Category Archives: GLBT

November Links Roundup: DILFs, Zombies, and Lot’s Wife

The theme this month is that there is no theme.

My fellow midlife transitioner, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, has written an excellent new book with the waggish title of DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Penguin Random House, 2025) Part memoir-in-essays and part cultural criticism, DILF covers the fraught but inseparable relationship between transmasculine people and feminist movements. A prominent feminist cultural critic before his transition, Doyle found that his experience was erased or his credentials questioned in spaces he had once fought for, even while he remained subject to patriarchal oppression as a gender minority. The book weaves personal anecdotes with important reassessments of Second Wave thinkers, recovering a complex historical record that reveals the gender essentialism of contemporary TERFs as a deviation from the movement. Read an interview with him at Assigned Media, “Jude Doyle on Manhood After Patriarchy”:

I think that if we view feminism as the struggle of gender-marginalized people for bodily autonomy, rather than just calling these things “women’s issues,” then we make room for all trans people within feminism. We can state that the right to change sex is a bodily autonomy struggle. It is regulated in the same ways that things like abortion have historically been regulated. It is opposed by the same people. They really strongly want to link us to our reproductive anatomy and say that that defines us. That this is the only thing we can ever be, and that our lives essentially need to be run by it. Taking it to a bodily autonomy front leaves room for all trans people to participate, particularly transmasculine people.

I think it would also help tremendously if we recognize that sexual violence is routinely wielded against anyone who steps out of line within patriarchy. We have a really essentialized view of who a victim is and who a perpetrator is, and really often that leaves sexual violence survivors who aren’t young cis women out of the picture. It’s intensely harmful, when you look at the sheer rate of sexual violence in the trans community.

This essay on his blog, “DILF Redux: TERFs, Transmascs, and Two Steve Feminism,” is a good sample of the book’s arguments and his reasons for writing it.

Do I want to be seen as just another guy? Sometimes. Maybe. It would be a start. Does it make sense, sociologically, to interpret me as “a guy” in a way that implies a cis life history, dominance within patriarchy, or even just being seen and treated as a man on a daily basis? Not really. Yet most people who do this think they are affirming my gender — or, at least, they tell themselves they are.

There are two things I want to impart here, at the beginning of what threatens to be a long essay: First, your experience of gendered oppression is not necessarily about who you are. It’s about what people think you are, or what people have been primed to see when they look at you. Second: What cis people tell themselves they are doing, in regard to a trans person’s gender, is often very different than what they’ve done.

Award-winning poet and social media sage Richard Siken was recently the featured poet at Only Poems, with an interview and excerpts from his new collection of prose poems, I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken explains why he switched to this poetic form after suffering a stroke: “The line break is part of the lyric gesture. You can’t sing without a body. I didn’t have a body, not a reliable one.”

Around Halloween, Harvard Magazine’s website featured a 1986 article from its archives, “The Secrets of Haiti’s Living Dead”. It profiled anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis’ investigation of the science behind the zombie legend. He did in fact find a compound that, mixed with other ingredients, would slow a person’s metabolism enough that they appeared dead and were buried, later to be dug up and forced to work for the enemy who had poisoned them. But science alone didn’t explain the zombie phenomenon. The “resurrected” poison victims accepted their enslavement because of their shared social beliefs.

Davis was certain he had solved the mystery. But far from being the end of his investigation, identifying the poison was, in fact, its starting point. “The drug alone didn’t make zombies,” he explains. “Japanese victims of puffer-fish poisoning don’t become zombies, they become poison victims. All the drug could do was set someone up for a whole series of psychological pressures that would be rooted in the culture. I wanted to know why zombification was going on,” he says…

…Davis’s investigations uncovered the importance of the secret societies. These groups trace their origins to the bands of escaped slaves that organized the revolt against the French in the late eighteenth century. Open to both men and women, the societies control specific territories of the country. Their meetings take place at night, and in many rural parts of Haiti the drums and wild celebrations that characterize the gatherings can be heard for miles.

Davis believes the secret societies are responsible for policing their communities, and the threat of zombification is one way they maintain order. Says Davis, “Zombification has a material basis. but it also has a societal logic.” To the uninitiated, the practice may appear a random criminal activity, but in rural vodoun society, it is exactly the opposite—a sanction imposed by recognized authorities, a form of capital punishment. For rural Haitians. zombification is an even more severe punishment than death, because it deprives the subject of his most valued possessions: his free will and independence.

For other spooky news from my alma mater, check out this Harvard Magazine article on an exhibit of Edward Gorey’s drawings that ran at Houghton Library, the college’s rare books archive.

But for real-life horrors, it’s hard to beat the zombifying experience of a customer service phone call to a large corporation, as Ron Currie Jr. depicts in his short story “Conversations with Various Time Warner Cable Technical Support Reps, 8 p.m. to 3 a.m.” at MonkeyBicycle.

Me: I’m trying to figure out why I can’t get the HD broadcast of the basketball game.

TWCG: Let me check that for you.

Me: Thanks.

TWCG: …

Me: …

TWCG: I see here that you don’t have a set-top box.

Me: No.

TWCG: Well, to access those channels, you need the box.

Me: Even though those channels are included in the service I’m already paying for, and my television is perfectly capable of processing an HD signal on its own.

TWCG: You need to have the box to access those channels.

Me: Let me guess—you charge more for the box.

TWCG: Yes. It’s ten dollars a month.

Me: I have to say, it really bothers me that you’re pretending this is some kind of hardware issue. I mean, I already get the HD broadcasts of the major networks just fine. It’s not like my TV is a Trinitron, man.

TWCG: But the channels you’re trying to access require a set-top box.

Me: You can keep repeating the same thing if you like, but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

It only gets worse from there. Need something to read while you’re on hold? I highly recommend Currie’s mystery novel The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.

On a more upbeat note, programmer and social scientist Dave Guarino at Asterisk Mag explains “How to Make a Great Government Website” based on his redesign of California’s portal for accessing SNAP benefits. Many people who are entitled to government benefits don’t receive them, because of cumbersome and poorly designed application processes.

There are two other two big barriers I want to mention because I think they’re particularly relevant right now. First is the required interview. Most of the time it’s a phone call. Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview. Most state agencies are really slammed right now for a bunch of reasons, including Medicaid unwinding. And many of the people assisting on Medicaid are the same workers who process SNAP applications. If you missed your phone interview, you have to call to reschedule it. But in many states, you can’t get through, or you have to call over and over and over again. For a lot of people, if they don’t catch that first interview call, they’re screwed and they’re not going to be approved.

The last one we mentioned was documents. This is a big reason why people get denied. You have to submit all the pay stubs for the prior 30 days. If you only submit one pay stub and it doesn’t cover the whole period, you’re gonna get denied. If you don’t submit ID for all the household members, you’re going to get denied. Then there’s all these complicated edge cases: “I’m homeless. How do I prove residency in this county and state?”

