K.E. Skedgell

T his post goes hand in hand with my last post, Can You See Them? Your Characters, That Is. A few days ago as I was mindlessly browsing my Facebook news feed, I came across a post from an author I'm following who posts photos of people and ads and such things from the era of the book she had written, which is the early 1900's. For the curious. The post was of this photograph of a handsome young man. Dapper! Swoon! I think I could look at him all day. Um, herm. Okay, back to the post. Anyway, as I was saying, when I got done drooling (I wasn't really drooling, you can't prove that I was), I realized that this young gentleman, or dandy, or whatever he was, resembled what I pictured in my mind's eye the character Josef Reichardt in the current novel I'm working on. A little about Mr. Reichardt. Born in Germany in 1803 to a wealthy baron, Josef lost his inheritance after his beloved father's death to his uncle when he married Josef...

QUILTBAG. What does that mean? Here's the definition according to the Queer Dictionary : QUILTBAG is an acronym. It stands for Queer/Questioning, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Transgender/Transsexual, Bisexual, Allied/Asexual, Gay/Genderqueer. It is meant to be a more inclusive term than GLBT/LGBT and to be more pronounceable (and memorable) than some of the other variations or extensions on the GLBT/LGBT abbreviation. When I first came across this acronym, I thought, what the hell does QUILTBAG mean? It can't mean a bag made out of a quilt, because, you know, silly me, that's the first thing that popped into my mind. So I looked it up and it all made sense to me. The acronym itself is befitting, like a quilt it represents patches of the different aspects of queer life, all wrapped up into one acronym like a bag. The representation of queer folks in entertainment has grown in the last several years as the world becomes more accepting: from books to TV and mo...