... having been breathed out

Holding strong at six books currently underway. One of these days I'm gonna get it down to five, y'all.

I finished Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex. I'm sure no one who has seen me enthusing about it the past few weeks will be surprised to hear me say that it's excellent, but y'all: IT'S EXCELLENT. Highly, highly recommended, and I don't even read memoir as a general thing. Dube writes with incredible intelligence, experience, and empathy about the intertwined recent histories of the queer rights and sex worker rights struggles in India and the US, and how those things intersected both with global events (the AIDS crisis, the puritanical policies of the Bush administration, the rise of the BJP and Shiv Sena parties) and with his own life as a gay man bridging the gap between his Anglicized Hindu upbringing in Calcutta, and his social justice work and education in the US, India, and elsewhere. I was telling starshipfox in comments, that one of the things I found particularly moving about this book is that, although Dube never sugar-coats anything, he does pay attention to moments of success and hope; and overall manages to maintain hope in the face of what is often some very grim subject matter. That's an ability I admire so, so strongly; and a line that's very difficult to walk effectively.

The only quibble I have with this book is that Dube's terminology around transness feels dated. I think some of this is an awkwardness of cultural translation: when talking about sex workers, for example, he often uses the phrase "women, trans women, and men sex workers," which reads oddly to American eyes because it seems to imply that "trans women" is somehow a separate category from "women." However, when he uses this phrase in Indian contexts (which is most of the time he's using it), it's pretty clear that what he actually means is "women, hijras, and men sex workers," which is a distinction that makes a lot more sense since the Indian concept of "hijra" doesn't map neatly or exactly onto the Western concept of "trans woman," but is instead considered a distinct gender category from either "woman" or "man." Dube does use the phrase once in an American context, where it should probably have been replaced by something like "women, non-binary, and men sex workers." He also occasionally uses "transgender" as a noun, which feels awkward. But overall this is a pretty small complaint compared to the vast number of things that Dube does extraordinarily well and insightfully.

After finishing the Dube I started in on Jane Austen's Persuasion, which greywash and I are reading for our study group on adaptations. It's been SO long since I actually read any Austen, and I have to say that as I get older my impression of her barely-contained bitter fury only increases. It's pretty remarkable that her stuff is often remembered as gentle and frothy, because: I'm only three chapters in, but wow. Tear em up, Jane.

I also finally got around to reading Kate Lear's "It is No Gift I Tender", the last long story in her Endeavour Morse/Max DeBryn fic series. This whole sequence is lovely: bittersweet, understated, and erudite in extremely show-appropriate ways. Lear's Max voice is just really, really wonderful; and since Max is canonically really, really wonderful, stealing every scene he's in despite there being relatively few of them, it's a particular pleasure to get to spend so much time with him via these stories. I especially appreciated the ways in which Max's specific set of cognitive distortions are simultaneously very visible to the reader as cognitive distortions, and also often pretty inarguably reasonable reactions to the position he finds himself in vis-à-vis the law and society. There's also just a lot of awkwardly infatuated midcentury Englishmen lying around in gardens reading Catullus and attending open-air Mozart concerts and going on confusedly heartbroken fishing trips and so-on, which is a narrative space that's extremely soothing to me personally. (... However much of a contradiction that might be with also reading a lot about the history of 20th century British imperialism. I contain multitudes.)

Also read a bit more of Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things (previously mentioned here and here) which continues to abound with fistfights and delightful genderfuckery. Carrasco really makes the most of her protagonist Alma spending most of the book in one disguise or another—usually as her male altar ego, Jack Camp—and taking her primary delights in (a) fighting/rivalry and (b) noticing other people noticing her and reacting to her. "Alma likes to know what people make of her," says the narrator at one point, which is partially a survival strategy, but she she also just gets off on it, and gets off on provoking as much of a reaction as she can. Which is great fun to read.

Purchase-wise, I picked up a Kindle edition of The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects, by Mari Ruti for the queer theory bookgroup meeting mid-May. Kindle editions are way down on my list of preferred formats, but as the linked post outlines, it was like $60 cheaper than a paper copy, for some reason beknownst only to the publishers. So. There we are. I'll probably start this in the next week or so.

I also, on a whim, while browsing in a local bookstore with a friend of mine, picked up a sale NYRB Classics copy of Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark, which is a sort of absurdist-sounding French novel written in 1935 but set in 1917, in which a philosophy professor in a provincial town gets into a petty squabble with a hawkish pro-WWI colleague and ends up fighting a duel. Those who know me will understand the SEVERAL reasons this setup appeals. I also just love the NYRB Classics imprint; I think they're doing great work getting obscure and out-of-print works, many of them in translation, out there into the world.

