So Wrong, it's Gotta be Right - anthology out now!

I have something very different and special to announce today. In collaboration with Lizzette Monroe and Sigh of Erotically Inclined, in addition to 8 other authors from that community, I am launching an anthology of short stories:

👉 So Wrong, it's Gotta be Right: An Erotically Inclined Queer Love Anthology

Part 1: The Anthology

Answering the call of caede styles and the Queer Wrongs jam, we got together in May to start planning a collaborative release as a community. It's our first big project beyond just running a Discord server together, and I'm incredibly happy with it. The three of us designed the parameters and read and edited the entries, but, at Sigh's encouragement, I will proudly own that my project management and layout contributions were the foundation that let us build this thing together. Almost four months later, it's finally here: our solemn refutation that queer people should or even can make ourselves small enough for the bigots and censors.

The premise of the jam is such:

Gay rights! Trans rights! Queer rights! This jam believes in those. But this jam also believes in wrongs. Even the most "inoffensive" queer media has been getting policed and censored from all sides - fuck that. This event aims to celebrate stories that feature queer characters who are "bad" in some way, from regular people who make mistakes to quirky villains to morally bankrupt murderers.

And from that prompt, each of our authors contributed something special and different, giving us a wide range of heat, wrongness, complexity, and subject matter. From heartwarming first dates, to heartwarming regicide, this collection has something for everyone.

Download the anthology now — it's 100% free forever!

It has been an absolute delight and honor to join Liz and Sigh on the Erotically Inclined team and to put this thing together. It's a letter of love to freaks everywhere from a group of writers who refuse to let our spirits be broken.

Huge thanks are in order to my fellow admins, to our writers and community members, and to caede styles for organizing the occasion for this project.

The rest of this post is about my own entry in the anthology.

Part 2: What I Wrote And Why: Signified

Spoilers abound! Read "Signified" before continuing.

My own contribution to the collection is "Signified," a 5000-word vignette set in a college classroom. A rhetoric discussion section led by the Graduate Student Instructor Ted Parker is wrapping up, and the POV character, "Meer," is being goaded by her twin brother Beauby into hitting on Ted. Beauby leaves with the rest of their classmates, and Meer begins seducing Ted—passionate, revolutionary Ted, Ted whose recent beating at the hands of the campus cops during Occupy made him YouTube famous.

What follows is an erotica of errors. Ted's commitment to the cause comes into question; Meer's identity comes into question. Their dalliance is enjoyed, but then that enjoyment is cast into doubt.

The basic premise of a character doing gender cosplay in order to seduce someone they shouldn't be with is not new, and it's certainly "wrong" enough for the prompt. But it wouldn't be me if I wasn't using a piece of shitpost smut to do something I find interesting, and the main theme I'm playing with here is the fallibility of perception—and the fallibility of corrected perception.

A lot of trans narratives dig into this idea that there is something essential beneath the surface of the birth-assigned-gender, something that may not be tangible or rational but that the trans person somehow sees, as if by magic, in order to then make their way across that frightening ocean to a new identity. This trope is real enough for many of us, myself included, but it's also too tidy.

Ted, seeing Meer and immediately recognizing her as the "Jason" on his student roster—though he says nothing to indicate this until the final line of the story—must assume he is seeing the same thing Meer has seen: her transness, her blossoming as her true self.

And... that's not what's happening, because Meer is only performing femininity as part of a D/s game with Beauby. Throughout the encounter with Ted, Meer's deception is primary to her. It is a tool, a joy, a thrill when the encounter is going her way, and it's a shame, a weight, a curse when it is not. Walking away from the classroom, having feasted upon Ted's body, Meer is confident that Jason, the superficial, obvious version of herself that requires no magic to be seen, is her truest self.

Whether she's right or not is largely open to interpretation, but the story draws a parallel between her gender and Ted's activism.

We learn that Ted did not put himself on the line at Occupy out of principle. He did not face the pigs for his ideals. This admission, delivered to Meer early in the scene, feels like word-of-god, and Meer accepts it. When it comes back into question toward the end of the story, with Ted's more recent injuries giving away his continued dedication to Occupy, Meer has to struggle with the fact that she has used Ted's self-criticism against him. But more importantly she has to struggle with the truth beneath the lie beneath the lie: Ted's revolutionary reputation was built on false premises, but the "truth" beneath it served only to distort the realer truth of his revolutionary sincerity.

And that's tough for Meer to face, because if "Meer" is a false premise and Jason is the obvious "truth" beneath Meer, what if there's a realer truth beneath Jason that looks a lot like Meer?

Yes. My contribution to the anthology is a shitpost about semiotics, and not a particularly deep one.

So in a very real way, the "queer wrong" of my entry is simply the entry itself 😂

But hey. Somewhere in between the Lawful Good of the egg prime directive and the Chaotic Evil of treating every cis man like a boymoder, you might find the sophomoric thesis of "Signified": gender expression is a signifier that can lie twice.

You know what they say about two wrongs?

So wrong, it's gotta be right!

We opted not to have individual author acknowledgments in the anthology, preferring to give a broad thanks to our supports in general. I still want to name my dear friends, peers, and family who helped me in the process of getting "Signified" out there: Casmarlis, Lydia, AwkwardMD, Liz, and Sigh.

Looking for more reading? anita and AwkwardMD joined the Queer Wrongs jam separately from our anthology—as did I 🦊

• "The Color of Illusion" by anita
• Mad World by AwkwardMD
• "NetorACE" by Rambling Chantrix