral to Pornhub, Jeffrey Escoffier’s New Book Charts The Way https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/from-physique-pictoral-to-pornhub-jeffrey-escoffiers-new-book-charts-the-way/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/from-physique-pictoral-to-pornhub-jeffrey-escoffiers-new-book-charts-the-way/#respond Fri, 21 May 2021 13:36:40 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104640 This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists. But, as […]

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]]> This book about pornography—with 28 pages of endnotes, a colon in the title, and a $173 price tag on the hardcover edition—unapologetically identifies itself as an academic tome. Flipping through its charts and statistics, we might hear our own inner voice grumbling, Even queer fuckfilms have succumbed to the graphs of social scientists.

But, as with pornography itself, first impressions can be misleading. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography, at $28 for the eBook, is enlightening and even affordable. Its author, Jeffrey Escoffier, a founder of OutLook and director of Out/Write, a professor who has taught at Berkeley, Rutgers, and The New School and is now a researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, avoids pedantry. His graphs, viewed in close focus, give us a rich view of the upheaval in global culture that has taken place since the nudist and bodybuilding magazines like Physique Pictorial, passed furtively from hand-to-hand among closeted men in the 1950s, giving way to Tom of Finland and the abundantly stuffed crotches of his models, and all that has followed since. 

“Perversions” and “Scripts”

Escoffier’s book recounts an engaging history that culminates, after millennia, in the mainstreaming of modern hard-core porn—meaning, in his very specific definition, sexual imagery, particularly in videos, of explicit depictions of intercourse, including oral copulation. Escoffier notes that sex researchers of the 1920s, whose focus was primarily on married heterosexual couples, broke ground that later was deeply plowed by Alfred Kinsey, who began in the 1940s publishing the results of surveys that included homosexual feelings, fantasies, and behavior. He doesn’t mention Magnus “Max” Hirschfeld, the German doctor whose Institute for Sex Research, founded in 1919 in Berlin, was the first association in the modern world to promote homosexual and transgender rights. 

The author employs the words “perverse” and “perversion” in a way that might be off-putting to an LGBTQ audience. But he is openly gay himself, and no prude, and uses these words in context as a social scientist and historian. Escoffier is known, among many other things, for his earlier studies of “gay for pay” film actors wh6ose heterosexual orientation does not impede their sexual performance with men. He has examined with particular interest what he calls “the social conditions that enable heterosexually-identified men to turn in credible sexual performances in gay pornographic videos.”

Like “perversion,” the word “script” has a special meaning for Escoffier, who devotes most of the book’s attention to films featuring sex between men, and treats pornography as a vast screen on which all of our fantasies are projected. He writes boldly, “Sexual scripts are necessary at every stage of production and are the reason that people watch porn.” 

Such a broad assertion concerning people’s interest in porn risks neglecting the developments we see in amateur, do-it-yourself fuckbuddy videos, in which guys who obviously like and are attracted to each other are having fun—not posing or “performing” together. Amateur videos may prove to be a more reliable measure of what people want than statistical analyses of commercial video sales. Joe Gage, creator of rough-trade classics beginning with Kansas City Trucking Co. in 1976, commented in a 2007 Butt Magazine interview, when asked if he liked the work of other directors, “I like amateur porn the best, because it’s real. It’s real sex.”

Do-it-yourself

As is so often the case, LGBTQ people were at the forefront of a social upheaval that soon paid benefits to the entire world. Remember “Chat Rooms”? Maybe you don’t, but if you use any form of social media you are an heir to the slow, noisy, dial-up services that began in the early 1980s, patronized by gay men eager to hook up in a new, virtual way. Personal use of the Internet exploded as men learned to cruise without having to look their best—and, as the technology evolved and allowed them to share photos and videos, to create a new species of pornography. This new generation of do-it-yourself porn embraces various body types, ages, and racial groupings—not as fetish categories for commercial-porn keyword clicks, but as real-life guys doing what comes naturally.

Escoffier refers to the video audience as “spectators,” reinforcing the understanding of porn as a creation tightly controlled by producers who believe they know what the porn-consuming public wants. He nods to Pornhub as the world’s largest distributor of porn and notes that “video pornography on the Internet is not only a hugely popular form of entertainment, but also a body of knowledge about sex that is both a form of sex education as well as a self-help guide”—the modern pillow book. What he doesn’t mention is that the early growth of Pornhub was driven largely by non-commercial, amateur, DIY videos making Pornhub and other amateur sites like XHamster and @ment4us wildly profitable.