So there are three big categories of barriers. The application barrier, the interview barrier, and the document barrier. And that’s what we spent most of our time iterating on and building a system that could slowly learn about those barriers and then intervene against them.

Western Massachusetts publisher Perugia Press has been launching women poets’ careers since 1997. “Lot’s Wife,” an excerpt from their new release Apostasies by Holli Carrell, encapsulates her book’s feminist critique of Mormonism and all religion that sacrifices women’s and children’s welfare. “I don’t believe she looked back/in longing for a home that was never hers,” Carrell writes; “who honors the terms of a tyrant god?”

Novelist and political commentator A.R. Moxon (The Revisionaries) wrote a hard-hitting piece about the emptiness of bipartisan comity towards fascists, on his blog The Reframe: “Eventually You’re Going to Have to Stand for Something”. His immediate inspiration is NY Times pundit Ezra Klein’s suggestion that the late Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics the right way”.

I cannot get over the degree to which Klein’s response is emblematic of the politically empowered white liberal response to this age of autocratic fascist abuse and violence, in his predictable rightward instinct and in his seemingly impenetrable assumption that, even though he admits he has no idea what the solution to our present situation might be, he is still just the person to deliver a solution. And Klein is not just any talk-guy; like [Ben] Shapiro’s influence in Republican spheres, Klein has the attention of Democratic politicians.

The nature of Klein’s quote (above) is an admonishment. Because of the nature of Klein’s audience, and because of the nature of the criticism to which Klein is responding, it’s not an admonishment to the Bens Shapiro or Charlies Kirk or other authoritarian supremacists of the political world. Rather, it’s an admonishment to people who are opposed to this authoritarian supremacist movement, for not being willing enough in his view to live with authoritarian supremacists.

This is the grain of sand at the center of the pearl of my ire, because “we are going to have to live here with each other” is the exact premise that Republicans do not agree with any of us about, and while Klein in his remarks pays lip service to some of the recent proofs of this clear fact, in his analysis of what to do about it, he excises this reality entirely. In his mind, he and Kirk were just two guys, both trying to change the country for what they thought was good. It’s a bond. Never mind that what Kirk thought was good was the American military in the streets of Chicago, and mass kidnapping in service of a white ethnostate, and the end of bodily autonomy for women and queer people, and so forth. In the Klein world, moral clarity about abuse is polarizing, and polarization, not abuse, is the problem to solve.

We are going to have to live here with each other. Not an option if you are trans, as long as supremacists (or those who would capitulate to them in the name of winning) are still permitted to wield the levers of power. Not an option if you are an immigrant. Not an option if you are pregnant with a complication. Not an option if you are sick, or out of work. Not an option if you are homeless. And eventually not an option if you are in opposition in any way to the dictator president and his coterie of supremacists, or if you just happen to fall afoul of somebody with a grudge and a trigger finger and not much to lose. Not even an option if you are Charlie Kirk, it turns out. The bullet that ripped into him was an act of violence against us all—specifically, an act of violence that springs out of a world of inevitable gun massacres that people like Charlie Kirk have insisted upon as a core tenet of their individual freedom to enact political violence.

We have not forgotten the Palestinian genocide over here. I’m glad the remaining hostages have been returned. Not surprised Israel isn’t keeping up its end of the deal.

We attended a friend’s shiva for her mother last month where one of the service leaders cited activist rabbi Arthur Waskow, who had just passed away at age 92. Read about him in this Jewish Telegraphic Agency obituary:

Starting with his creation in 1969 of the “Freedom Seder,” a version of the Passover Haggadah that introduced contemporary liberation struggles into the ancient story of the Israelite escape from Egyptian bondage, Waskow became one of the leading voices bringing Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on the progressive political agenda.

Waskow disseminated these ideas as the founder of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, initially to address the threat of nuclear weapons through a Jewish lens. Over time, the organization came to focus on other concerns, including Middle East peace, interfaith relations and climate change.

In 1993, Waskow co-founded, with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a flagship for the Jewish Renewal movement. Waskow was said to have coined the term “Jewish Renewal” — a movement grounded in “Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions” — in an issue of Menorah, a magazine for social justice and ritual issues he launched in 1979.

Not having heard of Waskow before, I was equal parts curious and anxious to research whether he supported equal rights for Palestinians–a point on which progressive Jews often founder. Indeed he did, as evidenced by this bold essay, “There Is No ‘Jewish’ State,” which can be found on the website of the Shalom Center, an organization he founded in 1983 to fight the nuclear arms race. The article is not dated, but the text references the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, so it’s very recent.

Sure, there is a State that is ruled by Jews; but they have done their best to rid themselves of most of what were for the last three thousand years the compassionate parts of Jewish identity…

…[It is n]ot, I would say, a Jewish version of democracy. Perhaps not even a biblical version of democracy — which defined people who were non-Israelite residents of the ancient states of Israel and Judah not simply as foreigners but for many purposes with all the rights of full citizens.

That was not the case when the modern State of Israel was born, despite a Declaration of Independence that claimed equality to all religious communities, sexes, and other residents. For at the beginning, the “Arab” or “Palestinian” communities of the state were governed by military law. And after a war in which the state of Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, Gaza, and a few strips of the Golan in the north — almost all populated by Palestinians — there were various degrees of military control imposed sometimes by annexation, mostly by occupation…

what I have described is rooted in my assumption that Jewish values and Jewish identity have been deeply inflected by the Torah and its protections for the actual Land or Earth and for “resident aliens,” by the Prophets; and by two thousand years of rabbinic rulings for justice and compassion. My assumption includes the evidence that democracy has been deeply wished-for by most of the world’s Jewish communities and by the world that voted in the United Nations to sponsor a state made mostly of Jews.

So the Declaration of Independence had to affirm democracy not only for Jews but for all its inhabitants. But most of the Jewish communities of the State of Israel have had very little commitment to the idea that everyone who was governed by those Jews who sit in government offices and comprise “the State” is entitled to an equal voice in shaping that government and its policies.

That is why I say there is no Jewish State. The founding document of the Zionist movement calls for the creation of “Die Judenstaat.” That means the state of the Jews, but it does not mean a Jewish state, embodying the values and the long-shaped identity seeking democracy and expressing compassion.

May we heed his words.

October Links Roundup: Act Like It Matters

Spooky season is upon us, somewhat redundantly when every day is terrifying. Pumpkin spice dictatorship, anyone? I’ll take mine to go.

Your boi was interviewed on the queer storytelling site I’m From Driftwood, an archive of short videos by LGBTQ folks talking about pivotal moments in their lives. Watch me talk about becoming Mommy-Man in “Adoption, Transition, and Becoming Whole”. (Shirt by RSVLTS because Facebook clothing ads know me better than I know myself.) These guys were super fun to work with. Get in touch with them if you have a story to tell.

