February is LGBT+ History Month in the UK. In honour of this occasion the NGL is using our table display to showcase books from the Queer Armenian Library!
Started by J.P. Der Boghossian, the QAL aims to curate & promote literature by LGBTQIA+ authors in Armenia and the diaspora. Much of the text below comes from the Queer Armenian Library project website, which is constantly updated with more Queer Armenian literature.
This book display and blog post were inspired by a pop-up instantiation of the QAL spearheaded by Dr. Suzan Meryem Rosita Kalaycı, CDF in Women’s History at Pembroke College. Many thanks to her and to the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Studies, who funded the pop-up!
J.P. Der Boghossian on founding the Queer Armenian Library
I’m not Armenian because I’m American, and I’m not American because I’m an Armenian with French citizenship. I can’t be Armenian and don’t belong in Northern Michigan because I’m Queer. So, what and who the hell am I?
The Queer Armenian Library came from a painful sense of trying to reconcile all of this. There had to be others writing about this. There had to be others wrestling with integrating their senses of identity. Initially, I was hoping to find a book or two. And slowly, I began to find more and more. And then I decided I wanted to find everything. I think scouring the internet for every book, article, and poem I could find was a way of pulling all these disparate parts of myself into a singular whole being. It wasn’t just a Queer Armenian Library that was being born; I was creating myself too. And I hope it can be the same for others. They can come to the website and find all these amazing works and begin to live authentically and live for themselves and create lives full of life and joy.
— J.P. Der Boghossian, founder of the QAL. Photo and text from an interview by Alexandra Kuenning at Alturi
Essays and Short Stories
Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree by Jarrod Hayes
Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree takes as its primary object of study this desire for rooted identity—a desire to find and become one with one’s roots—as well as the problems that inevitably arise when one sets out on such a journey.
— Queer Roots for the Diaspora, p. 1
For those interested in the Armenian Diaspora, [Hayes] examines it in chapter five through an analysis of the films of Atom Egoyan.
— description for Queer Roots for the Diaspora on the Queer Armenian Library website
About Strange Lands and People by James Najarian
in Our World, Your Place: An anthology of short stories edited by Trevor Maynard
About Strange Lands and People follows Brendan, a gay Armenian adopted by an American family. Najarian explores the differences of how Brendan and his boyfriend Garo navigate the world of Armenian cultural identity as they set out to find Brendan’s birth parents, both of whom are Armenian. Garo represents one reality, a boy who grew up in an Armenian household, within an Armenian community. Brendan, on the other hand, represents a different reality, a boy growing up in an American household, where his Armenian heritage is exotic (his kindergarten teacher calls him, “our gypsy boy”). As Brendan and Garo get closer to learning the truth, Brendan’s inner conflict grows as he wonders what might have been.
— description for About Strange Lands and People on the Queer Armenian Library website
First Light at Dawn by Nyri Bakkalian
in Queerly Loving #1 – ed. G. Benson and Astrid Ohletz
Bakkalian writes the short story as an email from Kate Davis to her high school friend Hannah. Davis hasn’t seen Hannah in years. They have only recently reconnected. Davis’ tell-all email focuses on her “deployment and discharge and transition and the bad days.” Deployed to Iraq, Kate has a moment of clarity during the Battle of Al-Hakawati, not just about the war, but about her invisibility as a trans woman. She applies for her discharge and begins her transition. From there, she details for Hannah her new life, the symptoms of PTSD, and her experiences being seen as a woman, who she has been her entire life.
— description for First Light at Dawn on the Queer Armenian Library website
Queer Motherhood is Speculative Fiction by Kamee Abrahamian
in Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices – ed. Joukhadar Zeyn
When they pushed their way into this world, a portal ripped my body open and remained that way for many months. During labor, the midwife kept measuring the size of this opening. As the numbers increased, I became worried that this portal would sever waist from hips, a magic trick gone wrong. There was a period of silence and bliss in which my understanding of where the room ended and where my body vanished entirely, followed by convulsions, an exorcism—then she said “ten centimeters,” and I knew it was done growing. I did not realize until that moment that my experience of time and space had transformed, my perspective was no longer three-dimensional.
— excerpt from Queer Motherhood is Speculative Fiction in Mizna
We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora – ed. Aram Mrjoian
We Are All Armenian brings together established and emerging Armenian authors to reflect on the complications of Armenian ethnic identity today. These personal essays elevate diasporic voices that have been historically silenced inside and outside of their communities, including queer, multiracial, and multiethnic writers. The eighteen contributors to this contemporary anthology explore issues of displacement, assimilation, inheritance, and broader definitions of home. Through engaging creative nonfiction, many of them question what it is to be Armenian enough inside an often unacknowledged community.
