Report compiled by Tristan Marshall, Visual Media Investigator, Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media
To my superiors:
I apologize for the prolonged lack of communication. I came into contact with a new fragment of Passerine Birds of the Great Lakes (Vol. II) and thought it pertinent that I quarantine until I was positive that I was no longer transmuting. The fragment is in storage at my place of residence; please send an agent to collect it as soon as possible, it’s broken three filing cabinets as of writing.
Unfortunately, due to my contact with Passerine Birds, I had to immediately vacate my civilian employment. I have been squatting in a building that once belonged to the law offices of Peterson and Vanclad PC, Attorneys at Law in the scenic Mistake on the Lake-- Cleveland, Ohio. If I’m correct, then at least one member of the Institute’s Board should have raised eyebrows upon reading that name; Abraham Vanclad was a nightmare to Northern Ohio’s indie publishing scene from 1976 until his death in 2009, due to his litigation of smaller presses when they toed the line of public domain. While most of them were unscrupulous (no tears will be shed for No Vacancy Publishing’s demise, with their $50 submission fee and proto-MLM pay structure) his litigation means that over three dozen anthologies, comprising over 1,000 individual short stories, are now permanently out of print.
And, it seems, Mr. Vanclad kept trophies of sorts-- I don’t see why else the room that was formerly his office would have an aging copy of 1995’s On King Arthur’s Secret Service, an attempt to adapt Arthurian Lore into a James Bond-esque spy-fi setting, or 2048, an anthology that somehow had the blessing of George Orwell’s estate to tell stories of the world of 1984, IngSoc and Big Brother during the titular year. All of these have been documented, and I have done my best to preserve them (again, please send an agent to collect) but the crown jewel of the collection was a copy of Prismatica, the lost 2009 queer fiction anthology curated by Valeria Schrader.
Firstly: it’s braced. I’ve managed to confirm that much-- the paper is impossible for me to tear or cut, the cover is unaffected by mold or any other form of rot or aging. It’s a bona fide anomalous document containing seven pieces of short, queer fiction from the late 2000s.
I’ve inspected the volume fully-- it seems to have lost the ‘bite’ it had circa 2009, as it were. From what I’ve read, Prismatica was weaponized post-publication, being handed out at gun shows, Republican campaign rallies, and other conservative functions disguised as everything from The Turner Diaries to The Anarchist’s Cookbook; excerpts of it were even reportedly published in pamphlets meant to look like Chick Tracts, though they lacked any illustrations. The Institute was predominately straight prior to the mass proliferation of the internet; perhaps the fact that I haven’t been affected by a fully intact copy of Prismatica is due to my own complex relationship with gender.
Regardless, I have read all seven stories, and have summarized them below.
Lipstick Stain
By Julian Schipp
‘Lipstick Stain’ tells the story of a teenaged boy who, after wearing his mother’s lipstick out of curiosity, is forced to eat the rest of it. The effects on his body are horrific-- probably the most graphic description of aluminum poisoning I’ve seen outside of a murder mystery novel. His mother tries to bury his paralyzed body in the yard without realizing that he’s alive.
I had to be careful when reading this; Lipstick Stain was associated with at least a dozen cases of aluminum poisoning reported at the 2012 Republican National Convention; these were likely psychosomatic in nature, due to reading graphic descriptions of the symptoms. Precedent exists for plain text causing illness if the description is graphic enough; see the 1952 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maladies or the Palmer, Kansas School District’s 2013 STD Education Pamphlets, among others.
Agent O
By Gregory Grimm
A spy thriller pastiche, comedic in nature; the twist is that the James Bond stand-in, ‘Agent O’, is gay, and nobody seems to get it, least of all the object of his affections, Agent Q. I don’t much care for spy fiction, so I don’t know how this stacks up in the genre, but much of the humor seems to come from the fact that it doesn’t occur to most people that LGBTQIA+ people… exist. There’s a line that mentions Agent O foiled ‘a plot wherein terrorists attempted to set off a bomb that would have rendered the citizens of San Francisco unable to be attracted to the opposite sex’. Grimm is listed as having been with ‘a man he considers his husband for fifteen years’ in his bio at the back of the collection; I don’t know if the humor simply isn’t landing with me or if it’s just bad writing.
The anomaly with this work is both active and annoying; every piece of music I hear sounds like it’s straight out of a bad spy film. My playlist says ‘Florence + The Machine’, but I’m hearing the theme to Operation Double 007, a 1967 Italian spy film starring Sean Connery’s brother.
