Hooray! It’s marching season in the north, where members of a loyalist old boys’ club drag up and sashay across the region, all to honour their Dutch homosexual overlord, William of Orange.

The first time you looked at the cover of one of Ann Bannon’s books, you probably laughed, or groaned, or just put it back. On the cover of Ann Bannon’s book, Odd Girl Out, the blurb reads,

Suddenly they were alone on an island of forbidden desires.

Right. Next?

GCN is in trouble. The latest edition tells us just how much financial difficulty the publication is in. I know that GCN has been criticised for various reasons, but I think that GCN is too important to fail. It’s part of Irish LGBT history. What are your memories and experiences of GCN?

Psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach’s recent book Bodies examines the current ‘beauty terror’ and how it manifests itself in various forms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Orbach published a hugely popular and influential book in the late 1970s called Fat is a Feminist Issue and founded the Women’s Therapy Centre in London.
What has this got to do with a lesbian blog you may well ask…?

Name some gay superheroes. G’wan have a go; Batman circa 1960 obviously, Wonder Woman (in my mind), Anole from X-Men for the geeks, would Xena be considered a super-hero? Anyway, there are a few but not many which is odd considering the camp as knickers potential in super universes. One man who, probably, got sick to the back-teeth of having no gays in the super-hero village is Martin Eden, the man behind Spandex; the world’s first gay supe troupe comic.

What gives a greater insight into a city than its bookshops…? Here’s what we found in Bluestockings: bookstore, fairtrade cafe and activist center, nestled by a vegan restaurant in East Village, New York. Though only 10 years old, on first impression the shop seems a little anachronistic- a throwback to 1970s and 1980s activism.

Yesterday saw the launch of “The Beaut.ie Guide to Gorgeous” by one half of the beaut.ie team, Aisling McDermott. Whether you’re a stone butch dyke, a totally femme lipstick lesbot, a straighty katie, drag queen, or anywhere along the spectrum in between, there just may be something in this book for you.

Sarah Waters is a lesbian book-lover’s dream; not only is she a hell of a writer but she’s as out as a person can be. As a result we have five books which, had she been a lesser writer and just a lezzer writer, would be in our library but not the mainstream. With Sarah, lesbian culture is brought to the wider world.

If you’re looking for something easy, fun and quick to read on your holliers this year, you could do much worse than Mari SanGiovanni’s debut. Our heroine, Marie, is starting to think that she may be just as nuts as her crazy, American Italian family. She has started obsessing over Hollywood actress, Lorn Elaine and is in a realtionship which died years ago.

When we meet Nora, she is a grumpy old woman getting ready to die. Although that may sound like the most depressing opening to a book, don’t let it put you off Days of Grace. This sad, warm, funny story is so full of heart and love , you’ll be thinking about it for weeks after finishing. Through it, Catherine Hall manages to tell story of love, desire and repression and how forgiveness is sometimes the most important thing in your life.