Books
Too Queer to Read
Oct 2nd
Banned Book Week is wrapping up, and you can bet your bottom dollar that queer titles are tops among the small-minded bigots looking to control access to literature in American schools..
“Every year, the [American Library Association] and other liberal groups use this trumped-up event to intimidate and basically silence concerned parents… the truth is, parents have every right and responsibility to object to their kids receiving sexually explicit and pro-gay literature without their permission, especially in a school setting.” – Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family.
Yes, because everyone knows the best way to make sure kids don’t try to get their hands on something is to tell them they can’t have it.
Courtesy of the National Coalition Against Censorship, here’s a brief rundown of queer titles that the Moral Minority have tried (sometimes successfully) to remove from public libraries, schools and, in some cases, even bookstores.
0Cult of Boys
Sep 23rd
With her scrapbook Cult of Boys fashion photographer Toyin Ibidapo created a visiual memorial for the (slightly older) androgynous sons of the fading emo decade.
You can’t always trust your gaydar. Opening this book might let you think of the numerous gay photographers with their affection for teens. Not this time though. Cult of Boys comes form a woman who photographed for clients like the Dazed & Confused magazine or the late queer fashion star Alexander McQueen.
The portraits of the emosih lads featured in this book were made over a longer period of time in her own flat. Most of the boys are scantily clad (or not at all) but eroticism isn’t the major theme; there seems to be an intimate atmosphere built on trust and maybe even friendship. Ingenuous models explore who they are–and who they could be. Although carefully staged the photos, which might remind you of the Yatrofsky’s work, seem genuine and emit the honesty and frankness the photography of the young and beautiful so often lacks. Impetuous and with lots of charm the fascinating pictures capture the raw vulnerability of the soft youth.
Translated from Queer.de
0The Empress Sword
Aug 6th
With a kingdom to save and a dragon to slay, not to mention the loss of a dear friend and the first stirrings of a childhood crush, transitioning into a female is literally the least important problem on Crown Prince Aster’s mind. See, there’s this dragon attacking Caledon, and the only way to defeat it is to find and wield the mythical Empress Sword—a sword that will not bear the touch of any man. So Aster does what any sensible thirteen-year-old crown prince would do: he gets magical gender reassignment surgery.
Actually, it’s more complicated than that, and Aster doesn’t exactly understand what he’s agreeing to when he grasps the sword for the first time. Nonetheless, Aster becomes Astrid and what had the danger of becoming yet another too-straightforward boy’s adventure book on the shelves swiftly takes on new dimensions. We suddenly have a strong, female protagonist where we once had a slightly naive but endearingly noble male—one who has no problems with it beyond the obvious issues of a changed centre of gravity and a vague sense of “this is new and a bit weird!”
The narrative continues to refer to the prince as “him” because for Aster (as he still thinks of himself—though he quickly realizes that introducing himself by the prince’s name would draw confusion), the transition to “femaleness” is at first only a matter of changing some outward behaviors—like when the prince has to convince people that “he’s” become a girl, but maintains a comfortable male wardrobe, manners, and speech with friends. The prince’s own perceptions of “femaleness” are challenged and turned over frequently, but Aster’s assumptions are the fault of a royal upbringing (and a perception of “maleness” that is also quite skewed due to that heritage).
Aster’s transition is a non-issue in the book, with no broad, overarching statement made about transphobia. There is no fear over body image, shame, disgust, or humiliation—these things are entirely absent from Aster’s transition experience. And that’s a statement in and of itself. The fact that Jaxton doesn’t make a big flurry/trauma/statement about the gender change—nobody calls Astrid gross, unnatural, or a freak when they find out she used to be the prince—is a small but important victory.
In Aster’s arrogant and selfish selflessness, we see the ego of a child who has always been treated like an equal and a grown-up, played fantastically against the condescending humiliation of being a “little girl.” More important is Aster’s realization that people were just as condescending when she was a boy, but in a more subtle way because she was a prince. And Aster has no problems with being a girl in love with another girl.
Aster is also rather egalitarian in other relationships. Aster is good friends with a stable boy and doesn’t see why a merchant’s daughter can’t be asked to dinner, and when confronted with a monster who displays intelligence, actually listens to what the dragon has to say and concedes that the dragon’s point of view and concerns are as valid as the humans’ are. In that moment, the book is elevated from mere adventure story to a tale about equality, compassion, and the basic rights of all people—be they dragons, foreigners with unfamiliar features, or boys in dresses.