— description for We Are All Armenian on the Queer Armenian Library website
The Institute for Other Intelligences by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Published in 2022, The Institute for Other Intelligences by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a work of speculative fiction and media theory about an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of “AI agents” gather at a school for oppositional automata to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the trainings collected in the book aim to optimize the operations of future generations of intelligent machines toward just outcomes.
— description for The Institute for Other Intelligences on the Queer Armenian Library website
Armenian LGBTQIA+ Memoirs
Since the beginning of the 20th century, Armenians in diaspora have excelled at sharing the losses and lessons of their lives in the form of personal memoirs. Now, Queer descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors have continued this tradition by publishing their own stories.
Transition: Becoming Who I was Always Meant to Be by Chaz Bono
Best known as the child of Sonny Bono and Cher Sarkisian, Chaz Bono was one of the first trans people to tell their story widely on the public stage. His autobiography Transition is likewise the first known full-length memoir by an author of Armenian descent.
Balls: It Takes Some to Get Some by Chris Edwards
Wildly successful advertising mogul Chris Edwards seems like a paragon of American capitalist masculinity. In Balls, however, he tells the story of how his Armenian-ness and his trans-ness have interacted – both with each other and with his identity as a quintessential businessman.
Straight to Gay: How Coming Out Saved My Life – Creating Joy & Health by Audrey Kouyoumdjian
Half-memoir and half-self-help book, Audrey Kouyoumdjian’s Straight to Gay tells the story of how one “typical” Armenian-American woman’s embrace of her own lesbianism helped her deal with death, health issues, and deeply ingrained cultural stigmas and traumas.
Author Spotlight: Taleen Voskuni
Taleen Voskuni is an award-winning writer who grew up in the Bay Area Armenian diaspora. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in English and currently lives in San Francisco, working in tech. Other than a newfound obsession with writing rom-coms, she spends her free time cultivating her kids, her garden, and her dark chocolate addiction. Her first novel, Sorry, Bro, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, was named an Amazon editor’s pick, and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times. Sorry, Bro is also winner of the 2023 Golden Poppy award for best romance. Lavash at First Sight is her second published novel.
— from TaleenVoskuni.com
When Ellie’s lovingly overbearing parents ask her to attend PakCon – a food packaging conference in Chicago – to help promote their company and vie to win an ad slot in the Superbowl (no big deal), she’s eager for a brief change and a delicious distraction. At the conference, she meets witty, devil-may-care Vanya Simonian. Ellie can’t believe how easy it is to talk to Vanya and how much they have in common. Their meet-cute is cut short, however, when Ellie’s parents recognize Vanya as the daughter of the owners of their greatest rival. Sworn as enemies, Ellie and Vanya must compete against each other under their suspicious parents’ scrutiny, all while their feelings for each other heat to sizzling temps.
— description for Lavash at First Sight on the Queer Armenian Library website
There are so few books on the Armenian diaspora experience, very few lighthearted ones, and even fewer LGBQTA+ stories. Armenians deserve joyous stories, queer Armenians even more so. I wanted to give visibility to the forgotten people within a forgotten people, and give them a happy ending. Also, I wanted to open the narrative on the complex contradictions of Armenian diaspora culture—how it is both painful and funny, beautiful but repressive.
— description for Sorry, Bro on the Queer Armenian Library website
Author Spotlight: Michael Barakiva
Michael Barakiva is a Jewish-Armenian theatre director, producer, and novelist. Born in Haifa, Israel, Barakiva grew up in New Jersey before attending Vassar College and Julliard, where he focused on English literature and theatre. Currently residing in Manhattan, Barakiva has directed and produced a wide range of stage plays and musicals across the US and around the world.
Barakiva’s young adult novels feature protagonists who, like himself, are Queer members of the Armenian diaspora. While they inevitably tell us about the way in which Barakiva views his own identity, their Armenian-ness and Queer-ness are not necessarily central to their stories. Instead, they serve as examples of Queer members of diaspora “just existing” in the same contexts as non-Queer protagonists do – albeit with a healthy dose of overblown family drama or fantasy.
One Man Guy is the story of Alek Khederian, a high school student with a loving but overbearing Armenian family navigating growing up gay in suburban New Jersey. When his demanding parents force him to attend summer school to improve his grades, Alek meets the impossibly cool Ethan and, as high school students often do, falls head-over-heels in love. Yet, while Alek is worried about what his conservative parents will think of his new beau, it’s his older brother Nik’s new half-Armenian, half-Turkish girlfriend Nanar that tests the limits of his family’s love.
