How Many Times Did I See Black Swan in Theaters While Closeted? An Investigation

Last week, I convened with a group of friends at Autostraddle writer Christina Grace Tucker‘s home in Philly in order to correct history. Specifically, one friend in our crew of pop culture obsessives was determined to revisit 2010’s Black Swan, a movie that swiftly took over my entire life during my first semester of college, the period of time when I was the most deeply and achingly closeted, even to myself. This friend knew her opinion on the film back then was extremely biased and nonsensical — she decided to hate Black Swan because the second she saw it, she knew Natalie Portman would win the Oscar for it (which she did), and she desperately wanted Annette Bening to take home the prize for her work in The Kids Are All Right. This friend was, at the time, also performing heterosexuality passionately and poorly like myself, going so far as to invent a boyfriend for the internet who did not exist and who no one had even asked about. It’s safe to say that neither of us kids were “all right.”

It was a thrill to rewatch this movie last week with a gaggle of pals who share my propensity for a well timed Gay Gasp and ample absurd commentary during a collective viewing experience. I tend to revisit this movie at least once a year, and last year rewatched it twice in the month of October as research (for once, I’m not using that word facetiously!) for the list of Autostraddle’s 25 Scariest Queer Horror Movie Moments, compiled by me and Autostraddle critic Drew Burnett Gregory. Drew was also in attendance at this intimate and unwell Philly screening of Black Swan, and I was shocked to learn she hadn’t seen it since her days of watching it constantly when she was in high school! This cinematic retrospective was Huge for all of us, even for me, the person who has seen it the most of the group.

“That was more sexual than I remember,” Drew said of one of the movie’s more disturbing mommy issues moments (of which there are so many!).

I remembered all too well. Most images from the film are emblazoned in my brain.

But how many times — exactly — have I seen Black Swan? To answer that question is as impossible as trying to imagine anyone other than Mila Kunis in the film’s role of bad girl ballerina Lily. She’s perfect! No notes! I did think, perhaps, an achievable investigation could be determining just how many times I saw the movie in theaters when it came out. But even that task has sent me down a strange spiral of doubling and fractured memory underscored by a homoerotic hum MUCH LIKE THE MOVIE ITSELF.

It is not unusual for me to have seen a movie multiple times in the theater, especially during the stretch of years when I was closeted. It’s not that I’m no longer susceptible to extreme obsession now in my loud and proud dyke era; I certainly am. But there was something in particular about the ritual of repetition back then that appealed to me and that seems inextricable from the fact that I was burying my most intoxicating desires. In Black Swan, the suppression of desire has intense physical and mental effects. I understand that very well!!!!

I’ve written about this proclivity for repeat viewings in an essay about Inception before. I’ve also written about my history of hoarding digital receipts of my own life. Rather than saving movie ticket stubs, I saved my movie missives, all the chaotic and often all-capsed posts I flung about tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and other digital spaces in a time when I lived most of my “real” life in said supposedly “unreal” spaces. This should, in theory, make it easy for me to triangulate just how many times I saw the movie in theaters, a question I sought to answer just last year, presumably because I wanted to write an essay about it then:

triangulating my old tweets and old tumblr posts in an attempt to figure out exactly how many times I saw the movie Black Swan (2010) in theaters

— kayla kumari upadhyaya (@KaylaKumari) August 27, 2022

Between old tweets, tumblr text posts, and Facebook updates, I can see that I saw Black Swan twice in the first week it came out. The first time was in Chicago with my longtime internet friend Erin, who posted a reaction photo of both of us on her own tumblr after the first viewing. This was during the trip when we met each other in person for the very first time, instantly bonding over our enthrallment with this movie despite also both claiming to not really be able to stomach scary movies prior to it. The second time was back on campus in Ann Arbor with two friends who were dating. But I have an elusive memory of a third viewing in my hometown when I was back for winter break, seeing it at the theater I’d grown up going to for midnight and repeat viewings countless times. I can’t remember who I was with — if anyone. I was the only person I knew then who went to see movies by myself. But I was also genuinely terrified of this movie, which seems silly to me now as a certified horror lover; considering the movies I gravitate toward now, it’s comparatively tame! And then there’s also a fourth memory I can’t quite reconstruct by way of my digital archives or my own brain. I swear I saw it again in Ann Arbor when I returned from winter break, this time at the movie theater that was slightly farther away from campus with another internet friend who I’m no longer close with and can’t ask about.

I clearly gave up trying to figure out how many times I saw the movie in theaters back in 2022. It could have been just because I got busy and the essay slipped away or because it just wasn’t the right time to write it. Or it could be because I knew I wasn’t even asking the right question. Perhaps a more answerable question — though it wouldn’t have been answerable at all back in 2010 when the then-version of myself was returning to the theater over and over to watch an erotic psychological thriller about ballerinas — is why did I see Black Swan so many times in theaters.

In December of 2010 when the movie came out, I was 18 years old. I was a freshman in college. I’d only seen women makeout on the big screen twice before, and my memories are wrong about which happened first. By my memory, it was the movie Jennifer’s Body that showed me girls kissing girls for the first time. But I also know I saw the Charlize Theron-starring movie Æon Flux in theaters, and it came out four years before. Still, every time I try to stack these memories in my mind, they’re impossibly inverted. In any case, after seeing Jennifer’s Body reluctantly with a friend, I swore off horror movies. I told myself at the time it was because of the gore and the jumpscares, but I think I was scared of something else.

Then I saw Black Swan the following year, and that thin string between fear and desire plucked inside me once more. In one of my tumblr posts, I reference not breathing for a full seven seconds during my second viewing. Which seven seconds? My memory, again, fails. But I can imagine.

There are so many mirrors in Black Swan. Most scenes feature a mirror or a reflective surface of some kind. Nina in particular is forced to look at herself, and when she does, she sees things she doesn’t want to see, sometimes things that aren’t technically even there but that nonetheless feel like a surfacing of something very much there inside her. The doubling throughout Black Swan is meant to instill fear; Nina’s mind is unraveling. She keeps seeing herself — a twisted version of herself — in shadows and in others. But the doubling conveys desire, too. Nina appears to herself during moments of self-pleasure and sexual fantasy. It’s a haunting and a seduction.

No wonder I kept coming back, stacked versions of myself reluctant to look in a mirror but eager to gaze at this film that discomforted me greatly. It’s a different viewing experience now, of course. I can name the parts that I obsess over. I can see the profound impact the movie has had on my own artistic aesthetics, which often straddle the erotic and horror. Some of the most fucked up aspects of the film — Nina’s relationship with her mother, for one — are the kinds of themes I embed in my art, sometimes buried so deep I’m not sure if people pick up on them. I may be out now, but I haven’t shed my tendency toward concealment entirely.

Watching it with friends, especially some who hadn’t revisited it in a while, was a singular experience. We laughed; we Gay Gasped; we startled. My obsessions could be said out loud. Emphasis on loud, in fact; my friends are a rambunctious group of frenzied femmes. I expressed these obsessions as jokes and increasingly ridiculous commentary. It was a decidedly silly evening, even as it stirred up cracked memories of prior viewings. And maybe that’s what keeps me coming back still, over a decade later. I no longer need Black Swan in order to access some disguised part of myself. But every time I watch it, it feels like a repetition and like something new.

After We Watched Barbie

“Do you know your lineage? You know, lineage. The people who preceded you in history. Not your bloodline, nor your family tree. Nothing so flimsy as biology or genetics. Lineage, rather, is made up of the people who, in their lifetimes, fought the battles we are fighting now, struggled towards the same goals, tried to carve out similar lives against similar backdrops.” — Kathryn Payne, “Whores and Bitches Who Sleep with Women”

You’re a grown man with the trauma of a little girl.

I cried during Barbie. I was wearing a pink button down with a silver locket with his love note inside. I was a month into top surgery recovery and feeling good about my flat chest. The next day, while driving up and down the rollercoaster of rural Ohio, I took advantage of my two months of free Spotify premium and played the Barbie soundtrack through the speaker. I was swaying in a neurodivergent fashion until Sam Smith’s voice came on. “Man I Am,” an ironic song. Holding the steering wheel in one hand, I pressed next. It was a bit of a risky move, reaching for my phone with my post-surgery arm still readjusting to the mobility. But the (re)imagination of Ken sounded obnoxious and gave me almost a sense of repulsion. It was everything that signaled white masculinity, something I did not have an ounce in me. The memory of high school me dancing to women empowerment songs came flooding back.

I stopped listening to these songs. Or maybe I listened to them during these solo drives after I double checked all windows are closed even though I did not open them, or when I was alone in the bedroom and bobbing my head with headphones on. Maybe I erased these scenes from memory not because they make me dysphoric but because I was sad that I cannot claim them anymore, that I am no longer a part of the sisterhood or solidarity, the only things that I have missed since transitioning. A lot of the trans masculine people relate to Allan. In a movie with two presumably heterosexual white leads, Allan is queer-coded with his rainbow t-shirt and desire to give men foot rubs. He wants to escape Barbieland with Gloria and her daughter Sasha, but eventually he returns with them for the mission to save Barbieland from patriarchy. He unusually hangs out with Barbies rather than Kens, but more often than not, he awkwardly does not fit into either side. In a world full of Barbies and Kens, Allan is the only Allan, and he doesn’t understand why. I share this loneliness with Allan, though my friends are a lot kinder to me and are understanding of the complexity of gender.

Transitioning to a man in a predominately white world makes me resentful. Genders are floating worlds, and I am doing gender somewhere I do not belong. I am a man, but I never feel as strong of a connection to manhood as I do to Chinese womanhood. Sometimes I am jealous of my little sibling being a non-binary woman. How joyous it is, after all the gender-questioning, to discover you are still a part of womanhood. I told many people I still feel a sense of affinity with women after coming out as a trans man; some of them understand, some of them don’t. But the rainy night after we watched Barbie, I remembered that even though I joked about being the queer-coded Allan, I can no longer speak as a woman. I will listen to my friends’ complaints about patriarchal violence of women and be an ally.

I don’t mean that trans men cannot speak about the misogyny they experienced; it’s just now, most people will look at me and not see the layers of patriarchal violence I experienced. The song “Sweet Cis Teen” asks: Am I a boy or am I just my trauma? But all of my experiences did not magically disappear the moment(s) I realized I am a man, nor were they left behind. It was traumatic being a Chinese woman. I was spat at, harassed, fetishized, assaulted, told that my worth depended on others, my experience and abilities invalidated. My bodymind holds these memories and shapes itself with them, and I do not want to trivialize these memories because they continue to inform who I am and my politics. You can’t blame me for claiming womanhood along with manhood. I am a greedy being, a Chinese dyke before becoming a Chinese transfag.

