If you like fake dating between people who play with LEGO and bake apple bread, or you like ace romance, or you want to read about autistic love stories, The Heartbreak Handshake might be for you.
It's available NOW in eBook or Paperback from Amazon and is part of Kindle Unlimited so you can read for free if you have the membership! Get it here (affiliate link) or find out more about all of the Clover Hill Romance books here.
It's a shared small town world where characters make cameos in other books, but each one can be read as a standalone, so pick and choose the ones that appeal to you!
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The Forgotten History of the World’s First Transgender Clinic
I finished the first round of edits on my nonfiction history of trans rights today. It will publish with Norton in 2025, but I decided, because I feel so much of my community is here, to provide a bit of the introduction.
[begin sample]
The Institute for Sexual Sciences had offered safe haven to homosexuals and those we today consider transgender for nearly two decades. It had been built on scientific and humanitarian principles established at the end of the 19th century and which blossomed into the sexology of the early 20th. Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish homosexual, the Institute supported tolerance, feminism, diversity, and science. As a result, it became a chief target for Nazi destruction: “It is our pride,” they declared, to strike a blow against the Institute. As for Magnus Hirschfeld, Hitler would label him the “most dangerous Jew in Germany.”6 It was his face Hitler put on his antisemitic propaganda; his likeness that became a target; his bust committed to the flames on the Opernplatz. You have seen the images. You have watched the towering inferno that roared into the night. The burning of Hirschfeld’s library has been immortalized on film reels and in photographs, representative of the Nazi imperative, symbolic of all they would destroy. Yet few remember what they were burning—or why.
Magnus Hirschfeld had built his Institute on powerful ideas, yet in their infancy: that sex and gender characteristics existed upon a vast spectrum, that people could be born this way, and that, as with any other
diversity of nature, these identities should be accepted. He would call them Intermediaries.
Intermediaries carried no stigma and no shame; these sexual and Gender nonconformists had a right to live, a right to thrive. They also had a right to joy. Science would lead the way, but this history unfolds as an interwar thriller—patients and physicians risking their lives to be seen and heard even as Hitler began his rise to power. Many weren’t famous; their lives haven’t been celebrated in fiction or film. Born into a late-nineteenth-century world steeped in the “deep anxieties of men about the shifting work, social roles, and power of men over women,” they came into her own just as sexual science entered the crosshairs of prejudice and hate. The Institute’s own community faced abuse, blackmail, and political machinations; they responded with secret publishing campaigns, leaflet drops, pro-homosexual propaganda, and alignments with rebel factions of Berlin’s literati. They also developed groundbreaking gender affirmation surgeries and the first hormone cocktail for supportive gender therapy.
Nothing like the Institute for Sexual Sciences had ever existed before it opened its doors—and despite a hundred years of progress, there has been nothing like it since. Retrieving this tale has been an exercise in pursuing history at its edges and fringes, in ephemera and letters, in medal texts, in translations. Understanding why it became such a target for hatred tells us everything about our present moment, about a world that has not made peace with difference, that still refuses the light of scientific evidence most especially as it concerns sexual and reproductive rights.
[end sample]
I wanted to add a note here: so many people have come together to make this possible. Like Ralf Dose of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft (Magnus Hirschfeld Archive), Berlin, and Erin Reed, American journalist and transgender rights activist—Katie Sutton, Heike Bauer. I am also deeply indebted to historian, filmmaker and formative theorist Susan Stryker for
her feedback, scholarship, and encouragement all along the way. And Laura Helmuth, editor of Scientific American, whose enthusiasm for a short article helped bring the book into being. So many LGBTQ+ historians, archivists, librarians, and activists made the work possible, that its publication testifies to the power of the queer community and its dedication to preserving and celebrating history. But I ALSO want to mention you, folks here on tumblr who have watched and encouraged and supported over the 18 months it took to write it (among other books and projects). @neil-gaiman has been especially wonderful, and @always-coffee too: thank you.
The support of this community has been important as I’ve faced backlash in other quarters. Thank you, all.
NOTE: they are attempting to rebuild the lost library, and you can help: https://magnus-hirschfeld.de/archivzentrum/archive-center/
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While I continue to procrastinate on SMS I think y’all need to see the copy of Frankenstein I just bought because I’m OBSESSED with it
First of all, gorgeous cover art.
Then you get to the actual PAGES, and
LOOK AT THAT
IT’S SO GORGEOUS
THIS LOOKS LIKE IT COULD BE FROM PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
THE CREATURE LOOKS SO FUCKING COOL RAAAAHHHH
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Pride and Prejudice is such underrated autistic representation because the entire plot is like
Darcy: Yay I'm doing a good job socializing! This conversation is going so well!
Elizabeth: What the fuck is your problem?
Darcy: Oh no I am not doing a good job socializing this conversation is not going well.
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I grew up as the weird (autistic) goth kid who spent a lot of time in graveyards. I didn’t have friends. So I invented them. That’s why I’m an author, I think. I crafted worlds full of wondrous diversity, quirky characters, peculiar souls. I knitted them into families. I often felt at home when I read; the work of Neil Gaiman, of Terry Pratchett, of Ursula Le Guin, of Terry Brooks… My fiction is meant to be participatory too. When you read it, you should feel like you came home and friends were waiting to greet you.
Maybe in a really cool graveyard—like this one at Scone Castle.
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