The Sapiosexual Love Letter Podcast

Dear Reader,

I have spent the last week processing a swell of primal rage over a comment tweeted by some right-wing asshat. This asshat was described as a business person who lost his recent campaign for public office, but I’ve forgotten his name and I’m not going to go looking for it because he doesn’t deserve the clicks. His tweet was something like, “People who support gender-affirming care for trans kids should be lined up against the wall and shot.” I probably am misquoting the first half of that sentence, but I pretty vividly recall the “lined up against the wall and shot” part.

This makes me feel a lot of things.

The first, easiest, most obvious knee-jerk thing is that I want this guy to die in a fire. Because fuck this guy, and fuck his gestapo ideology, and fuck his failed political campaign and all his future business endeavors.

But apart from that.

People sometimes use this sort of phrasing as if it’s purely rhetorical. Like, people who put mustard on french fries should be taken out and shot, hardy har har. But in fact, repeatedly throughout history, people actually have been lined up against walls and shot, or macheted or gassed or lynched or otherwise murdered, for their political beliefs, or for who they are, or who they love, or what they look like, or how they worship. Those are the primary reasons throughout history for lining people up against the wall to shoot them.

I can’t really write anything sensible about this. I keep chasing it around in the same circle, but this isn’t a dialogue. This is me reacting to someone scribbling swastikas on a street corner.

It does inspire me, though, to dig in and figure out what else I can do: to be a better trans ally, to support queer representation in books and other media, to be a more active and more useful advocate for issues important to the queer community.

Years ago I read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, and this bit stuck in my mind like sand in an oyster (boldface mine):

To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

I don’t want to get into the business of exchanging violence for violence. If it comes down to lining people up against the wall, I know which side of the guns I want to be on, and it is never going to be the trigger side, and it doesn’t matter who is up against the wall. And I don’t want it to come to that, for any of us. History has shown us what that road looks like. I would rather find a way to go somewhere else, toward a better goal, down a different road.

Here’s the poem that I wrote earlier this week, as I was thinking about all of this:

Love wins.

Love wins because you can't stop itYou can't stomp it outBecause love persistsLove finds love, attracts love, makes loveLove wins because love has gravityThe arc of the universe bends toward itLove wins because I say soAnd if you strike me to shut me upI'll turn my other cheek and say it againAnd if you cut out my tongue, I'll sign itAnd if you take my hands, I'll dance itAnd if you take this body, my ghost will shout itBecause love winsLove wins

So, I don’t really have a good segue from there to talk about books, except maybe that “love wins” definitely describes my taste in books, and also the one I want to talk about takes me back to the goofy nerd kid I was with an almost wrenching nostalgia. Or perhaps it reconciled me with the goofy nerd adult that I am.

Looking for Group by Alexis Hall is the story of a university student who falls for someone online who he thinks is a girl, who turns out to be a boy, and it turns out not to matter because he still really likes him. And the thing is, while I’ve never properly gotten into online gaming myself and have no direct MMO experience, I did spend a fair amount of time in close company with gamers. I also like to think that what my geekitude lacks in depth is made up in breadth, and also over the years I have spent probably an ungodly amount of time online. So in a very unexpected way, this book felt like sinking into a warm bath of pure homecoming.

We meet the characters online, through the guild application and chat dialogue where they first encounter each other, and then in their first, um, dungeon raid thingie. There’s a lot of gaming vocabulary which I didn’t especially stumble over reading, but which I’d be hard pressed to use back correctly in a sentence; there’s also a glossary at the back for the reader’s reference. I actually really profoundly enjoyed this aspect of the book. I also like the way that chat dialogue was represented, simulating the format of chat in a game, including the manner in which conversations can cut through each other depending on who’s talking to whom. Likewise, some of the action in the book takes place in the online world of the game that the characters are playing together, and some takes place in the real world, and I loved the mix, which of course is all taking place in the virtual space of the book itself.

This isn’t a super sexy book insofar as it’s all closed door, apart from some kissing. But it is absolutely breathlessly sexy in the way that it evokes being young and in a world shimmering with potential. (And the kissing is really lovely too.)

Particularly if you have any background with gaming or game development, or if you went through a phase of heavy chat usage or are otherwise steeped in game culture by osmosis—or if you don’t have a background in any of those things, but you are willing to bring your adaptable brain to pick it up as you go—then I highly, highly recommend this book.

One last note, I’ve been keeping up a twice-weekly cadence since I started this newsletter, but I’m finding that now I’m spending so much time thinking about what I’m going to write that it has started to take me away from actually reading. So I’m going to try dialing back my love letters to weekly, and maybe I’ll have some other silly art for you as well.

Take care.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

As my corner of the world teeters on the brink of spring, and as I am yearning to start getting outside in the sunshine, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about bodily joy—that species of physical joy in movement, in sensation, in exertion, even in exhaustion.

From a conventional “fitness” perspective, I am a fairly indifferent specimen. I’m reasonably strong, have good mobility and range of motion, and could probably walk 500 miles and then walk 500 more if the occasion arose. On the other hand, I’m a lousy runner (although I keep trying, mostly out of a perverse satisfaction in persisting in something that I am manifestly terrible at), and I have zero talent for any form of sportsball type activity. I mostly eat pretty well, but literally as I’m typing this, my Instacart delivery arrived with my Häagen-Dazs and potato chips and kettle corn, plus some actual groceries that I pretended that I needed.

So I’m not a typical fitness buff by any means, but I do enjoy learning about health and fitness and nutrition. In some ways, it’s an area that poses a unique intellectual challenge in that there is so much bad information, not just all the hot air in popular media but also a lot of very poor science. And even where there are scientists doing good work, they’re still faced with fundamental logistical barriers to running good experiments. On the flip side, running an n=1 experiment on yourself is highly accessible, so there’s daily opportunity to test your own hypotheses.

One of the fitness-ish resources I follow is Casey Johnston’s She’s A Beast, and she recently linked to an essay from 1992, Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body by Kathy Acker. At the start of that essay, Acker wrote:

During the past few years, I have been trying to write about bodybuilding.

Having failed time and time again, upon being offered the opportunity to write this essay, I made the following plan: I would attend the gym as usual. Immediately after each workout, I would describe all I had just experienced, thought and done. Such diary descriptions would provide the raw material.

