QUEER AS FOLKLORE: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters
SACHA COWARD
Unbound
$25.00 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents which reveals the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.
Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.
Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.
To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Funny how the stories of queerness, of love between same-sex couples, are so very often found in "monster" tales, isn't it. I mean, the rise of vampire fiction as AIDS bit gay men hard is a tough sell as coincidence. Back a way we have Dr. Fankenstein building his perfect man, who then gets all freaked out because he isn't just like the other boys; we have the enduring folktale of Beauty and the Beast, as queer a metaphor as you can find; we have the Greek gods taking outlandishly unlikely forms to get off with humans.
And that's just the Western world.
In modern times there are the just barely clothed superheroes in comic-book or filmed form, flaunting their junk in our faces at $25 a ticket or graphic novel (aka comic book) with oblivious or deeply in denial boys of all ages perving on their favorite characters' amazing prowess without seeming to have a single introspective neuron firing. These hypermasculine avatars of (mostly) toxic masculinity go around destroying things with their unstoppable powers; what better way for these theater-loads of bottoms to get their desperate need to be dominated, wrecked, brutalized met safely and without admitting to themselves their need is deeply, deeply sexual? Likewise the astonishing-to-me rise of RuPaul and drag as mass entertainment...male parodies of femininity enacted for the audience's titillated amusement. There is no filmed entertainment of any sort that doesn't rely on the universal human lust for voyeurism. If I'm at all honest, that applies to literature and reading as well.
Those sour reflections out of the way, let's talk about the *fun* of it all.
The author's done a creditable job of assembling fun examples of myths and folktales that present queerness in a framework of plausible deniability, as has ever been the case. We've always been here...just have to listen to the quiet parts in between the blaring trumpets of heteronormativity. Only in recent times have we been able to say the quiet parts out loud, and it makes the control freaks and haters absolutely wild with fury that anyone could not want to be exactly like them.
Hm. I seem not to have left the sourness behind after all. Well, take the rough with the smooth, laddies and gentlewomen. I listen to unreflective heteronormativity all day every day. Listen to how it feels to be consciously aware of the receiving end of a microaggression for a change. It's never been what you meant, it's always been what the audience hears.
The audience for this survey course in queer identity is in for a treat in terms of the author's clear desire to bring us history burnished to a mellow, shadow-melting glow of inclusion. The care with which he draws lines between what modern people mean by queerness, and the often very different understandings of gender and sexuality people held in earlier times, is both commendable and clarifying. It enables us to respond honestly from within our framework to stories coming from a different framework. It's often done anecdotally, using reports of experience, so data-driven readers might not like this narrative choice. We're in the unabahedly popular arena in this book. Applying academic rigor to the way the author informs us of the existence and the resonances of queer icons in our (Western) cultural history is unwarranted.
Breadth and anecdotality (I think I just invented that word) are both strengths and weaknesses. As always. No tool cannot also function as a weapon. I did wonder at times where the heck Author Coward found his examples of modern peoples' resonances with the stories we inherited from the foreparents. At times this is my favorite thing about the read; at others, it feels...grafted on, placed too carefully to feel entirely natural.
I am mostly unhappy, to the extent I actually am, with the absence of world cultures' representation. I understand this isn't sold or described as about world cultures, but tell me in the subtitle..."The Hidden Queer History of Western Myths and Monsters, f/ex...that I'm not getting this broader focus. I promise I'd still buy and read it. So now you know where that last half-star went.
Still a good read, still a great gift, still something I want people to know is available for their amusement and edification.
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