#i compiled them into one big lgbt shelf

[takeshitakyuuto]

you know that stereotype of men watching construction sites. thats how i look at bookshelves

[houseoforange]

Many moons ago, tmills published something of a playlist — or, I think he used the words "compilation album" at the time — inspired by the movie Drive (2011). A couple of songs from his user-created album eventually became longtime faves, including Electric Youth's "Faces" and this song that I'm sharing here.

Fave songs ebb & flow in each of our minds. One day you're humming ABBA in the office, and later you're belting Céline Dion at day's end underneath the shower (for the record, I have never belted Céline Dion in the shower, or in any place, really). Last night I remembered Groove Armada's "Paper Romance" here, and while I didn't belt the song underneath streams of disjointed jets of water — made so because I'm too cheap & lazy to clear off the hard water stains let alone buy a new showerhead — I visited YouTube to see the video. I had never seen the music video before. While I can't say that it's a particularly remarkable or memorable video per se, the aesthetic really jibed with my intellect in that moment.

I have kind of a whispery confession to make here. Sometimes (well, more like every week) I visit a lesser-known LGBT-friendly bar in a sketchy side of town, far from the trendy "gayborhood" of San Antonio. As I push forty years old, I'm increasingly aware that my shelf life among the glamorous, image-conscious Zoomers expired a long time ago. And it's fine. My generation pushed out the generation before it, and I guess it's my turn now — my turn to flee into the sinewy embrace of the "old hags" who waited patiently year after year for me to realize that my wiry hair accented by the receding hairline, my ballooning paunch, my wincing visage in the face of the DJ's earnest "nostalgic hits" that I swear I heard only a few months ago, are all neither welcome nor cute in the bars.

Speaking of Zoomers, my own generation is odd. It's a neglected micro-generation called "Xennials." Look it up! We exist. We're sandwiched between Generation X and Millennials. Now Millennials are also supposedly too old, and soon they'll come waddling into the oldie bar after me. But beyond being forgotten in the mix of two very loud, two very raucous generations, my identity as a gay Xennial has also been a nebulous, weird thing to me.

I grew up in the 90s accepting things like Don't Ask Don't Tell, where it was OK to be gay, but don't talk about it, OK? And DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) was around, and DOMA meant that it was fine for gay people to have "civil unions," but we shouldn't get fully married because, you know, that's not cool. Do people still say "cool?" I haven't heard anyone say it in ages. Anyway, beyond these policies, the West was navigating a precarious relationship with Russia post-Iron Curtain, and we were also mitigating a diminishing social landscape made possible by the exponential growth of the internet. The 90s were really transitional, man, and I'm still traumatized by it.

Much of this uncertainty left me feeling profoundly conflicted in several ways, and I didn't have any help from the Big Two generations, including their gays: Generation X gays (and frankly all gays before them, too) are really loud & proud about their homosexuality — and rightfully so! — and Millennial gays are really subdued & mellow about their homosexuality, and Millennials used to be the future at one point, so I should probably emulate their reserved attitude, right? I don't know. I don't know where these 'tudes leave me, or how I'm supposed to think. Anyway, the point of this stream of consciousness is that I now visit the "oldie" bar, and I take the bus there because drunk driving no longer exists under Millennial law — ridesharing made drunk driving a thing of the past — and Generation X always drove drunk in any case, but that never meant that I had to follow their outdated example(s) either. So public transit is my option since I don't really fit in with drunk driving nor with ridesharing, especially since I'm too poor for it anyhow, and thank heavens for public transit, am I right?!

And so after visiting the oldie bar as I do every week, I watched Groove Armada's video, and I thought about how the girl in this video kinda reflected my mood, being alone in the middle of the night, stumbling onto the streets, mais mon Dieu qu'elle est belle quand coule son rimmel, and it's true because the bartender gave me a lovely compliment last night about how my eye make-up "pops" every week when I show up to our little haunt.

And then I saw the number of views on this video: a measly twenty-four thousand. And then I felt profoundly neglected and confused all over again.

According to Wikipedia, Groove Armada has been around since 1996. They've probably made so many hits before & after "Paper Romance," but Paper Romance must have somehow got lost in the shuffle — just like me.