After each workout, I forgot to write. Repeatedly. I...some part of me...the part of the ‘I’ who bodybuilds... was rejecting language, any verbal description of the processes of bodybuilding.

Acker goes into a meditation on the nonverbal language of the body. And ultimately she concludes with the thought, “As long as we continue to regard the body, that which is subject to change, chance, and death, as disgusting and inimical, so long shall we continue to regard our own selves as dangerous others.”

We do have fraught relationships with our bodies. I started by talking about joy in the body, but joy is certainly not everyone’s universal experience. It’s not uniformly my own experience—but it’s a prize I gladly seize when it comes around, whether that’s the feeling of a cozy nap, or the sun on my face, or the satisfying crackle of stretching out my shoulders after spending too long in front of my computer. I love running for about 10 seconds, and then I hate running; but I always enjoy the feeling of having run. I love the first bite of a really fine dish, the moment of sensory overwhelm when I am compelled to set down my fork and just sink into deliciousness, that small mouthful somehow becoming a full-body experience requiring complete focus and concentration.

This is another reason that fitness and nutrition make the most sense to me in the context of how one actually feels, as opposed to being hijacked in service of some set of arbitrary culturally-mandated standards. Because literally all of our feelings arise from the body. All your emotions, all your thoughts, are all generated by the meat puppet of your physical body. You need oxytocin to feel love. You need cortisol to feel exhilaration. You need nitric oxide to relax. The more that your body is in good working order, the better support for your feelings.

And the body rewards patience. That’s true in so many ways. All the best, most actionable advice about health and nutrition mostly boils down to: build good habits. Move your body, avoid eating things that make you feel like crap, and work on doing that a little better every day. And steadily over time, you’ll get a little stronger; you’ll move a little easier; you’ll feel better than you did before. Health is a long game that plays out over decades. Barring acute injury, it’s your small consistent choices that will have the most impact.

You know where else the body rewards patience? Where else joy in the body leads? Yeah. Bow chicka bow wow.

I feel like we don’t usually talk about “sex” and “patience” in the same frame. Maybe in pro-abstinence education? Obviously that’s not where I’m headed with this. But I do think there are a couple of ways that patience can be a virtue when it comes to sexy times.

At the outset, there’s the opportunity for admiration and longing and pining. This is certainly a double-edged sword because unrequited admiration is definitely a drag, and longing never put to proof is what turns one into J. Alfred Prufrock. Yet there is a lot to be said for being a little storm-tossed on the way to falling for someone, or enjoying a long, slow burn as a relationship ignites.

Then in the act of intimacy, there’s racing headlong into pleasure versus the slow tease. There are benefits to either approach, to be sure. But I think the latter tends to get short shrift in pop culture representation—for one thing, you can cinematically represent overwhelming passion and still keep an R rating. Romance novels include much better representation of the dynamic of one lover patiently, painstakingly taking the other apart.

I’m also going to circle back to that idea of the unspoken language of the body. I think what Acker touched on with her essay on bodybuilding likewise carries over to sex, that there is a realm of physical expression that can be inherently experiential and very hard to verbalize, at least in the moment, at least for many people. And this is another place where patience has value: in letting your feelings be what they are and taking the time to get to know them; in letting your brain catch up to articulating a need where your body is subsumed in feeling; in paying attention to your partner’s signals as you go.

There are many lovely examples of very sexy patience in romance novels, but I’m going to pick An Unseen Attraction by KJ Charles as one to highlight. This is the first book in her Sins of the Cities trilogy, set in Victorian London. The first book centers on a lodging-house keeper, Clem, and one of his boarders, Rowley, who has the taxidermy shop next door. And both of them are such charmingly tender characters that it’s hard for me to keep in mind that, oh yes, there’s also a brutal murder mystery that lands on their doorstep, and arson and threats and danger, and also a perfectly appalling badger styled after Hermes the messenger god, which isn’t a crime per se but ought to be.

Both Clem and Rowley had pretty shitty childhoods for extremely different reasons. And they are so remarkably gentle with each other. Clem is a bit neurodivergent and has a hard time with new things, and Rowley is very risk-averse. And so they have this charming slow burn at the start, enjoying each other’s company and trying to understand whether the other might, maybe, perhaps be interested in anything more. Then as they get intimate, the way that dynamic of patient generosity is translated into the bedroom is just a pure delight.

Also, the mystery part of the story is dynamite. And the rest of the trilogy, just so, so good. Highly recommend.

One more little adventure in the area of books and patience: I made my first attempt at bookbinding this weekend.

What happened is, a fellow fan of gorgeously-written smut recommended the story sturm und drang on AO3. It is an original novella-length “explicit gay goethe pastiche” and just absolutely delightful. Speaking of yearning and pining and passion held on the brink. It doesn’t actually get outright sexy until about 80% of the way through, at which point it gets very sexy; but before that, it’s all just being swoony and storm-swept in the Kentish countryside.

So, since it’s an online fic, there is no copy to purchase, but having read this an unseemly number of times over the past couple days, I thought, hmm, I guess I could print it out myself? Which turned into messing with page formatting and looking at bookbinding hacks, because that has always intrigued me. I decided that I didn’t have the patience to try to figure out how to print proper signatures to do a fully sewn binding, so I just created a simple 2-up layout and printed the pages single-sided, then did a glued binding. I added a ribbon, because why not, and then made a flexible hardbound cover out of scrap cardboard and canvas. I didn’t have any sort of proper press to hold things together, so I used stacks of books. They’re all going to be on the shelf together; they might as well get to be friends up front.

That’s all from me. Hope you’re well. I think now I’m going to go get some ice cream and read my fancy new book.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

You ought to know that this is shaping up to be a more regular correspondence than I have managed to keep up in … well, ever. In fact I have a very long history of being a very poor pen pal, or returner of phone calls, or replier to emails. Also a very inconsistent blogger and a non-finisher of all manner of art and craft project.

On the other hand, in my professional life, I’ve built a reputation as a person willing to take on projects and see them through. And when I am speaking with colleagues in a coaching or mentoring capacity, I generally lean hard into the importance of follow-through on project opportunities—and that even if nothing goes as planned, you should still look for ways to distill what you learned along the way, which you can then point to as a result. (It’s not a disaster—it’s a key learning!)

