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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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
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Dear Martin by Nic Stone (Dear Martin, #1)

Dear Martin is really fucking good. Justyce is writing letters to MLK Jr. as a way of processing what's happening around and to him... lots of racism and also normal teen stuff. Mixing letters, transcripts, and normal narration to tell a story of one Black teen's life.

He's a teenage boy (17) trying to figure out dating, worried about going to college, the stuff you're supposed to have to figure out. His friendships feels messy and genuine, his interactions with Manny and SJ have different vibes and it helps show what he likes about hanging out with them. The adults in his life (Doc, Justyn's mom, Manny's parents, SJ's parents) have very different kinds of advice to give and they help him to process what's happening in his life, even if he doesn't always agree with what they say about it.

It's also a book about racism, racial profiling, systemic racism, and police violence against Black people, because that's just as much a part of his life as his friendships and crushes.

The story is told through a mix of third-person narration focused on Justyce, his letters to Martin Luther King Jr., and various transcripts and letters not written by Justyce. The mix of narrative devices allows for "show not tell" when necessary, and to get Justyce's voice directly through the letters when he's had time to reflect on whatever just happened. It also means that a variety of levels of conversation on the same basic topics happen throughout the text. 

It feels a bit like, narratively, Melo was in the story just to mess with Justyce (starting with the incident with Castillo, being repeatedly mentioned as on-again/off-again but not actually being in the story much). I wish she'd existed as more than someone to mess up his other relationships, there's a lot more of him explaining why he likes her than us actually seeing them together. But hey, sometimes it's like that, and ultimately this isn't a book about him and Melo.

Make time to read this one, I'll definitely be reading the sequel.

The book is inspired by real incidents but the specific details are fictional. 

CWs for racism, police violence, murder, assault, gaslighting, major character death.


A young Black man stands in profile, shaded in red and the headlights of a police car from the shoulders down
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