Sometimes I wish that my lover is a woman. It is a purely selfish wish that I don’t actually believe in. Of course I want him to be whoever he is, and I love him regardless of gender; man or woman or person, he will forever be my princess. But sometimes I wish he understood how it feels to be someone who is raised to always put others’ feelings first, to be always prepared to manage the feelings of the future someone you haven’t met, to have your worth defined by that. This doesn’t necessarily mean being raised as a girl — marginalizations share commonalities, and most trans feminine people have experienced transmisogyny since childhood — but girlhood is where it most commonly occurred. I wouldn’t feel resentment doing more emotional labor in the relationship if I was doing it for a woman. Since I am not a woman, needless to say not a straight woman, I can’t speak on their experiences, but sometimes I feel so lonely that I (knowing this is problematic) think this must be what it feels like to be a straight woman in a heterosexual relationship. And I feel this way despite having a caring partner who does not subscribe to toxic masculinity. My love, it’s not that I wish you were a woman. I just don’t like to think about how my bodymind can be used for comfort, but at the same time, I want nothing more than to comfort you. This paradox kills me.

When I walk into the men’s bathroom, they still look at me, they smell something in me. That is not where my kinship originates. Or, I choose not to let that be. It is unjust to define womanhood by violence. Violence by men, violence by patriarchy. My kinship springs from the Chinese women — and Asian women more broadly — who loved me, nurtured me, inspired me, but at the same time knew their worth. I watched Barbie with two close friends who made me feel connected to Chinese womanhood because my bodymind has been carved with shared experiences and survival strategies. Because somewhere in space and time, I was a little girl furious at the double standards, a bisexual teenage girl scared for the scrutiny of her bodymind, a dyke marching after the powerful, brillant, and gender non-conforming dykes in history. Because my grandmothers and my mother and my sister and the future aunties to my child taught me how to fight and how to love and how to survive.

Untethered: In Pittsburgh Everyone Knows Everyone and I’m Sure I Do Too

Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!

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I hold the puppy in my arms while strangers mill around outside of a taco truck. I’d run into my friend at a gallery crawl / art walk type of thing that takes place every first Friday of the month. This 2.5 lb creature, who is only supposed to grow to be five lbs and is covered in silky black fur, snuggles in my arms and sniffs me with his teeny nose. His mom had handed him to me as soon as I told her about the breakup.

“Here, you need to hold him,” she told me.

He rests his head on my forearm for a time before fidgeting for a return to his mom’s arms. The puppy’s mom is another of the many mutual friends of my ex and me. Pittsburgh is often called “The Biggest Small Town” because it is actually a difficult task to meet someone you aren’t connected to in some way via just a few hop skips or jumps. You are almost always going to run into more people than you think you will when going out to any event. So, naturally, I’ve been running into connection after tenuous connection that is difficult to navigate.

Then, there’s the fact that I almost didn’t recognize my friend because she’d donned a long straight-haired wig over her usual curls, completely changing her profile. To make it even more difficult, she was wearing a new pair of glasses with a Completely Different Shape. Friends, I have to tell you, I am mostly recognizing you via a combination of context, hair, gait, voice and style. The part of my brain that clicks and tells me who someone is just by seeing them has always hovered at around 25% or so of what would be optimum functionality. It’s called face blindness. And yes, this has led to a bevy, a list I could write but won’t, of embarrassing incidents and unintended social faux pas. It makes it so that every social situation has the potential to devolve into a bizarre puzzle game where the cost of losing is potentially hurting someone else’s feelings. Still, I do my best out here, as we all must.

Before I held the puppy in my arms, I’d actually come from the gallery my ex-husband-who-is-not-my-most-recent-breakup-but-here-we-are-mentioning-him used to manage. He’s long since left town, and it has a new manager who I don’t know. But who did I run into, but a person who I fully believe was my ex husband’s old boss! But I’m still not sure that’s who it was! This is someone who went to our wedding, who I’d attended fundraisers with, who I had met on multiple occasions. And still, I was standing there like: “according to context this person is surely X and he definitely has his head shaved like X always did but like, I don’t remember this middle aged white man having this face”!! If I had to draw him, I would have drawn a completely different looking person! I left hoping it was who I thought it was. I didn’t call him by name because, well, you never know.

Back to the Taco Truck with the adorable puppy and company! I feel the need to explain to you that this couple is kind of split, that my ex knows the puppy’s dad, the musician of the pair, and I’ve helped the arts leader (puppy mom) of the pair and her team with fundraising over the years. They’re older, parental figures to us. We’ve eaten with them on countless occasions, attended each others’ events, and know a network of the same people. I helped her write the letter she posted on social media that eventually helped her get a new kidney. Unlike some people who were squarely friends with one or the other of us, I felt like, here, I could at least claim that we all had our own relationships to each other. I can see in my friend’s wide eyes that she’s shocked by the news of the breakup. We were the kind of stable-seeming couple that people thought would be together forever. I mean, I thought that at one point. Now, I’m navigating each of these social connections, testing the waters, seeing who might still want to be a part of my life and have me in theirs. “Seriously. Don’t be a stranger,” she tells me, her eyes locking right on mine, for emphasis. I believe she means it, and I start to wrap my head around a world where at least some of our mutual friends may still want to know me.

Oddly, then, maybe emboldened, maybe just somehow intoxicated by a couple of tacos, I move onto a gallery owned and run by a mutual friend. I approached and, at first, in the dark, and I think — especially — as I was alone and not in what he would have recognized as my paired form, the owner doesn’t know it’s me right away. Relatable.

He starts to give a spiel, “This is an adults-only exhibit — oh…” he catches who I am while I’m smiling at him, laughing a little, because, of course, he knows I’m game for whatever indie video game art he’s curated. He smiles huge, and I’m highly amused to watch someone else go through the same steps of recognition I always have to. I step aside while he shouts the full extent of his exhibit’s forewarning at newcomers behind me. We catch up for a moment, and I can’t tell if he’s heard the news. This time, though, I don’t share. If it’s already spread through all my ex’s friends, then he’ll know either now or later.

I go in. And friend, listen, I like weird art, gross art, confrontational art, and I am beyond fucking delighted by the first thing I see — a video game done up in what I can only describe as the hyper-realistic, “gritty” skin of so many contemporary video games, usually ones that involve fighting and shooting. One gallery goer is manning the controls while a group of people watch the display projected on the gallery wall and shout and cackle whenever something new happens. It looks to me like this game takes place entirely in a rather crusty men’s restroom. When I came in, the POV player was peeing in a urinal, just a stream of yellow splashing down that went on for way too long. It was more urine than any person can actually produce at one time, a fact which has the people collectively gathered in the gallery ABSOLUTELY CACKLING. The player moves on to explore the restroom and then a character, a man in a white collared shirt and beige slacks with big clear glasses and a thin mustache enters the restroom and stands at the urinal. The player approaches and the man unzips his pants to reveal a gun. What follows is an incomprehensible mini game where the player has to disarm the gun by licking it up and down. The tongue that appears on screen is heinous and red. I think I clapped. I definitely took a video of it and proceeded to show it to anyone who wanted to see it for, like, my entire weekend.

After a quick goodbye to my friend, I head back to my car. But along the way, I come across a lemonade stand run by SWOP Pittsburgh (mutual aid situation for sex workers if you’re interested). The sign reads “Lemonade, $4. Spit, $2.” I donate to get a lemonade and am, if we’re being completely honest, incredibly tempted to ask for spit in it. As I’m mulling over my options here, one of the tablers asks if they know me from somewhere. I look at their face, panic because I’m already hyper aware I am batting…I don’t understand baseball, but something really bad…with recognizing people tonight and say “Maybe! I’m definitely around? Maybe a dance night???” I try because this person looks queer, and maybe I saw them at Jellyfest. I also have to always wonder if, though it rarely happens, whoever is asking this is an Autostraddle reader, but I never lead with that because saying Autostraddle out loud is a thing in and of itself. I then wonder…could it be? A man walks up and disrupts the chat and my awkward descent into a cavern of anxiety, so I thank them, tell the man the lemonade is indeed good and worth buying because I want him to give them money, and then head out. I ponder this as I drive to what is, yes, another dance night. (I really like dancing, okay?) While I tap my fingers on the ol’ Subaru’s steering wheel, I acknowledge the feeling that I might actually know this person, but then — despite Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh — I say something to myself like “what’re the chances?”

The next morning, I woke up to a text asking me if I was at the gallery crawl the night before. It’s a queer person I met online and have been talking to, but barely. This was the exact same person I’d bought lemonade from. I make some coffee before I text back, hand on my forehead, dying inside, that I thought it might be them but clearly just psyched myself out of saying anything because I didn’t think it was likely. They absolutely do not care, a thing which is incredibly refreshing, and we agree to get coffee on Thursday so we can talk about nerdy shit.

I’ve been doing a lot of coffee-should-we-be-queer-buds meets. These are cool! Meet someone, connect somehow, see if they wanna grab a matcha or something. At one such meet with someone who happened to have grown up in Pittsburgh and never left, I mention I seemed to be (KNOCK ON WOOD) having good luck with making new friends. I did say this before my dizzying and harrowing Friday night of Not Recognizing Anyone. And this is, of course, entirely contingent on continuing to put myself out there. People in Pittsburgh, especially those who grew up here, tend to be cliquey. And to be honest, this was maybe the only person I have met in recent times who was from-from Pittsburgh. Usually, I’m meeting and making friends with other transplants. The other person laughs. I laugh, too. We talk about how I don’t want to come across as full of myself, but like, as with anything, effort can in fact produce results.

And because this is now the third installment of writing this column and it’s been six weeks since I was dry-heaving with anxiety when I was trying to go out dancing, I thought I’d list some progress I’ve made in terms of battling social anxiety and living life as a single person trying to build and participate in community:

• I’ve gotten used to the ritual of pulling out Instagram after having a fun conversation with someone so we don’t lose touch. My Instagram DMs are just as active as my text messages.
• I’ve stopped being afraid of texting people to see if they want to hang. As it turns out, it might be a nice thing to receive a text from someone who wants to sit around and write together or grab a coffee or go for a hike.
• I have indeed realized that if you keep going to the same places you will see the same people and your connections with those people will deepen. You’ll notice I keep going back to the same dance nights! I’m not like some kind of Italo-Disco fiend (although not gonna lie, it is great to dance to), but the fact of the matter is that I run into people I know at these things. Fun people who I like! Then we catch up, throw down some moves together, and say we really need to hang out as we leave but, like, in a sincere way, not in a “let’s do lunch sometime way.”
• There is something nebulous here about the fact that I do believe tapping into a scene of queer people in their thirties and forties with a decent amount of extroverts, especially ones who will organize an event and invite people, who will smash their friends together like dolls and insist they get to know each other, is of immense value. I feel like we do a lot of introvert appreciation on this site, but did you know that if you’re quiet or an introvert or highly anxious that you can find extroverts and via some kind of Outgoing Person Magic, it’s like you kind of pick up some of their social superpowers by being in their orbit? Hot tip from me to you!
• I haven’t dry-heaved with anxiety lately! Goals!

I guess that, sometimes, working on yourself can feel like playing whack-a-mole. If I’m not dry-heaving alone in my car and have moved onto not wanting to lock myself in a tight dark closet when faced with the prospect of meeting new people, then what pops up but the old chestnut of not recognizing human faces — a thing no one expects and which comes with vast and varied opportunities for offending new friends and potential friends and further offending enemies, even! But if I hadn’t started trying to make new friends, I wouldn’t have had to deal with this. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of the Self-Work Whack-a-Mole!

And for the folks following along for Redwall Summer, stay tuned for updates in the next volume.

