Proud Pink Sky

by Redfern Jon Barrett

Overview

In this stunning work of speculative urban fiction, Redfern Jon Barrett breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia—presenting an ambitopian vision of the world’s first gay state.

A glittering gay metropolis of 24 million people, Berlin is a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenagers William and Gareth, who flee toward sanctuary. But is there a place for them in the deeply divided city?

Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering high rises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district—not until she and her family are trapped in a queer riot. With her husband Howard plunging into religious paranoia, she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.

Challenging assumptions of sex and gender, Proud Pink Sky questions how much of ourselves we need to sacrifice in order to find identity and community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612942537
Publisher:	Bywater Books MI
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Pages:	275
Sales rank:	1,079,237
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Redfern Jon Barrett (they/them) is a writer, community activist, and author of the novels Forget Yourself and The Giddy Death of the Gays & the Strange Demise of Straights, which was a finalist in the Bisexual Book Awards and shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Redfern's short stories have appeared in Booth, The Sun, Passages North, SLEEK, and Flash Fiction Online, were shortlisted for Scotland's HISSAC prize, and longlisted for the Royal Academy/Pin Drop Short Story Award; their other writing has been featured in publications including Guernica and PinkNews, as well as the National Museum of Denmark.

Born in the North of England, Redfern lived in market towns, seaside resorts, and post-industrial cities, before moving to Wales and gaining a Ph.D. in Literature from Swansea University(Prifysgol Abertawe). Their campaign work for LGBTQ and polyamory rights has been referenced in The Mirror, Metro, BBC News, Buzzfeed, and The Independent. Now Redfern lives in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, with two boyfriends and far too many books.

Learn more about them at www.redjon.com

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Tender and heart-breaking, Proud Pink Sky is centered on a Berlin that could have been—a paradisal Gay Republic that is not all it seems—and it’s absolutely captivating, a perfect blend of reality and fiction, disquiet and hope, caution and celebration. Beautifully conceived and deeply affecting, Proud Pink Sky is a book you’ll want to return to again and again.” —Calder Szewczak, author(s) of The Offset

“The conflicts and conversations—both micro and macro—will be achingly familiar to anyone who has been engaged with queer or trans movements in recent years, helping us to remember the vital need for coalition and solidarity right now. Please read this book!” —Meg-John Barker, author of Queer: A Graphic History

“Drawing on an in-depth knowledge of queer history, Proud Pink Sky richly imagines an alternative world that is neither utopia nor dystopia. Barrett’s vertical Berlin is a setting built on dreams, yet pocked with flaws, nuances, and squabbles that make it feel credible and strangely universal. Intriguing and occasionally shattering, Proud Pink Sky defies binaries in more ways than one, making it a compelling and welcome addition to the speculative Queer canon.” —Christian Baines, author of The Beast Without

“Redfern’s fabulous ‘what if?’ envisions the queerest of timelines—a postwar Berlin that refashions itself as the world’s only gay city-state. This electrifying tour through a would-be utopia riven by its own contradictory laws, traditions, and prejudices is at once deeply celebratory and critical. Like 1984, its distant ancestor, the novel questions and probes but dares to hope for a happier, freer future.” —Brett Josef Grubisic, author of The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck

“To enter the pages of Proud Pink Sky is to be engulfed by a tidal power of masterful storytelling, morphing histories, and utopian imaginings. Boundaries of families and colonies, maps and guidebooks, words and sounds, dissolve into delicious, heady outcomes in this vital inhabitation of queer homelands. The crisp narrative pace combines with sensuous contours of language to remind one that to belong to an electrifying urban milieu is to also belong to its many troubled, unspoken intimacies and exiles. Redfern Jon Barrett has composed a virtuosic novel of fearless incantations.” —Gayathri Prabhu, author of If I Had to Tell It Again

“In Proud Pink Sky, Redfern Jon Barrett demonstrates that utopias and dystopias are not the opposites of each other—they coexist in the exact same space. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said, ‘Beware of the Other’s dream, because if you are caught in the Other’s dream, you are screwed.’ With Barrett’s eye for both history and prophecy, the Gay Republic of Berlin feels as lived in as a real nation. Though they’ve built an imaginative and thought-through alternative universe, they don’t stop there; the yearnings and struggles of their characters are also true and engrossing. Barrett’s novel is a compelling page-turning read and an important warning.” —Paul Gallant, author of Still More Stubborn Stars

Editorial Reviews

01/02/2023

Both queer as in gay and queer as in strange, this remarkable alternate history of 1990s Berlin from Barrett (Forget Yourself) follows William and Gareth, a young gay couple fleeing homophobic families in England for Berlin, and Cissie, a cis, straight mother of two whose husband brings their family to Berlin, known as “Gay Berlin” since it became an independent state and haven for homosexuals in an otherwise antagonistic world, for work. Both perspectives demonstrate the growing unrest within the city-state as underground movements work to destabilize the conservative leadership, which discourages experimentation and keeps nonbinary, polyamorous, and even straight people as a kind of underclass. Frequent use of Polari, a real but here fictionally embellished language used by gay people, at times may take the reader out of the story, though it is clearly well researched by Barrett. Also distracting are the twee names for places in Berlin: “Twinkstadt,” for example, or “Paw,” the area for bears. The reader is not meant to sympathize with the micro categorizations these areas enforce, but the irony is a bit over-the-top. The result is a gripping if somewhat heavy-handed work of speculative fiction. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Astute and frightening as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four yet reads with the pace and energy of a modern action thriller.” —My Gay Toronto

“Proud Pink Sky is an impressively readable work that captivates you early on and drags you effortlessly into a utopia that isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be. You’ll enjoy the characters, the story, and the setting. What more could you ask for?” —Out in Print

“. . . an important, well-written, complex tale that will grip you, shake you, and give you a different view of what makes a utopia, and at what costs.” —Queer Sci Fi

“Like most utopian/dystopian novels, the main point of this novel is showing us a hypothetical universe—what would the world be like if LGBTQ people had defeated, or at least helped to defeat the Nazis? What would a city-state run by and for LGBTQ people be like? . . . Utopian novels tend to be weak when it comes to having an actual plot, but Barrett dodges that problem.” —Interzone

From the Publisher