Curio of Wondrous Delights

The incomparable delphi has been ever so gently nudging Ivan E. Coyote at me for...at least a year now (D, I do listen; swear! My brain just has the attention span of a gadfly) Anyway, I've been slowly sifting through recs after I fell in love with Andrea Gibson's spoken word stuff, and today seemed like a good day to look at Coyote.

Their work is not quite as easily accessible as Gibson's--they seem to love the festival circuit, and not produce a lot of albums, though I'm hoping youtube recordings will be fairly prolific. But one of the immediately accessible bits is "Birdsong Part II" and I'm hollowed out, raw at the vulnerability and ferocity; experiences that ring slightly different than mine, but close enough that almost every sentence feels like being struck with a tuning fork.

Certain phrases keep reverberating: suit of sequins and steel. new name: sir never sirred. But especially that last; a name both wryly poking fun at how fucking often we get misgendered, but also lampshading so much pain; alchemizing it into strength and humor and joy.

It leaves me breathless and semi-incoherent in the best possible way:

So, I'm still feverish enough there's no way I can do this justice. With that disclaimer on the table: Chris Hayes is a generally center-left American news host. Not ultra-progressive, but good enough on most issues that his "Why Is This Happening" podcast has been on my radar for a while. Especially since the hour-long podcast interview format gives him a lot more room to shine on one particular subject than does a news broadcast, where he's necessarily skipping from topic to topic. He was, at least in this first episode, an excellent longform interviewer. Asked insightful questions but only to steer the conversation, and listened far more than he spoke. Also was just very aware as a cis dude that he'd never handled these topics personally, freely admitted his own blindspots, and so deferred very well to Daniel without any fuss if he overstepped.

Being on day two of a raging fever that made sleep impossible, last night seemed an excellent time to listen. (in retrospect, I'm surprised I could understand more than one word in ten, but on the scale of fever-induced oddities it def could've been worse.) The first episode that came up was an interview with Daniel M. Lavery. I had no idea who this Daniel person was, but did remember Amal El Mohtar retweeting a Grace Lavery, who had some insanely insightful comments about being on the gender nonconforming spectrum, and muzzily wondered if they were related. They are, as it happens, in that they're married, and Daniel recently took her last name, for reasons both deeply loving and viscerally difficult that get explained in-show.

As it transpired, Daniel had recently released a memoir, called something like: Something that May Shock and Discredit You, which I intend to try and read soonish. And much of the focus of the show was growing up queer in the evangelical church, and fuck it was a funhouse mirror in which I recognized more of my own life than I think I ever have from a queer writer. With the fever, it was enough of both catharsis and gut-punch I was weepy.
Everything from:

• the getting saved to please your parents! because there was this sorta inevitability, even if you couldn't articulate it, that well. this is what's gonna happen and everyone expects it to happen. it's supposed to bring so much joy and relief and I want that, and it'll make them so happy
• the church not wanting to seem outright homophobic so just being deeply deeply sad about queerness and saying that we should be kind to gay people, the way we should be piteously kind to anyone with an affliction
• the slow evolution of queerness. from realizing you were lesbian to realizing it went slightly sideways from that onto the gender-nonconforming spectrum
• the fear that doing anything about those feelings will only result in regret, and the terror because no one has any easy answers for you; you just gotta walk the path (I'm still really struggling with this, and hearing it articulated, seeing Daniel's joy after resolving those fears, gave me such peace. No answers--and answers won't really come till I'm a little further away from the familial nest and pursestrings, but such peace that I can just. take small steps and see how they feel. that there's a way to gently ease into possible transition.
• And the immense difficulty of familial relationships when it's not so much rage but devastation. As though your queerness has blighted their crops. My interactions aren't as hard as Daniel's, but they're still. really fucking hard. And we hear a lot about families who rage at their queer children, but not so much families where it's just. immense disappointment and vast devastation.

The whole interview is so worth a listen. (had a very hard time finding a screen-reader friendly version, but if Google Podcasts doesn't work in your part of the world, it's available on all the usual suspects from spotify to apple.) But there's one bit that felt deeply revolutionary for me: it was a quote by Daniel's friend that he passed along. God made trans people for the same reason he made wheat and grapes, but not bread and wine. So we, too, could be part of his marvelous creative process, just as we are when we change grapes into wine and wheat into bread; so we can prove that we don't just inhabit our bodies but can sculpt them.

My feelings on faith are more agnostic than anything these days, but my God, if I'd had someone to say that to me as a struggling Christian kid, it might've changed the entire course of my life, and made it so much less complicated, and I'm so grateful there're people making a path for queer folk within religion.

I first encountered Sarah Gailey's work in STET which's an absolutely gorgeously constructed little stiletto about the perils of our smart tech.

I then proceeded to gush about the first five chapters of her novel Magic For Liars in a cold-induced delirious rush that's still remarkably coherent despite that, and which I still intend to "meta the shit out of" upon finishing--look, I'm a gadfly and got distracted. It's one of those books I won't have to reread a bit of to remember precisely! where I was.

So you can imagine I've been looking forward to her novella Upright Women Wanted like an impatient kid at a candy store, especially when you read this summary:

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

“That girl’s got more wrong notions than a barn owl’s got mean looks.”

Esther is a stowaway. She’s hidden herself away in the Librarian’s book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her—a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

And then, y'all, the first chapter came out as excerpt. And it opened with:

As Esther breathed in the sweet, musty smell of the horse blankets in the back of the Librarians’ wagon, she chewed on the I-told-you-so feeling that had overwhelmed her ever since her father had told her with the news about Beatriz. She’d known that none of it would come to any good. She’d told Beatriz as much. Tried to tell her, anyway.

But Beatriz never did listen. She always was stubborn, as stubborn as a hot day, the kind that comes too long before a storm breaks, and so she hanged. She swung by her neck while Esther’s father, Victor Augustus, made a speech about the dangers of deviance. Silas Whitmour had stood a few feet behind the podium with his fists clenched in his pockets. His lips had been pressed together tight, his eyes on Esther.

Not on Beatriz. He wouldn’t hardly look at Beatriz at all.

His eyes were on Esther, who had lied to her father and told him she’d make the whole thing right.

The Head Librarian didn’t find Esther Augustus until they were two whole days outside of Valor, Arizona. She swore so loud and colorful that it snapped Esther right out of the Beatriz-dream she’d been having, and by the time Esther was sitting upright, the Head Librarian’s revolver was pointed right at her face.

“Don’t shoot me,” Esther said, her voice raspy. Her mouth tasted foul from two days without only the bottle of water she’d brought, two days without a toothbrush and without food. “Please,” she added, because her mother had raised her right and because manners seemed like a good idea when a gun was involved.

and just kept getting better.