Last October, Lambda Literary named Stroke Book on its "Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Books" list.
In Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot (Fordham University Press, 2021), Alexander uses a medical crisis as the catalyst to explore existential questions in lyrical diary-like prose, including the nuances of being a queer person subject to medical intervention. His Creep Trilogy- which includes Creep: A Life, a Theory, and Apology(Punctum Books, 2017), Bullied: The Story of an Abuse (Punctum Books, 2021) and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir(University of Chicago Press, 2022) - is a series of memoirs that interweaves personal narrative with culture analyses about growing up queer.Īlexander’s books resonate with readers: They come at a time when queer people, despite finding new forms of freedom, are still making sense of a homophobic history. Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor's Professor of English and informatics at UCI, is author, co-author and editor of 22 books, spanning from computing studies to creative nonfiction. And often it is important to use more specific words, like "lesbian" and "trans" and "bi." But "queer" has persisted as an important term to mark how gender variant and non-heterosexual people have turned a hateful slur into a rallying term for activism and pride. With that said, not everyone in the LGBT community, even now, identifies with the term.
They reclaimed the homophobic insult as a term of power, a way to fight back against discrimination and oppression: 'We're here, we're queer, get used to it!' Many contemporary LGBT folk of a certain age remember distinctly the taunt and slur being used against them in their communities of origin.ĭuring the 1980s, however, LGBT rights activists, particularly those fighting the American government's refusal to address the AIDS crisis, began using the term "queer" as an umbrella term for LGBT people. Since the late 19 th century, "queer" has been a term of contempt used against gender variant and non-heterosexual people.