Ella is transgender. She’s known since she was young; being a woman just fit better. She was happier in skirts than trousers, but that was before her stepmother moved in. Eleanor can’t stand her, and after Ella’s father passes she’s forced to revert to Cole, a lump of a son. She cooks, she cleans, and…
A dynamic composite of rising stars, The Collection represents the depth and range of tomorrow’s finest writers chronicling transgender narratives. 28 authors from North America converge in a single volume to showcase the future of trans literature and the next great movements in queer art. I met a girl named Bat who met Jeffrey Palmer…
Teens are more aware of sexuality and identity than ever, and they’re looking for answers and insights, as well as a community of others. In order to help create that community, YA authors David Levithan and Billy Merrell have collected original poems, essays, and stories by young adults in their teens and early 20s. The…
This essay explores the ways that teleological narratives of transition come coupled with corresponding affective narratives that frame life “pre” transition as characterized by a reductively bleak emotional surround and cathect life “post” transition to a bright-sided promise of social ease, domestic comfort, and existential peace. Building on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of cruel optimism and…
Keywords: comics, illustration, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, music, comic books, Lynda Barry, Wimmin’s Comix, lesbian separatism, WBC
Raising My Rainbow is Lori Duron’s poignant, heart-breaking, and at times hysterical memoir of her and her family’s adventures of raising a gender creative child. Whereas her older son Chase is a Lego-loving, sports-playing boy’s boy, her youngest son C.J. would much rather twirl around in a pink sparkly tutu, with a Disney Princess in…
BRAZIEL ROBINSON POSSESSED OF TWO SPIRITS: Braziel Robinson, recently deceased, is a negro of about seventy-five years of age, and came to our plantation immediately after the war to test the question whether he was really free or not, and had the right to move from his former master’s place. He soon established a reputation…
A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical…
On the first day at his new school, Leo Denton has one goal: to be invisible. Attracting the attention of the most beautiful girl in his class is definitely not part of that plan–especially because Leo is a trans guy and isn’t out at his new school. Then Leo stands up for a classmate in…
Bloom takes us on a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of “people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic” – female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and…