Welcome to Litsy!

An amazing, thoughtful collection of letters sent back and forth between two queer filmmakers: one HIV positive, the other transgender. This is how much it touched my heart: I had to hug the book before I returned it to the library! If you loved Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, then pick this up.

Joynt recalls the time in 2001 when Kate Bornstein spoke at UCLA: "The thesis of my latest book is do anything you need to do in order to find a home and to stay alive. Just don't be mean."

When I finally resolved to come out, I remember wishing that I might wake up the next morning a towering hulk of a man, with the gritty details of my transformation already prepackaged into smoothly humorous sound bites. The reality, of course, is that transitioning begins as a brain game. Wait - for me, transitioning is always a brain game.

Chase quotes James Baldwin: "A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing–at least deliberately–to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions which the story leaves us."

Chase: The modern novel began a couple of centuries ago as a collection of letters. It was a hybrid form that could throw its arms around a private correspondence, and more importantly, the private life that this correspondence made possible, and then recreate it as a feature of public life. The novel was a new form of technology, and the long hours required to absorb it would help create the very interiority it was trying to describe.

Our dying selves emitted a very particular kind of light that I saw for the first time in the waiting rooms of Vancouver General, where an entire generation of men had turned into the walking dead. Today it's me with the facial lesions and the cane. Three months ago I was bench-pressing 400 pounds, now I can hardly get out of bed.
#AIDS #LGBTQ #queerbooks 💔
(Image from Hoolboom's site: http://mikehoolboom.com/)

"Making movies became a way to have a more creative relationship with my fear." -Hoolboom. Two #LGBTQauthors write back and forth in this thought-provoking book. @RealLifeReading
(Image from Hoolboom's site: http://mikehoolboom.com/)

I think my mom and I both recognize that our stories are no longer true in the way we tell them, but we rely on our scripts anyway. Perhaps we are rehearsing, or perhaps we are building a safe house with a sign on the door that reads 'All versions are fine here,' with a host who answers the door saying, 'I will love you anyway.'

This was such a powerful read! This book is constructed from letters written back and forth between two filmmakers - one of whom is transgender, the other is HIV-positive. They reflect together on the idea of a second life. Highly recommend! #transbooks #queerbooks #litsyAtoZ #letterJ @BookishMarginalia

This is an amazing read so far. Two filmmakers - one transgender, one HIV positive - communicate through letters about their lives, their art and various transitions they've made. Highly recommend! #transbooks #queerbooks 😍📚

I've never read anything by someone HIV-positive and I heard great things about this. You Only Live Twice book is a series of letters written between two artists about their first lives and second lives. The themes include transition, gender, sexuality, identity, art, family, and film. I'd recommend this to anyone whose interested in Canadian artwork, or to anyone who loves reading texts by people with a lot of passion.

What if we took in the scene from a distance, a telescopic distance even? What if the long shot reveal that the penis is, in fact, not the problem to be solved? What if it was not a requirement of public transition to be satisfied or excited? What if the only reliable narrative is one where the endpoint continually shifts and changes? Dysphoria, indeed.

Starting this #libraryread. Is #ratsoflitsy a thing yet? Meet Jack the rat! He loves to chew the spines of old library books.