Articles and Reviews Round Up

Lambda Literary has an interview with Sarah Schulman, author of Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.

AfterEllen has an article on Lesbian Lit.

Bittersweet by Nevada Barr at Butch Style.

Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon was reviewed at Buy Book Gay Lesbian.

Affinity by Sarah Waters was reviewed at Once, Oh Marvellous Once.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters was reviewed at A Writer’s Reading Room and We Be Reading.

Danika reviews Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks

If you’re sick of only reading coming out stories (not that there’s anything wrong with coming out stories, but sometimes it’s nice to have some other plot), try reading some Fantasy/Sci Fi lesbian books, because they can just not make it an issue. It’s so refreshing! Zanja, the protagonist (and the woman on the cover, I assume), is attracted to women (exclusively, as far as we know), but it’s not an issue. In fact, there are more same-sex couples in the book than opposite-sex, but it’s never mentioned or agonized over, it just is. It’s so refreshing!

I’m still fairly new to Fantasy books, but I really liked Fire Logic. As usual, with the fantasy books I’ve read, I was totally over my head in the beginning and didn’t understand the politics or names, but unlike some of the other Fantasy books I’ve read, I actually feel like I understood it in the most minimal way by the end! That’s exactly how it should be: not taking me by the hand and introducing every element, but providing enough detail so that being immersed in eventually imparts some understanding.

I apparently enjoy stories where people travel, because I’m going to mention it again in the review of this book: I like the travelling scenes. I liked how the book had several different plot arcs happening in a succession, not just one overall one. And most of all, I liked the love story. I was rooting for them, but the drama seemed very real and not just contrived to keep them apart. The love story was an essential part of the story, but it also didn’t overshadow the more political aspects; they worked together well.

Overall, though I’m not sure I express it well, I really recommend this book, especially if you’re looking for one where the main character just happens to be a lesbian, not a book where it’s about her being a lesbian.

Reviews and Articles Round Up

Once a week I gather together the lesbian/bisexual/pansexual women/genderqueer books news and reviews.

Lambda Literary has an interview with the co-author of Gay and Lesbian Library Service

Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction has Femslash Con Special – From Fan Fiction to Published Fiction and Readings with SX Meagher

I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell Do I Read? has an article on queer teen short stories.

Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw was reviewed at Bookish Butch.

Turning the Page by Georgia Beers was reviewed at Lesbian Fiction Reviews.

Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature by Emma Donoghue was reviewed at eurOut.

Last Chance at the Lost and Found by Marcia Finical was reviewed at Buy Book Gay Lesbian.

The Judie Grahn Reader was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

Blinded By the Light by Morgan Hunt was reviewed at Kissed By Venus.

The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund was reviewed at My Qmunity Arts Blog.

The Cain Casey Series by Ali Vali was reviewed at Lesbian Fiction Reviews.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters was reviewed at Peachybooks.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters was reviewed at The Book Nurse and Fyrefly’s Book Blog, .

Turn for Home by Lara Zielinsky was reviewed at Kissed By Venus.

Huffington Post article about gay teen books

It’s nice when queer lit gets some mainstream attention. As usual, most of the books featured are about gay boys, but there’s five lesbian books in there, too. (One of my pet peeves is when something claims to be LGBT and is really just gay with a couple lesbians thrown in. If you’re going to say you’re representing the LGBT community, you have to actually include bisexual and transgender material, at the very least.) Anyway, here’s the article.

What are your favourite teen lesbian or pansexual/bisexual/etc girl books? Hello, Groin by Beth Goobie is my favourite.

Conversation About Well of Loneliness

As you may recall, Cass from Bonjour, Cass challenged me to read The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, that old depressing lesbian classic. I accepted the challenge. What we also did, though, is discuss/rant about the book together. We had two conversations about it. I’ll be posting excerpts of the first one (when I didn’t have notes) and Cass will be excerpting from the second one (when I did have notes and we were both a little more organized). Here are the highlights, with spoilers marked. I’m sorry to say that we started at the end, so the beginning is a little spoiler heavy. Spoilers are up for interpretation, though, so I hid plot points but showed who the major romantic lead is and general things like that.

Danika: […] Okay, so, to get started… overall impressions? I liked Stephen as a character right up until the end, where she started doing stupid, manipulative, controlling things. I thought she was really sympathetic until maybe the last tenth of the book, when I lost a huge amount of respect for her.

