Dear Lovers, Sisters, Brothers, Mothers, Adopted Aunts, Long Lost Fathers, Half-cousins, Wives, Black Sheep and Partners In Crime

As you know, we have a soft spot for collectives, collaborations, friendships and support structures. People doing things with other people: loving, working, organizing, living. These strategies for surviving together form an underlying thread throughout all our issues. This time we wanted to look more closely at one way of naming these friendly constellations: FAMILY.

120 pages exploring the body and bodies, inside out and outside in. Bodies that dance and move. Bodies making waves. Body double. Bodies at work and working with the body. Using the body as an instrument. The body as medium and massage of touch and being touched. The single, singular body as the very basis for a ‘we’.

Interviews with image ingenue K8 Hardy, filmmaker Babette Mangolte, writer Jina Khayyer and documentarist Mariah Garnett. Essays by Derica Shields and Crystal Campell. Plus 7 Q&A's with healers, herbalist and modern witches. Beautiful bodily artists series and last but not least – horoscopic aphrodisiacs.

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

These days, if you call someone to go for a drink or a walk in the park, the obvious answer is: 'Sorry, I'm too busy'. Too busy with what? What do you do all day in your studio or office, bar or dancefloor, spending precious time on 'work'? And what makes it different from labouring? Do we slave for money – or no money – building on a system that is doomed to collapse? Or do we build on a new future where work and play are equal? When we work on our own initiatives and with a self-generated goal, would that still be called work? In this issue: other voices, other routes.

Featuring Alice Carey, Anna Franceschini, Lizzie Fitch, Devin Blair, Kim Gordon, Annika Henderson, Melanie Bonajo, Marie Branellec, Elizabeth Orr, Holli Smith, Joke Robaard Litia Perta and Marie Karlberg.

There can never be enough queer spaces, and the club is as good a place as any to begin an exploration. For generations, the club has been a space of legend, gossip, hearsay, and queer history, a place to gather and build community, to feel safe and experiment. The editors of ‘Girls Like Us’ decided to make a guest-edited issue centred around queer architecture back in 2019, long before the pandemic hit. They found the Swedish queer art and architecture collective MYCKET to fill this role, and later also realised how much club spaces were missed in pandemic times. Because, missing clubbing is one thing, but not being able to dance is something else entirely.

A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery.

Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.

This debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.

Transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure, from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama, Purnell's characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it, or perhaps because of it, they shine.

"Brontez Purnell has such seemingly casual genius that at times you forget you're reading a book and are transported to some couch/bus/basement where the drugs are really good and your friend is really funny, maybe your weird closeted cousin is on HarlemHookups in the corner, and all of a sudden your friend says some fucking Sappho ass, weird ass, brilliant ass bullshit. I love this slut of a book, it's a slut ass maker. 100 Boyfriends or no new boyfriends at all, Purnell's autofiction/memoir/whatever the hell this marvelously sad and intoxicating book is shook me up good with its honesty and blunt-to-face endings, the jokes and stories I didn't know we were allowed to tell outside of circles of faggots and misfits. But this book is in those circles, makes you tea and steals for you, it invites us in, but would we mind shutting the hell up cause it's a little hungover? The light is coming through the windows so clear." -- Danez Smith, author of Homie

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock.

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work.

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.  

For Myles, time's "optic quality" is what enables writing in the first place, as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Artist's book (an hallucinated portrait gallery of most of the characters created by Brice Dellsperger for his film remakes) / first substantive study of his work, with an essay by Marie Canet.

Brice Dellsperger's Body Double is the first monograph ever published on the artist's already cult film productions, with a long essay by art historian Marie Canet that addresses filmic remake, but also issues of models, gender politics, and representational chaos. Consisting in a large body of unpublished images, the book also invites the reader backstage—as in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, after which this book is modeled—into the Dellspergian camp film factory, to get a closer look at the characters and personas that populate the Body Double series, and that are creations both of the artist and of his main performer and muse, Jean-Luc Verna.

Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.

Brice Dellsperger has exhibited extensively in Europe and abroad, and began his well-known Body Double series in 1995. His work is in collections that include the Museum of Modern Art, Musée d'Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Available in French edition.

Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future.

Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology, luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey, Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book.  

