A soon-to-be-released Queer travel anthology, Edge of the World by Alden Jones, features 16 essays by Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, and Transgender Americans of various ethnicities, who reflect on their experience with other cultures, and how those cultures receive their Queer identities.

Jones, an award-winning writer, teacher, and speaker based in Boston, has also traveled to 40 countries. For Edge of the World, which will be released on May 6 for $19.95, she compiled tales with differing styles, address varying concerns, including the two below.

"The Return" by Putsata Reang

In "The Return," Putsata Reang writes about the challenges women have to deal with concerning gender norms and societal expectations, like getting married, having children, and serving a husband in the home.

Her family fled Cambodia in 1975, when the communist Khmer Rouge regime captured the country. They left on a ship built for about 30 people but that had 300 refugees stuffed aboard. Furthermore, it lacked food and water, and ten days into their journey, Putsata — a one-year-old baby — stopped feeding and crying. The ship's captain commanded her mother to toss Putsata overboard, but she refused.

From then on, Reang wanted to be the best Cambodian daughter she could be. And while she grew up in the US, she frequented Cambodia throughout her life.

In her essay, Reang describes her "pushy" aunties who desperately want her to get married. At one point, when she's stationed in Cambodia, she does. It wasn't long before Reang divorces him, returns stateside, and marries a Gay woman.

Reang documents a visit to Cambodia with her family a few years after COVID, and discusses how open and free she feels being Gay in the US versus treading more cautiously with her extended family members.

"To be gay in Cambodia would be a betrayal and an unforgivable moral offense in the eyes of my relatives and my people, disrupting a centuries-old cultural order in which gender roles are distinctly delineated. To fail at being a girl was to also fail one's family," Reang writes.

By the end of the essay, she finds closure in terms of navigating her Queer identity and learns that being Gay in Cambodia is not always a betrayal or an unforgivable moral offense.

"La Cubana" by Daisy Hernandez

Describing herself as a Pansexual woman with no Gaydar, Hernandez tells the story of her Nonbinary partner Frankie's introduction to her father, mother, and auntie. Throughout, she tiptoes around educating her elders so as to avoid any possibility of them rejecting Frankie, while also ensuring her partner feels comfortable and accepted.

Hernandez was raised in New Jersey by her Cuban father and her Colombian mother, who moved to Hialeah, Florida, a city northwest of Miami with a very high Cuban population (and a Don't Ask, Don't Tell culture), after Hernandez moved out of their house at the age of 29.

Upon first meeting Frankie, Hernandez's auntie thought they were a butch Lesbian, while her father assumed they were a rich husband. Hernandez contemplated correcting them but wondered how, if she did, she would go about explaining gender identities to her parents, who were in their 70s and 80s.

At the end of the story, Hernandez asks, "Did I need to use my relationship as an educational lesson on queer life for an old Cuban who was smoking cigars despite having a massive stroke?" The short answer was no.

Hernandez never quite explained all the details of Frankie's Nonbinary identity, but she learns that they are all accepting of each other simply for the person that is standing right in front of them, despite any preexisting ideas.