Hello and welcome to Queer's Fiction, where we talk about queer historical media.

I'm Jason.

I'm Elo.

And today we're talking about the 2019 film and 2009 novel Tell It to the Bees.

We have a couple of content warnings for this episode.

Homophobia, including homophobic violence, sexual assault and forced abortion.

If any of that sounds like something you don't want to listen to, that's totally fine.

We have plenty of other episodes that you can go and listen to which have different content warnings,

which you will hopefully enjoy.

Not the content warnings, the episode.

So Tell to the Bees, the novel, was published in 2009.

It's written by a woman named Fiona Shaw.

Shaw is gay, as is her ex-husband.

They split up and both immediately went into relationships.

This happened when their daughters were sort of in their late tweens, early teens.

And I read an interview talking about how they both struggled initially with kind of the sudden change to their lives in terms of dealing with a separation,

but also coming to terms with their parents as sexual beings that existed outside of the norm.

And I feel it is interesting to bring up in the sense that I can see that reflected in the

character of Charlie as portrayed in both the novel and film.

Okay, that's interesting because as I imagine we'll get into later, I had, I guess,

like thoughts or questions about Charlie and his purpose in the story, etc.

So, yeah, definitely the interview that I read, particularly the part where, because this

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