June 28
2018: Happy Pride! Today’s book rec is Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. That’s right, folks, you heard it here first: William Shakespeare was probably queer. I like to think he was bisexual, though of course the whole idea of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual hadn’t been invented back then (I think I’ve explained all that before, but if I haven’t, sorry, my brain is too fried to talk about it right now, hit me up tomorrow). He wrote sonnets to beautiful women of course (“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” etc.), to an unknown “Dark Lady” (who has dark hair and “dun” (brown) skin, so there’s a question as to what ethnicity she belonged to), and to an unnamed “Fair Youth” or “Fair Lord,” who was male, which is good enough for me, but even if Shakespeare wouldn’t choose a queer identity for himself now that the concept exists, I think his work provides enough material to have a discussion about the queerness in them.
See this image from the 2009 Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night starring Audra McDonald, Anne Hathaway, and Raul Esparza. If I had a time machine this is the first place I would go, to see this play, because those three are my faves.
This particular play is extra queer because it’s about a girl (Viola) who dresses as a boy (“Cesario”) and is sent by her male boss to woo a woman, Olivia, who is in mourning for her late husband and refuses any and all advances. The only problem is that Viola is herself in love with her boss, Duke Orsino, who is an overly dramatic whiny pissbaby and I love him dearly. Orsino is attracted to Cesario and isn’t sure why, and he’s weirded out by it, so he tries to double down on wooing Olivia (again, through Cesario, since Olivia won’t actually let him in her house), but Olivia is way more interested in Cesario, who is actually Viola. Viola’s got a fraternal twin, Sebastian, who might as well be identical they look so much alike, who she thinks is dead. Sebastian thinks Viola is dead, but he’s got an extremely devoted friend, Antonio, to keep him company while he grieves. Sebastian and Antonio turn up amid all this chaos with Orsino and Olivia and there are mistaken identity shenanigans, but Olivia gets with him and Viola reveals that she’s actually a woman so Duke Orsino is immediately like, Awesome, let’s get married, you don’t even need to change into a dress, it’s fine. In Shakespeare’s day acting companies were all-male, so that lends itself to even more subtext and gender play. (Stephen Fry was in an all-male production of Twelfth Night a few years back, and it rocked.) The whole thing is extremely funny, and basically Shakespeare is the best. (If this story sounds familiar it’s because it was the basis for the classic teen comedy She’s the Man starring Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum.)
Anyway all this is to say, Who wants to see Shakespeare in the Park with me next month? They’re doing Twelfth Night.
2017: Happy Pride Month! Today’s book rec is None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio. This is a YA book about an 18 year old girl who learns that she is intersex: she’s got a traditionally feminine appearance, but her chromosomes are XY, and she has undeveloped testicles in her pelvis rather than a womb or cervix. I thought that since this was the first (and pretty much only) YA book from a major publisher about being intersex, that it was going to be one of those very sincere but not very well written passion projects on Important Topics, and that reading it would feel like homework, but I was surprised. It’s a genuinely interesting and fun read. Sure, there are some cliched elements, and sometimes the writing is a little clunky (as expected from a debut novelist), but I genuinely cared about Krissy and her identity crisis and her dad and her friends. Shortly after Krissy finds out, her entire school finds out, and there’s a lot of bullying and explanations of what it means to be intersex and how people with androgen insensitivity syndrome, the most common version of being intersex, cope with it, and how they relate this knowledge to their conception of themselves and their gender and crucially, the ways in which other peoples’ expectations of gender play on them. It was especially interesting because I know even less about intersex identities than I do about the transgender experience. I remember an episode of House where the twist was that the beautiful young supermodel patient was intersex, and that House was characteristically disgusting about it, but this story treated the characters a lot more humanely, and I think it’s a good introduction to the subject, and I’d like to learn more.
