El Círculo Sáfico: Lesbianismo y bisexualidad en el Madrid de principios del siglo XX
Paula Villanueva
Levanta Fuego, 2024, 288 pages
18,00 €

Reseñado por Angela Acosta

Read this review in English

Las mujeres sáficas que vivían a caballo de los siglos XIX y XX formaban un núcleo de escritoras y artistas vanguardistas en España y, tras una dictadura y varios métodos de censura y silenciamiento, por fin las podemos nombrar y conocer en pleno siglo XXI. El Círculo Sáfico es el primer libro de carácter didáctico escrito para lectores que aún no conozcan las historias de las lesbianas y mujeres bisexuales que fueron llamadas “invertidas” en aquel entonces. Así es, el tercer volumen de las memorias de la dramaturga lesbiana Victorina Durán, y las investigaciones de Vicente Carretón y Eva Moreno Lago sobre dicho Círculo Sáfico madrileño y el que existió en el exilio bonaerense sirven como los puntos de partida del presente volumen sobre las redes epistolares, románticas y de amistad entre escritoras y artistas sáficas.

Paula Villanueva reivindica la presencia de nombres y textos sáficos, algunos ya aparecidos en los documentales de Las Sinsombrero de Tània Balló (2015, 2019, 2021), a través de una exploración de los espacios de encuentro y el “quién es quién de las bisexuales y las lesbianas” (119) que comprende la mayoría del libro, nombrando a la Condesa Gloria Laguna, Ángeles Vicente, Elena Fortún, Victoria Kent, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Rosa Chacel, Victorina Durán, Carmen Conde y las parejas de estas. Estas mujeres sáficas se integraban en el ámbito cultural modernista junto con Federico García Lorca y Luis Cernuda, los intelectuales queer más célebres de su generación, pero todavía resulta difícil encontrar evidencia de ellas en los archivos y los manuales de literatura sobre la llamada “Generación del 27” y la “Edad de Plata” de la literatura española.

Si bien es cierto que todas estas mujeres eran blancas y la mayoría provenían de familias acomodadas, las mujeres destacadas en este ensayo representan un abanico de experiencias y expresiones de género y sexualidades de tal modo que Villanueva hace hincapié en la importancia del asociacionismo femenino en su capítulo sobre el Lyceum Club Femenino y la Residencia de Señoritas. Estas instituciones brindaban educación y amistades que apoyarían a estas mujeres por vida, a pesar de que cerrarían después de la guerra civil.

“A mi juicio, esta asiduidad o costumbre es lo que crea el Círculo y no la previa consideración del Círculo Sáfico como una asociación fundada, registrada o semi-institucionalizada. Que las mujeres sáficas se han necesitado y buscado a lo largo de la historia es una obviedad—igual que los hombres gais o bisexuales—, y por ello considero que es aquí donde debemos poner el foco” (88).

El Círculo Sáfico recapitula los frutos de las investigaciones contemporáneas sobre las mujeres modernas de forma accesible, tanto en términos del lenguaje como en la presentación del marco histórico y cultural. Los capítulos preliminares sirven como una introducción a la mujer moderna y el asociacionismo femenino, contextualizando a estas mujeres vanguardistas que “atentaba directamente contra las visiones dicotómicas y binarias del mundo” (43) dentro de las conversaciones sobre la patologización de la sexualidad en el contexto occidental y la modernidad sáfica en el mundo angloparlante con Gertrude Stein y El pozo de la soledad de Radclyffe Hall.

El libro no es una mera reseña bibliográfica, sino un estudio pormenorizado sobre los desafíos personales y profesionales a los que se enfrentaron las mujeres lesbianas y bisexuales (incluso cuando los propios familiares negaban las relaciones que tuvieron con otras mujeres) que al mismo tiempo cuestiona por qué no se ha considerado la sexualidad en algunas investigaciones sobre ellas. Los apartados reúnen a nombres ya reconocidos como Victorina Durán y Elena Fortún junto con nombres de mujeres poco mencionadas aun en el ámbito académico, como la Condesa Gloria Laguna cuyo “lesbianismo, fue una íntima amiga suya” (125). Estos perfiles de mujeres sáficas logran un buen equilibrio entre la discusión de textos sáficos como Zezé (1909) de Ángeles Vicente y Oculto sendero (escrito entre 1939 y 1948) de Elena Fortún y cómo estos textos fueron inspirados por las tertulias y las relaciones epistolares que nutrían las vidas de escritoras y artistas sáficas.

La voz de la autora está presente de principio al fin, guiándonos por el Madrid de los años 20 y 30 y el Círculo Sáfico de Buenos Aires establecido por Durán durante su exilio bonaerense. Sobre todo, agradezco el cuidado con el que Villanueva cuenta las historias de amor en tiempos de guerra, de esposos celosos como Antonio Oliver quien destruyó varios poemas de Carmen Conde y de “la bisexualidad no declarada y conflictiva” (239) de la actriz Margarita Xirgu.

“Todas necesitamos olvidarnos, al menos durante unas horas, de las violencias del mundo; del mismo modo que necesitamos habitar una burbuja en la que nuestras vidas pueden ser plenas, junto a amigas y amores con las que compartir luchas, construirnos políticamente y cuidarnos” (238).

