So many stories … queerly retold.
There’s a reason why so many people still debate the Bible, research the history of Greek myths, and resurrect the pagan beliefs co-opted by organized religion. These stories are filled with characters who’ve never gone away even in our modern times. Lunafly retells many of these stories, often through the lens of unbridled queer sexuality. Raymond Luczak rewrites legends from centuries past. Adam becomes our first homosexual and Judith embraces her own sexuality to free her people. Luczak strips away the obfuscations that have long cloaked the homoeroticism of Greek myths to reveal how many of us humans are still gods. Paganism is used to evoke the larger narrative that had existed long before Adam and Eve entered our consciousness.
Reviews
Raymond Luczak’s latest, Lunafly, takes us, the perpetual lovers—always searching, grasping, groping—through the constrictive directives of Biblical times, via the lustful legends of Greek myth, and brings us back to nature, having shown us a new way to live without the rules and laws society has mandated, in a new world where Tom of Finland gets to be the son of Zeus, the women of the Bible finally get to speak and we are allowed, encouraged even, to get lost in the wild woods of the imagination.
— Mark Ward, Circumference, Carcass, and HIKE
In this heated exploration of the true desires and visceral lives behind Biblical characters, Greek gods, and humankind itself through time, Raymond Luczak writes with an edge sharper than the sword of Judith as she slays Holofernes. With lines like—’There’s got to be a way somewhere / down into the cellar of your heart’—Luczak acts as a sexual anthropologist, excavating passionate truths behind our myths—men loving men, women loving women, and the ways we are all made of stories. In these poems, we journey through scenes of passion unwritten from the Bible and Greek myths before ultimately seeing how the gods themselves might have been made—in the beginnings of our relationships with the Earth, the seasons changing, fire, the forests, and each other’s bodies. Luczak ultimately takes us in a circular motion right back to the places where we’ve laid down in the dirt—’let us fall in love again among the daisies’—because although we’ve built kingdoms for our gods in the sky, the raw truth is the love we’ve found with each other between the moss and the roots at our feet and in our hearts.
— Kris Ringman, Sail Skin: poems and I Stole You: Stories from the Fae