... having been breathed out

Let me tell you, friends, I am not thrilled to be on Day 2 of jury duty with horrible cramps. Nothing about that delights me. :-/

The plus side of sitting in an uncomfortable beige room all morning yesterday while the courtroom readied itself for our participation, was that I got through about a third of Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, on which tellitslant and I are attempting to more-or-less coordinate our reading. I'm definitely digging it thus far: certified Bisexual Disaster and University of Toronto dropout Starla Mia Martin returns home to the small town where she grew up, moving back in with her mother and taking a graveyard shift job at a campground to try to get her debt load under control, and is promptly haunted by an equally queer ghost from the recently-demolished amusement park down the street, which used to provide the town's economic lifeblood. Excellent, evocative sense of place (always a must for a ghost story); believably prickly dynamics between a mother and daughter who are both, shall we say, strong personalities; and I like Starla's narrative voice. Excited to read more.

Other than that, my big reading news for the week is that I did actually manage to make it to Queer Book Group! And it was super enjoyable! Hurrah! The group was about a dozen people, most of whom seemed like regulars who knew each other, although they were very welcoming. The conversation about Real Queer America really demonstrated why it's interesting to talk with other people about books: in some cases peoples' qualms about Allen were the same as mine: in the service of highlighting the positive work being done and lives being lived by queer folks in red states, she at times soft-pedals the negative aspects. But other people had qualms that were almost the opposite of mine, feeling like the book was a downer for the degree to which it DID discuss the negatives. There was also a good, kind of tangential conversation about our own backgrounds as they related to the book, which was particularly interesting because many of the group members were in their 50s and 60s and a few others were in their 40s; Allen is 30 and talking to such a multi-generational group really highlighted what a short historical memory her book has. This is not exactly a criticism of Allen; she set out to write essentially a travelogue/memoir, not a history. But talking to people twice her age who grew up in small towns definitely emphasized how much things have changed. It was also interesting hearing people's takes on Allen's hostility toward big, overpriced cities, of which San Francisco is of course high on the list. The group being an East Bay audience, I found it kind of hilarious the degree to which it was split between "How dare she insult our beautiful California!" and "She is correct, the city exemplifies everything horrible about corporatized queerness."

Anyway, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted out of the experience, so I will be back for sure. Next month's selection is Larissa Lai's fairy-tale-inflected novel When Fox is a Thousand, of which I had never previously heard. Will report back!

Incidentally: tangentially apropos of the Allen, or at least of a couple of conversations I've had on here about a subject Allen neglected: I just this morning learned about Karen Tongson's Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, which came out in 2011. It's still not exactly the study of queer life in red-state suburbia that donut_donut and lazaefair were craving (Tongson focuses on the Los Angeles sprawl), but I'm nonetheless intrigued.

In the grand tradition of divorcées women people in their late thirties, it seems my brain saw fit to start my birthday with a 1am anxiety attack to the nonsense tune of "You Are Bound To Lose Everything Worthwhile In Your Life (And Now You Are Too Old To Start Over When You Do)," with an encore rendition of the catchy little number "Adding More Worthwhile Things Only Means A Greater Amount of Inevitable Loss." To quote that immortal sage Jake Peralta: "Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool." The silver lining was that after I moderated my mental/emotional spiraling with some CBT exercises and arrived at the point where I was able to breathe but was still very much awake, I found myself with a few hours of surprise reading time, which has been thin on the ground lately. So that actually was cool, and not in the Peraltan sense; even if I honestly would rather have been sleeping.

During the night I got through a couple chapters of Samantha Allen's Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, which is the May selection for the queer book group that I am going to attend this time, y'all, it's happening. Allen's prose style is super engaging and fast-paced, and she strikes a nice, supportive three-way balance among (a) explicating the larger political context for the things she talks about with facts & figures, (b) connecting with other individual queer folks on her travels and relating their stories, and (c) her own personal history and feelings on being a queer person in red-state America. As a trans woman reporter and ex-Mormon who started coming out to herself while a student at Brigham Young University, later fell in love with her now-wife over graduate studies in Bloomington, Indiana, and currently lives in Georgia, the latter are, as you can imagine, many and complex; although an important part of this book's political agenda is to destigmatize middle America and the South among lefty/queer circles, and to make the point that they have always been, and always will be, just as queer as anyplace else. In fact, Allen says in many places that she prefers to be queer in a red-state context, both for practical reasons—regular people can still afford to live in places like Houston and Atlanta, unlike in New York and San Francisco—and also because in these places, where LGBT folks are still more urgently embattled, she finds it possible to access a queer community that has more passion and cohesion, and less cliquey in-fighting, than she has found in the big coastal cities.

(As a side note, I was talking to both greywash and the friend/lover with whom I had dinner on Monday, about the weird defensive reaction I noticed in myself, especially to Allen's intro chapter. A wholehearted lover of cities myself, and also a seeker-out of passionate, politically-engaged people with whom to surround myself, my experience of LA and San Francisco and Portland has been much different than Allen's—and that's totally fine! I'm still 100% on board with her mission of reclaiming red-state America for the queers who have lived there all along, and for whom it is a beloved and meaningful home. Queerness is not, as she argues well, an urban invention, and there's a ton of amazing activism going on outside NY and SF. Despite being completely convinced of this, though, I surprised myself by ongoing surges of defensiveness about the parts of Allen's argument that I read as portraying city-dwelling queer communities as apathetic and petty. Luckily, as the chapters progressed I got over it: probably at least in part because it becomes very clear that Allen, despite her preference for red-state queer America, does not sugar-coat the challenges of queer life in Utah or Texas, even as she also celebrates their joys.)

Anyway, the first post-intro chapter involves Allen's first return to Utah since she left the church to transition, and it's poignant to read her personal reflections on finding a much more thriving LGBT support system in place there now than when she left. She talks to Mormons and ex-Mormons who have decided to stay and fight to make Utah a more welcoming place, with to all accounts impressive success. Allen and her traveling companion spend a good deal of time at the Provo chapter of Encircle, talking to the youth who are served by the programs there and who basically, in some cases, consider it home. She also talks to Emmett Claren, one of the first openly trans people to remain in the Mormon fold: he lives with the constant possibility of excommunication, but for him the faith and community are important enough that he plans to stay until & unless they kick him out, and meanwhile he is agitating for greater acceptance from within. The second chapter of the book, which deals with Texas—both a rally against the transphobic bathroom bill that passed their legislature in 2017, and a look at queer organizing in South Texas immigrant communities—is also very interesting, if less personally immediate to Allen's life story. More updates as I continue!

I've barely started Mari Ruti's The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects, which is the Q2 selection for the queer theory book group that meets this coming Wednesday. I'm still in the midst of Ruti's dense introduction, always the slowest-going section of an academic book. Her points seem interesting but honestly I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to get through something this theoretical before Wednesday. I'd like to! But I won't beat myself up about it if I can't.

I've also been really really meaning to pick up Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, which tellitslant and I were going to try to read at the same time. But between work, house and puppy I have not managed it. Sorry for my tardiness, tellitslant! /o\ It's next up this weekend, and since I'm taking tomorrow off and have few concrete plans other than sleeping, writing, and reading, I'm hopeful that I can polish off the Allen and move on to the Dawn.