Gersande La Flèche wants to read On Being Different by Merle Miller

On Being Different by Merle Miller
Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the …
Why can't I read all these books!? 🍋🟩
🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc.
📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction et de fiction, de poésie, des classiques, du spéculatif, du réalisme magique, etc.
💬 they/them ; iel/lo 💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande
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75% complete! Gersande La Flèche has read 9 of 12 books.
Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the …
Qu'est-ce qu'être gouine ? Bien plus qu'une orientation sexuelle, l'homosexualité féminine se conjugue au pluriel : ce sont des identités, …
"If I have any secret stash of poems, anywhere, it might be about love, not anger," Mary Oliver once said …
Un recueil commencé hier soir dans lequel j'ai plongé instantanément. Ce n'est pas seulement 3 novellas mises bout à bout, mais un vrai projet éditorial porté par Xavier Vernet, lequel accompagne la lecture, avec une préface et des interludes retraçant le projet. L'ouvrage s'ouvre ainsi sur une longue préface intime et personnelle, où il explique comment est né le recueil : il y est question de mémoire, de deuil, de rapport à la fiction, autour d'un souvenir de lieu, fugace et partiel, surgi de son enfance, et face auquel il a sollicité des auteurices invité·es à l'intégrer dans une novella.
If we needed more evidence that we weren't in Kansas anymore, Ken Waxman's September 1976 cover story, "The Rise of Gay Capitalism," in glossy Toronto Life identified "gay purchasing power" as "real power," and described a new class of entrepreneurs that "serviced" the "booming gay market." [...] This time, Michael Lynch penned the review. "Alas, I don't recognise my gayness in the fact that we 'spend more money than straights on grooming, entertainment, clothes, drink, and travel.' If it's 'self-righteous' and 'left-wing' to question this characterization of gayness... then shucks mom I guess I'm self-righteous and left-wing. [...] And I wish — is this left-wing? — that Waxman had made a fourth Discovery: women. In this article, as in the 'gay marketplace,' women only exist as 'girls.' Telling evidence isn't it, that when gayness is defined as no more than consumerism, it aids and abets the macho exploitation of women."
No one ever talks about "lesbian purchasing power" it's a real mystery... (Sarcasm.)
I need "Shucks mom, I guess I'm self-righteous and left-wing" on a t-shirt.
In July 1976, Montreal hosted the summer Olympics. The games were a boondoggle, raking in money for contractors and leaving the city with a billion-dollar debt that would not be paid off for thirty years. [...] But for an increasingly visible gay community, the issue was repression. Under the guise of Olympic security, Montreal police launched a crackdown on gay establishments. It began with a raid of Montreal's Aquarius sauna and the arrest of thirty-five men as "found-ins" in a bawdy house, February 1975. In October, six gay bars were raided, including the city's most popular women's bar. [The police violence escalates and escalates for a paragraph...] In May, a local employee of the Olympic organizing committee leaked a directive confirming that "non-conforming elements" were to be "driven underground" in the Quebec City-Toronto corridor for the duration of the games. Guy Toupin, the Montreal police officer co-ordinating Olympic security, claimed the raids were only "a part of our normal police work." But he went on, "if such action helps us in turning up potential terrorists, so much the better."
— Queer Progress by Tim McCaskell (13%)
The more I find out about the Montréal Olympics the more I'm disgusted. Also, wasn't it over thirty years for the debt? We (people in this city) were still talking about it when I was in my late teens...
Women in the workforce earned approximately 60 per cent of what men earned. Lesbians, independent of men, tended to be poorer. The commercial scene's orientation to men reflected this difference in disposable income.
— Queer Progress by Tim McCaskell (5%)
This was still the case in Montréal up into the 2010s (maybe also today?). Lesbian spaces tended to get shut down or gentrified out quickly, whereas spaces for gay men were more likely to endure.
As we moved from the peripheries to the mainstream, there was a remarkable transformation in dominant LGBT politics, from one aimed at social transformation to one that celebrated social inclusion. Toronto's Pride parade now featured many of our traditional antagonists: the Conservative party, churches, some of the biggest corporations and banks, the police, and the military.
— Queer Progress by Tim McCaskell (3%)
Pride was a riot, is now a corporate/state exercise in pink-washing.
En d'autres termes, les cissexuel·les conçoivent la légitimité de leur genre comme un droit de naissance. Il s'agit bien souvent de malhonnêteté intellectuelle quand dans notre société beaucoup de cissexuel·les (si ce n'est la majorité) tendent à considérer avec mépris les sociétés et cultures qui reposent sur des systèmes de classes ou de castes – alors que leur métier, leur statut social, leur situation économique, leur pouvoir politique, etc., sont prédéterminés en fonction d'un accident de naissance. Si, en Occident, la plupart des cissexuel·les critiquent le privilège de naissance comme un moyen de déterminer d'autres formes de classes sociales, ils et elles y adhèrent hypocritement dès qu'il s'agit de genre.
— Manifeste d'une femme trans et autres textes by Julia Serano
In June 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York responded to a police raid with three days of rioting. The gay liberation movement sparked by Stonewall emerged in the 1970s. It was based on the liberal notion that sexuality should be an individual expression rather than a social obligation. But the movement also drew from the social solidarity promoted by socialism, Keynesianism, feminism, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonial struggles to produce the notion of "community." This allowed it to project political power to combat the moralizing discourses of law, religion, and psychiatry.
— Queer Progress by Tim McCaskell (3%)
This book starts off with so many bangers I have to physically restrain myself from typing in the whole book into quotes on here.
J'ai relu le premier tome d'un trait, qui est un bon exemple de ennemies to lovers-I-mean-still-ennemies-jk. Ça fait des années depuis que j'ai lu cette série pour la première fois, il y a des passages du premier tome qui sont restés gravés dans ma mémoire, qui est bon signe. J'espère que le deuxième tome sera similaire.