Terry Dactyl, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
$18.00
A dazzling, defiant novel about love, loss, and chosen family, Terry Dactyl follows a trans woman’s journey from 1980s club culture to the COVID-19 era, in a story of queer survival that’s both historical and hallucinatory.
Description
Terry Dactyl
By Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore — Paperback, releasing November 11, 2025
From trailblazing queer author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a feverish, time-bending odyssey through art, desire, and resistance. Terry Dactyl is a shimmering portrait of survival, tracing one trans woman’s search for love and belonging across decades of queer history—from the height of the AIDS crisis to the isolation of COVID-19.
Raised by fierce lesbian mothers in 1980s Seattle, Terry learns early that beauty and pain often share a pulse. Fleeing to New York, she finds family among the city’s underground club scene—artists, hustlers, and gender outlaws living on their own terms, even as the world turns hostile. But twenty years later, when pandemic lockdowns force her back to a gentrified Seattle, Terry must confront the ghosts of her past and rediscover what it means to be alive, connected, and free.
With Sycamore’s trademark lyricism and raw honesty, Terry Dactyl spins a story as electric as the dance floor and as intimate as confession. This is queer history written in glitter and grief, a novel that refuses to forget.
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