Me conmueve mucho cómo el libro resalta la solidaridad y la hermandad entre las mujeres queer: desde los compromisos políticos de la abogada Victoria Kent y la poeta Lucía Sánchez Saornil hasta la valentía con la que Victorina Durán, Rosa Chacel y Elena Fortún escribieron sobre las redes sáficas de su generación. Espero que estas mujeres modernas nos inspiren a sumar más nombres y voces diversas a estos “antecedentes tribadistas” (89) mientras les rendimos homenaje en nuestras investigaciones y versos.

Dra. Angela Acosta es profesora asistente de español en la Universidad de Carolina del Sur. Sus poemas han aparecido en Yellow Arrow Publishing, Heartlines Spec y Apparition Lit. Es coeditora con la Dra. Rebecca Haidt del número especial de Feminist Modernist Studies sobre la modernidad sáfica española (vol. 7, no. 3).

The Sapphic Circle: Lesbianism and Bisexuality in Madrid at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Paula Villanueva
Levanta Fuego, 2024, 288 pages
$19.60

Reviewed by Angela Acosta

Lea esta reseña en español

Sapphic women in Spain who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries formed a core group of avant-garde writers and artists, and after a dictatorship and various methods of censorship and erasure, we can finally name and get to know them in the twenty-first century. The Sapphic Circle is the first educational book written for a general readership who don’t yet know the histories of lesbian and bisexual women at the beginning of the twentieth century, then called “inverts.” The points of departure for this volume on the networks of epistolary correspondence, romance, and friendship among sapphic writers and artists are lesbian playwright Victorina Durán’s Así es (That Way), the third volume of her memoirs, and Vicente Carretón’s and Eva Moreno Lago’s research on the Sapphic Circle of Madrid and the circle that existed among women exiled in Buenos Aires.

Paula Villanueva recovers sapphic women’s names and texts—some of which already appear in Tània Balló’s Las Sinsombrero (The Hatless Women) documentaries (2015, 2019, 2021)—through an exploration of female gathering spaces and a “who’s who of bisexuals and lesbians” that comprises most of the work (119; All translations in this review are my own). These names include Countess Gloria Laguna, Ángeles Vicente, Elena Fortún, Victoria Kent, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Rosa Chacel, Victorina Durán, Carmen Conde, and their partners. These sapphic women were vital contributors to the Spanish modernist milieu along with Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda, the most famous queer male intellectuals of their generation. But it remains difficult to find evidence of these women in archives and textbooks about the “Generation of 1927” and “Silver Age” of Spanish literature.

While all of these women were white and the majority came from well-off families, the women discussed in this book represent a diverse range of experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality. To this end, Villanueva emphasizes the importance of social institutions in her chapter on the Female Lyceum Club and the Unmarried Women’s Residence in Madrid. These institutions provided education and friendships that would support their members for life, despite later closing due to the Spanish Civil War.

“In my opinion, diligence or custom is what created the Circle, rather than the previous view of the Sapphic Circle as an association that was [formally] founded, registered, or semi-institutionalized. The fact that sapphic women have needed and sought each other throughout history is obvious—just like gay or bisexual men [have done]—, and for this reason I consider that this [unstructured creation of the Circle by upper-class women seeking community] is where we need to focus” (88).

The Sapphic Circle brings together the fruits of contemporary scholarship on modern women in an accessible way, both in terms of language and in the presentation of the historical and cultural background. The preliminary chapters serve as an introduction to the concept of the modern woman and women’s groups. Villanueva contextualizes these avant-garde women who “directly challenged dichotomous and binary worldviews” (43) within conversations about the Western pathologization of sexuality, while also considering sapphic modernity in the English-speaking world as represented by works by Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

The book is not merely a literature review, but a detailed study of the personal and professional challenges faced by lesbian and bisexual women (including when their own relatives denied the relationships they had with other women), that at the same time questions why their sexuality remains unmentioned in some research studies. The book’s sections bring together already well-known names like Victorina Durán and Elena Fortún with women hardly mentioned even in academic conversations, such as Countess Gloria Laguna, for whom “lesbianism was a close friend” (125). These profiles of sapphic women strike a good balance between discussing sapphic texts—like Ángeles Vicente’s eponymous Zezé (1909) and Elena Fortún’s Oculto sendero (Hidden Path), (written between 1939 and 1948)—and discussing how these texts were inspired by the tertulias (social gatherings) and epistolary relationships that nurtured the lives of sapphic writers and artists.

The author’s voice is consistently present, guiding us through Madrid of the 1920s and 1930s and the Sapphic Circle of Buenos Aires that Victorina Durán established during her exile. Above all, I appreciate the care with which Villanueva tells love stories in times of war, describing jealous husbands like Antonio Oliver who destroyed some of Carmen Conde’s poems, as well as the “undeclared and conflicted bisexuality” (239) of actress Margarita Xirgu.

“We all need to forget, at least for a few hours, the violence of the world; in the same way that we need to inhabit a bubble in which our lives can be full, alongside friends and loves with whom we can share struggles, construct ourselves politically, and care for one another” (238).

I am deeply moved by the resounding solidarity and sisterhood among queer women on display in this book: from the political commitments of lawyer Victoria Kent and poet Lucía Sánchez Saornil to the courage with which Victorina Durán, Rosa Chacel, and Elena Fortún wrote about the sapphic networks of their generation. I hope that these modern women will inspire us to add more names and diverse voices to those of our “tribadic predecessors” (89) as we pay tribute to them in our research and poetry.

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Yellow Arrow Publishing, Heartlines Spec, and Apparition Lit. She is co-editor with Dr. Rebecca Haidt of the Spanish Sapphic Modernity special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (vol. 7, issue 3).