In the end, the success of The Empress Sword lies in the normalizing of transgender characters and heroes who treat everyone around them equally, and offering a fantastic quest adventure yarn for young people that teaches as well as entertains. [via Lambda Literary]
0Lockdown High
Jun 11th
The Guardian‘s John Harris reviews Annette Fuentes’s Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse, an investigative book on how "zero tolerance" policies have produced high-schools that "reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence." Harris points out that the insanity isn’t a mere American phenomenon, and has been enthusiastically embraced in the UK, where things are about to get much worse. [via BoingBoing]
Now, as the surveillance state embeds itself in the lives of millions of children, the education bill currently making its way through parliament promises to extend teachers’ powers to search pupils to the point that, as the pressure group Liberty puts it, they will be "proportionate to terrorism investigations". Teachers will be able not just to seize phones and computers, but wipe them of any data if they think there "is a good reason to do so" – a move of a piece with new powers to restrain pupils and issue summary expulsions.
Not entirely surprisingly, education secretary Michael Gove casts all this as a matter of copper-bottomed common sense. "Our bill will put heads and teachers back in control, giving them a range of tough new powers to deal with bullies and the most disruptive pupils," he said last year, before he used a very telling phrase: "Heads will be able to take a zero-tolerance approach."
For many people, the idea of school discipline will still be synonymous with Victorian images of cane-wielding teachers, but we now seem to be headed for something much more insidious: authoritarianism for children, sold to students and staff using the dazzle of technology, and the modern vocabulary of the security crackdown.
And all this, you may remember, from a government whose coalition agreement promises "a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion".
Only for grownups, perhaps.
0WTF? Sex Secrets
Apr 26th
Our friends from the WTFSexFacts Twitter channel got an eBook out that contains more than 1000 sex secrets by people of all ages. You can grab a copy here for £2.50. Go & find the secret mentioning milkboys 
Have an example:
Female: “When I was in high-school, the school geek got beaten up and stripped. It was the single most sexy thing I ever saw. Not the beating, of course. I knew something was going on because there were boys and girls all rushing to the small woods next to the school playing field, so my friend and I went to see what was happening also. Five boys were kicking the shit out the geek for some unknown reason. As usual, a crowd of kids gathered around to watch, mostly boys and a few girls. Not satisfied with beating him up, they decide to humiliate him by taking off his clothes. I guess they did it because there were a few girls watching. I guess they weren’t going to miss the thrill of seeing a boy stripped to nothing. They just stood there watching how all his clothes were taken off. The thing is, when he was naked, it showed he had the BIGGEST penis you will ever see. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was like a boy with a man’s penis. Everyone was shocked. I swear it was like a scene in a movie. The whole crowd fell silent. Even the boys beating him up. It must have been so embarrassing to have your clothes taken off in public and everyone enjoying his shame. I couldn’t get his penis out of my head. I felt really guilty too about what happened and reported it to the teachers. The boys got expelled and some of the people watching got suspended. I befriended the geeky boy hoping to have some kind of sexual encounter with him, but he turned out to be queer.”
0A Transgender Fairy Tale
Apr 3rd
Many of the stories we were told as children are built on a foundation of traditional gender roles. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White (among others) all need to be rescued by strong, sword-toting young men. Although they are less well-known, however, there are transgender fairy tales out there. A perfect example of this is “The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy,” which can be most easily found in Andrew Lang’s “Violet Fairy Book.”
Since this text is out of print, I’ll summarize. The story starts off a little like Mulan. A great emperor takes over a lesser kingdom and offers the king peace on the condition that he send one of his sons in for ten years of service. The king, however, has three daughters and no sons, so he tests the girls to decide who to send.
Although all three of the daughters try, only the youngest is enough of a “manly” warrior to pass the king’s test. She goes into the emperor’s service. After proving her worth to the emperor in many ways, he selects her to go on a difficult quest to bring him the woman of his dreams, the beautiful Iliane.
After being rescued by the disguised princess, however, Iliane falls in love with her. The princess, who reciprocates these feelings, wishes she was a man. To make a long story a bit shorter, they eventually run away together. A hermit who tries to stop them curses the princess, changing her gender. The princess, however, is glad to finally be the man she wanted to be all along. The text reads “when the princess suddenly felt she was really the man she had pretended to be, she was delighted.” Obviously, they get married and live happily ever after.
Although the story is pretty lengthy, I actually find it more engaging than many of the fairy tales I heard as a child. It certainly beats hearing about helpless heroines. Maybe, with more publicity and encouragement of tolerance, this tale can find its way back into bedtime stories.
This article was originally published on The Beanstalk
0Gay Man’s Worst Friend
Mar 19th
The one publication that never failed to inspire this blog was Destroyer from the Swedish queer activist & troublemaker Karl Andersson. It was the first (and so far only) magazine that dared to put teen boys into a place that our modern society had reserved for adolescent girls. What was normal for the latter—to be adored, idolised and often enough sexualized—was apparently unforgivable once the same patterns were applied to boys.