Just like me.

Anyway, tmills, the original uploader of the music, probably doesn't even remember sharing his lil' ol' album. If you're reading this post, buddy, then thanks for the tunes! You also added Neon Indian's "Polish Girl" to the album, but I already had that song, so it's been a duplicate track in my library for ages now. I bet you also didn't know that Neon Indian, or at least the main talent from Neon Indian, comes from San Antonio too, just like me. Just. Like. Moi!

And as an epilogue to this whole journey, according to Wikipedia's entry for Neon Indian, an ex-girlfriend to the main talent in Neon Indian apparently conceived their very name, "Neon Indian." Their band's whole identity was borne of an ex-girlfriend, a lady whom I've discovered, after some light stalker-ish investigation, is also the sister of a guy that I used to date several years ago. Worlds collide, right? There's probably an anecdote here about identity and barely missed opportunities, but I've done enough instrospection in this post. Sayonara, all!

[straydog733]

Reading Resolution: “Our Happy Hours, LGBT Voices from the Gay Bars”, Collected by S. Renee Bess and Lee Lynch

13. A collection of short stories: Our Happy Hours, LGBT Voices from the Gay Bars Collected by S. Renee Bess and Lee Lynch

List Progress: 20/30

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, after I received it as part of a blind giveaway at an independent bookstore in Oakland, which feels very fitting. Our Happy Hours, LGBT Voices from the Gay Bars is obviously about bars, but often makes references to bookstores, community halls, clubs and online forums, all places that queer people gather with each other to form communities. Our Happy Hours was compiled in 2017, in direct response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. Through fiction, non-fiction and poetry, writers process their feelings about the massacre itself, about their relationship with gay bars in general, and about their communities. Collected by S. Renee Bess and Lee Lynch, who both have stories included, the anthology strives to paint a picture of what these social institutions mean to people, for better or for worse. And on the whole, this collection does a good job.

Multi-author anthologies are always hit-or-miss and your enjoyment of them is largely dependent on how you respond to each individual writer’s style, which is a big gamble to take. While Our Happy Hours didn’t always knock it out of the park, the success percentage was definitely higher than many collections I’ve read, and I don’t recall many true low points. The fact that Bess and Lynch’s respective stories were among my favorites makes me think that having good writers at the head of the project definitely helped the collection as a whole. These are my top recommendations

“Omar Mateen’s Shirtless Pics Make Me Sad” by Clay Kerrigan

“On the Sidewalk in Front of Kellers” by Richard Natale

“Black and White Strobe Lights” by Rebekah Weatherspoon

“A Night Beyond the City Limits” by Renee Bess

“At a Bar in the Morning” by Lee Lynch

“Chances” by Shelley Thrasher

“Sharon’s Lookout” by Anne Laughlin

“All I Never Said” by Patrick Coulton

“The Pulse” by Michael Ward

These particular stories stood out for being rich, evocative, and different. Because the downside of this anthology is that a lot of the stories are quite same-y. Despite being called “LGBT Voices”, the stories are majority lesbian with occasional gay male stories, and most of them are unambiguously positive. The stories that really jumped out to me were ones that addressed issues of racism, ableism and substance abuse within bar culture; being queer does not make something perfect. These nuanced takes avoided looking at the community with rose-tinted glasses, though still with a great deal of love.

I have never been someone with a regular place at gay bars, though I have very fond memories of Divas in Northampton, MA and The White Horse in Oakland, CA. These stories were written in the immediate aftermath of the Pulse shooting, and I am reading them during the Covid-19 pandemic, which is bound to change the face of bar culture for many years to come. But even in the face of trauma and disease in pain, there will always be a queer community out there for people to find a home. And I am glad that Our Happy Hours was able to record some of those moments in time.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.

[sapphicbookclub]

Author Spotlight: Shannon McGee

I’m happy to spotlight an author of our future book club read! Shannon McGee who wrote Of Gryphons and Other Monsters and Of Dragon Warrens and Other Traps, talks about what and how much representation affects LGBT people. Read on if you’re interested in just how similarly we all feel when turning to specific representation in media.

