"Flaunt and Flail": Queer Art in the Age of Techno-Fascism
I have a novel coming out in August! Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a tender, hopeful story about a trans woman named Jamie and her lesbian mom, Serena. It’s been years since Serena’s wife died and some other stuff went wrong, and Serena has been hiding from the world ever since. But Jamie is a witch as well as a PhD student, so she decides the way to bring her mother back to the world is by teaching her witchcraft. And meanwhile, we see how Serena fought for LGBTQIA+ rights in the 1990s and 2000s and struggled with parenting a trans kid. Plus there’s a Dark Academia subplot involving a mysterious novel from 1749!
You can pre-order Lessons in Magic and Disaster in all the places, or get a signed/personalized copy from Green Apple Books. If you send me a receipt, I’ll send you a PDF with a ton of bonus material for my novel All the Birds in the Sky — including a big chunk of the sequel. And if you’re in L.A. this Thursday, come hear me read from Lessons at North Figueroa Bookstore along with some amazing queer writers!
Okay, on with the newsletter…
Some Thoughts About Making Queer Art Right Now
How can queer art help us to survive, and maybe even fight back, during this bloody awful moment in history?
I've been asking myself some version of this question non-stop for ages, but I still don't have any clear answers. What I do have is a bone-deep sense that we need to be twice as wild, twice as flagrantly ourselves — and at least three times as experimental, honest, and weird as before. We cannot let the shit-weasels shut us down or terrorize us into bland respectability. We need to see each other standing up in all our finery, making no sense and holding each other up. And we need to be seen, too.
We need to freak some people out.
One thing that is super obvious to me in this moment is that respectability is a slaughterhouse. This has been true for a long time, but it's true now than ever. Respectability inevitably leads to conceding that some LGBTQIA+ people are a bridge too far, and don't deserve human rights. That we may have to sacrifice some for the good of the rest. That well-behaved, “nice,” “mainstream” queers deserve more rights than the rest of us.
Like I said before, I am proud to be a bad trans person.
Publishing timelines being what they are, it's pure luck that this summer, I happen to be publishing the gayest book I’ve ever written. (See above!) It’s less of an accident that the book I just finished recently, which I hope will be out in 2026, is even gayer and more excessive than that.
And I'm craving more brazen art and writing by other trans and queer people. The same way that going to queer events and being surrounded by my community fills me with hope and strength for the fight, consuming the work of uncompromising queers reminds me that I'm not alone and my dreams don't have to be compressed to fit the space that craven pundits and politicians are willing to allow.
Recently, I was emailing with the wonderful Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of the upcoming novel Terry Dactyl. (Mattilda edited an anthology back in the day called That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation, which I was honored to have an essay in.) I asked Mattilda about trans art and resistance, and she replied:
I think it’s about refusal — refusal of conformity, refusal of complicity, of complacency, of normalcy, of assimilation or blending in or just going along. It’s about taking this horrible hypocritical world and flipping it. Creating something so absolutely ridiculous or enticing or contradictory that it undoes the horror around us, or at least gives us a moment to see what needs to be undone, because sometimes if we have that moment, that’s a starting point. For getting somewhere else.
To me this is the potential of trans identity, right? That we can imagine a way out that isn’t about fitting in or blending or conforming to the violence of the world around us. That we can flaunt and flail, and in the flaunting and flailing, maybe, there’s something else. And if there isn’t something else, then we can at least confront what is here now, to try to undo some of the horror, at least for a moment. …
The government is trying to bring us back to a time before we had the same range of options for self-determination, the same possibilities for living with and loving and taking care of one another against the status quo, where these options have become more visible and accessible to a wider range of people.
So we’re in this moment of regression, and I think the most important thing is not to internalize the violence. We have to resist in whatever ways possible, in everyday life, in our interactions in the world, in the way that we live and love and try to dream in spite of everything that is always against us.
As always with Mattilda’s words, this galvanized me and gave me a lot to think about.
The people who are in power right now want us to be quiet and cowed. So we need to be noisy and defiant to show that we are not going anywhere. And we need to show each other that we are going to survive this — even if it gets dark.
So here’s where it gets complicated, for me at least. If you just wanted a pep talk about queer art, please stop reading now.
I keep thinking that there’s a role for queer art and artists in jolting straight people into waking the fuck up and paying attention. I feel like there’s still so much complacency and denial out there, even though I’ve also been galvanized by witnessing and taking part in protests and other events. But one of the things I believe in the core of my being is that art can help reach people where political rhetoric and facts can’t. There’s something magical about identifying with a fictional character, or getting swept up in a story, or just being shocked by a piece of weird art into seeing things in a different way.
