TERRY DACTYL, trans girl's life from plague to plague

TERRY DACTYL
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.

Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.

Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It was my world, this one. The AIDS epidemic to COVID...yeah...my adulthood. So no, not the lesbian moms part, and I'm not trans, but it still feels very familiar if not very sweet and happy.

No book about this span is ever not going to center the experience of loss and grief. It was the fabric we cut our lives out of. It takes a lot of moxie to be openly trans, even now when you can imagine your lesbian moms being glad for you that you've found your Self, the real one. Terry never hides her identity. She is herself from giddy-up to whoa. It leads her into the loving embrace of her found family in New York just as AIDS begins scything them with its death sentence for being queer.

Why this is a book made for the run-up to Yule is it's about us who live in loss, who never get to be the happy little homebody, who always yearn for something gone beyond our reach. Its unconjoined nature makes it the right kind of read for a busy and distracted holiday...re-reading a sentence or two is absolutely ordinary in this book's world. What this read offers, in this "festive" season, is the company of someone who survived...without her loved ones. Terry's a survivor in the approving, tough and capable definition; also in the lonely, left-behind definition. As COVID threatens to ravage her world again, she retreats to her home in Seattle.

It's not her home. It's a different place with the same name. I relate...I'm from Los Gatos before Netflix, Austin before Infowars, Manhattan before 9/11. None of my homes are remotely the same as when I was growing into myself there. It was this fellow-feeling that kept me reading the non-linear, mosaic story that followed the vibes of the story not the plan of it.

Certainly an unusual choice to make, going home to weather a storm. I wish I'd been able to spend more time in her moms' company, and wanted some greater theme to emerge from their choices to give Terry's life a more theatrically-defined completeness. I know this story is more the way life is lived: moving from experience to experience while still working out what the hell just happened.

Completely successful on that measure. I'm glad I read the story. But now, please write something from Terry's mothers' point of view, please and thank you, Author Mattilda.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel, trans awakening story

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel
GRIFFIN HANSBURY
W. W. Norton & Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is always a class divide in capitalist societies. There are reinforced, heteronormative binaries; there are intense pressures to conform. In 1984, these things were unquestioned, and enforced by laws prohibiting "crossdressing" and enabling parents to abuse and harm their children physically and psychically to "straighten them out."

There was a lot more, but that's plenty for now, if you weren't there you should be glad you missed the AIDS deaths, the hoo-rah for Reagan shit, the pillaging of Social Security...oh dear, starting to sound familiar? Oh, I forgot: the war on workers, the plant closures, the pension-fund thefts....

None of that shit is foregrounded but it very much makes the attitude (transfem) Sylvia carries, downright truculent, make more sense than it already does. Melanie...Mel...is attracted to Sylvia for her serious edge, her survivor's black humor, her wealth of knowledge Mel wants and needs. Mel wants to become Max. Mel has no way to verbalize that, has no framework to put a new mind into, is reeling from the very existence of someone...someone she knows...holding a slightly skewed mirror to her thus showing that she is real, there are others.

Of course, capitalist patriarchy is not about to let Mel go.

I'm queer but not trans; I've known it since 1966 without knowing what it was or meant, just that it was me. As a male, my path was hugely easier than Mel's or even Sylvia's. I got threatened and bullied in school. No one ever followed through because I'm also large and tall. It was entirely bad enough; these characters would've given anything to be in my so-easy place. I hurt for them now, in this miraculously better world we've wrestled into being that can never be left to just run the right way because "They"...the god squad, the macho pindicks, the scumbag transphobes...will not allow it. Our lives, our happiness, our progress, all threaten "Them" in some inexplicable way.

I still don't get that. I have the one "christian" sister who said to my face (okay, my ear, it was by phone) that gay marriage threatened her church because "what if "They" make us perform a wedding?! It will diminish my marriage!"

I was more patient then and did not simply hang up and never speak to her again. We had a discussion, but I was so sick with rage that I remember little of it except telling her that if someone sued their church to force them to marry a couple queers I'd contribute heavily to their legal defense fund.

Again, this is mild compared to what the characters face in this story.

It's never been easy to be Other. It leads to the emotional and physical violence of being Othered. As the story moves from 1984 to 2019, I felt a lot of the emotional rawness, the highs and the lows, leaching out; the author wanted, like me, to make some points, and in the context of a novel that drains dramatic tension below optimal levels. It doesn't ever recover, though. We get a satisfactory ending where from the jump I was primed by the intensity of the story for a satisfying one. It's not bad, it's not poorly thought out; it just didn't go to the next level. Things like Mel becoming Max don't resonate like the woofers at a concert because we never delve, or even dabble, in the dysphoria inherent in transness pre-transition; we don't get, let's say, the bathroom-usage nightmares that make the pervasiveness of transphobia and its implicit capacity for potential lethality immediate.

So I land on four stars and strongly recommend you give this (after some probing questions, though) to someone trans you know and love. I think they'll really mean the thank you they offer.

AUGUST WAS #WITMONTH...NOW IT'S SEPTEMBER, NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH

AUGUST 2025 was a very satisfying #WITMonth! My goal was writing at least 30 reviews of works translated by, or written by and then translated, from women the world around sourced from the DRC aggregators.

End of celebration report: thirty-two (32) posted, two ahead of my goal. As is always true, searching the tag "#WITMonth" on the blog, by clicking it at the bottom of this entry or by entering the text in the search box, will give you all the entries so tagged. You can also click right here.

There were standout reads, of course; fewer than I would've preferred, but including a strong contender for my 2025 six-stars-of-five accolade is The Remembered Soldier, a Dutch Great-War story of identity, of need and longing and love you can't imagine life without, all so precisely, sharply even, wrapped in that wooliest of media: Memory. There is nothing in any of that warbling of joy to detract from the amazing non-fiction work (So What) If I'm a Puta that tells the own-voices stories of transfem sex workers in Brazil. Transfem folk are at the highest risk imaginable for femicide. It's a tough, bleak read, but it left me fully aware of how easy it is for transphobic...people...to do their ugly, hateful work without knowing a fraction of the cost others must pay for it.

I'm delighted that August is going out on the happy note of a lovely stretch of just-right days with sun, breeze, not-hot not-cold temperatures, not-too-humid (I live on the beach, humid gonna happen) air. It's like it was before climate change really began biting us.

