Hashtag Queer: LGBTQ+ Creative Anthology, Volume 3

Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Qommunicate Publishing (April 15, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 236 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1946952257
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1946952257
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.3 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.54 x 9 inches

Table of Contents

FICTION | Short Stories

Character Driven | Brian Rowe

Reporter | Stefen Styrsky 

The Atomic Principle of Bathroom Graffiti | V.F. Thompson

annulus | Amanda Poythress

Last Innings | Shreya Chakraborty

Healthy Enough | Christina M. Wells

The Hunter | Laramie Dean

Olwethu & Zachariah | Jason Maseko

Fathers’ Love | Hunter Liguore

After the Rains | Tanima Das Mitra

Sweet-talk | Cila Warncke

A Beginning | Lupin Thurrott

NONFICTION | Essays & Memoirs

Other Intimacies | Cheryl Wollner

Transference, Transition | Andy Winder

A Certain Type of Brilliance: Claiming Femme | Meg

POETRY

All Glory Be | Ian Duncan

Love Glitter | Joyce Frohn

First Date Jitters | Violet Mitchell

I’m Reading the Vagina Monologues | Violet Mitchell

Storm Emma | Violet Mitchell

Batman Doesn’t Scare Emma | Violet Mitchell

Encircled | Sarah Bigham

When memories fracture and we learn to make do | Sarah Bigham

A Widow Speaks #2 | Anthony DiPietro

An Apostle Breaks His Silence | Anthony DiPietro

The Tacit Poems | Melanie Bell

How to Fail With a Lover | Marie Hartung

SCRIPTS | Plays & Screenplays

Melody | Amy Fox and Wren Handman

The Parrots of Heaven | Evan Guilford-Blake

The Seasons Speak in Four Parts | Addison Rizer 

Editor's Note

Since the release of Hashtag Queer, Volume 2 just last year, the country of India ended its criminalization of homosexuality, a point expressed by two writers from that country published in this volume. Both celebrated that they could even write and submit work that, only months prior, would have jeopardized their safety. Indeed, the world has come a long way, even in our lifetimes, and yet one look at Brunei’s recent government-sanctioned stoning of queer folk reveals how far we still have to go.

Queer literature is arguably more relevant now than ever, or at least more vibrant and prolific. The need to express our struggles is more than therapeutic: it’s political. By continuing to write and publish our experience, we refuse to let others push us back into the shadows and pretend we don’t exist or are an aberration. By stepping into the light, again and again, we make it impossible to deny us.

When we first launched the Qommunicate Publishing imprint with Hashtag Queer, Volume 1, we didn’t set out for it to have a theme other than queer literature. We found however, in the submissions we culled, a common thread we identified as: “A life in the day”, or, in other words, a firsthand experience of queerness from the earliest awakenings of youth to the last breath of old age and death. In the second volume, we noticed a different theme emerging in the works: a focus on the innately human struggles all people face, showing queer people are people too. This third time around, we struggled at first to identify a common link until it hit us like a lightning bolt that the struggle, or struggle itself, was the link.

However much coincidence did or didn’t play into it, the Hashtag Queer series was born at the birth of a major cultural shift in America, and the world. While hateful, divisive behavior, bullying and discrimination have been around since time immemorial, perhaps never before in the free world has it been so sanctioned and emboldened. As such, people living in society’s margins are feeling more threatened than perhaps ever in their lives. There appears to be a heightened level of fear, anxiety, anger, despair and desperation exacerbated over the past few years making itself evident in the submissions we’ve read and curated for this volume. For writers, who find self-expression in words on a page, those words convey an urgent and dire effort to contend with this struggle. Indeed, and at the risk of oversimplifying, if Volume 1 was about the queer part of being a queer human being today and Volume 2 was about the human part, this third volume in what has so far developed into a trilogy, is about the today part: that is, about being a queer person alive today, facing struggles distinctly modern and new. 

This is partly evident in the amount of magical realism wending its way through the pieces, a genre defined by its uses to transcend and redefine boundaries, painting new worlds similar enough to our own for us to see ourselves in them yet different enough to describe the indescribable, convey the inconceivable, reveal the unfamiliar in the familiar. Other pieces confront the present struggle in more direct terms: stories of war, dating apps and adapting to the march of progress. At the same time, themes of self-acceptance and personal empowerment continue to permeate the series, more queer voices beyond gay and lesbian—including trans, bisexual, non-binary & asexual—demonstrating that, no matter the faces of adversity at any given moment in history, some of the struggles queer people face are eternal and universal… at least so far. As I said in my introduction to the first volume, it’s only an issue until it’s not an issue.

Indeed we’ve come far, and still there’s so much farther to go. Until then, may we continue to archive our collective struggle as queer people today through the inspired words of writers like those featured here. A huge thanks to all of them for opening themselves so vulnerably for our betterment, and a likewise huge thanks to you, the reader, for giving their your time and attention.