The predictable outrage didn’t just come from the usual right-wing suspects but also, and even harsher, from the gay scene. While love without [age] boundaries was an´ordinary part of the queer spectrum once (no matter if you take historical personalities like Oscar Wilde & Walt Whitman or the fact that mainstream gay mags in the 70s & 80s used to make no difference between teen boys and buff men when it came to sexy photos) it seems to have become somewhat of a dark family secret of the past that must be kept under the carpet no matter what. Because otherwise, that seems to be the logic here, we might fuel the “all homos are peados” argument and eventually lose the equal rights and fragile freedom we achieved over the last 20 years.
Now you can read the whole story in a recently published book. Gay Man’s Worst Friend is not only the thrilling story of Europe’s most controversial gay magazine, told from Stockholm, Prague and Berlin. It’s also the story of the gay movement in the 21st century. The outraged reactions to Destroyer expose hidden power structures and show how gay identity has been steadily shrunk over recent decades, excluding ever more expressions of homosexuality.
Read more at the Destroyer Blog or order the book at I Love Mags
0Most Targeted Books
Dec 30th
Those are the books American parents try to get banned from libraries the most often [via good.is]
0A Guide to Trap Sex
Oct 14th
The latest of the manga-style health and sex guides now popular in Japanese book-stores includes a guide to being an “otoko no ko,” with an emphasis on healthy sex. The recent “otoko no ko” boom appears to be in full swing, creating a demand for explanatory literature as well as pornography.
For those unaware of the background behind the practice, the 女装少年 / josou shonen (“crossdressing boy”) archetype has a long history both in manga/anime and in traditional Japanese culture. In the last 2 years this archetype has started to enjoy a boom in popularity, becoming known as 男の娘 / otoko no ko (a pun based on substituting the character for “girl” with the character for “child” in the word 男の子 / otoko no ko, “boy”). The phrase and practice is mostly bound up in the “moe boom” and the “shota” genre, with most examples being 2D works.
Being a hard to translate piece of Japanese wordplay referring to a comparatively obscure Japanese subculture, it is no surprise to learn that the term has virtually no traction in English – generally an “otoko no ko” would be referred to as a “trap” in English, although this translation probably differs somewhat in nuance.
As well as comics, there is also a significant subculture of (actual) effete young men interested in crossdressing and adopting a femininised masculinity – some evidently proving quite successful at passing themselves off as women. The practice is generally considered quite distinct from similar fetishes, sexual orientations or gender identities, and has no clear analogue (yet) overseas – practitioners (despite the broken English seen in the book) should not be considered transsexuals in the western sense, and there appears to be very little overlap between “otoko no ko” and Japan’s well established “new-half” subculture, and certainly no surgery.
The book featured here is 「もっと知りたい！オトコの娘の保健体育」 / “Motto Shiritai! Otoko no Ko no Hoken Taiiku” – “I want to know more! Health and physical education for otoko no ko.” Detailed guides to all manners of sex (mostly with men, such as giving good fellatio or receiving anal sex pleasurably) are included, and less intimate matters such as proper application of makeup are also featured.
The tome is on sale in Akiba bookshops, as well as on Amazon. There are also the guides to female onanism and male anal onanism for similarly essential reading. [Article by Sankaku Complex]
0Banned Books Week
Oct 4th
The Banned Books Weeks is just over but however, since the problem is still there I will pirate the following post from violet blue nonetheless.
Some people want to burn books that contain, represent or express ideas they hate; in America, a number of people (the same ones, most likely) try very hard every year to have certain books banned. They want them removed from American libraries, schools, anywhere they can try to get a book erased. (Good thing there is actually no such thing as “unpublishing” don’t you think?)
The American Library Association fights these demands for book removals. Every year. And so every year they celebrate Banned Books Week (September 25−October 2, 2010). This is to draw attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States and stress the essentialness of intellectual freedom. The ALA published this .PDF of books that were targeted for banning 2010. While sickened to see Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings on the 2010 list, I wanted to note the sex books on this year’s list. The reasons are usually “Nudity, Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Anti-Family, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint.”
People who ban a dictionary for containing a definition of oral sex will faint right here
- Deal with It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gURL Esther Drill
- Joy of Sex Alex Comfort
- Sex for Busy People: The Art of the Quickie for Lovers on the Go Emily Dubberly
- Lesbian Kama Sutra Kat Harding
- Mastering Multiple Position Sex Eric Marlowe Garrison
- Vampire Academy series Richelle Mead
- The Joy of Gay Sex Silverstein, Charles, and Felice Picano
- Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (Pulled in CA for containing “oral sex”)
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