Cass: Stephen’s a bit of a jerk. [highlight to read spoilers] Who’s she to decide Mary wants to marry a man even Stephen didn’t want to marry? I appreciate Hall’s argument for tolerance and acknowledgement (“Give us also the right to our existance!”), but the ending is frustratingly …something. Paternalistic, maybe. [end of spoilers]

[…]

D: That’s exactly what I thought! In the end, I realized that Stephen is pretty sexist. She had that whole “I know what’s best for you better than you do” attitude. I wasn’t impressed. [spoilers] But what’s-his-name (see, this is why I took notes), the romantic competition, was just as bad. I was furious at both of them.

C: Martin! Martin is a big dumb jerk, too.

D: Ah, yes, Martin. I looooved Martin when he first came on the scene. (I live in BC, so I was like “Yes! Trees!”) Then, like Stephen, he took this nose dive as a character in the end. Sigh.

C: Stephen’s whole “Mary would be so much happier with a man” plan (without, you know, consulting Mary) [end of spoilers] really examplifies the problem with the Inversion theory.

D: Inversion theory?

C: Inversion as opposed to lesbianism. Like, an invert is a masculine woman or a feminine man. And they are doomed to forever fall in love with people they can never be with. Since of course they can’t be with one another.

D: Oh, yes. That really is pushed in WoL, huh? Because Mary is feminine and (by our current labels) bisexual, or even straight-with-an-exception, because you can’t be exclusively attracted to women if you’re feminine.

C: Oh, I don’t know about that. I think we put Mary in a lesbian bar circa-1955, she’d be all over the butches.

D: Probably. But I think that’s how Stephen sees her. I guess I think Stephen doesn’t really know her all that well at all, or at least doesn’t respect her. Because I think Stephen thought that without her influence, Mary would be “normal”.

C: Yes. Oh, inversion. How I shake my fist at you.

D: Definitely. So, again coming at it with 2010 labels, do you think WoL first more under a trans umbrella or a lesbian one? I think they can be read from both perspectives, but do you think it fits more into one than the other?

C: I really don’t think it’s fair to push our labels onto a book from 1928. Trans- identities are, by definition, personal and self-definied/understood, that I think it’s impossible to decide whether or not Stephen Gordon is a trans character. We’d have to ask her. But if I had to make a decision, I’d say it’s a lesbian novel. And even though I’d love to, I’ll still resist calling Stephen a butch, for the same reasons.  But I know you think of it as more of a trans novel. Care to rebut?

D: A very good point. Not that Stephen would be able to tell us, because she didn’t have the language. It’s odd, though, because the first half of the novel I was very, very sure that Stephen’s gender was more of an issue for her than her sexuality. I mean, by… what was it, 7 or 9? Something like that. As a kid, at least, she got a crush on a woman, so her sexuality did come up early, but her gender seemed to be an issue even earlier. I mean, even before she was born her parents were sure she was a son (not that that was unusual for the time). She was named Stephen. She hated anything feminine, any feminine clothing, her long hair, etc. She spent a long period in her childhood dressing up like a boy. There’s a great quote somewhere (I have it in my notes) where she asks her father if she could be a boy/man if she really tried hard, or if she prayed hard enough. She looks exactly like her father. I mean, it’s hard to tell if she really is “butch” (again, I know it’s silly to apply 2010 labels to 1928, but for the sake of argument) rather than trans. And, who wouldn’t want to be a man in 1928? It was a better life. So I’m divided, but I think there’s a good argument for it being a trans novel.

After she cuts off her hair and buys her own clothes, though, those issues seem to fade to the background and her sexuality becomes the big issue. There is one passage where she looks in the mirror and hates her body, but hating your body is a genderless problem, so again, hard to say.

[…]

C: The term ‘homosexuality,’ while in use in 1928, didn’t yet have its modern definition or its now understood division from gender. Inversion, on the other hand, completly tied sexual orientation to one’s gender and gender expression. A person labelled female at birth could not, by defition, be an invert without displaying masculine traits and masculine leanings. Therefore, in order to be a novel ABOUT inversion, Stephen has to be masculine. If we are using our modern lens here, then we can agree that, despite her masculinity, Stephen is not automatically male. The fact that her parents gave her a traditionally male name is out of her control. Lots of girls who continue to identify as women like to dress in pants rather than dresses because they are easier to walk and play in. Looking “like a man” or being masculine doesn’t make a person a man.

The conversation with her father is trickier, but if she has a crush on a girl, and thinks that only men and women can have relationships together, it’s logical that she would want to be a man in order to be happily in love with a woman.