How Representation Affected My Coming Out Process

Growing up I was shy. I had a very tight relationship with my family, but I wasn’t great at talking with people outside of it. I even went through a few years where I was That Kid™ who had a stack of books on either side of her desk and didn’t talk to anyone. As I was trying to find myself, I had an almost gluttonous attitude towards books. Books helped me understand not only other people, but also myself. They gave me the courage to form real connections by showing me the ways in which we’re all alike.

I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in a time with a surplus of kick-butt females in books—not to mention television. Those books gave me role models who were loving, smart, funny, reserved, and strong. Lady knights and California mediators alike showed me that there were all kinds of ways to be a woman and that none of them detracted from my potential bad-assery.

However, there was one aspect of myself that I could never seem to find represented in the way I desperately wanted. My books never seemed to show me how to fall in love with a girl and not have that be my whole life. With the Amazon.com nowhere near the comprehensive powerhouse that we know and love/hate today, and Barnes and Nobles’ “LGBT” section consisting of one shelf of books tucked in next to the “Self-Help,” section, my choices in queer books always seemed to boil down to teenage depression or adult pornography. It was discomfiting, to say the least.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there’s no place in the world for those stories. Normalizing sexuality between women gets a big A+ from me. As an adult who has become fully comfortable with myself, I’ve read my fair share of romance novels. I can also see the necessity writing about girls who come out and are subsequently thrown out by their family. Stories about girls who profess their love to a friend and get rejected are relatable as all get out.

Some people really need to read those stories. They need to read that yes the sexual aspect of their sexuality is valid, and also yes finding love when you’re not straight can be hard and the pain of rejection feels unbearable and that’s all normal too.

As an unemployed teenager who wasn’t “out” yet, romance books were not an option. Even if I had wanted to read adult romance novels, (which I didn’t, gay or straight) I wasn’t about to ask my mom to buy me a book where two women were having sex—heck no. And I definitely wasn’t interested in a book which was basically designed to make me cry. Pass.

As someone who used books to help me see the heights of what was possible, what I gathered from this selection of books was that loving women was either raunchy—not my bag—or… survivable. Which was bleak. It made the idea of coming out even more nerve-wracking. Especially since I had so little to go off of! What if I came out, and then realized I was wrong? All signs pointed to the fact that there was only one way to know for sure and whether I was or wasn’t the consequences would be huge and terrible.

As a lover of all things fantasy, what I really wanted to read was the hero’s journey. I wanted wise-cracking knights, gruesome but manageable dragons, and a hero defying the odds. I wanted action-packed fight scenes, and romantic professions of love with maybe some tasteful fade-to-black moments all wrapped up in a happy ending. I wanted all the things the other books promised me was possible as a straight girl. I just wanted the girl protagonist to fall in love with another woman by the end of the series. I wanted to know that was possible.

For a long time, I just gave up looking for that kind of content. It was too hard to root out. Instead, I put a pin into that aspect of myself. It wasn’t exactly something people talked about, it wasn’t something I could try out without hugely terrible consequences, and I couldn’t read about it to get a better idea of if those consequences were worth it, so I just had to resign myself to never knowing.

I dated boys. When I didn’t want to kiss my first or second boyfriend I remember thinking, "Well this could mean anything.” I mean I could do it, there were just other things we could be doing besides stupid kissing. True, that wasn’t how the girls in the books felt about kissing their boyfriends, but maybe longing was something I would

grow into. Not wanting to hold my boyfriend’s hand or spend… any time with him… That didn’t have to mean anything.

Then, sophomore year of high school I kissed a girl at a party. We’d been drunk. Had that meant something? I still wasn’t sure. I took the pin out, and I went looking again.

By that time, the landscape of the internet was changing. Fantastic advancements had been made. Communities had formed. Lists of resources were being compiled. Fanfiction had roared into life. Tumblr? Click. Click. Wooh boy! I saw myself all over the place. For the first time I began reading my own thoughts coming from someone else’s brain. A stranger described the way my insides rolled when the girl with the short brown hair looked up and smiled at me. They talked about how falling in love with her didn’t hurt, and how it felt like warm sunlight in my chest. They wrote about suddenly understanding why people were so ga-ga over kissing, when it never meant anything before.

