Today on the site I’m delighted to offer a peek inside one of the best-named queer anthologies of all time, Be Gay, Do Crime ed. by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, which releases June 3rd from Dzanc Books! Here’s the gist:
A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of queer chaos from an all-queer author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and Francesca Ekwuyasi
A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she’s had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers’ homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.
In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime–unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.
And here’s a bit more about the stories, as presented by its fabulous contributors!
“Operation Hyacinth” by Sam Cohen
It’s pretty obviously a time to be gay and do crime. This story was due months before the country started to be dismantled from the top by rapist death-obsessed kleptomaniacal oligarchs but the same was true then. When Molly asked me to be in this anthology, I was overwhelmed by options—there were so many gay crimes I wanted to imagine: ecoterrorism, assassination, hacking into billionaire’s accounts and redistributing wealth…but then, I thought, it’s always best to work locally. In Los Angeles, it’s become normal for developers to buy entire city blocks, displacing long-established and evolving communities, shutting down bars and restaurants and stores everybody loves. LA neighborhoods obviously have long histories—people who’ve lived near each other and coevolved and grown with and around each other—often from several different communities—and here developers were, yanking them out at the roots to replace them with some strip of pilates studio/single-origin coffee shop/ceramics-and-soap store and the people who frequent these places.
When I was writing this, my best friend’s bungalow complex in Echo Park was being purchased by developers. It was a complex of queer people and Spanish-speaking Mexican Americans, where everyone still paid rent from 2009, rent that is maybe 30% of what similar units in the neighborhood would go for now. Where would everyone go? I felt scared and angry and powerless and those feelings engendered this crime fantasy. I listened to a podcast about a female bank robber who robbed banks for fun, and it made it seem really easy and possible to rob banks. And I love a group crime, a queer collaboration.
Just yesterday, my friend in Ohio who has read this story sent me a flyer to pitch in to help families in a 10-unit Echo Park bungalow complex keep their homes of decades. I want to be in the fight and also I feel so hopeless: the law is designed to protect the rich—the landlords, the developers. I wanted to write a story that imagined renters and queer people and POC and longterm inhabitants of the neighborhood winning.
I also wanted to memorialize Kendy, the meanest little Yorkshire terrier of Echo Park—RIP.
“It’s A Cruel World for Empaths Like Us” by Soula Emmanuel
My story is about a trans woman who is very early in her transition and working a dead-end desk job not unlike the one I was working in when I was early in mine. She has a bad experience with laser hair removal and is unable to get her complaint resolved, so, naturally, she begins phoning hoax bomb threats to the laser clinic and the businesses located nearby. She gets an enormous thrill out of the power it gives her, at a time when she feels very isolated living with only her cat for company. I suppose I was inspired a little by Josie Giles’ essay Wages for Transition, about how the work of transition should be compensated – my protagonist is going through this incredibly stressful and expensive process while having to do her day job as well, and she cracks under the strain. Perhaps the moral of the story is: once you’ve spent an entire morning sitting in an open-plan office with laser hair removal marks all over your face, you’ll naturally want to smash capitalism into a fine paste.
“Peep Show” by Alissa Nutting
Comp-het and Catholicism really did a one-two punch on me, and it took me decades to fully come out. I’ve never been economically dependent on a man, but I still had a panic button in the back of my brain that said, Being lesbian isn’t safe because in a worst-case scenario, your survival might depend on pretending to be hetero and letting a man take care of you. I saw heterosexuality as the only social safety net women have in America. This illusion of “security” (that I’d never even benefitted from in practice!) was a terrifying deterrent to me for a very long time. So I think a lot about straight-passing privilege, and transactional straight performativity. I wanted to write a story about a character who feels like resisting that privilege and forfeiting those benefits is too risky, even when it should be clear that she’ll lose far more than she’ll gain.
“The Meaning of Life” by Myriam Lacroix
It’s no coincidence that “The Meaning of Life” is the first chapter in How It Works Out, the novel-in-stories I spent over half of my twenties writing, and that came out last year. How It Works Out is a multiverse novel in which each chapter offers an alternate outcome to the relationship between Myriam and Allison. The book begins with ecstatic early-romance fantasies and, slowly, sees Myriam and Allison’s relationship take stranger and darker turns. How It Works Out was inspired by a list of possibilities I wrote in my first queer relationship, back when queerness felt like a sexy and divine revelation. “The Meaning of Life” was the first of these possibilities I developed into a chapter, and the most loyal to the original list. In it, Myriam and Allison find a baby in an alley, and against all odds build a chaotic and beautiful life. While Myriam and Allison are introduced as the idealist and naive weirdos they are, and while the world around them is full of dark realities, they laugh and fuck their way through it, making art and breaking rules and primal screaming at the ceiling in all-gold outfits. To me, “The Meaning of Life” is the absolute fantasy. It’s unrestrained queer joy.
