That’s Queer…

Yes, it’s been a long time since I posted here. But, I return with great news. Ken Summers, a real friend and colleague in this madness that is the paranormal has written a very interesting book.

Queer Hauntings: True Tales of Gay & Lesbian Ghosts (Lethe Press), is a must read for anyone interested in often overlooked stories and even a few familiar stories with overlooked parts.

In the paranormal field with its rather high incidence of religious belief, issues related to LGBT people are often swept aside. LGBT paranormal investigators are even subjected at times to insensitive remarks, name calling, or even inappropriate jokes. This is abundantly clear if you look at the Ryan Buell thread on my political blog where I was called any number of names by “paranormal fans” when I suggested that I actually did NOT care whether Ryan Buell was gay. In addition, the lengths that these people went to to assure me he was not gay were hilarious. In their mind being gay is an insult and a character flaw.

So, it is not surprising that LGBT ghosts also get short shrift when it comes to investigation and even our folklore. This is where Ken’s excellent book comes in. Ken allows both the LGBT reader and the Straight Ally a glimpse at the hidden folklore of our community. With this work he brings our own stories of love, loss, and tragedy into the pantheon of mainstream folklore.

While the straight community has their ghosts of TB, Cholera, or Yellow Fever epidemics, Ken reminds us of our ghosts of AIDS. The correlation cannot be lost on those of us written out of history and folklore for so very long.

By collecting these stories, Ken has done a great deal to advance our own sense of self as a community with a history and a mythology; a community that sees itself reflected in those scary tales that we often recall around campfires or crisp Autumn nights.

The stories are all very readable and relatively short making the book excellent fare for quick reading or storytelling. I might be biased since Ken is a friend, but I honestly think this is an important step in understanding the role of folklore and mythology in a community and seeing how it is developing as that community is allowed to share its stories with the wider world.

You can get a copy at Amazon.com and I urge you to pick this one up today.