D: True, but coming from a modern perspective, that assumes that you are by default the gender you were assigned at birth and only the opposite if there is overwhelming evidence. We don’t have overwhelming evidence that Stephen would identify as a man, but we have a lot less evidence than there is for Stephen identifying as a woman. She can’t stand to even be around women, except the ones she falls in love with.

That makes sense, but it isn’t just around having a partner that Stephen is frustrated at being labelled a girl. In fact, as some point she said “Being a girl ruins everything” (not an exact quote)

C: […] [H]er gender and gender expression can be on the trans-masculine spectrum without her necessarily being trans. In 1928(ish), being a girl DID ruin everything!

I think you are the gender you understand yourself to be, but sadly I can’t ask Stephen. 😉

D: Oh, and I meant to say in that first paragraph that of course she doesn’t hypothetically have to identify with either or just one. If I’m assigning modern labels, Stephen is probably more butch or genderqueer than transman, but you’re right in that it’s so very much a personal definition that it’s pointless to guess at that.

[…] I definitely think think Stephen would be in the trans-masculine spectrum, but isn’t that under the trans umbrella? Of course, it depends on how wide we’re making the umbrella, because under a lot of definitions Stephen would be included there by default because of her refusal to conform to gender norms in dress, hair, attitude, etc.

That’s a big part of the problem in trying to assess Stephen’s discomfort with her gender. Is it because she feels more trans, or is it just a natural reaction to the restrictive nature of being a woman at the time?

[…]

D: Okay, did you notice that animals can practically talk in WoL?

C: Why do animals always die in gay books? Why? And what is with LESBIANS and HORSES. Excuse me. INVERTS. Inverts and horses.

[…]

D: I thought that one of the ongoing themes in WoL is that aging is a tragedy. Everybody gets old and it is terrible.

[…]

C: Do you think TWOL is still important reading?

Hall hates the feminine ladies. Poor Mary. Do you think Lady Una gave Hall a good talking to after she read TWOL?

D: Yeah, I got definitely get a whiff of misogyny from WoL.

I think so. I mean, like I was saying in my post, it’s amazing/depressing the things that are still relevant. Stephen actually makes a pretty good case for same sex marriage, letting queer people serve in the army, and letting gay people adopt. It’s a sympathetic plea, partly because Stephen is so traditional other than her “inversion”.

I hope so. I wonder what Hall’s other books are like, if they all have this feminine = weak theme

C: I will be honest. I just hate BEING GAY IS SO HARD books. I know it CAN be hard and there are problems, but these books make it sound like we’re the most miserable bunch ever.

D: Ugh, I know. And the unhappily ever after queer books. When you’re already dealing with a tough time coming out or something, you don’t want to read about “DON’T BE GAY OR YOU’LL DIE/GO INSANE”. Of course, being gay in 1928 would be pretty awful.

C: Granted, 1928, not such a good year for the ole inverts.

[…]

C: What’s your favorite happy ending lesbian book?

Rules: 1) No one can die. 2) No horses 3) No rape.

Okay, commence. […] ( I can’t think of any.) […] Are you stumped because I am stumped.

[…]

D: THOUGH, and this is one of my issues in the book, Stephen could have had it so easy! You’re freaking rich, Stephen! You can lavishly support your hot young girlfriend! You can go on vacations and hold big lesbian parties! Why so sad?

And that was about it for our first conversation! I cut out the slightly off-topic meanderings (talking about the WoL covers, other lesbian books covers, and some other lesbian books), but if anyone’s interested in reading our random babbling, I can post that, too.

Check out more of Cass and I talking and complaining (I kid, I like it despite some of its issues) at Bonjour, Cass!

And hey, if anyone wants to do something like this with me again, just let me know! I’d probably be up for it. You don’t even need to be a book blogger. In fact, feel free to email me about lesbian books anytime (my email is in the About Me) section. It is my favourite topic! You can also ask me questions (even anonymously) on my Formspring.

Reviews and Articles Round Up

Here are the reviews and articles on lesbian/bisexual/pansexual women’s books I’ve stumbled on in the last week.

Lambda Literary has:

QueerType has its own very thorough (queer) July Publishing Notes.

Readings in Lesbian & Bisexual Women’s Fiction has a radio segment with author Moondancer Drake.

Care2 has an article called Equal Writes: An LGBT Summer Reading List with a fair number of lesbian books.