So, September is #NationalTranslationMonth, which I'll be leaning into for my reviewing. I'll include women's translations as new ones pop up, hashtagging with both #NationalTranslationMonth and #WITMonth to be sure they're discoverable from every abgle. It won't be as focused a push, but will definitely be noticeable. No goals set so I'm not pressuring myself to accomplish something; I'll just be taking extra note of a book's origins.

And with that, I'll wish global-northerners a happy incoming fall and global-southerners the same for spring! Excellent reading mojo for all, of course.

(SO WHAT) IF I'M A PUTA: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire, starting #WITMonth with a, umm, bang

(SO WHAT) IF I'M A PUTA: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire
AMARA MOIRA (edited and tr. Amanda De Lisio & tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An incisive, intimate diary of the life of a travesti sex worker in Brazil, with a foreword by Charlotte Shane

So What If I’m a Puta, originally published on author Amara Moira’s popular blog of the same name, consists of 44 crônicas that wryly portray her experiences as a trans sex worker in Brazil. In a brazen, funny, and at times heartbreaking voice, Moira explores the political and personal textures of her encounters with the men who buy sex from her, and the complex reality of her labor of a sort of love.

Woven through Moira’s essays are reflections on transition, safe sex, desire, whorephobia, consent—in the grim context of Brazil’s record rates of violence against trans women. Ultimately, Moira writes to center trans sex workers in Brazil’s putafeminist movement, modeling a feminism that envisions inclusivity, safety, self-determination, and joy for us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Self-determination, personal autonomy, individual freedom, call it what you like: It is the central fact in the competing ideologies of high-control and laissez-faire systems of social organization duking it out around the world of 2025. Spoiler alert: It's always going to fall short for one side's happiness and comfort. I myownself want it fall shortest for the high-control (usually religious) fascist slime.

There. I'm out of the closet. I want what "They" claim to want, the PTB out of my personal business, telling me who I can fuck, marry, or vote for. What "They" want is to impose more control on people they don't like, eg women, queers, other religions, and that will make "Them" happy. No it won't. Read Amara's words.

Her clients for sex services are very high-control men, from (I suspect) the same background as the other fascists though that is only inference on my part. The stories of the services they require of Amara, a woman in their eyes, aren't any surprise to any woman reading the book.As a cisqueer man i'm not going to assume I get what these cishet men are after because I'm not after it. I'll say that every single woman I've ever known well enough to have this kind of subject arise in our conversations has a story like at least one of Amara's stories...men who get joy(?) from overriding her wishes, aka rape, all the weird psychosexual kinks all people have...it's part of her job as a puta (whore in English) to meet them. Or so the men buying access to her body assume.

The huge tragedy in this is transphobia. It leaves women like Amara outside the moral indignation circle "feminists" like the hateful wizard-book lady draw to protect women from abuse and exploitation. It leaves these women open to the rage-filled hate of their clients, often leading to femicide, that evil act of gendered violence.

Those gender essentialists are complicit in each and every crime committed against transfem or transmasc people. If you are a gender essentialist, do not tell me so and expect to receive any respect or even tolerance for your hateful belief.

Amara Moira's blog, this epitome of it brought into English by the amazing Bruna Dantas Lobato (whose work I've praised in those linked reviews) and Amanda De Lisio (who both edited the blog entries and assisted in translation), takes back control of her narrative. She is the embodiment of self-determination, lacking throughout this read even a whiff of victimhood. And honestly, if Author Amara wanted to play the victim card, I would say nothing against it. She has too much integrity for suchlike nonsense, though.

The only quibble I have is the same one I have with all fix-ups of shorter works: It gets repetitive. The book clocks in at under 200pp, so it isn't a deal-breaker for me. I do not know how better to convey my sense of the importance of this read than to say: If ever you're going to say a transphobic word, don't open your yap until you've gotten to know a trans person.

Start here.

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN, a story I love but a novel I don't

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN
KATHERINE BRYANT
Walrus Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1927, the beautiful city of Berlin is the gay capitol of the world. Ruth, a performer at one of the nightclubs in the city, and her girlfriend, Tillie, are living their lives and enjoying the freedom of the Weimar Republic. They are surrounded by a chosen family that includes drag performers, transgender women, and the prominent physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Ruth, Tillie, and their best friends, James and Ernesto spend much of their time at the Institute for Sexual Science, the hub of the queer community in the twenties and early thirties.

As the '20s come to a close, Tillie watches her father, a prominent lawyer, as he becomes more entrenched with the Nazi Party. Working in his law office as his secretary, she meets prominent figures in the Nazi Party, including Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and becomes increasingly concerned as time passes that there is much more at stake than just her relationship with Ruth, who is also Jewish.

Tillie becomes privy to the planning of rallies, the plans the Nazi party is making in order to ensure Nazi victories in major elections, and how the Nazis are taking over Germany one neighborhood at a time. The novel jumps between the twenties and thirties and the early nineties and a young woman named Thea. Thea is dealing with the onset of her grandmother's dementia, and discovers secrets hidden away that her grandmother never intended for her to uncover.

Alternating between Tillie's perspective during the '20s and '30s as the Weimar Republic slowly gives way to a dictatorship and Thea's perspective in the '90s as the secrets of her grandmother's history come to light, Give My Love to Berlin follows the lives of two gay couples—Tillie and Ruth, and their best friends, James and Ernesto—trying to navigate falling in love, thriving in their community, and coming to terms with the danger they are in just by being who they are.

The author wrote this book for several reasons, mainly because she had never heard of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, or his work and she did not know that Berlin had been such a huge part of gay culture. After the 2016 election, the author could see parallels between the vitriol for the queer community in many parts of the United States and the way queer people were being treated as the Nazis gained power, particularly in Berlin. Now, with all the anti-drag and anti-transgender legislation, it is more important than ever to tell these stories so we can keep them from repeating in the future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The reviews of this book on Goodreads are very divided. Many apparently Jewish reviewers seem to take exception to the author's inclusion of queer people as victims of the Holocaust. Many others seem to dislike the wooden prose. I'm in the latter camp. (Pardon the wordplay.)

