How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity

4:00 pm 4 March 2015
How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity - 'Michael Cart', 'Francesca Lia Block', 'David Levithan', 'Ron Koertge', 'Eric Shanower', 'Julie Anne Peters', 'Jennifer Finney Boylan', 'William Sleater', 'Emma Donoghue' I really want to give this more stars, but I was majorly disappointed. I went into this expecting an LGBT anthology. It described itself as anthology of gay, lesbian and transgender stories. But I think a more accurate description would be "a cis gay male romance anthology with a sprinkling of lesbians and trans people thrown in." Seriously, seriously disappointed. Also, would it kill to get some representation gay/bi trans people for once?

Let's break it down:

Cis gay male stories: 7
Cis lesbian stories: 3
Trans stories (none gay): 3 (2 FTM, 1 MTF)

What is up with that? It's not like cis gay men don't already dominate LGBT media already. It's ridiculous.

For what it's worth, I at least liked three of the stories in the anthology: The Missing Person (MTF), First Time (lesbian), and The Silk Road Runs Through Tupperneck, N.H. (gay male)

Otherwise, I'm not going to be recommending this to any lesbian or trans readers any time soon, honestly.