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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

TITLE: Black Leopard, Red Wolf
AUTHOR: Marlon James
PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books
YEAR: 2019
LENGTH: 640 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: N/A

DNF page 25 (4% in).

I’m uncomfortable with the sheer number of descriptions of things that somehow involve people’s bodies in a sexual manner even when nothing sexual is even happening. It felt like everything was couched in terms of a male/female binary. The thing that made me stop was one character’s casual description of circumcision and female genital mutilation as equivalent and positive things to do to children’s bodies. It’s possible that the overall stance of the book doesn’t condone this (authors are not their characters, after all), but I’m too distressed to read more and find out.

CW for misogyny, drug abuse (not depicted), confinement, blood, domestic violence, violence, sexual content, child abuse (not depicted), child death (backstory), death.

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The stylized faces of a black leopard and red wolf superimposed over each other. A green fern-like vine wraps around their features.


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