So, my story “She Loved Me Too” got shortlisted for The Wattys and I have yet to fully accept that. I am so thrilled and honored and downright dumbfounded because when I entered the contest I didn’t expect to get anything out of it but here we are!
We talked with three self-published queer authors—Blue Delliquanti, M. Haynes, and Fiona Zedde—about their self-pub journeys, the state of contemporary publishing, and their advice for new writers.
Speak earth and bless me with what is richest make sky flow honey out of my hips rigis mountains spread over a valley carved out by the mouth of rain.
And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forests hollow fingers whispering sound honey flowed from the split cup impaled on a lance of tongues on the tips of her breasts on her navel and my breath howling into her entrances through lungs of pain.
Greedy as herring-gulls or a child I swing out over the earth over and over again. - Audre Lorde
Welcome to ¡Hola Papi!, the preeminent advice column by John Paul Brammer, a Twitter-addled gay Mexican with chronic anxiety who thinks he can fix your life. If you’re a queer person facing a dilemma — maybe you’re thinking about dumping your partner (they forgot your birthday), fighting with your roommate (they never pitch in for groceries), or being haunted by a gay ghost in your attic (the screams won’t stop and the cleansing ritual has failed) — we’ve got you covered.
If you need advice, send him a question at [email protected]. Be sure to begin your letter with “Hola Papi!” It’s part of the whole deal.
Hola Papi!
I’m a chronically single bottom. I like casual sex, and while there’s weirdly not a huge gay casual sex scene in my city, I get by just fine meeting men on FetLife. I like being alone and belonging only to myself, and I like to keep my relationships casual. But here’s the thing: A lot of men seem to read “casual” as “one night stand.”
When the sex is exceptionally good, I can’t help but yearn to see a man again and again. Am I desperate for wanting to hook up again after a casual hookup? And if I enjoy casual sex so much, why isn’t a one-time mind-blowing session enough for me? Please help!
Love, Bored Bottom
Hello, Bored Bottom!
I must admit, your question has stuck with me for the past week or so. I think it’s because I consider myself, if not a sex addict, then someone who thinks about sex too much for his own liking. Not that thinking about sex is inherently bad or anything — it’s just that I could be thinking about literally anything else. What would I rather think about? I’m not sure. My brain is too addled by sex.
Anyway, I have spent countless hours looking for sex — labor that absolutely does not square with the limited rewards. Occasionally, the sex is good. Most often, it is forgettable. Sometimes, it is terrible. I’m getting pretty tired of walking up some decrepit staircase in a weird apartment building, knees knocking, wondering if I am going to be murdered or merely disappointed. Sometimes I stop and think: What rational explanation is there for this behavior?
If I had to guess, Bored Bottom, “yearning” would be the culprit in both our dilemmas. It’s the proverbial carrot on the proverbial stick; the engine of wasteful, whimsical activity, like waiting around and hoping (amidst a sea of feedback that cautions us otherwise) that the ideal hookup will finally happen and launch us into an ideal situation with an ideal person. This isn’t restricted to sex and romance, by the way. People experience this in the realms of work and friendship, too. Yearning doesn’t discriminate.
Bored Bottom, do you ever wonder if the universe gives us just enough to keep us hoping for more? I believe it does! Because every once in a while, right when I’m about to give up on my Quixotic quest for the perfect Grindr hookup, one happens. Kind of. More like it halfway happens, which tells me the possibility of it all-the-way-happening exists, and so I continue. But this probably isn’t the universe’s doing. Only our own brains could fool us so utterly and completely.
My birth name, Tanwi Nandini Islam, is laced with meaning and history. Tanwi, in Sanskrit, means the “epitome of femininity,” a youthful intention that my parents drew from a line of poetry; Nandini is a name for the goddess Durga and also means “daughter.” And Islam (which needs no introduction, but given the state of affairs, let’s remember) means “peace.” My grandfather bestowed this last name on his three sons, but not his daughters: a display of piety and being in fashion with other Bangladeshi Muslims of his era. Islam is a name that reveals more than the religion of my family. It is a unique marker of my Bangladeshi-ness — a name that others in the Muslim world don’t carry as a surname.
From the very start of my life, my name announced my gender and religion. Tanwi Nandini Islam, in its femininity and its religiosity, is a name corseted tight with meanings. But you’d never know that from my life growing up in the South, Midwest, and the suburbs of New York. I went from Toni to Tawny in a New York accent within a decade, where none of my close friends, except for Bengali ones, knew how to actually say my name. My name never felt like mine, from the minute when my white first grade teacher at Robert E. Lee Elementary school, a lover of those orange peanut butter sandwich crackers, pointed at me with her dusty neon fingers and drawled, I’m just gonna call you Toni, okay?At age five, I wondered silently if Toni could be a girl’s name. I didn’t protest and accepted her racist misnaming. I didn’t know then that teachers could be wrong.
A few months ago, I found myself on a list of Muslim women writers on #MuslimWomensDay. I experienced several simultaneous, opposite and intense reactions — I am not a practicing Muslim and I love the other writers on this list. Why are assumptions being made as to my religion and gender? Do these markers make my writing more interesting or more vital? Collecting us all into the category “Muslim woman writer” is perhaps something that empowers and brings comfort to plenty of people, but for me, it feels imprecise and inadequate. And I don’t see my questioning as turning my back on the person I am or where I’ve come from: Among the believers, there are the questioners, and the disbelievers, too. We are not a monolith.
I consider the word “woman” an approximation; a deeply limited way to describe the skin I’m in. Contradiction is part of what defines diaspora, a word that means to scatter or to sow like seeds. It’s hard to describe the dissonance between how my body reads as woman but how my mind is free of limitation and categorization. The gender we are assigned at birth can never capture our true complexity. As much as I’ve tried to find words to pinpoint a desire or an expression of myself — femme, queer, bisexual, pansexual — no one word resonates. They are all true and untrue.
Part of my evolving consciousness as a writer means that I accept the tension between my mind and my body. Whereas I’d spent the last 30 years making a home for myself in the name I’d been given, I have come to want — rather, demand — that my writing become my liberation space. Writing is where I can take up room with imagination and intellect. Women and queer, trans, and nonbinary people have been denied the freedom to share our thoughts and discoveries for millennia. Writing is a sacred place to validate our present existence and eons we’ve never known, but somehow remember in our bones.
Tanaïs, the name I have given myself, is a portmanteau of the first two letters of my three names — a name that came to me after appearing on that list as a Muslim woman writer. I wanted to find a meridian between identities that honor where I’ve come from and where I am headed. When my parents named me, they made a choice to honor the Hindu and Muslim traditions that run through our country, like rivers that flow from the mountains in India through the plains of Bangladesh; like the blood shed when we divided South Asia along the narrow lines of faith. Tanaïs is a renaming where patriarchy and lineage and gender and religion are dissolved. This is a liberatory, liminal space that honors my multiple experiences as a queer, femme, Muslim, Hindu, Bengali, American diasporic being, free to imagine worlds on my own terms.
Woolf is considered one of the most important modernist writers of the 20th century and one of the most famous members of the Bloomsbury group.
She and her husband had much more liberal ideas about sexuality than general society did at that time. They were not monogamous, nor were Virginia Woolf’s lovers all men. Many of her novels, including Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando: A Biography have bi characters, with Orlando telling the story of a man who magically becomes a woman at 30. He lives for more than 300 years without ageing and engages in relationships with both genders. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women’s writing and gender and transgender studies.