Do You Have Fire?

all photos courtesy of the author

July begins, and the hand that clenches the heart in my chest loosens and disappears. It will be back next year but will hold me with less urgency. My brother died 11 years ago at the very end of June. All of June is his. The emails start coming on June first, anticipating his memorial day. They continue all month, peppering my inbox like the acupuncture needles that hit on something sensitive and twang your arm or leg, making you jump. The anticipation of this day is a twang in my side. I know when it finally comes I can somewhat relax into the routine of that day — the phone calls, the pictures, the want to be alone — and yet the anticipation unnerves me. I don’t like June. I wish my brother had died at the beginning of a month, where the rest of that month is the post-day and the anticipation period barely exists.

We spent that June 2012 in the same house. I had come home for the summer to work full time, be with family, and tend to my brother’s wounds. We all knew it was significant that he could no longer live in his own apartment and that he was moving in with us. But the concept of “hospice” eluded us all, even though the hospice nurses were there sometimes around the clock. Young, healthy looking people don’t just die. But my brother went from speaking to not speaking that month, from pale to yellow. The manifestation of his colon cancer prevented his body from releasing fluids or excrement, and his body slowly — so slowly, it seemed — stopped functioning. I would go to work and return to subtle changes at home, both in my brother and in everyone around him. There was so much music and movement, so many people, and yet the feelings leading up to his final days were calm and love and peace and togetherness. It is still the most liminal space I’ve ever occupied.

Ten days after he died, I was to board a plane to Berlin for a short summer study abroad program before I returned to my last year of college. My parents made a genius decision to stop by my brother’s apartment on the way to the airport and quickly — with a hard time limit — go through his belongings. None of us had been there since he died. He had spent the final month of his life, that final June, in my parents home where we all lived together in a way we hadn’t lived in 20 years.

We were all bursting with our own flavors of frenzied grief. Those flavors would sharpen over the next few years: my mother’s overwhelmingly external grief; my father’s reserved sadness as he supported my mother; my sister’s escapism as she fled shortly after to live with a cult in Topanga Canyon; and my physical manifestations of grief which washed my body in chronic pain.

But in those two hours where we filtered through pants and shoes and jackets and more pants — which all, all, all, all fit me perfectly — we were the same type of frenzy. It was a task no one wanted to do but that we had to do, and we let ourselves play dress up.

Because everything fit me, I now had the entirely new wardrobe of a 35-year-old “metrosexual” with the nicest clothing and accouterments I had ever seen. (He was a true metrosexual when that was a word people still used.) There was a pair of shoes I still have that remains the single most expensive item of dress I own. My mom kept saying it was the same brand of shoe O.J. Simpson wore on that fateful night. That sentence meant nothing to me. But I knew somewhere that this clothing would change me as much externally as internally. I would go from owning a few men’s buttonups to an entire wardrobe of men’s pieces.

I boarded the plane with new aviator glasses, a new army green jacket, and new shoes already on my feet. How hard it must have been for my mother to see me become him so soon after he left us. How comforting. I was oblivious to it all. Emotions would hit me in waves I couldn’t comprehend for years and years after this day. I would eventually move with my grief through music and dance and poetry and all of the methods a good artist uses to feel and process and heal and lighten. But right then, I had a suitcase full of new clothing, and I was leaving the house of mourning.

I arrived in Berlin and moved into a true Bohemian chic apartment. The ceilings were tall. There was so much art and fruit and cigarette smoke and a piano and guitars and a book of Rilke poems placed on my bedside table. I had landed.

Under the guise of studying German a few days a week, I had arrived in the exact place needed to me, a place where I was unknown. I would run from my host family’s apartment to the Tiergarten where, like an animal of that garden, I would cry and cry and cry. No one knew me there. No one knew my story. My host mother and I learned a Brahms piano piece for four hands that summer. My host dad — 6’4”, from the Black Forest, built like an oak tree — would drink a full bottle of wine each evening and regale us on the classical guitar. My host sister and I fell kind of in love, the way you can where everything is foreign and new and you are awash with fresh grief and doing shots of Jäeger at the club and making out on the dance floor.

I smoked my first ever cigarettes that summer. Everyone had their papers and filters in one pocket and their loose tobacco in the other. Sun was breaking on the east side while a Russian woman and I drunkenly walked the streets asking people, “hast du Feuer?” (do you have a light?). We ended up at her place and fooled around and when we woke she wouldn’t speak to me and I had to use her roommate’s computer to Google where I was and find my way home.

A few buses, and I was back in my host family’s apartment. My host mom had made me toast, drawn a bath, and read me Rilke afterwards. She had me memorize a few lines of Rilke each day.

While the rest of my family stayed buried in the grief of continuing to live in the physical home where my brother had just died, I got to fly away. Run to the wild gardens of Berlin. Make out with strangers in dark clubs. Learn pieces of a new language and watch the Olympic Games on television in that new language. Wear men’s clothes as if they were the only pieces of clothing I ever owned.

Today, I wear one of his shirts, a fancy buttonup with the buttons hidden by fabric. It’s a darker gray-blue shirt with white pin stripes, and I wear it with some buttons open, showing off my top surgery scars and the hickies on my chest. I wear this shirt like he would wear it on a yacht at Cannes, looking like he had a net worth. He knew he was attractive because it was so clear how much he loved life and lived fully. I don his clothing and, to this day, feel the pulse of a man who lived fully intertwined with my own. It’s July, June is over, it will come again next year. My birthday is next week. I can breathe.

Just Waiting To Be Found

feature image photo by Jeffrey Coolidge via Getty Images

I think about Billy Corgan a lot.

I used to, anyway. There was a solid 15 years where his name probably didn’t escape my lips, as I moved from Teenage Music Obsessions to broke single parenting, until he reminded me of his existence via chemtrails and broke my heart.

For my entire childhood, I spent every summer in the Appalachian Mountains. One of the benefits of being at Mamaw’s was access to cable, something we only had at home for a brief period, when my undiagnosed ADHD-hyperfocus obsessions began to shift from reading and berating myself to TV schedules, which shifted from Laudable, past Acceptable, straight to Inappropriate, despite being driven by the same behaviors. Remember to channel it to an appropriate place at all times, kids.

In the open kitchen/dining room, there was a small TV on a wooden stand, tilted to a diagonal, with a VCR, so Mamaw could keep an eye on the little kids while working in the kitchen. She also used the small TV to break up fights when kids wanted to watch the big TV in the living room, regularly used by Pawpaw to watch Judge Judy, Andy Griffith, and westerns in his navy blue coveralls from His Chair™, the La-Z-Boy we’d all play-fight to steal from him, partially because it was the best chair, and partially because we were all pests.

It was rare no one was in the kitchen, particularly during the summers. All six grandchildren, three permanent-residents of the small community and three of us dropping in for the summer months, along with every Thanksgivingwinterbreakspringbreak we could, depending on where we lived at the time. When the room was empty, I loved to flip through channels slowly, seeing what was going on out there, grateful it wasn’t stuck on Cartoon Network or the Weather Channel, hoping for an X-Files rerun because Law & Order marathons weren’t quite a thing yet.

As I came up on MTV, I started channeling through more slowly, hoping to pause to see what was on. MTV was Strictly Verboten in my home. Even when we had cable access in my parents house, I was too scared to sneak it, afraid I would be caught. Since it housed Beavis & Butthead and Trashy Music, it wasn’t worth the risk.

As I scanned through, though, the “Tonight, Tonight” music video was playing, near the beginning, and my hand immediately dropped. I sat there, mesmerized, watching the recreation of A Trip to the Moon — old things and most sci-fi of the era were allowed in our home — transfixed by the orchestral instruments. I desperately hoped no one would come in, forcing me to change the channel (out of obligation for my parents, out of embarrassment for the rest), until I could find out what this magnificent thing was.

I immediately grabbed a pen by the kitchen phone to scrawl it down.

As soon as I saw the band name, though, my heart sank. I knew anything called The Smashing Pumpkins would never pass the inevitable Is It Acceptable tests at home. I would immediately have to hide it or be afraid of this cutting judgment that made me feel terrible for liking the things I liked, a scrutiny I can’t stand up to, to this day, and the reason I could never go before a dissertation committee or even finish my portfolio in my Master’s program that required detailed notes and commentary from each member of the panel. I left the program with six credit hours remaining, partially because I was too weak to face it.

At some point during the short film as I tried to take in every moment, I noticed something a bit off about Billy’s hand but forgot about it. I held my breath, hoping something equally magnificent would come on, wondering if all Banned Music were that magical, and a video from Pretty Hate Machine began. I wasn’t quite ready yet and quickly turned the channel before someone heard it. MCIS had to be my entry point to the wider world of pop culture before I was ready for Trent Reznor.

My whole childhood, I was a saver. If I spent money, I very carefully combed ads, doing price comparisons of the different My Little Pony villages, to the point where my parents would sigh and say, just buy it. I always had a little stashed away, able to lend my folks a few dollars if they needed some cash because we were too far from an ATM and everything ran on physical bills.

I don’t remember how long it took me to buy Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It may have been sneaking up the register at Walmart that summer in South Williamson, if it was open by then, or perhaps it waited until we drove back to Arizona, where we’d recently moved. That was the point, though, where I would go back and buy small things with my own money, and could slip in Fear Street books between more acceptable items. I listened to MCIS for the first time on a walkman with headphones and very, very slowly worked up the confidence to listen to it on my stereo until I felt brave enough to face any comments. Little did I know if I’d bought it elsewhere, it would have had the full song titles listed on the back and I’d have an Explicit Lyrics label to desperately peel off, as I began to do with Alanis, Veruca Salt, Pixies, Liz Phair, the Breeders, and eventually Nine Inch Nails. I slowly worked up to listening to the local alternative station by the end of sixth grade, starting off every description and justification to my parents with “They’re not bad, they’re…..”

Wherever I went, though, it always came back to the Pumpkins. Eventually, my parents were able to hear some good in it. My dad sat overnight with us outside Dillards with me, twice, to get sold-out-in-15-minutes tickets to small all-age club shows, as long as a friend’s parent also went.

I don’t know when I really started to notice Billy’s birthmark, but it was early on, and likely dug into some quality time of slowly loading articles found via Altavista or Lycos, in the era before Google existed. This was also the period where Billy always wore long-sleeve shirts (ostensibly) to minimize it, and I absorbed every word he publicly said on the topic.

I was born with vascular nevus. The top right quarter of my body was a dark black-to-red, turning more red with age, but the color changed dramatically from pink to red to purple to blue, depending on my blood pressure and temperature. A few who have gotten to know me well enough can use it as an indicator of my mood or nerves, knowing the patch that starts to turn purple if I get incredibly anxious. This birthmark has played both a huge, and also an almost nonexistent role in my life.

These days, I frequently forget it’s there, until I see a new doctor, who assumes I’m coming in for a dramatic rash and wonder why I’m not at the ER, or a new acquaintance will assume I had a terrible reaction to DC’s mosquitos and feel the need to comment on it. My favorite, though, was the time I was pushing my toddler in a cart at the grocery store, and a doctor kept following me, asking questions about it, asking if I’d come see him about it as I kept telling him no, it’s fine, it’s been monitored my whole life, please leave me alone. I’ve never met a doctor that hasn’t had 50 questions about it, that hasn’t asked me about removing it via laser with a hopeful glint in their eyes, warning of potential tumors and clumping blood vessels.