On the Button Poetry channel on YouTube, Ethan Smith’s poem “A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” shows kindness towards those parts that can be hard to integrate after transition.

A.T. Steel won the 2025 Narrative Prize for “Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell,” the sad but defiant story of a young trans woman on the streets of Harlem in 1991. You will need to create a free account at Narrative Magazine to read it.

I have had the pleasure of meeting Solstice Lit Mag poetry editor Robbie Gamble on several occasions. One would not suspect that this modest man with a history of activism for immigrants was the heir to the Procter & Gamble dynasty, as he chronicles in the poem “Gamble Patrilineage” in The Nomad. A short narrative poem with the scope of a 19th-century novel, it reckons with the racist and eugenicist history that many American fortunes share, but in a gentle rather than shrill way.

In the Guardian, this vivid excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me describes a childhood of wild outdoor exploration and emotional neglect, as the author’s mother burned herself out trying to provide secure housing for the family during political upheaval. Now I’m eager to read her books. I’ve gotten interested in Indian literature lately, and am struck by how little we were taught about non-European history in my junior high and high school classes. I feel like a 12-year-old again, reading isolated novels without cultural context and missing so much of the significance of the action.

At her Substack twenty-first century demoniac, Helena Aeberli gives us another reason to hate AI: it can take revenge porn to another level by making realistic deepfakes of any woman who dares to speak out online.

Technologies like AI are changing the way we relate to one another. They are exacerbating the worst parts of human nature and society. When social media becomes a first-person shooter game and personalised algorithms deliver your interests on a platter, anything goes. The nonconsensual use of generative AI to doctor women’s images is just the beginning. The end point of individualism is the belief that only you exist. Everyone else is just an NPC.

As AI becomes more humanlike, albeit in a meaningless, surface-level sense, and as people come to regard it as such, the reverse is also true. People come to see each other more like AI, approaching them with an eye to utility. We regard those we encounter online more like characters than people, one-dimensional and stereotypical. They exist to provide a service, whether they like it or not…

In an essay with the catchy title “Stupidology” in n+1, William Davies argues that our social systems are tending more and more towards normalizing the abdication of individual judgment. Authoritarians and tech oligarchs benefit from the destruction of universities and the discrediting of experts, which is why Trumpism aims its guns at anything that “help[s] make the world intelligible”. Artists, too, because imagination alone lets us respond properly to new situations rather than regurgitating data as AI does.

Rabbi, journalist, lawyer, meditation teacher, professor…Jay Michaelson wears many hats, according to the bio on his Substack. In a recent post, he asks the question that’s certainly been weighing on my head since January 20: “Does Anything You’re Doing Matter? (And does it matter if it doesn’t?)”  In this time of great disruption and uncertainty, one can find relief in the spiritual principle of non-attachment to results, as propounded by Thomas Merton and the Talmud’s Rabbi Tarfon, who said that “it is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” On the other hand, a too-glib reliance on such reassurance can make us satisfied with merely performative activism, “an un-pragmatic and ineffectual politics of purity, as we see in some corners of the Left today”. Michaelson concludes: “For me personally, the ‘Both/And’ synthesis has to do with using one set of tools to ascertain which interventions can be effective, and a different set of tools to assess the spiritual and emotional worth of those actions.”

July Links Roundup: Hit Me, I’m a Writer

Happy summer! (Just kidding, I hate summer.) It’s time for my monthly effort to close all my open browser tabs before the End Times.

Bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress and many more) talks about being both Black and Jewish in this 2022 profile from The Jewish Chronicle (hat tip to Noah Berlatsky). What stood out for me was his tough-love advice about perseverance as a writer:

“I tell writers all the time: ‘Listen, you got to write every day, you got to just keep writing and writing and writing.’ They say, ‘Well, this isn’t any good.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good. You just keep writing.

“You think when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace — the first word he wrote down — that it was good? No, it was not!”

After close to 50 novels, he’s not stopping.

“It’s like people who love boxing,” he says. “Who loves being hit? There are people who really like it… and it’s like that.”

Yes, writing is my kink, and I bottom for novels…

At Electric Lit, Jacqueline Alnes interviews Sarah Chihaya about her memoir Bibliophobia, which, among other things, describes how academia engenders an extractive approach to literature that can kill the pleasure of open-ended discovery. Chihaya says:

Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.

This resonated with me because the self-hating voice in my head is usually nattering on about why anything I’m doing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

Lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage gave this inspiring 6-minute speech at Bar Harbor Pride about the link between joy and resistance. When we work together to resist oppression, we create a more meaningful life for ourselves, which liberates our capacity for joy. Gage reminds us to look up the histories of our queer elders for examples–a frequent subject of her plays, which have foregrounded historical lesbians and butches such as geneticist Barbara McClintock, Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and actress Eva Le Gallienne. She quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, saying that if we’re not uncomfortable with some of the people in our coalition, it’s not broad enough. I especially appreciate Gage saying this as a radical feminist, because that community has too often indulged their discomfort with masculinity to exclude trans folks.

Did you know that the term “drag queen” was pioneered by William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who organized pageants and drag balls for Black queer men in 19th-century Washington, DC? Watch this 3-minute video from the Black Gay History Channel to learn more. (Hat tip to Robert Jones, Jr.)

In this 2016 essay in Guts Magazine, “Forgiving the Future,” Laura Shepherd reflects on the Tarot’s Death card and the bittersweet emotions of transitioning in midlife.

In the wake of increased and widespread attention to the trans experience in popular culture, I began to feel like the future was already happening…

Suddenly, it seems, people don’t spend half a century in the closet for being trans anymore. The stories we tell now—of coming out loud, proud, young, and beautiful—render my own story a homely tale of timidity. That I climbed out from under the weight of an almost universal narrative of denial to become proud to be trans is, these days, like having taken the scenic route to travel a great distance—as though I was simply fearful of highway speed. That it was for a long time unfathomable to live as we do now is close to irrelevant. That’s what it feels like to me, at my age, being part of a larger movement so much younger, so brazen in motion, with more room to move—space created in part, I sometimes forget, by lived experiences like my own.

Instead, I grieve that I don’t get to be young and be me.

Social worker Griffin Hansbury writes about the value of bad feelings in “Be the Brick: Notes Toward Thinking About the Clinical Value of Trans Negativity,” published in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues last month. The brick, here, is the one thrown to start the Stonewall Riot.

As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance…

Trans people, like other queers, feel pressure to be happy, normal, assimilated; but rage, shame, alienation endure. Refusing such affects can mean feeling worse: I should feel okay (happy, normal), but I don’t, so something’s really wrong with me. But why should we feel okay when trans-antagonism persists (past and present)?

For a book-length exploration of this theme, see Hil Malatino’s Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which my transmasc book group read last year.

