#queerbook

📚 QUEERBOOK 2024 is hereee! We made a book by and for LGBTQ+ youth! 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Last year, we asked LGBTQ+ youth: what's your idea of a "queer utopia?"

Not gonna lie - with more than 150 bills introduced in 35 states in 2023 that aimed to restrict student access to inclusive and diverse books and other library materials, the theme felt pretty radical.

And you DELIVERED. With the help of our Youth Voices (amazing queer youth activists from across the country), we compiled your amazing submissions of poetry, short essays and letters, visual art, photography, and more into Queerbook 2024. Like a yearbook, it captures what queer youth are feeling, going through, and hoping for - right here, right now across the U.S.

It's also no accident that it's the perfect small-ish size to stash in your locker or backpack so you can crack it open any time you're looking for some queer connection. :3

Read some more about the book and grab your own limited-run copy of Queerbook 2024 now here.

A Marvellous Light by @fahye Freya Marske

Café, Rain, and Umbrella - May Flash Fiction Contest: 280-Word Romance!

It was fun to write this one. I love OLxOL Yuri and always wanted to write this kind of story, but with only 280 words, it was challenging. If I have time, I will try to record an audio, but I cannot promise it.

Café, Rain and Umbrella

We met by chance when you joined our company. You were so different, and the desk that separated us felt like a shoreless sea. Why did you never care about your appearance, fashion, and chitchat during the lunch break? Why did you never tried to fit in?

You made me angry when you sat alone, but deep inside, I admired your courage. I wished that just for once I could stop caring too, but I am a coward. I was so afraid of being alone. Even if all those people just fill the emptiness around me, I cannot imagine my world without them. It is a fair deal. We are "friends." With them, my phone and TV, I managed to push my loneliness away. And I knew they do the same… but you were different… and I hated it.

I was busy that day, too busy for lunch. I let my "friends" go without me. I just had too much to do… You came to my desk with a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and a smile. For a long time, I wondered why you did this. I never believed your "you looked hungry." Why then? You never cared about those unspoken contracts that bound people to be nice. You weren't like this… then why?

It was a rainy day. I took my courage and shared my umbrella with you. Now your daughter calls me "mom."

Published on https://neobook.org/book/FmLeHz7V/

Frantically scrambling to get out ahead of the crowd on this one I know it may feel very tempting to be a smarmy asshole and take yet another opportunity to shit on tumblr for being a garbage website while purporting itself as “the queerest place on the internet” but this one’s not actually them!! It’s an ad from the It Gets Better Project, and actual nonprofit focused on helping LGBTQ people!!!