So in my personal life, I don’t mind washing out on projects and do so all the time; but in my professional life, I am result-oriented. I thought I was going to wind that up with some particularly clever insight, but I think it’s simply that we show up differently under different circumstances. Yep.

One of the rules that I try to follow in my professional life is identifying “one good reason.” I can’t recall exactly who I got this from, but the idea is that if something is genuinely worth doing, you should be able to identify one good reason for doing it, which fully stands on its own. There might be multiple reasons for doing it, but you should be able to pick one and have it be worth doing on the strength of that one reason alone. If instead you are in a situation where there are a bunch of middling reasons to do a thing, but there isn’t one solid stand-alone reason, then it’s probably not worth doing. Even if you have a dozen well-it-could-be-helpful-with reasons, that doesn’t add up to one actual good reason.

In my personal life, I suppose sometimes I take that approach, but it’s probably at least as often that I follow the rule of “no reason.” As in, often it’s worth doing things just because you want to do them. And I think we fool ourselves into habitually thinking that we ought to have a proper reason for doing things, when really that’s a cultural hang-up. Rationality becomes the brain’s spin doctor, which we use to justify ex post facto why it is that the thing we want to do is also the rational or correct thing to do. But I think it’s more honest—both emotionally honest and intellectually honest—to admit the extent to which we do things because we want to, because they feel right. The rational mind is a great tool for talking yourself out of doing something rash, or for applying knowledge and experience to override naïve assumption; but to use that rational capacity to tell yourself a story about how clever you are for doing something you want to do anyway is a bit self-righteous and masturbatory.

And people feel remarkably differently about things. Which, I’ve got to say, I find endlessly fascinating.

When I was in my first year of law school, a friend and I were talking about a contract case we’d just read, which was used to compare different remedies for breach. In the case, the plaintiffs had hired a home builder to construct their dream house, and their building plans specified a certain type of expensive, highly energy efficient window that was to be used. And then the window installer put in cheaper, less efficient windows. So, what’s the remedy? To me, it seemed obvious that it would be adequate to make a monetary award, calculating the difference in value based on the cost of the windows and the expected difference in energy bills over time. To my friend, it was equally obvious that the only fair solution was to remove the inferior windows and install the correct windows. And I think some of that had to do with the fact that at the time I was a 20-something renter who came from a very DIY, make-it-work upbringing, and she was a 30-something homeowner with multiple experiences working with contractors on home improvement projects.

And it’s not just that our feelings can vary based on our different experiences; our very perceptions can be fundamentally different. Color vision is a great example of that. Some people are colorblind. There’s also evidence that rarely people may be tetrachromats, having four types of cone cell for color perception instead of the usual three. So if you line up a person with red-green colorblindness, one with “normal” color vision, and one with tetrachromacy, and you show them the same scene, what they see will both be informed by what they focus on based on habit and experience but also fundamentally by how they’re processing color.

I think that brings me around to what I really want to talk about, which honestly is always what I want to talk about, which is love.

It’s fair to say there’s sometimes a bit of an alphabet soup issue in the LGBTQQIAA+ community, and some internal squabbling around evolution and application of terminology and so forth, but allow me to just stand back a moment and marvel at the richness and texture of human experience for which there is all this blossoming vocabulary. Because it takes one person saying, “gee, I love those red-purple flowers,” and another saying, “aren’t those blue? I see blue” before we can even start to understand the fundamental variations in perception that inform our experiences. Words matter. Articulating our experiences matters.

And how we feel and give love is one of the most foundational aspects of the human experience. That’s how we function within families and communities, at the most basic level. The love we receive as children, and how we see relationships operating around us, all shapes how we learn to give love and form relationships as we grow and get out into the world. Culture shapes how we think about who is worthy of love, or how to find love, or what love is supposed to look like.

So what I really want to tell you—and perhaps this is my “one good reason” for this entire epistolary book review project—what I really want you to know, and to feel as you read this, is this: that the world is full of love, and you are worthy of love, and the love that you have to give is beautiful and precious and a goddamn miracle.

I also want to circle back to some comments that I made in my Sunday letter, which were about my pet peeve of lazy representations of women in fiction but, in hindsight, which I made in such a lazy way as to carelessly throw shade an entire subgenre. Who being lazy now, Beas?

As a reader, generally I prefer to focus on what I like about what a book is trying to do, and I’m even willing to make up a little reconstructive headcanon to bridge the gaps. But of course, I do have some firms dislikes. For instance, I generally avoid books where the dramatic tension arises from one or both characters stupidly or selfishly lying to each other. I can handle a character being put in the position of needing to lie, or irresistibly feeling like they need to lie, but it has to be for larger plot reasons, not just to prolong the conflict. (Even better if at the big revelation, the other character comes back with, “Well, yes, obviously you were lying, dingus” or something equally anticlimactic.)

Another dislike for me is the use of a strawman allegorical object to score some moral point that doesn’t actually inform the characters or the story in any meaningful way. So for instance, I recently read a story where one main character was a scientist who worked in a lab in which women were very underrepresented, and she had an older male colleague who subjected her to crappy chauvinist comments and was disrespectful of her work. And having written that sentence, I guess you can see why, uh, I’m not sure why this gets played for laughs? And it’s not like the bozo colleague had an important role in the story; he was just there to make a point about women in STEM fields facing challenges. And the thing about that is indeed, there are a ton of challenges faced by women in STEM fields, and for the most part they’re much more complex and thorny than straightforwardly objectionable chauvinist behavior from an archetypical Grumpy Aging Misogynist colleague. Like, pay disparity or unconscious bias in publication or in hiring or in tenure committees.

The flip side of this is that I really like to see important issues explored or illustrated or deconstructed in genre writing, in the context of the story. An example of a novella that does this really well is Cat Sebastian’s A Little Light Mischief, wherein a pickpocket-turned-lady’s-maid and an impoverished-spinster-turned-lady’s-companion pair up to right wrongs and steal things. And it’s just very well done. It’s a story about the actual specific characters figuring out how to navigate their own lives with autonomy under a challenging set of constraints—figuring out what it is they want and how they can go about getting it—and a lot of that has to do with the ways that the world they live in is hostile to women, and there’s some really good illustration of what allyship among women can look like, and how internalized classism can inform women’s relationships with each other, and what it looks like to seize agency using one’s own unique skills and gifts. And it does all this while also being a great story about women who dig each other. Just *chef’s kiss* so good.