The family lore goes that it’s fairly rare in cis women, typically on the face, and rarely on the right side of the body. I don’t know if any of this is actually true or just stories for the dinner table. But other than a distant cousin who I’ve never met that had it on his left leg, every other person I’ve met with it has had it on his face, until Billy Corgan. To my knowledge, I’ve never met another cis woman with it.

When I was 16, my hand began locking in a claw, and I had surgery on it on the winter solstice. I watched Tori Amos perform on daytime TV once I was taken home with my head still in the clouds, the surgery performed by a doctor who took pictures of my entire birthmark topless, having me remove my shirt while he, the nurse and my mother were still in the room and watched, to my horror.

When I was 15 and went to my first Pumpkins show, my very best friend, who I’d met in an online chatroom years before, flew out to meet me for the first time from Albuquerque. I took her to school for a day, we ditched school for a day and watched Go at the AMC at the mall, and we went to the general admission show at a smaller theater with a revolving stage (that was stationary at the time), and saw one of the first shows since Jimmy returned to the band.

Before the show, we made friends with the kids in front of us in line — I was one of the earliest people to arrive because ADHD hyperfocus. We got them to hold our spot in line and waited in the back of the circle, where we got to meet Billy Corgan with a small crowd of teenagers. I don’t remember what I said; I didn’t have him sign anything. I just tried to thank him for opening up my world so much, for being that entry point, for helping me deal with my arm and develop the self-confidence to admit what I liked and why I liked it (a skill I’ve never quite honed and really would have helped me when I came out, very gradually, over the course of a decade). I stayed mesmerized by his arm as I shook his non-birthmarked right hand with my birthmarked right hand.

My friend and I ran back to our spot in line, near the opening to the bar, and waited with the kids from the local private Catholic school we’d met earlier, absolutely stunned. We got excellent seats despite feeling angst toward some VIPs who were escorted right past us. We patiently sat through the opener, Queens of the Stone Age.

That was the first of many times I saw the Pumpkins. There was the mini tour they did after D’Arcy left, with Melissa Auf der Maur, at a small bar in Tempe that was razed shortly after. Such a large crowd showed up that instead of doing a show in the wooden-fenced backyard of this bar, they did two performances and no signing. My sister, friend, and I were lucky enough to be in the group right after the cut-off, so we could watch the first show through the gaps in the fence, and the second show from the front.

During their break, I stayed up and bought Zwan tickets and cringed at how much I disliked Billy’s solo album, despite being delighted by how prominently he displayed his birthmark on the artwork, much more subtle than my own arm. When they reformed years later with only Jimmy and Billy remaining, one of my best friends from high school/college roommate joined me to see them at a newly constructed mid-sized venue four days before my 24th birthday, where they played music I didn’t know at the beginning and end of the show, but the middle was everything that got me through junior high and high school, including quiet renditions of “Thirty-Three” and “Perfect,” making every second worth it. Whatever changed in my life, I could always put on my Siamese Dream CD.

I’ve never listened to the new albums. I easily went over a decade without listening to the old albums, and when I was reminded of how much they meant to me, it was with the reminder that this person, who created so much that helped me come to terms with who I was, what I enjoyed, the initial judgments and literal, verbal commentaries by total strangers on my body out in the world, was aligning himself with the factions in this country that literally wanted me to either shut up or die, depending on who was speaking that day and how emboldened they felt. I’ve had almost a decade of grappling with that, finally coming full-circle and allowing myself to start listening to my favorites from time to time, remembering the years I carried the box from the Aeroplane Flies High boxset as my purse and lunchbox, and starting to let them back in my life.

10 Mountain Goats Songs, Ranked by Transness

feature image photo by Steven Dewall / Contributor via Getty Images

The Mountain Goats are easily my favorite band, and a quick survey of their social media fandom shows I’m not alone in my obsession with finding themes of gender oppression and transformation in their raw, high-wire, indie-rock lyrics about tragedy, monstrosity, drugs, and sickness.

As one fan put it: “if I had a nickel for every time John darnielle wrote something that isn’t explicitly about being trans but sure isn’t *not* explicitly about being trans, I’d have a lot of nickels.”

I recently had the pleasure of seeing them alive on their Bleed Out tour where, after nearly suffering a panic attack at dinner, I was transported to a crowd of other raving, crying queers holding each other close and trying hard to be unafraid of the future.

Singer-songwriter John Darnielle appears very aware of his trans fans. In a now-deleted twitter exchange, he wrote:

This prompted fan-band INNNNI to write a whole song about being “a friend of John Darnielle,” fighting against every-day anti-trans actions. One fan even compiled every Mountain Goats song with even a hint of transness in a massive spreadsheet!

With a new album coming out about Jenny, a character from album All Hail West Texas the band describes as a woman “in the process of becoming someone other than the keyholder she’s been,” fans have speculated we may get confirmation that this enigmatic motorcyclist is some kind of trans.

With all this in mind, I think there’s no better time to write about the ten trans-est Mountain Goats songs of all time.

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“Broom People” / The Sunset Tree

From the autobiographical and unabashedly vulnerable 2005 album, Darnielle flexes both his expressive voice and evocative lyricism on this track about poverty, self-harm, trauma, and the vitality of youth. It was this song that my partner and I rocked back and forth to in the front row, tears and sweat streaming like rain down our faces as we screamed the lyrics with Darnielle and backing vocalist Peter Hughes.

“Friends who don’t have a clue,
well-meaning teachers,
but down in your arms,
in your arms, I am a wild creature.”

I’ve always cried to this song. When I was a kid, I held a dozen secrets from friends and teachers — about suicide, about gender, about how achingly hard it was to get out of bed every day — and found comfort in the arms of people just like me.

“The Mummy’s Hand” / Unreleased

“Now hold on,” you ask, “isn’t it a little unfair to list a song we can’t legally listen to?” Well, it’s true that Darnielle only performed this song publicly once, but it’s my track of choice to belt alone in the car, and I make the rules. Go buy a copy of The Sunset Tree and wait to do the same for Jenny from Thebes, and I think you can dig into the archive of vanished songs with conscience clear.

“Say the spell three times, crank up the special effects
I’m gonna cast off all my bandages and see what happens next
I will rise fully formed
Like an infant, freshly born”

While not the last song on this list about rebirth, “The Mummy’s Hand” is a great example of the band’s enduring themes of embracing monstrosity. As if speaking directly to those who call any living thing a monster, the song asks “If you prick us, don’t it sting / if you kick us, won’t it hurt?”

While nominally about the Hammer Films horror icon, the lyrics are instantly relatable to anyone in the process of a liberating (if uncomfortable) transformation, and the invocation of shedding bandages evokes images of surgery and recovery. In the comments of a YouTube upload of the song, one fan wrote: “I’m going to come out at work tomorrow. I’m sick of this shit.”

“Birth of Serpents” / All Eternals Deck

On an endlessly witty album that covers everything from vampires to cavemen and Charles Bronson, this track resists definition. It’s partially about confusion: Its lyrics invoke twisting, cramped tunnels, vague visions in crystal balls, and blurry photographs. But as the vocals grow tenser and more strained, we get this delightful dysphoric refrain:

“See that young man who dwells inside
his body like an uninvited guest”

“Hail St. Sebastian” /  Unreleased

Here we have another unreleased song. Darnielle claims he “promptly put [the song] away” after writing it, because “some things you have to kill, just to see if they will come crawling back,” which is both trans and metal as hell. Consider this the song crawling back, John.

“If it doesn’t crush me
It’s alright
If it doesn’t break me
It’s alright
All the petty demons trying to break me in two
I was born stronger than any of you”

“Hail St. Sebastian,” in addition to being titled after a martyr enthusiastically embraced by the gay community, fully embodies the pensive defiance of confronting hatred with grace. There’s something so liberating and heartbreaking about the lines “bless the brave assassins / who strike us while we sleep.” It always makes me cry.

This song is about any persecuted minority who goes down swinging, but the lyric “Everybody hates a victim / Who won’t stop fighting back” takes on a special heat when considering those infuriating neoliberal bigots who claim not to have an issue with whatever group is on the chopping block…as long as they’re not too loud when fighting for their rights.

“Palmcorder Yajna” / We Shall All Be Healed

On an album about addiction, this track may be the most explicit. Many trans people deal or have dealt with addiction, myself included. There was a time where I looked to anything to stop feeling, to stop thinking and be comfortable, however briefly, in my body. I put this song on the list not only for this reason, but for these lyrics:

“And I dreamt of a factory
Where they manufactured what I needed
Using shiny new machines”

Originally about the injustice of how the state treats those struggling with addiction and the lack of pure, safe drugs for those who need them, these lines are likewise relatable for anyone on hormone replacement therapy.

With climate change on the rise and trans healthcare under threat, the queer people who desire medication for transition are in fear of shortages and bans. But for another perspective, consider that the drugs we use to alter our bodies are not made for us. Estradiol and injected Testosterone were developed to treat menopause and hypogonadism in cis people, with the side effect of making some trans people happy. In these lyrics, I see the dream of drugs made for us, to help us alter our bodies at will, as best as science possibly can.

“The Young Thousands” / We Shall All Be Healed

By now, you may be asking if there are any songs by the Mountain Goats I don’t cry to. Well, yes! But they’re mostly the funny ones, like “The Monkey Song” and “The Anglo-Saxons.” Not this one.

I was in college when I first heard this track, heading to an English class taught by a professor whose philosophy of life changed me forever. It was autumn, and I stared out over the red-orange campus and felt the convulsive guitar and ringing piano push me closer and closer to coming out, like waves bearing a boat into harbor.

“The ghosts that haunt your building are prepared to take on substance
And the dull pain that you live with isn’t getting any duller
There’s a closet full of almost-pristine videotape
Documenting sordid little scenes in living color”

I identified so strongly with the lyrics it scared me. I had stomped down my gender confusion so much it left my whole soul bruised and tender, a dull pain which only got sharper with time. I tried to tell myself I was past the self-hatred and disgust that began at puberty, that I was content with my lot in life. But I, like the speaker of the song, had a closet full of evidence to the contrary, the memory of a thousand sordid scenes of gender-play and crossdressing more vibrant and real than anything I ever did as my assigned gender.

When I came out, it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt beautiful and inevitable, like the thousand ghosts of my body had decided for me.

“Hebrews 11:40″ / The Life of the World to Come

Given how queer people often have to find and forge their own families when rejected by the ones they were born into, the following lyrics on an album about death, rebirth, realization, and religion should hit close to home:

“Invent my own family if it comes to that
Hold them close, hold them near
Tell them no one’s ever going to hurt them here”

A song about surviving in any way you can, “Hebrews” reminds us it gets dark before you “feel certain [you are] going to rise again,” and echoes the solemn resolve of those aching for another body:

“Take to the hills, run away
I’m gonna get my perfect body back someday
If not by faith then by the sword
I’m going to be restored”

“Heretic Pride” / Heretic Pride

The definitive anthem of gays with religious trauma, “Heretic Pride” describes the same defiant martyrdom as “Hail St. Sebastian,” but is absolutely, positively feral about it. The second song and title track of the album, it describes a stoning from the perspective of the victim, who has nothing but spite (and yes, pride!) to show their murderers. At a show in Milwaukee, Darnielle summed up the song in gory detail: “You start to say to yourself ‘when they kill me, I hope my blood gets on them.”

