These are the voyages of the library lady. Her mission: to seek out new stories, new transgender literature that is actually worth reading. Welcome to the ITS book review column. I hope you enjoy the column and remembereven I can't read everything, so if you have a favorite book that I haven't mentioned yet, write and tell me about it.
The editor asked me to begin this column with Callahan's Lady by Spider Robinson. While I have to admit that I love all of Spider's Callahan stories, I have to point out that this one is not a TV tale. In over 200 pages there is exactly one scene in which Prof., a con man who is incapable of swindling anybody he doesn't actually despise, disguises himself as a woman. Granted Prof. is so convincing that he is granted permission to stay in the women-only lounge, but that is the only time he's in drag, and Prof. is not a crossdresser; he's just trying to avoid a Neanderthal hit man who believes the Prof. owes him $20,000 in counterfeit money. Genuine, cold cash is not acceptable.
Frankly a better bet is the same author's Callahan's Secret. The Callahan stories include a recurring character, Bill Gerrity, who is a transvestite that frequents Callahan's Saloon. While Bill never gets any big roles, The Mick O'Time in Secret is his finest bit yet.
Gender themes aside, the Callahan titles are, without exception, excellent, human, sensitive, thought-provoking and often side-splittingly funny.
I should mention Carmen Miranda's Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three: the anthology, not the song that inspired it. For the non-filkers among you, I should explain that Carmen Miranda's Ghost... is the name of a very funny and popular science fictional folk (thus, filk) song. The song inspired an anthology of stories with more or less the same theme. No less than three of these have transgender plots. The best is anthology editor Don Saker's own Tarawa Rising, in which aging drag queen, Tarawa Beachhead, must confront her 70th birthday, mortality and loneliness, with the help of Carmen Miranda's ghost. In Basket Case, a space marine major must solve a murder on Space Station Three where the suspects are a rabid homophobe who hates crossdressers and an armored, taloned alien male who insists on dressing like his idol, Carmen Miranda. While In The Can is, alas, another "he-drag-queen-did-it
except that the accused murderess is the ghost of Carmen Miranda, who is going to get exorcised to worse than death if the psychic detective can't prove she was framed.
On balance, this anthology is very enjoyable and a lot of fun to read.
I have also found another transgendered minor character in S.P. Somtow's Moondance. Billed as the "Werewolf novel to end all Werewolf novels," the plot revolves around a group of European Iycanthropes who migrate to the old West for freedom and safety only to find themselves threatened by equally Iycanthropic Indians. One of the minor characters is Maria, a Hispanic man who lives as a woman and works in a carnival where s/he is blackmailed by one of the most thoroughly evil villains I've ever seen. Be warned; this novel has some truly graphic sex and violence.
Enough of these bit parts! Let's talk about something with a real transgender plot - like Desert Peach #8. Desert Peach is what might be called an underground comic. It's hero, Manfred "Pfirsch" Rommel, is the younger, prettier, gay-er brother of the Desert Fox, Irwin Rommel, and commander of the biggest collection of oddballs in the German Army (the 469th Halftrack, Gravedigging and Support Battalion). In the words of his creator, artist Donna Barr, Peach is "feminine, not effeminate." In Desert Peach #8, Peach's hapless orderly, Udo, becomes the belle of the local theatricals, inspiring the General to send him and Peach to England disguised as two missing female spies to recover some tank plans. The problem is the English landlords may be Gestapo agents and their patriotic son is one of Peach's old boyfriends.
What can I say? Weird as the plot sounds, Peach is always great fun and more intelligent than most of what's on the best seller shelves. Hopefully Frau Barr will give us more tales with Peach and Udo fashionably dressed.
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