Finally got myself a copy of The Brightsiders! It’s been super hard to find in Australia, for some reason.
Also, decided it was due time I read Carol/The Price of Salt. When I got my copy off the shelf, I realised for the first time that the cover is a pastiche of Nighthawks, which, so far, seems to suit the mood of the prose really well.
In today’s guest post you get to learn a bit about Lisa Jenn Bigelow, the author of middle grade f/f novels Starting From Here and newly released Drum Roll, Please, and about her experience growing up and becoming a writer.
Drum Roll, Please: How an F/F Tween Novel Was Born, Grew Up, and Came Out of the Closet By Lisa Jenn Bigelow
1995
Senior year of high school. After two years of questioning, I’d decided I was gay. Probably. Aside from a trip to the mall with a skater boy, I’d never dated. Everything felt hypothetical.
I’d scoured libraries and bookstores for queer books. (This was before I had Internet access.) Those I found were mostly about gay men, mostly about AIDS. Nothing for teens. There was a lesbian bookstore downtown. I’d read about it in the paper, seen its rainbow flag flying. I mustered the nerve to go in. There, I found a flyer for an LGBTQ teen support group. The group had its own library, packed into a Styrofoam picnic cooler. There was Annie on My Mind, by Nancy Garden. Tales from the Closet, by Ivan Velez, Jr. Queer YA existed after all.
I wish I’d discovered these books earlier, before I started to question myself. I wish there had been more of them. I wish they’d all had happy, or at least hopeful, endings. My life today is still shaped by those early years of feeling alone, afraid, and inferior. I was fortunate to feel confident of my parents’ and closest friends’ support, whenever I came out. But school was a homophobic environment. The local paper regularly printed homophobic letters to the editor.
Day after day, the headlines debated whether gay people deserved the same rights as straight people. President Clinton passed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act. Homosexuality was technically a crime in many states.
I didn’t think I’d ever be allowed to marry. I didn’t think I could ever have children. But those books in the cooler were a ray of hope.
Idk if anyone else has noticed this, but in this scene of Love, Simon you can see that Simon has the book More Happy Than Not on his shelf. Coincidentally, More Happy Than Not also features a boy struggling with his sexuality, so whether this was planned or that Becky Albertalli is just friends with Adam Silvera, it’s still a cool feature because it implies that Simon read it and maybe helped him figure out himself.
I TOTALLY SPOTTED THIS IN THE MOVIE THEATRE! Adam Silvera’s not my favourite author – his books just didn’t speak to me, nbd – but I know they’re really important to a lot of people, and that the people dressing the set took the time to put queer books on Simon’s shelf meant a lot to me. I just wish we had a great front-on shot so that we could see the other books, because I’d put money on there being more queer titles up there. Bless this set dresser, they did good.
Oooh, and if you haven’t read any Sarah Waters, you should try her out. Anything of hers except The Little Stranger, which is heterosexual and unsatisfying. Everything else is gay and set between the 19th century and the 1940s.
*slams fist on the table* YOU SEE, I KNEW YOU WOULD COME THROUGH. THIS IS THE KIND OF RECOMMENDATION I LIKE.
i will look all of these up with GREAT enthusiasm, thank you. i am a huge sarah waters fan and love all her books, even (i’m afraid) the little stranger, although it is admittedly very heterosexual. the only one i haven’t read is affinity, which you’ve just reminded me i want to read.
THANK YOU!
p.s. oh my god so i can, i love saying ‘my wife’, every time i say it i get little confused tingles.
Another bonus of the Santa Olivia/Saints Astray duology – most of the characters are people of colour. It’s very relevent given current US/Mexican relations, as it’s set in a fictional near future in a DMZ between the two.
Nightrunner series would definitely get you through a holiday – eight books including the short story collection, eleven if you include the prequel trilogy The Tamir Triad.
When The Moon Was Ours is full of the lushest language. Gorgeous. And The Rules of Magic is the prequel Hoffman wrote to Practical Magic. It’s the aunts, plus their brother, growing up in the 1960s. Art and feminism and sex and illicit dark-ish magic. *grabby hands*
Affinity is full of spiritualism, women’s prisons, confidence trickstering and gaslighting. The first time I read it, I thought it was a bit odd, but I liked it better second time around. ENJOY.
Give a shoutout to your favorite LGBTQIAP+ book! 🌈📚
Everyone NEEDS to read I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. by John Donovan. First young adult novel with LGBT themes, published spring of 1969 by a gay New Yorker (the proximity to Stonewall is amazing), and it would be a beautiful, amazing book worth reading even if it weren’t historically important.
I’ve never heard of this one! Sounds like a great read for Pride Month!
not my favorite, but my first gay book was A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White. it’s set in the 1950s, so it’s got some historical context. also, my high school english teacher gave it to me before i had come out to anyone, and that was honestly such a read
I love that I’m hearing about all of these older LGBTQ+ books that we don’t often hear about anymore! Thank you for sharing!
If we’re going older books, I think more people need to know about Peter McGehee and Doug Wilson’s trilogy of autobiographical novels. They’re devastating, beautiful, and burn bright with life and humour in the midst of dying, at the height of the AIDS crisis. They do have sexual content and difficult subject matter, so they’d be for mature readers who are ready for that, but I think they’re important, and most people don’t know they exist. I read them first in my very early twenties, and they will never leave me or my bookshelf.
Welcome friends! For Pride Month, I’m hosting an LGBTQ+ literature giveaway!