Everybody talks about Will and Grace having led to a lot more acceptance of gay people in mainstream us society. And I'm sure the folks who made last year’s documentary Will and Harper were hoping it could make that same kind of impact in convincing lazy-minded cis people that trans people really do pose no threats, and we’re just gosh-darn regular folks. My evidence-free gut feeling, though, is that you need a lot of ACT-UP and Queer Nation shocking the pants off people before you can achieve any results with something like Will and Grace. But I literally know nothing.
I’ve had a ton of conversations lately with folks about this: how can trans artists help in the battle against fascism? I have this very unformed notion that we could be doing some combination of art, pranks and protest. But I’ve also seen that kind of thing go horribly wrong in the past.
The other day, I was having coffee with a friend, and he was talking about terrible queer performance art he’d witnessed back in the 2000s. Turned out, we’d seen some of the same terrible performance art, and I’d even taken part in some of it. One time, I did an erotic performance while also doing a dramatic reading of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s infamous speech about “irrational exuberance,” which I think was my attempt to comment on the libidinal excesses of late-stage capitalism? I don’t know. I also took part in some very ill-advised weirdo outsider art actions to protest against the Iraq War, in which everybody involved was white and nobody had fully thought anything through. (One time, writing for a small indie magazine, I wrote a piece where I figured out the blood-to-oil exchange rate: if you sold a pint of blood, how much crude oil could you buy with it? This was so pointless, but I was angry and wanted to use my satirist brain.)
I’m an absurdist at heart, and when I become outraged, I tend to double down on absurdism — but the heart of absurdism is a sense that meaning is fake and nothing makes sense, which is also the logic of fascism. I think this is why I’ve seen so many attempts to use silly chaos for resistance fail, or backfire outright. It’s a huge part of why I worked so hard to move past pure absurdism in my fiction, and get better at writing emotionally-compelling relationships and characters.
So many of my heroes are fuck-ups — and not in a charming way. Like, I venerate the legacy of the anarchic queer performance troupe The Cockettes, who were incredibly influential and whose members included Sylvester. And yet! The Cockettes’ most famous stage production, Pearls Over Shanghai, was basically nonstop cultural appropriation and Orientalism, replete with copious yellowface. As Julia Bryan-Wilson writes in her book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, “Indeed, when considering the seemingly casual racism that accompanied many of the Cockettes’ productions, we might ask: whose world, exactly, is being made here?”
So that’s what I’m kind of wrestling with here. I want to believe that queer creators can do more than provide comfort and inspiration to our fellow queers — that we can take part, meaningfully, in the struggle against fascism. I know in my bones and sinew that this is possible, and that bringing our full outrageous visions to the world can help create a change. But I also know it has to be more inclusive this time, and that white people shouldn’t be the only ones leading the charge. And also, that you never know how a piece of art might be received, and by whom. This newsletter started out as something very different, back in January, and then I had a ton of conversations with various trans folks that forced me to take a step back and think a bit more.
For now, I’m trying to write stories that I hope will weird you out and make you both laugh and cry, and I’m going to as many protests as I can. And I’m going to keep thinking about this question and having as many conversations about it as I can. Stay tuned.
Music I Love Right Now
Can we please give clipping. a Hugo Award already? Seriously. They’ve been nominated twice, and their new album Dead Channel Sky is an absolute masterpiece.
As the reference to the opening line of Neuromancer reflects, this is a cyberpunk album. (Complete with a delightful earworm of a song called “Mirrorshades.”) But Dead Channel Sky is no exercise in nostalgia or empty shout-outs to William Gibson or Bruce Sterling. Rather, it’s relentlessly timely and relevant, speaking to this moment with total clarity. Daveed Diggs’ voice is frenetic and witty, spitting lines about “consciousness is a memory stick” and “gender is so easily programmable.” And the music itself is full of modem squeals and electronic groans, but also at times lilting synthesizers. I keep listening to this album and hearing more stuff in it, because it’s a complex and multilayered work. As my friend was saying the other day, it’s probably already clinched the title of best album of 2025, and it’s also bound to be one of the year’s best works of science fiction. Give these guys a Hugo Award, I beg you.
I was lucky enough to see clipping. in concert last week, and it was a transporting experience. And Annalee Newitz and I were privileged to interview the band for our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
