Nonbinary: A Memoir

There is no such thing as a safe word. 

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? 

Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. 

‘Mayer’s writing is generous, astute and sincere; in Bad Language, they choose their words carefully, using incantation and spell to distil a complex argument – the transformative power of language lay in its ability to shape sense perception. For Mayer, the task of ‘making ourselves up’ is another way of asking, what kind of world do we want to live in?’ – Lola Olufemi

SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.

A pulpy, mytho-poetic dispatch from an “anarchist jurisdiction” that explores the liberatory possibilities of community and womanhood. 

Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.

Slide into spring with our mega-stimulating 38th issue. 

Hop in the jacuzzi with Italiano chart-topper Mahmood. Read the hustling tell-all with Ashland Mines aka deejay Bobby Beethovan. Zip to queer futures with internet-doll sensation @StarAmerasu. Go behind-the-scenes of some of the biggest French content creators with photographer @RaphaelChatelain. There’s hairy art from China, trans love affairs, cottaging evidence for court, d*ck arrangements, ladyboy activism, and so much more. 

Plus, a back section of smutty poetry submitted to us by our talented readers, and a visit to our favorite local cruise bar on BUTT’s 25th anniversary. At 152 pages, it’s sure to satisfy size queens all around the world. 

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

A highly personal and sensitive exploration of motherhood.

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Iman Mersal  navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child. 

"If I'd been more aware and someone had asked me about 'my mother's picture' I would have shown them the bird she'd stitched onto the canvas herself. It is not aesthetic vision or skill that summons my mother's presence in this canvas, but the slight punctum the bird gives me. I get nothing of this sort from our studio portrait. The bird's eyes are always looking at me, as though they belong to her. The bird: motionless, for whose sake my mother sat and stitched by the window where the light came in, each pinprick a symbolic laceration in the process of its embodiment: cuts by the hundred to make it whole."

Iman Mersal (born 1966 à Mit 'Adlan) is an Egyptian poet, writer, academic and translator. She works as an Associate professor of Arabic literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. An anthology of her works was translated into more than twenty languages and she has five poetry collections published.