Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone
Quill R. Kukla
W. W. Norton & Company, 2025, 176 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

“We need to talk to one another in order to explore what we want to do and how to do it well together.”

Kukla provides readers with vignettes of sexual encounters and breaks down the philosophical questions that arise surrounding pleasure, ethics, and desire in these encounters. As stated in the title, their examples do aim to include everyone: readers see queer stories, stories with older people, individuals with disabilities, neurodivergence, Black and brown individuals, and generally an avoidance of white, able-bodied, cishet stories. I appreciated this, as oftentimes material on sexuality can operate on assumptions of cisgenderness, heterosexuality, whiteness, and no disability. It’s important for a book/guide on good sex to actually be applicable.

The work acknowledges that discussions of sex often center on consent and how to prevent bad sex. Kukla makes clear, “This is a book about good sex. I want to explore how we can expand and protect our own and one another’s sexual agency and pleasure, and enjoy wanted, satisfying, ethically sound sex.” They explain that human flourishing necessitates opportunities to access and exercise sexual pleasure and agency, both safely and ethically. If our only understanding of sex rests on a yes/no binary, a binary of simply avoiding harm rather than exploring pleasure, we can miss the conversations, cues, invitations, curiosity, and mutual building that sexual relationships need to move into those safe and ethical experiences.

This is not to say the author rejects consent or the importance of avoiding harm; consent is defined at the outset and upheld as necessary at all times. A recurring concept in the work is “scaffolding,” which can be cultural, social, or interpersonal. The idea is that structures and systems will be set up to safeguard and reinforce autonomy. Examples include negotiations of safe words in advance (interpersonal) or having good sex education and access to contraceptives (social). Kukla writes, “Much of good sexual communication is not about asking questions or giving answers at all: We should be building fantasies together, flirting, expressing our concern and affection for one another, and establishing trust.”

I appreciated their efforts for practical guidance, and I enjoyed the work. I personally feel it needed more detail in the areas Kukla let us know were challenging, but the author still did a good job of engaging. My feelings may just be my own internal conflicts with ideas of consent and power.

You can watch an event Lighthouse Bookshop facilitated for the author online for free here!

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland.

In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 2019, 272 pages
$26.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Content Warning: Abuse

My first encounter with Machado’s In the Dream House was when I worked in domestic abuse services and research. One of the women I was speaking to described what she had survived and asked if I had read Machado’s work; she shared a segment from the book to describe her experiences. The book gave her the words to describe what happened and what she needed to help her healing process, and I remember thinking, “This is something I should read.” This story is non-fiction. This narrative is Machado’s lived reality. Her recount is powerful, both in its content and in its presentation. She splits the narrative between ‘I’ and ‘You’ (‘I’ being the author now and ‘You’ being the author during the abuse). Suddenly, you’re reading about emotions and situations that ‘you’ experience as a victim-survivor, and empathy becomes ingrained.

She avoids explicit details of the abuse, but is clear about her survival of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological violence. The woman in the dream house (the abuser) can be both exceptionally ‘loving’ and, the next instant, violent and terrifying. This duality mirrors the complicated realities of intimate partner violence (IPV): the person you love isn’t always bad all the time; it can be hard to realise a situation is abusive when you’re being love-bombed between the violence. Machado is clear—having survived and writing this from the perspective of someone who escaped—that no matter how ‘good’ an abuser can seem at times, it never excuses their abuse.

Lesbian IPV often goes unrecognised by both support services and survivors themselves, in part due to misalignment with heteronormative scripts of abuse (cis male abuser/cis female victim: white, thin, physically abused). Machado writes, “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat” (156), and rightly explains how even within the queer community, gender rhetoric has been used as “a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse” (230). She shares the story of Debra Reid, a Black lesbian woman who killed her abuser in self-defence (see the Framingham Eight). Reid’s case was reframed as ‘mutual battering’ and her sentence was never commuted like those of all the other women in the Framingham Eight. Machado concludes, “Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. . . Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean” (161).

There is also the complexity of reporting abuse in the queer community: Machado reiterates concerns about reinforcing negative lesbian stereotypes by sharing her experiences. She writes about this complication, noting, “queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind” (51-52). When reflecting on the abuse, she muses on what she’d say to her abuser: “For fuck’s sake, stop making us [lesbians] look bad” (145). The reality is that abuse can exist in all relationships, and if we avoid speaking out about it, it continues to go unaddressed, unexplored, and leaves queer communities vulnerable.

