Contemporary Queer

Bodies: Letter from the Editor + Table of Contents

July 3, 2015July 6, 2015 Sage Nenyue

“If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the common saying in publishing. Considering this issue is Bodies, we decided to chill on that front. In this edition, we kept the shock out of shock value and let the words of our creators speak for themselves. Read More

On Reliquaries

July 2, 2015July 6, 2015 Keio Valentine

How many demands

Can you put on a body

Before it collapses under the stress? Read More

Flesh

July 2, 2015July 6, 2015 Brianna McNish

The body is an elusive mistress that betrays me in my moments of deference—not just wholly for the loveliness of curving hips and a man’s defining muscles, but for my own horror of admiring, and at times even hesitantly defying, media’s perception of beauty. I am not talking about my reverence for the aforementioned curves and muscles. I am not talking of media’s bias towards the lanky, the fair-faced; a celebrity’s airbrushed features glorified in the latest edition of a magazine—no. Since I was twelve, I burdened a strange endearance for the wide and plush (not curvy) bodies bereft from media, and grew to love those types of bodies unconditionally notwithstanding the lack of confidence in my own. Read More

feel myself.

July 1, 2015July 7, 2015 Joaquin Del Ray

lately my sex drive is totally rampant and out of control and I have no idea what it is. Read More

Volumes in Colour

June 30, 2015July 7, 2015 Shantel Perry

We as black women are blessed with an adorning of power. We are strong, because by being black we are forced everyday to go to war with the ideas that introduce themselves and proclaim who we are as black women before a word or formality ever slips out of our lips. Our skin speaks. We ask it to let our lips do the talking, but it cannot, its position coated in histories of melanin- is firm. Read More

Gay Macrophilia: A Sexual Fantasy of Great Proportions

June 29, 2015July 13, 2015 Sage Nenyue 3 Comments

I don’t always browse Tumblr, but when I do I’m always 1 click away from “weird sex tumblr” (WST)*. To see if you’re prone to this, go to Tumblr (it works best in a public place like a library or computer lab) and search for something innocent like “shoes”, “houses”, “Best anime to watch when you get stood up by your date again”. Within minutes of clicking around, you should find yourself in a place that will make you blush and hurriedly try to X out the screen as people start turning around and judging you. That’s when you know you’ve made it.

Anyway, I just so happened to have been transported to WST at home. Alone. And I stumbled on something that I found both erotic and fascinating and—if I were a nun—obscene. It was a man, the size of skyscraper, putting another man no bigger than his hand into his mouth. And that isn’t a euphemism for sucking cock.

Dude was legit about to devour little homie. Read More

sexualities

June 25, 2015July 7, 2015 Venus-Thomas Hinyard

on my arched back

lie the consequences and trajectories

of branding myself a slut

before anyone else leaks my body. Read More

CQ Interview: “Blown Covers” by Ryan Thomas

June 22, 2015July 7, 2015 Sage Nenyue

“Finally! I get to read more than the first few chapters!” I exclaimed when a close friend of mine (Ryan Thomas) sent me the novel he’d been working on since college. I start reading the first few pages of Blown Covers and then I only emerge when day has turned into night, weekend into Monday, and everything I loved has turned into ashes in my mouth because the main character–*doesn’t add spoiler*.

Blown Covers, the coming of age story that follows three teens sharing an apartment while working the same literary internship, is something I wish I had read when I was younger. Written in three languages (and translated into English), it takes us through the trials of David (White American-Enlgish), Chrstiano (Spanish-Spanish), and Lena (German-German) as they deal with their inner turmoil and each other.

I sat down with the author Ryan over coffee (several thousand miles apart) and asked him to talk more about the book and his role as its author. Read More