My Essays & Articles
These links go to articles and essays that I am proud of writing for a variety of websites and organizations. You can click the headers or the button below each excerpt.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed Valentine’s Day. It meant that I could give people things that expressed my platonic love for them. It gave me a chance to make or buy little cards with little messages of affection that we’d all put in each other’s handmade mailboxes on our desks. It was great to be able to share that with my friends from school. What could possibly be better than a day that dedicated to celebrating all the people that you love?
Unfortunately, my feelings toward the holiday have gotten more complicated as I’ve gotten older.
When it comes to the book publishing industry, there are a lot of barriers to inclusivity and diversity. Editors and publishers sometimes claim that books by and about marginalized communities do not sell, and many refuse to give underrepresented authors a chance to even try and sell their work. Recently, however, many groups within book publishing have started to push back by tracking the field’s diversity through reports and infographics, to illustrate the lack of books published by non-allocishet white people.
I was excited about Netflix’s Grace and Frankie from the moment I heard about it in late 2014.
If you haven’t watched the show, it is a dramedy featuring Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston playing two men, Robert and Sol, who have fallen in love with each other over the last 20 years as law partners, and their now ex-wives, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as Grace and Frankie, picking up the pieces of their lives together.
You had me from there. That the series really focuses on the two women was an added bonus. Grace and Frankie does a lot of things really well, but there is one thing about the show’s execution that feels lackluster to me — the complete lack of discussion about Sol being bi or pansexual, or bi or panromantic.
In fact, the words have never even been used on the show.
Le Button and Aydin Kwan first met as fellow students the Masters of Library Science Program at the University of Washington. They got to know one another little by little, and realized they were the perfect partners for this. Thus their semester-long capstone project was born for their master’s program – the Queer Comics Database.