Machado’s work is incredibly important, but readers should be aware that the content can be difficult at times. This difficulty doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage, but I would encourage readers to make sure they have space to work through any issues that may arise while reading. If any of the content mirrors your relationship or experiences (current or past), or if something doesn’t feel right in your relationship, reach out to a number below. Contacting doesn’t mean you’re in an abusive relationship, but it never hurts to speak to someone about an experience you feel uncomfortable with. Your feelings and experiences are real and deserve respect, validation, and support. Your partner(s) should respect you and make you feel safe.

Help is available:
RAINN (US): 800 656 4673
Lada Nacional Gratuita (MX): 800 822 4460
Canada Crisis Lines
Galop (UK): 0800 999 5428
1800Respect (AUS): 1800 737 732
WAVE Helplines (EU): 116 016

Allison Quinlan is a former support service provider and current PhD student working with adult LGBTQ+ survivors of IPV in Scotland.

Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethic for Transfeminist Worlds
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
Pluto Press, 2024, 256 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

I received a free copy of Trans Femme Futures in late 2024, shortly after For Women Scotland, funded in large part by famed TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) Joanne K. Rowling, defeated the Scottish Government in the High Court, forcing them to define ‘woman’ based solely on ‘biology.’ Trans individuals were not consulted, did not testify, and were not considered when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued guidance to practitioners following the decision. Effectively, rights were stripped from trans, nonbinary, intersex, and non-‘normative’ women across the country, including rights to support services following abuse, as well as the ECHR issuing toilet bans. Trans men were seemingly not targeted in the guidance, only trans women. So, Pluto Press offered Trans Femme Futures to help us understand how transfemme individuals are perceived socially and invited us to imagine a world where existence is not criminalised, erased, or constantly threatened.

From the start, Trans Femme Futures outlines the importance of rejecting ideas giving legitimacy solely to individuals who fit social ideas of transness—in their words, “a body that is legibly and visibly trans, in public or in private.” As they note throughout the work, multiple factors influence individuals’ presentations and how they are perceived based on race, ability and health, access to healthcare, size, and more. Breaking out of these assigned femme ideals is as much a method of active disruption as it is of creating an existence that is one’s own, rejecting conformity to yet another gendered expectation. Following the thread of self-expression outside assigned ideals, the work discusses assimilation and respectability politics regarding sexuality:

Like queer liberalism before it, the sanitised reframing of trans and non-binary folks might make some of us more respectable, but often at the expense of those of us who wear our sexualities upon our sleeves, or those of us who are objectified and hyper-sexualised (most often Black and Brown trans women and other trans people of colour).

After establishing the dynamics of heteronormative and cisnormative social interactions in conversation with transfemme lives, bodies, and spaces, the work moves on to the theme of community, which is present throughout the rest of the work. The authors explore the differences between a community (group members have something in common but don’t necessarily know everyone) and a collective (existence through direct relations), and how these can contribute to organising for a better future. However, they warn against experience-led organising creating an obligation to participate, and emphasise the importance of holding differences within organising spaces, noting that care should be mutual.

Across the chapters, the authors argue that trans liberation won’t be granted by the structures that currently oppress us, and they take an abolitionist, grassroots approach to building a future. Community and collective struggle stay at the core of their roadmap for trans femme futures:

Part of the work of overcoming oppressions, including internalised oppressions, entails countering the voices and affective economies that claim we are not worthy of support, while building the social infrastructures and worlds that can open the space to articulate one’s needs—in a way that is couched in consent.

Solidarity, which aims for total liberation, is the path forward. In a time when courts write trans erasure into policy, Trans Femme Futures insists we’re already forming a better future collectively. The work comes to a close, centering joy: “In the end, it’s all about the joy of living our lives and the pleasure of shaping them together.”

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and quite angry at people who continue to buy Harry Potter. At least learn to pirate!

Leaving Home at 83
Sandra Butler
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 178 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Martha Miller

In this memoir, after a series of illnesses, Sandra Butler decides to leave home after fifty years and move to Phoenix to a residential home for seniors called Desert Manor, where she longs to have the details of her life taken care of. This is a funny but honest account of her adjustment period, where her desires are lined up against reality. For example, she wants to eat prepared meals in the dining room with other lodgers. But it doesn’t work out. She learns that the food isn’t that good, and the tables have assigned seats. She doesn’t fit in and is told as much, so she ends up buying food and eating in her apartment alone. One of her reasons for moving to Phoenix is that she will be close to her daughters. That doesn’t work out the way she thinks it will, either. She seldom sees her children.

