Q: Why the impulse to traverse old habits? / A: I believe in the refusal to explain.

The stories in this folio piece together alternate, speculative histories that reflect distinctly queer modes of life: often without a clear resolution, a “moral,” or a sense of “straight” logic

“What’s more difficult? Gay marriage or ghost marriage?”

Not just her former hands, but the whole scaffolding of the skeleton in front of her had become a Jenga tower whose crucial block had been pulled away from the bottom

when does / a door become / a door , as it opens / or when it closes , / revealing an entirety – its face / or a fixed movement / of its hinges , is that smiling / or saying goodbye , / moonlight / or memory.  

Looking far away, there was only the sign of the Doraemon Tea Shop. Like a borderless white pocket in a fourth-dimensional world, it could be as small or big as you wanted it to be, emitting endless bright light.

“Meth was Trainspotting and Dust of Angels. Taiwanese education had worked like a charm, and he had taken a step back from the idea. What else was out there for him to try?”

As I looked in the mirror, Master flexed His fingers against my skin, as naturally as a handler would lovingly caress their pet puppy.

The concrete tetrapods tempered the waves, and the space between them made room for love between boys.

“Discipline”, “Survey on Female Occupational Injuries in a Fishing Village”, and “Goddess Transformation”

When the epiphyllum buds reached peak bloom, petals everywhere began to fall. They began to fall like rain.

On the “impossible archive,” the historical and future queer imaginary of a “lesbian cultural archive” and Grandma’s Girlfriends 阿媽的女朋友

It didn’t bother him that he attracted, and was attracted to, people of the same gender—all of this felt perfectly natural to him.

There was a time, Abu says, before your great-grandmother, when water was blue because it was a bruise, when it could feel our hands like the skin of a fruit.

“I was interested in a coming-of-age story that wasn’t about running away from the domestic space but about burrowing and binding and rooting more deeply.”

Borders and exclusion are the flip side of identity. They are all components of the question: “Who belongs?”

The sounds of Taipei, from farting mopeds to bustling night markets, unfold through tracks by Joy Division, Asobi Sekksu, Dum Dum Girls and more

In the center of the plaza stands a bronze, 15-foot statue of the Chinese sage…In its shadow, a woman with a visor and clipboard is selling shuttle tickets to Foxwoods Casino.

Orhan Pamuk and Mo Yan, Noble Prize winners in Literature, were both writers-in-residence at the prestigious International Writing Program. An interview with IWP’s current director about one of the program’s founders, the remarkable Chinese novelist Hualing Nieh.

Qiu Miaojin—one of the first openly lesbian writers in ’90s post-martial-law Taiwan—committed suicide at the age of 26. What follows is an excerpt from her “survival manual” for a younger generation. With an introduction by translator Bonnie Huie.

So ironic, it’s not.

I checked out a space on Catherine and Madison, thinking that a Chinatown address would at least appease my dad.