From the 1970s through the end of the last century, commercial studios refined and professionalized their product, catering to increasing numbers of fetishes, “perversions,” and interests, in slickly produced, high-quality, keyword-driven commodities. Long gone are the original black-and-white “Old Reliable” films of the early 1970s, which featured snarly, rough-trade types masturbating on camera, often on a familiar worn-out couch, chewing cigars and, occasionally, flipping off the viewer. Meanwhile, technology has allowed fuckbuddies to make quality video recordings of themselves and to post their videos online for anyone to enjoy. The production values are not as impressive, but the intimacy more than compensates.

The Object of Knowledge

But even this erudite observation is subject to reexamination: In a section near the end of Escoffier’s book, perhaps to atone for the statistics and graphs in earlier chapters, he quotes from reviews written by film critics who have had the opportunity to hire their favorite porn actors for live, in-the-room-together, sex. A film scholar studying PornHub and OnlyFans is likely to be able to find his favorites on RentMen. An enterprising performer/escort uses his recognized profile name everywhere, and posts his travel schedule months in advance.

These explicit reviews end the book on a good-humored note: “He was not Rick Gonzales the porn star… he was Rick Gonzales my LOVER for two hours and he just made love  to me.”

Andrew Holleran, in his 2015 essay “Notes on Porn,” commented that the occasional moment “when two men do make contact is more powerful than all the anonymous pistonlike fucking of ordinary porn films.” The three-page essay was one of the most often cited items ever to appear in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Concerning the illusion furthered by porn that the viewer is, in Plato’s terms, experiencing “the object of knowledge,” Holleran wrote, “…you are as alone after sex with someone in a porn film as you were when you began. Depending on your age or temperament or circumstances, this may be a good or a bad thing.”

Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge
by Jeffrey Escoffier
Rutgers University Press
Paperback, 9781978820142, 238 pp.
February 2021

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/from-physique-pictoral-to-pornhub-jeffrey-escoffiers-new-book-charts-the-way/feed/ 0 Mouths of Rain Showcases the Richness of Black Lesbian Intellectual Life https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/mouths-of-rain/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/mouths-of-rain/#respond Thu, 20 May 2021 18:40:54 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104581 Mouths of Rain is a distinct anthology of writings from Black lesbian intellectuals, showcasing the creativity and depth of thought in the community over the last century. Edited by Briona Simone Jones, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University’s English department, it features academic essays, personal recollections, short fiction, and poetry. The anthology boasts works […]

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]]> Mouths of Rain is a distinct anthology of writings from Black lesbian intellectuals, showcasing the creativity and depth of thought in the community over the last century. Edited by Briona Simone Jones, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University’s English department, it features academic essays, personal recollections, short fiction, and poetry. The anthology boasts works from well-known figures such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Ma Rainey, as well less prominent but equally as insightful authors. The title of the anthology is inspired by Lorde’s “Love Poem,” with its line “carved out by the mouth of rain.” As Cheryl Clarke writes in her Foreword, “Lorde’s generation of Black lesbian writers showed us how to talk and write about sex.” Some works have been published before, while others, including an Alice Walker poem, appear for the first time.

The book is divided into five sections, each exploring a different topic. Part I, “Uses of the Erotic,” starts with an excerpt from Ma Rainey’s song “Deep Moaning Blues,” “I went out last night with a crowd of my friends, / It must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men,” which then moves into a thrilling, explicit sex scene by Harlem Renaissance writer Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson. Dunbar-Nelson’s “You! Inez” continues the eroticism with lines like “Red mouth; flower soft, / Your soul leaps up.” These poetic, sensual works ground us in the physical and emotional power of lesbian love, serving as a nice lead-in to Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which asks women to reclaim their eroticism, so often “vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society.” Lorde argues that the erotic is “an assertion of the lifeforce of women” and allows for deeply profound connections between women. Because eros is “born of Chaos”, it has the power to inspire creativity and “give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world,” perhaps the greatest means of resisting “racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.”