Butler thought, “We have to have our paradise while we’re alive” (117) and hoped that Desert Manor would be one step toward it. However, she’d only seen pictures of her apartment before she moved, although she was offered a tour. When she enters the apartment, she finds pigeons have taken over her balcony. Then, when she has cleaned it, she has to block off the birds’ return with plastic wrap. So, there’s no sitting out there and enjoying the desert views.

Butler considers herself a lesbian activist, and even though she tries to be as open as possible, she doesn’t find a single person like her. Unexpectedly, she finds her way to the hearts of other residents through her Judaism. She asks residents about themselves and eventually wins them over as they tell their stories. It is only in the end, when she gets to talk about herself, that she can say she’s made some friends. Each friend she makes, she must do so by accepting their quirky personalities. She learns to live in an environment that she originally wanted to change. And in the end, she becomes satisfied with it.

At Desert Manor, Butler must confront her age more than ever. At one point, an Avon Lady comes, and she buys a bunch of makeup that renders her smooth and unidentifiable. Before the makeup, “My hair was thinning, my hips were thickening, my eyes were dimming, and my teeth appeared to be shifting. There was no cute part left anywhere on my body” (70). She quickly washes the stuff off her face and puts it away forever. She finds that she prefers the wrinkles and brown spots she’s developed over the years. “The primary identity here [Desert Manor] was old. Everything. . . collapsed into that” (113).

Along with the other residents, Butler feels sad that there’s no longer anyone who knows her history. One night at a dance, she discovers she can no longer dance through a whole record and determines to dance on her feet as long as she can and then dance from her seat. Accepting this, she says, “When I moved to Phoenix, I’d longed to have the details of my life taken care of, which they weren’t” (138), but she develops attainable new desires.

This is a well-written, humorous book. We find that while Butler must work to adjust to things at Desert Manor, she becomes friends with most residents, and they adjust to her. She is the leader of more than one Jewish group and works to include other residents. Meetings that were four or five people became more than thirty. We learn, as Butler learns, that she is more than a lesbian activist.

I felt the book started slowly while detailing her illnesses, but it was worth continuing. When she moved to her new home, the conflicts were interesting and often amusing. I wondered if young people would enjoy this book. There is no wild sex or walks on the beach. But I certainly enjoyed this short 178 pages, where I found truths about aging, things that I identified with, and things that had me worried. I am a few years short of 83, but suddenly that age doesn’t seem so scary to me.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade
Scribner, 2025, 480 pages
$31.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a book divided into two parts. The first is the life of Gertrude Stein when she came to Paris with her brother Leo, who was interested in art, and the beginnings of her art collection. What follows is twenty-some years of their lives through some of the greatest history of literature and two wars in Paris, as Stein meets and befriends Alice B. Toklas, falls out with Leo, and during World War II hides out with Toklas in a small French town—writing, living, and loving. The second part begins with Stein’s death and Toklas’ efforts to publish Stein’s prolific unpublished writings. Toklas worked with scholars and powers that be at Yale, where Stein’s papers had been donated, for twenty years as she aged and finally died. In an effort to save Stein’s papers, Toklas accidentally sent a scholar not only books, but notebooks containing hers and Stein’s personal lives. Thus Stein and Toklas’ personal life became public. An unpublished book titled Q.E.D. that contained the events of Stein’s first lesbian affair, before she met Toklas, a secret for which Toklas never quite forgave her, was published under another title. It’s hard to reduce Wade’s book, which is so rich in information, into the length of a review. While a great deal of An Afterlife is written in academic passages, in fact, it’s not a difficult read. There’s something about it that compels the reader forward.

When Stein died in 1946, the bulk of her writing was unpublished. Her work, Wade claims, was all her life “spurred by her scientific background” (3). Trained in medicine as a young woman in the US, this influence is clear later on in her writing. Stein asked questions about how perception worked, how words made meaning and embody the essence of people, places, things, and existence. She saw words as living things with physical properties, like materials a painter or sculptor might use to shape something new. Stein did with words what an artist does with paint.

