Electric Literature

Like many of you, I wake up each morning with the feeling that they’re coming for us. But then I think, they have always come for the queers. And we have always, throughout human history, stood watch all night over the fire. We have always taken care of each other, and we will keep on doing it.

I’ve been joking lately that I’m just going to get gayer. I’m going to m...

Sometimes you are reading a book—not even one by a well-known transphobic children’s author—and are struck, halfway through or near the end, by a bit of transphobia. Sometimes it’s load-bearing: Both Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Lidia Yuknavitch’s

I had forgotten the taste of bread. Of salmon and chicken. Of chocolate and figs. My tongue held the memory of these foods, of a cube of Kobe beef so tender that it felt a profanity to chew, of a spoonful of gelato, which seemed to carry a lesson of its own: how the initial shock of cold will g...

I’m just sitting down at a table at the back of the bookstore café with a stack of books and an iced coffee, and the woman at the next table, thirtyish, dreadlocks, librarian glasses, nose ring, leans over and says, “Skip that one.”

With her chin she points to the paperback with the bright purple cover at the top of my stack.

I’m talking...

I grew up in a small southern town. The models I had for queerness were people on television, living glamorous lives in New York City—lives totally removed from the farmlands, marshes, and forests that surrounded my home. One day, desperate for a nearer, more intimate model, I went online and searched, “Can animals be queer?” This search eventually led me to Bruce Bagemihl’s ...