Note: effect faded after approximately six hours.
The Queen in Yellow
By Nannette Simpson
“Over the course of the 20th century, the so-called Yellow Sign, a symbol both deviant and divine, became a common mark for the sexual pariahs of the world-- gay, trans, lesbian, all could come together beneath the Yellow King’s mark and be one.” Thus begins The Queen in Yellow, a tale which attempts to tell a new story from the world of Robert W. Chamber’s horror anthology The King in Yellow. ‘Carcosa’ is misspelled twice in the 5000-word work, and the plot tells the story of a trans woman getting the Yellow Sign tattooed on her right breast, and how it affects her.
There’s a strong theme of reclamation throughout the work, which makes sense; The Yellow Sign and various other hallmarks associated with Hastur were co-opted by Lovecraft for his Cthulhu mythos, and Lovecraft was every flavor of bigot available in the early 1900s. Enjoyable enough.
Again, I had to be careful with this one; copies of The Queen in Yellow distributed at the 2010 Louisville Gun Show resulted in ‘spontaneous changes in human mammaries’, per an Institute report at the time. While reportedly the effect is less pronounced in those who aren’t cis-hetero, I’d rather not risk the chance of me needing a mastectomy while I’m uninsured.
At this point, I started noticing that there were consistent elements in each of the works-- particular word choices and foibles that are hard for unskilled authors to conceal, or easy for a skilled author to accentuate for thematic purposes. For instance, the phrase ‘lemon-scented’ appears in each story, as does the description of a ‘sky so blue you could drown in it’, and both this and Lipstick Stain have a character extinguish a candle by pinching the wick. Schrader was the editor for this, so she may have inserted these phrases… but she could just has easily have written them all herself and published them under a variety of pseudonyms.
Guenevere’s Eyes
By June ‘Jojo’ Johannsen
A lesbian retelling of the tale of Guenevere and Lancelot-- Lancelot in this continuity is a young woman impersonating her older brother, who is a ‘layabout and a lout’. Apparently, the author thought alliteration was appealing to her audience, as it pervades the work. ‘Lancelot’ commissions the assassination of King Arthur so that she and Guenevere can be together.
Note: I’ve been informed that several early King Arthur stories were written in alliterative verse. Perhaps this was intended as a callback to those?
Language and references are both anachronistic; it’s one thing to mention Bedlam House in a vaguely medieval work, but at one point, a ‘village idiot’ croons out a verse from Sloppy Seconds’ immortal song, Why Don’t Lesbians Love Me?, in order to heckle Guenevere and Lancelot kissing in public. He even says ‘dude’.
Guenevere’s Eyes was, perhaps appropriately, reported to cause blindness among seven members of staff at a facility called Camp Bethlehem, a ‘pray the gay away’ conversion camp in Western Pennsylvania-- once again, this doesn’t seem to affect me, but I would caution any of the Institute’s more conservative members against reading it. Furthermore, this shares the ‘lemon-scented’ descriptor with the other works in the anthology, this time talking about some wine that Lancelot drinks.
Great Blue Sea
By Willa Tombstone
As far as I’m aware, the term ‘queerbaiting’ didn’t arise until the mid-2010s; however, the term ‘queer baiting practices’ comes up in this story in an odd context. It’s a cyberpunk future, and ‘fishermen’ are tasked with weeding LGBTQIA+ individuals out of the population by luring them into containment using what I can only describe as rainbow-coded dog whistles. Some of it reminds of Fahrenheit 451, specifically the later theatrical adaptation; it’s legal to be a homosexual as long as you don’t show homosexual behavior, just as it is legal to own books but you are disallowed from reading them. This is the situation our protagonist, a ‘homosexual man of fifty-two years married to a woman with whom he has had five children’, finds himself in.
It’s… grim, to say the least. Rather gruesome, as well. But this anomaly might be the most baffling of the bunch-- it wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after reading it and going to do some light errands, I found that people were asking what my pronouns were regularly-- I’m male-presenting, by and large; could this confound pronouns? Possibly more testing needed.
If I am correct, and Schrader did write all of these stories, or affect them in some way with her editing, then it’s clear that we have someone who has great skill with the art of writing. Five distinct anomalies across five separate works; it’s terrifying, and likely explains how Schrader was able to pull off what she did when she was active.
