Queer And Pleasant Danger
Kate Bornstein
The story of “a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology, and leaves 12 years later to become the lovely lady she is today” is like reading about a handful of lifetimes in one. Bornstein – assigned male at birth in late 1940s New Jersey – embarks on an incredible journey of self-discovery within the unique climate of late-‘70s L. Ron Hubbard Scientology.
At the root of Hubbard’s now infamous religion, is the belief that each Scientologist’s human form contains a thetan, the genderless spirit used as a control system between itself and the physical universe. Bornstein writes the most comprehensive understanding of Scientology I’ve come across, while simultaneously conveying what a very appealing idea it would have all seemed, in a time before we properly acknowledged gender fluidity, and the concept of being transgender.
How To Grow Up
Michelle Tea
Everyone’s favourite lesbian literature maven is back with another selection of stories. This time, instead of running wild through the streets of San Francisco, she’s quietly seated at her store-bought vintage writing table, reflecting on how it came to be that she A) bought the damn thing rather than dragging it in off the street and B) is 41 and engaged. For anyone who identifies as queer and feels like maybe that put us slightly behind the “natural” order of life’s milestones (for whatever reason), Tea sets us all at ease, writing that even fully grown, she’s no adult. On finally reaching her deathbed she decides, “I want to have lived. To have taken chances. To not have settled for the poor person’s reduced experience of life, shackled to a job, making ends meet, but to have lived as much like a rich person as I could, with their fuller experience of the world, with travel and art and proximity to things beautiful. I wanted to live like I wasn’t afraid, like life was there for my taking.”
When Everything Feels Like The Movies
Raziel Reid
It’s not every day that a 24-year-old first time novelist wins the Governor General’s Award, and then promptly finds it petitioned based on the content of his work. Content that is so glaringly absent from the greater discussion surrounding LGBTQ youth and the sex they’re having. Part coming-of-age story, part survival guidebook, and inspired by true events, Reid’s novel hits the mark at every turn encapsulating readers, with a mix of hilarity, bravery and a very raw, honest look at how we treat others when we don’t understand them.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
Seven years in the making, this graphic memoir pushed the boundaries of both genres, dissecting the heavy themes of sexuality, gender, abuse, suicide and family when it debuted in 2006. Bechdel, an openly gay woman, learns upon her father’s untimely death, a host of secrets hidden within a family raised by a closeted father and a mother in denial. She explores diverse, yet connected ideas, with passages like, “It’s imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex,” alongside flat out questions like, “What would happen if we spoke the truth?” Set against the backdrop of the family owned funeral home, the title is a touch of irony on the family business and the sometimes unbearably difficult environment the Bechdel children endured at home. Six years later, Bechdel reflected on the relationship between she and her mother in the companion piece, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama.
Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes
Kamal Al-Solaylee
A storyteller by trade, Al-Solaylee, is an accomplished journalist and theatre critic living in Toronto. Born the son of one of the wealthiest property owners in all of Yemen, Al-Solaylee's opening line reads, "I am the son of an illiterate shepherdess who was married off at fourteen and had eleven children by the time she was thirty-three." The story of his navigation through the rigid cultures of Middle Eastern society is not the typical version you may expect. A father educated in Britain, whose dream for his family to live in a progressive society sees the family move to Lebanon, Egypt and ultimately back to Yemen during some of the worst years of civil war, a family trapped in the turmoil of a politic they don't adhere to. As his world regresses, and his brother's religion takes on a more radical nature, Al-Solaylee - coming to terms with his homosexuality – realizes his own chance for survival is getting out. Anyone who knows what it's like to have to leave all you've known to fulfill all you are - this is a story of how, sometimes, you can never go home again.