The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art
Eileen Myles
Semiotext(e), 2009, 368 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Pippin Lapish

My Date with Eileen Myles

My girlfriend Sascha and I are in Brooklyn. Our night out begins at a tattoo parlor offering fifty dollar flash designs. I think Sascha wants a cross on the back of her neck, or maybe a smattering of stars on her hip descending into the delta of her crotch, or “mom” written inside a
pierced heart on her shoulder. I’m not sure, but all of her ideas translate tradition into the language of youth.

We walk into the shop and the poseur vibe is suffocating. The music is bad and too loud, the lights are too bright. It’s a bad idea to get tattooed somewhere so transparently and terminally uncool. So we leave. We both operate via reflexive aesthetic judgements.

On our way out, we pass a bookstore. I duck in automatically and wordlessly. It became a game for me to sniff out the good titles, to trim my vision into the pattern of spines. And then I won the game: I found a book I’ve been looking for. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles.

The title is nonsensical. When you’re Eileen Myles, the title of your book doesn’t have to make sense, because you’re a hotshot. The book is a collection of previously unpublished essays, interviews, and blog posts, the dregs of a career. It’s a little hard to find, which is why I hadn’t already read it. Iceland lived in my saved for later list on Amazon, but buying from Amazon always feels desperate and cheap, like winning by default. Finding it in the wild, especially by accident, was triumphant. I had made the Big Catch, the winning kill. The book isn’t one of Myles’ pithy, slimmer volumes either. It looks like a textbook, thick and turquoise, with a photograph of an iceberg on the cover. The title is in all caps, and the Semiotext(e) logo announces the book’s verbose obscurity. It’s not bestseller or cult-classic material: it’s for the serious, rabid fans of Myles, those pitiful fanatics who lap up their every word.

GOD HATES BAGS, at least in New York, so I was stuck carrying the book around all night. It became a third wheel. Sascha had mapped our night out:

1. Get a tattoo
2. Get sushi
3. Ride back to Manhattan for a haunted house
4. Go to sex shop for a new cock

Our first order of business was an unceremonious yet total failure. The bookstore was shoved right between items one and two, imperceptibly inserted by me. It was a pound where I picked up a new pet, so Sascha was rightfully endeared and a little annoyed at my impulsivity. Iceland was a parrot occasionally chiming in. A newfound object of my attention and affections.

At the sushi restaurant, the book occupied its own little corner of the table, except for the moments I picked it up and dragged my finger along the pages. A few times, I committed a grave vulgarity: I cracked the book open and read a few lines at the table. Sascha stared at me as my head lowered and I squinted in the dim light. My attention was caught by a line: “. . .you are breaking the code of the working class by aiming to be a big cheese” (14). “Ha, Sascha, listen to this!” But then I saw her stony expression and. . . nevermind.

Reading Eileen Myles is the experience of discovering language. Like, “Oh what does this button do” and then you find out. Myles handles words with both reverence and a deeply personal sense of play. Puttering around in language but then holding specimens up to the light.

Sometimes I decide that text by Eileen Myles is my property. I just think “Yeah, you’re coming home with me,” and then it doesn’t go away. Eileen Myles’ prose is loyal. They write a lot about dogs and their writing seems to have a canine sort of personality. Meaty, heaving and drooling.

Eileen Myles treats all subject matter with the same weight. Every observation, object, or feeling is described with Myles’ signature certainty, so it all gets blown up onto this cosmic emotional scale. Everything, from the pain of losing their father to the creak of a wooden bed frame, is handled with the same odd mixture of intensity and flippancy. In Iceland, there’s an essay about working class speech. Myles says: “I think the part of working class speech that I’m aiming at today. . . is this willingness to throw the words away, to let the situation speak” (17-18). Myles really gives objects a chance, and a voice. Reading Eileen Myles has the mythic futility of emptying and filling a lake in equal parts. I am talking about Myles’ measuredness, their evenness, or their fairness. It’s all nice and balanced in Myles’ work. Not flat nor mathematical, just outstretched, like a palm or a clearing. Real open. You can step right inside.

After the sushi we were back on the L train, returning to Manhattan for the climax of the night, the haunted house.

When Sascha tells me stories about Los Angeles I have to manually paste the idea of heat on top of the scene. Heat and fame are two elements of Los Angeles that one grows immune to. The Midwest breeds loners, but she always felt like one part of something bigger, a conduit to a world that’s always churning and producing. She’s four foot eleven and beautiful in an untroubled way, which means she fits in everywhere. She’s a letter shook loose from the morning paper, always ready to burst into a headline. She’s kinetic—a live wire, a turning point. Iceland says “. . .it’s so American to think you can figure it out alone. With a little help from your famous friend” (160).

At a certain point in the haunted house, an actress dressed in a white slip with black hair over her eyes started breathing in my ear. In my terror, I shoved Iceland over my face, like a child with his blanket. I started thinking of the book as my exit out of the constructed nightmare, a little self-contained cell of the outside world. It was funny to see Eileen Myles’ name in a sudden red glint, bringing me, momentarily, out of the illusion. Fitting, somehow. Like Iceland is a break room in hell where the demons can go drink coffee out of styrofoam cups before heading back to work. Iceland says it’s like “. . .hand painted Goth, I mean S-C-A-R-Y, everything is ‘kid,’ and for one cool weird moment (well, nine minutes) we are all totally free” (311). That’s the great thing about haunted houses. Sort of like in a book, you’re not responsible for your actions inside a haunted house. You can scream and piss and fall on the floor and no one’s allowed to fault you. Iceland and haunted houses exist in this identical, egalitarian emotional sense, like you can get away with anything so you try everything.

One thing about Eileen Myles is that they never explain anything. There are no extended metaphors in Myles’ work. Everything is up front, bare, and laid out. They’re a real take it or leave it kind of author. Author is derived from the Latin augere, meaning to originate, which is where we get authority. So Myles is well within their etymological right to make no sense. In their book Afterglow they say, “The English language is extremely boaty.” And that totally deranged thought strikes me as incredibly correct. Because Myles doesn’t dither or wring their hands or worry, for an instant, about being understood. Their writing is governed by their intrinsic and inalienable authority, the writer’s birthright. They’re unreliable. Their writing is shaped like the slump of a shrugging shoulder or the contours of a dismissive hand. In Iceland they say, “Camera means room in Italian. No stanza does. Maybe it’s Spanish. Anyhow, I feel like a camera which is not” (320). Overall, Myles doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They just put it out there and middlemen, sifters, and interventionists like me handle the rest. They throw the meaning outside the parameters of the page, like the words are in the book, but the message is elsewhere.

Myles’ writing is a lot like a tin roof. Rippled shelter. Either hot to the touch or cool. Flimsy, but who would fuck with a tin roof? Even nature seems to spare it out of pity. There’s something scrappy and twee about it. Always an A for effort.

Myles flits between personas. Sometimes they’re a refined art critic and sometimes they’re shaking their fist at a cloud. They’re flighty and gimcrack. They mostly punch up. They’re assured and aloof but grubby, somehow both hardworking and bohemian. I picture their books coming together like a barn raising, but a barn raising that happens in a dream, so no one really breaks a sweat.

After the haunted house, we keep moving, still working off the adrenaline. Iceland says “You don’t want to be scared. You want to be excited, ennobled, teased alive.” “Heh, Sascha, listen to”—two eyes, recently recovered from terror and newly adjusted to the dark, shoot toward me—“nevermind.”

We walk to our favorite sex shop. Five inches is no longer cutting it. It’s an easy fix. It’s weird to browse for a prosthesis, but it’s funny to think that I can upgrade an organ. Is it a humiliation or a privilege? It’s just funny. Iceland says, “I see the pussy on the tip of a dick. A fat little smiley face” (304). A dildo’s pronouns would be ha/ha.

I pick out the strap. I walk over to Sascha, who’s flipping through the porno magazines. We pick out two issues from 2007. Later that night, we go through them and rip out the ugly girls.

The new strap is sixty dollars. I try not to imagine fucking her with sixty dollars. Iceland says “It seemed to me to be on the order of a lesbian ripple or chip.” Right: like a crinkly fistful of bills. I think about Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism as it pertains to my cock—oh, sorry. Sascha hates that word. Instead, she calls it a “worthy investment,” which makes me imagine it increasing in value, like my boner is a graph of an improving economy.

With my girlfriend, my newly buzzed hair, my leather jacket, a book by Eileen Myles, two porno magazines, and strap in a black plastic bag, I could feel my gayness literally hanging off of me. Iceland talks about “little girls hawking lesbianism. . . on a 40s street corner like they knew they had something cooler than lemonade” (66). I felt like the biggest dyke in the world, which is to say, a king. There’s not a more kingly feeling than your girlfriend being a little bit mad at you.

Sometimes I have these thoughts or experiences where I think to myself, “That’s an Eileen Myles moment.” Like when Sascha said to me, “They just don’t make tour buses like they used to.” And that statement feels like a joke, but there’s a vaguely sad plea for reflection buried right in there. That’s Eileen Myles’ formula: an acute yet superfluous observation with a twist of painful honesty.

Laying in bed that night, when Iceland’s been put away and the cock proved its worth, I tell Sascha why I like Eileen Myles so much. I told her about this one time, when I was reading Inferno, and they described the clit as a ‘spud.’ That’s the exact moment I realized just what you could do with language. Sascha cringed and said, “Eileen Myles should be tried for their crimes against my imagination.” I replied, “Be careful what you say; it’s gonna end up in the essay.”

Pippin Lapish is a writer from Michigan. Her work has previously appeared in Denver Quarterly, Gryllus Magazine, 11½ Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Her first poetry book, The Contrarian, is forthcoming from Hobby Horse Press. She lives in New York City.

Country Queers: A Love Letter
Rae Garringer
Haymarket Books, 2024, 208 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Country Queers: A Love Letter is, simply put, a celebration of queer stories. Opening the book and seeing so many familiar interviews from Country Queers oral history project brings back vivid memories of the first time I heard these stories—a feeling I suspect many who followed this project will likely share. The work is stunning visually, with each page showcasing beautiful artwork and photography, but the real heart of the work is the platforming of queer stories. Garringer’s work tenderly immortalizes queer rural lives.

This work commits to a holistic view of queer country life, gracefully balancing stories of joy, community, and love with harsher realities of oppression, isolation, and loss. Garringer reflects on how much queer rural narratives center on suffering, but they beautifully emphasize how queerness is also full of life and celebration and persistence. This duality is interspersed well, and you get a full picture of what it can mean to be a country queer.

“In the beginning of this project, my questions skewed heavily toward asking what issues and challenges rural queer people faced, but many narrators, including Sandra [an interviewee], taught me that those weren’t necessarily the right questions to ask and that our struggles aren’t the only interesting or important things to talk about” (54).

