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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou...

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This Is How You Lose the Time War is dizzying in the best ways, like discovering a secret passage, a new flavor of fruit, realizing the color of your best friend's eyes. It's seeking and hungry, content to be perfectly itself: strange and beautiful.

I read it, every passage made sense but when I reached the end I sat back and find myself unable to sum up the whole in a way that does it justice. It's a time travel story where the mechanics are fascinating but incidental, hinted but never expounded. It's a love story about enemies becoming friends, inseparable while also impossibly distant. Their address is clinical and tender all at once.

Reading this book was like the first time I tried persimmons, at a party last autumn. They taste like if a carrot were a fruit, like I ought to have known the flavor but had definitely never tasted it before. This book snaps and fizzles in my mind, every syllable feels important but ultimately is meaningful for its place in the larger whole rather than its component parts.

CW for war, violence, gore.

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