Some poetry that struck a chord with me this month:

“Fauna” by Richard Siken, at The Shore Poetry, makes the Elks Club more surreal by taking it literally, as a symbol of an older generation of men’s unspoken inner damage. “Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact.”

In Rattle, Cam McGlynn’s “Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits” is pure pun-filled fun about human and avian mating. “I’ve yet to check a European Shag/off my life list and now that I’m married,/I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance…”

Abby E. Murray’s “I Can’t Find My Gender,” in One Art, uses wistful humor to depict the gap between knowing one’s self and being legible to others. Hat tip to the e-newsletter from Perugia Press, which published Murray’s excellent poetry collection about being a military spouse, Hail and Farewell.

…I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be…

Another Perugia Press poet, Lisa Allen Ortiz, understands why new purchases can make me sad, because I’m already mourning their wear and tear, their future unwantedness. In “Furniture,” published in Sixth Finch, she muses:

Last week my friend Farnaz
taught me the term
anticipatory grief
meaning we’re sad now for a thing
that will happen
later.
Imagine that.

Thi Nguyen’s “In the Time of Tuberculosis,” at Frontier Poetry, describes intersecting assaults on her well-being, from the illness that the doctors initially dismissed, to being locked in the ward when it progressed to a dangerous point–all this occurring against the backdrop of the 2016 election.

She had forgotten
that when she left Viet Nam
30 years ago, she was once dirty.
Given the TB vaccine,
she was made clean.
She was once an outsider
allowed to be let in.

I was born in the US.
I was born clean
but now I am dirty.
I’ve dirtied others.
I am not allowed outside,
I am kept inside, the door locked
from the outside.

And finally, some fine prose links:

In “Residential School Requiem,” an excerpt from D.A. Navoti’s memoir-in-progress, published in Craft Literary, the author walks through a park on the site of the Phoenix Indian School that his grandmother was forced to attend, pondering what is memorialized and what is left out.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School.

In fractured lit, Anais Godard’s “The Clay of It” is a sweet and surprising flash fiction about the nature of intimacy.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

Queer nerd fan site Geeks Out interviewed Andrew Joseph White, whose horror fiction foregrounds transmasculine and autistic characters. I’ve read two of his powerful novels, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and an ARC of the forthcoming You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. Body horror in the service of social justice, these books hold nothing back.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially thriller and horror?

I’ve always been a writer at heart. I talk a lot about writing being my special interest as an autistic person, and that’s true. Writing is how my brain processes information and works through emotions, on top of it being my “safe space” where I feel seen, soothed, and understood. The fact that I write thrillers and horror seems like it should contradict that, but it doesn’t. I’ve always been drawn to horror—my gender dysphoria and social deficits have always felt “at home” in the horror space, so to speak, especially when I struggle to express my anger or upset in other ways. The tension and fear are cathartic.

And these days, I’m not just writing for myself anymore. I’m writing for my readers, especially my younger ones. It’s amazing how you can connect to the roughest, messiest parts of yourself and others through the lens of fiction…

***

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers, especially queer ones out there?

Be ugly.That’s the advice I give to every young writer, every queer or disabled writer just starting on their journey: be ugly. I was held back for years by a fear of being “bad representation”—I threw away complicated characters, flinched from messy topics, and denied myself the chance to become a better writer because I was afraid of how my work would impact the reputation of my identity group. But you can’t do that! You can’t let yourself become beholden to a bigot’s perception of you. You cannot make art attempting to stave off every single bad-faith perception that could ever be made of you. Tell the ugly truth of the situation, be honest and unashamed and unflinching, and you will go far.

Thanks for talking back to my brain worms, Andrew!

June Links Roundup: Ungovernable Pride

It’s June–that month when we shove our lifestyle down your throat. You know you want it, baby.

Via the novelist Robert Jones, Jr.’s Substack, I discovered another Black queer radical newsletter, ToussaintF12’s notes from the edge of empire. His latest post, “queer as in ‘rocket launchertttt'”, is a snappy and well-researched battle cry for the current resistance. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a highlight:

…empire, liberalism, and corporate agendas flatten all forms of deviance into marketable identities. specifically, a distinction between “gay” as an imperfect umbrella term and “queer”, as a term that alot of people still draw a false equivalence with. gay usually refers narrowly to sexual orientation, while queer functions more as a political orientation: a refusal of normativity in all its forms: gender, family, citizenship, economy, whiteness, nation-state, even time itself.

the difference matters because we live in a world where u can be gay and uphold carceral logic, imperial war, and racial capitalism. queer, signals something deeper than who u fuck or love. it signals how u resist. it pushes us to interrogate what we’re aligning with and what we’re opposing. without making that distinction, we risk reducing queerness to aesthetics, visibility, or lifestyle, and stripped of its insurrectionary potential.

the empire has learned to neutralize queerness by flattening it into mere identity. being gay is not a choice. it’s a biologically-influenced orientation shaped by complex interactions of genetics, hormones, and development. but queerness is not the same tho. queerness is a political decision, a social posture, a structural antagonism. it names a refusal to comply with the systems that manage and discipline sexuality and gender. to be queer, as in radical as fuck.

queerness is a mode of war against the social, political, and hegemonic order. it’s the art of becoming ungovernable while keeping love intact.

I found the above to be an enlightening framing for the dynamic between choice and innate identity with respect to my own transition. Because I’d already stepped (or been pushed) outside certain systems of normalcy, I was able to recognize who I wanted to be, and had some practice with putting my existing attachments at risk in order to thrive.

Speaking of Robert Jones, he is a very well-dressed man. His essay on the Met exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is a delight.

While it’s not often the focus of mainstream conversations, dandyism, as an identity, is a precursor to queerness; and many of the Black men (and others) who embraced the style were not just making fashion statements, but sociopolitical ones as well. They were attempting to break free of the patriarchal expectations regarding gender, gender expression, race, and sexuality that were (and are) forced upon Black men.

And they did so with enormous sartorial flair! Oh the drama, honey! The draaamaaa!

Also linked in Jones’ article, check out playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ Vogue essay “On Being a Modern Dandy,” archived here. Harris’ works include Slave Play.

A dandy, at his or her core, is a rewriter of narratives—the narratives carved into a society’s understanding about the communities from which the dandy has emerged.

…to be a Black dandy is to dress as though you know you’re loved and therefore have no use for shame. Shame is the enemy of all exuberance. Shame comes from fear, and fear is the enemy of style.

In an interview by Stephen Meisel at CRAFT Literary, poet and prose author Jesse Lee Kercheval discusses the mechanics of visual storytelling in her first graphic memoir, French Girl. I read a lot of graphic narratives, both for pleasure and for the Winning Writers self-published book contest (still open through July 1! send us your comix!). Something I’ve noticed is that text and image can wind up battling for dominance. Especially in nonfiction, the words may take over the page, reducing the visual element to static illustrations that leave me wondering why the memoir or exposition was put into a comics format at all. Conversely, an image-heavy story may lack verbal connective tissue to explain plot and setting. Kercheval talks about leading with the image so that it actually adds new emotional information to the text.

