#QUILTBAG Nonfiction

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: The Fruit Metaphor

I first wrote and performed this essay at the University of Iowa Feminist Voices Showcase in 2014. This is an edited version of the piece. Happy Asexual Awareness Week!

Does an apple with a banana sticker on it feel dysphoria?

When I was little, my family often spent the summer at my grandparents’ beach house in North Carolina. One day during one of these summers, my dad went grocery shopping and came home with a big bag of fruits and vegetables. He called my cousins and me over from where we were playing and told us to help put the food away.

And then, in a moment of fatherly silliness, my dad peeled a sticker off of a banana and put it on his forehead. I can still hear him saying to my mom when she walked in, “I am a banana! You can read my label.”

I remember finding this very funny. I mean, it was obvious to all of us that my dad wasn’t really a banana, no matter what his “label” said.

Even if you put a banana sticker on another fruit, like an apple, the apple would still be red, round, have a thin, edible peel, and have hard, brown seeds. A banana is yellow, curved, has a thick, inedible peel, and has tiny, almost unnoticeable seeds. No one would think that this mislabeled apple was actually a banana. They’d just think that the grocery store worker who put the label on it made a mistake.

But what if a different fruit arrived in the grocery store?

Imagine a fruit that’s purple, is small at one end and big at the other, has a thick, inedible peel, and has a big, hard pit. The grocery store worker tasked with finding the right label for this fruit might try to compare it to other fruit.

The fruit in question is purple, so it’s like a grape. But a grape is small and round, and this fruit is small at one end and big at the other, so it’s like a pear. But a pear has a thin, edible peel, and this fruit has a thick, inedible peel, so it’s like a banana. But a banana has tiny, almost unnoticeable seeds, and this fruit has a big, hard pit, so it’s like an apricot. But an apricot is orange, and this fruit is purple.

What if the grocery store worker doesn’t have a label for this fruit?

We humans love to put everything in its proper category. What things “are” matters to us, and so from a very young age we classify the world. Red toys go over here, yellow toys here, and blue toys here. Pots and pans are kitchen tools, while toothbrushes and toothpaste go in the bathroom. I am from Illinois, and my friends are from Iowa, Ohio, and Florida. My father is a college professor, and my mother is a high school teacher. I am a writer, a theme park employee, a girl.

Everybody knows that differences exist. What’s less clear is what these differences mean. Categories and labels let us see a varied world as orderly and making sense. Being different doesn’t matter if you know that you still belong somewhere, that other people experience the world the way you do, that even though you’re different, there’s nothing wrong with you.

I should consider myself lucky. I have a very loving family. From a young age, I knew, whatever I became in my life, my family would accept and support me. Lots of people don’t have that assurance.

But having that assurance didn’t change the fact that there was a part of me that I didn’t have a label for: my sexuality.

I can’t remember “learning” that people had different sexualities. It was just a part of the world, a part of the news, the media, and the people around me. I gradually came to know some labels for these differences: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual. And, like the grocery store worker sorting fruit, in junior high I began to compare myself to these labels.

I could imagine myself falling in love with a boy, so I could be heterosexual. But I could also see myself falling in love with a girl, so I couldn’t be straight. But if I was attracted to both boys and girls, then I couldn’t be homosexual either. And I didn’t feel any aversion to people who were transgender or nonbinary or any other gender really, so maybe I was bisexual or pansexual.

But I’d never really felt sexual attraction towards anyone. I looked at pictures of people on the internet - movie stars, celebrities, the people that my classmates swooned over - and I felt nothing. I had no sexual desire for these people that everyone said were “so totally hot.” Did that mean I was asexual?

Eventually, I learned about romantic orientations, that it was possible to be attracted to people in an “I want to date you” way, but not an “I want to have sex with you” way. And there were plenty of people that I liked to spend time with and hug sometimes. So was I asexual, but panromantic?

And then, as if I wasn’t confused enough already, in high school and college I did start to feel sexual attraction. But it was a rare thing, something I only ever felt for a few of my very close friends, and when no relationship developed, it went away again. 

If I had felt attraction, then I couldn’t be asexual. But none of the other labels felt right. I wouldn’t put any of those stickers on my forehead and believe that I truly was what it described.

I knew that I belonged places, that I was a girl, a daughter, a friend, and many other things. But in this category, a category that people all around me were exploring and finding their labels in, I was clueless. I didn’t know if I had a life story that anyone else could relate to. I didn’t know if there was a label that fit me.

That is, until the spring semester of my first year of college.

While scrolling down Tumblr one evening, I saw a post with the word “demisexuality” in it. I didn’t know what demisexuality was, so I googled it. And I learned that demisexuality is an ace-spectrum identity. A demisexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction unless they first form a strong emotional connection with another person.

