Queer View Mirror: Lesbian and Gay Short, Short Fiction

Claire Wilkshire is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of
British Columbia.

The short stories in Queer View Mirror run “the gamut of first love,
supermarket cruising, car sex, love gone awry, change-room sex, dykes
cruising drag queens, sex with aliens, surviving gaybashing, fashion
oppression, divine sex, cross-cultural pub crawls, unsafe sex, holidays
with family, lesbian mothers, breaking up, SM sex, intergenerational
attractions, and how to disrupt 12-step meetings.” The selections come
from Glasgow, Minneapolis, Auckland, Melbourne, San Francisco, and
KwaZulu Natal, as well as Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton.

While it is impossible to pick the “best” of 101 stories, a few do
stand out: Faustina Rey’s “The Truth” and Welby Ings’s “The
Bachelors” for their evocative treatment of incipient same-sex desire
in a homophobic culture; J.L. Belrose’s hot and sassy “Shopping”;
Michael Lowenthal’s bleak “Day of Atonement: Confessional”; Jackie
Haywood’s “Sole Brothers,” in which a man faces AIDS with a
mixture of rebelliousness and grace; and Annette DuBois’s
“Michigan,” which describes an encounter between a group of lesbian
activists and a grandmotherly type—assumptions and hostilities fly
like chipbags in a hurricane.

Queer View Mirror is an important anthology because it demonstrates
artistic accomplishment —the “flourishing” of gay and lesbian
writing—and because it offers the mirrors in which lesbians and gay
men can see their own experiences reflected.