My favorite lesbian books read in 2012
Including the categories Fiction, Graphic Novel, SF/F, Young Adult, Erotica, and Nonfiction.
this is s good list. check it out.
I’ve read The Abandoned by Ross Campbell. I highly recommend.
i am tired of people insisting that how jkr revealed dumbledore’s queerness is or can be enough
because you know what? the only people who gonna know about it are us, those who read the books as they were written, those who watched tv and listened to the news and read newspapers or internet articles around the time of the reveal, and learned about it that way
but give it another ten years, and these interviews won’t mean shit. the only readers and fans of harry potter who are gonna know that albus dumbledore is gay are the ones who will actively seek out additional information about the books. who will go on wikipedia or jkr’s website or somewhere else to dig interviews and bonus info about the characters
hell even right now my nephew’s reading the books and there is no way for him to know unless somebody tells him. my cousin—his mother—won’t tell him because she doesn’t know either, and if she did she wouldn’t because she’s homophobic as hell. and i am afraid to tell because she might be seriously angry with me if i do. however, if it was right there in the books, there’s nothing she could’ve done about it! he would find out it from the book, maybe from harry himself, and that could’ve, would’ve made him think
i don’t know if it’s western-centric view of the world, where people forget how many households still don’t have computers or access to the internet. or maybe it’s us in the fandom who can’t imagine not wanting to seek out additional information. maybe it’s not thinking ahead and forgetting that only the text itself usually perseveres (well in our age all these interviews are gonna be preserved but who’s gonna seek them out?) and it’s also the matter of vicious circle where in a non-english speaking fandom there might not be enough interest to actually translate this bit of information and spread it around, therefore denying the queer part of the fandom this bit of visibility
and the thing is, do you not see how ridiculous it sounds? if it’s so easy to ensure queer folks don’t even realise they’re being represented in these books, it’s not representation at all. queer visibility MUST MAKE US VISIBLE. MUST MAKE US UNIGNORABLE. UNDENIABLE. or it’s meaningless.
Released today!
PROJECT UNICORN, VOLUME ONE is a collection of thirty young adult short stories featuring lesbian heroines. As ghosts and witches, aliens and vampires, the characters in this extensive and varied collection battle monsters and inner demons, stand up to bullies, wield magic, fall in love, and take action to claim their lives–and their stories–as their own.
Written by wife-and-wife authors Jennifer Diemer and Sarah Diemer, this volume of stories, with genres ranging from science fiction and fantasy to the paranormal, is part of Project Unicorn, a fiction project that seeks to address the near nonexistence of lesbian main characters in young adult fiction by giving them their own stories. PROJECT UNICORN, VOLUME ONE contains the full first three collections of Project Unicorn stories: The Dark Woods, The Monstrous Sea and Uncharted Sky.
Available On:
Amazon (for Kindle)
Barnes and Noble (for Nook)
Smashwords (for all other eReaders + online reading)
Createspace (paperback)eReader edition on Etsy (all proceeds to authors)
Signed paperback on Etsy, PLUS free eReader edition!
(all proceeds to authors)There are countless young adult books in existence. And among those many stories, there are very few which contain lesbian main characters. If we were to look at YA books as a reflection of the teenage population, we’d have to assume that there were only a handful of lesbian teens in existence.
And that’s simply not true.
There are so many amazing, vibrant, heroic young ladies who spend every single day living out their own stories. They go to school, hang out with their friends, get great or terrible grades, and they happen to date and fall in love with other girls. These ladies are not mythological figures or legendary creatures, but their virtual invisibility in young adult literature–the very genre meant for them–renders them as rare as unicorns.
When you’re invisible in your own cultural reflections, that suggests a few painful, though unstated, things: You don’t exist. You’re worthless, unimportant. You just don’t matter enough to have your own story.
That’s not true.
And we need to stop saying it’s true by not telling these stories.
We grew up as invisible lesbians. We went to our libraries, desperately searching for stories that reflected us, and found none at all. If the Internet had existed back then, we may have had a bit more luck finding that ever-rare lesbian YA book, but, unfortunately, we didn’t have that resource until Sarah was in her later teen years.
We know what it feels like to be relegated to invisibility.
It’s 2013. We can make instant coffee with the push of a button. We can touch screens and talk to our phones and do all sorts of awesome, space-age things, and we still don’t have lesbian main characters in young adult books. There’s something woefully wrong with this situation, and, as storytellers (and YA authors), we decided to do our part to change the trend.
And Project Unicorn was born.
Project Unicorn: A Lesbian YA Extravaganza! is a fiction project that seeks to address the near nonexistence of lesbian main characters in young adult fiction by giving them their own stories. For an entire year, we’ve pledged to put out two short stories each week, each with a lesbian heroine, and each a genre story (science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, paranormal, etc.).
This first volume collects the first three months of the project’s stories. Within these pages, you have girls who save themselves and each other, girls who rise up against terrible circumstances and find their own strength and courage, girls who deal with real-world problems and decidedly otherworldly ones…girls who live and love and create their own ever afters.
They are reflections of the real heroines who live and love today. Now. Everywhere. Lesbian girls who are not invisible at all, who matter deeply, who are cherished human beings.
This book is for every girl who has never found a story about someone like her.
These stories are for you. <3
Dear Liberal Allies – what your college courses on oppression didn’t tell you
I’m not angry or upset about anything in particular at the moment, but I thought I’d take a little time to write something out that had been bugging me about allies. It’s certainly not all-encompassing or totally comprehensive, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about in terms of being a good ally and a good neighbor, especially here on Tumblr.