It's a great idea for a book, one that would've come across better had it felt less like research notes made to fit...poorly...around fictional standards. It's not clear to me that all the plot points were thought through...why would a woman working for literal Nazis ever question a trans person feeling threatened anywhere at all?...so I was left with the idea that this story seized the author's imagination but didn't get the mulling time, or followed editorial guidance, to smooth some of the burrs on its edge.

I was utterly repelled by the amount of sexual violence, as I know I was expected to be; the response to it from every character seemed...off. One does not just seamlessly drop the horror of sexual violence. It's ordinary to mask the trauma as a survival mechanism, but this felt more like just being okay with it. Again, I think this is more about the author not taking enough time to think these issues through, or not having (or heeding) editorial feedback.

If the author ever revisits the story with a strong editorial eye, this could be a good, interesting, involving novel. As it is, this is not a great read. I'm disappointed and saddened to say it.

BECOMING A VISIBLE MAN, 2nd edition, still nothing like it

BECOMING A VISIBLE MAN
JAMISON GREEN
Vanderbilt University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a clear and logical style, Becoming a Visible Man tackles the history, biology, medicine, philosophy, and politics that claim to define and control gender in the US.

Profoundly personal and eminently practical, Jamison Green clarifies transgender experience for transgender people and their families, friends, and co-workers. Medical and mental healthcare providers, educators at every level, business leaders, and advocates seeking information about transgender concerns can all gain from Green's integrative approach to the topic. This book candidly addresses the emotional relationships that are impacted by a transgender transition, and brings refined integrity to the struggle to self-define, whether one undergoes a transition or chooses not to.

Emphasizing the lives of transgender men (who are often overlooked) he elucidates the experience of masculinity in a way that is self-assured and comforting, not demanding or threatening. Self-acceptance and health are always at the core of his message. Green's inspirational wisdom has informed and empowered thousands of readers with knowledge and compassion. There is still no other book like it in the transgender library.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Most people are profoundly unaware of the entire experience of being outside the gender binary in a world totally predicated on it. I was one, until I wasn't anymore, and like the "eww-ick" homophobes I've known and known of over the years, I had no idea how my ignorance would come across to the trans people I knew and know.

It is worth an empathetic look into the lived experience of the people you're Othering.

This is the second edition of a book now twenty years old. It helps to understand that; it helps to know that, while some things have changed, more have not...or have not for the better. Reading Author Green's personal story of knowing he was a man yet having the body of a woman is deeply moving. It is important to learn this from a person whose gender dysphoria was severe enough that the long, complicated road to gender-affirming treatment was the best option. For anyone who thinks this is a simple thing, read this book.

A lot of Author Green's impact on the conversation around trans issues stems from being willing to educate others about the topic. This is very much a book aiming to teach...at times a bit too determinedly so, hence that missing half-star. It can feel overwhelming. It has taken me literal years to read the book. It is, for me, an occasion of deep shame to realize how in my ignorance I was insensitive to my trans siblings. So learning the parameters of the experience of being trans has been a difficult reckoning, a hard catharsis, and a reason to look deep inside myself.

I know many are now looking at this and shuddering, thinking "no thanks." I would have as well. I did, apart from small bursts, for a long time. Not greatly to my credit I've chosen the first Pride Month of the Felonious Yam's second regime to finish and review it.

If you're having trouble seeing how this can even be a thing, try this analogy I found in the book. I'm paraphrasing here but: biosex is the hardware; cultural gender roles are the software; one's internal gender identity is the operating system that communicates between them and is the "user interface."

It's hugely helpful to me to have a simile to turn to for deeper understanding. What this does is offer a way in to "getting" how issues can arise in any of these ways of existing in the world. It also acts as a powerful reminder that there is not one single way to be literally anything in this world. All of life is in spectrums. We're educated in the US...in the religious-nut-capitalist world more generally...to see binaries, of which there are few. They're very comforting for lazy or stupid people but if science has taught us nothing else it's taught us that comfort is only bought at the exorbitant price of ignorance.

The annotated bibliography is quite something. The idea of all these sources existing in spite of every attempt to silence or disappear them by the screaming bigots is impressive. It also helps explain the screaming bigots' urgency in erasing us all. Information leads people to learning, and the habit of mind we call learning is the most potent weapon against the unreasoning hatred that is required for fascism and authoritarians to rule.

Resist them. Learn about the facts of transness from someone who lives it, and is willing to teach you when you're ready to be taught.

THE DEFAULT WORLD, like the title, the story repays more introspective thought

THE DEFAULT WORLD
NAOMI KANAKIA
Amethyst Editions (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A trans woman sets out to exploit a group of wealthy roommates, only to fall under the spell of their glamorous, hedonistic lifestyle in tech-bubble San Francisco.

Years after fleeing San Francisco and getting sober, Jhanvi has made a life for herself working at a grocery co-op and saving for her surgeries. But when her friend (and sometimes more) Henry mentions that he and his techie festival-goer friends spent $100,000 to transform a warehouse basement into a sex dungeon, Jhanvi starts wondering if there’s a way to exploit these gullible idiots. She returns to San Francisco, hatching a plan to marry Henry for his company’s generous healthcare benefits.

Jhanvi enters a world of beautiful, decadent fire eaters and their lavish sex parties. But as her pretensions to cynicism and control start to fade, she develops a Gatsbyesque attraction to these happy young people and their bold claims of unconditional love. But do any of her privileged new friends really like or accept her? Her financial needs expose the limits of a community built on limitless self-expression, and soon she has to choose between doing what’s right, and doing what’s right for her.

This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the 21st-century's broken promises.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Goals and aspirations are like morals and principles: without them you're adrift, with them you're at risk, under their spell you're doomed. Stop introspecting and examining yourself, your mental construct, your inner dialogue, and see how fast the fall from the moral high ground comes.

Surfaces aren't very pretty after you've experienced what Jhanvi has. All that energy to become a surface version of a fantasy she's had locked in her head until it's eaten every other thought in there. Like Saltburn, like The Talented Mr. Ripley, this is open to a facile reading of "how awful these rich scum are" followed by "what a prick this grifter is."

Don't stop there.

How horrible a world do we live in when this kind of grift is the only way to get what that very world has conditioned you to think you want?