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph's College. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Published Oct 2020

Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

& colin kaepernick is my president, who kneels on the air
bent toward a branch, throwing apples down to the children
& vets & rihanna is my president, walking out of global summitswith wine glass in hand, our taxes returned in goldto dust our faces into coins
& my mama is my president, her grace stuntson amazing, brown hands breaking brown bread overmouths of the hungry until there are none unfed & my grandma is my president
& her cabinet is her cabinetcause she knows to trust what the pan knowshow the skillet wins the war  
—from “my president”

One part ketamine spiral, one part confessional travelogue from the edge of gender, TGSM is a hallucinatory transmission on sex, identity, the internet, and the flickering wish not to exist in a given body at a given point in time. TGSM raises questions with which we have begun to negotiate broadly as a culture: what is actually happening to someone when they transition? how should we understand or describe such processes? what is the role of drugs, of hallucination, of imagination, in transition? is being a trans person in this moment in history, when the identity is ever more carefully traced [and tracked] by larger cultural forces, more liberated than before? 

Drawing its source material from chance encounters, wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms, to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don't know how they work, TGSM is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.

Hannah Baer runs the meme account @malefragility on instagram, and studies clinical psychology in new york city.

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves.

An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.

At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences.

By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.

The story of a dangerous man seduced by peril, Querelle deals in a startling way with the Dostoyevskian theme of murder as an act of total liberation.

It is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder. Georges Querelle, its protagonist, is a bisexual thief, prostitute and serial killer who manipulates and kills his lovers for thrills and profit. The novel formed the basis for Querelle (1982), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film.

A Hypocritical Reader is your emancipation, reader. Want to lose yourself in your favourite genre? This book is for you. Want to question the influence of modernist experimentalism on the short story form? This book is also for you. Want to explore that unspeakable Barthesian dictum? Okay? You want to psychoanalyse the (female) writer? Hmmm. Follow the book's emotional arc, or pick your own path by choosing which pages to turn to. Hell, you can even clip out the individual words and collage your way into exciting new worlds. Just don't tell the author. This book is Calvino, with an attitude.

Rosie Snajdr is an author, editor, and academic. Her work has appeared in The Cambridge Literary Review, Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and is forthcoming in TOTAL CANT (Cant Books).

A conversation about performance, genre and cinema in the subversive work of Brice Dellsperger.

In this conversation between Dellsperger and Marie-France Rafael, following current (post)gender discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual) identity as products of a cultural construction informed by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet do not depict a preexisting sexuality but establish an image of it and its (normative) framework. Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he, starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies for subjectivity.

Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.

Marie-France Rafael (born 19984 in Munich) is a tenure-track professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She holds a PhD in art history; she studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. She is notably the author of Reisen im Imaginativ: Künstlerische Situationen und Displays (Travel in the Imaginary: Artistic Situations and Displays, 2017) and Ari Benjamin Meyers: Music on Display (2016).

Published Oct 2020.

A cult classic in France, the first translation of a novel that captures a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris.
'finally there are the rolling stones who call for all these at the same time among them and around them: the policeman, the cross-dresser, the dancer, Frankenstein, the dandy, the robot'
--from Dusty Pink

Written with the hope of achieving a "dreary distant banality," Jean-Jacques Schuhl's first novel is a subjective stroll through an underground, glamorous Paris, a city that slips into the background but never disappears, hovering on the verge of its own suppression. An elegiac and luminous cut-up, Dusty Pink brings together race wire results, editions of France-Soir, the lyrics to well-known British songs, scripts from famous old films, pharmaceutical leaflets, fashion ads, and strips and scraps of culture in which the avant-garde and academicism blur in an overview of the cultural scene. This world of atmospheres, portraits, and dazzling associations of ideas creates a plane of shimmering surfaces.

Published in French in 1972, Jean-Jacques Schuhl's Dusty Pink became a cult classic. This is its first translation.

Cult author Jean-Jacques Shuhl won the Prix Goncourt in 2000 for his novel Ingrid Caven, which sold over 235,000 copies in France. It was his first book since Dusty Pink was published in 1972.

Composed between destinations, in airplanes, trains, museums, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff's Vzszhhzz captures the slight intersections of a loose group of artists and lawyers, restauranteurs, philosophers, wine-makers and boxers whose lives are conducted almost entirely in a second language. A loose chronicle masquerading as a novel, Vszhhzz - like Michèle Bernstein's All The King's Horses, the Bernadette Corporation's Reena Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg's Surveys - couches Graff's sharp observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too much, Vzszhhzz says everything about the relation to time, cities, weather and smog that has become the lingua franca of a creative and transient life.

Writer and curator Jeanne Graff was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and lives in New York. She is a columnist for May Revue (Paris), works in a vineyard, and teaches at HEAD art school in Geneva. In 2014, Graff founded 186f Kepler, an art space without walls. She has organized numerous international exhibitions, and performs with her band Solar Lice. Graff recently completed a writing residency at Villa Noailles in Hyeres, France.

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.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad.

This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.