Every day is a good day to celebrate and envision equality for all, like my little dog Pilot here. In 2023, our Pride celebrations and activism have urgent significance, so this week I’ve chosen three books that celebrate queer survival and joy.

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit about Carlotta by James Hannaham is set in and out of an upstate prison and Brooklyn in the 1980’s. The book opens as Carlotta, a trans woman, is about to go for a parole hearing after serving most of a 25-year sentence in a men’s prison. Parole is granted and she heads home on a bus. Arriving at the house where she grew up, she walks into an exuberant party with all the food, music, drinks, and dancing anyone could want. But the party isn’t for her homecoming — it’s for a dead man. Carlotta dismisses this mistake, at least on the surface, just as she dismisses any mention of her dead name as she grabs all the life she can on her first day out.

In a brilliant move, Hannaham ditches conventional punctuation and dialogue tags and blends first person and third person narration, allowing Carlotta’s thoughts and perspective to mesh with the voice of a cagey omniscient narrator.

The story and setting brought me back to my time as a public defender who was so often astonished by my clients’ reckless enthusiasm for life, even when life had shat upon them relentlessly. Carlotta is unforgettable.

Heaven by Emerson Whitney

I came to this book because I needed more of Emerson Whitney’s writing after reading an advance review copy of their soon-to-be-published memoir, Daddy Boy, which becomes available June 27, 2023. Both books are from the McSweeney’s imprint, and both are literary excursions that draw on queer theory, art theory, and personal experience.

Heaven diagrams Whitney’s complex relationships with their family’s women. The book opens with Whitney re-remembering a story she’d been told about one of their mother’s near-death experiences of getting sober. The two, mother and child, are estranged, but Whitney isn’t here to judge. On the contrary: “Everything I fear in her lives hot inside of me.” Just look at how “hot,” one little word in a little sentence, opens up meaning. This is a short book, but one where you’ll probably highlight or copy down a zillion phrases or sentences. The writing is that good.

When the beloved grandmother asks “do you think you’re like this because your mother loved your brothers more?” Whitney notes that “No one asks about the root causes of heterosexuality or cisgenderism.” This questioning of underlying assumptions is the sort of thing I live for, along with relentless logic. The book is rich in both.

The Sacrifice Zone by Sandra Gail Lambert

Saving the best for last — and fessing up, up front, that author Sandra Lambert is my friend — is The Sacrifice Zone, a cli-fi, sci-fi environmental thriller with wholly unique elements, like one family’s sticky bond with the land they live on between the Gulf of Mexico and a nuclear power plant. Some think it’s a jealous, malevolent bond, one that makes it impossible for the family to leave.

A worldwide environmental disaster unfolds as Vic, the main character, is interning at a newsroom. She’s one of the few members of her family who can tolerate being away from home for long, and she’s different from them in other ways, too. A polio survivor, she uses braces and crutches to propel her through the world, and she’s a visibly butch lesbian.

At her newsroom, she hears and feels a siren going off hundreds of miles away. There’s been an explosion at the nuclear plant near her home, where a new device, “World’s Ease,” was being tested. This new technology, touted as civilization’s great energy solution, turns out to be a weapon. Vic leans into the horror that will change her family, her homeland, and the world, as she and her cameraman inch closer and closer to the truth.

Avalailable as an e-book, or the serialized version on Substack. Oh, and I have three FREE (no credit card required) one-month subscriptions to Lambert’s Substack to give out, which means you can read AND listen to The Sacrifice Zone in addition to her other witty and insightful essays about writing, queerness, disability, publishing, and aging. Send me an email if you want one of those free subscriptions: michelejsharpe (at) gmail