Stein may be called less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. As a woman with a wife, I liked the phrase, “My wife my life is my life is my wife,” (105). I admit that before reading Wade’s book, the most I knew about Stein was ‘a rose is a rose is a rose,’ which I discovered was so well known that Toklas had it embroidered on several objects in their home. I knew that Stein was an overweight lesbian who wrote in repetition and was often difficult to read. Her process was sleeping late and writing, and then Toklas typed up the writing the next day. She loved reading mysteries and often read one a day. In later years, during a trip to America, she wanted to meet Dashiell Hammett. One thing I think most know about her is she entertained visitors in her room with walls covered with paintings. The studio gatherings consisted of painters, modernist writers, and their wives. Stein entertained the artists and Toklas the wives. I actually started to wonder if Stein had not been an overweight, openly lesbian female, her writing might have been considered on a level of Joyce, Faulkner, and other experimental writers of the modernist or post-modernist era. The truth was, “Stein always made people uncomfortable” (375).

Stein’s second book, The Making of Americans was completed in 1912 when Stein was 38. It was a reparative classic immigrant narrative. New people make new existences out of old lives. Stein did not make a profit from her writing even though the women self-published five titles under the trade name of The Plain Editions between 1930 and 1933. She and Toklas financed the books by selling a Picasso. Whenever money was tight, they looked toward the many paintings in their studio. Nevertheless, Stein soon started to make a little money from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas published in 1932, and an opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, for which she wrote the words and Vergil Thompson wrote the music. One very interesting part of Stein and Toklas’ life was World War II when, as two aging Jewish women, they left Paris and stayed in the country. Paris was invaded and eventually so was the small town where they hid. But they survived to return to Paris.

Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946 of uterine cancer, leaving Alice B. Toklas a widow for the next twenty years, with four hundred dollars a month and a mission. All property, including stocks, bonds, $82,000 cash, royalties, and the high-priced paintings from the studio, belonged to Stein’s nephew, whom neither woman was close to. Four hundred dollars a month in 1946 may have been adequate for living expenses, but as the next twenty years passed, the compensation paid for less and less. As time passed, Toklas frequently borrowed money from friends just to get by. After Stein’s death, only two books made money. The first was Q.E.D., the second was We Eat: A Cook Book, by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, which Stein wrote most of. These royalties went to Stein’s nephew.

Scholars who worked with Stein’s writing discovered that it changed over the years; in the beginning she used syntax to explore the inner process of emotions, and later she used language from literary conventions to explore her own feelings. With Q.E.D., Toklas pondered the final success of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt which after several rejections she finally published in pulp. Q.E.D. was published and a success. Toklas never abandoned her mission to get the rest of Stein’s writing published. Thanks to her, more of Stein’s writing was published after her death than before.

While the beginning of the book was an exciting love story, this later part was sad, as Toklas’ health went downhill. She died March 7, 1967 and was buried in the same grave as Gertrude Stein. Here the story is well written and interesting, and is also heartbreaking, for as Toklas became old and ill, much of her life was told from the point of view of scholars and publishers who worked with Toklas and watched her struggle.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is full of pictures and illustrations that support the story. I found this a well-written and easy-to-read book about a well-known modernist literary figure and a better-known early-twentieth-century lesbian couple. Their devotion to art and literature as well as to each other is remarkable.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. Her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Miller_(author).

Fragments of Wasted Devotion
Mia Arias Tsang, illustrated by Levi Wells
Quilted Press, 2025, 144 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is an incredibly self-descriptive title. Before reading, I assumed it was the poetic, hooking title that so many collections use (and then vaguely connect to one piece in the work), but no, this is simply a collection of Tsang’s fragments of wasted devotions. She sets the reader up to know the story won’t end well: “My heart was too young to be settled,” and she proceeds to become devoted anyway: “but I laid it down on your chest anyway” (1). From the first line, she presents the reader with the question: What does one do with unrequited devotion?

The ‘fragments’ aspect of the title rings true as well. Each work tosses you into a story with little to no context, and you certainly won’t find out the conclusion here, either. Readers see a fragmented narrative where the only throughline you can grasp is the devotion, again and again, no matter the person, place, or time. I struggled with this a bit, but I think that’s because I personally wrestle with more poetic vignettes like this work, not due to any flaw in the book. However, given that the fragments of Tsang’s wasted devotions are the heart of this collection, I found this fragmented presentation of vignettes clever and intriguing.