Romance novels are all about relational dynamics, so as a genre, this is prime territory for exploring issues of justice and cultural complexity. We use stories to learn and explore, try things on, experiment with alternate realities. When I was a kid I used to play dress-up with clothes. I think now I mostly play dress-up with stories.

To play and to love—I think that’s what we’re here for. I suppose maybe I am results-driven after all. And the result is love. Love is the point. I wish I could spit in the eye of any tyrant who says otherwise. Maybe I can’t do that, but at least I can write you this little letter.

Hope you’re well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I don’t have a proper book review for you today, and I’ll tell you why. The short answer is, I found I didn’t really want to keep reading the book I was reading. But the long answer (because you know there’s gonna be a long answer) is really about my expectations as a romance reader, including how characters are drawn and what sex-positivity looks like to me.

The book I’m not-reviewing is Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake. It’s an f/f romance with a solid premise. Delilah Green is a photographer whose career is starting to come together in New York, and she goes back to the town where she grew up to photograph her stepsister’s wedding (pressured into it “with a guilt trip and a five-figure check” which to me sounds like a highly privileged way to look at getting well paid to do a job, but whatever). Claire Sutherland is a single mom and one of the stepsister’s lifelong best friends. Sparks fly, hijinks ensue, et cetera.

And ok, I have a confession to make: I have a long and disappointed history of not especially enjoying lesbian romances. And this has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the absolutely fucking relentless pressure of what E.M. Forster once described as the title of Eternal Woman, with a modern twist. Because any time you have an an author getting all self-conscious about the fact that they’re writing Women Characters, or for a Woman Audience, then almost inevitably you get this thread of Heroine Overcoming Symbolic Hurdles of the Patriarchy. And I only have a little bit of receptivity to that before it makes me tired in my soul. I should say, this isn’t an issue limited to lesbian romance writing; this comes up all over Romancelandia. It just annoys me the most in lesbian romance, where you get the added twist of stories that are gunning hard for Overtly Transcending the Patriarchy, which is effectively the same thing but on a meta level. Whereas I’m really just looking for a story about women who dig each other.

But in fairness, that was not specifically my problem with Delilah Green. I’m not sure whether the story takes a turn through such territory or not because I didn’t make it past chapter 2 (or wherever specifically the Kindle sample cuts off).

The book starts by Delilah waking up at 2am to her phone ringing, in a strange apartment in bed with a woman whose name she can’t remember, and she spends the opening chapter mentally thumbing through L-names. Clearly this is meant to be funny as it also illustrates her free-wheeling don’t-tie-me-down lifestyle, but I would have liked her better if she’d felt at least a little awkward about it.

Tangent here, and it’s story time. I once did a summer internship with a crew of fellow interns. I don’t remember most of their names. There was another woman, and a guy from New Jersey who raised some eyebrows with his casual jokes about his cocaine habit, a very trim, clean-cut guy named Carl, and a slightly stockier, devil-may-care guy named Clark. And Clark and I developed a bit of a flirtation, and near the end of my stint in the internship, we hooked up. This was pre-Netflix, but it was definitely in the vein of Netflix and chill. Except that of all the bizarre choices, for some reason I picked Memoirs of a Geisha. Helpful tip: that is not a movie to make out to. Anyway, the evening went on, cue the violin crescendo and footage of fireworks, and then there we were, lying together in the lamplight like, well, probably like a couple of beached walruses. And he turns to me and says, “So I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I was hoping we could just be cool about this at the office, yeah?” Which are definitely the sweet nothings anyone would want to hear in the afterglow. And I tartly replied, “Gee, I dunno, I was thinking I would get a button made that says, I had sex with Carl.” And he looked at me, brow furrowed just a little, and he said, “Clark.” And I laughed because it was hilarious. Awkward, but obviously hilarious.

So, if I were staggering around some strange woman’s apartment at 2am looking for my pants while I answered an unwanted phone call, I can say from a place of some confidence that I too might fail to remember said woman’s name. But I’d at least feel a little awkward about it, and to me the awkwardness just makes it more funny.

Then in chapter 2 of this book we meet Claire, who is out having drinks with another friend, who is trying to get her to find someone to hook up with. And here too, this scene is meant to be a cute introduction to these colorful characters, with the friend amusingly shouting out to the bar, hey, who wants to sleep with this gorgeous lady, because humiliating your friends and exposing them to sexual harassment is just the height of a fun night out; and then Claire blushing furiously as she admits she hasn’t had sex with another person in, gasp, two years. And up to this point I was still willing to roll with the story, but then I hit a bit of a “wait, what?” that I just couldn’t come back from. The friend makes a joke about Claire’s vibrator being very, very tired, and we get this:

Claire laughed but she couldn’t deny it. She’d had to charge her vibrator’s battery at least twice in the past month.

And this just took me straight out of the story, because then I had to spend a few minutes thinking through the comparative battery life of different sex toys, and what exactly two charges in a month is supposed to imply. Clearly the text implies that’s a lot, but that really depends on the vibrator, doesn’t it? I think I can safely say this is the first time I hit a back-to-reality road bump of physical plausibility based on sex toy battery life.

The net effect of the first couple chapters was a high degree of wanting to be sexually carefree and sex-positive, but coming across in way that was actually, to my reading, kind of judgy and sex-negative. I think opinions could differ about this; I think someone else might read this in its intended spirit and find it all light-hearted and snarky and funny. Maybe another day I’ll pick it up again for another try. But for now, let’s get back to talking about vibrators.

I really enjoy, in a warm-fuzzy way, mention of sex toys in romance writing. Because people read romance in part to learn about sex, and so it’s nice to see positive representation of sex toys, which are safe and fun and never forget your name or judge you for how many times you charge the battery. Toys are still more likely to come up in stories that are at least a little bit kinky, but I like that the trend in the genre is to be more inclusive of sex toys for everyone, including prostate toys and dildos and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

The weather this weekend was gorgeous. I spent it alternately out walking and then coming back in to nap on the couch with my cat. I think I logged a solid six hours as a kitty lounge pillow this weekend.

That’s all the news from here. Hope you’re well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I started writing about burnout and self-care, and the more I wrote, the more I thought, “No, this is garbage, no one needs to read this.” So we’re not doing that this week.

