By Samuel B.
I often feel as if I have lived multiple lives, each sharply demarcated from the last; sometimes by a change in location, a change in name, a change in body. I imagine that I am not alone in this way of carving up and segmenting my life, but I also imagine that being transgender has exaggerated some of the effects of this.
I’d like to share some books that were meaningful to my queer self in each of these different lives:
Early Childhood
Something Queer at the Library by Elizabeth Levy
So maybe this is the other type of queer, but Elizabeth Levy’s “Something Queer at the…” series was the first set of books that made me yearn for trips to the library, so I’ve got share it here. I am still beyond thrilled that I get to run an LGBTQ+ events series at the Southside Library called Something Queer at the Library.
Later Childhood
Encyclopedia Brown: boy detective series by Donald J Sobol
I had the biggest crush on Encyclopedia Brown in elementary school, but I think I mostly just wanted to be the great boy detective – emphasis on boy.
High School
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
I’m not entirely sure I fully realized what a queer book The Color Purple was when I read it in high school. I am entirely sure I didn’t fully realize what a queer person I was when I read it in high school. But years later, I still remember how much its queerness resonated at the time.
Early College
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
This was my favorite queer book that I read as I was struggling to come out. Oscar Wilde strove to keep this book’s queerness plausibly deniable and failed – that was pretty much how my life went too.
Late College
The Transvestites by Magnus Hirschfeld
The first time I really saw myself in queer nonfiction was Magnus Hirschfeld’s description of “secondary homosexuals,” people who today would be known as gay trans men and lesbian trans women. The Transvestites was originally published in German in 1910, and coined the word “transvestite,” whose original meaning is closer to today’s term “transgender.”
Grad School
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
I didn’t read this until after grad school, but the haunting, academic but extremely poetic descriptions of racism on the queer dating scene brought me back to my time doing queer studies and trying to date in small-town Indiana.
Fieldwork
Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia edited by Emily Channell-Justice
I did my fieldwork for my doctorate in cultural anthropology in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, studying LGBT issues. This book didn’t exist then, but I got to know most of its authors in the few years after I returned from Central Asia, and I even get a shout out in the acknowledgements!
Return to my hometown
Tell Me How to Be: a novel by Neel Patel
While my experiences are quite different than the character in this book, this story of a queer Asian man returning to his hometown as an out adult struck a chord while I did the same.
Santa Fe
She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
I’ve been reading the most that I have since childhood in the year that I’ve been living in Santa Fe but wouldn’t say I’ve quite found the right book to sum it up yet, so instead I’ll just recommend one of the best (of many) queer books I’ve read since I moved here!
Booked Solid in Santa Fe 