I deeply appreciated the honesty in her writing. Who hasn’t wondered how to hold someone in their heart if they can’t “eat my groceries before they rot?” (8). You don’t have to have your whole life together to love someone deeply. Tsang also dips into the complicated truth of loving someone who has hurt you (I’m also a firm believer in holding love and anger in your heart at the same time). “Melatonin Dreams” is a three-part piece where Tsang describes the pain of recurring dreams about her partner; a house in New Haven that’s long, brown, and green “like a shotgun. . . I’m ready for you to blow my head off again” (34) and then writes, “I am still trying to protect you from the rage of everyone who wants me to be happy” (35). Don’t we all know it—you have long conversations with family and friends, tearing apart someone for how they treated you, but you have that inexplicable urge to defend them (not their actions necessarily, just them). It can feel hard to hate someone you’ve seen humanity in, no matter how they left you. She finishes, “It’s hell to be trapped behind my own eyes, letting you happen to me when I’m supposed to have control here” (38).

How much these experiences are actually in Tsang’s control, I’m not sure. She writes, “I am on edge and I am breaking my life to get to you because that is what I do for what I love” (42), and she buys the bus ticket, crossing cities to reach someone one hundred and forty-three point three miles away. And again, she writes that the people she loves ask, in horror, “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” (44). But Tsang answers her own questions, and mine, and those of the people who love her, when she writes, “I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask is there anything left to give and it howls yes yes yes forever” (42). “Longing Distance” was my favourite section of the collection because it replicates a feeling I think many of us have experienced, to some degree, of putting the world on hold to get to someone we love who doesn’t necessarily return the effort. “I shouldn’t have had to beg,” she writes, “I wish I could want anything else” (67–68).

So what does one do with unrequited devotion? The reader is welcome to find their own answer. Tsang, for her part, “fade[s] to black with a heart bursting with all the love you wouldn’t take and I know I’ll forgive you anything” (111).

Lastly, on page 15, there is an illustration of a little creature with a face like this: (•⤙•), and I love it. I didn’t write about all the illustrations, but every one was absolutely gorgeous, full of whimsy, and engaging.

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and might be the world’s slowest writer.

All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
Elizabeth Gilbert
Riverhead Books, 2025, 400 pages
$35.00

Reviewed by Cassandra Langer

Elizabeth Gilbert, global sweetheart of women’s magazines, TED Talks royalty, and patron saint of anyone who ever wanted to eat their way around the world, has returned with a new memoir. This one is not about finding love in Bali or mastering yoga in an Indian ashram. No, All the Way to the River is Gilbert’s full-throttle plunge into grief, queerness, addiction, mystical visitations, and the kind of emotional mayhem most of us would only confess under anesthesia.

This is not a beach read. It’s a fasten-your-seatbelts-for-a-bumpy-ride-and-maybe-book-an-appointment-with-your-therapist-after-you-finish book.

Gilbert begins with a visitation from her late partner, Rayya Elias, whose spirit seems far too opinionated to stay politely deceased. People may roll their eyes at such things, but I’m not one of them.

After my beloved dog died, I returned home to an apartment so empty it echoed. I clutched her leash like a Victorian widow and wept into her water bowl. The next morning, a disgusting, toilet-water-soaked tennis ball—yes, that one, the one I threw out—appeared on my pillow. I didn’t scream. I thought, “Oh. So that’s how it’s going to be.”

So when Gilbert talks about Rayya dropping in from the great beyond, I’m right there with her. Some of us get messages from the dead. Some get comfort. Some get ghostly tennis balls.

Gilbert’s memoir is a wild mosaic, equal parts emotional demolition derby, spiritual travelogue, queer romance, and New Age interpretive dance. At moments, it feels like The Killing of Sister George wandered off, took mushrooms, and started reading Jean Genet.

She tells us right away: “I couldn’t believe I had sunk this low.” And to her credit, she means it every time. Gilbert dives from one high to the next: emotional, spiritual, narcotic, romantic. It’s like watching a very literary pinball machine: bing, new obsession. Bong, new crisis. Ding, new mystical revelation.

And somehow it’s both maddening and completely relatable. Who hasn’t, in a moment of loneliness, reached for something questionable? Maybe not a controlled substance or a penthouse rental, but we’ve all been there in spirit.

At the heart of the book is Gilbert’s care for Rayya as she dies from pancreatic and liver cancer, a journey as tender as it is terrifying. Gilbert is loving, terrified, overwhelmed, generous, impulsive, broke, extravagant, sober, not sober, heartbroken, hopeful, and hysterically human. Sometimes all in the same paragraph.