Garringer weaves their journey as an interviewer within the histories and perspectives on queer life in rural or country settings and explores intersecting identities excellently. You feel connected to interviewees on the pages through Garrigner’s commentary alongside transcripts, and these connections only grow as you dive deeper into the book. The structure follows the project’s journey from the start (2013) to the pandemic years (2020 to 2023). Even the process of finding interviews was fun to read about; so many stemmed from connection through queer grapevines. Many queer folks may recognize this phenomenon as a tried-and-true method of connecting. The book does well in recognizing and celebrating diversity in rural queer communities. Themes of life, community, land, and home fill the pages. Accompanying each narrative is an inclusion of Indigenous land acknowledgements.

Country Queers touches on several connected topics—activism, disability, climate change, family, loss, and love. Some of the more moving sections explored the loss the AIDS epidemic brought. Throughout are recollections of how queer community was its own source of strength when facing unimaginable loss or harm. Garringer writes, “rural people often depend on each other to survive, taking care of each other” (95). Threads of survival and joy run through the book, but it doesn’t avoid challenging topics. Further, they write about how rural queers’ stories need to be shared, given that so many elders and histories can be inaccessible or hidden.

“Ninety-plus interviews in, and I can count on one hand how many were elders. . . we have been robbed of access to our rural queer elders through decades of outmigration, through the AIDS epidemic, and through the long country queer survival strategy of silence and secrecy” (49).

This treasure trove of stories connecting us to locations, histories, and communities reveals realities many may be unfamiliar with. It often seems that many view rural spaces as inhospitable for queerness, but this book reminds us otherwise. It’s a love letter, like the title says, not only to the individuals whose stories fill the pages but to rural queer folks everywhere. The book is more than transcriptions of stories—it’s a connective celebration visibilizing queerness.

Whether or not you followed the Country Queers project for ages or you’re just now learning about it, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in queer history and rural life. There are events in 2024 and 2025 across the United States with the author, and you can check them out here if you’d like to learn more. The project is so beautiful in multiple ways. I hope you love this book as much as I do.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) is a queer American from the rural south living in Scotland with their partner. They volunteer as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom and manage a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse.

A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a group of women set out to change the world
Jane Cholmeley
Mudlark, 2024, 384 pages
$21.99

Reviewed by Michaela Hayes

It is easy to forget that accessing lesbian and feminist literature was once incredibly difficult. Or rather, for me, it is hard to even imagine. I work for a lesbian literary magazine and have completed both a BA and an MSc in literature. I have lived in a world where reading feminist literature isn’t only easy, it’s encouraged. Reading A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley, I’m reminded that I’ve been incredibly lucky. This book serves as a timely reminder as well, as book bans are surging in both the US, where I’m from, and the UK, where this book is set and where I currently live.

A Bookshop of One’s Own is Jane Cholmeley’s account of Silver Moon, a feminist lesbian bookshop she opened with her partner-turned-best-friend (very lesbian indeed), Sue Butterworth. The shop was on Charing Cross Road, a street in central London renowned for its specialist bookshops. Silver Moon was opened with substantial help from the Greater London Council (GLC), a government-funded program that ran from 1965 to 1986. According to Esther Webber of BBC News, the GLC was created in response to a disjointed and disorderly London still reeling from World War II, with the aim to promote prosperity among the population. To the GLC, this included cultural pursuits, which led it to subsidize rents and provide loans for institutions deemed culturally important, such as Silver Moon Women’s Bookshop: “As well as giving greater support to the arts in general, the GLC wanted to give a voice to the unheard, the disregarded, the disadvantaged” (43).

A Bookshop is a sweeping account of Silver Moon from start to finish—Cholmeley covers the inception of the idea for the bookshop, the trials and tribulations of operating a feminist business in a capitalist world, the changing tides of politics in Britain during Thatcher’s reign, and the forces that ultimately forced the bookshop to close. The strength of the book lies in the details. Cholmeley is a self-professed ‘numbers guy’ and, as a result, leads the reader through the nitty gritty of feminist bookselling that might otherwise remain unknown to us. It is one thing to know in theory that Thatcher had a disastrous effect on feminist and justice-oriented endeavors and another entirely to understand the mechanics. Cholmeley makes clear through facts and figures that the shuttering of Silver Moon was due to a confluence of factors, nearly all of them tracing back to the rapid privatization of public services.

Cholmeley’s humor threads through the book and binds it together. Though she recognizes that Silver Moon became an invaluable and world-renowned feminist institution, she makes clear that she and her team weren’t thinking about glory or legacy:

“. . . we were much more concerned with survival and laughter. I want this to be our record. A record of the joy—of seeing favorite authors prosper; the awe—of welcoming a heroine superstar author to the shop; the fun—of thinking up subversive merchandise or rewarding ourselves with outrageously boozy Christmas dinners; the anger—of having to clean the carpet from a wanker’s sperm; the political defiance—as we rainbowed-up the Charing Cross Road and fought Section 28; the daily grind—of learning to run a business; the tensions—around politics, personalities and priorities” (3).

With this book, Cholmeley succeeds in her mission; indeed, A Bookshop of One’s Own makes plain all of the above while also shedding light on the rapidly changing political landscape of Britain under Thatcher. Silver Moon closed in 2001, but its legacy lives on in ways that we will never know the extent of. However, this book helps to fill in some of the blanks. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of feminist bookselling, especially younger people such as myself who have a hard time imagining the world pre-internet when access to information was far more restricted. This book is especially relevant today as, unfortunately, right-wing governments intent on erasing queer and racial history surge all over the world.