The dimwitted techies are awful; Jhanvi is horrible; but who here hasn't bought into the surface glamour of the world as it points its skeletal finger directly at your core of lack and absence, to say "fill that this way to be truly full at last?" It's seductive because it sounds easy and we want it to be true. It's neither. This is the beating heart of Author Kanakia's story.

The sheer chutzpah of writing across race and class and hotness boundaries about the things that both cross and reinforce those boundaries in such a direct narrative voice! That it comes out of a deeply unreliable narrator's mind. That it's entitled "The Default World." That Jhanvi's completely sure she's Right. That she never tips her hand...you can read Author Kanakia's story on any level you meet it at, come away sure that's The Right Way to see it, and no one can tell you otherwise. That is craft at an unusually high level.

Beware of Being Right. It is addictive and destructive and utterly blindingly grotesquely wrong.

I'm aware that a lot of people found this a challenging story to accept. I think that's excellent. I assure you Jhanvi is only fictionalized, not fictional. She's alive and well and grifting her heart out in reality more certainly now than ever when trans folk are under attack in 2025-Felonious-Yam Murruhkuh. I say, good on ya babay and more power to you in the quest to become yourself.

The big problem for the Jhanvis of the world, the Henrys and Katies of the world is discovering you *are* yourself already, and you don't like that person.

So why didn't I finish the book off with the rest of that fifth star? Because setting the story in the Aughties felt like Author Kanakia wanted to be safe, putting it at a distance. That was uncharacteristically cheap. But there's nothing to say others will feel that way.

BELLIES, Author Nicola Dinan's Polari-Prize winning first novel

BELLIES
NICOLA DINAN
Hanover Square Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER of the 2024 Polari First Book Prize

The Publisher Says: I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The depth of my youthful ignorance was forcefully recalled to me as I read this novel. I knew a transfem lady in my youth. I was utterly rejecting and actively unpleasant to her, a thing that recalling in my elderqueer years I view with horror at my cruelty.

If she is still alive (not a given for QUILTBAG people my age), I hope it is a life accompanied by a circle of people knowing her, giving her the fullest experience of being loved, accepted, and celebrated for being herself. It shames me what I thought, felt, and—mortifyingly—said to her when she came out to me. Living well is the best revenge. I hope she has had her revenge on me in spades these past five decades. My own trans family and friends have reason to thank her for bringing my unreasoning prejudice to the forefront to be confronted.

I came to this story, then, predisposed to find in it a measure of redemption. Not mine, but Ming's as she comes to realize transitioning is her only path forward to a fulfilling life..."I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space"...while knowing it means literally never going back to her birth family; and Tom's, as he comes into contact with an entirely new spectrum of identities just as being gay is really settling in as his honest identity. His gayness, kindness (edging into codependence), and almost desperate desire to help are deeply familiar to me. "I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren't right for me, and I'm just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people." So relatable!

Much as in Disappoint Me (q.v.), the heaviest desriptive lifting is being done in service of food. Like that book, it's always true that food descriptions are in a heightened register. Do not read this book while hungry. If you're wise, only do so after your favorite stick-to-your-ribs meal is on board and you have something dessertable on hand.

Like any story about being a young adult, still less one who is transitioning and one who is in love with someone making the transition, there are a lot of operatically heightened emotions flowing around. The friend group Ming and Tom create all have drama, upsets, ideas and opinions of Ming of Tom of Life...you remember. It's a messy, intense time. It's the meatiest chunk of a life well-lived, and these young folk are living it! I confess to feeling worn out by the intensity of it: "I'd spent years feeling happy to be nourished by Ming's light, so much so that I'd never asked what I could be for myself, only what I could be for her. I'd long suspected that Ming shone brighter than me, the same way I'd suspected Sarah {the girl he left for Ming} did, too". I suspect I supplied the intensity as Author Dinan reserves her descriptive riches more for food.

A beautiful, passionate evocation of one's early adulthood, replete with relatable drama, unimaginably brave and accepting people bound tighter than they ever will be again, and the most wonderful thing of all: Discovering Love.

DISAPPOINT ME, easily the title most easily misunderstood for #PrideMonth

DISAPPOINT ME
NICOLA DINAN
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it possible to love someone after you know their worst moments? Is it possible to love someone when you don't know their worst moments?

That's an existential question, applying to each and all of us. It's one to ask yourself when thinking about any relationship, including your relationship with yourself. Max is doing a lot of thinking about relationships to self, and to Truth, and to facts...and Vincent. She's been blindsided in her complex developing relationship to him. Add to this a quite conservative Chinese family (pretty much a trope heading into stereotype-dom at this point) that's honestly struggling (I mean struggling, and being honest about it) with her transfem identity, and to the past actions Vincent undertook that form a separate narrative strand.

When Max decides she is going to pursue a heteronormative identity, it came after a crisis in her life. This makes it feel a bit forced. If this had been something Max was mulling over, I'd've found its narrative suddenness a bit less jarring. That said, I'm actually kind of relieved not to have the narrative focus on Max's transition...it's happened, it's done, what's next? Vincent being okay with her transness was, dare I say it, a bit less startling than I was perhaps expected to find it. Until, that is, we move into a timeline of Vincent's past and discover what Max now learns; this event is going to change everything in the present as it did in the past.

What matters in all these deftly plucked strands of Author Dinan's story-web is the essential unknowability of one's emotional life once given into the hands of another. What we feel for the other, what is felt by the other, how all that will intertwine to make the web that couplehood sticks us to, what new information—truth, fact, realty—means in that web is where we're meant to focus. At times the quotidian world intrudes and distracts, or is allowed to intrude and distract. The attentive reader will notice register shifts in Author Dinan's prose from pleasantly descriptive to nearly florid at those moments. I'm assuming food is a comfort drug to Max and her found family....

Where do we end up in this web? In it. I read the book assuming I'd reach a conclusion to some of those issues raised above. I do not think quite a few people will find the openness of the ending, the real lack of closure for Max and, to a lesser degree of investment, Vincent, to be satisfying. I took a star off because I was not given a sense that, by the end, Max had any kind or sort of response, still less plan, to all she's learned. We simply...leave the story, trailing web-strands of it behind us.


Not a perfect read, then, but one I very much enjoyed. More from you soon, please, Author Dinan!

