Unreal Sex

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.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.  

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. 

Contributors: Federico Campagna, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Daniel Heath Justice, Bhanu Kapil, Canisia Lubrin, Una McCormack, David Naimon, Nisha Ramayya, Shoshone Collective, Standard Deviation, Marilyn Strathern. 

Co-published by Spiral House and AA Publications to coincide with an exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association, London, opening on 10 October 2025.

”One of the literary greats of the 20th century.” Margaret Atwood

Vaginal Davis offers insights into her collaborative practice of making music in art-punk bands in Los Angles and Berlin.

The artist Vaginal Davis certainly moves on dangerous ground with her transgressive shuffling of gender and genre boundaries. The self-described "sexual repulsive" co-founded several art/punk bands in her expansive 40-year-plus career, namely Afro Sisters, ¡Cholita!, Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME), black fag and Tenderloin. As a writer and "Whoracle et Delphi", Ms. Davis turns her quirky hairy eyeball to the collective practice of making music in the saucy underground scenes of Los Angeles and Berlin. In their contributions, longtime comrades and collaborators Bibbe Hansen (artist and Warhol Silver Factory habitué) and Felix Knoke (guest performer for The Hidden Cameras and band member of Tenderloin) rave about joint performances and rehearsals, divulging sacred secrets and rifts. Bruce "Judy" LaBruce, Glen Meadmore and Lisa "Suckdog" Carver make surprise guest appearances, along with images from live performance spectacles The White to Be Angry, Trust Fund, Interracial Dating Game, We're Taking Over, Afro De Sade and Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life.

Edited by Jenny Schlenzka and Julia Grosse.
Texts and works by Vaginal Davis, Bibbe Hansen, Felix Knoke.

Published on the occasion of Vaginal Davis's exhibition at Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2025.

Vaginal Davis is a Berlin-based American intersexed artist, queer icon of art and music. Vaginal Davis herself is a living work of art: a performer, writer and creator of iconic zines; a visual artist, experimental filmmaker; a self-proclaimed Blacktress and drag terrorist, a gossip columnist, influential socialite, educator and countercultural renegade. Since the late 1970s, her oeuvre has pushed the boundaries of art, music and performance. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the United States, she named herself after feminist and Black Power activist Angela Davis.

THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart (Belladonna*, 2015) and Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture, which produces a poets theater series at the Stud in San Francisco. He has received fellowships from the Poetry Project, Poets House, Lambda Literary, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Maxe is a lecturer in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Stanford University.

A post-apocalyptic retelling of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Who will survive when the world is destroyed? Can stories from the distant past teach us how to change a dismal present? Merchant shifts perspective between three survivors of a flooded world as they try to navigate the threat of mass starvation; Jessica, a patrilineal Jew from Venice (named after the Italian city but located on the mountain K2) who has memorized the complete works of Shakespeare; Cem, an orphan of Venice; and Shinobu, an advisor to the empress Ama in Fuji. Ama has been gifting edible algae blocks to nations worldwide, but Jessica's arrival in Fuji to beg for more food for Venice upsets the delicate international balance Shinobu has been maintaining. As a series of buried secrets and miscommunications carry consequences of potential global destruction, everyone must determine what they are willing to do to survive in a hopeless world.

Alexandra Grunberg attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts earning a BFA in Theatre. She earned her MLitt and DFA in Creative Writing at The University of Glasgow. Grunberg presented her research at various academic conferences in the UK, including “Once and Future Fantasies” at the University of Glasgow, “CRSF 2021 10th Anniversary Conference—Speculative Futures & Survival” by the University of Liverpool, “Beast Modernisms Conference 2019” at The University of Glasgow, “Creative Writing: Processes, Theory, and Influences” at The University of Edinburgh, and “The Literary Self: From Antiquity to the Digital Age” at The University of Edinburgh.

A dirty cult-classic put out in a small batch by an underground publisher (Rudos and Rubes) in 2015, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger recounts the life of an artist and "old school homosexual" who bears a big resemblance to author Brontez Purnell.

Our hero doesn't trust the new breed of fags taking over San Francisco, though. They wear bicycle helmets, seat belts, and condoms. Meanwhile, he sabotages his relationships, hallucinating affection while cruising in late night parks, bath-houses, and other nooks and crannies of a newly-conservative, ruined city.

Furiously original, vital, and messy, this funny "non-memoir" uncovers a revelatory truth for the age: there are things far scarier than HIV.