AI: Queer Books
By A book on asexuality by Anthony F. Bogaert aimed at educating general readers was recently released. I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet, but having seen it get positive reviews and attention from other asexual people I’m hoping it’ll turn up in a local library soon. It’s actually one of the first such books to be published – unsurprisingly, there haven’t been that many books published with explicit references to asexuality, though of course there are instances where you can interpret characters as asexual (here’s a reading list comprising works with both explicit and implicit references).
I’ve not made much headway in that list, but I’m hoping that when I have read a few more of those books (and a few more have been published) I’ll be able to recommend the best. I kind of wish more books that tackled asexuality head-on had been around when I was younger. It would have been valuable to see that I wasn’t alone, a feeling I suspect many asexual people share. I especially think more books should cover asexual relationships – far from being boring, as some people say, I think writers exploring previously unexplored (or undervalued) types of relationships would be very interesting (here’s that statement written a lot more eloquently and comprehensively) and, of course, beneficial to younger or less informed people. For now, however, I quite enjoy reading about other areas of LGBTQ* culture, though I still haven’t explore that much either.
Have you read any books – fiction or non-fiction – with LGBTQ* themes recently? What did you think of them? Do you have any long-standing recommendations, or alternatively books that failed to live up to your expectations? What area of LGBTQ* life would you most like to see explored more?
The Afternoon Inqueery (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Queereka community. Look for it to appear on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, at 3pm ET.
(Featured image by Till Westermayer on Flickr)