Most of the pieces in French Girl did begin with drawing rather than writing. After so many years as a writer, if I start with words, I end up with way too many words for a comic. And if I write first, then draw, I end up drawing the very thing I write… The idea is for the words and images to be different, for each to add something new to the whole.

…you can’t just say “apple” and draw an apple. Unless you are doing a children’s alphabet book. Something in the art has to fill in the scene, the character, the mood. Add what is not in the words. And the art needs to do a lot of work because the hardest thing for me with comics is how very few words you get.

In Electric Lit’s personal narratives column, Michelle Gurule makes a heartfelt case that “My Uncle Doesn’t Need to Die in Prison to Learn His Lesson”. Gurule humanizes her aging uncle before revealing more details that would lead some to deem his crime unforgivable, an effective rhetorical move that reminded me of Sister Helen Prejean’s philosophy that a person is more than the worst thing he’s ever done. Whatever we conclude about his worthiness for medical parole, we can’t see him as anything but a fully rounded human being, forever altered by decisions he made as a traumatized and impoverished 19-year-old.

The Guardian has a name for why I’m feeling crazy: “hypernormalization,” a Soviet-era term for dissociating about the collapse of society so that we can function in daily life.

For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, [digital anthropologist Rahaf] Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”

Hat tip to Charis Books & More, a feminist bookstore in Georgia, for the link. Donate to their fundraiser.

Practicing Candor: Don't Pretend Everything is Fine

You know the meme.

In honor of Father’s Day this month, a couple of literary links. Hayan Charara’s poem “Translation” in Jewish Currents cleverly uses line breaks to bring out layers of meaning from an immigrant father’s misspoken idiom.

Get the get out of here my father
said to men and women he wanted
gone from his world By his world
I mean the beer and wine he built
and ran in Detroit And by beer and wine
I mean the convenience store he wanted
to call Father & Son but went with
Beer & Wine which is also
the prison he made for himself…

Winner of the Palette Poetry 2024-25 Previously Published Poem Prize, Ollie Schminkey’s “My Father” is an exceptionally successful contrapuntal. I’m never sure whether to read these two-column poems across, like lines with a large break in the middle, or down, like a newspaper. When they’re written properly, as here, they work in both directions. The form is perfect for this poem about losing his father to cancer. The father is both absent and present in the speaker’s mind, like an optical illusion flipping back and forth.

Another cancer poem, sorry, but this one is beautiful too: Geoff White’s “To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God,” at Frontier Poetry. Similar in its use of duality as a formal device, the poem repeats variations on “And I did. And I didn’t.” to express the contradictory demands of witnessing a friend’s death. One cannot do anything to stop it, perhaps one cannot consistently have faith, yet one must do something to acknowledge and be present with this awful/awe-full passing.

…They said she was still listening though I didn’t
remember the last time
I saw her awake.      And I didn’t
Then I did.     Then I didn’t
Then that wasn’t the point anymore.

In response to RFK Jr.’s eugenicist statements, Illinois has taken steps to shield autistic people’s medical records, Noah Berlatsky reported last month for Prism.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed an executive order safeguarding the medical records of autistic people in Illinois. The order follows a recent federal proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a national autism database. It prevents state agencies from sharing autism-related information with anyone outside of state government without a clear reason and informed consent.

The order also clearly states that “autism is a neurological difference—not a disease or an epidemic—identified by trained clinicians and healthcare professionals, with rising identification rates attributable to improved practices, greater awareness, and expanded access to screening tools.”

Support Noah’s freelance journalism on Patreon.

March Links Roundup: Fictional Truths, Factual Lies

Two months into the regime described by the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog as “Triumph of the Shill,” we hear the word “fiction” thrown around a lot as an insult, the devil on the shoulder whose nemesis is the angelic “fact”. At the same time, this administration seems grotesquely afraid of the ethical and historical truths that fiction and the other imaginative arts can reveal.

Neuroqueer author [sarah] cavar’s Substack alerted me to Hannah Kim’s Aeon article “The truth about fiction,” which explains that the metaphysical assumptions behind our genre classifications are not universal. In modern Western thought, fiction is distinguished from nonfiction because the latter is true and the former is invented. However, in classical Chinese literature, genre divisions pertained to the significance of the topic.

Analytic philosophy came to ask the questions it asks because it inherited the ancient Greek idea that some things are less ‘real’ than others. In Anglo-European philosophy, ‘fiction’ is closely connected to what’s imagined – that is, what isn’t taken to be real – because the tradition inherited the appearance/reality distinction from Plato. Fiction occupies the ‘appearance’ side of things, whereas nonfiction occupies the ‘reality’ side…

In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.

Recall how Plato relies on the appearance vs reality distinction to argue that what’s ‘really real’ (the unchanging Forms) are beyond our sense perceptions. Humans were meant to use the intellect, and not their senses, since sense data mislead us, while philosophising gives us a chance to grasp what’s beyond phenomena. In contrast, Chinese metaphysicians didn’t think ultimate reality is unchanging. Instead, the dominant view was that reality, including nature, follows consistent patterns (the Dao). What is ‘empty’ or ‘unreal’ was seen as the generator of all things, and all things were considered equal in significance since they are all manifestations of changing patterns…

… Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ [fiction] and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived.

Kim argues that beneath our supposedly objective tests for fiction versus fact, the genre border is a political battleground. Classifying a work as fiction can allow more leeway for controversial takes on current issues…or it can be a rhetorical device to undermine narratives that challenge us.

cavar is editor-in-chief at manywor(l)ds, an online journal of creative writing by neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and Mad writers. I learned a lot from this poem in Issue #7, “plurality: a personal primer,” by rose& elysium. The author(s) are members of a plural system, i.e. several personalities sharing the same body.

…many professionals promote final fusion, becoming a singlet,
as the ideal outcome for Plurals; to us, it’s a nightmare, another
type of conversion therapy entailing the fundamental loss
of separate, functional identities as we would merge into
an “original” self, a singlet who none of us remember being…

Plurality threatens Western metaphysical beliefs about the One being more perfect than the Many. A lot of psychiatric professionals are too uncomfortable with that critique.

Lu Chekowsky’s essay in Pigeon Pages, “How Sex Work Prepared Me for a Career in Advertising,” has sharp humor with the ring of truth. The hermit crab structure of a resume adds to the satirical edge.

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. ​You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything. 

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.

