Author and critic Ilana Masad joins “The Gaily Show” every third Friday of the month to share her queer book recommendations.
Masad, who holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska Lincoln, is the author of the novels “All My Mother’s Lovers” and “Beings,” the latter of which won this year’s Lambda Literary Award for speculative fiction. She also co-edited the anthology “Here for All the Reasons Why We Watch The Bachelor.”
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“Gay Bar: Why We Went Out” Explores Complex Spaces
The first recommendation is Jeremy Atherton Lin’s “Gay Bar: Why We Went Out,” a genre-blending memoir, travelogue, and history examining the complexity of gay bar spaces.
“It’s kind of a memoir travel log history all in one, doing that lovely thing that us queers like to do or we genre blend,” Masad said.
The book investigates how gay bars function as sites of both safety and longing.
“There is this nostalgia that I think a lot of people have for a place and time that maybe never existed in exactly the way that we feel like it did,” she said. “The Abbey, by the way, notoriously has a very complicated history, and it’s actually one of the things that Atherton Lin gets into in the book because they had some very, very racist policies, not official of course.”
Atherton Lin raises provocative questions about whether people go to gay bars “to be more gay or less gay in that space or something else altogether,” Masad explained. Atherton Lin also examines the concept of safer spaces and how desired danger fits into contemporary conversations about community gathering.
“He doesn’t have an answer, but what I like is that he’s asking these questions of how do we deal with these tensions of what we want from our spaces?” Masad said. “Do we want them to be safe? Do we want them exclusive? Do we want them to be open and welcoming? Do we want them to feel safe? Do we want them to feel a soup song of danger when we come in?”
“All City” Reimagines Utopia After Disaster
Masad’s second selection for August is Alex DiFrancesco’s dystopian novel “All City,” which centers on New York City after a devastating superstorm. The story follows diverse characters who take over an abandoned luxury condo and attempt to build a utopian community amid urban collapse.
“It’s very reminiscent of Hurricane Sandy and the horrors that were rocked after that when people didn’t really take it seriously,” Masad said.
The novel explores how marginalized communities organize themselves when traditional systems fail. Masad emphasized that DiFrancesco avoids romanticizing the process of creating alternative societies.
“Alex doesn’t present a utopia as something that you can just sort of fall into,” she said. “It takes a lot of work and planning and conflict and conflict resolution.”
The plot intensifies when art dealers arrive, seeking to acquire murals painted by a mysterious graffiti artist documenting the ruined city. The situation escalates when original building owners decide to reclaim their property now that it has increased in value—both because residents repaired water damage and because the building has become an artwork.
Masad connected this narrative to broader patterns in American history, noting how communities invest in neighborhoods only to be displaced once property values rise.
Susan Stryker Traces the History of “Gender”
The final book is “Changing Gender” by Susan Stryker. This auto-theoretical work combines memoir with scholarly research to examine the etymology and evolution of the word “gender.”
“She is one of the pioneers of trans studies in this country,” Masad said. “And she has written a new book called Changing Gender. And it is another book of auto theory, another sort of genre pioneered by queers as far as I know, where there’s some elements of memoir alongside theory.”
Stryker challenges a commonly circulated narrative promoted by conservative voices—that the word “gender” only became associated with identity and bodily experience in the 1950s through figures like John Money and Alfred Kinsey. Through archival research, Stryker demonstrates this timeline is inaccurate.
“There’s this sort of false story that is bandied about on the right and on the left, that it’s only from the 1950s, or so, that gender has been used either as synonymous with or related to sex,” Masad said. “And what Susan Stryker finds as she delves into archives is that first of all, that’s not true.”
The book traces gender beyond mere grammatical categorization, exploring how various languages have historically employed multiple gender systems. Masad highlighted Stryker’s analogy about how scholars understand their tools.
“Gender is a tool that they know how to use very well,” Masad said. “They know how to research, they know how to think about it, they know how to wield it. But it’s like carpenters wielding a hammer, you don’t have to know where the hammer came from. And Susan Stryker is like, where did the hammer come from though? How did it get built?”
Additional Listening
Do check out Ilana’s recent appearance on Ghostbox Radio, hosted by Greg Bakun, where she discussed her novel “Beings.” Listen everywhere you get your podcasts or watch it on YouTube.
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism whose work has been widely published. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is the author of the novels All My Mother’s Lovers and Beings, as well as the coeditor of the forthcoming anthology Here for All the Reasons: Why We Watch The Bachelor. https://www.ilanamasad.com/
