Archive for the LGBTQ Category


Summer Reading: The Grave Soul by Ellen Hart

September 30th, 2015

GSELHJLOne of the most delightful things about the novel Maria-sama ga Miteru ~Ibara no Mori was the description of Sei, the compulsive reader, looking for stories that reflected what she was going through, this unspoken, confusing and many ways, distressing love of another girl. She found things about homosexuality, of course, that treated it as a pathology and, based on the descriptions of the stuff she read, she found herself staring down the Well of Loneliness and other dire lesbian classics.

I loved this section of the novel, because I too was young, and combing through the library, trying to find books that didn’t make me want to stab myself. I wasn’t, thank the gods, looking for confirmation…I just wanted to read a good book with lesbians.

I was lucky. I found Desert of the Heart, by Jane Rule and Beebo Brinker,  by Ann Bannon and I found lesbian mysteries. Murder at the Nightwood Bar by Katherine V. Forrest launched me into a 1990s full of volumes of lesbian-protagonist mysteries. Naiad Press was publishing them in droves and I was haunting Barnes and Noble, (this was so long ago Borders did not yet exist and B&N’s “Gay and Lesbian Fiction” shelves were a second home) buying them and borrowing them at the library, Dozens, maybe hundreds of lesbians with long-dead lovers, with drinking problems who weren’t out, who were out and suffering from institutional homophobia, being stalked and tortured and beaten and eventually catching the bad guy. So, so many mysteries. So many, in fact, I became absolutely sick to death of mysteries.

At then end of the decade, there were two authors left I could stand. Forrest kept writing, left Naiad for a major publisher and her character, Kate Delafield, out and comfortable at last, became more comfortable for me to read. And Ellen Hart, whose Jane Lawless mysteries scratched an itch for lesbian characters who were not suffering from homophobia, alcoholism, or trauma. Although Jane had the prerequisite long-dead lover, she ran a restaurant, had a female Oscar Wilde as a side-kick and was quite likable. I always liked Jane.

But, as I mention, I left mysteries behind me. And I had not realized that Ellen Hart was still writing them. Until last year, when I discovered Ellen Hart on Facebook,I also discovered Jane once more. And just after I had caught up to Hart’s last book, (the Fates must have found this hilarious, I swear I can hear them giggling,) it tuns out that her new publisher is an imprint of a large publisher and her editor is a friend of mine.  And so, with thanks to the publisher, I had a chance to make the last of my summer reads, Ellen Hart’s newest Jane Lawless mystery, The Grave Soul.

It was an excellent book.

The construction was turned inside out a bit, so we begin with the aftermath of the crisis, then work our way back in to it. We, the reader, always know that aftermath and so the tension is turned way up throughout the book without us actually having to go through the crisis itself. When all too many novels these days are merely prologues to violence, stalking and torture scenes in the name of “suspense,” this approach worked to create a lot more suspense without having to subject us to violence porn.

It was good to revisit Jane Lawless, the restaurateur who sleuths on the side, good that she broke up with her horrible girlfriend in the last novel, good that they did not get back together in this one. Cordelia, her side-kick, is always too much to be believable, but that is what we like about her. She’s the comedic relief in the Shakespearean sense of the word.

The story was tightly written. The mystery was a classic small-town murder, but one in which Miss Marple had to come from out of town in order to make sense of it. And the ending was appropriately Agatha-Christie-like as well.

All in all, an excellent revisit to an obsession of my youth, long before Yuri manga, and long before Jane (or I) was so comfortable with saying the word “gay.” In this case, I was able to come home again and find that what has changed, has changed for the better.

It was a good read, and I’m glad that Ellen Hart is still out there plugging away at it. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 8

Facebook is your friend. Ellen Hart, Katherine V. Forrest, Ann Bannon and many other lesbian writers of the past and present are there and you should totally take a look at their books. This is your literature.





LGBTQ Manga: Torikaebaya (とりかえ・ばや ), Volume 7

September 10th, 2015

TKB7In Volume 6, Sarasojuu lost the child, and Suiren left court to look for her…and found her. In Volume 7 of Torikaebaya (とりかえ・ばや ) by Saitou Chiho, together they visit Yoshino no Miya-sama, a man wise beyond his years, who already knows about their secret.

While they are at Yoshino no Miya-sama’s place, the Mikado comes to visit and their learn some amazing things. The Mikado is Yoshino’s older brother and Toguu-sama is Yoshino’s daughter. In exchange for a vow to protect Toguu-sama, as she has few allies in the capital, Yoshino promises to help the siblings. They, to the utter delight of their family, return home. (Their family has been a high point of the series from the beginning. Totally supportive and loving.)