Schrader was part of a majority-female pro-queer militia calling themselves ‘The Society of Stonewall Scythians’; they were calling for LGBTQIA+ individuals to arm themselves long before it was in vogue to do so, and while it has never been proven, allegations linking the SSS to the 2006 ‘Fountain of Blood’ outside the Sistine Chapel have circulated for over a decade. Schrader herself may be a polymath, versed in both anomalous writing practices and anomalous sculpture.
Royale
By Colleen Pierce
Gay intrigue at a royal palace in the fictional European country of The Republic of Cote Rania. (At least I’m assuming it’s European-- they mention their ‘cousins in England’ at one point.) Surprisingly complex for a short story-- but complex doesn’t mean interesting. It revolves around a succession crisis after the crown prince announces that he will marry his male fiance, and… bearing in mind that I don’t know much about anime, this feels like the plot of a bad anime, one where every character has the same face and there are fewer frames of animation than a Synchro-Vox cartoon.
This story is unique in that its effects seem to be geared towards queer individuals; Cote Rania's flag is described as being 'hued with all the colors of the rainbow... a stain on vexillology, but a flag the people are proud of, and fiercely defend'. This might explain why, in 2018, the Patton Baptist Church in Patton, Nebraska was destroyed following its public burning of the Inclusive Pride Flag; anecdotally speaking, I nearly cursed out a woman for sneering at an agender pride pin I had on my shirt.
Prismatica
By Valeria Schrader
Prismatica is the titular work in the piece, and is less a short story and more of a manifesto by Schrader, beginning with an autobiographical segment. She explains how she was six years old when the Stonewall Riot happened, and that her father berated the television whenever he saw news about it; she reasoned that if these people were capable of making her father angry so easily, that she wanted to know more about them. When she came out as bisexual and trans-femme in 1984, her father attempted to ‘dispose of her’ (her words exactly), but she ‘fought him off with a copy of Juliet & Juliet by Mary Caddick’; Caddick was a queer author who died in 1987, and her work has largely been beneath notice. However, I managed to dig up a police report about the 1984 incident, which states that Willem Schrader, Valeria’s father, was found in a ‘crater’ in his front yard, with ‘several broken bones’. A manifestation of Schrader’s own abilities ,or does Juliet & Juliet have its own anomaly?
In any case, she continues with a screed:
“For centuries, the Christian Man has attempted to lock us in closets and let us suffocate. For centuries, the Christian Woman has pushed to lobotomize us in the name of defending her children. Levi’s tribe is dust, and its laws with it. We will not be beholden to the laws of a God of Hate-- we have a right to live, a right to love, and it will not be abridged by the fascism of the Christian Nation. I refuse to be beholden by any of your Stolen Commandments, and that includes the seventh-- I shalt kill in the name of my own defense, beginning with…”
And then the document goes on to list dozens of names. I’ve looked them up-- all of them were local to Northern Ohio, and all of them are affiliated with some form of homophobic group of some form, ranging from members of the Catholic Church to the law firm of Peterson and Vanclad, PC. Abraham Vanclad was hired by someone else named in the manifesto to sue Schrader and her publishing company for harassment and defamation of character, among other allegations.
Process servers attempting to serve Schrader with papers vanished twice, re-appearing in Nova Scotia weeks later. So, Vanclad took it upon himself to attempt to personally serve Schrader. The result was recorded in a statement to the Cleveland PD by a witness:
“I lived down the hall from her. She seemed nice enough; a little quiet, and clearly a dyke, but she didn’t seem harmful. So when I heard screaming coming from her apartment, I thought ‘oh my god, someone’s hurting her’. I called the police, but when I looked out into the hallway… it was the strangest thing. There was something standing out there, it looked like a sculpture, a man made out of paper, like pages from a book. It was soaking wet, too; it took me a while to realize it wasn’t water or ink. That man was a lawyer, you said? He was just trying to do his job. I hope you catch her.”
And they have yet to; Schrader has been on the run for over a decade at this point. Reportedly, she was sighted at the 2016 Akron Firearm and Hunting Expo, distributing pamphlets; the contents of these pamphlets are unknown, as the majority of them seemingly self-destructed following reading. Notably, Akron held its first Pride parade the following year.
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To my readers: thank you for sticking around, those of you who have. My employment situation varies between 'precarious' and 'non-existent' at the moment; while donations are not expected, I do have a Ko-Fi you can find in the sidebar, if you wish to donate.
I'm behind on Institute work, but hopefully I can make up for lost time. I have a couple of items in the trunk, as it were, waiting to be published.
Be seeing you.