Michaela Hayes is a writer, researcher, and, above all, a reader. She’s currently living in Edinburgh, where she just finished a master’s in Literature & Modernity, in which she focused on posthuman feminism. She’s currently gearing up for another winter in Scotland, so if you have gay book recommendations, send them to Michaelahayes225 at gmail dot com.

Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility
Hannah Murphy Winter, photographed by Billie Winter
Chronicle Books, 2024, 248 pages
$29.95

Reviewed by Bailey Hosfelt

Journalist Hannah Murphy Winter and photographer Billie Winter explore the power of queer love and the politics of visibility in a collection of in-depth interviews and intimate photography in their new book, Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility. A collaborative project by the authors who are also wives, this release is both a visually beautiful art book and a thought-provoking read. It offers readers a glimpse into the rich lives of fourteen queer couples, spotlighting their thriving relationships, varied forms of creative expression, and personal and professional achievements.

Divided into three sections, the book interviews queer power couples, which the authors define as couples who are out, coupled, and able to influence mainstream culture across diverse industries and from different embodied perspectives. The book features famous partnerships such as Mike Hadreas and Alan Wyffels of Perfume Genius, Jenna Gribbon (artist) and Mackenzie Scott (musician known as Torres), Roxane Gay (author) and Debbie Millman (designer), and comic artists Molly Knox Ostertag and ND Stevenson, among others. The book also includes partners with successful careers in other fields, such as fine-dining chefs Samantha Beaird and Aisha Ibrahim, academic scholars Marilee Lindemann and Martha Nell Smith, and influential scientists Barbara Belmont and Rochelle “Shelley” Diamond.

Whereas Murphy Winter’s journalistic work often covers queer pain—namely, the laws, legislatures, and political administrations trying to erase queer people—Queer Power Couples intentionally deviates by centering queer joy and affirmation. As the authors write in the introduction, queer people must often locate queerness in small moments or nuances to find proof that they’re not alone, a process that involves “sifting for scraps” (10). In contrast, Queer Power Couples’ presentation of queerness is neither ephemeral nor implied. Instead, it offers an authentic showcase of queer individuals who are out and proud, spanning various ages, demographics, and lived experiences. By highlighting queer lives and amplifying their visibility, this book and its interview subjects make a crucial contribution to broader LGBTQ+ representation, especially for younger queer readers.

Queer Power Couples certainly spotlights its interviewees’ big wins, such as publishing a book, going on tour, and producing a television series. However, the book’s strengths ultimately lie in its emphasis on the joys in the smaller, everyday moments couples experience together: reading on the couch, walking a dog, or preparing a meal. Through these depictions, the authors celebrate the experiences of building and maintaining a life together, including its mundanities—something queer people often fear will forever remain out of reach.

In each interview, the authors asked couples the same question: Who was the first person you recognized as queer? Despite the same query posed to every couple, each conversation was unique. Insightful reflections emerged on how queerness intersects with other identities—such as female, trans, immigrant, Black, Muslim, Christian, Southerner, and parent—and how interview subjects navigated these aspects of themselves, both in times of conflict and harmony.

Murphy Winter’s journalistic chops draw out stimulating meditations from the interview subjects on what it means to step outside the confines of heteronormativity. Winter’s photography (in both black and white and color) provides tender insight into the couples’ lives and loves. With full-page spreads dedicated to both words and photography, and pages that intersperse or alternate between the two, Queer Power Couples gives equal weight to the visual and written, allowing each medium to shine and interlace with the other.

In addition to Winter’s photography, the work includes self-portraits taken by couples and photos partners took of each other. These provide the work with greater intimacy and highlight the relationship between seeing and being seen. Much like lesbian photographers Joan E. Biren (JEB) and Donna Gottschalk, Winter captures couples’ intimacy and connection by photographing them in physical locations that are part of the world they have built together, establishing increased authenticity in her images.

As a quote from Dr. Ilan Meyer, a researcher at UCLA’s Williams Institute, emphasizes early in the book, “A happy gay couple is, in the context of history, a very revolutionary idea” (21). Queer Power Couples celebrates queer life and love, introducing readers to “a catalog of trails that have already been carved out by queer people who are changing the world in their own way, not in spite of their queerness, but at least, in part, because of it” (246). Queer Power Couples is a resonant read, offering queer readers “more maps, torches, and possible selves” (246), just as its authors hoped it would.

Bailey Hosfelt is a lesbian writer. She recently graduated with a master’s degree in gender and women’s studies from UW–Madison, where she wrote a thesis on Dyke TV and queer activist infrastructure. Previously, Bailey lived in Brooklyn, New York and worked as a journalist for local newspapers. Bailey lives in Chicago with her partner and their two cats, Hilma and Lieutenant Governor.

The Land is Holy
noam keim
Radix Media, 2024, 180 pages
$24.95

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

“My blood is trying to tell me something, and in the dark of the house I am trying to listen” (15).

In The Land is Holy, noam keim crafts lyrical essays, each braided with profound metaphors containing miles of connections across generations and geography. Through stories of storks, aoudads, and linden tea, the reader witnesses a mosaic of keim’s ethnic and cultural reality. keim is a Jewish Arab born in Occupied Palestine, who spent their childhood and young adulthood in France, and finally moved to Turtle Island in their adulthood. The Land is Holy is a gift for readers searching for a home in our postcolonial world.