Pink Banana World has an article called What Makes Lesbian Literature Lesbian Literature?

eurOut has an article called LesBian Literature: Favourites

GLBT Promo Blog has info on a giveaway of a copy of Sapphistocated for US residents. Winner announced August 3, 2010.

Victoria Oldham spreads the word about six EU authors from Bold Strokes Books doing a reading at Waterstones Book Store in Market Square, Nottingham, July 29 at 6:30pm.

From the Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Lawsuits That Have Changed Our Nation by Carlos A. Ball was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

Around the Houses by Amanda Boulter was reviewed at Lesbians of North London.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham was reviewed at Things Mean a Lot (one of my favorite book blogs).

Inseparable: Desire Between Women In Literature by Emma Donoghue was reviewed at The Smart Set.

Finders Keepers by Karin Kallmaker was reviewed at Bookish Butch.

Kicked Out edited by Sassafras Lowrey was reviewed at Lambda Literary. This is an incredibly important book to read, I highly recommend it.

Centuries Ago and Very Fast by Rebecca Ore was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

Affinity by Sarah Waters was reviewed at She Reads Novels.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters was reviewed at Rhapsody In Books.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters was reviewed at Mundane Extravagence, Things She’s Read, and Reviewing Everything.

Guest Lesbrarian: allis

Hooray, a guest lesbrarian! We haven’t had one of those for a while. This review is from allis, and you can find her on Livejournal here. Thanks, allis!

Women of Mystery: An Anthology by Katherine V. Forrest

As the title let it guess, all those stories have female lead character, usually lesbian character, and all the stories involve some kind of mystery. They are indeed all intriguing in their own way and pull the reader in right from the start and doesn’t let it go until the very end. There is no way you can stop in the middle of a story. You have to know how it ends, you have to know who killed who, why all those secrets, is she really a werewolf, etc…

The opening lines are really great and make you plunge into the story from the very first words as you can see in those few examples :

“I started to suspect she was a werewolf on our first date” (“Let Sleeping Cats Lie” by Jeane Harris)

“I need you to solve a mystery for me” (“The Intersection of Camp and St. Mary” by J.M. Redmann)

“The first time you get kidnapped can ruin your evening.” (“Two Left Shoes” by Carole Spearin McCauley)

The authors have all very different interpretations for the word “mystery” and you are sure to be surprised by some of them. There are classic crime, fantasy story, ghost story, family story, funny story, etc… No story is like another. As a fan a diversity when I read an anthology, I really enjoyed that part of the book.

Though well written most of the stories didn’t stick with me. I had to return to the first lines to remember what the story was about. This anthology is a quick read, ideal when you have to wait somewhere, in the train, or just want to read a bit of mystery at night.

It was a nice easy read, but it definitely is not an anthology I’ll remember much. But maybe it’s just because I’m not that much into mystery stories in general…

There was really only one story I didn’t like much. It was “Violation” by Victoria A. Brownworth. It’s not that it was badly written but I just didn’t like the theme of it much. I thought it was a bit more serious, a bit darker than the other stories too.

My favourites are “Elsie Riley” by Martha Miller for its atmosphere and really open ending, “Let Sleeping Cats Lie” by Jeane Harris for all its surprises, “House Built of Sticks” by J.L. Belrose for the family drama seen through the eyes of a child who doesn‘t really get all that is happening, “The Intersection of Camp and St. Mary” by J.M. Redmann for its humour and “Murder on Chuckanut Drive” by Ouida Crozier for its main character and general atmosphere.

I would rate this anthology 7/10.

Have you read Women of Mystery or something like it? What did you think of it?

I made another tumblr.

This will be the last blog from me for a reasonable amount of time, I promise. I’ve been planning this one for a while now: it’s called FY Lesbian Literature and it will be mostly pictures and quotes of lesbian books, authors, readers, etc.

What do you think of FY Lesbian Literature? What do you think should be on there?

Just a reminder, I’d love to post any guest reviews of lesbian/bisexual/pansexual women/genderqueer books, just go to Guest Lesbrarians for my email address and the guidelines.

Ivan E. Coyote on gender identity

I adore Ivan E. Coyote (author of several short story collections/memoirs and a novel), as you might already know, but I especially like Ivan’s new article on gender identity and pronouns. Check it out here. I wish she had spoken at my school; Ivan is definitely the kind of role model I would have loved to have.

What do you think about Ivan’s thoughts and conclusions on her own gender identity and pronoun choices?