TRANS MEDICINE: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender, urgently needed explication of a subject most people do not "get"

TRANS MEDICINE: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
stef m. shuster
NYU Press
$28.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice

Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to "treat" gender identity today.

Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers' lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Gender-affirming care" is a phrase that, to me, ought to be unexceptionable, even anodyne. Instead it causes fury and terror among people who subscribe to high-control religious and social systems.

I've never understood why.

I'm an old, cisqueer, white guy. I participate in several streams of privilege. I have no tiniest sense that my privilege is in any way threatened by the existence and/or acceptance and/or celebration of people not like me. The threats to my privilege come from those who want to deny the legitimacy of any of the founts of the privileges I enjoy. Trans folk aren't among those people as far as I can tell.

And this is despite the long, tragic history of gender-affirming care's resisters. That same kind of control is what we all agree is terrible about anti-Semitism. But it's okay when directed against those transgender...? Why? Because you, o great-hater, aren't yourself trans? Are you Jewish? Does that make hating Jews okay? Difference is not evidence of turpitude, or some kind of curse; spectra are the norm in all systems of what we call (without knowing what it means) the real world. We've barely begun to understand the world as it is. Part of that learning is, of necessity, not knowing, having certainty taken from us.

Somehow this kind of person doesn't ever answer these kinds of questions or address these realities. Their old certainties feel too comfy to give them up.

Most of us who aren't trans have no concept of what it takes to get access to gender-affirming care. I had only an inkling before I read this book. My inkling is still more than most have, and I'm now au fait with a much greater swath of how the concept of affirming the gender of a trans person came about. How it's been debated and designed to exclude, how it's been denied...a human-rights violation if there ever was one...how it's been weaponized and reshaped by the great-haters.

I have never met a trans person who is anything but kind, caring, and decent. Not one trans person I know, or know of, has ever advocated for anything remotely like enforcing their identity on anyone. The canard that education about trans people makes more trans people is a (deliberate, says my inner cynic) misframing of the truth: Education gives trans people access to an identity. to a word, an idea, that they know from the inside describes and delineates them. Had I grown up twenty years before I did, I would never have been aware or brave enough to invent gayness for myself. Education doesn't create difference, it enables the different to define themselves, to discover they are not the first, the only, the freak.

Gender affirmation will never be easy for some, there are trans people who struggle with it, too. This is a huge reason it needs affirming care from trained professionals. "It costs too much" is an absurd sentence coming from anyone in the richest country...the richest culture...there has ever been on the planet. No one should go without in a world of obscene abundance. That most definitely includes trans folk.

This book's essay-and-excerpt fabric will keep some readers from fully investing in the concepts. I found the sheer breadth of identities all speaking in support of trans-affirming care to be one of the greatest strengths of the read. I encourage other allies, and those who simply do not understand the idea of transness, to pick the book up. It can, if you decide to allow it to, help you find your empathy for these, our sibling humans.

DEAR CIS(GENDER) PEOPLE: A Guide to Trans Allyship and Empathy, when you wonder "what do They want" best ask Them

DEAR CIS(GENDER) PEOPLE: A Guide to Trans Allyship and Empathy
KENNY ETHAN JONES
DK Books
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful call to arms to empower cisgender people to be better allies, blending memoir, detailed research, and interviews.

The trans experience is all too often the subject of fierce debate in the media and online. While we’re having more and more conversations about the trans experience, the stark reality is that hate crimes against the trans community have quadrupled over the past five years and that two in five trans young people have attempted suicide.

But behind the shock headlines and the distressing statistics, what does it really mean to be trans?

In this powerful, extensively researched, and deeply personal book, Kenny Ethan Jones, a trans activist and writer, offers an authentic and in-depth insight into the trans experience. From gender dysphoria to surgery, from being outed to finding love and considering parenthood, Kenny Ethan Jones draws on his own life and the stories of others from the trans and nonbinary communities to create discussion around the complexities and reality of the trans experiences in today’s society.

Dear Cis(Gender) People is a powerful call to arms, equipping people of every gender with the tools to step forward as allies in order to bring about meaningful change. Through acting and speaking out, we can create a safer, fairer world for trans people—a world in which all of us can exist as our most authentic selves and celebrate who we are without fear.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I can not say this loudly, often, or long enough: PAY.

ATTENTION.

TO.

WHAT.

THEY SAY THEY WILL DO.

You can start here, with this book made up of trans peoples' words. It's addressed at all cis people, a group I am very much part of. I needed to hear these trans voices. These voices are not heard in any systemic way even in the QUILTBAG community. Trans people can and should speak up...and all too often, risk the direst imaginable consequences for doing so. I think the best way to learn is to ask, and if the silence imposed on trans people in F2F reality is blocking that avenue, then we can read! This book marries asking with reading because Author Kenny Ethan Jones has spoken to his fellow trans folk and used their own words to address us cis people, regardless of our sexual identities, about the nature of being trans.

The ball is in our court, cis folk. We possess the information, now we need to listen to what trans people want us to know. There is no more fig-leaf for our ignorance. Now it is a choice to remain ignorant. I think almost everyone who reads this blog, being readers themselves, will take this chance to lift the veil of unknowing and see what the most Othered people in the QUILTBAG rainbow of identities want to get in the way of support and acceptance.

I hope this compact, unchallenging read will make its way into your reading this #PrideMonth. There are so many ways to offer the gift of acknowledgment. The price is, honestly, negligble to the giver; the gift is precious to the receiver, as the stories told here will show you. Please do the whole angry, shouting world this favor:

Sit and listen to what your Othered siblings would appreciate you offering to them.

CANTO CONTIGO, music-world YA with trans rep...brush up on your Spanish at the same time

CANTO CONTIGO
JONNY GARZA VILLA
Wednesday Books
$20.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: When a Mariachi star transfers schools, he expects to be handed his new group's lead vocalist spot—what he gets instead is a tenacious current lead with a very familiar, very kissable face.

In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School’s Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he’s ever met.

Now eight months later, Rafie’s ready for one final win. What he didn’t plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life—his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy’s Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez—the boy Rafie made out with—who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie's abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can’t squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he’s known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him.