For keim, home sometimes means freedom and exile. Their complicated relationship with home is put into perspective with their striking natural metaphors. Like keim, the aoudad has an interesting history of migration and displacement. They write, “The aoudads have switched homes, trading their ancestral West to the West of the new world” (33). This migration and displacement is keim’s lived experience. All of keim’s geographical homes are tainted by histories of conquest and colonization, so they must find true home amidst grief. They lament, “I am grieving and I want to blame geography for my grief. If I were home, I wouldn’t feel grief anymore” (40, italics theirs). What is home, then? Geography? A feeling? People? To keim, home may be constant migration.

Birds are an important motif in The Land is Holy, but their prime function is to display the natural reality of movement and liberation. keim recounts a rare outdoor prison visit with their friend, where they see a starling fly over. At this time, they were discussing liberation (24). The collection opens with a stork flying home for spring: “They will return. Storks always find their way back home” (12). keim suggests that migration, seasonal travel towards a place that meets your needs, is liberation. Starlings and storks know when and where to fly by instinct. Their act of flying home, and keim’s act of discerning their own home, should be as natural as breathing.

keim leaves the proverbial nest of their childhood to answer the call of liberation. When she is young, keim’s mother changes her name from Hassiba to Hassida. Just one letter changes the meaning of her mother’s name to the Hebrew word for stork, “becoming the only home she would know” (16). Hassida’s chosen name is the driving theme of this collection. However, keim has not spoken to their mother since they left France. Despite this, they write: “I seem to always return to the feeling of being my mother’s child” (17). Their relationship with their mother is a place of deep love yet also hurt, requiring sacrifice and grief. Like the stork, keim always finds their way back home to their mother, albeit metaphorically.

keim discusses how important the concept of flâne is to them; it directly translates to “wander,” “stroll,” or “saunter” aimlessly. But to them, it gains a political meaning: flâne is “the holiness of the unplanned, the cycles of rebirth that come from experiencing new realities” (145). The reader must practice flâne when reading The Land is Holy. This collection of essays is meant to be wandered through. Read only a few essays at a time and savor its holy land.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in their chapbook, Palimpsest, from Bottlecap Press and at CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press.

Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between
Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Frances Lincoln (Quarto), 2024, 240 pages
$35.00

Reviewed by Bell Pitkin

Divided into three acts, renowned curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley explores how contemporary LGBTQI artists have utilized various mediums to explore ideas of queer space, queer bodies, and queer power in her new book: Queer Art: from Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between. Whether you’re an artist, a curator, or just an admirer of the arts, this book is required reading. Rolls-Bentley goes beyond providing historical context and looks to the ways in which queer art and visual culture have radically shaped and aided our communities. She writes, “Queer people channel the power to redress realities: excavating queer histories and distilling lessons of the past to create a foundation upon which to project, manifest, and build better futures, new ways of being, and new worlds” (214).

Included in the list of highlighted artists are many who have collaborated with Sinister Wisdom, such as Tee Corinne, whose photograph graced the cover of Issue 3, Clarity Haynes, whose oil painting was featured in the 2023 calendar, and JEB (Joan E. Biren), who has been a long-time collaborator and friend of the journal. In addition to providing more context about some of my favorite queer artists, there were many names I was pleased to be introduced to, including drag king Whiskey Chow, cubist painter Nina Chanel Abney, and documentary photographer Bex Wade. As the years pass and the shape of art continues to change, I’m excited to see which artists join those listed in these pages. There’s so much beauty that’s yet to be created.

All art is magical, but queer art is especially magical. Of the more than two hundred artists included in Queer Art, each has used their creativity to explore their identity, share their unique perspectives, and advocate for their community. Take inspiration from the beauty within these pages and create your queertopia.

Bell Beecher Pitkin is a multi-media artist who lives and works between Charlotte, North Carolina and Boston, Massachusetts. They received their bachelor of arts from Wellesley College, where they studied Cinema and Media with a concentration in Photography. Within their practice, Bell works primarily with medium format photography to explore notions of the archive, family, and the queer identity, often situated in the landscape and mysticism of the Southern United States. Bell currently serves as the Gallery Manager for the Leica Boston Gallery and as a Curatorial Assistant for Sinister Wisdom.

All In: Cancer, Near Death, New Life
Caitlin Breedlove
AK Press, 2024, 152 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Margaret Zanmiller

Caitlin Breedlove’s All In delivers a raw experience of an often ignored queer woman’s perspective concerning an ovarian cancer diagnosis. The memoir follows Breedlove from winter 2021 to autumn 2022, though readers are occasionally transported to Breedlove’s life before her diagnosis and to moments with ancestors. Breedlove encourages us as readers, all experiencing a collective sickness, to understand the cycles of our lives, be in communion with our ancestors and community, embrace change, and move forward with radical honesty. We are living in a time when disability is becoming more common for the American people. Our institutions ignore COVID-19 and other mental and physical illnesses, and our support for the disabled community wavers. Breedlove shares her experience with disability, working against persistent erasure.

