In the latest episode of the Queer Love Podcast, trans pioneer and gender outlaw Kate Bornstein speaks with host Jerry Portwood about the reissue of her book, Hello, Cruel World: 101+ Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. The second edition now includes 20 additional alternatives and Kate’s urgent new essay, “Hello, Cruel Gender.”
At the top of the pod, Kate addresses the hate messages coming from the Trump administration and beyond and what it means living a world when “cruelty is in power”:
“That's not gonna stop us. We are a culture; we aren't a bunch of disjoined bunch of people. I was fortunate to be in the position of a gardener and plant some seeds along with some other folks of my generation and they have been watered and we have entire garden now. And you can't mow that down!”
Kate also explains that she originally wrote and published Hello, Cruel World in 2006, before Obama was running for president, and things quickly became polarized the following year.
“What I didn't know when I was writing Hello, Cruel World was how to deal with a bully who said, ‘Don't cross this line. Once you cross this line, you're on the other side. You are other. That makes you bad. Other is evil.’
“And I didn't really address that as deeply as I wished I could have in the first edition. That's why the 20 new alternatives to suicide deal mostly with the idea of good and evil culture—which is what we've become.”
Listen in as Kate narrates one of the new “lessons” in the book: “Stay friends anyway.” Kate and Jerry also discuss how “stepping into the world of BDSM dykes” gave Kate’s writing a “rocket booster” when she was working on the Gender Workbook, her new theory of “gender in four dimensions” and how queer love is something not static. As she explains, “when you answer what is love, you've lost it. You know it when you embody it.”
Plus, find out what to expect in her queer romance novel, Nearly Roadkill, which is being reissued in September with an expanded narrative and a new, nonbinary character.
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