Eventually, she lands in a twelve-step program, declaring that after contemplating murder, suicide, or possibly both on alternate Thursdays, it was time to “ask for help.” A sensible conclusion, really.

She writes with naked honesty, sometimes too naked, the way someone overshares in a group therapy session, and you suddenly find yourself rooting for them against your will.

This memoir is not for everyone, especially not for highly critical readers, but co-dependent lesbians will lap it up. It is for:

● people who fall in love like they’re leaping off cliffs
● people who grieve like the world is ending (because it is, for them)
● people who can’t resist one more emotional thrill ride
● people who have ever seen a sign from the dead and want a near-death experience

Others may find the book unbearable, too intense, too mystical, or too steeped in the spiritual equivalent of rainbow smoothies.

But Gilbert herself? She is a tangled, addictive, self-aware mess. And she knows it.

All the Way to the River is not tidy or transcendent in the way Gilbert’s earlier memoirs were. But it is deeply human, fiercely loving, unintentionally funny at times, and full of the chaos that happens when you’re trying to hold on to the living while being haunted—spiritually, emotionally, sometimes literally—by the dead.

By the last page, you may still not understand Elizabeth Gilbert, but you will absolutely appreciate her.

After all, most of us are just one heartbreak, one impulse purchase, or one ghostly tennis ball away from the river ourselves.

Cassandra Langer lives in Jackson Heights, New York, where she writes and reviews books, and makes art under the watchful eye of a very demanding calico. She is a contributor to The Gay & Lesbian Review, Ms. Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life. She is currently completing her second volume of a two-book anti-conversion memoir, consisting of Erase Her: A Survivor’s Story (available at Amazon in Kindle and soft cover) and working on The Other Side Of The Rainbow: Growing Through Trauma. https://theothersideoftherainbow.org/

Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA
Amy Erdman Farrell
The University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 320 pages
$35.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

In Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA, Amy Erdman Farrell takes on the momentous task of documenting, with painstaking attention to detail, the multifaceted and complex history of the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA). Farrell impressively spans the life of this American institution from the mythologies built up around its founder, Juliette Gordon Low, all the way to how the organisation now manages competing accusations of wokeness and conservatism. Farrell has provided a definitive account of the GSUSA which builds remarkably on previous histories in breadth, perceptiveness, and a willingness to acknowledge the organisation’s complicity in regimes of oppression.

Intrepid Girls unearths a number of significant events in the GSUSA’s over a hundred-year history and it is immediately evident that this is an extensively researched project involving many years hard at work in GSUSA archives. Beginning with the organisation’s origins as an improvement upon the United Kingdom’s imperialist Girl Guides, Farrell takes the reader through Girl Scouting’s early years, its government-sanctioned involvement in both American Indian residential schools and Japanese-American incarceration camps, and its persistent failure to desegregate and support African-American Girl Scouts throughout the twentieth century. From its initial history as a conformist organisation working hand-in-hand with the US government to assimilate girls of colour, indigenous girls, and immigrant girls, the organisation is accused of sowing subversion increasingly in the later years of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Caught up in McCarthyism, disputes over sex education, and endorsement of the United Nations, the GSUSA undergoes socio-cultural changes which shift it from a stalwart of patriotism to a threat to family values.

Central to Farrell’s narrativising of the history of the GSUSA is identifying the ‘strategies of innocence’ used in response to attacks from all sides of the political spectrum. Presenting Girl Scouts as inherently innocent, unable and unwilling to discuss controversial topics or politicised issues, Farrell shows how the GSUSA persistently engages in a ‘dangerous innocence’ which denies its complicity in oppressive regimes under the guise of girlishness. Farrell is expertly able to follow this thread throughout the GSUSA’s story, acknowledging how silence and a desire to please all stakeholders all the time, even at the expense of Girl Scouts themselves, has led to an organisation fraught with doing too little, too late. Essential to this history is Farrell’s repeated interrogations of an organisation that seeks to promote girls’ leadership, whilst consistently refusing to name which girls are leading, and to where they are expected to lead. Intrepid Girls asks hard questions about how the GSUSA represents itself to the public, and how these representations are grounded in a history of deploying whiteness as innocence and neutrality as apoliticalness.