“Well they come and pull me from my house
And they drag my body through the streets
And the sun’s so hot I think I’ll catch fire and burn up
In the summer air so moist and sweet”

As the ritual killing starts, the speaker “marks their faces,” as though memorizing them to haunt in the afterlife, and remarks:

“Transfiguration’s gonna come for me at last
And I will burn hotter than the sun”

That’s just the dream, isn’t it? That there will be a moment, however brief, where you can be you, the fullest, most effulgent, most fiery you there can possibly be.

“White Cedar” / Transcendental Youth

I was mooching off two college friends, living in their small apartment rent-free over the summer when I made my first appointment for gender-affirming care. I’d wronged both of them in different ways, but they were kind enough to let me live there and drive me back and forth to the clinic. When I got back, approved for HRT, I played this song and cried, turning every ounce of water to tears of joy, anticipation, and hope for redemption.

“I’ll be reborn someday, someday
If I wait long enough
I don’t have to be afraid
I don’t wanna be afraid
And you can’t tell me what my spirit tells me isn’t true, can you?”

My friends kept silent as the testosterone-blocking medications briefly depressed me, made me gaunt and tired, before the full flower bloomed and I left my old life and body behind. I can’t ever thank them enough for their help, and I hope they forgive me. I wish I could tell my smaller self that the day does come; you can change.

“Attention All Pickpockets” / Letter from Belgium EP

For my money, this may be the best song to ever come from the Mountain Goats. The shortest track on this list (just beating out “The Mummy’s Hand”), “Pickpockets” describes two friends separating with an excited, anxious love for the future.

“And the cornet blows
Where the oleander grows
And us two, not the same people that our old friends knew”

On one upload of this song, someone has commented:

“This song reminds me of how much I love my sister for who she is— even if for 20 years that was my brother. We don’t change because life stands still around us and I don’t know if our old friends would recognize us. Or care.”

I’ve met up with a lot of people I knew who transitioned since the last time I saw them. Sometimes, we bond over having to leave things behind, old friends and old selves. There’s nostalgia, hunger, and hope when we part ways. But other times, it’s more simple than that. Sometimes you’ve got to take a look at your life, then get in your car and drive away. It’s hard to carve a path for yourself, but you do the best you can, and “hope they’ve got plenty of money where you’re going.”

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Jenny From Thebes comes out October 27, and the Mountain Goats announced a whole suite of tour dates alongside it. I’m getting tickets just for a chance to learn a little more about Jenny. And myself.

Untethered: Turning Dancing, D&D, and Body Piercings Into Friendships

Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!

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Did the berries ripen earlier this year? So many plump raspberries rotted on the vine, sour burgundy juice streaming down over black slimy mold. Newly invasive spotted lanternfly nymphs crawled and hopped all over the brambles. I would photograph them, to preserve this particular moment in ecological collapse, while I picked raspberry after raspberry, wrapped in a thorn blanket of brambles that could not touch me in my overalls and thick buttondown.

Still, when the days are too hot, when acidic sweat is dripping down your face and your lungs are catching on themselves because they’re clogged with wildfire soot — you have to admit that no amount of stability will save you. No, it’s the community bonds that we form, or in much less fancy language — it’s the friendships that hold us up and see us through.

But one of the things about not having spent significant time being single is that my friends have often been tangled up with partners. When the partnership dissolves, even if they don’t “pick sides,” people usually still choose one person to hang out with. So, now, I’m looking at the small lineup of friends who are still in my world, and the much larger cadre of people I might only ever see in passing.

Over the past month, I’ve realized if I want more friendship in my life, I’m going to have to be almost aggressive about a) following up with people I’m friends with to see if they want to hang, b) finding new people to be friends with and c) being open to experiencing the magic and the beauty of other peoples’ chaos.

***It was a Saturday, and I’d gone over to my ex boss / current friend’s house to read Tarot as part of a fundraising party she threw because she needed help paying for a new roof. As I hung out, I realized this party was filled with 30 and 40-somethings in the arts in 2023 and that every single person was asking the Tarot about their career, their path ahead. Everyone was also unmoored and unsure and hungering for something more than lying down beneath the crushing wheels of the monster truck of time.

Then, my friend cracked my head open with a real shocker. She’d been thinking about me since I’d expressed to her that I felt like I was losing my community for a number of reasons. So, this straight woman had remembered I have wanted to try playing D&D for forever and when this group of queer theater adults wrapped up a two-year D&D campaign and were looking to engage in a series of one-shots and board game nights for the summer, she asked them if I could join.

I asked her “Did you set me up with a polycule, J?”

“Pretty much!”

A few texts later, and I was scheduled for my first ever D&D one-shot campaign where, of the group, I knew one person decently. I arrived, brought my vegan chickpea salad to add to the food my friend’s fiance was making for everyone, and made friends with the cat while a bunch of delightful queers popped into the cozy living room in ones and twos. A cloud of pot smoke and tacos which some people — but not me, gawd — had with THC laced hot sauce (???) later, and we were sitting around picking an animal to play as from a series of choices. We wound up with an owl, a loon, a kitten, a fawn, a lizard. Yours truly was a pony. Between the party posing as Applebees characters, getting a room full of monsters drunk on beverages made of thousand island dressing + broken glass + vodka, and trying to punch a magic bubble repeatedly — all via theater kids really laying into their voices, I had so much fun I transcended to a higher plane. I also learned what happens when you roll a 20, about some of the mechanics of the game and what a “one-shot” is in D&D. For anything I didn’t understand, the table was happy and eager and patient when it came to explaining. Every time someone pointed out which die was the correct one, and each time the other players welcomed my voice into the melee, my heart grew like, I don’t even know, three sizes (with advantage). My therapist is probably right: I need more people who don’t actively resent me in my life. And given the chance, I might see I am not the worst person on earth if I give new people the chance to get to know me.

***Jellyfish, Pittsburgh’s own queer disco DJ duo (who you might remember from Spaghetti Disco), put on JELLYFEST last weekend, with a dizzying lineup of queer entertainers, the culmination of which was two floors of under-the-sea decorated dance rooms filled with sweating, fanning, dancing, writhing, kissing queers. In the lead-up, I was busy, mostly in my Instagram DMs, talking to friends and almost-friends about going.

It was another night of going out dancing solo, with the hope of seeing people, but this time, progress! I didn’t almost dry heave. Yay! I felt like I had the hang of things, in fact, until I spotted a couple friends of my ex, who I’d hung out with on more than one occasion, whose homes I’d been in, who we’d planned to go camping with. I went up and said hello and then, immediately, that I wasn’t sure I should have. What followed were their hands on their chests and a lot of reassurances that it was fine, followed by “how are yous” and “it’s so hards.” They were not wrong, but it was also clear the conversation couldn’t progress beyond that. These were now former friends. After I complimented the home-crafted silver snake C had around their neck, I waved goodbye and avoided them for the rest of the night — but not resentfully, just because that’s how it is.

After I got caught in the middle of a drag show for like 20 minutes, I finally found my friends. Though locating people in a crowd filled me with dread (I’m relatively face-blind LOL), I managed.

There was one friend I was certain was there but who I wouldn’t see for at least an hour. Someone had wanted a cigarette, and we all needed air. My friend, S — the one who bills herself as an excellent distraction — caught me scrambling up a dirt pile to sit on a concrete wall outside. S called out to me “Nico! I knew that was you! It would only be you climbing something like that in practical shoes!” I’m not sure what that says, but from that point on, there was an ever-expanding and contracting group of dancing bodies that found each other and lost each other and found each other again. And, inevitably, at one point, a Barbie Girl remix played across the speakers while the queers who’d come decked out in tight pink dresses and delightfully hairy armpits truly had their moment.

***“Let’s put holes in ourselves!”

For the purposes of this, I’ll just refer to the queer chef I found on an app looking for platonic friends as Chef, because that’s fun and we all liked The Bear, didn’t we?

So, Chef and I are talking, trying to see if we’re friend material. He’s poly-saturated and looking for platonic connections. I’m, well, you know my circumstances — in need of friends who don’t know my ex. We get on the topic of dangly earrings, and then of piercings. He’s wanted his bridge pierced for some time. I share that I’ve wanted my nostril pierced for years.

He declares, then: “Let’s put holes in ourselves!” which is, in itself, iconic and something that says “friendship” to me. We make a plan to simultaneously meet and get pierced together at a place where he thinks he can get a discount. We book it, and then we wait.

Then, he’s late (due to work), I’m on time, and the piercers are so sweet and nice about waiting for Chef to get there before piercing him. They take me back first, and I try to, as I must always with strangers, explain to the piercer what an ‘Autostraddle’ is. He presses me for an example of something I’ve written while he gets the needle ready, and I quickly explain about Gandalf Big Naturals, as one does.

Afterward, we go to grab some beers and cheers to each other. “Happy Hole Day!” I shout while we clink glasses and affirm each others’ piercings look awesome. We talk about work. He tells me about his woes at a restaurant where the owner won’t hire a dishwasher, but, I kid you not, has hired a magician that visits tables on Thursdays and Fridays.

After a while, we part ways but make plans for the last of the raspberries I managed to salvage and freeze. He wants to make them into a raspberry liqueur. Naturally, this completely activated my childhood Redwall Brain. This is now the fate of the frozen raspberries. No question. So, I’ll finish this by sharing this meme with you before I follow up with my chef friend.

In the midst of climate change and being single and building everything back up from absolute scratch, I have to ask, is it now…hot and sweet and friendship-stuffed “Redwall Summer?” Is it? Maybe? Please?

Sad in a Prettier Place

Feature image by James O’Neil for Getty Images

Before I moved from DC to California, Instagram’s creepy algorithm delivered me an image that said something like “moving won’t solve your problems, you’ll just be sad in a prettier place.”

A big reason for my move was the fact that I’m immune compromised. I couldn’t safely exist in a world that has decided to ignore the pandemic that still kills hundreds of people in the U.S. each day unless I moved to a place where I could be outdoors all year to limit my risk. Regardless of what that Instagram post said, I knew moving would at least solve that problem.

In 2022, while everyone else was starting to “move on” from a pandemic that has definitely not moved on from us, I became a medical mystery. People like me don’t get to move on because even a regular virus can send us spiraling into a pit of mysterious symptoms. In January 2022, I got some sort of infection that was not COVID. In a matter of one week and one infection I went from dancing nearly every day, walking my dog, hiking, and swimming regularly to feeling like I was running from simply walking from my couch to the bathroom When I stood up or tried to walk my heart rate would skyrocket to the 150s. Only a few weeks before that I had gotten married in Orlando and walked many miles a day in Disney World and sightseeing on a road trip along the east coast. But that person is gone now.

I thought I was going to die and I was afraid to move, convinced I was on the verge of a stroke or a heart attack.

After that, everything became a blur. I know I went to doctors and did testing but I cannot tell you when or where because I was so damn exhausted all the time that it was a struggle to stay present. Everytime I left my apartment to go to these doctors and tests, my heart responded like I had run a marathon.

