Basking in love and books. ☀️❤️📚️

Plus, updates to A Transmasc Library and some beach read recs.

Jul 21, 2024

The vibe this summer is heavy and thick. The oppressive humidity in NYC dialed back this week, but the palpable angst in the air continues to suffocate. Hitting the pause button this weekend to bask in the sunshine that love and books provide.

A year ago., I was decompressing from a startup rollercoaster, assembling a consulting business, and developing my writing practice. I drove to the Berkshires for a quiet week with friends and my thoughts. Often, hindsight reveals where the inflection point occurred; this was one of those extraordinary moments when I saw the shift emerging over the horizon. I had encountered someone so spectacular. She set my body and heart racing. I tried to document the fleeting feeling:

I’m not running away from anything anymore; this time I’m running towards something new. And trying to go at a pace that sustains.
I just arrived up in the woods for a few days with just trees, sentences, and friends.
More words (and miles) to come…

My host friends Liz and Dev are truly magical humans, a couple of romantic writers. Their love story on a cargo ship is as noteworthy as their book collection. These are precisely the people you need when you are high on the rare air of falling in love. I showed up at their doorstep vibrating and sheepishly admitted there was a person—on the other side of the country!—who turned my heart and head upside down. More pragmatic friends would have rolled their eyes and questioned my assertion. Liz started investigating the feasibility of flying to San Francisco from Hartford, “tomorrow.”

I did not get on a plane. I did obsess over every word of 100+ texts. When I finally convinced myself that I wasn’t dreaming, I audaciously proposed (to someone I had not yet met in real life) that she pull up a chair in this magical library-in-the-woods and write by my side.

Now, here I am, here we are, 52 weeks and thousands of miles later. Happy. In that very same library. Writing into our futures…

One year later, Kyle and Wendy, encircled by words and trees. Connecticut. 2024

Feeling beyond lucky to have found a love who also loves to surround herself with books (maybe even more than me?!)

After we drove back from a week in the woodsy library, I was inspired to refresh my very urban micro equivalent. I kicked off this year with an expansion of my studio shelving and the creation of A Transmasc Library. Six months and more than three dozen new books later, some updates to report:

First, the structural. I replaced sagging standard-issue Elfa white shelves with long pine planks. What was just overflow is now organized into sections: feminist theory, memoir, queer history/culture, political science/American history, writing craft, and fiction. One purple yoga block. And a photo of my college roommate smoking on our roof.

Next, the acquisitions.

Most of the books I’ve read this year are written by or about transmasc people. (With a few notable exceptions, like Hua Hsu’s heartbreakingly phenomenal memoir Stay True.)

In the past six months, A Transmasc Library has more than doubled to 63 titles. Memoir remains the largest category, but there are some notable additions to fiction and critical theory. Thank you Ellis Martin, Esther Bley, Brenna Munro, Max Fenton, Kate Greene, Naomi, Jennifer for your many suggestions. The collection now extends across two shelves with room to keep growing.

Here are three recent books I can’t stop thinking about—all make for great beach/pool/cocktail-by-the-AC summer reading.

Idlewild (James Frankie Thomas)

Unbeknownst to each other, two transmasc authors both gushed to me that Idlewild was their favorite book of 2023. The novel is as much a story of coming-into-queerness as it is an elegy for the loss of an intimate friendship. (While thematically akin to Stay True, different in every other way.)

The story is riveting and hearbreaking, but what makes the book sing is how James plays with voice throughout. Fay and Nell, former high school besties, recount their relationship from meet-cute onward, from their own points of view. This split narrative is sometimes interupted by a shared voice in flashback, where you get to experience their connection directly. I loved every page and underlined choice sentences throughout. Especially how James expertly narrarates the euphoria of trans awakening.

But then I felt a breeze on my neck and saw a butch girl in the mirror and my head felt light enough to float away like a balloon set free.

What I wanted was not to watch a boy kissing a boy, but to be a boy kissing a boy.

Confessions of the Fox (Jordy Rosenberg)

This book! I don’t know where to begin. The premise is so wild, the scenes are both jaw-dropping and titillating. Thank you Esther Bley for encouraging me to stay out of my usual non-fiction rut and read this head-spinning novel set in eighteenth-century England. The story is captivating, political, and smutty. Read if you prefer to have your critiques of capitalism interspersed with steamy romance. Or vice versa.

Both stories—the primary one that unfolds in London and the present day happening in the footnotes—feature fully embodied transmasc protagonists. Jordy deftly, in two different sets of vocabularies, allows them to beautifully self-identify.

You may know this, but it is possible to hold back a single set of tears for years straight. Many a filmic crescendo concerning masculinity confirms this fact. Quiet shot of car interior. Aging guy. Beard scruff. Hands on wheel. Black night. Cue music.
Predictably that night—although I am a guy by design, not birth—as I drove away from campus and toward [undisclosed location], I was fucking crying.

And when he heard his name in her mouth something happened.
The apparation-Jack zoomed down from his watching-spot on the ceiling and sank firmly—and with a heretofore unknown warm Pleasure—into his body.

I’ll be first in line when Jordy’s forthcoming hybrid memoir, Good Material, publishes: “A yenta on her deathbed rewrites Karl Marx’s magnum opus, Capital. Liberties are taken.”

The Appendix: Transmasculine Joy in a Transphobic Culture (Liam Konemann)

Speaking of London… I found The Appendix during a quick stop at Gays the Word while there on a business trip. It was wonderful to drop into a queer bookstore full of shoppers on a random Wednesday at 5p. Even more incredibly, they had an entire bookshelf of trans books. I flew home with 15 lbs of books in my suitcase.

Liam’s book is a quick, powerful read and part of the UK publisher 404 Ink’s Inkling series. The toxic media narratives around trans folks boiled over there years before they reached fever pitch here in the US. Liam, a journalist, began earnestly recording the neverending transphobic headlines, beliving in his power to write a story that might expose the evils of the incessant rhetoric. Along the way, Liam reckons with the direct impact on his body and soul.

I began to understand two things that other trans writers already know; one, that paying close, deliberate attention to transphobia is a terrible idea that will make you sick and, two, that showing people where they make you bleed would not stop them from cutting you again.

At the time when I first read, I was grappling with my own physical response to facing a board of elected officials who denied my existence. I wish this feeling wasn’t so intercontinental.

Read if want a window into being trans in the UK—read if you want a little affirmation to keep going.

I reject the oft-spouted idea from anti-trans voices that transmasculine bodies are mutilated. I dreamt of this body, and I celebrate it, even if it hasn’t turned out exactly to my specifications. Trans bodies are often portrayed as sites of horror, trauma and dysphoria, or as exampels of medical or scientific overreach. I prefer to think of trans bodies as sources of love and desire. We have partners, we date, we are intimate. I still feel gender euphoria when I place my palm flat in the centre of my chest, or when I catch the angle of my jaw in the mirror. There remains a feminitity to my physicality that I wouldn’t trade, and I have been called both slinky and sprite-like by other men. This body feels etheral. I had to pass through another realm to get it.

A Transmasc Library (as of July 13, 2024)

All titles available on Bookshop are linked below and here. Any purchase from these links support local bookstores and give a tiny percentage back towards acquiring more books for this collection. Anything not available on Bookshop is linked to the most reliable source. Some of the older titles are long out of print and hard to locate.

This list represents what I have in my collection, not every book known or recommended. I keep a running list of new titles to add and, when possible, add to a Bookshop wishlist.

Have a book (or writer) I should add to the collection?
Please suggest in the comments.

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