Alongside Farrell’s thorough research, the story of the Girl Scouts is enhanced by reflections on her own involvement in the organisation. Chapter Ten offers an account of Farrell’s 1975 pilgrimage to Juliette Gordon Low’s birthplace in Savannah, Georgia, with her Girl Scout troop. In providing this snippet of personal history, Farrell presents a case study for her claims about the GSUSA’s silence and feigned ignorance on social issues relating to oppression. She highlights how Low’s social position in the late nineteenth century as a wealthy heiress in the South, bolstered by both slavery and taking land from American Indians, provided the seeds for the GSUSA. Yet twelve-year-old Farrell was taught nothing about slavery, stolen land, or how these enabled the existence of the troop in which she found so much community. As such, Farrell offers a poignant account of what happens when innocence is adopted as a ploy to evade unpleasant histories and perpetuate hero-worship of real, complicated people. The inclusion of Farrell’s personal insights is a boon to this work of history, emphasising the real and lived impacts of the Girl Scouts, both positive and negative.

Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA is a work of impressive depth and a significant contribution to our knowledge of the GSUSA as an organisation that now represents a major aspect of American culture, known throughout the world. Farrell’s analysis exceeds that of a facts-driven history, offering an analytical lens on the strategies and actions of the GSUSA which forces us to look past the sweet-as-pie façade of the Girl Scouts and examine its deeper, messier, complex history.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa and Substack girlishh.substack.com.

Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen
Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars
Anthem Press, 2025, 226 pages
$110.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen begins with a discussion of the 2021 SNL skit “Lesbian Period Drama.” This introduction documents the notorious rise across popular culture of visual media tropes depicting frail Victorian women engaged in tense romantic affairs. Accepting the display of satire as confirmation, Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars study neo-Victorian cinema and television in the past twenty-five years that center lesbianism, asking why filmmakers are drawn to the long nineteenth century when narrating queer female-centered stories.

Beginning with the early 2000s adaptations of Sarah Waters’ novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith—which triggered an enthusiasm for indulgent narratives of queer Victorian romance, Maier and Friars guide the reader through a broad range of material. Focusing on British and North American productions, with the notable exception of Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it is undoubtable that this monograph represents the most complete assessment thus far of the lesbian period drama as a subgenre of historical cinema. Their forays into the American West with Godless (Frank) and The World to Come (Fastvold) were particularly insightful in their expansion of the geographic landscape of what is considered neo-Victorian cinema, examining how the conventionally masculine genre of the Western is queered by the inclusion of lesbian stories.

At times, Maier and Friars’ survey would have benefitted from a tighter focus, particularly in those chapters on biofictions like Lizzie (Macneil) and Ammonite (Lee), where the details of the cinematic narrative and historical accuracy meander far from the text’s central focus on lesbians on screen. Overall, Maier and Friars tell a contemporary nuanced story about declining spectacle in the depiction of neo-Victorian lesbian performances while emphasizing the emotional dimensions of these romantic relationships.

Despite frequently turning to the perspectives of directors in their analysis of neo-Victorian cinema, I was surprised to find that Maier and Friars spent little time considering the lack of lesbian professionals involved in the production of these films and television series. Across their selected corpus, only two leading actors publicly identify as queer: Kristen Stewart of Lizzie and Adéle Haenel of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Similarly, only one director of the included films identifies as a lesbian, Sciamma, also of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. For a monograph that generously turns to the authority of the director on many occasions, this absence will be apparent to any lesbian reader wondering why period dramas rarely include lesbians in the creation of lesbian stories.

A similar limitation may be noted in the decision to use the term ‘lesbian’ over more inclusive terminology. Lesbian is not a term that is used frequently in neo-Victorian period dramas, since it is an identifier that only came to popular usage in the twentieth century. Its modern use in describing both real historical people and fictional portrayals of neo-Victorians on screen risks rendering some women characters’ sexualities less visible. Not all the women depicted in Maier’s and Friars’ corpus are shown as exclusively interested in relationships with other women—in The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Harkin), for example, Marguerite also has relationships with men. Whilst the last quarter century of neo-Victorian representation has affirmed that lesbians did exist in the past, the existing scholarship has not made sufficient room for the possibility of bi- and pansexualities, which continue to be historical and cinematic impossibilities.