I really love that about writing. I like that about the process. I like that later I can go back, read what I wrote, and think, “Huh, is that really what I thought I think? Well, I’m not sure I agree with that at all.” Some people seem to commit harder to the thoughts they’ve expressed, but I think I swing the other direction—that having expressed an idea, I find it easier to interrogate it, pull it apart, and if it doesn’t stand up, to let it go.

So instead, I’m going to share a poem, sort of on-theme for this newsletter:

Ages of My Life If It Were Made of Romance Novels

Seventeen.There is this new thing called the internet, and there is a boy on the other end of it.You meet in a chatroom. Soon you talk every day. He is funny. He is so smart.He teaches you how to say things like lol and *cries*.He has a girlfriend.He tells you this, in chat, and you stare at your screen, mortified,and then he says, “But something happened to me a few weeks ago”and you are determined to be incurious, be cool, and you say,“Oh, what was that?”and he says, “I met someone online…”Suddenly you are breathless, literally breathless, on a precipice of wordsin your ladybug pajamas in your dark bedroom, hands over the keyboard, frozen and electric.Yes. He means what you think he means. He adores you. It feels just like all the stories said it would.He breaks up with the girlfriend.He starts telling you, As you wish and Ditto. And then later, I love you.You take a plane across the country, and you meet.You go to a movie theater to see The Matrix, and he drives you down all the back roadsin a place like none you’d seen before, all dusty bluffs and brittle grasses, stark and beautiful.Back at his house you watch The Fifth Element and make out during the opera scene.If this were a romance novel, he would have the perfect kiss.His dad makes you steak and sautéed mushrooms and your first artichoke.You can still taste it. You can still feel the pull of leaves between your teeth.

Nineteen.You are four thousand miles from home, living on rye pastries and egg butter.An artistic free-spirit adopts you as a friend.She gives you a makeover before a party,an hour in a close intimate bubble, fingers delicately pressedagainst your cheek as she studies your eyelashes,applies one more coat of mascara.Her breath is sweet as she leans in closeand gently blows a stray eyelash from your cheek.You talk about writing and art and the world, andshe is all passion and animation, soft curls and green eyes.If this were a romance novel, she would have broken things off with her absent fiancéand you would have taken her out for terrible pizza and pear cider.You would have kissed her under the cold clear sky.

Twenty.There is this boy from your writing workshop.You are friends. He has a girlfriend.You spend a lot of time together. You are just friends.He has long hair and tapered punk sideburns. He’s a photographer.He breaks up with his girlfriend. You are a supportive friend.You come down with a stomach bug and miss class,and he brings you soup, and you sit together.And you trace your fingers across his knuckles, and down the back of his hand,and across his palm, and back again, and he lets you.You have no idea what you’re doing. There is no thought to this. It’s just a perfect moment.And then a few days later, you go out on a dateat a Mexican restaurant, and you get the pollo con mole,and later you kiss. Another time you spend the night.You cook for each other.You move in together.He writes and writes. He is so beautiful, this tender-hearted punk.He takes you mountain biking, and you move to the desert.On your birthday, it snows, and he takes you for a cold picnic lunchto the top of the red-rock mesa, to look out on the valley through the snow.When he turns the car off, you can hear the snow falling, in one long hush.

Twenty-four.You are just starting law school. You are new in town.You meet a guy online. You hook up.You start dating.He’s kind of an asshole, but you like him.One of his tattoos is for the Ironman he did two years ago. He’s training for a triathlon now.He gets you lifting weights. He’s a good lifting partner,but he’s kind of a shit boyfriend.You like him anyway.You meet his family. You’re not sure you like them.He meets your family. They’re not sure they like him.You talk about moving in together. You find out he’s messing around with another girl online.This is not a very good romance novel.

Twenty-five.She’s good friends with one of your friends.You think she has a girlfriend, which perversely makes you feel safe flirting with her,since clearly it doesn’t mean anything.If this were a romance novel, it would turn out to mean something.Maybe that day you’re sitting in the back of the lecture halland under the table you pull up the hem of your skirt to show her the satin elastic top of your thigh-high stockings(and just why are you wearing stockings to your class on tax law?)and she says, Oh Jesus.You hold that oath close as a kiss.

Twenty-seven.You meet at a party. You are not a good guestbecause you just spend the whole time talking to this one guy.He’s a former video game developer. He’s going back to grad school for math. He is adorable.You give him your email address, and he asks you out for lunch.When he walks you back to campus afterward,you kiss him on the cheek, and you have never seen a boy look so delighted.You want to see that again.It’s almost too easy. You both fall so fast.You have plans to visit a friend across the country, and on your long drive back,he spends two hours on the phone with you, helping you stay awakeso you can be safe, so you can get home to him.He has a colorful cast of friends, and you love them.He has a colorful Polish family, and they love you.You move in together, into an attic apartment that is all angles and gables.You find that he keeps eating all your candy,so you start buying dark chocolate for yourself because he doesn’t care for dark chocolate,and he objects, and then he eats the dark chocolate anyway.If this were a romance novel, this would be cute,and then he would start buying the chocolate.(But then, if this were a romance novel, you wouldn’t be secretly in love on the side.)(I mean, not in love. He’s just a friend. He has a girlfriend. It was always impossible.)(He encouraged you to go out with math guy. He’s so happy for you, to see you happy.)(You dance at his wedding.)(You still hang out. You have rambling conversations spiked with fire and laughter.)(He drinks too much, but he’s trying.)(It’s possible you shared some revealing details over drinks. Never mind.)(He only kissed you the once. It was practically chaste.)(No one ever needs to know about any of this.)

Thirty-one.You break things off with the plumber you’ve been seeing.You say, “I think I just need to quit dating for a while.Really I’d like to meet someone with no romantic expectations at all,maybe through a friend or at work or something.”And then it turns out that’s what happens.And yeah, it makes for a pretty good romance novel.

Forty.I’m not sure how post-apocalyptic dystopian mayhemis going to work as a romance novel.Let’s find out.

