#lgbt books

[makingqueerhistory]

Dinner on Monster Island: Essays

Tania de Rozario

In this unusual, engaging, and intimate collection of personal essays, Lambda Literary Award finalist Tania De Rozario recalls growing up as a queer, brown, fat girl in Singapore, blending memoir with elements of history, pop culture, horror films, and current events to explore the nature of monsters and what it means to be different.

Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to "banish the evil" from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren't just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere--including your own family and community--and look just like you.

Dinner on Monster Island is Tania's memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore--where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic. As she pulls back the veil on life on the small island, she reveals the sometimes kind, sometimes monstrous side of all of us. Intertwined with her experiences is an analysis of the role of women in horror. Tania looks at films and popular culture such as Carrie, The Witch, and The Ring to illuminate the ways in which women are often portrayed as monsters, and how in real life, monsters are not what we think.

(Affiliate link above)

[sapphicbookclub]

Author Spotlight: Talia Bhatt

We're excited to highlight Talia Bhatt, author of the current club read Dulhaniyaa. Read on to hear how her identity and experiences informed her writing, and how queer love is a jailbreak.

“Desi trans lesbian” feels, sometimes, like an ephemeral identity.

I am situated nowhere transhistorically and barely transculturally, having to borrow the language, social trappings, and forms of identification of the nation(s) that colonized and impoverished mine to even express my embodiment and positionality coherently. In a world where Afsaneh Najmabadi can pose the question “Is any one of you a lesbian?” to a room full of Iranian transsexual women and get blank stares, as she relates in Professing Selves, or where Deepa Mehta notes in her groundbreaking lesbian romance Fire that Hindi lacks even a word to express the concept of a woman loving another intimately, romantically, carnally, I am unmoored and unfixed, an anomaly because I dare to imagine my transsexuality independent from men.

“Woman are for men”, assumes every culture with harsh patriarchal contradictions—which does not entirely exclude the West—and trans women doubly so, since the abhorrence of non-heterosexual modes of living and social organization leads many from cultures like mine to presume that a woman would only transition to be with a man. A profound loneliness dogs my very existence, alerting me to the wispy shadows of a shrouded past that barely had a record of women like me prior to the midpoint of the 20th Century, only whispers and rumors and sensationalist gossip scrawled in academic journal by Esther Newton, alluding to the idea of a “man” that, having availed of hormones and surgical interventions, now sleeps with lesbians—the scandal. 

No ancestors that are mine to claim.

Dulhaniyaa is not a particularly melancholy book, though a certain pensiveness pervades the opening chapters. There a story within the story written in subtext, in allusions and word choices and snippets of dialogue, that Esha and Billu and Dolly and others are aware of: my homeland, my motherland, my culture and my nation and my state—it is not a place for queer women. It is certainly, emphatically, not a place for a trans woman who fancies herself still attracted to other women, or even indelibly non-binary in a way. Women like us have no names, no pasts, and almost certainly no futures within the narrow confines of the constructed and stifling heterosexual hegemony.

A reviewer was kind enough to sum up Dulhaniyaa for me better than I ever could, stating triumphantly that “Queer love is a jailbreak.” It’s a quote that has stuck with me both for how simply it states a core theme that I certainly labored to convey without necessarily consciously meaning to, as well as for how profoundly vast and unencompassable the prison I find myself in is. My shackles are Time and Language itself, my cell the land I was born in, my wardens its people. I am a refugee in a sense that many, many queer and especially trans people tend to be, evicted and disowned and erased from hearth and homeland.

I wrote Dulhaniyaa because someone broke me out of that cell. She saw the woman I was as well as the woman I could be, and helped me bridge the gap between the two. She is now my wife.

Queer love is a jailbreak. Get your pickaxes ready.

[marsfandoms]

OMG "The Sunshine Court" is already released and somehow I didn't realise?!?!?!?!?!?.!.!?! *Runs immediately to buy, download and reeeeeeeeeead* 😍

[fourthleafluck]

gothic horror + sapphic romance??? yes please???

Alexandra from The Haunting of Heatherhurst Hall by the fabulous @nothwell . This is the first side of a reversible keychain. Kit coming soon!