Canto Contigo is a love letter to Mexican culture, family and legacy, the people who shape us, and allowing ourselves to forge our own path. At its heart, this is one of the most glorious rivals-to-lovers romance about finding the one who challenges you in the most extraordinary ways.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: People are complicated, messy creatures, amalgamated from every speck of the spectrum of existence. No one who thinks babyqueers, that is your adolescent persons of all genders and preferences, should be kept in the dark about this, has any moral authority. They're arguing for repressions that they screech loudly about perceiving against them, but it being okay to do to others because they're Other.

The centrality of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is obviously lost on these idiots.

Now that's out of the way, Canto Contigo (that title rips my sentimental heart out) is the 180° opposite of the book-banner/oppressor mentality's comfort zone. There's an out trans person in a gay relationship! That ought to send some fur flying among the deeply homophobic Latine folks, the religious nuts, and the fascist identity police. Good job, Author Garza Villa. Keep swingin' for their kneecaps. That goes also for Rafie's overweening Man-itude. The sheer arrogance of all adolescents I have ever met too often gets left out of the mirror of YA fiction. There is not a male person alive in the world today who could not benefit from seeing how his Man-itude looks from the outside. Start early instilling awareness and perspective in your boys, gay or otherwise. It will help him, and all who love him, in the long run.

The grieving that Rafie does for his Abuelo is very well-handled, and makes Rafie's dickheadedness a lot more forgiveable. It's a big refreshing change to see boys being credited with the ability to process deep emotions, albeit not smoothly. Too often the resolution of the grieving is both too smooth and too fast. Rafie's grieving isn't complete by the end of the story but it's underway...much more honest, IMO. I'll alsi let Anglophone readers know that there's a goodly amount of Spanish used in the dialogue. As that's normal for Mexican-American boys, I didn't actually notice it much until I was asked to translate something. So, be aware if speaking Spanish is not on your list of accomplishments.

The vibrancy of these boys rushing into their lives, hurtling past the idiocy of phobes and their control fetishes, their smallness of spirit, and the rules they insist must be obeyed, was delightful. The music lessons are fascinating. The fact that the boys are rivals for a very important and prestigious position in their school's mariachi contest is a great way to keep the emotional loud pedal down without it feeling as though the author's manufacturing crises. It's baked in when the situation is set up this way. Going for the same role in a public-facing event is going to make competitors out of any two boys, then add to the mix that Rey's got the added pressure of representing for all of transmasc-dom.... They're believably entwined, they're completely besotted, and they each want to win.

Great way to tell a story. It's told well. I'm glad I got to know the entire bunch. Yes, even the jerks...need jerks to make a love story about us-v-them really work. This one's got that covered. I might think twice about handing the book to anyone fourteen or under without really carefully considering where that kid's social development was. Fifteen on up I'd be completely comfortable handing it over.

Get one for yourself, too, grandparent, and have a book club.

QUEER AS ALL GET OUT: 10 People Who've Inspired Me, inspired me in my turn

QUEER AS ALL GET OUT: 10 People Who've Inspired Me
SHELBY CRISWELL
Street Noise Books
$18.99 trade paper, available 23 November 2021

Rating: 5 shining, proud, delighted stars of five

The Publisher Says: Take a walk with one queer artist from Texas and explore the lives of ten LGBTQ+ people from history.

What does it take to live your truth? And how do we each navigate the struggle for personal acceptance within a society that is so often intolerant? In this galvanizing story of resilience, Shelby Criswell takes us by the hand and leads us through the lived experiences of ten inspiring people. Each an example of how to find your way as your own authentic self.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This US Thanksgiving, or "Happy Holocaust of the Native Americans" Holiday as I am prone to call it, I wanted to offer something I am truly thankful for: Young Queer creators telling their authentic stories from the places they live. It's not a luxury I had; it's not a luxury to be taken for granted anywhere, if you listen to Scholastique Mukasonga; and so it should be celebrated as much as we're able to do so.

This is a strong open, the simple act of getting one's order in a coffee shop made without awkwardness or fuss or hostility. The kindness of simply not assuming anything and still making the effort to be polite is, sad to say, still revolutionary and worthy of comment and praise. But it's a fruitful moment: It gives birth to the concept, "who came before me? who else struggled with the world's pig-headedness and intolerance?" As the marketing material offers this list of people profiled in the book, I can do no better than to offer it to you in my turn:

Mary Jones (mid 1800’s);

We’wha (1849-1896);

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935);

Dr. Pauli Murray (1910-1985);

Wilmer “Little Axe” M. Broadnax (1916-1994);

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973);

Carlett Brown (1927-?);

Nancy Cárdenas (1934-1994);

Ifti Nasim (1946-2011);

and Simon Nkoli (1957-1998)

Comprehensive! Impressive! I loved the profiles, as brief as they were by necessity, because they were handsomely illustrated and clearly selected for Author & Artist Creswell's personal connection to their message(s). First up is late-life out lesbian Nancy Cárdenas:

I found the story of Cárdenas's coming out so touching, that she was inspired to do it by the horrors of the AIDS plague (Beauty Salon came out the same year she died of breast cancer). It is an ongoing tragedy that breast cancer's ravages deprive so many of us of people we love, and the world of so many bright and shining stars. Cárdenas led an exemplary life and I'm delighted to meet her here.

The other nine protagonists are equally well-chosen, equally share their space with the everyday bravery of a trans person living in Texas well. The idea of being openly anything in Texas is something that slightly stuns me. Yes, I grew up in Austin; I wasn't ever really *in* so coming *out* wasn't very necessary; but it was always, always clear to me in 1970s Texas that I was suffered to exist and that sufferance was revocable at any time.

That young Shelby Criswell isn't as threatened in their environment thrills and delights me. This lovely book exists because they made it; they made it because it spoke to a need in them; and that need, as is so often the case, is the normal human need to see yourself in the world, past and present.

Anyone out there who needs to hear this, here's the message in lovely images and direct words without fear or judgment. If you know someone who's got a tablet who needs to hear this message of being seen, being valued and valuable, being the heir to a lineage of ancestors, here's a #Booksgiving treat to gift to them.

THE DOCTOR'S DISCRETION, a still-rare example of transgender representation in romantic fiction

THE DOCTOR'S DISCRETION 

E.E. OTTOMAN 

Pronoun 

$3.99 Kindle original, available now

 Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: New York City, 1831.

Passion, medicine and a plan to break the law ...