*****

Alright, switching gears:

Today’s actual novel to share is The Forgotten Dead by Jordan L. Hawk. This was a fun read about a professor of parapsychology teaming up with a band of ghost-hunters to confront a haunted house with a traumatic connection to the professor’s own childhood. The ghost hunter side of the story was very well drawn, with compelling details about aspects like how to responsibly explore an abandoned house. The professor, Nigel, is very likeable and makes a plausible professor of parapsychology; I would’ve liked to see a little bit more of what that entails, though I thought the book still worked without it. (Hoping we get more of Daily Life of a Parapsychology Professor in the next book.) The lead of the ghost-hunting team, Oscar, is also very likeable, and I thought there was an interesting balance achieved in creating a character who is a natural medium, who was raised to reject what he saw and live in fear that he was going crazy, who nonetheless picks up a hobby exploring abandoned sites for potential hauntings. And then when Oscar is ready to start believing what he sees, I really loved the way that Hawk uses Oscar’s college football career as a skillset to draw on for mediumship. Unlikely transferable skills are just candy to me.

From a heat-level/intimacy perspective, this was downright chaste, in a way that I found consistent with the characters and story. This relationship starts on the footing of Nigel securing the professional services of Oscar’s team, and both characters are very aware of not wanting to violate professional boundaries. And then there’s a night when the whole team needs to stay at a motel, and I have to say, I sort of loved it that Hawk had the characters sharing a room that actually had two beds. Like, this would have been an easy moment to pull an “only one bed,” and maybe I’m overthinking this, but I just thought it ended up feeling like a cute nod to that trope without actually taking it that direction. So, there does end up being a very sweet relationship arc and with a little cuddling and kissing, but no outright steamy bits.

The Forgotten Dead releases April 15, 2022. I’m already looking forward to the next book.

The snow has been melting where I am, and it’s starting to maybe feel like spring? In this corner of the world, one learns not to pin too much hope on March, but it smells like mud and the birds are singing like crazy, so hope comes calling.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I’m going to start by telling you a love story. It will sound familiar. Maybe I should say the love story. It goes like this: Boy meets girl. (Or, person meets person.) They find that they like each other. They kiss. They fall in love. This love is the most important thing in the world. They have sex and get married (or they get married and have sex). They settle down, raise children, stick it out through good times and bad. Cue sunset. Roll credits.

You recognize this story, yes? It is the amatanormative love story of the Western world, for the age we live in. There is nothing inherently wrong with the story itself. Broadly speaking, it’s kind of nice. The problem isn’t with the story; the problem is the normativity part — that is, treating it like a prescription.

It’s possible that you can think of a couple whose lives together can actually be described using the above story. But you can think of more counter-examples, right? Most people’s lives don’t actually look like this. Yet culturally, we keep telling this story. Because it sounds so nice.

Taking this as the normative standard is at the heart of a lot of harmful bullshit. It’s exclusionary and erases people’s real experiences of life and relationships. Perversely, because it treats love and intimacy as a script to follow, it also contributes to sexual harassment and sexual assault. And since any sex outside this narrative is morally suspect, then discussion of anything outside this narrative is also also suspect, leading to paranoid nonsense about sex education, not to mention the “don’t say gay” bullshit we’re seeing in Florida. So, no need to have any uncomfortable conversations about consent and boundaries and safety and preferred practices. There’s a script to follow. Just stick to the script, and you’ll be fine.

This is, fundamentally, stupid.

I don’t mean it’s stupid to have cultural narratives. That’s just the human experience. But it is deeply unfortunate that we let ourselves be trapped by these narratives. And even more so, it is shitty and terrible for one set of people to demand to impose their narrative on others.

Amatanormative expectations miss the reality that:

* Some people don’t want to get married. Some people don’t want kids. These are valid choices.

* Some people don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction — maybe not at all, maybe only where they have a strong emotional bond, maybe something else. A-spec identities and experiences are diverse. Relationships do not have to fit a particular mold to be valid.

* Many, many people have experience with multiple relationships—in the form of successive relationships. It’s not necessary to devalue previous relationships just because they turned out to be impermanent. Likewise, ethical nonmonogamy is a totally valid choice. For that matter, it’s healthy to have other platonic relationships outside your intimate relationships. It’s ok to have multiple “most important” people in your life.

* Cultural prescriptions for relationships can’t tell you anything about what actually does it for you in the bedroom. Adhering to the amatanormative myth is no guarantee of a satisfying sex life.

This being The Steamy, that last bullet point is the one I want to dig into further, starting with the question: What is sex, anyway? That is, what are we talking about when we talk about sex?

There’s a general pop culture school of thought that “sex” means penetrative sex between partners. This also results in some very lawyerly interpretations of what counts or doesn’t count for the purpose of virginity, for the purpose of cheating, for the purpose of calculating the seriousness of unwanted advances.

And all that lawyering around the definition of sex? It’s nonsense. Sex isn’t fixed as any one specific act or function. Sex is what you do toward getting off. And if you’re getting off on something, then it needs to be consensual for everyone involved.

And if sex is “what gets you off,” then whatever you prefer is valid. The negotiation of desire is between you and your partner. Nobody else in the world can have a damn thing to say about it.

It’s just plainly true that people have complex desires, and different physical needs, and of course it’s no good demanding to constrain them to an artificial roadmap of what sex and sexual fulfillment have to look like. Because then people get so confused about why they’re unsatisfied, assuming that the problem is with them, or with their relationship, rather than with the story they’re trying to adhere to.

Here are some more true things about sex:

* Most orgasms with partners are asynchronous. There are no extra points awarded for coming at the same time as your partner. Taking turns, or getting your partner off and then yourself, or vice versa — it’s all good.

* Most people don’t orgasm from penetration alone. It’s cool if you do, but there’s nothing at all wrong with you if you don’t. Some people find g-spot / p-spot orgasms more achievable with direct, focused stimulation rather than through penetrative sex. A lot of people prefer to orgasm in other ways.

* Not all women enjoy receiving penetrative sex; plenty of women enjoy giving penetration. Plenty of men enjoy receiving penetrative sex; not all men enjoy or have a preference for giving pentration. Non-binary and agender and non-gender-conforming folks likewise have varying preferences.

* Everyone’s body is different, and I realize that’s a truism, but consider for a moment that it’s actually a pretty evident literal, physical truth. If Person A and Person B have different body shapes, then the nerves and muscles in Person A’s body are necessarily going to be arranged a bit differently than the nerves and muscles in Person B’s body. So honor the configuration of your own body, and do whatever it is that best gets you off, based on your body’s needs.

