Archive | Queer Matters
What with the Q&A: ‘Danish Girl’ Author David Ebershoff
I caught up with David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, about Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of gender reassignment surgery. This 2000 historical novel won a Lambda Literary Award and has been adapted into a film starring Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander.
LISA ROSMAN: Let’s first establish your resume. In addition to being the author of The Danish Girl and other notable books, until recently you have been the vice president and executive editor at Random House. But now you’re just going to focus on writing.
DAVID EBERSHOFF: That’s right.
LR: Don’t you like the way I say just? Like that’s just all you’re going to do!
DE: [Laughs] Yes, for a long time I had two careers and I decided it was time to scale back to only one.
LR: I remember reading in Publisher’s Weekly a few years ago about how you couldn’t really imagine not having a day job. What was the shift there? Continue Reading →
The Courage of Intimacy: ‘Carol’
Walking out of “Carol,” director Todd Haynes’s newest film, I had to laugh about our need to sneer at the past no matter how much we fetishize it. Progress is elliptical, not linear, though the LGBT community can be forgiven for temporarily forgetting this fact. This year alone we’ve achieved civil rights inconceivable only decades before–when AIDS patients were treated by the government as if they’d earned their fate, and simply being gay could deny us of our legal right to work, live, find shelter, and, of course, love.
Amid this unprecedented groundswell of mainstream acceptance comes Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 eponymous novel about a love affair between the titular married socialite and Therese, a shopgirl twenty years her junior. Originally published under a pseudonym and with a different title, the book not only reflects the obstacles facing a lesbian couple in the mid-twentieth century but the holistic confusion facing any woman coming of age – when the world claims her body and sexuality before she’s grown comfortable with them herself. Students of queer and feminist literature have long prized the novel’s precision and defiant optimism, and for good reason. It is a quiet tour de force that remains radical today. Continue Reading →