Untold Stories

 

So I am trying to get in a few more books before the end of 2020. I have 5 to go at this point to reach my goal of 104 books this year. (And I will write a blog post about my books in a few days.) I recently finished uncorrected proofs of Flowers by Night which I got from the site booksirens.com.

It is a story that looks at multiple characters creating their own found family in first half of the 19th century in Edo—the city that would become Tokyo. It looks at how gender/sexuality/ and disability were understood at the time.

It was interesting how the novel explores how at the time there was an understanding that gender and sexuality was on a spectrum while also providing context for why certain individuals were able to express that spectrum and others were not legally allowed to and it often came down to which class you were considered.

I always love to learn about cultures who have had (at different points in their history often before the western nations came with their very binary ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality and reframed how these cultures understood these concepts) more complex and nuanced understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.

This is why it is so important that writers dig deep into the histories of other cultures because there are often ideas that do not come back around into general cultural understanding until decades or centuries latter. We who are LGBTQ+ have always been here we just had many different names and understandings which means we need to pay more attention to see where we have been.