#how to find queer books

[jezebelgoldstone]

Hey Jez how in FUCK did you find dozens and dozens of queer novels so easily? app dot TheStoryGraph dot com tumblr dot com queer release booklists on publishing house and bookseller websites

I am poor and I can't AFFORD - I feel ya babe me neither

DID YOU KNOW that most libraries have digital books and audiobooks as well as hard copies?

In the US, you can get a library card in the city you live in AS WELL AS THE CITY YOU'RE EMPLOYED IN. FOR FREE. No help for us who are disabled enough to not be able to work, but still. Get every library card you can holy fuck.

There are SEVERAL ENORMOUS online libraries that you can access if you have a US library card (I'm not sure about library cards from other countries, but if you know then please say in the reblogs). If you can't get a library card, ask to share a library card, ask to share a login for one of these websites with someone who does have one.

If none of the libraries you have access to have the book you're looking for, REQUEST IT. ESPECIALLY if that book is self-published. You'll end up being able to rent the book without buying it yourself, it'll stay in the library's collection so OTHER PEOPLE will have access to it too, AND you'll support the author (again this goes double for self-pub authors). It's a win-win-win!

Download a program to open and read .epub, .mobi, etc on your laptop or phone or whatever device you want to read on

There you go! Access to, at minimum, like every English-language book published in the last three hundred years!

[endusviolence]

Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

[read-alert]

This does come with the caveat that I can't quite remember if the characters in How to Find a Princess, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, and Chain-Gang All-Stars identity specifically as lesbians or not, but they are all sapphic. Full titles under the cut!

EDIT: Apparently Alice Walker is a big proponent of a famous antisemitic conspiracy theorist, David Icke, so be aware of that when considering The Color Purple

Happy Lesbian Visibility Week! 📚📖🏳️‍🌈

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole

Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

[detroit-become-moomin]

Hey there! Completely forgot to post about this here, but - charity project for trans kids!!

POINTY THINGS, a folk horror collection written by me, illustrated by @ehlihr, and edited by @nimagine is now available for purchase online through Pride 2024. All revenue raised during the upcoming year will go to LGBT+ mutual aid orgs defending trans youth! In this collection you'll find:

55 pages & 22k+ words of story

unsettling megafauna

a trans take on red riding hood

fun facts about 16th-century beheading practices!

deeply unsexy vampirism

haunting-as-dysphoria

3/5 stories brought to life in spooky, atmospheric detail by elisar's illustrations!

The charities we'll be donating proceeds to include Equality Texas and the Transgender Education Network, but I'm also keeping an eye out for other mutual aid orgs defending the rights of trans youth in the American Southwest.

🩸PURCHASE HERE (GUMROAD) 🩸

🩸 OR HERE (KO-FI)🩸

[uncanny-tranny]

I know this is a very unoriginal observation (much like any other), but I'm finally reading The Great Gatsby, and even I wouldn't describe men the way Nick does.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Pluralities

sci-fi novella

a burned out 20-something with premonitions has a gender-questioning journey, after quitting their job and becoming friends with benefits with a trans guy

with a parallel narrative about a runaway alien prince in a space empire and his complicated friendship with his sentient spaceship friend

audiobook arc from netgalley!

[up-in-flames-writing]

In lieu of Stuff Your Kindle day, can we talk about the issue of how the m/m genre of books, romance or not, is almost entirely dominated by women? Can we talk about how the most recognisable gay couples in media are written by women? Can we talk about how queer men can't even write about ourselves, how we are only allowed to exist when it's from the point of view of a straight woman sexualising us?

Can we talk about that? Or am I going to get called misogynistic for pointing out the disparity between who gets the writing deals, & who gets their books turned into movies, & whose shit gets popular versus whose doesn't? Can we talk about how m/m fiction is only allowed when it appeals to a cishet gaze, or is that too much for tumblr to take?

Can we also talk about how trans queer men are even more hated by publishing? Can we talk about how we get shit from both sides? Can we talk about how books about the experiences of being a queer man, written by queer men, never get the same recognition as books written by women on this subject (barring academia which has its own problems)?

Can we talk about that? Can we?

[adarkrainbow]

Are there fairy tales and folk tales with real queer subtext?

I always hear about the existence of fairy tales with queer subtext. I even posted a tale with a subtle lesbian subtext some years ago.

But it was one of the few I could find. This and the one with the transgender Prince Charming.

Are there more of them?

Well there are a lot of those stories around but it is hard to exactly locate and pinpoint them precisely because of how scattered they are and how usually subtle it all is. With mythology and legends of the sort you have much better chance.