Maier and Friars’ Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen offers a valuable retrospective of the rich neo-Victorian lesbian narratives in the first decades of the twenty-first century that I hope will ignite enthusiasm for further investigations. Their multifaceted analysis, encompassing feminist, queer, and decolonial insights, is a significant contribution to the field.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa and Substack girlishh.substack.com.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics
Rupert Kinnard
Stacked Deck Press, 2025, 278 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

Allow me to introduce to you Professor I. B. Gittendowne, otherwise known as Rupert Kinnard, the creator of the first Black gay and lesbian comic strip. The strip ran for over twenty years in a variety of alternative and queer periodicals, and now, Kinnard has collected these pointedly hilarious gems into a beautifully designed and produced 11 ¾” by 9 ¼” hardcover volume: Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics. Beginning with his first cartoon character, the Brown Bomber, Professor I. B. Gittendowne deploys the most effective and universally available persuasive tool—humor—to topple racist, sexist, and homophobic absurdities. The four-panel strip grew to feature two inimitable main characters: the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé. Perpetually nineteen years old, the Brown Bomber (named after boxing champ Joe Louis) is an endearingly innocent, buff, single-gloved, non-violent gay superhero; his side-kick, Diva, is a Ph.D.-holding lesbian educator—honoring, Kinnard tells us, the many strong, intelligent women in his life. Together, the two create a depth of social analysis and action that could not have been achieved by a single character.

In 278 lavishly-illustrated pages, Kinnard tells the story of how he developed the strip over the years. A native of Chicago, Kinnard began his artistic career as a student at Cornell College, a small liberal arts school in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. At first, the strip’s only regular character was the Brown Bomber (B.B.), who appeared in the weekly student newspaper, addressing various institutional problems. B.B. was joined at times by the Vanilla Cremepuff, a barely disguised college president, viewed askance for clueless inaction on racial issues. After three and a half years—and wildly-successful campus Brown Bomber T-shirt sales—the Brown Bomber came out as gay.

After graduating in 1979 and moving to Portland, Oregon, Kinnard began publishing Brown Bomber strips in a short-lived local gay and lesbian newspaper, the NW Fountain. A few years later, the Brown Bomber began gracing the pages of a new queer publication, Just Out, where he was soon joined by Diva Touché Flambé, who offered transformative visions and actions to assuage the Brown Bomber’s dismay at the irrationality he often encountered. In addition to occasionally displaying certain mystical powers when nothing else would suffice—e.g., turning an unrepentant LA police officer into a pig—Diva introduces a therapeutic device called slapthology, promoting clear thinking in the recalcitrant with a slap upside the head. “Wow!” says a character, post-slap, “My mind feels as fresh as a breath mint! I guess most written history has centered around the accomplishments of white people!” Kinnard reflects, “I saw myself as being part Diva and part Bomber.”

A job loss in Portland led Kinnard to move to the Bay Area, where Cathartic Comics flourished in the SF Weekly, an alternative paper, for seven years. During this time, Kinnard reinvented his author persona as Prof. I. B. Gittendowne. When the SF Weekly changed hands, ending that paper’s run of Cathartic Comics, Kinnard returned to Portland. Kinnard’s involvement in a life-changing car accident brought the weekly strip to a close, but did not alter the enthusiasm of his fan base or change Kinnard’s dedication to the persuasive use of art and humor as an avenue to social justice. We can only be grateful that he has spent his recent years compiling and designing this celebration of B.B. and the Diva.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! features hundreds of Cathartic Comics strips which otherwise would have vanished along with the newsprint on which they appeared. The artistry is superb, every panel full of energy as characters interact with each other and react to their world’s latest outrages. The Brown Bomber almost always looks the same—wearing the same tennis shoes and over-sized athletic socks, the same shorts, same cape, same boxing glove on his right hand, same scarf tied on his head. The elegant Diva, however, rarely wears the same outfit twice.

In the text accompanying the strips and other illustrations, Kinnard describes both his choices of drawing tools and his artistic and graphic design education. He narrates the development of Cathartic Comics from his childhood to 2025, providing explanatory detail for strips that comment on events with which some readers may not be familiar, such as Ronald Reagan’s gaffe during the 1988 Republican National Convention when he tried to say, “facts are stubborn things,” but actually said, “facts are stupid things.”

Occasionally, I found myself losing the thread of the narrative text as I immersed myself in strip after strip from a given era. Later, I discovered two compact chronologies near the end of the book. I’d suggest that readers look at these first for an overview, then read from the beginning. I should also add that some typos, misspellings, and punctuation errors have crept into the text, but, while unfortunate, they do not lead to misreadings.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! offers hours of joyful reading, just when we need it.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.