I wanted to share some more queer stories for Pride Month, just because I can! I’ve really loved the recent explosion of queer literature. There’s always room for more improvement, and some genres get more representation than others, but overall I’m very excited to see how many more queer books we’re getting across the board: in SFF, in poetry, in literary fiction, and even in YA and children’s fiction. I’ve tried to share some recent titles in a few different genres for today.
To start with, I wanted to recommend some queer poetry! I don’t talk about poetry here much but I’m actually a HUGE poetry nerd, and read a lot of it. And quite a lot of the poetry I read is queer of some kind or another. So! I have a few to share!
Night With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong – this poetry collection from Vietnamese-American poet, also well known for his fiction novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, focuses on Vuong’s experiences with immigrant parents, being an outsider in American culture, facing anti-Asian racism, and his experiences as a gay man with less-than-supportive parents, and facing homophobia in America on top of the racism he deals with. The poems are lyrical and hard-hitting. Vuong has a second poetry collection out now, Time is a Mother, which I haven’t had a chance to get my hands on yet.
Next, the two poetry collections by Chen Chen, a Chinese-American poet, examine similar issues of race, sexuality, family, and belonging. His collections are When I Grow Up I Want to Be A List of Further Possibilities, and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (which I wrote a full review for here). Chen’s poetry, like Vuong’s, deals with the experiences of being an Asian immigrant in the US, and the issues of anti-Asian racism that arise from that. He is also a gay man, and examines the homophobia he experiences in American society, as well as from his parents – particularly his mother with whom he has a fraught relationship. Chen’s poetry is more visceral and blunt, with occasionally humorous or explicit language and description, and some experiments with form. His second book in particular, pulls inspiration from and pays homage to a number of other Asian-American poets, including Bhanu Kapil, Jennifer S. Cheng, Justin Chin, and Marilyn Chin.
Another queer poet worth checking out is Jay Hulme, with his collection The Backwater Sermons. Jay Hulme is a trans-man in the UK, who is also a devout Christian. Much of his work deals with the complex beliefs and emotions that arise from the intersections between religion and sexuality, particularly in a christian culture where some subsections of the community are very welcoming of queer identity, and other subsections are violently and vehemently opposed. Hulme imagines gentle and accepting Jesus in a dance club, and re-frames saints with queer identities of all kinds. Personally, as a queer woman who came from a Catholic background and now has a complicated and ambivalent relationship with religion writ large, I found Hulme’s poetry and perspective on Christianity touching and enlightening and filled with a hope I have not yet found for myself. Here is one of the poems from this collection: “Jesus at the Gay Bar.”
I can also highly recommend K. J. Charles’s newest release: The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, which is in the same vein of much of her other work. A queer historical romance, this one is set in Regency England (did I mention this is one of my favorite time periods?), and features a lonely prickly baronet, his former lover – a charming smuggler, and a creepy gothic estate on Romney Marsh. I love everything Charles writes, and this one is no exception. Hopefully, I’ll get around to writing a full review for this one eventually, but in the meantime, you should still check it out!
And I’ll stop, today, with The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard. This one is a sapphic science fiction with space pirates, and a sentient spaceship. It’s been described as Black Sails in space, but with lesbians, romance, and Vietnamese influences. This one came out last year, and I had it on my radar then, but didn’t finally get around to buying until last week. So, I haven’t read this one yet, but it’s at the top of my TBR stack. It sounds amazing, and the reviews have been great, and I have no doubt I’ll love it when I get to it.
Amanda Haimoto Rudd 