I don’t know how to describe what I felt reading that definition, other than with the words, “Oh my god, this is me. There is a word for what I am. Other people experience the world the way I do. I’m different, but there is nothing wrong with me.”

I am a demisexual. You can read my label.

Come back every week for a new Thursday Thoughts!

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[batmanisagatewaydrug]

fresh! reads! now!

hey what's up it's time for books

you remember how I like extremely specific lists? well...

in addition to the various delights offered up today I'd like to add Freya Marske's A Marvellous Light, which seems like it would be right at home with the other historical fantasy romances on this list. bear in mind that I haven't read it (yet), I literally just found out about it today via podcast and the timing really came together on this.

next up, a jaw-droppingly long of queer adult sci-fi and fantasy released or slated for release in 2022:

I really admire the compilationist's mission statement: "If you haven’t been around for my previous lists, this list and the ones before (see: 2021, 2020, 2019) – and the ones that will come after – are my answer to every, “Where are all the queer/LGBTQIA/QUILTBAG fantasy and science-fiction adult books?” or, worse, “only Young Adult (YA) has any queer representation.” as some of you may recall, the very existence of Fresh Reads Friday comes from similar frustrations.

this list is far too massive to more than offer a blip of each book, but these teasers are delightful all on their own. some of my favorites, plucked at random: "magic was cool until it started causing earthquakes," "oops this dying god gave me magic-breathing powers," "seducing the archeologist was never going to go well," and "what’s worse: the FBI or a space armada?"

oh hey, and speaking of queer books...

go read some nonfiction! reject assimilation and remember that radical queer liberation is the beating heart of the movement! throw a brick at a cop!

lastly: PLEASE tell me you guys know about the Lambda Literary Awards.

Lambda Literary has been uplifting queer writing and stories for thirty years, and this year's crop of award winners - which spans fiction, nonfiction, poetry, romance, books for young readers, and more - is absolutely delicious. I JUST read this year's winner for Gay Fiction - 100 Boyfriends, by Brontez Purnell - without realizing it had won the honor, and it definitely deserves the win. it's clever and messy and funny and sharp and sad and a hundred other things - one for every boyfriend. I'm also anticipating reading the winner of Transgender Nonfiction - Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun L. Harrison - very very soon.

[recklessindulgencereviews]

[Banned/Challenged Book] I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel & Jazz Jennings (authors) & Shelagh McNicholas (illustrator)

[Banned/Challenged Book] I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, & Shelagh McNicholas #IAmJazz #bannedbooksweek2019 #bannedbooks #challengedbooks #censorship #ala #books #reading #RIWW #RI #RecklessIndulgenceOfTheWrittenWord #RecklessIndulgence

For this week, I’m featuring a banned, challenged, or censored book each day of the week alongside your regularly scheduled line-up!

Dial Books Pub Date   September 4th 2014 Genres     Children’s Picture Books, LGBT+/QUILTBAG+, Nonfiction, Biography Goodreads

Description

The story of a transgender child based on the real-life experience of Jazz Jennings, who has become a spokesperson for…

[lgbtqreads]

Hey do you have a list of books about queer/QUILTBAG (I don't like LGBT, personally) history? Stonewall, the lavender scare etc but also the stuff we might never have heard about at all? I'm trying to teach my newly-minted bi sister about our history because schools never did but I think we need more than just what's in my memory and on Wikipedia.

Pulp by Robin Talley is actually great YA fiction that encompasses the lavender scare, and The Porcupine of Truth by Bill Konigsberg also has elements of being about learning queer history. But if you’re looking specifically for nonfiction, here’s the page to browse: https://lgbtqreads.com/non-fiction/

[381181]

Quiltbag groups in my area:

9-13 year olds

13-23 year olds

18+ “GBT men”

Book club

What do you do when you’re older than 23, not a man, and only read nonfiction. Just die?

[bookclub4m]

May BookClub4M Genre

Our May genre is.....

QUILTBAG/LGBTQ Non-Fiction!

Happy reading!

[sophieakatz]

“When did you know that you were asexual?”

Happy Asexual Awareness Week!

Like what you read? Consider tipping the writer!

[bookclub4m]

The ones I didn’t get to

Here’s a couple more books that I personally selected as possibly good reads for me in QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+ Non-fiction.*

The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood by Richard Blanco (2014, Ecco) is an really poetically written (unsurprisingly, the author is a published poet and was the first immigrant, gay, and Latino US inaugural poet when he read his work at President Obama’s 2nd inauguration ceremony) memoir that really speaks to the blending of cultures in his upbringing. He and his family immigrated to the US from Cuba when he was an infant. I really only read the first section dealing with his fiery, troublesome grandmother and the two of them coming to grips with being in both and between both Cuban and American cultures. It’s beautifully written but unfortunately just hit me at a reading moment where this was not the reading experience I most wanted.

Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleves (2014, Oxford UP) unfortunately did not even get cracked open by me during the book club month on QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction, though it really sounds interesting. This is a look into a history of lived lesbian experience from the early to mid 1800’s that is something I think we often assume was just somehow not there, nonexistent, why even bother looking….but there they are! And it is totally worth looking for and reading about. I’ll come back to this one again someday.

I was also looking for some non-fiction that was really inclusive of the Asexual experience but wasn’t able to get my hands on (through our local library) anything that I felt comfortable with. If anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears!

*A quick note about why we keep writing “QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+”: We originally wrote “LGBTQ Non-fiction” back when we first quickly threw together our “genres” list over 2 years ago. When we pulled that “genre,” some group members wanted to use QUILTBAG instead but other group members wondered if that terminology is really well known yet. We wanted to be really inclusive, but also recognizable...so we’re just throwing all the acronyms and terms at the wall and whatever sticks for you is great! Sorry for any confusion!

[bookclub4m]

Just in time for LGBT Pride Month, this episode has us discussing LGBTQ+/QUILTBAG Non-Fiction books! We talk about queer Canadians, own voices, the importance of cultural context, and how this is our newest episode ever (in terms of publication dates for books). Plus: Anna and Matthew will be at the American Library Association conference in Chicago this weekend. Tweet at us if you’ll be there and want to say “Hi!”.

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or your favourite podcast delivery system.

 In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jessi

Books We Read (or tried to)

The Lesbian Lexicon by Stevie Anntonym (recommended)

Queer Game Studies edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Matthew mistakenly called this Queer Gaming)

David Bowie Made Me Gay by Darryl W. Bullock (out November 21st, 2017) (recommended)

Outlaw Marriages by by Rodger Streitmatter

Queers Were Here: Heroes & Icons of Queer Canada edited by Robin Ganev and RJ Gilmour (recommended)

Scott Thompson (of The Kids in the Hall)

LOOK: Lesbian Organization of Kitchener

LOOT: Lesbian Organization of Toronto

The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care edited by Zena Sharman (recommended)

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (recommended)

The Life and Times of Butch Dykes (series) by by Eloisa Aquino

The Case of Alan Turing: The Extraordinary and Tragic Story of the Legendary Codebreaker by Éric Liberge and Arnaud Delalande (recommended)

My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Nagata Kabi (recommended)

Goodreads review that suggestions Nagata Kabi is “non-binary and possibly asexual”

Cities vol. 1 by Anand Vedawal (recommended)

The Prince of los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco

Books We Mentioned

On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor

Fun Home and Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Pedro and Me by Judd Winick (that page shows the terrible cover) (recommended)

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature by Dorothy Allison

Forward by Abby Wambach

Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man by Thomas Page McBee (recommended)

My Body is Yours by Michael V. Smith (recommended)

Female Masculinity by J. Jack Halberstam

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (recommended)

Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan E. Coyote (recommended)

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh (recommended)

Princess Jellyfish (series) by Akiko Higashimura (recommended)

DAR (webcomic) by Erika Moen

How to be a Guy (series of articles) by Jay Edidin (recommended)

Links, Articles, and Things

Our list of genres

QUILTBAG definition on Wiktionary

LGBT Pride Month

QZAP: The Queer Zine Archive Project

Mass Effect

Kaiden Alenko

Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian

Broad City

The Imitation Game

Otokonoko: A frustratingly brief WIkipedia article about crossdressing in Japan

Questions

Do you want a postcard? Email us your address!

Will you be at ALA in Chicago? Let us know!

Got any recommendations for asexual non-fiction?

Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts for all the QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+ books we read, follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, July 4th, when we’ll talk about Reading Exhaustion and Reading Slumps (or maybe a super secret surprise).

 Then come back on July 18th when we’ll be discussing Legal Thrillers!

[bookclub4m]

We talk about when, why, (whether), and what we Reread, and what does it all mean? Plus: format shifting for rereads, plays vs. scripts, cover versions of fiction, and the suck fairy.