Breedlove writes for mothers, queers, immigrant daughters, those passed on, and those surviving with cancer (27; 119). Stories from people like Breedlove fight against the traditional expectation to erase sickness and death from Western culture and discourse. Through engagement with stories such as Breedlove’s, change and suffering become a little more approachable simply because we no longer feel we are doing it alone. Breedlove notes the small number of books about cancer written by and for oppressed individuals. Breedlove, in the personal process of becoming a ‘filled bowl,’ is filling a collective bowl with her story. She approaches her story of cancer and near death with care, love, and empowerment. She adds new and collective tools to dismantle the masters’ house. For example, her descriptions of pain and near-death help to dismantle the white supremacist ideals of perfectionism and individualism (Okun, 2021) we typically find in books written by white women with cancer.

Themes of this chronology include motherhood, queerness, and Eastern European spirituality and culture. Readers searching for depictions of motherhood in all its pain and glory, the safety and healing of queer communities, and the beautiful simplicity of spirituality should be pleased with this book.

Towards the end of the book, Breedlove addresses her repetitive approach to writing; she states that this repetition reflects her natural state of forgetfulness that comes with sickness and opioid usage (95). I think the book’s repetitive nature also emphasizes a necessary approach to our collective struggles. Our brains and, often, our social status protect us from hearing what invokes change. We are rightfully rehearing and repeating congruent lessons. This (un)learning furthers our ability to be intersectional and non-binary in our thinking. Each lesson relearned directly challenges our individualistic comfort, our collective comfort, and our regime’s stability. The institutions around us, the systems that rule the Western world, work tirelessly to erase our stories and our progression. They encourage the disregard and silence surrounding our stories. Breedlove chronicles herself. She writes fully in her life, body, mind, and spirit.

Overall, Breedlove’s story is not just her own, but our collective experience with an oppressive state demanding overwork, overproduction, and silent death. She uses a refreshing writing style that inspires acceptance and confidence. In this book, readers sit with the reality of our collective sickness, the power of our stories, and our ability to be reborn alongside the ever-changing world.

Margaret Zanmiller is a Saint Paul dyke with a BA in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Minnesota.

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
Sabrina Imbler
Hachette Book Group, Back Bay Books, 2024, 288 pages
$21.99

Reviewed by Dot Persica

I was in Brooklyn waiting for an audition when I stepped into Greenlight Bookstore to pass the time. How Far the Light Reaches immediately seized my attention. I didn’t know it would be a Queer book when I picked it up; I was just captivated by the cover illustrated by Simon Ban. I can’t help but think it’s no coincidence Queer people keep finding each other in the midst of the world’s attempts to isolate us. Something at my fingertips must have known before I did why, once I picked up this book, I could not part with it.

How Far the Light Reaches has everything. Imbler takes us on a journey of self-discovery by connecting ten sea creatures with peculiar characteristics to events in the author’s life: they dive into their relationship with their mother and disordered eating through the story of the octopus mother who starves in order to protect her eggs; they travel back to their grandmother’s youth guided by the Chinese sturgeon; they look deep into their present and future, exploring what it means to be different and to be part of a whole through creatures like hybrids and salps. Imbler’s experiences with sex, race—specifically being biracial and Asian in America—their gender nonconformity and the constant discovery of who they have been and who they are becoming are explored alongside each creature, connected seamlessly. The isolation of being racialized in a predominantly white context, the overwhelming joy of discovering spaces in which they are no longer the minority, the pain and the solace found in being who they are, navigating the aftermath of sexual assault, finding love and losing it and finding it elsewhere, everywhere—are all experiences that coexist and overlap. They cannot be separated but are dissected in this book like little animals, part of Imbler’s quest for answers.

This is the strange and beautiful, perfectly crafted child of the memoir and the encyclopedia.

As I was reading, I felt as though I was shifting from egg to larva to juvenile to adult, like one of the creatures described by the author: I was part of their delightful, excruciating, rewarding journey of growing up, and I felt as though I was going through all those changes myself in a strange time loop of my own making, pausing whenever I was forced by the outside world to look up from the book, and resuming my metamorphosis as soon as my eyes returned to the page.

Imbler digs to the root of painful topics in a gentle way. Their retelling of their trauma is for those who understand it: it’s an embrace rather than a slap; it doesn’t seek to spark compassion in the disinterested perpetrators. Imbler’s vulnerability is for those who have had similar experiences. In doing so, they hold not only their readers but also their own younger self (all their selves) in an embrace that lasts until the final page of this book, past the acknowledgements, and up to the last citation, maybe longer. This is a love letter to Queer people, an ode to the perpetual survival of marginalized communities against all odds.

I got through this book in two days because I am an autistic lesbian who wants to know the secrets of the ocean but was too bad at science to try to go into marine biology, but it would have been hard to put down regardless. The creatures chosen by Imbler for this personal and poetic work span from ordinary to almost mythical; we learn about the incredible adaptability of the goldfish and the surreal habitat of the yeti crab, living in conditions we consider absurd. Queerness is defying expectation, making it through, the same way nobody teaches ontogeny reversal to the immortal jellyfish, but somehow they know how to do it. Making sense of your existence on your own terms in a world that wants you docile and compliant because you are a “woman,” because you are Asian, is defying expectations. Loving someone who is like you when you are consistently told that the way you are is wrong: defying expectations. With each creature, the concepts of “natural” and “unnatural” are redefined—each creature is a key unlocking a facet of the human experience; each human experience is transposed into something greater, a whole that we are all part of.

How Far the Light Reaches is a window into each other, which means ourselves, through Imbler’s work. What a gift.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with a vague dance background; they have experience directing opera, helping out here and there on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a co-founder of the Italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA*, with which they have organized community events, raised funds, and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.