* Masturbation is healthy and is a great way to explore what you like. Having some ideas about what you like is going to make for better sex with partners.

* Communication is vital to good sex. That includes being able to verbalize “yes” and “no” and “right there” and “let’s try the purple one this time” and especially “hm, that isn’t really working for me, can we try this instead?”

It’s a myth that good sex requires being swept away by spontaneous desire, with every touch and every motion magically in sync. If you’ve had a fair share of good sex, then you’ll know full well the extent to which it can be messy and ridiculous. To borrow from Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It,

I mean, when you think about what you’re actually doing … let alone what you sound like … it makes you wonder how anybody can videotape themselves … although I’m up for that if you are.

So, take this blessing to go forth and have the relationships that are right for you, and be intimate however is right for you.

And with that, I want to talk about The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian. This is a m/f romance between bisexual characters, which for me as a bi/pan person just puts huge goddamn hearts in my eyes. The book follows The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, picking up two characters where they were left at the end of that book. While each book does stand on its own, I do think it’s probably helpful to read them in order for context and to avoid spoilers.

Marian Hayes is a sharp-edged woman who made a bad bargain in her marriage to the Duke of Clare, not in the least because it turns out to be invalid due to bigamy. Rob Brooks is an experienced highwayman who has been living the Robin Hood lifestyle since boyhood and is determined to keep it that way. When Marian’s plans for redress against the Duke go spectacularly sideways, the only person she can turn to is a charming criminal she can’t trust, and she and Rob skip town together.

This book is such a great romp. Both Rob and Marian are extremely likeable in their very different ways, with Rob the sunshine to Marian’s determined grump. It’s a fun adventure within the four corners of the book — but the other thing I loved about this story was it’s repeated defiance of amatanormative conventions.

Marian is the mother of a months-old little girl, and Marian’s feelings about motherhood are deeply ambivalent. She was dangerously sick through her pregnancy, and she experiences depression and has a hard time connecting with her child after the birth. She’s very aware that another pregnancy would likely be equally dangerous and potentially would be the death of her, and she’s not going to take that risk. It’s also clear that she experienced some sexual trauma in her marriage which has left a mark. These are really challenging topics to tackle in a lighthearted romance novel, and it’s really well done, unflinchingly and with compassion. Rob also has some past trauma—from past imprisonment, from darker things he’d done—which somehow rests in balance with his character of irrepressible good cheer.

Both Rob and Marian are sexually experienced, with male and female partners. They both know and are comfortable with their own desires. And not only does Rob adore Marian, but he also is very happy in the role of giving his partner what they need, or giving himself up to his partner. So, to bring it back around, here we have a romance novel with beautiful representation of asynchronous orgasms, sex without penetration, honoring each partner’s physical needs, and exhibiting excellent communication.

This was a really charming and delightful book. It’s currently available for preorder and releasing on June 7, 2022.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

When I was in college, I studied abroad a semester in Finland. I packed two very large bags, one a soft-sided carry-on that converted to a backpack and the other a very large duffel bag. (They were brand new, chosen by me, and I had firmly rejected anything with wheels. I’d rather carry it, I said.) And my mother took me to the airport to send me off. She waited at the gate with me, and hugged me, and we waved to each other until I disappeared down the jetway. This was when you didn’t need a boarding pass to go through airport security, and anyone could meet anyone at the airport.

In fact, this was late August of 2001.

I lugged my bags from the Helsinki airport to the train station, and took the overnight train to Joensuu, a university town in the Karelian region on the eastern side of Finland. A Finnish student met me at the train station, showed me around, gave me some advice on where to shop and what resources were available for international students. I started classes a few days later.

On September 11, 2001, I had just finished classes for the day, and I went to check my email on a shared computer in the hallway. When I logged out of my email, I was taken to the provider’s landing page, full of top tips to lose weight and celebrity gossip and sports trivia — and right in the middle of the page, a brand-new article with a picture of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. It had just happened. I remember a sort of confused daze — what is this? is this real? — and then another student said the news was on in the lobby down the hall. And I went and stood with two dozen other people, watching a Finnish news anchor in a blue and green plaid sportcoat, and it began to sink in, began to be real. I had been in Finland for less than two weeks.

I have been thinking of the Ukrainian students who are studying abroad right now. It is not the same thing, I know. I cannot really imagine what it’s like to know a full-blown war is going on at home. But I do keep imagining, hoping, that their fellow students are being very kind to them, unflinching and supportive and simply kind. As my fellow students once were. That is what I remember most vividly, even more than the grief and the frightening uncertainty — as the fall wore on, there were bright birch leaves like gold coins, and sitting around together with coffee or cider and maybe a cake someone made, and such kindness.

My friends were German, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Portuguese. One good friend was Russian-Lithuanian, her family a living history of Russianization in the Baltic States. I took classes on Baltic history and Russian history while I was there, learned about the ways that Finland sought to maintain its independence balanced between empires. I learned a little Finnish, not very much, but I could at least say simple things like “How much?” and “Thank you” without Finns wincing.

I lived in a shared apartment, about a mile and a half from the university. There was a bus, or you could walk or bike along a trail through the woods. I got a bike from a local guy who regularly fixed up old bikes and sold them to students. It was red, and a little too tall for me, and very heavy; and I was sort of glad to have the excuse of winter to stop riding it. Mostly I walked everywhere, miles and miles of walking.

At the end of my semester in Finland, a friend and I took a trip to Spain. We had booked plane tickets and a first night in a hostel, and everything else was by the seat of our pants, but it all worked out. At the end of our trip, my friend would be going back to Joensuu, while I was headed for a few days to the UK and then home to the US. I had shipped a few boxes home, but I had my trusty luggage.

That huge wheel-less duffel bag, it turned out, was a deeply terrible choice. It was very full and enormously heavy, and I was constantly shifting it out of other people’s way or trying (not very effectively) to minimize its footprint. And I carried it for miles. Not the entire trip, fortunately — I was able to store it with a hostel where we stayed early early on in Spain. But then I had to deal with it when I flew on to London and then took a train to Shrewsbury, then was able to leave it with a friend’s family while we made a trip to visit another friend in Aberystwyth. (These were friends I’d made at my home university in the US, when they were international students.)

