You couldn’t wait, right? We left you wondering more about our interaction with LGBTQ+ literature, and you like listening to us in the Ivory Tower Boiler Room so much that you couldn’t wait to come back and listen to the rest of what we had to say about queer literature, Pride, allyship, coming out and queer mentors. Well here’s part II of our Pride Month Writers’ Round Table where we keep trying not to talk over each other while we share about some of our personal stories.
If you haven’t already listened to it, you can also find part I online. In Part I you’ll hear us talk pronouns, identity, positionality, and what Pride means to us.
After we recorded this episode, as we were preparing to release it, Andrew and Erika found themselves feeling deeply weighed down by some of the emotional labor. After some back and forth chatter on the phone, they recorded a brief postscript of sorts, which we’ll bring you tomorrow, along with some resources about allyship. Meanwhile, here are some links Andrew has shared for you to explore relating to the content we bring you in Part II-Erika will bring you some links with our post-script:
Disclosure-a documentary exploring tropes, stereotypes, media images, and what else shapes the narrative about transgender people. We are asked to confront our unexamined assumptions about what we know about transgender people as we hear from people like Chaz Bono, Laverne Cox, Lilly Wachowski and others.
Paris is Burning-A 1990 documentary about the 1980s ball culture in New York City, and the queer BIPOC communities of color involved in it. There is some controversy over the making of Paris is Burning, and so we also suggest reading this article as well.
The City and the Pillar-the 1948 Gore Vidal novel about a young man coming of age and discovering his sexuality, notable for being one of the first novels to portray gay men in a more masculine way and actually portraying the main character in a sympathetic way.
Call Me by Your Name-A love story set in 1980s Italy between a young American-Italian Jewish boy (Elio) and a visiting American graduate student (Oliver.)
Two films about Marsha P Johnson, the iconic transgender artist and activitist who is said to have thrown the first brick at the Stonewall Riots (“the first Pride was a riot,”) to check out: “Happy Birthday Marsha” about her life before the riots, and “The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson” about her suspicious death in 1992.
We’re going to share a bunch of allyship and support related links with the episode end note, but for now we hope you will check out PFLAG and the Centers for Disease Control’s list of LGBTQ+ Youth Resources.