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Andrew Minyard- All for the Game by Nora Sakavic

Neil Josten- All for the Game by Nora Sakavic

[wiltkingart]

i've been rereading the no.6 novels

[dollhousefemme]

Mrs. S by K. Patrick

[queerism1969]

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

I just pre-ordered these and I have come here to YELL ABOUT THEM

We've got...

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa, a YA transmasc retelling of Pride and Prejudice

A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock, which is a queer horror with Frankenstein vibes about two dudes and their plant daughter

More Than a Best Friend (published as Don't Want You Like a Best Friend in America) by Emma R Alban, a historical sapphic best-friends-to-lovers story described as Bridgerton but with lesbians, with parent trap vibes

Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland, queer pirate adventure with OFMD vibes (Alexandra also wrote A Taste of Gold and Iron, which I really enjoyed and is also the only author in this list I know for sure is on tumblr, hello @ariaste)

[foundintheforgotten]

The Kickstarter campaign is LIVE HERE!

If you're interested in a sapphic, grimdark fantasy comic series featuring romance and horror, and older lady love interests, please consider checking our page out and pledging! If you are unable to, you can still help by spreading the word and reblogging!

We finally finished the sketch for our tarot card design!! What do you guys think? Spicy enough? It'll look even better when it's fully rendered!

[bi4bihankking]

The Locked Tomb Series Summary:

The “Lesbian Necromancers in Space” book series

The Murderbot Diaries Summary:

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

[makingqueerhistory]

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

Kit Heyam

Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives. Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

(Affiliate link above)

[thebibliosphere]

(ID in alt)

Hello Tumblr! I am posting this on behalf of the Queer Liberation Library, who don't yet have a Tumblr, but have promised me they're working on it. Some of you may remember them from the Twitter Poll I was involved in a few months ago where Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites beat multiple award-winning, trad-pub queer authors with a hefty 69% (nice).

For those of you unaware, the Queer Liberation Library, or QLL, is an organization fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community.

And today, June 12th, 2023, they launched their fundraiser to try and reach 15k so that they can start purchasing digital licensing for queer media and hopefully open their digital doors to library patrons across the US in 2023 with as many queer and trans books as possible.

You can check out their newly redesigned website here:

(If you are in an unsafe space and need to exit the webpage quickly, there is a quick exit bar at the top that redirects to a weather page. When I spoke to them about their web design they were also open to accessibility suggestions and are potentially working on a dark mode for those of us who need it.)

If you know me, you know I am unequivocally pro-library, both as a reader and a queer writer. But with the current rise of homophobia, transphobia, and the proposed ban on books taking hold in certain States, the importance of having protected access queer books cannot be over-emphasized enough.

The QLL aims to protect that access, aiming to provide FREE access to queer and trans media (ebook and audio) to patrons regardless of location within the United States.

They are funded entirely through regular donations from their supporters and their now annual Pride fundraiser, where they hope to afford the cost of not just library books but also maintaining their web presence and staff.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this project is a labor of love for everyone involved and its importance.

And just to clarify, I am not involved in any way beyond raising awareness. When QLL reached out and asked me to retweet their fundraiser tweets, I readily agreed and offered to post about it on Tumblr because I believe in their mission and the world they are trying to build.

One where queer and trans books can't be banned or taken off of shelves because of bigotry and hatred.

If you would like to donate to the cause, you can do so here:

They've already surpassed their first 2k, and it'd be absolutely wonderful if we could help them reach their next milestone. And if you can't give, please consider signal boosting this post.

You can also follow QLL at:

Twitter: @queerliblib 

Instagram: @queerliblib 

Tiktok: @queerliblib

[mysweetsinfulobsessions]

HIJAB BUTCH BLUES by LAMYA H.

Alright, changing it up a bit with my book stuff but this one hit home with me. The author draws very interesting parallels between stories in the Quran and her experiences as a gay muslim woman that are very interesting. And if you think you can’t be muslim and gay, or wear a hijab and be gay, or even tackle muslim culture and queerness in one, then you’re bound to be pleasantly proved wrong with this one.

[jesncin]

Happy Trans Day of Visibility! This year I wanted to celebrate by showing you what Lunar Boy, our upcoming middle grade graphic novel, means to us as queer Indonesian representation: the thought process behind crafting a sci-fi Indonesian future that embraces queer history.

Pre-order Lunar Boy or add it on goodreads! Support QPOC creators and stories!

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Neil Josten- All for the Game by Nora Sakavic

Gideon Nav- The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir