Launching a book: Absolute Pleasure
The last time I launched a book with my name on the cover (Derby Life) was ten years ago. Since then, I’ve been involved in launching dozens of books (or thousands if you count my work at Kickstarter) but I forgot how uniquely thrilling and humbling it is to promote your own book.
Absolute Pleasure: Queer Perspectives on Rocky Horror is being published this week on September 16th! In this non-fiction anthology, 26 trans and queer writers have shared their stories, musings, and criticisms of the iconic cult film and its role in queer and mainstream culture to mark its fiftieth anniversary.
This has been a huge labor of love, and I am so looking forward to sharing the book with people and having conversations at the events I'm hosting this week and beyond. The tour schedule is listed here, and I would love to see you at one of the events if there's one in your neck of the woods.
The party on Thursday 9/18 should be super fun, and if the ticket price is a barrier, email me and I'll put you on the list.
If you have any Rocky Horror-loving friends, I'd be really grateful if you would let them know about the book and/or events. It's hard to get attention for an independently published book, and I'm doing everything I can to spread the word about the book. If you'd like to share on social media, a newsletter, carrier pigeon, or any other way, there are lots of images sized for social media here along with a one-sheet about the book. You can also preorder the book via the Brooklyn-based indie bookstore Hive Mind Books, and I'll sign it for you.
And if you happen to know Tim Curry, let me know, cuz I'd love to send him a copy of the book.
I drafted but didn’t send a newsletter back in June: “Not just proud, but also furious.” I think it is still worth sharing now, since the issues I was talking about have only gotten more intense since then.
Not just proud, but also furious
Pride has felt strange this year. It’s hard to reconcile the shiny commercialized fun-for-all-ages parade and month of parties and spotlights on The LGBTQ+ Community, including copious rainbow-colored merchandise, with the dramatically changed reality for queer and especially trans and gender non-conforming people in the United States in 2025. The election of Trump elevated him and his Project 2025 cronies into positions of power they have used to scapegoat and legislate against trans and queer people,
Even the past few years, before the intense escalation of discrimination that Trump’s re-election has brought, it has been difficult to get into a celebratory mood years into a global pandemic which is still killing and disabling thousands of people each month, which our government and many in public roles have declared to be over, and are acting accordingly. One of my earliest touchpoints with queerness and activism was ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, and their slogan “Act Up! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!” (I highly recommend this 2021 article, “How ACT UP Changed America.”)
One of the most difficult elements of the pandemic is that being together in person in community is a vector by which this deadly and disabling virus spreads. Being together in person in joy, in pain, in protest, and in love, which have been part of the bedrock of queer community for generations, have become and remained risky and even deadly in a world that has all but abandoned COVID harm-reduction protocols like masking, testing, contact tracing, and more.
Coalitions are crucial. Winning progress requires solidarity, mutual respect, and collaboration across the lines of gender, race, class, nationality, sexuality, and other types of difference. Rightwing politicians and capitalist oligarchs love to scapegoat and divide their opponents, point at some of us as The Problem so we don’t all look at them as the real problem, and act accordingly.
“Pushback against social progress isn’t a new phenomenon, and neither is adversity for LGBTQ people. But prior generations grew up knowing it firsthand, whereas Gen Z has been raised in a world where, each June, huge rainbow parades bearing the imprimaturs of corporations and local governments rolled down the streets of every major U.S. city. That gave them plenty of reasons to believe that the recurrent waves of discrimination their elders faced—the Lavender Scare, Ronald Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act—had been relegated to history’s dustbin.
“The freedom these young adults grew up with was, in part, the freedom not to think about these things. That liberty was incomplete—stratified by class, race, region, or pure luck—but wherever it did exist, it represented the fulfillment of a long-held dream, one in which queer people would be able to pursue careers, relationships, and families without fear of being outed or ostracized. Having to ask Where and when can I hold my beloved’s hand? is caustic to a person’s dignity. Having to wonder Where can I safely use the bathroom? is abrasive to the soul. It fundamentally alters one’s brain chemistry to see Sesame Street accused of “grooming” for posting a Pride message.
“Today, recognizing that decades of change may not be as irreversible as they’d thought, some Gen Zers look back to their radical elders in search of models for moving forward. They counter homophobia and transphobia with slogans like “The First Pride Was a Riot.” They argue that the power of Stonewall came from the open rebellion of an unapologetic, unassimilated group. If even Elmo is getting called a groomer, their line of thinking goes, then being palatable doesn’t work: You might as well show up, as many did at WorldPride, in leather and drag.”
“Even if it becomes much harder to be openly gay or trans in America in the coming years, five decades of history cannot easily be undone.” “This Pride Month, the Backlash Has Officially Arrived”
For the past year, I’ve worked intensely on Absolute Pleasure, an anthology of essays by queer and trans people using the film as a lens through which to think and talk about queer life in the west over the past fifty years,
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year thinking and reading about what our culture looked like across the decades, how things were for me as an unknowingly queer kid growing up with no queer family, community, or role models in an extremely homophobic country and culture. I’ve thought a lot about how things have changed for queer and trans people, especially in the past ten years. And I’ve been in conversation with younger trans and queer people, both on the page and off, about their experiences, and how those are similar and different than my own.
This summer, I spoke to cultural critic Shasha not Sasha about the film and our different experiences growing up queer in different generations. Their video is an incredible history and analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and its role and impact in culture across the past five decades.
I’m looking forward to having more of these conversations around the book launch and beyond. I hope you’ll join me.