Well my Reading Wednesday entry might be a little shorter than normal today because, very unusually for me, I've spent the entire week reading just one book: Siddharth Dube's memoir An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex. I've been laughing at myself because last week I was kind of like "yeah, idk, it's okay," but almost as soon as I'd posted that entry—and as soon as Dube got beyond his own childhood and adolescence, and into his work with the HIV/AIDS crises in India and the US—the book became RIVETING. To the point where I'm now sneaking paragraphs while waiting in line at the grocery store, or waiting for greywash to get back from the restroom at the restaurant. Dube worked for several years as an investigative journalist, then went back to school for public health before returning to India to write two books, one on the daily lives of a family of rural Dalit people, and the other on the AIDS epidemic in India; and while the personal elements of the book undeniably add investment and gravitas, it's in connecting them to the larger sociopolitical currents that his writing really shines.

In case you missed it, I excerpted a (very) lengthy passage about the amazing HIV/AIDS prevention work done by South Indian sex workers, a section which literally had me gasping, pumping my fist, and saying "HOLY SHIT" aloud for the duration. (FYI: it looks like SIAAP, the org featured in that passage, is still going strong, and in addition to a continuing focus on the rights of sex workers and their children, has expanded their programs to include work on adolescent mental and sexual health, education around consent to combat sexual harassment and violence among young people, and advocating for respect for the labour, agency, and consent of informal laborers and migrants. They're killing it, basically. Sex workers get shit done.)

I've now reached the section of the book that deals with the backlash against SIAAP's practical, sex-worker-led style of 1990s AIDS activism: the Bush administration's post-9/11 war-mongering and the prescriptivist, anti-sex, Christian fundamentalism-inflected strings they tied to all the aid money they offered; paired with the rise of the BJP and the Hindu right in India which, among other things, spurred a backlash against the nascent queer rights movement there, painting queer sexuality as a Western import antithetical to the "authentic" Indian way of life. (Dube goes into some detail earlier in the book about how, on the contrary, the homophobia in India's laws and customs dates largely from British colonial rule, not before—but as we in Trump's America can all attest, historical accuracy is not the forte of conservative nationalist movements.) This part of the book is equally riveting if substantially less optimistic; it's reminding me viscerally of my hatred for the Bush administration, which—is interesting to be reminded of, actually, since hating the Bush administration had a somewhat different flavor than hating the Trump administration, despite certain obvious commonalities. Watching kids on tumblr treat George W Bush as a sort of funny uncle, with his paintings and his ranch, really brought home to me the extent to which people tend to think of the current tyrant as an exception. It only takes scratching the historical surface, though, to be reminded that although Trump is flashy and personally idiotic, white supremacy, puritanical Christian supremacy, homophobia, misogyny, profit-mongering, and punitive, paternalistic policies that attempt to control the bodies and actions of the poor, are PROFOUNDLY nothing new.

Anyway! Ahahaha. So now I'm like 70% through this book, and haven't read anything else all week. Which is cool, since there is a whole queue of people lined up for my copy, meaning I have to actually finish it by the return date. I'm excited that it's in high demand, though, because it 100% deserves to be. Gripping, gripping stuff.

My only other reading-related news is that as consolation for missing my book group on Sunday I ordered their next selection, Samantha Allen's Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States. Which arrived yesterday, so: I will read it and try again. May will be here before I know it. Etc. etc. The May group actually meets on my birthday weekend, and I feel like a new queer bookgroup will be a great birthday present if it actually pans out this time.

After moving to Delhi, [my close friend] Siddhartha had lived in a series of rented apartments in the cheaper sections of Defence Colony, Lajpat Nagar, and Jangpura. Siddhartha's flawless Hindi and his angelic good looks always enchanted his landlords initially. But in just a few weeks they would inevitably turn hostile.

They disapproved of the unending stream of bohemians visiting Siddhartha—men of feminine appearance (some with tweezed eyebrows and a hint of kohl), rough and macho men, obviously single women (based on their arriving and leaving without male companions), and even one flagrant cross-dresser who sometimes arrived decked out int he shiny slips he favored. Singly or in a group, they all disappeared into Siddhartha's apartment.

The curtains were then pulled tight. Whatever the hour, there was music and loud laughter, sometimes broken by suspiciously long silences. Impromptu parties took place at odd times, occasionally even in the afternoon. The sound of ghungroos and male voices seductively singing "In ankhon ki masti ke, mastaane hazaron hain"—"Countless men are intoxicated by my bewitching eyes," a courtesan's siren song from a classic movie—would drift down. Siddhartha's voice, excited and giggling at a peculiarly high, feminine pitch, would float above the din.

Soon enough, the landlords would insist that Siddhartha move out, saying that his lifestyle was unacceptable in a respectable neighborhood. Though they strongly suspected he was gay, it was never brought up. They had no firm proof, and the large number of women visitors must also have confused them. But, Delhi being lawless in such matters, the landlords either refused to return Siddhartha's rental deposit, or, without giving him due notice, insisted that he leave immediately or be thrown out forcibly.

Because I had long taken on the role of being Siddhartha's responsible older brother, I inevitably got involved in the crises. Try as we might, matters would deteriorate. On one occasion, I came to blows with a landlord and his adult sons. Luckily, my years at [Eton-style boarding school] Doon had made me a tough opponent, and they backed off after we traded a few punches.

—Siddharth Dube, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex

Holding steady at six books currently in progress, although they're a slightly different mix this week than last week. It's difficult to decrease that number when holds keep coming in on Libby!