In May an endocrinologist told me she had found the answer. My cortisol was dangerously low from a round of prednisone. We treated that with a different steroid: hydrocortisone. And it did help the dizziness and the fatigue enough that the fog started to clear – but it never went away. Once a month I would go to the hospital to sit for a multi-hour test where a nurse would inject me with different chemicals to measure how my body’s hormones responded, to see if I was recovering and ready to come off of the hydrocortisone. In November they said I was fine now and I could slowly wean off of the hydrocortisone. I was healed. Except I wasn’t.

In December when I moved across the country and the physical labor that comes with moving paired with the fact that my cortisol deficiency was supposed to be gone made me acutely aware of how lightheaded I was and how rapid my heart rate was. It had slowed some from the initial highs immediately following the infection, but I regularly felt like I was on the verge of passing out. I saw a cardiologist who told me I clearly had dysautonomia but there wasn’t enough time to do testing before my move. Not to worry though I was moving to an area with some of the best doctors in the world! In fact, if you search US News’s ranking of the Best Hospitals in the World, 40 of them are in California.

But no state full of good doctors and (mostly) blue voters could keep the U.S. medical system from its modus operandi!

We arrived at an empty apartment shortly before Christmas to 80 degree days and palm trees decked out in lights. It seemed like a scene in a movie where the main character goes on a dream vacation to some tropical paradise, but real life meant staying in paradise while learning how to navigate the everyday.

Shortly after the New Year, all of the stress from moving brought on one of the worst autoimmune flare-ups I’ve had in years. It felt like having the flu without the congestion: fevers, intense body aches, cold sweats and chills, intense fatigue. I was so exhausted that I could only stay awake for two or three hours at a time for an entire week. Everything that I needed to do — mail, laundry, unpacking, work — literally piled up around me and slowly closed in on me.

Being incredibly sick in a new city is a good way to realize just how far you are from everything you know. My health insurance had changed so I didn’t know if my medications would be covered. My friends and family now went to bed when my night was just starting. I lost the network of trustworthy doctors and physical therapists that had taken me years to find.

Trying to find new doctors who would listen and take me seriously as a queer, chronically ill, plus size woman felt like playing roulette. A doctor might have great reviews online and then tell me all of my problems would be solved if I just went to the gym. Every new appointment required trying to explain my complex history over and over again. So many doctors were completely dismissive of my concerns or didn’t understand the ways in which my identities intersected with my medical conditions. I had to constantly advocate for myself and fight to be heard but I was already exhausted from fighting my own body.

One particularly pompous doctor dismissed all of my previous diagnoses and symptoms as simply being caused by temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ). I never said I had any jaw pain! But he cut me off every time I tried to speak, made assumptions about my life and experiences, and proceeded to mansplain my own body to me. It was like he had already made up his mind before I even walked into the room, and nothing I said could sway him from his arrogant position. Another doctor gave me a lecture about a certain diet I should follow without taking any time to learn that almost all of the foods she was recommending are foods my body can’t tolerate.

Thankfully I did find one good doctor who was able to treat my flare up, but it only led to more complications. The treatment caused a different problem and though I could actually stay awake and go back to work, it made the dizziness that plagued me for over a year get worse and launched me into a new effort to solve that mystery. It feels like I’m stuck in a never-ending movie montage of doctors and tests.

One test was supposed to be the final answer, with numerous doctors enthusiastically swearing it would reveal the source of my dizziness and get me on a treatment plan. So after not eating or drinking for many hours, I was strapped to a hospital table a la Frankestein’s monster and covered with electrodes and monitors. They tilted the table into a standing position and waited for my symptoms to appear. And nothing. Nothing happened. The nurse asked me how I was feeling, referring to my symptoms, but I — trying not to cry — said angry. I had felt dizzy and nearly fell over just a few minutes before the test when I stood up from my chair in the waiting room, so why couldn’t that happen now? I told the nurse and doctor that I felt like I had just taken my computer in to have a bug fixed, only for it to not happen when I tried to show the staff what was wrong.

So I was left without answers and with doctors who were officially stumped. One doctor referred to a speciality testing center at Stanford University — the only center of its kind on the entire west coast. But Stanford must have gotten itself confused, because it sent me a form rejecting me as if I had applied for college and not sent a referral for medical care! The letter was incredibly vague with no useful information about why they rejected me, how to appeal, or anything, and they wouldn’t give my doctor more information either. When I called, the best answer I got was “find another clinic.” Well, Stanford likes to boast about two things: this is the only facility of its kind on the entire west coast and Stanford’s medical system has been recognized by the Human Rights Campaign for being LGBT friendly. The next closest clinic is in Salt Lake City Utah, home to the notoriously homophobic Mormon Church. How can a place that calls itself LGBT friendly reject an LGBT patient with no explanation and then tell them to travel to Salt Lake City instead?

The next stop was a different test at an otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat) who ran me through a strange series of tests and refused to give me my results until I came in person, even though the next available appointment was not for three months. So, you’re telling me you have the results in your hand right now and know if there is something seriously wrong with me and you expect me to wait three months? I did some research and it turns out that this is actually against multiple federal laws (HIPPA and the 21st Century Cares Act) defining patient rights and guaranteeing quick, unimpeded access to results so that patients can have all of the information they need to access the best medical care. I had to get my primary care doctor to help advocate for me and remind this doctor of laws to finally get my results, which actually did find something wrong with me.

I’m still dizzy every day but I’m feeling hopeful for the first time in a year and a half. I have a physical therapy appointment scheduled with a person who specializes in dizziness. I also have appointments with more specialists — but this time I actually have some answers and test results to take with me, and not just a list of mystery symptoms.

It’s been an incredibly difficult, exhausting, and stressful time. Sometimes it seems like I spend every drop of energy I have on going to a doctor or dealing with insurance. The truth looks more like a roller coaster. A TikTok video trend recapping 2023 so far, now that we’re roughly halfway through it, prompted me to look back at the photos on my phone.

It’s true there are times when a lot of it is doctors (I have social media accounts where I post about chronic illness so that’s why I have photos from my doctor visits) or pictures I took at home of my dog or even documenting my Lupus butterfly rash to show my doctor later.

But in between the lulls there are sunsets on California beaches, wildflowers from the super bloom, multiple trips to Disneyland (Disneyland is really great at accessibility and is pretty popular with the disabled community as a result), sea lions, and mountains. There are photos with the few friends I have here that I can safely spend time with outdoors because the weather is always perfect (look if you’re from Southern California and you’re reading this, I know you’re shocked that I would say the weather is always perfect when there were floods and June gloom, and it was “so cold” this winter — but Washington, DC has flood advisories, and heat warnings, and snow storms multiple times a year. I’m sorry, but 50 degrees fahrenheit is not cold). There are amazing foods I got to try because more restaurants here have outdoor dining. There are all the cute dog friends my dog made because my new building actually has a dog park. There’s a trip to Big Bear Lake with gorgeous mountains and an amazing queer-friendly cafe called LuLuBelle’s (please support them if you go to Big Bear, they are so lovely). There’s the hummingbird feeder I hung on my balcony and the beautiful bird friends that like to take advantage of it.

It’s true that moving across the country didn’t solve all of my problems. It did give me more access to outdoor activities to be safer from COVID. But it created new problems, too. But every day — whether I feel up to leaving the house or not — I wake up to flowers, palm trees, and hummingbirds outside my window. I’ve been able to soak in my apartment’s outdoor hot tub several times, which has provided some much needed relief to my joint pain. I have been able to eat outside, walk along the ocean, and see baby sea lions.

I am still recovering from my flare up and the things that piled up. I am still struggling to find new doctors and make new friends. I still don’t know when or if I will ever stop feeling dizzy. So maybe it’s true that moving just made me sad in a prettier place. But maybe that’s the point.

You and Me Against the World

feature image by Hiroshi Watanabe via Getty Images

I’m five years old and, not for the first time, you’re knocked out in our single-bedroom apartment. You’ve worked all day and studied hard for your nursing exam, and I don’t know anything about your worries about our lives. I’m content to play as you rest for the first time that day.

You sleep, letting the day get away from us. I play in our living room, creating an adventure in which I’m both the princess and the hero. You dream, and I invent. Then, finally, the sun goes down, and you rest still.

I’m not sure how you managed it, being a single mom and going through nursing school, all to make my life better, but I’m grateful for it. You’re stressed, and I know now it wasn’t easy, but you wore it so well.

Months fly by. You graduate and officially become a registered nurse, I get to put your pin on you, and we take a photo, one of my favourite photos of us to this day.

These moments between the two of us have lasted lifetimes. It was me and you against the world.

I don’t know the weight on your shoulders, but sometimes I can feel it settling against mine. I’m too young to understand what it means, but I’ll take the unknown weight if it means making your life easier.

I couldn’t know then what I know now. There’s no way for a five-year-old to heal your pain. Something vast and broad can only be healed through time. A year goes by, and you’re still not okay, but you’ve gotten better at hiding it. I’ve gotten better at being a “good girl”, racing through first grade and trying my best to be good enough for you.

We’re at McDonald’s, just me and you, the way it always is. A little boy calls me “that little Black girl over there”, not knowing you’re my mother and I’m not only Black. It’s the first time you’re faced with the reality that, despite the fact I’m our daughter, I’m also a young Black woman in a world that isn’t designed to see me the way you see me. It’s the first time you’ll realize my life experience will vastly differ from yours. I’m not sure you accept it; too worried about correcting the boy at the moment, not focused on the implication. This is something we’ll both struggle with in the future. For now, you’ve reminded the boy that I, too, have a name and that I am more than whatever his young mind is ready to project onto me. You, my permanent protector, have taken on a task you cannot imagine the importance of.

I’m in second grade, and I’ve lied for the first time. You’re upset, reasonably so; who is this child, and how is she so different from the daughter I’ve raised? For the first time, it’s not just you and me against the world; it’s you, it’s me, experiencing the world for the first time.

I have an independent spirit. Folks at church say I have an “old soul.” This growing independence scares you, but you want to foster it. You want me to be independent, but you also want me to cling to you the way other children cling to their parents. You admire my bold spirit; it shines through even at my young age. You can’t help but wonder at this child you’ve brought into the world. It drives you to worry. For me, it’s another Tuesday afternoon. My curiosity about the world is neverending; I want to know everything. I want you to know I have the answers to all the things that are hurting you. I don’t know yet that it’s not my responsibility to heal you, but I’m trying my best anyway.

I’m starting to develop my own personality. I shine in school, despite being the youngest in my grade. They want me to skip a year, but you worry I won’t gain the necessary skills if I do. You worry about how I’ll do socially, so I stay with my class.

You work more, but you never fail to come to every recital, every game, and every performance. I perform only for you, for my dad when he can come around. It’s winter, and our school break is coming to an end. You’re not sure how you’ll be able to keep me entertained and cared for when you have to work, but you’re trying to do everything you can so we turn out alright.

We’ve just moved into our first house. You are so proud, and I am so nervous. I only understand that the house brings you joy, but I’m not sure about the whole moving thing. I’m only a child; I don’t know what it means for you to buy your first house; I don’t understand the moment’s weight. I just know we’re moving away from our apartment where I’ve spent these first few years of my life, and I have no idea what’s coming next.

