PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality is an anthology of essays edited by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel that is essentially a smack in the face to traditional and even some non-traditional ideas of gender and sexuality. It refutes any idea of any sort of binary along either of those lines.

Through reading the essays the reader gets multiple examples of people who don’t fit into the neat little boxes that both queer and het society tries to push them into. Because there are so many, one right after the other, each building on the next and each becoming more strange, more queer, more PoMo than the last, there is no way to deny that these people are not just flukes.

For me, I found some soulmates in this book. I found people struggling with the same ideas I do and asking the same questions I’ve been asking for years: where do I fit in if I’m sort of this and sort of that and everything and nothing? How do I navigate these gender and sexuality galaxies if I can’t pin myself down and comprehend where everything in me is coming from?

The essays in some cases are roads of self-discovery, showing just a glimpse of what one goes through when one box is not an option, and what is possible when you embrace not fitting in. Other essays were dissecting specific ideas or impulses that the authors had which were somehow out of their comfort zone, such as a gay man wanting to fuck a woman, how males and females can interact outside of a heterosexual paradigm, how a female can be a woman stuck in a man’s body, and various other pomo genders and sexualities.

If you’ve ever not fit into the boxes the world gives us, which is just about everyone in my experience, I would say you need to read this book. Even if you don’t identify directly with those in the stories it will blow your mind and make you reorganize your thinking about the way that gender and sexuality work. It will help you recognize that you are not alone, there are others like you who can’t fit into the boxes.

Even if you know that already, because I certainly did know that there were others who feel like I do going into it, you will still get a sense of camaraderie of validation that while you are unique in your own gender and sexuality expression there may be others who are just as or more fucked up than you are. And I mean fucked up in a good way, of course. ;)