The Neurospicy Bean

  There’s nothing special about Chin’s writing, necessarily, but the stories, anecdotes, and culture that he shares in this memoir more than make up for it. This book drew my interest because my brother goes to school in Detroit, and I’ve actually seen where Chung’s – the Chinese restaurant behind the title of the book – used to sit, near downtown. The Chinese community in Detroit has a really interesting backstory, which Chin goes into extensively. And of course as a gay Chinese American he has a specific experience to share. I found it really interesting to read about.

  Yeahhh this was a bit too much in the string of cis white lesbians for me. I don’t know why precisely but this one in particular just felt incredibly cisgender. I should have flagged some of the particular moments that rubbed me the wrong way and I didn’t, but there were definitely a few instances where it just didn’t feel like the author had ever considered the trans perspective. Similarly, it often seemed that the author was lumping bi and pan people in with lesbians, which…let’s maybe not. Also, I really struggle with speculation about celebrities’ sexuality. It’s one of my least favorite forms of discourse because a) it inevitably leads to accusations of queerbaiting and b) oh my God you are not entitled to information about anyone’s sexual orientation ever. Even if they seem really super queer. Even if they’re in the public eye. Even if you think it would be really super good for the queer community if someone with that level of influence came out. I. Don’t. Care. It’s not ...

  I should start by saying that I have very complicated feelings about true crime, and they definitely colored how I read this book. As a genre, I find it to be frequently exploitative, disrespectful, and dismissive – in general, treating real-life atrocities as a source of entertainment. And this book definitely fell into that trap on occasion. Sure, stories about paleontologists trying to one-up each other are legitimately entertaining, but stories about eugenics, slavers, and Nazi scientists? Not so much. My girlfriend actually read a few pages of it and then said “I bet the author was white.” The worst example of this was a footnote that said something along the lines of “Everyone loves a Nazi villain,” which…the idea that Nazis are just bad guys with high entertainment value, not real-live people who murdered millions, is intensely uncomfortable to say the least. In other areas the author clearly took pains to clarify the awfulness of the people he wrote about, but even so, it...

Everyone should read this book, just for the perspective it provides. Far too often we’re taught by popular culture that queer community doesn’t exist outside of the western world and that, if trans people existed before 2000, they led repressed lives without access to community or care. These are vast oversimplifications which are challenged and dismantled in Geena Rocero’s biography. I’ll admit that I myself had fallen into these traps, so I was honestly amazed by the stories Rocero told – of the popularity of trans pageants in the Philippines even decades ago, of her transition from a relatively young age, of how the makeup counter at the Macy’s she worked at was known to be where the trans Filipina women worked. This biography provides a window into a world that many of us aren’t aware of – that, in fact, has been deliberately obscured and hidden from us by a culture that wants to teach us that to be queer, especially trans, is to be alone, that we have no history, that we should b...