Isaac Fellman's Blog

I've written before about Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962), the transgender radiologist, novelist, and medical researcher from the Pacific Northwest. Today I'm reporting back on his novel The Undaunted (1936), a rich historical document with a couple of flagrant self-inserts and an obsessive preoccupation with meat.

The Undaunted is a novel about medical research and infighting among doctors. Richard Cameron (40ish, tall, suffers no fools, grins on every page) is a passionate researcher bent on finding...

The eBook of my latest novel, Notes from a Regicide is on massive sale until Sunday 9/7. Pick it up for $2.99 on Bookshop, Kindle, Kobo, or even Nook, if you're possessed of a powerful, unusual energy. Notes was my first hardcover, and I know not everyone is in the mood to buy a $27 book, so here's your chance to read it for a sub-coffee price.

I hope you get a chance to check it out, here or from the library or in paperback next year – it is a big statement of faith about love and rioting (but ...

Dr. Alan Hart (1890-1962) was a transgender physician and author, one of the handful of trans men in the 20th century to live a public life. An expert on tuberculosis and its diagnosis via X-ray, Hart also wrote four novels and a nonfiction book; I haven't read most of his fiction yet (though the rerelease of his novel The Undaunted is sitting on my shelf), but I understand that it's about physicians, medical research, and the struggle to live a life in line with the ideals of the profession. I ...

Hello! I haven't wanted to write any essays since November, especially on lighthearted topics; I've also been doing quite badly in general. Nonetheless, I'm still me, and this week I felt the machinery creaking into life around one of the things that's keeping me going, the panel show Taskmaster.

Also, and I swear the timing is unrelated, but I have a book coming out on April 15th! Notes from a Regicide is a trans family saga of art and revolution that's been with me in some capacity since 2013,...

You'd never mistake Quentin Crisp's The Last Word for a good book; indeed, you can barely mistake it for a book. Crisp, the last of Britain's old class of professional gay men, and the author of the fine memoir The Naked Civil Servant, dictated it to a friend soon before dying at the age of ninety. It is a very short book with very large type, full of lucid rambling. Nonetheless, the book – published by a small press, eighteen years later, by that same friend – has a purpose, a very specific one...

"But Isaac," you might feebly protest, "who gives a shit today about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"? And I get it – it's a book destined to be a forgotten bestseller, if it isn't halfway forgotten already. Four years on the Times list (1994-1998), and a full-on movie (1997), and yet during this century, I've mostly only seen it discussed in trans circles (and very little there – it's not a Crying Game or a Silence of the Lambs). John Berendt's "nonfiction novel," half true crime and ha...

Powell and Pressburger's classic ballet movie The Red Shoes is proof that midcentury homophobia didn't need a queer body to give it shape. The heroine Vicky Page is seduced, made briefly ecstatic, and then driven to suicide, just like straight women were in lesbian pulps – but the role of her partner is played by an empty spotlight. Instead, her lover is the concept of ballet. Ballet stands in for the instability, the stigmatized infertility, the seduction of the innocent, with which queer peopl...

I'm a little haunted by the duo who were walking near us on the way out of I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun's fantastic psychological study of fandom and thwarted transition. They thought the film was interesting, but felt that its treatment of protagonist Owen's obvious transness was "ham-fisted." I thought: ah, yes, it would either be "ham-fisted" or "forced down our throats." The phrasing changes, depending on how you're processing your discomfort with trans people, but either way, the idea...

U.K., season 2. The real winner of this season is COVID-19, which lip-synched for its life to send everyone home halfway through the season. Baffled by British drag culture, RuPaul trips and drops the crown upon the head of a Glaswegian enby whose hair is a bird. It's not that Lawrence Chaney didn't have a dominant run (though seven months of quarantine did slash her momentum); it isn't even that Lawrence wasn't my favorite queen of the season. It's just that I'm not used to Ru crowning plus-siz...

I don't remember if I've written about Disco Elysium before. It's the kind of thing I'd do, but my memory is blurry these days. I feel like I'm looking at time through a shorter lens. What's in the background is soft and blurry, an effect that I learned the other day on Bluesky is called "bokeh."

I spend my time on Bluesky now because Twitter and Substack, where I originally built a readership outside of my books, have come out as hostile platforms for trans people. There was an argument for sta...