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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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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Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other. And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father--despite his hard-won citizenship--Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

TITLE: Last Night at the Telegraph Club
AUTHOR: Malinda Lo
PUBLISHER: Dutton Books for Young Readers
YEAR: 2021
LENGTH: 416 pages
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Historical 
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Partial Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Main Character(s).

DNF 73 pages in (17%).

I've previously loved some of this author's other books but just didn't get pulled into this one. It starts out with a lot of the tension centering around interpersonal dynamics of Lily's friend group, and I got as far as the beginning of the deportation plotline, but it's about 50/50 whether I'll like a non-thriller YA book with no magic, and this falls in the "no" pile for me. If you like sapphic historical YA about older teens finding love, give this a try.

CW for sexual content (brief), misogyny.

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A 1950's Chinatown street lit with neon lights. Two figures embrace at the edge of a streetlight's glow.


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