Though when it comes to traditional fairytales, the ones we do have are not very queer-coded. Cinderella isn't. Snow-White isn't. Sleeping Beauty isn't. Little Red Riding Hood DEFINITIVELY is about hetero predation with nothing in it.

I did find a quite fascinating article about the lesbian reading of "Frau Trude" by the brothers Grimm! It was contained in an interesting book called "Transgressive tales: Queering the Grimm". I did think the analysis went a bit further than what it should have and some elements were really pulled by the hair, but that's very typical of a lot of scholarly analysis. I remember during my research for writing my memoir, I stumbled across a psycho-sexual analysis of "Cunning Cinders" by madame d'Aulnoy, which wanted us to believe that the oven in which the ogre was pushed was a vaginal symbol and thus the heroine killed the monster... by sex? WTF. That's clearly NOT the meaning intended.

Honestly for this kind of research, go and try to read books precisely about the analysis of queer elements or subtext in fairytales. There is a LOT of those analysis coming around and a lot of books to choose from - try to see if you can reach or access any.

The problem is that the queer elements in the "serious" or "well known" fairytales, in the European sense, are very much missing precisely due to their "classic" nature which meant if there were any, they probably ended up removed, but there probably wasn't any in the first place, else they wouldn't have become classic. It is insitutional, cultural, historical homophobia, but we're not going to remake the world and it is as it is: if you want real "queer fairytales" you have to dig up in the obscure, overseen, forgotten corners of folklore study. I made a post a long time ago about the whole case of "The Sailor and the Dog", have you seen it? Else I should sent it back to you.

There is definitively much, much more queer subtext in literary fairytales precisely due to their artificial nature and how the authors put their personal experiences in it - and it doesn't help a lot of fairytale authors were queers themselves, from the 18th century France authors nobody remembers to Andersen. In general the literary fairytales (at least those of the 17th/18th century France) LOVED to play around with deviant sexuality and erotic subtone and "perversions" of all kinds. After all, Donkey Skin is about an incestuous father! Beauty and the Beast also always was a way for people to play around with zoophilia subtexts (though today it'd just be called "furries" I guess). There is one humoristic fairytale by Catherine Bernard called "The Prince Rose-Bush", about a prince turned into a rose-tree. And the many instances of the princess being caught or hurt by his thorns, crying over his petals while hugging the plant, having her dress torn by the branches... They all clearly were meant to have a little *wink wink* at the reader. You will DEFINITIVELY find more queer subtext in fairytales that involve crossdressing as a plot device - I know French authors LOVED the idea of crossdressing for their plots (usually a woman disguised as a man) and all the romantic confusions it caused, and so you always find in there a lot of queer elements.

Though all of this stayed very VERY subtle throughout the decades, and in France we would have to wait until the second half of the 18th century when the subgenre of "bawdy fairytales" popped up and suddenly everybody was writing stories even more explicit than Basile's Pentamerone or Straparole's Facetious Nights, about men being cursed at having their penis turned into a soup-spoon or a lover being turned into a couch over which his mistress slept, and other weird stuff like that.

Which brings me to another element: the same way queer elements are going to be very hidden, subtle in commonplace and famous stories, go look for the tales of explicitely sexual nature. The dirty tales, bawdy tales, grotesque tales - they are literaly everywhere, they always existed not just in literature but also in folklore since as early as time. And precisely due to being places where everything dirty and grotesque and sexual and gory exploded - that's where you find most easily the queer presence, since everybody always loved to have "sodomy comedy" at every era.

It is not a "fairytale per se" but it is still tied to it all: Le Roman de Renart, Reynard the Fox as the English call him. His adventures and ensemble of texts is not fairytale - it is rather a different sub-genre of medieval literature and folklore... But it did seep and influence the fairytale genre heavily because more than half of the "animal tales" or "fairytales about talking animals" in those fairytale anthologies and collections are actually derived from the Fox's adventures. (You will find in almost every European country, in fairytale collections, a simplified version of Reynard tricking Isengrim in losing his tail to a frozen pond or eating too much so he can't leave the building he just entered in). And Reynard the Fox was a bisexual icon. Well... as much as a rapist, murder, scammer, thief, pathological liar, sociopath-psychopath and necromancer at times can be a bisexual icon.

Because among the many sex jokes and sexual farces of the Roman, there are several tales of Reynard sodomizing as much women as men. Most notably there was one episode of the Fox and the Hare which revolves around gay sex as a joke.

