And during Pride month

In brash defiance of unwritten laws I will be getting to momentarily, yet another outlet has excerpted The Last Straight Woman. From The Kit, excerpt-of-excerpt:

You might imagine that The Golden Girls, that 1980s-into-1990s icon of women embracing the chosen family, would pass the Bechdel test and be full of women talking about things other than men. Not even a little bit.

In a 1991 episode, Never Yell Fire in a Crowded Retirement Home: Part 2, Blanche has been holding forth about muscular men, as usual, prompting Dorothy to say, “I just cannot believe how much you think about men.” Blanche goes on the defensive. “Men are an important part of my life. Not just my life, they’re an important part of all our lives.”

The scene fades out to a flashback of the 80-something Sophia recalling having put cash in the G-string of a stripper calling himself (in a little prelude to SATC) “Mr. Big.” Blanche of course knows the gentleman in question and quips that this is merely a “stage name.”

Today is June 25. It’s June. Pride month. And yet, I published a book about straight women. Last month, but last month is kind of like this month, is kind of like any month, really what was I thinking here? Not a book saying all women are or should be straight. Not (as was bizarrely insinuated) a pronatalist tract. Not a book about straight women that I was insisting be marketed as a Pride-related product. (There is apparently a thing—I write in the book about an essay objecting to this thing—where straight women who write male-male erotica strive for or maybe receive ‘gay representation’ awards, which is, yes, silly.) But still, didn’t I know? Shouldn’t I have abstained from publicity (including the sort that publications do, on their own timelines, without my necessarily even knowing about it ahead of time) for June? Clearly, reinvisioning straight womanhood along feminist lines had to wait until July.

For what it’s worth, it is by no means the LGBTQ community nor any subdivision thereof (i.e. the Ls, the Gs, etc.) is mad about this. I think a subset of the looking for imaginary things to get mad at online community—mostly but not only on Bluesky—has glommed onto this, in much the way people in the 2010s would strive to be first, in a comments section, to flag an instance of unchecked privilege.

The part I’m now getting a kick of, however, is the person on here who believes the book’s May release date or the Walrus excerpt’s June one was part of a strategy of some kind:

This got me thinking about exactly which months you could release a book about straight women. The first book-related interviews I did ran in December and February, and my glamorous book tour of the internet will extend to at least July. I have no reason to think this is abnormally a lot of attention. We are looking at eight months of unseemliness. If you restrict it just to the month before publication month and two months after (which feels like a natural relevance length for a new book, after which, not so new anymore), that’s still three months. Would it have hinted at a strategy if I was, in June, promoting a book coming out July 1?

Anyway, there’s someone on the internet who earnestly believes or enjoys arguing that there is a dedicated publicity team investing so much in this minor Canadian book that they are coming up with super-involved ways to maximize its sales figures.

So the real mystery is, who would be doing this? I don’t have outside publicists, just the (lovely, but I am not their 24/7 assignment nor assuming I would be) ones from the publishing house. If the May release date was in fact a plot to get the Walrus to run an excerpt in June, and then post that excerpt to Bluesky, where it would get people mad in a precise way that the late-May-running Toronto Star excerpt (which is the same as the Kit one, they are the same company) had not, if this was all planned-out meticulously so as to get people so mad on one platform as to inspire those on other platforms or dissenters on the original one to bulk-purchase the book in question, if this was not the happenstance reality of books coming out whenever they do and getting covered as close to their publication dates as is manageable, then frankly hats off to the cabal. There isn’t one, but if there were, I would be in awe.