The Book of Sainted Aunts: The Illustrated Portraits of Mildly Martyred Sinners-Turned-Saints Since Queerdom Come (2021, self-published by Anna Onni)

“[obsolete] An “aunt” is slang for middle-aged and elderly gay men or lesbian women (who were often mentors taking on protective roles for younger queers), reclaimed from the original association with an old madam who runs a prostitution brothel.

[current] The sainted aunts who have come before us have only been recently recognised. Since queerdom came, the revised requirements for sainthood have become more inclusive to the diverse forms of martyrdom and falsely-named sins of the past.” - Anna Onni

Anna Onni’s The Book of Sainted Aunts is a collection of portraits about sainted aunts curated and salvaged by Saint Lune of the Scattered Bibliotheque from a lost archive destroyed by extremists. Since queerdom came to the world, Saint Lune was able to gather and catalogue piles of what was left of these queer histories/herstories/stories.

At first thought, one would wonder, is this a legitimate collection? Did all of these mildly-martyred sainted aunts live? Is this heresy? The mystery of reading this collection is in the suspension of our beliefs. We enter into a mythology of the sainted aunts written from a Singaporean perspective. Each sainted aunt represents who we are as queer people in the 21st century composed of millennials and Gen Z’s.

There are sainted aunts who once lived as computer hackers, as queer activists, as archivists, as engineer/environmental activist, as unnamed swimmers, as cartographers for the underground movements, as graffiti artists and mural painters, as freelancers who left their desk job, as chefs in soup kitchens, as queer vegans, and as permanently exhausted individuals in society. These sainted aunts are characterized as people who have resisted the capitalistic societies where they lived. They took it upon themselves to find empowerment, belongingness, meaning, and rest in an economic system that exhausted and controlled queer bodies from achieving their full potential. Also, their names are allegories of our world which has moved on after postmodernism. You might encounter Saint Bob of Side Hustles (The Minor Saint of Workers in Capitalist Systems), Saint Bhogayya of Pagan but Vegan (The Minor Saint of Charming Ironies), or Saint Umm of the Permanently Exhausted (The Minor Saint of Self Care).

They act as guides to the current generation of readers in the hopes of bringing comfort in a heavily capitalist society. Onni subverts the usual canonized and beatified heterosexual,  cisgender, and celibate concept of a saint in Vatican. Here, the sainted aunts are considered to have lived in sin, but not mostly of it.  They don’t have to perform supernatural miracles or prove they had stigmatas. Also, they don’t have to die a heroic death for the faith.

These sainted aunts come from a “Post Queerdom” world that according to the myth created in this queerdom follows tenets that resemble post-postmodernism: “truths with a lowercase t”, “inclusive and ever-expanding networks”, “care for others begins with the self”, “freedom to wander”, and “collective spaces and communal efforts.”

The whole collection is informed by critical theories after postmodernism. We may encounter Marx and Engels, Antonio Gramsci, or Michel Foucault in some references. It is quite a fresh take on how to understand queer activism from the sources by which they are moved to create action in society.

As a subversion of the conservative and universal literary forms of the vita, or lives of saints, and prayer books, The Book of Sainted Aunts lets us enter pleasurably into the lives of these saints with a critical eye, queer and transgressive. As a hodgepodge of forms, the portraits, which act like nonfiction but are critically fictitious, are followed by excerpts of prayers, creeds, devotionals, chants, letters, journal entries, codes, dreams, rituals, and folk tales which are allegedly primary sources that come from these sainted aunts. Reading these excerpts after the narrative makes one realize that this book is not for commemorating the saints but for the readers of this ephemera that were almost gone in history. The words of these sainted aunts are embodied in our minds and souls as we read, as if we too become one with their struggles.

There is reverence in reading prayers and autobiographies. As fictions of the marginalized queers, these lives of sainted aunts reveal the struggles of the real world, of our lives which are stranger in nonfiction. They lend us to see this world from a distance and perhaps, by some form of meditation, be able to wander and arrive at the most concrete object of thinking, which is transformative action.

In the name of the queer Father, and the queer Son, and the queer Spirit…

Blessed are those who read this book, for theirs is the queerdom. May queerdom bless thee, as queerdom comes! Amen to that!

*To read digital book, you can find it here https://seaqcf.net/program/book-sainted-aunts-illustrated-portraits-mildly-martyred-sinners-turned-saints-queerdom , if you are base in Indonesia or Philippine and  wish to get the hardcopy please send your query to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.