March Xness, the tournament of literary essays about pop songs, took a break from competition this year to showcase a month’s worth of favorite first-round losers from previous years. Writing about the song “She’s Like the Wind,” Erin Vachon’s “Swayze ode to queer failure” won my heart yet again. “Dirty Dancing,” like “Jurassic Park,” was one of those iconic Gen-X movies that I only watched for the first time recently, when I had the tools to perceive its gender-expansive subtext. (Dr. Ian Malcolm will forever be a trans man in my head canon. Life finds a way!)

Take an hour out of your doomscrolling to watch this interview with novelist Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, on Wesley Dixon’s Vassar College series Conversations @ the Salt Line. The Prophets is a brilliant, beautiful, tragic, yet inspiring novel about two enslaved young men in love and how the purity of their relationship disrupts the plantation’s ethos of sexual exploitation. The interview touches on such topics as having empathy for your villain characters and  recovering the history of queer-affirming and gender-expansive African cultures before colonization.

Need something lighter? Check out Elizabeth Zaleski’s playful essay “Hung Up” at The Missouri Review, a compendium of penises she has known and their importance, or lack thereof, in her relationships with the men attached to them. If you’re more of a back-end person, see “Great Farts of Literature”.

Poetry by a Mom of Queer Kids: “Why I Want to Resist”

The author of this poem is a fierce mom in Florida protecting her queer kids from legalized bigotry. She shared this poem in an email to me on the weekend of the inauguration, and has kindly permitted me to publish it here, without attribution to protect her kids’ privacy.

Why I Want to Resist

Why do you want to resist?
You, of all people?

You’re white,
From the more privileged class,

All these minorities are wanting to take away all our gold,
Is the message I heard from my dad growing up,

God rest his soul,
Banker of a third generation,

So why do I feel like all the lights are going out in the world?
They’re taking away our safe spaces.

Please don’t let them blow out our flames,
Goddard College, they accepted me there to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing,

Amongst all the cool intellectuals there,
I felt imposter syndrome,

Why did they accept me here?
We met at Fort Warden, a former military base in Port Townsend, Washington.

It was an eye-opening experience,
I fit in here.

I’d finally found my tribe.
Goddard closed last year.

The lights are going out,
Fort Warden announced they’re no longer hosting events there,

Another light went out.
Oh how I long to bum an American Spirit off a fellow classmate-writer,

Oh how I long to walk the foggy sidewalks,
As a distant ship sounds a melancholy foghorn.

Goddard College was a safe space,
Not only for queer people, but simply for an artist such as myself,

Born into a family in which I did not belong,
Why do I want to resist?

What forces are bringing darkness into my life?
Why do I want to resist?

What forces of evil and darkness
Want to put out my light?

You’re of a privileged upper class,
Why do you want to resist?

I want to resist. I need to resist.
How can I not resist?

The memories flash through my head like a slideshow of oppression,
Yes, me.

The memories flash through my mind like a slideshow of oppression,
The moment my baby girl was born into this world,

A tiny, precious doll,
A light entered my life, a light I thought could never be extinguished.

Precious baby girl; teasing, dyslexia,
Remove her from the public school system,

She has dyslexia,
She’ll never be able to read normally,

She’ll never be able to do math.
“That homeschooling is a bunch of bullshit,”

Were the words of Cruella de Vil,
My own narcissistic mother,

“You’re educationally neglecting her because the doesn’t know how to read.”
She’s a brilliant artist, mom,

Look at her now,
She’s a lesbian, mom.

When I left an abusive marriage
And you refused to help to the fullest capacity to which you were able with all your wealth,

Then no, we couldn’t afford fabric or clay
For her to make her art,

“You’re projecting oppression,”
Someone who’d once been a dear friend of mine

Told me when I dared speak out against the Monroe County Sheriff Department
On social media.

He refused to speak with me ever since,
He returned a bag of gifts I’d gotten him as a peace offering to the store Mother Earth.

He has friends who are cops,
All hail the men in blue,

All hail the enforcers of corrupt and unjust laws
In this Florida.

The dictators are taking their place in the Oval Office,
They wear their bigotry and hatred like a crown.

The slideshow of memories,
My firstborn child, my son,

I didn’t know about gender identity
I did not know

Until he told me at 18, mom do you love me?
Yes.

Do you love me mom?
Yes.

I bought a skirt,
I like to wear it in my room.

Accused of being transphobic,
My ignorance was bliss.

I learned, I educated myself,
My daughter is a lesbian.

I take them shopping,
I don’t care which department they buy their clothes from.

She wears his hand-me-downs.
I was asked once by someone looking at my children from a distance,

‘You have two boys?’
‘No, that one’s my daughter,’ I proudly replied.

I could give two shots
What anyone has to say about it.

Slideshow, my son is standing in the streets of our neighborhood
Between two deputies, a third looking on,

On a mental health call,
After he’d been left home with his abusive father,

Claire and I had been gone.
Why do I want to resist?

The slideshow in my mind,
My ray of sunshine is lying in the back of an ambulance,

I’m in front with the driver,
Half the motherfuckers won’t even pull over.

“That’s my baby girl lying in there.”
When I finally told them at the hospital, “she’s not pregnant, she doesn’t like boys.”

The slideshow in my head:
“Please, can you take the handcuffs off him?

He’s unarmed. He was just crying out for help.
Take the God damn handcuffs off my beautiful baby boy.”

Slideshow:
We’re at the ICU with Claire,

She didn’t know that OD’ing on Tylenol could be so serious,
Could cause her organs to shut down.

Jacob and I were texting, if our sunshine didn’t make it,
The Lord forbid, we were gonna’ protest

All over the streets,
Bail each other out of jail if we had to.

Slideshow of memories:
They put my child in the back of the squad car still in cuffs.

Would you want to resist if you were me?
Ask yourself this; how could I, in good conscience, do nothing?

I want to resist.
My two amazing kids were my only support

In leaving my marriage,
My two amazing kids who the world loves to hate,

My two amazing kids who saved their own mom’s life,
That’s why I will never stop resisting,

Because I love my two babies too much
And I love all the other kids like them,
Trying to make their way in this harsh, cruel world.

December Links Roundup: Living in Boxes

As a very strange year comes to an end, and a disruptive and destructive one is likely to begin, the question with which I begin this links roundup is: why can’t we Make Architecture Great Again? Megan Gafford’s Substack newsletter Fashionably Late Takes laments that “America was supposed to be Art Deco”. Iconic early 20th-century skyscrapers married ornamentation and the machine-age aesthetic to produce a distinct American style. But soon the Bauhaus style of flat, featureless prisms took over, responding to a postwar malaise that was suspicious of beauty. Gafford’s historical essay explains why, “for a hundred years, Modernist architects have been stabbing the world’s cities repeatedly with their glass shards.” Nostalgia has been weaponized by the Right, but the average person’s sense of alienation is not wrong.