It meant something, and it didn’t have to mean something bad. Over the next four years I came out.

These days I have a “Battleaxe Bi” pin attached to a string of rainbow crystals that hang from the rearview mirror in my car. However, to start, my coming out was slow, and to only a select group of people. Don’t ask don’t tell culture was still really prevalent, and in a lot of ways it was how I lived my life.

I have a lot of thoughts on what it means to be a writer who is also a part of the LGBTQA+ community. For me, part of being a writer means being vulnerable. It means taking out some of your more personal hopes and dreams and sharing them to see if anyone else can relate. Growing up without seeing a lot of my own feelings represented, I understand fairly acutely why that vulnerability is important.

With that in mind, I’d been writing for years by the time I came to Taryn’s story, and it was normal for me to write my characters with my shared experience of being queer. It was basically a given. Whether they were fluid, bi, or a lesbian, if I was going to write a character she was going to like women in some way.

Still, when I came to the decision that I would be publishing this story, I had a few concerns. I think a lot of them boiled down to that old anxiety that my experiences were… well… abnormal. I mean, I still wasn’t finding many queer books at the bookstore. And what if it was worse? What if who I was truly was hate-worthy?

By 2015 seeing queer characters was becoming mainstream, and that filled me with joy, but I had also seen the backlash. Videos on Youtube of Naomi and Emily on Skins and Brittany and Santana on Glee had just as many negative comments as positive. Over the course of my life, among other things, I’d witnessed a girl I only knew in passing get kicked out when she came out, and I’d seen a friend’s grandmother harangue her on Facebook, saying she was going to Hell.

As someone who generally flew below the radar, I was afraid of being targeted and rejected.

I didn’t even advertise “Of Gryphons and Other Monsters” as a queer book before it came out, except in specific places online and to specific family members. It’s funny. Even though at its core I wanted my writing to show Taryn being a lesbian didn’t make her different I also desperately wanted readers to have a chance to get to know Taryn before finding out she was gay. I didn’t want either of us to be pigeon-holed.

Sometimes I joke that I basically used “Of Gryphons and Other Monsters” to come out to my extended family. I didn’t tell basically any of them who she was going to fall in love with. I just let them read the book and find out. They didn’t care. Turns out, it wasn’t a big deal to them, not like it was to me.

Once “Of Gryphons and Other Monsters” was out in the world though I finally let those fears go. Reviews came in and people reached out and said they loved her. I realized that I’d been acting out of a fear that was built into me in a different time. A fear based in sensibilities that we’re moving away from at a wonderfully brisk pace. Never fast enough, but faster than I can believe sometimes.

After that realization I felt way more comfortable marketing “Of Gryphons and Other Monsters,” and “Of Dragon Warrens and Other Traps,” as exactly what they were: Queer YA Fantasy. The response was immediate. My sales sky-rocketed. Turns out, in couching who Taryn was, not only was I doing myself a disservice, but I was also doing a disserve to everyone else out there who was looking for that same validation I sought as a teenager.

I know we’re not there yet, but I truly believe that we are rapidly approaching a time when that specific kind of loneliness and isolation of being a kid and not seeing your love portrayed—anywhere at worst, or as lewd or depressing at best—is vanishing. Already Garnet, Korrasami, and Bubbline are on my television—cartoon characters meant for kids, not adult character co-opted for lack of better options. My Goodreads “Want to Read” section is brimming with books starring queer ladies. The storylines available today are an ever broadening and deepening river that I get to swim in the rest of my life, and it’s only going to get better.

If you’re reading this and you’re a writer who wonders if people really want to read that gay fantasy book you’ve been writing… there are a lot of us out here, and we are always ravenous for more content. Please write. Please share. We are interested.

(As a side note: I wrote the first rough draft of this blog post before looking over past Author Spotlights and I almost laughed out loud at the common theme in our writing—we don’t want our sexuality to be the defining characteristic of our books. It’s important and in some ways it shaped me into who I am, but to quote Cosima of Orphan Black, “My sexuality is not the most interesting thing about me.”)

You can find Shannon on:  Twitter @WriterSTMcgee - Instagram @aquanaba - Facebook at facebook.com/shannontaylormcgee - website   shannontmcgee.com