Apologies for another long blog hiatus due to book promotion, practicing witchcraft, and reading the picture book Construction Trucks twice a day to the Young Master. (I highly recommend this one, by the way: very informative, with illustrations of multi-ethnic male and female workers. Bet you didn’t know how cement gets to the top of
September Links Roundup: Could This Be Magic Read More »
English Literature teacher Margaret Gish Miller may be retired, but she’s not resting on her laurels. At age 70, she has published her first poetry collection, Blood Moon Weather, through Dancing Moon Press. In it she lovingly depicts the bond between sisters healing from paternal incest, and looks back with wisdom and self-acceptance at the
Sisters in Healing: Poetry from Margaret Gish Miller’s “Blood Moon Weather” Read More »
This past March I attended the 5 College Queer Gender & Sexuality Conference at Hampshire College. One of the best workshops was “Sex-Negativity Never Happened”, led by Skramz Geist, a radical philosophy professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. We talked about how the “sex-positive” norm in queer communities can be exploited to push people’s
August Links Roundup: The Negative in Sex-Positive Read More »
Cards on the table: I preferred Bernie Sanders’ leftist economics but am content to vote for Hillary Clinton this fall. Neither the persona nor the politics of Donald Trump hold any appeal for me. That decision made, I’ve skipped most of the election coverage that clutters my newsfeed. But I haven’t been able to ignore
Don’t #DiagnoseTrump: How Progressives Exploit Mental Health Stigma Read More »
The countdown continues to the launch of Two Natures on September 15! Readings are scheduled for New York City, Northampton, and Greenfield, MA this fall. Watch this space or visit our Facebook page for exact times and directions. With guidance from The Frugal Book Promoter, I’ve garnered some encouraging pre-publication reviews and author interviews online.
Julian Gets Around: New “Two Natures” Reviews and Author Interviews Read More »
Coming out is peculiar when you don’t know what you are yet. I’ve been having a lot of conversations like this: “Um… I wanted to tell you… I’m decided I’m genderqueer now? But I’m not going to do anything about it? Like, I still use female pronouns and my husband likes boobs, so…” At which
Nonbinary Femme Thoughts Read More »
The new anthology Queering Sexual Violence (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016), edited by Jennifer Patterson, is a must-read for social service providers, activists, policymakers, and anyone who studies child abuse and intimate partner violence. It includes personal essays, poems, artwork, and hybrid-genre pieces by Sinclair Sexsmith, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Sassafras Lowrey, the late Chloe Dzubilo, and
Book Notes: Queering Sexual Violence Read More »
In the years leading up to Shane’s adoption, I used to say, “I want to be a parent, not a mother.” I had hoped that non-reproductive parenting would free me from predetermined expectations about the balance of caregiving labor and the self-negating emotional enmeshment that I didn’t want to replicate from my own childhood. I
July Links Roundup: Mommy T-Rex Read More »
Reiter’s Block subscriber Donal Mahoney offers us this thoughtful poem prompted by this weekend’s hate crime against queer Latin@ clubgoers in Orlando. High School in the Fifties In my all-boys school sixty years ago there were two boys who were different. All four years they walked to classes together, books clasped to their chests the
Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “High School in the Fifties” Read More »
In the early hours of Sunday morning, a gunman massacred 50 people and critically wounded 53 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, during Latin@ Night. News reports are calling it the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and the worst terrorist attack since 9/11. There is preliminary evidence suggesting that the shooter,
No More Queer Martyrs: Mourning the Orlando Nightclub Shooting Read More »