bookandcranny

[bookandcranny]

the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world

[bookandcranny]

“It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.”

— Judith Shulevitz, Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore

[bookandcranny]

“The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it. All roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.”

— James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer” in Esquire

[bookandcranny]

[“I told my mother I thought I might be trans in a lengthy and overly apologetic email, which she didn’t quite know how to respond to. From her perspective, my transition had popped up out of nowhere, with no prior warning signs. She was convinced I had been brainwashed into transitioning, and agreed to meet my counsellor for a joint meeting with me, primarily to meet the person she felt had brainwashed her child into transitioning.

My mother describes her first meeting with me presenting as Laura as very difficult for her, due in no small part to her inability to see me as anything but her very traditionally masculine son in a dress. For a while she knew but did not talk to my father, which she found very difficult. She told me years later that she went through a period of mourning, feeling like her child had died, and that she was left with a stranger she did not know. It put a lot of strain on her, and on our relationship as parent and child.

Why the assumption I was brainwashed? Because of autism infantilisation.

Before we talk more about my journey coming out as transgender, we have to rewind a little bit to something else that went on at around the same point in my life: my diagnosis of Asperger’s. By the time my mother attended that appointment and met me as Laura for the first time, I had already been diagnosed with Asperger’s, which was part of the reason she was so worried about me. She was not aware of any statistical link between autism and gender dysphoria, and in her eyes I was a vulnerable young person with an autism spectrum condition who was being manipulated into transition because I was easily swayed, or lacking in ability to assess my feelings on the matter properly for myself. This is depressingly common: an adult’s assumption that having an autism spectrum condition means you’re incapable of proper self-understanding, or that you’re susceptible to being manipulated into believing things about yourself that you did not previously. You’re not trusted as being of sound mind to make choices about your own life, out of fear you’ve been manipulated.

Speaking to my mother years later, now she has somewhat settled down and got used to me going by Laura and female pronouns, she told me that her biggest fear, and the primary reason she agreed to attend that first joint session together, was that, as a youth with Asperger’s, my therapist was influencing me into believing that I was trans. She feared it was some kind of brainwashing that my gullible mind could not resist the allure of, rather than believing my own account of what I was experiencing.

I also faced this same issue with doctors when trying to access medical support through the NHS. I would have general practitioners, mental health doctors and gender specialists alike raise an eyebrow when I acknowledged my Asperger’s diagnosis, and then proceed to take plenty of extra time asking me lengthy questions about how my autism symptoms manifested, to ensure I was of sound enough mind to make permanent choices about my body. Apart from the obvious infantilisation of people with conditions like Asperger’s on display there, I always just explained it as being like the decision to get a tattoo. I am an adult, over the age of 18, who has been deemed sober and mentally sound, and as such I have every right to permanently inject colours into my skin that may never go away. Why should I not be trusted to take slow-acting meds that are somewhat easier to reverse? Still, the fact I had to fight to be believed that I was mentally sound enough to make that choice says a lot about misunderstandings about autism spectrum conditions, but highlights that to assert that transition is unique in the permanent nature of its change to the body is completely inaccurate.”]

laura kate dale, from uncomfortable labels: my life as a gay autistic trans woman

[bookandcranny]

Me, trying desperately to write something approaching a normal romance novel: okay so there's a good king and a bad king and the prince is the son of the good king, and there's a war and the prince is captured.

Me on chapter 4: and actually there was a revolution and the good king wasn't actually good because the concept of kings itself is bad so the prince has to cope both with the after-effects of his captivity and develop a new identity because the soldiers who witnessed the king's interest in power over the wellbeing of his kingdom seceded they didn't need kings and maybe didn't want to risk their necks so a petty tryant could keep a tower full of gold. And somebody kissed? Where was I?

[bookandcranny]

Faggots, Dykes, and Fairies: Welcome to the world of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, an interview by Ernesto Macias:

[MACIAS: How would you explain this book to someone who has never heard of it?

