Llueve sobre Babel

Llueve sobre Babel is playing in theaters in Colombia! A Cali bar that's the inferno. As per Instagram: "Gala is building a queer magical realism cinematic universe. Two more films in development: Moonchild and Ascension. This is what Colombian cinema looks like when it stops asking for permission."

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I've published books, and my next one will be Attis & Aleph: Poems of the Daimonic. It's about a man in 1930s New York who was fascinated with what the idea of eunuchs meant to him. He couldn't finish writing his book, but I finished writing this one. It's advice to overthinkers. It talks about how to see your project in a new way and take the paths that will bring happiness and completion. I need your pledge on Attis & Aleph so that I can reach minimum funding and this book can happen!

It's part of the Book Bazaar 2026, a crowdfunding event on BackerKit, Oct 29–Nov 19.

2025: Rachel Harlow featured in the Inquirer

A new feature on Rachel Harlow:

A very important thread. When I was probably no more than 10, I saw this picture of the woman known as Harlow in the Philly Inquirer. A little babygay, I was shocked that such a glamour queen could live in my hometown and even more shocked to see her described as "a former man."

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— Tom & Lorenzo (@tomandlorenzo.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 10:33 AM

It was my first real inkling that there was a kind of life out there other than the one I was told I should have. Later, I rediscovered her in the 1968 doc THE QUEEN, in which she won the drag pageant and got read for filth by Crystal LaBeijja youtu.be/RYCQEl8TPeM?...

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— Tom & Lorenzo (@tomandlorenzo.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 10:33 AM

But her life was so much more than that moment. She premiered the doc at Cannes, where she dined with Capote and Welles and danced with Sharon Tate, this drag queen from South Philly

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— Tom & Lorenzo (@tomandlorenzo.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 10:33 AM

Getting to know this legend has been one of the greatest joys of my life and I'm so pleased to introduce you to her with this gorgeous feature from the Inquirer, where she speaks for the first time in over 30 years on her incredible journey share.inquirer.com/XdfXr9

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— Tom & Lorenzo (@tomandlorenzo.bsky.social) December 6, 2025 at 10:33 AM

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I've published books, and my next one will be Attis & Aleph: Poems of the Daimonic. It's about a man in 1930s New York who was fascinated with what the idea of eunuchs meant to him. He couldn't finish writing his book, but I finished writing this one. It's advice to overthinkers. It talks about how to see your project in a new way and take the paths that will bring happiness and completion. I need your pledge on Attis & Aleph so that I can reach minimum funding and this book can happen!

It's part of the Book Bazaar 2026, a crowdfunding event on BackerKit, Oct 29–Nov 19.

Trans man in Sydney, Australia (1937)

A clip of Peter Alexander, a trans man from New Zealand, interviewed in Sydney in 1937.

Also listed on the Digital Transgender Archive.

You may be interested in: As Berlin Held the 1936 Olympics, These Athletes Changed Their Sex: Assigned female at birth, some went on to live as men. Published on May 13, 2024 in Prism & Pen. 12-min read.

What makes a story queer?

Spotted on Bluesky:

I need the straights out there to understand that the presence of queer characters isn't what makes a story queer, and that you will never be the authority on whether a story is or isn't queer. It's fine and healthy to acknowledge that not every conversation includes you.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 11:50 AM

In a lot of media there's an assimilationist attitude toward the inclusion of queer characters, because it prioritizes cishet comfort: "they're not that different from you, their existence won't threaten heteronormativity!" But that's a lie, we are different and we still deserve the same empathy.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:05 PM

A near-universal component of being queer in a society like ours is being required, from birth, to identify with a pov that is not our own. With that in mind, part of being queer usually means reading between every line to find ourselves and others like us. It's a psychic survival mechanism.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:22 PM

So it's not just us queers having fun when we say Gonzo is a nonbinary icon, or that the only straight Star Trek character is somehow Miles O'Brien. By necessity we're tapped into the Astral Plane, and we're also objectively correct.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:31 PM

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959–1968

Today, CNN has an article: "In upstate New York, Casa Susanna was a safe haven for trans women in 1960s America," Suyin Haynes, CNN, June 26, 2024

"With coiffed black hair, pearls, a hand on her hip and a high-heeled pointed toe, a woman poses jubilantly for the camera on the steps outside her home. Her name is Susanna Valenti, and her home is Casa Susanna, located in the Catskills, in upstate New York. In the 1950s and ’60s, Casa Susanna served as a safe haven and a sanctuary for people to explore their gender identity and expression in ways they were not able to in daily life. ... Purchased in 2004 at a New York City flea market by two art dealers and later acquired by the AGO in 2015, this particular selection of 340 Casa Susanna images are part of a much wider archive, including some currently in the personal collection of photographer Cindy Sherman. ... In the last decade, Casa Susanna has inspired a Broadway play, Harvey Fierstein’s “Casa Valentina”; been referenced in the television series “Transparent”; and was the subject of an acclaimed documentary film released last year."

I hope to get a copy of this book, Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, to find out if Spanish was spoken there. As CNN says:

"Born in Chile in 1917, Valenti met her wife at a wig shop — popular with crossdressers — that Tonell ran in New York City. Casa Susanna was Tonell’s property in the Catskills; those who frequented the home included Gloria, a millionaire from Michigan; Jessica, a Colombian heiress; and Felicity, an airline pilot and World War II veteran who was the sibling of photographer Lee Miller."

Learn more about the book, a hardcover with 400 color illustrations, on the publisher's website.

Or buy it through Bookshop:

Just learned of this book, which has 400 color illustrations! "In the 1950s and '60s, an underground network of transgender women, gender nonconforming people, and men who dressed as women found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills, New York."

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) Jun 26, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Milan Kundera: 'We can never know what to want'

Emet North gives us this insight:

"...who among us has never dreamt of an alternate world? A choice made differently? Who hasn’t stayed up at night, contemplating some difficult decision, wishing it were possible to see both scenarios played out, to know definitively which option to choose. “We can never know what to want,” the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote, “because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” The unbearable lightness: “if we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.” The many worlds interpretation saves us from this lightness, gives our lives the weight of infinite repetition and variation. True, the rescue is more theoretical than practical, given that nothing about the interpretation suggests access to the alternate universes."
— Many Worlds and the Queer Imaginary: Imagine three possible futures for yourself. Let your future selves be bold..., Emet North, Reactor, May 8, 2024

I file this idea as a possible response to people who "ask" — that is, ask aggressively: How do trans people know what gender they are or want to be?

I wrote Why transphobia teaches us to be terrified of regret. It's an 8-min read on Medium.

To this, I add:

"As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrote in 'The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,' that an 'essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.'"
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024

"...a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those thousands of others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the Divine." ― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, quoted by Darrah Cloud