Passing Strange

The second in [b:a Tor.com collection of 4 queer-authored novellas|39724296|In Our Own Worlds Four LGBTQ+ Tor.com Novellas|Margaret Killjoy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522942282l/39724296.SY75.jpg|61405231], Passing Strange starts in the modern era with a (very) old East-Asian-American woman sorting out her affairs in her last few days, we quickly flash back to follow a handful of queer women in San Francisco of 1940 — and with brief hints of magical realism. In particular, most of the plot follows the budding romance between a “male impersonator” torch singer (we’d call her a drag king these days) and a cover artist for lurid pulp magazines who meet at Mona’s 440 Club, the first lesbian bar in San Francisco, opened in 1936.

The author describes it with “inspired by the pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy, Passing Strange is a story as unusual and complex as San Francisco itself”, the novella is something she started writing fresh out of college in 1977 with 4 scenes, featuring her 2 main protagonists, which she copied around from computer to computer. Until a friend at Tor.com asked her to contribute something to their then-new novella line in 2018 and gave her the impetus to turn those fragments into this beautiful novella, described by Marjorie Ingall for Jewish online magazine Tablet as having “flashes of A Wrinkle in Time and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco and Wong Kar‑wai’s In the Mood for Love”.

Her detail of the San Francisco of queer women in 1940 is rich and vivid, including showing how these women find a place in a world that wants to deny their existence — as Klages told Joshua Wilson for The Fabulist, “My job as a writer is to describe the setting a way so that it doesn’t feel like history. It just feels like you’re going out for the evening to a nightclub where you’ve never been before.” And as Ross Johnson said in his B&N review, “it’s to Klages’ credit that she invites us to observe these women without judging their means of survival”. The title is a play on words that weaves throughout the tale — of the 6 women main-characters, they are all passing in 1 way or another and “strange” was a euphemism for queer at the time, as she told Nike Sulway for Writing from Below:

Every lesbian pulp fiction paperback from the ’50s is titled something ‘Strange’ — sometimes it’s ‘Queer’ — but mostly it’s ‘Strange Sister’ or ‘Strange Lover’. The titles were just code for: this is gonna be queer. So I definitely wanted to have that in there.

And Passing Strange, while showing us the characters’ pain as well, does show us so much of their queer joy. One of the things I really liked about that Fabulist interview is Klages’s insistence on that:

In the early 1950s, there were hundreds of lesbian paperbacks. Some of them are cheesy, almost soft-core porn, some of them are actually really well-written, but the covers of most of them have a blonde woman and a dark-haired woman. And by the end of the story, almost always, the blonde-haired woman has discovered the love of a good man and has given up her sordid past. And the dark-haired woman either commits suicide, is killed, or is committed to an asylum as incurably insane. Those women were not allowed to have happy endings.
There are a very small handful of paperbacks from that time that are exceptions. But there is a long, long tradition of lesbian stories, starting with [b:The Well of Loneliness|129223|The Well of Loneliness|Radclyffe Hall|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415588651l/129223.SY75.jpg|1156985] in the 1920s, where there cannot be happy ending because society — and publishing — won’t allow it. One of the things I was conscious of in writing Passing Strange was that I was determined for Haskel and Netterfield to have a happy ending, but not a Disney happy ending. No tying it up in a neat little bow.

I had never heard of [a:Ellen Klages|24901|Ellen Klages|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1227067359p2/24901.jpg] before picking up this collection, but this is such a beautiful novella that I am certainly going to have to read a lot more of her work; it is easily one of my favourite recent reads and deservedly won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award and a Gaylactic Spectrum Award, as well as nominations for a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, a Bisexual Writers Award and a Mythopoeic Award.

CN: terminal illness and suicide, domestic violence, abuse by police, sporadic but significant era-appropriate homophobia and anti-Chinese racism, detail on living as a queer woman in 1940’s San Francisco.