Published in 2019, Hold My Hand by Michael Barakiva is the sequel to his first novel One Man Guy. […] Hold My Hand is notable for the fact that it is the first YA novel with two gay Armenian-American characters. Barakiva introduces us to Arno, a shy Armenian-American whom our hero Alex befriends at Saturday morning Armenian school at church. When Alek discovers that someone has written Gyot on one of Arno’s textbooks (an Armenian version of “faggot”), Arno comes out to Alek. Hold my Hand is also notable in how Alek navigates his sexuality in terms of whether he will have sex for the first time. […] For the Armenian community, this is a major breakthrough for Queer youth.
— description for Hold My Hand on the Queer Armenian Library website
Keepers of the Stones & Stars represents a departure from Barakiva’s earlier novels, both in its fantastic premise and in its backgrounding of the theme of the Armenian diaspora family. While the tale still begins in the humble city of Asbury Park, New Jersey, Keepers focuses on its two main characters – Reed and his new boyfriend, the Armenian-American Arno – as they become charged with magical stones which imbue their bearers with special powers and, of course, the burden of saving the world. Together, they amass a crew of misfits who, over the course of their quest, learn as much about themselves and their eclectic identities as they do about the strange cosmic powers which chose them for their quest.
The Fear of Large and Small Nations by Nancy Agabian
Feminist writer and teacher Natalee–aka Na–flees the conservative fearmongering of George W. Bush’s America to reclaim her cultural roots in post-Soviet Armenia. As she contends with rigid gender roles and rampant homophobia, learning the language when her linguistic roots in the Ottoman Empire have all but disappeared, and centering her identity as a bisexual Armenian American woman amid her own secret desire for love, Na is soon left with more questions than answers about where her fractured self belongs in the world.
— book description for The Fear of Large and Small Nations
Written in gripping short stories interspersed with intimate journal entries and blog posts, the fragmented narrative reveals what is lost in the tightrope journey between cultures ravaged by violence and colonialism–and what is gained when one woman seizes control of her story, pulsating in its many shades and realities, daring to be witnessed.
Nancy Agabian’s previous books include Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, a memoir honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and Princess Freak, a collection of poetry and performance art texts. In 2021 she was awarded Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. The Fear of Large and Small Nations is her first novel.
— description for The Fear of Large and Small Nations on the Queer Armenian Library website
Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story by Nyri A. Bakkalian
Wielder and blade. One heart together. Surveying the ruins of her wife’s hometown, River Victoria Eginian felt useless. Still adjusting to her cybernetic prostheses — the result of career-ending combat wounds amid coming out as trans — life was already a challenge. But soon she met the local combat dolls—cybernetic beings. River’s wife Dr. Isawa Kasu, a brilliant cyberneticist, leaps headfirst into helping her wife remake herself as a blue-haired combat doll with a new name: River M59A1.
— book description for Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story
Published in 2022, Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story by Nyri A. Bakkalian is a novel about a trans-lesbian couple: an Armenian-American combat specialized cyborg and her Japanese cyberneticist spouse Isawa Kasu. Their intense loyalty to each other carries them through a fight against long odds and systemic injustice.
Nyri A. Bakkalian, Ph.D. is a queer Armenian-American by birth, a military historian by training, and is proud to have called the American and Japanese northeasts her home. Her writing, art, and photography have appeared in Gutsy Broads, Metropolis Japan, The Copperfield Review, and other venues. She authored the novel Grey Dawn and the essay The Armenians of Pittsburgh.
— description for Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story on the Queer Armenian Library website
Leap: A memoir by Brent Love
In a small Texas town, Brent comes out to his parents, and on that night his place in the world cracks wide open. Unmoored from his family but unwilling to give up on his dream, Brent enters the Peace Corps with the incredible task of navigating an unfamiliar land, a new language, and a new identity as a gay man in post-Soviet Armenia. When his Peace Corps commitment begins to take unexpected turns, Brent must decide what matters to him most and where he thinks he belongs.
— book description for Leap: A memoir
Published in 2024, Leap by Brent Love is a memoir that details his experiences when he came out to his American family and then three days later began a two-year Peace Corp assignment in Armenia. This is the first memoir by an American writer detailing queer life in Armenia.
Brent Love is an American memoirist and Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. During his work as Roving Correspondent for the American Refugee Committee, Love covered stories across the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Love studied political science and international relations at Abilene Christian University and began his career in refugee resettlement in West Texas. He is the host of the surrogacy podcast Hope Works.
— description for Leap: A memoir on the Queer Armenian Library website