“Grand Beaver Cabin” by Emily Austin
Meet a 32-year-old woman with a strange vice: secretly entering, and dominating, children’s coloring contests. When she wins a trip to a beaver-themed, Great Wolf Lodge – esque hotel, she confronts her past disappointments. The story deals with being discouraged as a kid, seeing the specialness in others, learning from an old lesbian, and wanting better for younger generations. It was inspired by one of my childhood memories. When I was about eight years old, one of my older sisters won a giant chocolate rabbit at Easter. I wrote this while remembering myself gnawing on hunks of that giant chocolate bunny’s body.
“Two Hundred Channels of Conflict” by Mac Crane
Two Hundred Channels of Conflict began simply because I wanted to write a story about a weird queer person who watches another person’s TV through their window. I don’t know why, but I tend not to question these things. Then I considered why this narrator might not have a TV of their own and their anger issues were born. As a person who has always been angry, has always struggled with channeling my rage, it felt meaningful to write into this character and this story. And to resist giving them a compassionate arc and tidy, healed ending. To let them misbehave, to let them fuck up, to let them hope against hope anyway.
“Distraction” by Maame Blue
Distraction follows a young uni student who develops a crush on a new friend with sticky fingers and a fickle heart. I actually wrote the skeleton of this story about seven years ago. I wanted to explore that time in life when you’re just coming into yourself and everything feels crucial but contained, especially for someone living away from home for the first time. And nothing during that period can feel more important than the potential for love, even if the object of your affection feels uncertain, untrustworthy or completely wrong for you in all the right ways. The idea of flirtation as a distraction from real life, felt playful but exacting; a way for a character to learn who they really are when they go down the rabbit hole of their feelings and come out alone.
“Of Course, A Curse” by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
In the story “Of Course, A Curse”, a woman named Naya destroys her girlfriend C’s “cursed” hat after a violent encounter at a bar that she blames on the hat. The cursed hat is a convenient deflection for the real root of many of Naya and C’s problems, including C’s drinking and angry outbursts. C also steals watches with an almost supernatural knack for it. I wanted to explore how money and alcohol can add fuel to the fire of existing tensions in a relationship. Neither C nor Naya are innocent in this story; all my fiction tends to contain gays behaving badly, and I also describe my work as “relationship horror,” which is definitely applicable to this story. I’ve also woven in elements of queer archival work and queer history, because that seemed like a fun way to play with themes of intracommunity conflict and the complexity of what it really means to archive and document queer life. The initial images I had in my head before I began to write this story were: slipping watches off of wrists and a woman masturbating while someone read from lesbian archival materials to her. I’d started to write a story about a cursed hat in a craft class I teach on writing horror where I ask participants to make a normal piece of clothing “cursed.” I ended up smashing that together with those watch-stealing and weird masturbation images, and this story emerged.
“Wild Ale” by S J Sindu
“Wild Ale” is about a queer couple in the first months of lockdown during the covid epidemic. Cam, the narrator, feels increasingly isolated and numb, and deals with it through brewing beer as a hobby, even as anti-lockdown protests start to happen on her street. This story captures the frustration and yearning of those early lockdown months, the fear that made people act impulsively, the denial of some that their lives needed to change. I wrote this story while I was living in Toronto, one of the most locked-down cities in North America. We were self-isolating for about a year and half, which made us all safer and the covid rates were a tenth of what the U.S. was experiencing just across the border. But a year and a half is a long time to be isolated, so I took up beer brewing as a hobby. I also found myself spending impulsively, getting into unnecessary fights with my partner, and spending large amounts of time doing absolutely nothing, bouncing off the walls of our city apartment. I had a lot of time to think about how much we all need each other as humans, how much we yearn for connection, and that’s what I wanted to capture in “Wild Ale.”
“Make Life Great Again” by Priya Guns
Because I could and cannot simply blow something up – I wrote “Make Life Great Again.” It was conceived in December 2023 and I finished writing it in the summer of 2024.
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Molly Llewellyn is a twenty-something queer, disabled book blogger from the UK. She previously co-edited Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, published by Dzanc Books in 2023. She’s a big fan of “weird women” lit and anything that is the color green.
Kristel Buckley is an editor, publicist and former publisher from the Big Smoke. She is more than happy to talk your ear off about the unfaithful representation of women in history, and her passion is a more equitable, inclusive future for all stories from all voices. She lives in the UK.
