A house painted like a rainbow

A bit over five years ago, I wrote a post on Karen Knows Best, about Equality House, in Topeka, Kansas.

This past week, someone else wrote a beautiful story about its meaning to him and the community and the state–and what it can mean for all of us.

“River of Teeth” by Sarah Gailey

Update: edited on May 24 2018 to change pronouns to those preferred by the author.

Last year I became aware of Sarah Gailey on twitter (see here and here). Though I haven’t shared them here, I have very much enjoyed their pieces on Tor.com (they wrote a whole series on The Women of Harry Potter, starting with Hermione, and then there’s “In Defense of Villaineses”, and “Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF”).

Anyway, I finally snagged a copy of “River of Teeth,”  their debut novella, based on something that really almost happened. (Check out The Atavist piece that was the inspiration, or this Wired article for a summary.)

Beware: there’s violence, gore and death on the page. I wouldn’t say it’s lavishly described, but it’s graphic. Oh, and this is not a romance.

“River of Teeth” by Sarah Gailey

This is an alternative history set in the 1890s. In this timeline, H.R.23621 (aka, the Hippo Bill) actually passed, so that hippopotamuses were imported into the US to breed–for meat–in the marshy areas of the Gulf Coast. However, shit happens (doesn’t it always?) and what we have now a body of water where feral hippos roam, a blight on the country and a danger to both the environment and the populace.

Here, have a blurb:

Language again: inclusion v erasure

(Please see update at end of post)

I often harp on language usage, and I’m often irked when authors use it thoughtlessly.¹

This post by Alexis Hall expands on a couple of reasons why we all should think a bit more about how we express ourselves:

And for that matter, LGBTQ+ has issues as a term because it implies the inclusion of groups of people who are often, in reality, excluded by the mainstream LGBTQ+ community. And, bringing this back to publishing, it’s especially problematic in romance because very often LGBTQ+ is used to basically mean m/m. And part of me says that the use of inclusive language is a necessary precursor to genuine inclusion, but part of me says that it can be used as a smokescreen to disguise to absence of that inclusion. And my poor word choice at the RITAs is a good example of this. I instinctively used the more general term and, in so doing, betrayed my own failure to recognise the achievement of a writer of non-m/m LGBTQ+ romance.

…

Because it does not need to be explained.

See edit at the bottom

I’ve been quietly fuming for weeks over the court house clerks who are refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, going against the US Supreme Court ruling, based on the clerks’ religious beliefs.