And then, you meet him.

It’s spring, and you’re shopping for furniture for our new house. You walk into the store and meet him. Unbeknownst to me, you two begin to talk, to date seriously. Suddenly, there’s a new man in my life, one different from the others. The others were friends; they were men who were in my life for years and who I was comfortable with. But, he brings a darkness to you, something that changes in you and for the first time. I worry that I don’t know you.

It’s the first recital I have that you can’t make. I recite a poem you have heard thousands of times before. I look at the empty pew and pray for a miracle that you’ll be able to show, even though I know you’re at work. You can’t call out of work, and that’s okay. Months pass, and I mostly forget about the incident. Then, one morning I find you and him at our table. You tell me you’ve called out of work to spend time with me. I’m filled with resentment for the first time in my young life. I don’t like him, and for the first time, I don’t like you.

There was so much anger in my little body; I was upset because you could call out of work for him? But not for me? My young mind can’t process everything you’ve already sacrificed for me. My young mind can’t wrap around the idea that you deserve to feel all the love you’ve given me. Because you do, you’ve poured all the love you contain into me and deserve to feel it all. But I’m eight years old, and I don’t know that.

After he proposes, he takes me on a drive. He makes me promise not to tell you about what we talk about on this drive. He tells me he will be my stepfather, and I don’t have to like him, but I will respect him.

I decide from that moment on, I won’t.

You’d be surprised at what a strong grudge an eight-year-old can have, but I am your daughter; maybe it isn’t a surprise to you.

I know I don’t make it easy, but I never did well with change as a child.

And many things changed.

I remember the first time you yelled at me. You’re straightening your hair in the bathroom. You ask if I want to go to your wedding to him. I answer honestly.

You were hurt, I can see that now, but the way your eyes looked when you turned towards me frightened me. I had only ever seen you look at me with love, but it seemed you hated me at that moment. I didn’t understand the context, the implication of my words. I only understood you were angry, you did not like me, and that, for my honesty, I was rewarded with you telling me what a terrible daughter I was.

I realize now that you reacted in the way you were taught how.

This was a new side to you I had never seen before. I wasn’t prepared for it; I never was.

Later, you treat the incident as though it never happened. You don’t apologize, but we move on. I, of course, go to your wedding; it’s an honour to be there. You’re excited by the simple thought of marrying him. Surrounded by our family and friends, I still don’t like him, but you’re smiling, you’re happy, and for that, I would give anything. So I smile and participate as much as I can while staying out of the way as much as I can. Though the yelling has been more frequent and I’ve been left confused, for this one night, everything seems as though it’s okay.

It occurs to me now that this is when I began hiding from you. I never wanted to hurt you, but it seemed as though my honesty would only serve to hurt you.

How can I grow into my identity if the constant fear of wounding you holds me back? How do I grow into the type of person you want me to be if I can’t explore every part of what my personality has? Who am I supposed to be, and what will it take to get there?

The first time I told you I was queer. You didn’t speak to me for 24 hours.

I remember this moment clearly, as anyone who has had to come out to their parents will tell you this memory lives with them forever. We are driving back from dinner, the three of us. The secret has been weighing on me for a while. I’m only twelve, but still, even then, I know there is something different about me. My friends only talk about crushes on boys while I wonder about girls and boys. Being in a private school in the South means I learned early on to keep that kind of talk to myself.

You are upset and trying to communicate with me. You sit in the front seat of his car, texting me as I sit behind you. In a moment, I know I have to tell you. I know you won’t be happy, but I don’t expect the immediate rejection. I don’t expect to read your message “No, you’re not. Don’t say that.” I don’t expect you to rush into the house without a word to me.

Instead, I hear you tell him about it, exposing my secrets so readily, yet never speaking to me about them. You say to him that your daughter is not bisexual. That I don’t yet know what that means. It’s the first night you haven’t told me “Goodnight, I love you” in my twelve years. I cry that night and several nights after. For the first time, I’ve learned that your “unconditional” love can undoubtedly have its conditions.

I had already come out to my friends; they had been so welcoming, so kind. You told me I shouldn’t tell people that.
I know now that you were scared. You were so deathly afraid for me. You never stopped loving me but didn’t know how to operate from fear and still guide me. It’s not your fault. You had an implicit understanding that my skin colour would force me into some difficulties in life, but saying I was queer and bisexual would add hardships you hadn’t prepared me for. It was another division between you and me, and you weren’t sure how to handle it. You said it was your responsibility to prepare me for the world, for the hardships I would face. But all I wanted was a safe space to come home to.

You never talked to me about my admission. Instead, you tell me I can no longer have sleepovers with my girlfriends. I nod to your face but scream and cry into my pillow when the feeling becomes too big.

You lay with him in another room, and I can’t imagine the thoughts racing through your mind. I understand you were trying your best. You did your very best with me, always did. But, unfortunately, there’s no guidebook on what to do when your 12-year-old daughter, who’s never kissed anyone, let alone thought of it, tells you she’s bisexual.

Your reaction taught me not to tell anyone else in our family.

I continue to live as a bisexual adolescent in school, but I come home and learn to play my part perfectly. At 13, I have a crush on a friend in high school, though I’ll never tell you, too scared of what you might think or do. Then, at 15, I start dating a boy I met at camp. It doesn’t last long, maybe a few months, but it teaches me to keep secrets. Then, at 16, I start dating a girl a year younger than me. I’m elated, experiencing something new. I understand, for the first time, that you were wrong.

I knew at 12 what I know to be true now. Though now, at 23, I use the umbrella term of “queer.”

Later, you’ll tell me you’ve always accepted “gay people.” Then, I’ll wonder if you remember your first reaction to me and understand how my heart broke when I realized you could accept everyone else but not me. Then, I will start to wonder if it’s something about me that you can’t accept.

What does it mean if my own mother doesn’t love me?

This thought will haunt me for many years to come.

At 16, I’m applying to colleges. He’s been gone for a while, and it’s just you and me again. You’re nicer now, sweeter, as though the past was not the past but just a figment of my imagination. I apply to every local school you tell me about, but my eyes are set on Southern California. A school I had only just heard of in a city I had never been to.

“Why do you even want to go there?” you ask.

I don’t have a direct answer, something you’ve always disliked. So I tell you about how I want to go to UCLA to direct, to be creative, that it’s something that’s on my heart, and I know I can make it happen.

You tell me there’s no point in going to school for that; it’s just a waste of money, and I’ll never make anything of myself if I do that.

You’re hurt; you see my desire to go to UCLA as a desire to escape from you, from the life you’ve built for us. You don’t see it as an opportunity for me to grow. You see it as 1,500 miles across the country. You’re hurt, and you know how to hurt me so well.

I trade my dreams for ones that would make you proud. I stop writing, focus on school, and tell you less about my theatre performances and our work. I will tell you only about my chemistry classes and my love for forensic science. I tell you, if I go to UCLA, I’ll study chemistry.

You smile and tell our family. You’re proud of how smart I am and what I can do. You’re proud of how you’ve raised me, that this possibility even exists for me.

The spring after I turn 17, my senior year of high school, we’re in a hotel after a cruise with our family. We’re staying one more night and heading home the next day. I let out a small scream from my bed, and you turn over, anxious.

“What?”

“I got in!”

Your reaction is small. I’ve just gotten into my dream school, and you tell me that’s great and go back to sleep. Try as I might, your lack of reaction hurts me, but I’m so excited. I stay up for a few more hours, texting my friends and to let them know. They’re all so proud of me, and I wish you would’ve been too.

My dad tried to explain it to me a few months later when you shut me out. You’ve just told me you won’t help me pay for anything while I’m in school, that if I go there, I can figure out my own way. He tells me that you’re sad and scared of me leaving. All I can think about is that you hate me, that my biggest dream is just an inconvenience to you, and you can’t find a way to be happy for me. He tells me it’s not true, and I laugh over the phone. I remind him, of course, it’s true, that it’s been over a decade since the two of you divorced, and I’ve known you for longer. So I build a resolve around myself.
If you hate me, so be it.

Of course, he’s right. This is another incident that you will sweep under the rug, unaware of the damage already done. This isn’t as simple as me getting into my dream school. It’s your daughter, walking away from you like her father did all those years ago. It’s the pinnacle of tests for a parent; how well have you prepared me? Finally, at only 17, I’m off to college, off to greet the world.

Have you done the best you could do? Have you taught me everything I need to know? What will happen to me now that I’m not under your care?

You’ll visit California with me and drop me off at school, crying on the way back to your hotel. Then, despite yourself, you let me go.

At 18, I’m a force to be reckoned with. I’m intelligent, but for the first time, I’m outside of Texas, outside of your watchful eyes. I’m alive, and I’m brilliant, and I am struggling. I’ve wrapped up my GEs and am now heavily focused on my major requirements. I cry during every math class and struggle to keep up with my chemistry classes. I vow to switch my major; no longer interested in double majoring, I want to focus solely on psychology. You tell me I can still go into forensics that way. I keep my writing classes secret from you. I don’t tell you about the joy I experience simply by being in these courses. I don’t tell you the freedom in them, the freedom I get from sharing just a tiny bit of who I am with my professors. I don’t tell you they think I’ve “got some talent.”

Instead, I tell you about the church. I tell you about this group I’ve joined and how kind everyone is. I tell you how they’re preparing to go on a missionary trip to Ghana in the summer and that I want to go. I tell you, God’s placed it on my heart, although I’m not sure if that’s true. I just knew I needed the experience. You’re scared. It’s my first time traveling out of the country, and I’m going to a place where I’m told I’ll have no access to a phone for most of my two-month stay. You won’t have any way to contact me except on occasion through email.

I don’t know how, but you find a way to help me.

That summer, I’m teaching kindergarten and third grade. I’m nervous and scared, but you had faith in me, so I have faith in myself. I learn about Ghanaian culture, and even though I’m hesitant about the whole missionary part of the work, I enjoy teaching children and opt not to force any religious teachings out of my mouth. Instead, we focus on reading and writing. My students hand me a dress they’ve made for me at the end of the summer, and I cry, excited to show you they’re proud of me, too. Just like you.

If I was a force to be reckoned with at 18, I’m a storm at 19. I’m doing better in my psychology courses than in my English ones. I’ve gotten myself a highly coveted job as a resident assistant and am in charge of over one hundred kids.

And I’m in love.

Or whatever it is when you meet someone for the first time at 19 and realize you want to be a better person with them.

Of course, love is subjective.

He’s older than me, wiser, and it will never go beyond friendship, but I’m happy just to be in his presence. First, I tell him everything I can’t tell you about. Then, in his wisdom, he offers me words of encouragement and understanding. He’s an excellent teacher, and in the year we know each other, he helps shape me into a much better person than I could have imagined.

I won’t tell you any of this, scared of what you might say. In fact, we’re talking less and less now. I bring up incidents from the past you claim not to remember, and it hurts. You don’t like the person I’m becoming, or so it seems. My politics are too left-leaning, my ideas too big and yet not entirely focused enough to be understood. I’m coming into myself. You can’t fathom the girl you knew now having different experiences of her own. I’m not the girl that left Texas with you. When I return, I’m entirely new, someone you don’t have access to or know how to communicate with. There’s a fathomless distance between us, and neither of us can build a bridge to cross it.