Yes, it's crude, it's dirty, it's dark and rude and there's absolutely no romance whatsoever... But it is another fact of European literature (because again, I speak for Europe here mostly): gay romance is rare, but gay sex abound ; serious queer themes are hidden and erased, but grotesque queer farces did survive to this day. It is just an old phenomenon: whenever something is morally reprehensible or disapproved by a society, it will survive in culture mostly through the comedies and what we would call today "shock value" content. A la Roman de Renart.

[ineffablelvrs]

list of romance tropes that queer people do better than straight people:

- friends to lovers

- arranged marriage

- enemies/rivals to lovers

- love triangle (but it actually turns into a polyamourous relationship, not character c chooses between character a vs character b situation)

- forbidden love

- fake dating

[cuteniaarts]

@katkastrofa, circa 40-ish hours ago: Hey, what if our newest bunch of OCs adopted a baby from one of the other brothel girls who knew she couldn’t afford to raise one? That would make for some fun shenanigans :D

Me, with a notoriously non existent sleep schedule, instinct of self preservation or concern for my poor wrist: Alright, bet. Watch how fast I can make you fall in love with this hypothetical baby >:)

Daneli as a gentle and loving caretaker-turned-adoptive-mother is something that can be So Personal, actually, and originally I was going to leave it at this quick sketch, but then I got carried away thinking about what this child will grow up to be like raised by this little gang of misfits, so…

Here she is!! A little older and so, so beautiful, I need more of her in my life immediately, she’s way too precious

And, because I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t also add a sapphic element to this absolute cinnamon roll, a small crack ship that I’m only half serious about for when she’s a little older still:

All in all, we may be getting impossibly far from canon, but I for one already cannot get enough of sweet darling Kumisai <3

(I fully drew three pieces from scratch in 9 hours I cannot feel my brain or my hands anymore send help)

[gailynovelry]

Gently shaking the sort of people who go like "ew why would anyone describe a book using tropes, that doesn't tell me anything about—" honey, it's because it's a convenient shorthand. If you want to know what the story is about in actual detail, then click the link and read the summary. Maybe read a few reviews and learn what the experience was like for other people. Please, I know that you are smart enough to do a little research on your own.

And if you're not interested in the way the author described the book anyway, then why are you wasting time telling them how uninterested you are? Go find something you actually like!

[inniave]

so fucking sick of the constant misgendering. it's exhausting. even from fellow queer people??????? who know me?????????? HELLO?????????????

[everysongineverykey]

i love you azura books i love you luz's nerdiness given prominence throughout the show i love you "luzura" i love you amity and luz bonding over a "cringe" book series i love you lumity azura/hecate cosplay i love you young queer couple cosplaying as a queer couple that really inspired them as kids and helped bring them together i love you beautiful tribute to the power of representation in media as shown via a latina girl adoring and being heavily influenced by a book series starring a latina witch who she can see herself in i love you varied and beautiful discussions of representation in a show with heaps and heaps of just that :')

in the same vein, i love you cosmic frontier i love you chief engineer o'bailey-hunter parallels i love you gus captain avery cosplay i love you gus helping hunter confront his identity as a grimwalker by introducing him to a series with a character he can see himself in i love you star trek deep space nine reference i love you black boy cosplaying as a black space captain i love you camila connecting with luz using her own nerdy childhood obsession i love you power of stories and, again, representation in media i love you the owl house's constant message that representation matters i love you i love you💙💙💙💙

[metaben]

wait a second

that settles it for me you can't tell me a LINGUIST who was writing his story for over a decade was oblivious to the fact he "accidentally" kept implying that the "queer bachelors" in his story who never married or had love interests and spent all their time with men-

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

set in a cyberpunk Calcutta-inspired city, loosely inspired by Aladdin

chaotic monkey bot who wants to fight in underground mecha/bot tournaments and leave to become a space hero

his human sister, the daughter of failed revolutionaries who has been working her whole life to free their city from oppression and inequality, especially with the recent rumors that their planet is scheduled for destruction

and an old unearthed bot whose function is to observe & record the story of a client who meets the siblings and quickly becomes involved in their lives

and a treasure hunt to find an old and powerful piece of alien tech that has the power to radically change their city

[science-lings]

I wanna be able to know about queer history and different cultural views of queerness partially because I just really wanna know it and partially bc I think it would make fiction set in historical settings more interesting. I also think it would be cool to incorporate real past queer culture in writing without having to include the Horrors (homophobia, transphobia, etc).