I'm continuing to make my way through Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, from which I posted an excerpt a few days ago about colorism at post-Civil-War Black and mixed-race colleges and universities. This week I started and finished the third of the five sections, "William Lloyd Garrison," which covers roughly 1840 through 1880. This period is so much more talked-about in popular American discourse about anti-Black racism than the period in the preceding section—the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the dialling-back of Reconstruction are all, for good reason, central to what we tend to think about when we think about race in this country—that this section had fewer "huh! the more you know!" moments for me. Still, it continues to be a very helpful refresher and synthesis, combining concepts & historical trends I may be familiar with, in ways that I may not explicitly have thought of before. I'm intrigued to get to the section coming up—"W. E. B. Du Bois"—as the period it covers is my particular era of interest but American racism during that era hasn't especially been a focus for me. I'll be interested to see what kinds of connections it sparks. That said, it'll have to wait a bit: having reached a good stopping point, I returned the book to the library early & put my name back in the queue, since there was someone waiting.

I also finished Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, which, as mentioned last week, I picked up because it's the April selection of a local queer book group I'm hoping to join. Hooo, friends. I have taken one for the team in reading this so that you don't have to. I'm not exactly sorry I read it—I do still think it'll be a FASCINATING discussion, and it is useful to have the data point about the first novel with a post-op trans protagonist, and a novel that came out of the queer (gay male) world in 1968—but: wow. Last week I sort of thought, okay, this book is rapey and transphobic, but it's Period-Typical (tm) rapey and transphobic... and that could still be true but it definitely got WAY MORE rapey and transphobic as it went along, with the levels of casual racism and antisemitism pretty much holding steady. As the kids say, "yikes."

With regard to the transphobia in particular, I'm sort of left with this outstanding question about Vidal's intentions and my own ability to evaluate or even perceive them: there's just so much triangulation that I find myself having to do, in order to imagine myself into the shoes of his intended 1968 reader. ( Obviously, CW for transphobic details ahead. ) Don't read it, though, probably. Unless you're writing a paper on queer literature of the 1960s or the history of trans representation in America or something.

ANYWAY after those two uplifting reads, I felt in need of some pure escapism, so I've been spending some more time with Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, the previously-mentioned western opium-smuggling thriller with the bisexual/gender non-conforming Latina disguise aficionada protagonist Alma Rosales. It's super enjoyable! A real page-turner. Alma feels written with EXACTLY ME in mind, which is a nice change from the Vidal. I'm a little over a third of the way through it right now, and I think at this point I'll probably focus on this one until I finish it; it's pleasingly twisty-turny with a flash-forward/flash-back structure that keeps you guessing about how our heroine got from Point A to Point B. As the setup might suggest, it's also got a lot of extremely pleasing identity-and-disguise-and-powerfuckery porn (figurative porn, so far, though my hopes are high). For example, the scene when Alma, in male disguise as her altar ego Jack Camp, macks on the mistress of her male coworker with whom she also has a sexually-charged rivalry, and whom she previously cased while posing as a naive Scottish governess in need of a chaperone about town. Or the scene in which she watches this same coworker watch her interact with their mutual boss (and Alma's ex-lover) Delphine; and she is turned on by seeing herself in both their eyes. Good stuff! Good stuff. The Port Townsend connection continues to be fun, too: spotting traces of the town I've spent time in, in the 1887 frontier port described.

Thanks to the arrival of a Libby hold, I also started Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex, which is so far very... memoir-y. It's interesting, if no-frills in its style; so far he's covered his privileged & very Anglicized upper-caste Hindu upbringing in Calcutta, which includes an (also very Anglo-reminiscent) coming-of-age-as-a-gay-man-at-boarding-school-amidst-horrific-abuse-by-the-older-boys section, and then his awakening to a wider consciousness of systemic oppression during his sojourn at Tufts College in the early 1980s. His reflections on India versus the US in the 70s and 80s are interesting, as are his recollections of comparing the reality of the US with his youthful idealized notions of the freedom and equality in the west. One of the things he talks about at some length is how, upon coming to the States, he read voraciously everything he could find about the science and political reality of gay and lesbian life, even if a lot of that news was grim: because in India it was simply not mentioned, so he had felt wholly alone. In one of those pleasing bookish connections (pleasing for me, not for poor Dube), he writes:

So absolute was my lack of theoretical knowledge that everything I read came as a revelation. Despite having studied at India's leading school and college, I had never come across any scientific information on homosexuality, not even in biology textbooks. The sum total of my reading had been the mild allusions in Jacqueline Susann's books, a handful of sexual passages in Harold Robbins's potboilers, and Gore Vidal's oddball Myra Breckinridge.

"Oddball" is. One word for it. I will say, reading this passage the day after finishing Myra made me very grateful that I have such a comparatively wide and easy-to-access library of queer literature and resources available to me. Good grief.

Anyhoo anyhoo. Once I finish The Best Bad Things I want to start a re-read of Austen's Persuasion for greywash's and my project on adaptations. It has been a MINUTE since I read anything published before about 1890. Updates as they come.