At which point we come to the most interesting moment to date in this amazing & infuriating manga. Because the “help” Yoshino offers is to assist them to trade places. In the original Torikaebaya, the “trading” was the original choice for them to take the place of their sibling in the other sex’s world in order to be more comfortable with themselves. In this version, it is the moment they leave the life they had known and were comfortable in to “trade” to the world that did not suit them at all. In short, Sarasojuu would become Suiren and serve Toguu-sama and Suiren would take the position of a man at court, as Sarasojuu.

And so they do. Suiren still can’t stand being too close to men, and has a tendency to be delicate, but passes as Sarasojuu. Sarasojuu walks too fast and speaks too loudly for a woman at court and, although mostly everyone just assumes she is Suiren, Toguu-sama sees right through her instantly.
Sarasojuu confides in Togu-sama, and even allows her to speak to Suiren, who assures her that they are her allies from beginning to end. And in this, they are completely in synch. They will do everything to protect this young woman.

Finally a good thing happens. The Udaisho, Sara and Suiren’s father, begs the Mikado to *not* ask for Suiren to come up to the palace to be one of his women.  Mikado graciously agrees, so I steeled myself against something else horrible happening instead. ^_^;

The “something” turned out to be an assassination attempt on Toguu-sama. Sara (as Suiren) is able to move quickly, but it is another lady-in-waiting that makes it possible to capture the miscreant. Her name, she says, is San-no-hime. Sara-Suiren is shocked…is this her wife’s sister? Indeed it is. And now that they have become confidants, will Suiren help her? She’d like the Mikado to take notice of her. Um, sure, Sara says, wondering what on earth she could possibly do.

This series makes me chew my liver out, it really does. But that the “trading places”is not in the initial switch but here is so fascinating and modern, I’m foolishly still holding onto my hope that there is some small possibility of this all working out. Hey, I wanted only one thing from Gunjo, and I got that, so yeah. I’m sticking with foolish dreams.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – 1
LGBTQ – 7

Overall – 9

Compelling like a train wreck, I cannot stop reading this.





Lesbian Comic Anthology: Freya – Sequential Love Stories

September 6th, 2015

Freya_2015This past year I mentioned a crowdfunding effort for a series of European LGBTQ manga anthologies, Frey and Freya (both named after Norse Gods.*) I jumped at the idea of getting it off the ground and have now had a chance to read it. And, it was fun and good. But while I read it, I realized that we really need to talk about something.

Young lesbian artists, may I ask you politely to stop saying you drew this “because there’s nothing like it out there”? Yes, there is. You may not know where to find it, or have seen it, but yes, yes it is “out there” and we’re long past this being a valid sentence. Just because you’ve never searched “Lesbian comics” or  you don’t know about “Yuri manga,” does not mean something does not exist in the universe – just as series’ don’t end just because you stop following them. ^_^ We are at a point in human existence when it is both self-indulgent and foolish to insist that something doesn’t exist before you do it. It’s way more likely that you aren’t forging a brand-new never-been-done-path in LGBTQ storytelling, but are merely walking a well-trodden one. Other people are gay. Other people draw comics. Lesbian comics exist – and have existed for many years.

Also, crowdfunders, please make sure to print a few extra copies of your books, so when I review it, people can buy it. It’s depressing to say “Well, this was great, but you had to fund it to get one. Sorry.”

So Freya Anthology arrived and, like all anthologies, it has variable art and stories. A number of things really stand out to my American eye – the artists in this anthology, who are mostly from Sweden, like those from the Finnish anthology, Lepakkoluola, are way better at diversity than Americans and Japanese are. Also, I found the collection to be a really pleasant mix of fantasy, slice-of-real-life, history and sci-fi.

There were any number of stories about competent and strong women, although the girl-as-reward trope was too prevalent for my comfort. Balancing this out, there were few coming out stories, and even those were “go tell her you like her” rather than, “Do I like girls?”

 

The art styles are decidedly western – the one manga-inspired story, “Bubble” by Elise Rosberg, really stood out as an exception to the rule. Natalia Batista‘s wordless, and heavily black-and-grey work, “La Perte” was my personal favorite. The dark pages too my aback at first, but the story was solid, had emotional depth and the art really grew on me.

Ratings:

Art and Stories variable. It’s an anthology.

