Tumblr Porn Offers an Inside Look at Early Internet Culture
If you ever wanted to know more about what it was like during Tumblr’s heyday — the good and the bad — Tumblr Porn is an excellent little primer from a very-invested insider.
Sophie Santos’ Memoir Takes Us On Her Queer Path To The Lesbian Agenda
No one’s life is split into two simple chapters. Santos lets all her former eras live right next to each other in the mirror.
Arisa White’s “Who’s Your Daddy” Explores the Quest for Family and Healing in a Queer, African-Diasporic Context
Who’s Your Daddy travels from the United States to Guyana to explore fatherhood and the role of masculinity, care, and caregiving in our lives. While the search for and eventual dinner with the father is a primary narrative of Who’s Your Daddy, the love story between the narrator and Mondayway, the narrator’s beloved, will delight Autostraddle readers as well.
Casey McQuiston’s “One Last Stop” Is an Unmissable Queer Rom-Com Full of Hope, Humor, and Heart
In Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop, Jane and August fall in love in the all-consuming, omniscient, dramatic, lifelong lusty way only queers and fan fiction characters do.
Heather Corinna Makes Menopause Accessible, Hilarious, and Queer AF in “What Fresh Hell Is This?”
Come for the Victorian menopause psychoanalysis mad lib; stay for the ode to cooling pillows. Heather Corinna has gifted us the queer and trans-inclusive book about menopause you didn’t know you desperately need to read, with delightful illustrations by Archie Bongiovanni!
‘We Are the Baby-Sitters Club’ Succeeds in Both Praising and Critiquing the Books of Our Childhoods
No topic is off limits in this guide about the young adult book series that shaped the way so many of us interacted with our worlds as children, and the way some of us still interact with our worlds today.
“The 2000s Made Me Gay” Is a Pop Culture Filled Ode to the Queer Millennial Experience
“These essays offer layers of wise hindsight, exploring how certain 2000’s pop culture tropes contributed to how closeted so many gay millennials were — and how they influenced what kind of gays we would eventually grow up to be.”
“The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend is My Girlfriend” Is a Goddamn Delight
“The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend is My Girlfriend: Advice on Queer Dating, Love, and Friendship” is helpful, funny, aesthetically pleasing, and very very queer. In short? This book is a goddamn delight!
“We Are Watching Eliza Bright” Is a Smart, Feminist Thriller – and Also a Very Cool F*cking Book
“We Are Watching Eliza Bright” is a direct response to GamerGate… and a searing indictment of the political nightmare it foreshadowed.
Malice’s Lesbian Love Story (and Bitter Realities) Are Worthy Additions to Dark Fantasy Re-Tellings
The dark fairytale re-telling has become an established fantasy sub-genre in its own right, and Malice’s sweet lesbian love story and bitter realities are a more-than-worthy addition.
Power Is Searingly Political and Personal In Melissa Febos’ “Girlhood”
Secrets, silence, internalized misogyny, power, desire, and the catastrophic — yet very common — ways in which girls are harmed as they grow into women are all themes that Febos examines in “Girlhood,” an essay collection that blends memoir, journalism, and cultural critique.
How New Anthology “We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival” Honors Sex Workers’ Truths
We Too maps out the underground ecosystems of sex worker survival and self-determination that are literally the building blocks of a new world order.
Forsyth Harmon’s “Justine” Is a Haunting Book About Intense Teenage Friendship
This tiny book is a quiet horror story in which beauty is a terror and friendship is an undoing of the self. The final line has haunted me long past reading it.
The Audacity of Melissa Broder’s MILK FED
Broder’s coming-of age-tale MILK FED is at turns funny, poignant, and squirm-in-your-seat sexy.
For Us and for You: We Want It All Is an Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics and Archive of Trans Literary Movements
In We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel aim to amplify a politics of trans people against capitalism and empire.
Surprise Porn and Hospital Parties: The Queer and Trans Pleasure in Marty Fink’s “Forget Burial”
Marty Fink shows how caregiving is activism, disability is sexy and dusty archives are tantalizing in Forget Burial, an essential, highly pleasurable, read.
What If “When Harry Met Sally” Was a Feminist Lesbian Love Story? Emily Hashimoto Has the Answer with “A World Between”
“The trajectory with their partner or ex-partner and or friend or whoever is not linear; it’s, for some women, this big zig zagging: friends for five years, then date for ten years and then maybe be enemies for two years, and then you’re friends again… I felt like we don’t always see that in love stories.”
“Everybody (Else) Is Perfect,” Gabrielle Korn’s Debut Essay Collection, Examines the Media World She Helped Create
“Everybody (Else) Is Perfect” is a bold and complicated meditation on media, feminism, and the internet, written from the perspective of a thoughtful and deeply honest insider. It is also very, very gay.
“Detransition, Baby” Is a Book For Trans Women — The Rest of You Are Lucky to Read It
“The truth is I don’t know how to review Detransition, Baby. Torrey was too successful in what she set out to accomplish. If trans women have been and remain her primary audience then I, a trans woman, don’t know what to say from a place of supposed objectivity. The fact that this is not a PDF free on her website but a hardcover book garnering an immense amount of buzz fills me with a joy I can explain and a terror I cannot.”
Allison Moon’s “Getting It” Is the Casual Sex Guide You Didn’t Know You Needed
Allison Moon’s Getting It: A Guide to Hot, Healthy Hookups and Shame-Free Sex is about more than scissoring strangers — it’s about cultivating self-awareness and sexual self-esteem. Hookup culture might look different right now, but communication and boundaries are perhaps more important than ever before. The skills outlined in Getting It will help you navigate virtual slutdom in this challenging new era of distance. And if you want to gracefully transition into a post-pandemic world of IRL sexcapades, then you better start studying up now.