A couple of related stories came to my attention this fall about crackdowns on political speech. Since the election, lots of social media users have shared On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder’s first directive, “Do not obey in advance.” Authoritarianism advances when people preemptively try to placate the dictator. Sometimes I’m glad I grew up in an abusive home, because I already know that this never works. There is no moment when the Dear Leader will say, “Thanks a lot. I guess I owe you a concession now.”

I would like to tattoo this message on the forehead of every mainstream cisgender pundit (I’m looking at you, New York Times) who’s suggested that Democrats should abandon transgender human rights in order to build a winning centrist coalition. What are you winning for? Once you concede that one minority group can have their children taken away, their healthcare criminalized, their jobs and housing dependent on the goodwill of the majority, and the very mention of their existence expunged from school curricula and libraries, you’ve created a repressive state apparatus that could chew up anyone next.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Belliot reflects on the Kafkaesque sensation of “Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America”.

America’s rigidity about categories betrays the conservatism that underlies much of it, and with conservatism comes an obsession with ideas about how families are supposed to look and how men and women are supposed to behave. Conservative outlets repeatedly broadcast to men, in particular, that they will be lesser, weaker, somehow more “effeminate” if they are queer, and they turn this toxic idiocy into homophobia and transphobia—both of which were darkly alchemized into votes for a man who wishes to end our existence.

To accept us, by contrast, is to accept wider possibilities of being. To embrace the idea that binaries are too restrictive, that life, at its core, is a curious flowing thing that cannot fit our simple human categories. To accept us is to reject a frighteningly powerful myth.

At Xtra, Jude Doyle tries to sort out facts from improbabilities: “Could the Trump administration criminalize queer speech online?” Infamously, Project 2025 seeks to redefine any positive portrayal of queer identities as pornography, whether or not it has literal sexual content. Doyle is less worried about book bans than about erasure of LGBTQ internet archives.

One way Trump has already moved to enact Project 2025 is in his pick of the FCC chair Brendan Carr. Carr wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025, and as chair, he would be in a position to enact at least some of the criminal sanctions proposed—specifically, the bit about shuttering telecommunications firms that allow queer and trans voices to proliferate. The way he could do this is to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would make it an intolerable legal risk for internet platforms to host content by queer and trans people.

The article links to some guidelines for saving your materials offline and protecting your digital privacy. Remember that you don’t actually own the books on your Kindle. Save those paper books!

Meanwhile, some of our universities have already lost sight of their mission to protect free expression and teach critical thinking. This blog is a Harvard haters safe space. My alma mater makes it pretty easy to bash them, with increasingly absurd interpretations of its conduct rules in order to stifle pro-Palestinian activism. Max J. Krupnick reports for Harvard Magazine:

Last December, approximately 100 pro-Palestine students filed into Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room, taped flyers to the back of their laptops, and read for an hour. This “study-in,” billed as “silent” and “non-disruptive” by the student organizers, was not the largest or highest-profile protest of the year. But that event set the scene for this semester’s most significant challenge to the University’s efforts to curtail disruptive student protests.

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech…

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon…In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.”

…The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

These faculty members, too, were banned from Widener for two weeks following their study-in. Participating professors were especially upset to be punished for speech that was not controversial—in some cases, for displaying quotes from sources published by the University itself.

A similar faculty solidarity action took place at Northwestern University in Illinois. The campus newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, reported Nov. 21:

Around a dozen Northwestern tenured faculty members rallied by The Rock on Wednesday afternoon in protest of the University’s new demonstration policies. The demonstration drew a small crowd as faculty members marched with signs and spoke out against the new policies.

In September, the administration rolled out the new demonstration policies, which prohibit protests at The Rock before 3 p.m. on weekdays and the use of amplified sound in the area before 5 p.m.

…English Prof. Sarah Schulman, who is the faculty advisor for NU’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, condemned the University for disciplining students for putting up two “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” on campus.

This policy “criminalizes” and “alienates” students from the University, Schulman said.

“Instead, we should be listening to our students, supporting them and praising them for having the integrity to stand up against this violent status quo,” Schulman said to the crowd.

Follow queer historian and AIDS activist Sarah Schulman on X because she doesn’t seem to have jumped ship to BlueSky yet.

November Links Roundup: Counting Down the Days

Well, it’s November. Yay. Tonight we turn the clocks back an hour, and Tuesday we find out whether America will turn the clock back to 1850.

In case you’re Jerry the Vampire and only just woke up from a 50-year nap, don’t burst a blood vessel trying to read all 900 pages of Project 2025 before Election Day. Instead, consult the Stop Project 2025 Comic, an online anthology of graphic narratives that summarize the Trump team’s plans to destroy fair elections, internet freedom, reproductive and gender rights, the environment, and pretty much every other good thing in America.

Read Susan Perabo’s devastating flash fiction “The Life of the Mother” at Fractured Lit, inspired by the many real-life news stories about women dying from pregnancy complications after Dobbs. For some resistance vibes, read G.H. Plaag’s poem “Televised” in the journal ANMLY:

…we are posting this
to TikTok so the Chinese government knows
that we are hot and young and slutty
in our artificial cages, in our handcuffs,
in our straps. we need the spies
to learn about femdom and
the Wednesday Dance. we know,
we know—this could threaten everything
that makes this country great, our security
could be at risk, but we don’t care. we don’t believe
in borders or in anything. you have taken that
from us, belief. and you only have
yourselves to blame.
…

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn’s feature essay “Ghosts of the Groves”, from the Summer 2024 “Florida” issue of Jewish Currents, takes a deep dive into the political history of orange cultivation, connecting the crop’s rise and climate-change-induced decline in the Sunshine State to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian orange groves. With agriculture worldwide under threat from global warming and new insect-borne diseases, Florida looks to Israeli technology as a savior. Meanwhile, Palestinians saw their former cash crop being recast as a symbol of Israeli “improvement” of their land.

This budding partnership is a natural extension of the parallel histories of Israeli and Florida citrus. In both places, generations of settler colonists have valued oranges not only as a source of wealth, but also as a treasured part of their mythology. Early Zionist settlers in Palestine saw their agricultural output in morally and socially redemptive terms; their famous promise to “make the desert bloom” positioned cultivation as a route toward seizing the land, and oranges, in particular, became a narrative device to scaffold claims of rightful occupancy. In Florida, where oranges were likely introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, they came to represent the idea that the terrain was a potential paradise that only Europeans could bring to fruition.

As far-right political projects have consolidated power in both Israel and Florida—with Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration openly working to push leftists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other minority groups out of Florida’s social body, and Israel currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, seeking to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that it embarked on more than a century ago—shared politics have become the basis for an agricultural alliance.

And what are our preeminent universities doing in this time of crisis? Telling teachers and students to STFU about anything controversial. “Faculty Members Suspended From Harvard’s Main Library After ‘Study-In’ Protest,” The Crimson reported on Oct. 25.