When Doctor William Blackwood, a proper gentleman who prefers books to actual patients, meets retired Navy surgeon Doctor Augustus Hill, they find in each other not just companionship but the chance of pleasure--and perhaps even more. The desire between them is undeniable but their budding relationship is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious patient at New York Hospital.

Mr. Moss has been accused of being born a woman but living his life as a man, an act that will see him committed to an asylum for the rest of his life. William and Augustus are determined to mount a rescue even if it means kidnapping him instead.

Their desperate plan sets William and Augustus against the hospital authorities, and the law. Soon they find themselves embroiled in New York's seedy underworld, mixed up with prostitutes, spies, and more than a lifetime's worth of secrets. When nothing is as it seems can they find something real in each other?

My Review: Transgender persons have been among us throughout time, just like lesbian or gay persons have. What is different now is that we have the vocabulary to identify, to label them; this is both a blessing and a curse. I know, from my own experience of growing up Other in a world (South Texas in the 1970s) and in a family of mostly unsupportive women, the incredible power of naming yourself: "I am gay. Not a faggot, not a queer. I am gay."

What, then, is one to do when a transgender person has the clawing need to name themself? How to find the courage and the model? For millennia, that wasn't on offer; there was no way to explain a transgender person to themself. With few exceptions, societies where the trans people came out and lived as they ought to have had the freedom to live were reviled, subjected to psychological and physical violence at even greater rates than the merely homosexual. Most of us who are cisgender but queer (and it took a long time for me to warm back up to that label, let me tell you) can, at a pinch and for a minute, hide it well enough to pass if trouble looms. Not so a man in women's clothing, or a woman trying to pass as a man.

This is becoming a thing of the past. Bodies are plastic; we are able to sculpt and mold them in many ways once impossible. We understand the endocrine basis of gender a great deal better than ever before. How we're failing the transgendered persons in our midst is less and less medical and more social, political. MANY folk feel they are being abused by being asked to refer to and address the trans community by the gendered pronoun of their identity, not their biology. These are usually also the people whose faces turn red and mouths spew hate when asked to wear masks to help keep everyone safe during a plague whose causal virus is *demonstrated* to be airborne.

Idiots, in other words; deeply ignorant and utterly unworthy persons without a shred of worth or value to add to society.

That being both self-evident and inarguable, the book I review here is one in which a transgender person is "discovered," arrested, and subjected to the full brunt of the hateful and misguided legal and medical regimes in place in the US during the 1830s. These truly are enlightened times, as much room for improvement as there remains; we should all be grateful we live in them as well as practice kaizen, the path of pride in accomplishment melded to continual striving for improvement.

Mr. Moss, the person in question, is lucky enough to be rescued by Dr. Augustus Hill, a gay Navy veteran without a hand due to combat injuries. Dr. Hill's maiming hasn't disabled him; he practices medicine at New York Hospital. He must, given his limitation, accept the other work that comes to him. For example, as we meet him, he is busily cataloging and organizing a collection of medical books and objects. With him in this task is Dr. William Blackwood, a trained physician of free African descent. The men meet in the book stacks, sparks fly, they begin what must be a clandestine relationship of great tenderness, passion, and intimacy.

So when Hill impulsively rescues Mr. Moss from the humiliations and horrors attendant on being shown to be a "transvestite," he is by no means sure Dr. Blackwood will assist him in arranging an escape. This is a romance, so we all know that he will; but the author effectively conveys the uncertainty of Hill's anguished waiting for Blackwood to decide.

In the end, the to-ing and fro-ing of this rescue-cum-escape is resolved a bit too neatly; the idea of their assistance to a wanted fugitive possibly rebounding on them is snipped at the same time. One can see the appeal of such a symmetrical bounce of the ball. It wasn't particularly satisfying to me.

What worked very well was the atmosphere, the world-building of sights and sounds and customs and coping skills. I was immersed, I was enfolded, and I was invested in the Happily Ever After that must follow such a lot of stress and battling of demons.

What gave me great pause was, in this deeply unenlightened passage in US history, the fearful recognition that this story could become a cautionary tale and not just a thumping good read if too many people, for whatever reason, do not get themselves up off their hindquarters and vote 45 and his fellow kakistocrats out of office on 3 November 2020.

#TIL: Today I Learned, an acronym you've probably pondered but were afraid to ask your (grand)kids to define

#TIL: Today I Learned: Hilarious, Entertaining, and Educational Trivia
Stephen J. Spignesi
Skyhorse
$10.99 Kindle only, available now

The Publisher Says: From Abraham Lincoln to Babe Ruth, movies and music to politics and biology, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Spignesi compiles five hundred facts in this addictive bathroom reader trivia book.

From history and science to sports and literature, Spignesi offers eye-opening trivia in 500 facts inspired by the viral social media acronym TIL used on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook. #TIL: Today I Learned is sure to intrigue even the most jaded know-it-alls and walking encyclopedias, including little-known anecdotes and stories involving some of history’s most famous people, places, and things.

My Review: It's Friday, it's been a craptastic week, and I don't feel like being serious.
Consider:
There are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse around the world each day.
Then:
Three billion pizzas are sold in America every year. Americans eat 350 slices of pizza a second.
And these represent the damnedest, weirdest, least likely statistics I've ever imagined someone collecting. I mean, *everyone* lies about sex, so who asked whom and then decided to trust the answer given? I'd respond to someone's nosy sex-questions with some tart observations on the need for some people to get themselves a less intrusive hobby; but how many would resist the chance to fuck with the poor grad student or bureaucrat and hand 'em a line of nonsense? And the pizza one, well, again we run across the "...according to whom?" issue. The pizza companies no doubt collect statistics. Then, depending on whether the puritanical fear-your-food idiots, the meddlesome make-healthier-choices crumb-bums, or the investors' earnings committee is asking, they can slice and dice the data to present the desired picture to make them go away.

