Speed Glum Hero

"We didn’t have anything & we hadn’t seen much. So, naturally we understood less & felt owed something. We weren’t entirely wrong, though. It was 2011."

Part archival remix, part recruitment manual, this pamphlet’s cast of BAD HORSEY GIRLS will teach you how to neigh, dance and flirt until the vampires come home. A Series of Attempts #3 opens with Jordan/_Hell’s new manifesto ☆ LOVING WOMEN ★, that takes the Nomadic Sisters 1976 publication by the same name as a departure point. From here, ★ LE PONEY ☆ then follows a string of lesbian ponies through a dimensional split. A dimensional split that looks suspiciously like the L.A./Parisian+ queer scene… (͠≖~≖ ͡ )

About the author:
Jordan/_ Hell is a Black trans(2s) artist, writer, & scholar. Hell is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2021) & AUTOLINGO DIDACTICA (Monitor Press, 2023), amount others. Hell’s writing has been internationally published in multiple languages in press, interdisciplinary projects, & exhibitions by Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (DE), Arcadia Missa Gallery & Publishing (UK), Monitor Books (UK), Real Review (UK), Soft Opening (UK), Mousse Magazine (DE), 032c (DE), Rosie’s Disobedient Press (UK), Sticky Fingers Publishing (UK), The Bittersweet Review (UK), Pratt Institute’s The Felt (US), & others. Hell studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art (US). Currently, Hell is a doctoral candidate in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London.

Orbiting around the saddest house in the history of Grand Designs, Sam Moore’s Chesil Cliff House and other failures takes us to North Devon where, standing at the cliff’s edge, we meet Edward Short: a man with a Fred Perry shirt and a dream. Amongst a chorus of characters including Kevin Mcloud as Father Time, Moore by means of Short leads us into a study of creative failure, gender, and, ultimately, the desire to keep writing.

"I struggle to see anyone living here. It feels like a distorted wonder of the world, a cautionary tale. Something that could never have been lived in, but that had to be made."

About the author:
Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and Search history (Queer Street Press). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

About A Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

Featuring the photography of BENJAMIN FREDRICKSON 👅 

This issue of SISSY ANARCHY brings together an incredible cohort of sissies; who give up their environment, their daily encoded stances, to define with me here — in what has become such a tender edition of SISSY ANARCHY — a world where boundaries are stretched and obliterated.

Contributions featuring Imogen Cleverley, Joel Dixon, Donna Marcus Duke, Benjamin Fredrickson, Jordan Hearns, Misha Honcharenko, Ian Ivey, Hesse K, Mayah Monet Lovell, Sam Moore, D Mortimer, Barney Pau, L Scully, Pissed Off Trannies, Ailo Villan, Lee Rae Walsh

Founding Editor: Pierce Eldridge
Design: Caitlin Mcloughlin

Transchool: Volume 2 is an anthology featuring the multifaceted work — poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, genre-defying writing — by the second class of Transchool creative writers and their mentors, including Amos Mac, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Sylan Oswald, and torrin a. greathouse, with introduction letters from Chase Strangio and Kyle Lasky of @Transanta, Drew Denny, and Ren Heintz. Allies in Arts founded Transchool to empower the voices of trans and nonbinary writers ages 18-25. This volume of the Transchool anthology includes work that was created by these writers in June, 2024.

“These are the crevices that these writers have found and put to words while much of the world tries to turn us into a soundbite cliché, an emulsified reduction of what cannot be contained. There is a glow to each of these writers, and to the worlds they are bringing us towards.” – Dr. Ren Heintz

Contributors:
Chase Strangio
Kyle Lasky
Ren Heintz
Park Walters
J. Martel
Cassandra R. Flowers
Jo(rdan) Snow
Cameron Awkward-Rich
E.F. Tate
KB
Amos Mac
CL
R. David
Shea S. Davis
Sal Kang
torrin a. greathouse
Elijah Bendiner
Sylvan Oswald
Quinlan Owens
D. Ezra
Shoshana Katz
Dominic Emerson Wing

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. 

In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a mentally ill person suffering from gender dysphoria, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's Report to an Academy, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.  

Speaking from his own mutant cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence.  

Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.

In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell—the bard of the underloved and overlooked—turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.” 

The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement. 

With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

Making a fanzine is an act of rebellion, even more so if it is published and produced by a woman. The grrrls of today use them to inspire countless young people around the world, to take control of their lives and to create their own culture. These homemade publications are a quick and cheap way to spread their ideas and dismantle the usual stereotypes. Traditionally hand-drawn, photocopied, and stapled together, the format of fanzines are now as diverse as their subject matter, with online platforms and social networks fast becoming the norm. The fanzine is more alive than ever!

Gemma Villegas runs her graphic design studio based from Barcelona. She works in close dialog with commissioners and collaborators on a broad range of projects, including visual identities, exhibitions, publications, and digital platforms, overseeing the creative process during all the phases of a project. Her work is characterized by a fresh and powerful visual language focused on detail with special attention to typography.

catflap is the annual publication of new queer writing from Outburst Arts, a hot mix of open call submissions, curated interviews and smart queer writing with a disco heart.