The faculty study-in protested the library’s decision to similarly suspend student protesters who conducted a pro-Palestine study-in last month. The University’s decision to suspend students from the library had already come under fire from free speech groups, including the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

During the faculty study-in, professors silently read materials on free speech and dissent while placing signs related to free speech and University policy on the tables in front of them. As they did so, Securitas guards noted down their names and ID numbers…

…Though the University has previously disciplined faculty members for academic misconduct or violating policies on sexual harassment, the decision to suspend professors from a library for protesting appears to be unprecedented. The Crimson could not identify any past cases where Harvard barred a group of faculty members from entering a specific campus space as a result of their activism.

Along the same lines, “Yale College admin direct Women’s Center to institute policy of ‘broad neutrality’,” The Yale Daily News reported Oct. 15. Staffers are understandably concerned that this vague, sweeping directive would interfere with their choice of invited speakers and their advocacy for women’s issues like reproductive rights.

The News spoke to three Women’s Center board members about the “broad neutrality” directive. The students were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs as board members are employed by Yale College.

The three board members all emphasized that a policy of “broad neutrality” would be a drastic change from the Women’s Center’s feminist mission since its founding.

“The Yale Women’s Center was founded in 1970 when a group of the first women undergraduates staged a sit-in, occupying a space of their own. At the time, their feminist demands were divisive. What is divisive changes over time, and through the decades, the Women’s Center has continued to be a feminist space on campus, working towards collective liberation,” one board member wrote to the News. “Neutrality would contradict our purpose and compromise our daily functions.”

What could possibly have prompted this policy? Three guesses:

Last year, an annual event planned by the Women’s Center titled “Pink-washing and feminism(s) in Gaza” was indefinitely postponed by the board amid threats of disciplinary action from administrators, following their failure to respond to a Jewish student leader seeking to “meet with a representative from the Women’s Center to talk about how Jewish women can feel included and represented in our Yale community,” per the student’s email.

Doubling down, Yale’s Committee on Institutional Voice has extended the gag order to deans, top administrators, and faculty who head up departments or programs. “Yale leaders advised to refrain from statements on issues of public significance,” the Yale Daily News reported Oct. 30. While there’s something to be said for caution and humility in speaking for an ideologically diverse intellectual community, this move feels to me like preemptive compliance with authoritarianism. Yale leaders may fear retaliation from a Trump administration, similar to Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. It’s still cowardly. If America’s most powerful individuals and institutions knuckle under to the Mob, who’s going to help the rest of us stand firm?

How about Trans Godzilla? Jude Doyle at Xtra Magazine playfully explores the monster’s many gender possibilities. A gem in this article is the link to Cressa Maeve Ainé’s “Coming Out,” a stop-motion short in which a Godzilla couple affirm their child’s transition.

For more trans joy, read the story “Circles, Triangles, Squares” by Charlie Sorrenson at Electric Lit. My favorite part is towards the end, where the narrator realizes that mutual oversharing isn’t the same as a trusting friendship.

Britney Spears GIF - Britney Spears ...

October Links Roundup: Hermit Crabs and Other Art Forms

Pagan god or Eastern States Exposition parade float? You decide!

Welcome to spooky season, readers. This month there will be two links posts, this catch-all literary and cultural one, and a forthcoming one to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza.

To start the Halloween pumpkin rolling, let’s appreciate Taisiya Kogan’s flash fiction “Mrs. Morrison Proofreads Her Obituary” in Electric Literature. This is known as a “hermit crab” piece because, like the crustacean who lives in other species’ discarded shells, the author borrows a non-literary writing template to contain emotions and occurrences that don’t normally belong in that template. The disjunction between form and content, used brilliantly here, is a way to restore honesty to language instead of allowing received forms to numb our perceptions.

Also from Electric Lit, this horror-satire by Mary Heitkamp takes the metaphor “House Hunting” completely literally. While competing offers aren’t usually settled with crossbows in real life, the gore in this story forces us to feel the life-and-death desperation of our scarcity-based economy, which  makes us crazy no matter how many resources we have at the moment.

My 12-year-old son wants to be John Wick for Halloween, but you know what’s really scary? School bureaucracy! FYI, I love his new school and I have nothing but awe for the number of state-required IEP forms they must complete every year. But McSweeney’s understands the dread we parents feel when we receive an email like “A Note from Your Child’s School About Its Apps and Websites”:

Sports Apps
Register for athletics on SportsStarter but pay for the activity on PayBall. Message team parents/guardians on CrowdChat and coaches on CoachBabble. Find your team’s regular season schedule on YouthSked and its playoff schedule on TourneyTime. Buy tickets to athletic events on GameTix, but only after you’ve topped off your recently hacked School Wallet.

I recognized my own complicated gender feelings in essayist Oliver Radclyffe’s “The Sum of My Parts” at The Gay & Lesbian Review. A midlife transitioner, like me, he talks about the difficulty of forming a “cohesive narrative” that would include his female-presenting history, his gender role models, and the body he chose for himself now.

I always knew that “acting like a girl” felt wrong, but in order to compensate for the parts of my body which were still female, I was now trying too hard to “act like a boy.” It seemed that performative masculinity felt just as inauthentic as performative femininity. I wanted to stop performing, and just be.

It was only after a year of obsessing about whether or not I should start testosterone that I began to wonder if the problem was my sex, not my gender. Perhaps it wasn’t my femininity that caused of my dysphoria, but the fact that my body still retained traces of the female sex. Irrespective of how nonbinary my gender felt, my body wanted to be fully male.

At CRAFT Literary, Jennifer Springsteen’s speculative story “Corpse Washer” is a surprisingly tender and uplifting post-apocalyptic narrative about people caring for each other, medically and spiritually, in a time of plague. Race and class inequalities are not elided here, but neither are they insurmountable.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the season!

Date night at the Big E.

ICYMI: Watch Video of Jendi Reiter and Ella Dawson Reading at the BGSQD

Autumn-time, and the living is spooky… Happy October! I’ve just returned from New York City, where I had the privilege of reading with Ella Dawson at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division. In the Q&A session, we discussed how humor and romance leaven the portrayal of healing from abuse in our new novels. Mine, of course, is Origin Story (Saddle Road Press), perfect for fans of butt sex, radical Judaism, superhero comics, and hating adoption social workers. Ella’s debut novel is But How Are You, Really (Dutton, 2024). A bisexual love story with a theme of healing from intimate partner abuse, Dawson’s witty novel is set at a 5th-year college reunion where journalist Charlotte Thorne must contend with her bullying boss, the friend group who wonders why she ghosted on them, and the lovable almost-boyfriend who got away.

Watch our video (1 hr 7 min) on the BGSQD’s YouTube channel, admire our fit, and buy our books from their store. The BGSQD is located in the LGBT Center at 208 W. 13th St. off 7th Ave. in Manhattan. (Contact them for ordering if you are not able to visit the store in person.)