Tamara Jereé found their community in a sapphic book club on the South Side.
The Hyde Park-based fantasy-romance author struggled to find acceptance growing up in Alabama.
But they moved to Chicago in 2023, and got to know the city’s queer lit community and its authors for the first time. Their first short story collection, “A Vision of Moonlight,” debuted the same year.
It wasn’t until Jereé began writing their latest novel, “The Flowers I Deserve,” that they accepted themselves as non-binary, even as an adult steeped in queer community.
There’s a need for more trans representation in literature, they said, so like other local LGBTQ+ creatives, they’re trying to create space for their community in their writing.
As Chicago has become a haven for transgender people being targeted by legislation in the U.S., writing remains an escape for queer people in the city.
“There was no representation, or a space to explore and be myself [at home],” they said. “[So] that’s what I’m trying to do in my work.”
Tamara Jerée, ‘The Flowers I Deserve’
Jerée, 32, has loved creatures as long as they can remember.
Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire” and Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” are partially to blame.
But reading “The Gilda Stories” by Jewelle Gomez — a vampire novel with themes of queer community — was the first time they saw a path as an author. Despite one of Jereé’s Purdue University professors criticizing their paranormal stories as unserious, they said the book showed them a “tradition of Black lesbians writing really impactful work in this genre.”
“That book was my foundation,” Jerée said. “It felt like permission in a way, the encouragement to see this has been done before.”
Now the characters and creatures inhabiting their fantasy worlds draw on their own experience. Their latest release, published in November, follows a protagonist struggling with being shunned for a difference they were born with, and grappling with their ancestors’ desires conflicting with their own.
“They’re just going to be different if they’re Black and lesbian,” Jereé said.
Féi Iká Shumarí, ‘CHABÓCHI DOLL’
Féi Iká Shumarí said the closest literary mirror she could find was still written by gay men, a very different queer experience from her own.
Shumarí said they also were U.S. citizens, unable to reflect her own fear amid the federal immigration blitz gripping the area “by the neck” as someone who grew up without legal status. The Chihuahua, Mexico-born author and recent School of the Art Institute masters graduate was driven to write while living in Morton Grove, in part, because she realized “this may be where I’m last seen.”
She filled in the lack of representation herself in her book “CHABÓCHI DOLL” — or “foreigner doll,” combining the Indigenous Rarámuri word for outsiders and a slang term for trans women.
She encourages other writers to “share their full selves.”
“I’ve never read the story of an undocumented trans woman but I know many of them,” Shumarí, 33, said. “So there is a need to be filled, and I can fill it.”
Her book, out July 1, also serves as a classroom for those who have never met an Indigenous, Two-Spirit trans woman. It doubles down on the intersections of her identities, forcing readers to reckon with her experiences “until they can recite what I just said.”
“I just want people to read my s— so they can be better people,” she said.
Sloane Murphy, ‘Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow’
The queer lit icon Robert Glück once opined, “We are a village common producing images.” Three years ago, that was the inspiration for Sloane Murphy to start writing “Shut Up, I Love You, I’ll Call You Tomorrow.”
In her upcoming November book, the North Side resident puts readers in a fictionalized version of the bar stools and kitchen tables where she once sat to preserve those stories for future generations.
Misshaven eyebrows, awkward sex and trips to Edgewater’s Thorek Memorial Hospital all make it into her early 2020s time capsule.
She wishes she had more of that writing from her predecessors, and thinks of the gossip dished by women in bars near the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft nearly 100 years ago, where some of the first-ever gender-affirming surgeries were performed before it was burned by the Nazis.
“I couldn’t tell you what trans women at the bar sounded like in Weimar, Germany,” Murphy, 28, said. “[But] we have the opportunity to keep that record for the women after us so they know what it was like when we were here.”