#how to find queer books

[toaster-fire-art]

I've offically come full circle a decade later since I'm back hyperfixating on the Arthurian legend distracting myself from everything and listening to the same music as my 14 year old self was. But hey at least I have the confidence in drawing them now.

I love them so so dearly I'm going just a little insane, I'm sorry to everyone who doesn't know me beyond my usual fandoms, you have to put up with what rearranged my brain chemistry when I was a kid.

This started as just a few of the knights, Lancelot, Gawaine, and Galahad and then it became: "Oh but then I should draw __" and here we are. My designs are all over the place and I cannot be bothered to actually draw armor I'll die i just want to draw pretty patterns. But I think the mismatch of clothing styles and all that makes it cohesive?

And I'm going with Malroy and T.H White influence as it's what I know best, that being said all the boys have their coat of arms alluded to in some way but you might have to squint.

(my laptop absolutely hates me for this one. imagine exporting a file and then having to manipulate the sizing 3 times for it to even be able to upload anywhere, couldn't be me. I don't even know how to show the full thing..)

[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

[stagefoureddiediaz]

The Helena diaz of it all has me fascinated. I’ve said for a long while that Eddie’s real issues are his mommy issues and this episode just cemented for me that we’re gonna explore that and deal with it.

Because it’s Helena who forced Eddie to grow up to fast - because her husband wasn’t around much - so she pushed Eddie into de facto parent and husband role ls - selfishly filling her needs and ignoring the damage it was doing to her son (it is a form of abuse in my book).

Eddie then had the audacity to fall in love with and marry Shannon and get her pregnant. It’s why Helena was always so off with Shannon - she was punishing her. She is also punishing Eddie for all of this and his refusal to return to El Paso only cemented further her bitterness and resentment.

Now she does have Ramon back she doesn’t need Eddie any longer to fill that role so she is still punishing him and part of that is tied into her glee over now getting to parent Christopher - something she has always been intent on doing the doppelgänger just gave her the opportunity- as well as allowing her to further punish her son and his love of Shannon.

Her barbed comments about building a pool were all about showing what she can provide Christopher - how she is parenting him better than Eddie - it’s part of her mind games - making Eddie feel like more of a failure as a parent to his son.

The reality of course is that the reverse is true - Helena’s parenting is all superficial, flash and showy - it isn’t the hard day to day parenting when things get tough and you have to be the bad guy. While Eddie has made mistakes, there is nothing superficial, flash, or showy about his parenting. It’s why bucks comments about Eddie being a great dad are so important.

Eddie feel like a failure right now and that he is entirely to blame for everything. But in reality, while he does bear a bit of the responsibility, the truth of the matter is that he needs to learn and deal with the fact that all of it actually stems from Helena and her abuse of her young son - Shannon never stood a chance just like Eddie never has.

[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)🩸

[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?

[pickled-flowers]

I am starting to feel a lot of you haven't read stone butch blues?

[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.

[compress1repress]

from out on mainstreet by shani mootoo (1993)

(the whole thing is so good but I'll just post this excerpt bc otherwise I'll end up posting every other paragraph!! also it's from a collection of short stories but I only had access to this one)

[summergoodwife]

Gonna say it again, "Just stop consuming the genre" is THE WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSE to someone complaining about the lack of representation in their preferred genre!! And "Consume other stuff too" is not much better!!! I don't care how much you think varying media consumption is a Good and Holy lifestyle, not everyone wants to do that! There is no obligation to do that and there should not be! Because it's fucking entertainment. It's not a college major.

And! And and and. I would be remiss to not point out that when you tell someone, "If you want well written (minority) just get out of (genre fandom)" you are, regardless of your motivations, rhetorically aligning yourself with the exact same bigots who just want the pro-representation crowd to shut up and go away.

[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.

[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!

[wiltking]

my goblin emperor review broke containment and i feel like im on the edge of a massive crater but have yet to raise my head the final inch to see the oceans of people just on the other side

[mossandfable]

Did I have a super gay dream a few days ago and turn it into a dime novel? Yes, yes I totally did.

Creative title of all time, I know I know.

I took tiny creative liberties for storytelling purposes, but the story starts and ends exactly where the dream did. I have no additional information as I personally was not present in my dream and only sort of?? Witnessed it?

(The plot twist in the end surprised me too which was what probably woke me up lmfao)

If you want to read it, it's 2K words right here under the cut!

[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)

[this-should-do]

me when i meet with my colleges first out trans teacher who is like a celebrity with me after one of my teachers puts me in contact with her again (i had interviewed said trans teacher 4 years prior and hadnt met with her since) and she tells me tjat my teacher had so many positive things to say about me, about how i was one of her brightest most well spoken students and that she (within like 5 minutes of having been talking) immediately sees exactly what my professor had been talking about and so many super implied positives about me that i would never had known about and i dod everything in my power to avoid prying for more details but even what i heard was soso nicies

[thebibliocat]

going thirsty in a beautiful but treacherous oasis (looking for a decent book on my library app)