Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer. His research has been published in leading scientific journals including Cell, PNAS, and most recently, Nature Communications. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His previous book Virology was a finalist for the NBCC and Lambda Literary Awards in Nonfiction. His latest book is Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.
At Electric Lit Osmundson tagged nine "books by queer writers [in which] animals play an essential, mythical role, inextricable from the narrator or the story." One entry on the list:
Moby Dick by Herman MelvilleRead about another book on the list.
I only read Moby Dick recently, as a middle-aged bisexual man, and, wow, it’s the gayest book I’ve ever read. I’m glad I didn’t attempt it as a pre-queer high school kid, as so much of thequeerness of the text—not the subtext, the text itself—might not have landed for me. I don’t know how to write a list about queer animal books without including Moby Dick, in which Melville details the ill-fated search for Ahab’s white whale, famously a fish. From the opening scene of Ishmael sharing a bed with Queequeg and waking as “his wife” to the orgasmic definitely-not-sex the whalers share as they extract spermaceti from the head of a sperm whale by sperm squeezing, not only does the white whale represent the hubris of man against nature, but the all-male ship becomes a space wherein the desire for touch becomes not just allowed but a part of the labor:
Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed the sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.There are two wolves inside me, and they are both gay, and their names are Ishmael and Queequeg.
Moby-Dick appears among Daniel Poppick's seven books about work, GQ's green flag books, Eiren Caffall's ten titles on maritime disasters and ecological collapse, Emily Temple's ten notorious literary slogs that are worth the effort, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's top ten novels & stories about prophets, James Stavridis's five best books to know the sea, Robert McCrum's top ten Shakespearean books, Bridget Collins's top ten Quakers in fiction, John Boyne's six best books, Kate Christensen's best food scenes in fiction, Emily Temple's ten literary classics we're supposed to like...but don't, Sara Flannery Murphy ten top stories of obsession, Harold Bloom's six favorite books that helped shape "the American Sublime," Charlotte Seager's five well-known literary monomaniacs who take things too far, Ann Leary's top ten books set in New England, Martin Seay's ten best long books, Ian McGuire's ten best adventure novels, Jeff Somers's five top books that will expand your vocabulary and entertain, Four books that changed Mary Norris, Tim Dee's ten best nature books, the Telegraph's fifteen best North American novels of all time, Nicole Hill's top ten best names in literature to give your dog, Horatio Clare's five favorite maritime novels, the Telegraph's ten great meals in literature, Brenda Wineapple's six favorite books, Scott Greenstone's top seven allegorical novels, Paul Wilson's top ten books about disability, Lynn Shepherd's ten top fictional drownings, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, Penn Jillette's six favorite books, Peter F. Stevens's top ten nautical books, Katharine Quarmby's top ten disability stories, Jonathan Evison's six favorite books, Bella Bathurst's top 10 books on the sea, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best nightmares in literature and ten of the best tattoos in literature, Susan Cheever's five best books about obsession, Christopher Buckley's best books, Jane Yolen's five most important books, Chris Dodd's best books, Augusten Burroughs' five most important books, Norman Mailer's top ten works of literature, David Wroblewski's five most important books, Russell Banks' five most important books, and Philip Hoare's top ten books about whales.
--Marshal Zeringue