What can you win? Any THREE LGBT books that tickle your fancy, PLUS a copy of Stephanie Ahn’s DEADLINE. (Books shown are books I’d like to read or would like others to read, but if there’s an LGBTQ+ book YOU want to read that’s not on here and you win, hit me up with it! Let’s discuss it! There are many other options out there!)
How can you enter? Follow me (this is a giveaway to celebrate my 600 milestone, too!) and reblog this post. Likes do not count, but you’re free to like the post for reference. Giveaway ends on July 1, at midnight, when we usher in the next month of twentygayteen: Gayly.
Rules:
No TERFs, no truscum, no exclusionists, and no generally nasty people allowed; if you win and you’re one of those kinds of people I will silently draw another name.
This giveaway is for LGBTQ+ people only! If you’re an ally reblogging to signal boost, please tag your reblog as such so I can count you out!
Must be 18+ or have permission to give me your shipping address. If you are closeted and need the books sent somewhere else, to a friend’s house or your workplace, let me know. We will work something out.
Some of these books contain sexual themes, if you are a minor or uncomfortable with sexual content, let’s discuss the books beforehand so that we can figure out some appropriate literature for you.
If you’re only following me for the giveaway and plan to leave later, that’s fine, but I hope you’ll stick around to talk about writing with me!
INTERNATIONAL USERS: I am US-located and shipping, especially for books, gets expensive fast. If you are located outside of the US and win, I will buy you a $35USD giftcard to a bookstore of your choosing in your country, or Amazon! I hope you will use it to buy LGBTQ+ literature!
Ends July 1 at the stroke of midnight! (mountain time.)
Who am I? Why am I doing this? I reckon I’m just a frog working on my own novels! This is my Writeblr! I hope to someday be published so that you’re all forced to see my books on shelves at your local bookstores!
If you have any questions about the giveaway or how to enter, please send me a pm or ask off anon!
If this gets 50 notes I’ll tell you guys how I ran an underground sex ed class and helped put a pedophile in jail during second grade
Okay, so my mom has always been super open about health stuff and when I was just starting elementary school she got me a bunch of those American Girl books about your body and your feelings and they were really informative and truthful and I really liked them. One day I was talking to a friend about one of them and we started reading it and she was asking a ton if questions and seemed really excited and interested by it and I answered questions and explained stuff. We talked about the books during recess and eventually more girls joined in until we were a group of about 10-15 seven year-olds talking about puberty and sex and a lot of things that most adults don’t The thing about those books is that they look really innocent with cute drawings and there are chapters about brushing your teeth and stuff; but what most people don’t expect is that there’s a lot of health stuff about puberty and mental illness and drugs and a lot of really important stuff that everyone should know. The teachers didn’t care because the books looked super innocent and they thought were talking about proper brushing habits or something. We’d go sit down and read a chapter and I’d add some other stuff that my mom had told me and then we’d just talk and ask questions. It was kind of like group therapy but with sex ed. This was all okay until one of the boys saw a page with a ton of boobs on it (the page was demonstrating a breast exam) and he told the teacher. So they found and I got suspended and I wasn’t allowed to bring any more of those books into school.
Closer to the end of the year, one of the second grade teachers was revealed to be a pedophile when one of his students said that he tried to touch her inappropriately and then three other girls came forward with the same story. After he was arrested, the girl told me that she said what he did because we had talked about what to do in that exact situation. Because of our group she knew that she probably wasn’t the only one and she knew that it was wrong for him to do that and that she wouldn’t get in trouble if she told someone and that she probably wouldn’t have said anything if she hadn’t read those books.
I started doing it again the next year. No one stopped me.
Bless.
Reblogging again in hope someone could give me those books’ names
I believe it’s this one! Fits the description and the back cover even has the brushing girl.
There’s a series of books! ^^
The American Girl books are really, really good. They talk about things honestly but simply, and cover a lot of important stuff. 11/10 for those books.
These books were the only sex ed I had as a young girl. These were a door to reading bigger, badder texts and getting involved in activism…
100% recommend you buy these for sisters, daughters, nieces. 110%
My “Care and Keeping of You” book was not my only sex ed, but since my “official” sex ed was really creepy “SAVE YOURSELF FOR YOUR HUSBAND BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU’RE A HORRIBLE DISGUSTING PERSON” sort of sex ed.
However, 99% of what I actually learned about my body and puberty was from a) my subscription to American Girl Magazine, and b) my copy of “The Care and Keeping of You”, which I got because I was signed up for some subscription thing that they sent me books and stuff and when that book came out it was in that.
Basically, idk how well it stands up, but it was great for me as a young, sheltered kid.
THIS IS SO AWESOME. So many names of writers I love. And me too!
I find this picture fascinating. While obviously not a comprehensive picture of every kind of writing, it is a fairly comprehensive picture of a certain flavor of fiction. And in selecting authors to fill each spot, the person who made the selections picked all women authors, except for one.
I haven’t read more than a few of these authors, but I have enjoyed the ones I have. Seeing them all laid out like this is kind of a big motivator to read more of them.
They were making a point with their selections: the original, non-ironic, totally “what I just picked the best people, why are you looking at me funny” version of this graphic was all male authors, with one woman (who had a gender-neutral name and could have been included by mistake).
Tara Abernathy (from Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence) for the first prompt of Month of Love 2018, “Black.”
I’ve been wanting to do a piece for the Craft Sequence books, which I discovered and fell in love with maybe a year ago, and this was the perfect push.
Modeled for by the lovely @labillustration, a great artist in her own right.
I didn’t know this series, so I now have something new to read, thanks to this gorgeous art!
knitting in the dark 