Reviews

First Person Queer: Who We Are by Christopher DiRaddo, Lawrence Schimel, David Hatfield Sparks, Richard Labonté, Mette Bach

caedocyon's review

3.0

Kind of put off by the fact that two of the first three essays are by a cis woman who only dates queer men and calls herself a "queer heterosexual" (it's not like queer is a reclaimed slur or anything, nooo) and a cis woman who only dates trans and gender variant people and casually throws around a lot of slurs. I'm sticking this out for Ivan E. Coyote, but I'm not as excited about it as I was. :/

ETA: Okay, it turns out that those two essays were the most iffy in the book. Lots of interesting stuff about different relationship models from gay and queer guys. Some other good ones I'm not remembering. Ivan's was all the way at the end and worth the wait, but sad. Overall: decent, but not amazing.

djinnofthedamned's review

4.0

A solid anthology filled with disperate stories written in first-person perspective. I think the only thing that would have made this stronger is some subvisions so there is slightly more continuinty thematically. I understand that anti-continuity can be seen as the apex of queer or radical, the disruption from traversing the liminal space of one story to the next and they are not related in form and content. However, I do wonder once you get past the use of first person and the mention of gender idenity or sexual orientation what exactly these stories have in common with each other. Sometimes being "queer" really isn't enough of a binder to hold things together. The entire time I was reading this I kept thinking about what the call for submissions might have looked like: what are the central questions or tensions that authors within each of these essays are responding to? That became harder and harder to envision. And while that could play to the book's strengths, the essays themselves are not that long and naturally some are stronger than others.