This morning, I watched a video, about four minutes long, of residents being evacuated from Irpin, Ukraine. There were parents with children, and elders. Some people had dogs; one had a cat in a carrier. Some were carrying bags, and a few had rolling suitcases. No one had a giant absurd duffle that carefully contained everything they might need for weeks and months ahead; they must have been asked to bring only necessities. Many women had purses, which looks like an odd sort of luxury to be carrying in an evacuation from a war zone; but most of us who carry a purse can tell you that it’s pretty much a miniature bug-out bag. If I grabbed nothing on the way out the door but my purse, I would still at least have some basic hygiene and first aid supplies, a nail clipper and a multi tool, my ID and insurance cards and credit cards, a couple masks, a couple pens, sunglasses, a few reusable cloth grocery bags, a charging cable and a power bank. And a purse is a familiar weight that’s generally comfortable to carry for extended periods of time. For miles, if you need to.

I know people in the US whose families arrived as refugees. I have had a few conversations where people touched on that experience, or shared some little piece of their story. Yet I now I’m a little ashamed to admit that I never really properly thought about what it must have meant to go through that. Because they were now safe? Because that experience was past? I wonder if there is any such thing as the past.

I know someone who is the parent of a trans child in Texas, where the governor recently pressed state agencies to investigate parents of trans children for abuse. Her family was already planning to move to another state, in part for better access to gender-affirming health care and in part to escape yet another hurricane season. With Hurricane Harvey and the slow pace of rebuilding, then the last two years of pandemic, her kids haven’t been in a normal school classroom since 2017. While they are waiting to finalize the move, they had to have a family conversation about what to do if Child Protective Services knocks on the door. She doesn’t think it will happen, but just in case she is ready to grab a bag and her child and make a run for it. She appreciates the privilege of flight being a plausible option, the privilege of being able to afford to move, the privilege of being able to sit on a doctor’s waiting list for months and months. She says to me, “I know it’s not the same, but it kind of feels like we’re either climate refugees or political refugees.” She laughs as she says this, in a lost sort of way. I tell her that she has my support, if there is anything at all I can do. She says, “If you know any pediatric endocrinologists, that would be helpful.”

I know that I’m rambling. One more: Last September, straight-line winds blew through my town and knocked down dozens of huge old trees. It blocked roads and took down power lines, but it was the devastation of all those broken and shattered trees that broke my heart. It is not at all the same. This was a freak act of nature. And amazingly, no one was hurt. It was devastating, and it could have been so much worse.

T.S. Eliot wrote, in Little Gidding,

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

Let’s return to that trip to Spain twenty years ago: the second week, we found our way to a casa rural on a terraced hillside in a little village, overlooking orange groves and well-loved houses and the occasional clothesline full of flapping laundry, all lit up by the crisp December sunshine. And I remember looking out at it all and thinking, how is it that people fight and hate, when this exists in the world? As if greed and selfishness should burn away in the sunshine, or melt in the rain. In fact I still believe it, in the teeth of all that continues to happen: that there is terrible stupidity and waste perpetrated by the greedy and selfish, which at heart is a failure to open one’s eyes and see the world for what it is, as it actually is, as plainly before us as it ever was.

The sun is out today. The sky is very blue.

To choose to see beauty and kindness is to fight for the fate of the world.

And with that, I think I will segue to the book I have to share with you: A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall. There are a lot of very serious themes in this book, and yet every heavy thing is held so kindly, with such compassion and care, that it is not a heavy story. Indeed, it is delightful, full of wit and humor. It evokes beauty at every turn: in the personal empowerment expressed in the detail of an embroidered glove or a pretty pair of shoes; in the strength and courage that it takes to be a better person than you were; in the ways that simple expressions of care can create breathtaking intimacy.

This is a historical romance, featuring a trans heroine, set in England in 1818. We learn that before the book opens, its main characters were close friends who met at school, grew up together, then fought together against Napoleon. Both were grievously injured at Waterloo, and one presumed dead. For the latter, this turns out to be an opportunity for a new life, and Viola Carroll recovers from her injuries and discreetly returns to her family under her new name, taking on the role of paid lady’s companion and leaving her old identity dead on the battlefield. She assumes her friend, the Duke of Gracewood, will mourn his lost friend and move on, but two years later, Gracewood is mired in grief and drink and laudanum. This is where the book begins.

End to end, this was an impeccable and exquisitely executed historical romance. Not only did I adore this book, but it made me better love every book I’d read before which gave me the context to appreciate this one. If you are not a reader of historical romance, the key to the genre (apart from the romance) is that it takes characters whose desires and motivations are familiar and recognizable to a contemporary audience, then places those characters in a reasonable facsimile of a historical setting. And that setting frequently serves to allow the characters to swan around in pretty clothing and cast heated looks across candlelit libraries and so forth, but it also permits authors to do some interesting things with social dynamics to explore some unseen or forgotten bit of history, or to illustrate parallels to today’s world, or both. With this book, Hall fulfills that promise to the fullest.

Here are just a few tropes of the genre which were employed beautifully in this story:

* A lady with a secret, who must choose to be true to herself;

* A man grappling with an unloving upbringing, learning how to give and receive love — as a friend, as a brother, and as a lover;

* Characters returned from war, having seen things and done things they now must live with;

* The highly gendered expectations of what is appropriate or accessible for ladies and for gentlemen, and creative ways of recasting or defying those expectations;

* Action taking place in settings including a cold and severe ducal estate, and an airy and modern London townhouse, and a turn about Vauxhall Gardens;

* The threat of compromised virtue and a midnight chase to avert disaster;

* Definitely some swanning around in pretty clothing, to excellent effect;

* And the triumph of love, in all the ways.

I also loved it that there was no sense of imminent threat at every turn that Viola might be outed, and that she was known to and accepted by the people most important to her. In the reading group guide appended to the book, Hall notes that it was one of his goals “to write a historical romance with a transgender heroine in which the fact that the heroine is transgender is not the main source of conflict or narrative tension.” I thought this was brilliantly done, not heavy-handed or artificial, not disregarding the challenges faced by Viola but not playing them up for dramatic effect, and building tension and story in other dynamics between the characters and in the challenges they face.

A Lady for a Duke releases May 24, 2022 and is currently available for pre-order. It is really good.

With love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

This is an audio version of the original newsletter:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

This is an audio version of the original newsletter:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

This is an audio version of the original newsletter:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com