Overall – 7

An excellent anthology and one that I will gladly add to my growing “international” lesbian comic collection. I know that the Frey and Freya circle is making the round of European events, and they do have a Facebook page, and it looks like you you can order a copy directly from them, so definitely contact them!

*The Frey anthology will focus on gay relationships.





LGBTQ Comic: The Complete Wendel

August 30th, 2015

TCWen Back in May, I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural Queers & Comics conference in NYC. At the very end, as a panelist, I was given a copy of the definitive collected edition of Keynote Speaker Howard Cruse’s serial Wendel. Originally begun back when The Advocate was a tabloid, Wendel ran in the pages of the magazine through the 1980s (a decade that I spent mostly without a TV or car, working 2 or 3 jobs at a time and therefore somewhat limited in my participation in the world.)

I have just finished The Complete Wendel and both liked and disliked it in equal measure. It’s important to remember that while this was the Gay Community of the 1980s, I was not ever part of this community, so reading it is as alien to me as reading a book on being a mother of 5 children.

Wendle is a young guy, with a supportive family, working at a small tabloid magazine. He meets Ollie, an aspiring actor and, through the pages of the story, their relationship develops through years of political crisis, AIDS, and regular family and friend nuttiness.

The early stories were the hardest for me to enjoy. They are supposed to be funny, but there are not my sense of humor and so left me sort of “meh.” Wendel is earnest and openly feminist and progressive, but the actual female characters we meet are abrasive and irritating.  Particularly Tina, the butch lesbian girlfriend of Deb, one of Wendel’s coworkers who, as the comic pointed out, if you didn’t hope she was being ironic, was a horrible person. Ollie’s ex-wife, father of his child Farley, is pretty much a one-note  neurotic rant from the beginning to the very final page.

It’s not just the women who are irritating. Ollie’s best friend Sterno, an out-of-control hedonist is tedious. So, here we have Wendel and Ollie, whose main schtick is to be neurotic out loud and adorably in love and their terrible friends. ^_^ It took me a while to warm up to them. But…I did warm up to them.

They lived through the Reagan years, during which I came into being. Had I been 5 years older, I might well have been a lesbian Wendel. In a moment of complete irony, the book ends with some promotional posters featuring Wendel after the comic had ended, one of which was the March on Washington in 1993, which I attended (and wow, what a day that was). So Wendel ends as I began, in a sense. And that, in a nutshell describes my feelings about it.

Lesbian and gay comics have been with us since the beginning. Queer & Comics was about those comics and about the people who drew them. We’re incredibly lucky to have so many of them still alive and willing and able to tell their tales. It’s up to us to read them and remember them and pass them along.

The world of the bathhouses and the early Gay Liberation marches, are the history I read about, the shoulders that I stood upon. Wendel is my fictitious older brother’s age, never my own. But once I  got to know him and Ollie and his friends, they came to have meaning to me.

Ratings:

Art – 8 (It’s a style that is so wholly unlike manga, it’s fascinating to delve into. Every background, every cross-hatched shadow was done by hand.)
Story – 7 Slice of life with “silly” filter
Characters – 8
Service – Lots of male nudity and sexual situations, no explicit sex shown
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 8

I’d never have Sterno stay the night and would probably have told Tina to shut the fuck up, but I could see myself sitting and listening to their stories and understand that without them, I might not have been here.





LGBTQ: Manga de Tsuzuru Yurina Hibi /まんがで綴る百合な日々

August 13th, 2015

download5-e1429832392551Tanu is a careerwoman, Negi is her lover, and their story – how they met, what their life is like together, what their plans for the future are – make up this non-fiction comic essay, Manga de Tsuzuru Yurina Hibi (まんがで綴る百合な日々).

Their story is fairly typical – they talk about recognizing that they liked women in school, how they met at a drinking party and became friends, then lovers and eventually moved in together. The very calm predictability of it is what makes it worth reading. It’s utterly relatable. The end of the book is a Q&A with Tanu and Negi, moderated by lesbian talent and author, Makimura Aasako (author of Doukyonin no Bishoujo ga Lesbian Datta Ken and Yuri no Real.

The text is all handwritten, which makes this book a challenge for readers like myself and the story is not exciting, per se, but this is another great addition to our comic essay library of adorable examples of lesbian life in book form.

Ratings:

Art – 5 Cute cartoons, rather than sophisticated art.
Story – 6 Slice of life
Characters – 7

Overall – 7

I would have given this book a higher rating if Tanu and Negi were comfortable enough to show their faces. As it is, they are clearly not out, so the normality of their life depends upon a certain amount of secrecy and is therefore not actually normal.  I sympathize, but….