You can download the podcast directly, find it  on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jessi

Books We Mentioned

Titus Groan and Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton

The Kingkiller Chronicle series by Patrick Rothfuss

The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett

The BPRD: Hell on Earth series by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and others

A spinoff of the Hellboy series by Mike Mignola and others

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

Grendel by John Gardner (Jessi said “John Green”, but she meant this one)

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

On Trails by Robert Moor

Black and Blue Magic by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

The Great Alta series by Jane Yolen

Sister Light, Sister Dark

White Jenna

The One-Armed Queen

Sassinak by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon

The Nintendo Adventure Books series

The Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey

Romeo and/or Juliet by Ryan North

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

LaFayette and the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell

Othello by William Shakespeare

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer

And the movie based on the play

The Others series by Anne Bishop

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick, graphic novel adaptation by Tony Parker

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

The Adventures of Tintin series by Hergé

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

And the Hulu show

The Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery

The movie with Megan Follows

Anne, the new TV show

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Links, Articles, and Things

The Suck Fairy

10 Reasons We Reread Our Favorite Books by Sara Jonsson (Barnes & Noble blog)

The Seven Basic Plots

The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling, as Identified by an A.I.

A Brief Guide to Tintinology

The magic sound used by Matthew in our endtro is “fairy magic wand” by Robinhood76 from freesound.org.

Questions

Do you reread books? Why (or why not)? How often?

What’s a book you wish you could read again for the first time?

Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts, follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, June 19th, when we will inflict upon you the genre of QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+ NonFiction!

Then come back on Tuesday, July 4th, when we’ll talk about Reading Exhaustion and Reading Slumps.

[bookclub4m]

Yee-haw! Episode 29 has us reading Westerns! We discuss whether Westerns need cowboys, if stories featuring Mounties count as Westerns (maybe?), the idea of black hats and white hats, and Mr. Coffee Nerves! Plus: Matthew shows his ignorance of US history and everything rural.

You can download the podcast directly, find it  on Libsyn, or get it through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray

Recommended

The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout

True Grit by Charles Portis

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Far Out & Far Out 2 (in French) by Gautier Langevin and Olivier Carpentier

Did Not Finish

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Riders of The Purple Sage by Zane Grey

Links and Stuff

The Lone Ranger Matthew’s pretty sure he watched this version.

The space western BraveStarr in action

Lucky Luke by Morris (and others) (Belgian Comic)

The Sixth Gun by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt

Firefly and Serenity

The most recent Jonah Hex series ran for 70 issues from 2006 - 2011, All Star Western then ran for a further 34 issues from 2011 - 2014. None of you care.

Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Ríos (Matthew was wrong, there are 10 issues)

Loveless by Brian Azzarello and others

Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests (Genreflecting Advisory Series) by Diana Tixier Herald, edited by Wayne A. Wiegand (There are more recent editions; this is just the one we have with the essay Anna read and recommended.)

Maple syrup rustlers

Dudley Do-Right

Mountie pulps are called “Northerns” or “Northwesterns” and apparently Zane Grey was influential in this genre too! There are some serious fans who keep track of this stuff!

Heritage Minutes: Sam Steele - the RCMP of the Wild West

There is also a cool podcast episode from Library and Archives Canada on Canadian Pulps! You should listen to it!

Due South - our Canadian ‘90s moment

The Spur Award (& the winners) from the Western Writer of America Awards

When Matthew says what sounds like “beh day”, he’s actually saying "bd", with a terrible French Accent, for “bande dessinée”, meaning the Franco-Belgian comic tradition

Zane Grey is fascinating

The Wikipedia page for Riders of the Purple Sage is elaborate (and spoilery)

Postum shows up in old restaurant menus and in a marketing campaign using Mr. Coffee Nerves. Search for it in New York Public Library’s historical menus.

Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve

Zorro, a story and character that existed long before Antonio Banders

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner

Or, if you are like Matthew, instead you could watch Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or read the comics called Xenozoic Tales

The Oregon Trail game (a Western?). Play it on archive.org!

Cowboy Batmans can be seen in:

Batman: The Blue, The Grey, and the Bat

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4

Say “Hello”

Upcoming events we’ll be attending. Tweet at us if you’ll be there!

LA Zine Fest, May 28, 2017 (Anna and Matthew)

LJ Day of Dialogue, Book Expo America, & Book Con, May 31-June 4, 2017 (Anna)

ALA Annual Conference, June 23-26, 2017 (Anna and Matthew)

Questions

Do cattle rustlers still exist?

Does a Western have to be historical?

Can anyone tell us about any Spanish Language tradition of literature similar to Westerns?

Is Oregon Trail (the game) a Western?

Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts for all the Westerns people in the club read (or tried to read), follow us on Twitter,  and join our Facebook Group!

Join us again on Tuesday, June 5th for an episode on rereading.

Then come back on Tuesday, June 19th, when we will inflict upon you the genre of QUILTBAG/LGBTQ+ NonFiction!