@postirony​

A great place to start is hir 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come. It’s a shitty PDF but it’s short.

What I recommend reading most of all is Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. While SBB is more popular, this book is basically hir magnum opus which ze wrote throughout hir life, combining autobiography, historical analysis, and theory. Seriously read this book.

Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba is a collection of hir articles on gay and trans rights in Cuba before and after the revolution and Lavender & Red is a much larger collection of hir articles—including those in the first book—about gay and trans people throughout the 20th century. There’s also Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, which is a collection of hir speeches but sadly I can’t find a PDF of this one.

The main reason I’m upset hir other works aren’t as well known, aside from them being very good books that more people should read, is because I see a lot of terfs try to claim SBB. To the point where I’ve even seen some anti-terf people, mainly non-lesbians, say that the book is transphobic cause the only thing they know about it is that terfs like it.

Which, to begin with, you have to be real stupid to miss the multiple trans women in SBB, Ruth only being the most obvious, and the parts where Jess is literally persecuted by 70s era radical feminists. Hell, the free PDF version on hir website also includes a piece on the campaign to free CeCe McDonald. But also, as you can probably tell by hir pronouns and just the titles of hir other books, it’s flatly ridiculous for terfs to claim either SBB or Leslie.

But the landscape of children’s TV was very different six years ago. Like, that moment when they looked into each other’s eyes in a beam of golden light was revolutionary. I was living in a house with other queer people and we ALL screamed and cried, just like this.

Not until 2016. Before that, the marriage was only recognized in a few states.

My canon queer couple?

WAS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH AS COUSINS.

Cloverway gave one of them an offscreen boyfriend and, any time an uncuttable kissy scene came up, they started calling each other “cuz.” Another queer couple from the same show suffered the fate of being heterocized by one of them literally being genderswapped.

(Guess who became the girl. Go on, guess. At least it’s not as bad as France, where they became … brothers.)

That was my mainstream queer rep.

Oh. Until this came out.

… . yeah.

I’m not even in Avatar fandom and when those first gifs popped up on my dash, I started crying. I was 24 years old and crying over a show I had never watched because a pair of women held hands.

You can’t possibly understand what it was like before that.

You don’t want to understand what it was like before that.

I don’t want you to understand what it was like before that.

But there’s a reason we reacted like this.

Lil Nas X is letting y'all know that queerness is not a “white people thing.” 💁🏾‍♀️🌈

Queerness is ancestral || queer folks existed in pre-colonial spaces, struggled and resisted under colonialism, and are kicking down barriers in the 21st century.

Here are some must reads by scholars, poets, and activists who are sharing the histories, lived experiences, and ancestral-liberation work of those who came before and those blooming and yet to come~

Find their works listed below on my Neighborhood Historian bookshop.

Top Picks

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Audre Lorde (1984)

Freedom To Love For ALL: Homosexuality is not Un-African - Yemisi Ilesanmi (2013)

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity -  C Riley Snorton (2017)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong (2019)

Black Girl, Call Home - Jasmine Mans (2021)

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice - Shon Faye (Pre-Order)

Queer History, Activism, and Liberation in the United States (by time period)

Female Husbands: A Trans History - Jen Manion (2020)

Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco - Clare Sears (2014)

We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History - R. Richard Wagner (2019)        

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940 - Julio Capó (2017)

Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage - Lauren Jae Gutterman (2019) 

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics - Timothy Stewart-Winter (2017)        

The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America - Erin Cervini (2021)

We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation - Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown (2019)

Queer Twin Cities - collected by Twin Cities Glbt Oral History Project (2010)

Queerness Across Borders and Generations

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir - Samra Habib (2019)

Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation - (2020)

Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims - Mitra Rastegar (Pre-Order)

Lived Experiences and Memories in Marginalized Spaces

Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming - Carly Thomsen (2021)

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City - Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (Pre-order)

Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel - Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual - Merle Miller (1971)

Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender - Mia McKenzie (2014)

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers - Anne Balay (2016)

Rust Belt Burlesque: The Softer Side of a Heavy Metal Town - Erin O'Brien and Bob Perkoski (2019)

Study Resources

We Will Always Be Here: A Guide to Exploring and Understanding the History of LGBTQ+ Activism in Wisconsin - Jenny Kalvaitis and Kristen Whitson (2021)

New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent - edited by Margaret Busby (2019)