Absolute Pleasure
Hello friends!
It feels like I have been in a cocoon for the past few months, and am now emerging into the warm spring light and spreading my wings.
Though I’ve been quiet in public channels, I have been hard at work on some fun and fascinating projects which I’m excited to share with you (and a few that are still behind the scenes.)
First: my forthcoming anthology!
Absolute Pleasure is being published by Feminist Press September 16, 2025, just days before the 50th anniversary of the film’s release. I’ve been working on this project for close to three years, and I’m delighted to get to share it with the world.
Rocky Horror was incredibly important to me as an unknowingly queer kid growing up in the 80s and 90s. Representation of queerness and gender non-conformity in mainstream media was very rare back then, and mostly quite bad. And before everyone carried the internet around in their pockets, there truly were not very many ways for a young queer or gender non-conforming person to encounter queerness, let alone to understand the many gorgeous possibilities for our own queer lives.
The book also grapples with the dramatic reversals in the legislative and cultural landscape for trans and queer people over the past couple years. This has been much on my mind for the past six months as I’ve been working away in my cocoon, researching queer and trans history and trying to contextualize this book for readers at a time when things have gotten precipitously worse for trans and queer people very quickly.
I have been steeped in our history: the Lavender Scare, the HIV/AIDS crisis, various First Times and legal wins, and also the kinds of very public, inflammatory hateful rhetoric we’ve been subject to for the past 50 years and even before. Though it has been hard and sobering to read about and watch and listen to these things, it has reminded me that queer people are part of a long and beautiful lineage, and we have fought hard for everything we’ve ever gotten. It’s one of the reasons that the tour this fall is so important to me: I want to create in-person spaces for connection and conversation at a time when things feel very dark, and bring trans and queer people of different generations into conversation with each other.
You can find out more about the book and tour and preorder a copy here on Kickstarter.
I’m running a public survey to help me understand where the audience for this book might be, to inform my plan for a book tour in the fall. If you’re interested in getting an advance copy to review or cover the book in media, your newsletter, podcast, or something else, drop me a line and I can connect you with the Feminist Press publicity team.
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Outside writing and my work on the anthology, I have been approaching work with a lot of excitement and curiosity, following my interests and working on cool projects with great people. My past few full-time jobs have been pretty all-consuming, so I’m building some more breathing room for myself into my work life, drawing on my skills as an editor, creative fundraiser, publisher, and strategic thinker. You can learn more about my work on my website. Here are a few of the things I’ve been doing over the past few months.
I joined Beehive Books, an independent publisher of illustrated books with a focus on gorgeous production, as their Director of Operations. I have loved their work since I first heard about them close to a decade ago when they were getting their start and planning to publish a preposterously gorgeous oversized book, The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Works and Worlds of Herbert Crowley. Independent publishing is one of my deepest loves, so getting to help a publisher I truly admire refine their systems and build a solid foundation to publish even more excellent, ambitious books, has been wonderful.
A couple months ago, I got the chance to work with Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, a collectively-run publisher of radical culture. I helped advise them on their Kickstarter project for Margaret Killjoy’s queer anarchist punk fantasy novella, The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. It was a fun project, and I learned so much about alternative ways to organize the operations and decision-making of a publisher. I really like their model and how they’re doing things, and I think they should be on more people’s radar.
There are some other things cooking behind the scenes that I can’t talk about at this point. Looking ahead to this summer, I still have space for two developmental/line editing projects, and advising on or running one or two Kickstarter projects. I also have some hours open for one-time or ongoing projects and consulting with publishers, focusing on finances, strategy, marketing, operations, and fundraising. If you’re interested or have questions, please get in touch.
As the weather has grown mild, I’ve been going to book events again, and especially enjoying the programming at the new Hive Mind Books, Bushwick, Brooklyn’s Queer Bookstore. They have been putting on so many incredible events that I’ve started joking that I basically live there now. Their upcoming events feature Kate Bornstein, Sim Kern, and Feminist Press author, Freda Epum, among other great programming.
I’ll be at Consortium’s sales conference this week, and I hope to see some of you there.