Before you step in to help us out, I’d just like to clarify a couple things.
You and I, we may have taken the same seminars and maybe even read the same Audre Lorde excerpts or Ronald Takaki books, but know this: we learned very different things in very different ways
For students of color, for gay students, for trans* students, for the children of immigrants and refugees, these classes aren’t always about learning new concepts when it pertains to us. It’s more about learning the names of things we already knew fairly intimately. Do you understand that? You learned it another way. You went in, you got this set of key words and a list of definitions. Your learning was, in all likelihood, “Here is this word. This is what this word means.”
For you, it was “Xenophobia: a strong fear or dislike of people from other countries.”
For us, it was “Xenophobia: the time that boy in my kindergarten class spat on me because I couldn’t speak English yet. Or when I saw that clerk yell at my mom in the grocery store because her English wasn’t clear enough. Or when USCIS had us confirm our American citizenship with the same set of papers seven times over the course of sixteen years because they wanted to confirm that we were, in fact, actual American citizens.”
For you, it was, “Racism: unfair treatment of people who belong to another race; violent behavior towards them.”
For us, it was, “Racism: that one time I saw that manager tell that sales girl to follow my dad around at Kohl’s. Or that one time my neighbor’s kid got shot by the police and they tried to cover it up by convincing everyone he was in a gang because he was Hmong, but we knew he wasn’t. Or that one time my dad told me I shouldn’t rollerblade to the library because I’m not white and it’s not safe for me.”
For you, it was, “Homophobia: a strong dislike or fear of homosexual people.”
For us, it was, “Homophobia: that time in the sixth grade when Ryan shoved me against a glass door and banged my face in it while yelling, ‘faggot!’ at me until the teacher stopped him. Or when my Catholic high school’s president told me that, though he loved me as a child of God, he still believed I was sinful when I suggested that we start a GSA.”
For you, it was: “Classism: prejudice or discrimination based on social class.”
For us, it was: “Classism: that one time when my best friend came over to hang out in high school and her parents didn’t want her to come over again because they didn’t like our neighborhood. Or that one time when my friends had no idea what food stamps looked like and I was too embarrassed to explain what they were.”
So while you were learning that these academically-framed phenomena were real problems, we were just getting little figurative nametags for awful things that we already knew. Your weekly vocabulary list was, to us, just a hollow shadow of our lived experiences.
So my point is this:
If you didn’t live an experience, then step aside. Because we knew this stuff before our professors told us what to call it. We learned it from the bottom up, you learned it from the top down, and that’s not even a metaphor.
When you step out of class, you get to be like, “Oh, awesome. I am learning how to be a good ally and a better human being. This will help me.” For us, it’s more like, “Ah, so that’s what they’re calling it nowadays. When exactly did they say change was going to come for us?”
So in practice, here’s what all this theory looks like: you don’t always have to speak. I mean, certainly, you should totally call someone out on their oppressive bullshit. But if you identify as male, you don’t get to tell people what is best for women as though you have that authority. If you’re white, you shouldn’t be trying to “uplift” people of color by the grace of your intellect or your words. Nobody’s looking to be ‘rescued’ or ‘pulled up from out of their unfortunate circumstances’ as you may be tempted to believe.
All anybody’s looking for in an ally is someone who knows that “empowerment” means taking a step aside in a place where you know you have privilege. And if it is, for example, a PoC-to-PoC conversation, a woman-to-woman conversation, a queer-to-queer conversation, etc. about this stuff, and that isn’t who you are, you don’t need to be chiming in.
Just take our word for it, let us talk, and let us vent. We’d like you to give us room, and if you have to be helpful, then help make room for us by giving up some of your proverbial social girth.
Because the bottom line is that our academia has made a commodity of our lived experiences as teaching moments for you. And if you think your academic knowledge is more valid than our lived experiences, then you’re definitely not part of the solution.
Much love.
In which I write metaphors involving pizza about problematic writing
This post contains criticism of Steven Moffat, both his writing and his personal views as expressed on his Twitter. I’m putting it under a cut because I don’t want to inflict my views on people who aren’t interested in them. If you disagree with me and read on anyway, it’s a free interweb, but on your own head be it.
TW: Biphobia; monosexism; unchecked straight, monosexual, and male privilege; privilege denial; bisexual stereotypes; gendered stereotypes; gender essentialism; sexism; references to sexual harassment
Spoilers for Coupling
Let’s look at the twitter thing from the beginning
These are the tweets from Moffat that started the whole debacle surrounding sexualities. If you just look quickly, and isn’t very familiar with LGBTQ rights, this looks like a pretty cool thing. Because the Doctor doesn’t care about sexualities, and that’s… good. But this isn’t what this implies. He claims that The Doctor doesn’t see sexuality, and doesn’t understand it, and needs to have it explained to him. This is problematic because The Doctor has encountered a pretty decent number of non straight characters over the years. He was the one who explained Jack’s sexuality to Rose, he was aware of when Shakespeare was hitting on him and he knew and was aware of that present day academics are discussing Shakespeare’s sexuality.
The Doctor: Come on! We can have a good flirt later!
William Shakespeare: Is that a promise, Doctor?
The Doctor: Oh, fifty-seven academics just punched the air. Come on.
He knows of Human sexuality, knows how it works, and knows about the discussions surrounding it. If anything, my guess would be that he has a better grasp of it than we do, since he’s been following humanity for such a long time he ought to have a good understanding of the history of oppression and the problems that present day queer people still are faced with. Why doesn’t he already have a universal marriage setting on that screwdriver of his?