ASTA: Living with Larry and knowing Larry, he was always writing in composition books by long hand. Originally, it had all these funny names. He thought it was a kids’ book and then he showed me what you would call a script, I guess, of the book. I said, “Larry, this is not a kids’ book at all.” He said, “Yeah, I know, it’s my philosophy.” People used to call me “Loose Tomato” and they put Loose Tomato in the book.

BASSICHIS: Ned, will you say why people called you “Loose Tomato?”

ASTA: I was in my 20s and 30s. Sometimes I looked butch, but most of the time I looked femme. I would sometimes wear a loin cloth or a little tiny top or nothing. I always wore a tube top. Don’t ask why, but that name caught on. We were naked a lot. I think I’m a nudist, actually. I’m 72, and I’m still naked. I don’t know what to say about it. I live out in the country where nobody can see me. It’s very exciting. If you go on Vimeo and see Lavender Hill Love Stories, you can get an idea of what everybody looked like and what they didn’t wear.

MACIAS: Tourmaline, how do you describe the book?

TOURMALINE: I think that “72 and still naked” is a great way to describe the book.

ASTA: Oh God, really?

TOURMALINE: Speaking personally, a lot of my identity was as a movement builder, as a community organizer. Morgan and I would write each other these letters being like, “What if we were artists? Can we actually be artists?” Then we would send each other passages of the book that would help us figure out those questions. I would really describe the book as an invitation to get deeper with yourself and your truth and really shed the messages that can get so deep inside of us that keep ourselves small. To me, it’s a really profound invitation to be dependent and reliant on each other’s care, collective wisdom, and beautiful faggoty attire. 

MACIAS: Morgan, how would you describe the book?

BASSICHIS: The words that I always use are part fable, part manifesto. I love how the book is about wanting everything, wanting all of our liberation in all of its dimensions, and all the pleasures in the here and now. It’s about demanding or inhabiting that freedom now in so many different iterations. It’s also about all these groups of people and different sets of chosen family inhabiting freedom in different ways. In some ways, Lavender Hill is part of that fable. It’s part of that folk tale. The book goes back and forth between these big statements almost like posters, things you’d read on a poster at a protest. I always say since my roommate Bobby gave [the book] to me when I was 20-years-old, 15 years ago, which is that it almost feels like new pages appear all the time. I’ve read it many times but it almost feels like I haven’t quite finished it. 

ASTA: I still do that.

BASSICHIS: Sometimes I’ll describe it as a spell book. It’s about shedding certain genre definitions too.

ASTA: Everything you explained sounds like Larry’s philosophy, especially when you said “wanting it now, our time is now.”  He always said, “Let’s not mess around. It’s now. We come out now, we do things now. It’s our time. We’re gay.”

MACIAS: What was the intent of the book back then, and does it serve a different purpose today?

ASTA: I was just thinking that way back then, when he was putting all the ideology, philosophies, and definitely anarchy into the book, even the colors being red and black, it had to be anarchistic. I’d been giving the old book out where I worked to 21 and 20 year olds. They’re so interested in it, whether they’re gay or not. It blows me away, because they’ll say, “Is this about Trump? Is this about what’s happening now?” And I think, “Oh my God, that was ’77 and we’re still fighting the same fight.” When Morgan brought it to my attention to reprint the book, I was kind of shocked. Now, it all makes sense and it’s coming full circle. The intent of the book was that we could live together, we could fight the establishment, we could make new things, and we could create a new world. I think people still want to do that.

TOURMALINE: I think that we’re in the midst of an uptick in violence against our communities. Every year, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects reports that the increase in hate violence, particularly homicide and murder of trans people of color, is on the rise. We’re seeing that at the same time as really intense climate collapse. We can’t change policies, institutions, or politics without thinking and feeling differently; we can’t reorder our value systems without having a shift in what we value. Every time I read this book, I see something different. It’s about really allowing yourself to understand how you already are dependent on so many other people and in order to exist in the world—we’re all dependent. Some of us know it more deeply than others.

BASSICHIS: I’m just basking in what both of you just shared. I think it’s really important to say that this book has never stopped having a life. It’s not as if this book had a life in 1977 and then now it’s having a life again in 2019, but it has been circulated and passed between people every year since it was published by Larry in ’77, and it has been circulated by people giving each other their copies. In fact, that is the first mythology I heard about the book. You get your friends together, you get wine, and you pass around the book. People have Xeroxed copies, people have put copies online, people have DIY reprints. This book never went away. I think that signals a kind of hunger that so many of us have for a revolutionary queer politics. This tradition of revolutionary queer and trans politics has never gone away, and I think, right now, we’re in a really exciting moment—a kind of resurgence of this radical trans and queer politics that so many of us, young and old, are saying means the end of white supremacy. We are all looking for nourishment that is not fake optimism, but is nourishment to care for one another and to build the world  that we all long for and deserve. I think this book is part of that nourishment.

MACIAS: It surprises me that something that was written so long ago still feels so, like you said, necessary. The book was published in an effort to have more queer art or queer writing. We live in a time now where people can create their own art and self-publish. But back then, it was a real effort, and now we have–I don’t want to say an abundance–but we have much more to consume.

BASSICHIS: The context of this book was radical print culture. This need to communicate with one another, find each other, and to create a liberationist language that includes both suffering and joy and includes both resistance and mourning. Larry talked in one of his interviews about how no one would publish queer work. Of course, we also want to remember how gender, class, and race played in, and who, even then, had more easy access to getting things printed and continues to now. But I think this sort of hunger, this hunger to print things and to create language is still important.

ASTA: When nobody would publish his work, we were in Ithaca and he was like, “I’m going to do it myself. Forget it.” I think that was a sign of the times. Whereas now, I think it would be easier and there’d be people who would publish it. I remember going to the Oscar Wilde bookstore in the West Village, he was thrilled and signing books, but that was the first book. But it was like a flirtation of what he said, “I’m not going to wait for anybody to do it”.]

[bookandcranny]

exploring pzb's old website. struck by this ..

[bookandcranny]

new updated drive with psych abolition resources! it’s sorted into folders for specific subtopics for things like harm reduction, different types of support, disability justice readings, mad liberation zines, etc. it’s not complete yet—there’s a bunch more resources I want to add once I’m at my laptop again but wanted to share now!

[bookandcranny]

I keep reading fantasy book after fantasy book where the main character is nonbinary but also completely sexless and utterly passive and never grows or changes or becomes anything else over the course of the story and I can see this becoming a calcified Thing in the genre from here on out and I hate it hate it hate it

[bookandcranny]

An autobiographic topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films - Kier-La Janisse

HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMAN

[bookandcranny]

your writing does not have to be outstanding or exceptional. seriously, I read books all the time with just average writing, maybe some of the minor characters are one dimensional and cliched, maybe the dialogue is a little cheesy, maybe the plot is a little shaky, but the characters and their dire situation have hooked me. your story doesn’t have to be 5 stars to be worth writing and sharing and it will find the people who will love it.

[bookandcranny]

us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603274/survival-is-a-promise

"A bold, innovative biography that offers a new understanding of the life, work, and enduring impact of Audre Lorde.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today.

Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde’s quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive—to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands.

In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Lorde. Her life and work become more than a sound bite; they become a cosmic force, teaching us the grand contingency of life together on earth."

ENDORSEMENTS

"[A] scintillating tour de force . . . in a free-ranging style as distinctive as its subject . . . Forgoing the strictures and linearity of traditional biography, Gumbs enlivens her narrative with unconventional flourishes that in lesser hands might feel like a gimmick but here come across as revelation . . . Gumbs is a master stylist with a knack for writing sentences at once direct and expansive (“The scale of the life of the poet is the scale of the universe”). This is a feast for the intellect—and the soul." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Gumbs, one of our great poets, has delivered not only a masterful biography of Audre Lorde but a revolution in what a biography can be. Whether you only know Lorde through her most famous quotes or if you’ve read everything she wrote a thousand times, there is something new and exciting here for you. Structurally playful, deeply researched, vibrantly felt, it’s a masterwork all around." —LitHub

[bookandcranny]

I am pleading once again for white liberals to read The New Jim Crow and see how racist policing and law enforcement is 1) bipartisan and 2) the key to how people of color (Black people specifically) are systemically, violently, and purposely kept in check in this country. Begging y'all to see that someone doesn't have to say a slur to be antiblack in the entirety of their belief system, that the status quo you live under is maintained by the suffering (both current and potential) of millions

[bookandcranny]

In Consciousness Raising meetings, one after the other, everyone insisted they did not fantasize. I looked over at Lenore guiltily, afraid to risk saying anything. There are days I am not here at all. Two cups of coffee and I run away in my mind to eerie dreams of lovemaking, the dance, the swirling turn of bodies catching the slow glint of firelight. In the mountain clearing with the women's army, I give up hatred in the arms of a demon who knows no rhetoric. If I turn my head I can see her, the Black Queen, the one with the knives, razor blade under her tongue, and a smile like the one on Cass's face as she lifts her stick to clean out some redneck boy thinks he's as fast as she is. The gloves on her hands are spiked.

She teaches me to use them. She uses them on me, makes tattoos up my thighs for anyone to read. Under my clothes always, the feel of her hands on me, where no one can see. Men and women, women and men, the unguarded, the unsuspecting. Is she a man? Am I a woman?

I do not have fantasies. Fantasy opens me up; I become fantasy. I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, and the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the hip of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock. I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self?

"What about you?" Judy leaned toward me with an intent expression. "Do you have fantasies?"

The roar in my ears was my heart, an ocean of shame and rage. My leg muscles pulled tight and cramped. My belly turned liquid and hot under my navel. I would throw up if I opened my mouth. I would throw up. My muscles failed me, failed me completely.

"Not much, not really." Peter denied Christ three times before cockcrow. I cursed myself for being such a piece of shit, such a piece of chickenshit. "Not any more, not really." I kept my eyes on my hands where they twisted in my lap. If I looked up I might say anything, anything.

– from "Muscles of the Mind," in the short story anthology Trash by Dorothy Allison, 1988

[bookandcranny]

Burgerz by Travis Alabanza

Hurled words. Thrown objects. Dodged burgers.

After someone threw a burger at them and shouted a transphobic slur, performance artist Travis Alabanza became obsessed with burgers. How they are made, how they feel, and smell. How they travel through the air. How the mayonnaise feels on your skin.

Burgerz is the climax of their obsession – exploring how trans and gender non-conforming bodies exist and how, by them reclaiming an act of violence, we can address our own complicity.

[bookandcranny]

whenever I try to articulate my love for all the little gay boys who mothered and sistered me growing up and the little gay boy I was & am as a result I just end up going back to that commentary mike hadreas did for no shape bc he said it all

[bookandcranny]

Hi 👋, My name is Mohammad, and I’m reaching out in a moment of desperate need. I’m a father of three young children living in Gaza, and we are caught in the midst of a catastrophic war. Our home is no longer a safe haven, and the future here seems increasingly uncertain. 💔

I’ve launched a fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $40,000 to relocate my family to a safer place where my children can grow up in peace and have a chance at a brighter future.

Unfortunately, my previous fundraising efforts were abruptly halted when my account was terminated without explanation. However, I remain determined to keep fighting for my family’s safety and well-being. 🫶

If you could take a moment to read our story, consider donating, or simply share our campaign with others, it would make an incredible difference. Every act of kindness, no matter how small, brings us one step closer to safety and a new beginning. 🙏

Thank you for your time, compassion, and support. ❤️‍🩹

https://gofund.me/fd1faea2 🔗