Part II opens with Anita Cornwell’s essay “Three for the Price of One: Notes from a Gay, Black, Feminist” which relates the challenges she has faced in navigating her many identities. Growing up “Black, poor, and female in the Deep South,” she grappled with ”[the] battles, fears, phobias, and anxieties continually raging within.” Even her first female lover did little to help, for “if she knew other Gay womyn, she kept them rather well-hidden from me.” After several more lesbian relationships, she realized she was “irrevocably Gay” which drew her more into feminism, finding “straight men too sexist” and wondering why straight women “continued to let men use and abuse them.” Sadly, she found the feminist movement racist and unwelcoming, commenting that “fear of encountering racism seems to be one of the main reasons that so many Black womyn refuse to join the Womyn’s movement.” She also had to contend with “the extreme conservatism” within the Black community, so that even relationships with other Black lesbians became “such a harrowing experience.” However, even with all the prejudice she experienced, Cornwell writes that “I am sure glad I will never have to find out” what her life could have been had she not been lesbian.

Ann Allen Shockley’s “A Meeting of the Sapphic Daughters” tells, in fictional form, a similar tale to Cornwell’s essay. Lettie and Patrice are a Black, professional couple who attend an all-white lesbian group. The “bouncer” at the event stares at Patrice “long, hard, silent,” and the group’s president asks them if they “live around here,” which they take as a “subtle warning.” While confronting racism, they also question their own stances, asking themselves, “Have we come out to our colleagues, friends – students?” after lamenting their inability to find other lesbians of color. This story and others highlight the prejudices remaining within these different groups, and the work still needed to make them more welcoming places. 

Part V, “Radical Futurities”, contains some of the more academic pieces, with essays such as Bettina Love’s “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” which looks at how queer Black hip-hop artists use the concept of “ratchet” as a way of challenging the idea of respectability. Cathy Cohen’s “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics” suggests that those in the Black community who are “different” might have other ways of engaging in political struggle that are worthy of study. Lay readers might find these later essays, with their academic jargon and more removed tone, less approachable than the more personal works; still, they address important issues. Susana Morris’ “More than Human: Black Feminisms of the Future in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories” is a compelling look at Gomez’s science fiction novel about a Black lesbian vampire whose ethics, Morris suggests, might present an alternative to humanity’s self-destructive impulses.

The selections are wide-ranging enough so that every reader can find something of interest, from scholars and students to those just casually exploring the subject. One minor drawback, though, is a lack of publication dates for the older, “vintage” pieces. While reading them usually makes the era apparent, providing dates at the start might give a more immediate sense of the historical development. Still, the diversity of pieces, from across time and labels, written by “dykes, queer women, butches, femmes, and lesbians,” as Cheryl Clarke writes in her foreword, impressively shows the richness of Black lesbian intellectual life. Mouths of Rain is a timely anthology of writings that will certainly spark conversations, connections, and ideas, both within the community and beyond.

Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
Edited by Briona Simone Jones
New Press
Paperback, 9781620975763, 224 pages 
February 2021

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]]> https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/mouths-of-rain/feed/ 0 DARRYL: A Review https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/darryl/ https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2021/05/darryl/#respond Tue, 18 May 2021 16:36:17 +0000 https://www.lambdaliterary.org/?p=104539 “Darryl” is minor Twitter sensation Jackie Ess’s debut novel. The bright yellow and red cover, tastefully psychedelic with a proud blurb by Torrey Peters, hints at the wild unpredictability of what’s to come. After reading the first chapter—the first sentences—“You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife. But […]

The post DARRYL: A Review appeared first on Lambda Literary.

]]> “Darryl” is minor Twitter sensation Jackie Ess’s debut novel. The bright yellow and red cover, tastefully psychedelic with a proud blurb by Torrey Peters, hints at the wild unpredictability of what’s to come. After reading the first chapter—the first sentences—“You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife. But sure, ok, I’m the weird one”—I had to stop, read it again, read it aloud to my roommate, and then take a deep breath and keep going. 

I’ve been reviewing books professionally for years, but do not know how to write a review of “Darryl.” I attempted a straightforward interview with the author, but each question spurred its own separate and complex and rich vein of analysis, long enough for several pieces. So I’ve decided to resort to the journalistic standard I learned working on my high school’s newspaper, 5 Ws and an H, in hopes of even superficially capturing this book that’s unlike any other. Imagine if Chuck Palahniuk was a woman with a sense of humor about it, or if Chad Kultgen was less interested in heterosexuality. A novel in the tradition of disaffected white men who are weird about sex, skewered from the outside.