So I'm a cynical, skeptical old fart. Big shock, right? Yes, stats are the best lens we have for viewing the world and its multivarious multitudes on a macro level. We need them to model data to help predict and (if they're given to actual decent human beings with souls) prevent things like pandemics. They're also famously fungible. Mark Twain said of them, "Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"

But the bizarre statistics in this book, many of them so extremely strange that I want sources that Stephen Spignesi doesn't give, are leavening for my reading pleasure. The bread that's rising is trivia, the weird-but-true little flour particles ground so fine from the cereal grains of the world's astounding supply of facts and yeasted with those damned statistics. For instance:

The name of the zipper was created by the B.F. Goodrich company in 1923 when they started using the fastener in their rubber boots. They wanted something catchy or their promotional material, so they created a name based on the sound the clasp made when it was opened and closed: Zip!
–and–
Stay Puft Marshmallows have 100 mg. of caffeine in each marshmallow.

First: Oh my gawd that makes total sense, followed by "...and what'd they call 'em before 1923?" They were apparently first marketed as "hookless fasteners" starting in 1891 (see Wikipedia) but a more bloodless name I've never heard. Good on y'all, BF Goodrich, for giving the world an *excellent* new word.
Then: WHY IS THERE CAFFEINE IN MARSHMALLOWS?!
What's it doing there? How'd it get there? Why do they leave it in/put it there? Is there really, not just ing Ghostbusters, a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Company? (As a matter of fact...)

Things we never knew (or cared to know) about famous people are the evergreens of the trivia world. No one who's ever played Trivial Pursuit can escape the realization that we're a nosy bunch when it comes to what others do/think/feel.

U.S. President James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other.
–and–
One of Abraham Lincoln’s most memorable quotes on slavery was, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to have it tried on him personally.”

What a tragedy that Garfield was assassinated so early in his term! And Lincoln, well, he was an amazing person. Spignesi has a little tendresse for Presidential trivia, you see, so we get a lot of it. I'm not mad. They're always interesting people, presidents, even if not always for positive reasons. Although the positive reasons certainly exist:

So far, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served twice as long as any other president, has been the only United States president who did not lose a single staff member or member of his administration due to a scandal or an indictment.

How perfectly astonishing. Especially given the virulence with which FDR was *loathed* by the right-wing reactionary segment of the US population! And the business community! Well, she who laughs last, laughs best, I suppose, and now we're existing in the opposite end of the pendulum's swing. While Spignesi doesn't make the claim that this is a political, let alone presidential, piece of trivia, I offer it here in the spirit of spite and unkind laughter that this moment in political history elicits in me:

In the pre-politically correct era of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, the bottom three categories for IQ measurement were “Idiot” (<70 IQ); “Imbecile” (70-80 IQ); and “Moron” (80-90 IQ).

I will leave the butt of my joke unnamed. I hope it's crystal clear.

SPLENDORA, a 1970s first novel with bite

SPLENDORA
EDWARD SWIFT
Open Road Media
$10.99 digital edition, available now

Rating: 4 very nostalgic stars out of five

The Book Report: The book description rots on ice. Here is the jacket copy from the 1978 hardcover I checked out of the library:

“Splendora: A steamy East Texas armpit of a town where Sue Ella Lightfoot furthers her study of “sexual motives” with every issue of Real Crime magazine while Agnes Pullens drills young ladies in the finer arts of Dance and Expression (tap-dancing, tumbling, and recitation inclusive) and Zeda Earl Goodridge faces a life of ruin if her Christmas yard display doesn't take first prize this year. Timothy John Coldridge was born and raised here, was fussed over and admired by all—Esther Ruth's beautiful grandson, Little Timothy John.

At eighteen, Timothy John left Splendora, unhappily. Now, at thirty-three, he returns with a dazzling companion: Miss Jessie Gatewood, the new hired-by-mail librarian, come to operate the county bookmobile. Draped (and impeccably accessorized) in Victorian finery and drenched in social graces, Miss Jessie takes the town by storm. But though it might be said that Timothy John arrived with her, it might also be said that he arrived within her...and therein lies the tale. Aided at every turn by a cast of relentless eccentrics, Miss Jessie endures a series of thoroughly splendid adventures. But while genteel romance, high drama, torment, and Technicolored bliss capture center page (Can the organza'd charms of a spinster booklady capture the cloistered heart of Assistant Pastor Brother Leggett? Will Maridel Washmoyer's yardful of Styrofoam igloos thwart Zeda Earl's anticipated Yuletide triumph?) a more subtle underscoring theme persists: What can Timothy John mean to Splendora...or Splendora to Timothy John?”


My Review: My 2000 review: "Seminal literary gay novel of my early queer phase. Wonderful writing and affecting characterization."

Well. Um. You see, I was really young when I read this, and in the throes of coming to terms with impending fatherhood. I figured if you were a gay guy, you'd like to be a woman, like Timothy John seems to want to be. (The idea of transgendered people was not part of my mental furniture.) I'd banged a bunch of guys by this time, and I knew for sure and certain that I wasn't interested in a life of bread-and-water imprisonment within heterosexuality's grim and cheerless razor-wire fences and brooding gun emplacements, but kid = duty so I did it. At least with other guys I knew what the hell we were talking about. But books like this one, they set me on a completely wrong path. Gay, woman...same diff, right, since Timothy John lived as a woman, right? I DO NOT WANT A WOMAN NOR TO BE A WOMAN said my insides. But look! said the outside world, it's in a book!

So I laughed when I was supposed to and patted myself for being Literary Enough to get the point of Swift's humid plot (Miss Jessie and Brother Leggett get engaged but Bro can't deal and comes out to Miss Jessie who says hey cool me too and they have a religion/salvation fight and one thing leads to another and Timothy John burns down his house while Brother Leggett is racing up to spirit him away to live as man and whatever and the town matriarch speeds them off with a happy {if toothless, this is East Texas we're talkin' about} smile). But reinforcing the wrong ideas in my head did not make my life easier, nor did a subsequent encounter with The Carnivorous Lamb with its brother-incest lovers. EWEWEW. No thanks! Gordon Merrick cheesy romances! Yes! But then there was that whole duty thing.

I held onto this as my idea of a Good Gay Novel for a very long time. Re-reading it now, at over 50, I realize it's an artifact of the author's past...it's set in some amorphous 40s-50s type time when there was train service to burgs like Splendora...it's gawkily written, it's pretty garishly bedizened with Faulknerian structure and O'Connoresques of characters, and if this were my first read, I'd probably Pearl Rule it and move on with my day.

Time may indeed heal, but it also inflicts, wounds.