It is a truth that LGBTQ persons do not have a literature that reflects us. We have a literature that reflects some of us, and we have a literature that reflects many of us partially. We don’t have a literature that reflects how varied our community is and how different we can be, one from another. How differently we are treated and how differently we respond to our treatment. We differ by race, class, geography, gender and age, among other qualities. Our literature largely ignores our political predicament—that our “rights” are limited and depend on one vote in the Supreme Court. We don’t have novels about LGBTQ people who are discriminated against and abused and murdered. Channing Smith killed himself September 23, 2019 in Manchester, Tennessee, because he had been bullied and his notes to his friend were made public. He was sixteen years old, the same age as Timothy in Ceremonies. We have few adult novels about gay teen-aged suicides. The thinness of our literature is mainly a result of the wholesale purchase of the publishing industry by large media corporations, the large distributors, large booksellers who deal in the economies of scale, and writers who hesitate to write about the real lives of LGBTQ because they don’t think we are interested or are afraid. But we are interested, and some of us are not afraid. We know we are being abused, yet our literature doesn’t even show characters who rebel. We ought to be asking about our literature, Does this book in any serious way reflect our lives? Usually it doesn’t, and these Earthrise essays look at the effect of that failure. Buy Earthrise.