WHO

Darryl. White, in his 40s. He’s never worked and lives off a modest inheritance. He is a proud cuckold, or at least, as proud as he can be given that his whole thing is humiliation, and believes he has uncovered an eternal truth about hierarchies and gender through his fetish. He’s a father, but his son is already in college, and probably isn’t even his biologically. He’s married to Mindy, a woman who is unknown and unknowable to him. He may be having feelings for one of her regular bulls, Bill, but he doesn’t think he’s gay. He’s currently in therapy with Clive, a white-passing fascist of color who believes in MDMA therapy, among other unconventional psychological methods. He’s obsessed with Oothoon, a trans woman poet. He doesn’t believe he has the power to hurt anyone or to fuck up anyone’s life. He tries to do right by people. He is profoundly dangerous.

WHAT

Darryl’s greatest joy is watching other men fuck his wife. He also enjoys basketball, GHB, and shaving off his body hair. 

WHERE

Eugene, Oregon. Close to nature, but with a robust community of BDSM practitioners who are connected to darker events in LA, San Francisco, and Seattle.

“When I wrote this thing,” Jackie told me, “I was living in Eugene. I had just gotten there, Trump had just been elected, and there was this uptick in local neo-Nazi activity. It was really scary. The corner bar would get tagged up with iron crosses and swastikas. I felt like I had a target on me; like, how many trans women of color are there in Eugene, Oregon? I don’t want to say that I was the only one, but it’s possible that I was the only one. I don’t really know. I was walking around thinking, ‘I’m surrounded by this stuff,’ and the word these people were floating on the street is that this is their dawn of power.” 

White supremacy in the Pacific Northwest has a long legacy,” Jackie continued, “going right back to the beginning in places like Oregon and Seattle. The Northwest is a place where people are convinced of their own harmlessness, convinced of their own non-implication. They imagine racism as a southern thing, as a hick thing, everyone believes it’s somebody else doing it and yet somehow there are serious consequences.”

WHEN

Ess’s debut novel comes out May 2021 through CLASH Books and is available for preorder.

WHY

“I started writing this at a time when I was burned out on the concept of trans literature. I had this sense that anything that I wrote was going to be read through my genitals or my color or my life history and I was like, I want to put down my past, and I want to write from the outside, and encounter this stuff in a fresh way that would be sometimes uncomprehending and sometimes hostile but most times just a bit clumsy.”

“Darryl does get people wrong, but…he’s mostly a guy trying to figure it out. I was interested in that perspective, and I felt like in some ways my own perspective had been limited by righteousness. This tendency to say, ‘Yeah I know it’s hard for you to adjust, but that’s not the real problem, the real problem is surviving this thing.’ And maybe I agree, it’s true that is a more important problem, but I wanted to meet that person and answer that person who’s looking into my life, or lives like mine, and meet them in some of their frustration with this…

I wanted to write somebody having that experience. I think that experience is really interesting. Not exclusively a portrait of people who are antagonistic, it’s a portrait of a lot of people who are trying to get it right but who are maybe not recognizing that their idea of ‘getting it right’ is a little bit poisonous. What they want is an Edenic situation where these challenges wouldn’t arise.”

“That was a lot of the fun for me, writing something that was totally outside the umbrella that couldn’t quite be queer. And I love this tone, the strident voice that emerged partly out of fandom cultures, partly out of people who wanted to talk about politics and queerness, et cetera, moving from Livejournal and Tumblr and is now everywhere. Now the mainstream culture is discovering all that stuff, which is generating new anxieties; which is kind of frightening, honestly.”

HOW

I don’t know how else to talk about this book. It’s written like a diary, Darryl spilling his guts out to you, but like any self-involved diarist, he is the most unreliable of narrators. It brushes up against Dennis Cooper’s “The Sluts,” one of the most daring unreliably narrated novels in recent history, making that world of hustlers and the men who review them on messageboards close enough to touch. This novel uses a deadpan, reasonable, low-key tone to explore utterly unhinged concepts, wholly deranged rationales, in a dizzying whirl of subcultures and ideals and catastrophic decisions and their consequences.

Darryl
by Jackie Ess
Clash Books
Paperback, 9781944866846, 192 pp.
May 2021

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