Despite that, when I say I want to study abroad, you drop everything to help me. When I tell you I can get a partial scholarship, but I still won’t be able to cover the whole thing, you pick up extra shifts at work and tell everyone how proud you are of me to be able to do something like this.

I’m stubborn, just like you. Old hurts eventually boil over until there are three weeks when I’m in Europe, and we aren’t talking. You got upset with me over something, something so small now I can’t even name it. I decided we won’t speak; I figured it may be for the best. In those three weeks, something changes inside of me. I meet a boy, expecting a whirlwind of a summer romance. Unfortunately, it turns out to be anything but. As I’m crying in the shower before the sun peeks over the horizon one morning, I want nothing more than to call you, tell you, and let you heal me, as you always seem to know how.

I don’t.

I hold that all in. Instead, I let my dad act as an intermediary between us. I allow him to heal me, to try and fix us. We talk for hours, days on end, until we finally compromise. A slate wiped clean, a new way to communicate. We tentatively test this newfound way of speaking when I come home. But, wouldn’t you know, we’re better for it?

Except there are still things I don’t know how to tell you.

In the first week of my third year at UCLA, I switch my major again. This time to English.

I spent the first few classes of the quarter crying, horrendous tears that made my eyes constantly bloodshot, dark circles gathered under my eyes. I went to my academic counsellor because I was sure I wanted to drop out. I collected all the necessary papers and was ready. But I couldn’t tell you; how could I. How could I tell you I was prepared to throw away everything you had sacrificed for me? How could I tell you that I wasn’t the girl you thought I was, just a poor shadow trying to shine light like she did. My counsellor sat me down and asked me dozens of questions. She wanted to know why. Of course, she did. I didn’t have an answer anymore; I just knew I couldn’t keep going on the path I was on. Finally, she asked me the question no one had asked me before:

“If it was up to you, just you, not your parents, not your professors, not anyone else, just you, what would you want to study?”

The answer was quick and simple: English.

I had dreams of being a writer. Ever since I was a kid. Although you told me there was no money in it, I spent my childhood writing books and winning the Young Authors and Illustrators’ Contests in our district. Then, the summer I turned 14, I wrote three books, back to back.

From there, it’s easy. Within the hour, my major changes, and I have enough credits that, so long as I keep a good pace, I can actually graduate early. I don’t know how to tell you; I knew you would be upset. Worse, I fear you will be disappointed. Here is your daughter, who you constantly pushed to do great things, abandoning it all to follow her dreams. Yet, I’m experiencing a new form of freedom. Elated, I call my dad, and in a rush of giggles, I tell him what I have done. He laughs and tells me it seems more my style than psychology anyways and that I have to chase my dreams; I just have to know what that means.

At that moment, it meant being brave enough to tell you.

You are less mad than I expected but certainly still upset, wondering how I will come up with enough money to survive as an English major. But, for the first time, you seem more supportive than angry. I don’t have to tell you about the tears, the almost failing grades, I just tell you what I want, and you accept it, easy as that.

And then, the pandemic hits.

Lost in a whirlwind of events, I return to my dad’s house. The plan was to move to you after a short time when we realized how long this would be lasting. In a series of events, I receive a new medication prescribed by someone who had no idea what they were doing, and in a rush, I end up in the hospital with my dad by my side, with only the faintest recollection of how I got there. I stay there for three days, trying to put the pieces together. When I do, you are the only person I want to talk to.

After that, things shift between us; our communication becomes more open, and we learn how to navigate the minefield of each other’s emotions. I can tell you things I couldn’t before, but I still don’t know if I could make mistakes around you.

Can one wrong move ruin everything we built?

So I keep some secrets and build side walls where castles once stood around my heart. Still, you, with your relentless love, love me anyways. You show me grace when I deserve none, and through you, I learn to do the same. You are happier now, recently remarried with a glow to you. I like him quite a lot; I like how you smile when you’re with him. How happy he makes you. It gives me hope for a much better future.

I’m still learning and growing. I’m teaching myself how to forgive, love, and be. For the first time, I’ve realized I’m proud of the person I am, the person I’m growing into. I would not have made it this far without you. I’ve learned patience where I had none, which granted me more grace than I imagined. I’m seeing you, for the first time, as you are, not just as my mother, but as a person, with history, with hurts and pains I can’t heal, but I can support you through.

I am who I am solely because you are who you are. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am your daughter, everything you ever wanted, and everything you can’t seem to shake away. I remind you of who you are and reflect everything you’ve taught me onto the world.

The other day, you asked me how I would rate you as a mom. On a scale of one to ten, be honest; you pleaded with me. I’m unsure if it was a serious question or if you were joking around as Mother’s Day was coming up, but I answered as honestly as possible.

“10/10. Best mom ever.”

Because I know. I know some of your sacrifices, although I’m sure that part of motherhood means hiding even more of them. Because while it’s my first time being your daughter, it’s your first time being my mother. You have always done the very best you can, and I’m grateful for that. I’m thankful for the person you moulded me to be; I’m proud of the woman I’ve become. I can only hope you’re proud of me, too.

Love,
Autumn

What To Expect When Your Friends Are Expecting (as a Childfree Queer)

feature image photo by Francesco Carta fotografo via Getty Images

On a snowy Sunday while my sister was in labor with her first baby, I was drinking Bloody Mary’s at drag brunch. I thought this was where I wanted to be: somewhere queer and childfree. In the name of celebration I took shots, a thing I never do. It felt like happiness was the only thing I was allowed to express, but it was hardly all I felt. An odd mixture of fear and grief overwhelmed me. Sweat and glitter reigned as the contrast between our roles in the world sharpened.

I’m not having kids. There are a lot of reasons why, but the most uncomplicated one is it’s never been my desire. I think a lot about desire and how I can live a life that honors my cravings. At twelve, I identified my first instinct that I was gay, but out of fear and spiritual abuse, I buried it for years. Now, I am committed to cultivating a life that has abundant room for my desires. And the longing to become a parent has never emerged.

But I’m at a point in life where many people I love are starting to raise children. With each friend who initiates parenthood, I feel the same complicated feelings. Where does that leave me? One of my absolute favorite writers, Melissa Faliveno, describes this perfectly in her book Tomboyland. She says, “As more of my friends become parents, like the majority of the people in my life eventually will, I’m reminded that it’s an experience I’ll likely never share. And when it’s someone with whom I’ve always felt a deep kinship — a fellow writer or musician; a person dedicated to their career; a queer person who once said they’d never have kids and who I felt, in this way, would forever be part of my childless tribe — there’s a feeling that I’ve lost someone like me…Each time another friend has children, I feel a little more alone” (188).

So how is a childfree lesbian supposed to cope with that loneliness? As my community transforms, I’ve developed a curiosity on how to transmute isolation into connection. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any queer elders who could guide me here, to the point where I could understand how to share community with friends across differing desires. I’m certainly not pretending to be that queer elder for anyone else. But I have a good therapist and a patient partner who have helped me learn how to stay connected. So I’m sharing a few things I’ve learned with the hope that another queer childfree person might find refuge and feel less alone.

First, when someone you love has a child, you should prepare to be the one putting more effort into the friendship. It won’t be like this forever, but when a new human is brought into a family it’s a huge adjustment. Whether your loved-one realizes it or not, they won’t have the space for friendship like they once did. That’s okay! Expect to stoke the fire of friendship for some time, and remember just because they aren’t able to give as much, it doesn’t mean they don’t love and care about you. It means their world has rearranged and honestly, you checking in with them probably feels soothing amongst the change.

Second, normalize your feelings, no matter how intricate they are. Joy, sadness, excitement, disappointment — all are okay to feel! This doesn’t lessen the happiness you feel for your friends, it only enriches the interconnected beauty of being in community. It’s natural to grieve when a relationship once built on mutual desires shifts. Share what you’re feeling with a trusted friend who can honor emotional nuance. Someone other than the new parent! They are processing their own adjustment to parenthood, so it won’t serve your friendship to immediately flood them with your feelings too. Be patient. A time will come when you both have the capacity to share, and you’ll be glad to have waited for the right conditions to truly connect.

Third, identify the role you want to play. This is so important because loneliness calcifies when we believe we don’t belong. But the truth is, you absolutely belong and have the agency to decide your involvement. Maybe your role is making your friend yummy food or cleaning their house, thereby showing you are invested in supporting their immediate domestic space. Maybe your role is taking them out for tea, going on long walks, or grocery shopping together — reconnecting them to the world outside the home. Maybe your role is making playlists, buying gay baby books, or sending memes — infusing their life with art, representation, and humor. Your role could be anything! As a childfree queer person you have the enchanted quality of understanding the world differently. The antidote to loneliness lies in allowing that enchantment to guide you in discovering the unique, community role you offer.

Personally, I find myself continually drawn to the role of nourishment. Providing food makes me feel like my own aunts, bringing family together over beautiful, live-giving meals. Cooking for people also satisfies my ancestral Jewish instinct for nourishing community. I make my sister’s family a meal every week. My sister’s favorite is roasted veggies. Each time I make it she texts me about how good they are. Once she even texted, “I think I could eat those veggies every day for the rest of my life.” I love hearing this 1) because I am a glutton for praise, and 2) because it affirms that my role has a meaningful impact and I do, in fact, belong.

At home, in our kitchen, my fiancée sears shrimp in a buttery sauce for tacos while I read at the breakfast nook. She pours me a glass of rosé and makes a heat pack for my back. Joy Oladokun plays softly from our speaker as we decompress from the day. Our space is peaceful, a lesbian sanctuary for plants and cats. I put down my book to watch her constellate the kitchen when she stops to ask, “What if we had to put a baby to bed right now?” I laugh because I’m obviously really glad we aren’t putting a baby to bed at this moment. She is too. I know what she means by the question though. She means, what if we didn’t have this every night? What if we couldn’t follow our desires? I get up to kiss her and help chop the vegetables. “I’m glad it’s just us, nourishing each other. Plus, I love being the fun gay auntie.” She agrees and we stay up late, doing whatever we want, content with the company of only each other.

Leaning Into Pleasure at the Janelle Monáe Listening Party

Three days before the release of Janelle Monáe’s Age of Pleasure album, the email invitation to their listening party arrives in my inbox as I’m contemplating my face mask. Is it enough protection as the city’s AQI climbs toward 400? Would it be worse to take it off to eat my purse burrito on the walk to the A train or inside the train car? But when my phone vibrates and I read the invite, I don’t eat the burrito at all; I just spend the rest of the ride with The Standard’s address burning in my pocket while I decide whether or not to go.

How does one decide whether or not to party with Janelle Monáe, creator of anthems such as “Q.U.E.E.N.”, “Yoga”, “Tightrope”, and “Dance Apocalyptic” whose newer single “Float” is already on a loop on my every commute? I ultimately decide the way I always do: By measuring the amount of my health and livelihood I’d be gambling with. This is a classic plight of any marginalized person: The world is not built to accommodate us, but we must navigate it anyway; we’re all gamblers.

***Before I can muster the gall to send a text that could put my job in jeopardy, my boss texts me that work is canceled due to the air quality. I draw in a heady breath, put my phone down and swipe my lipstick on. I breathe carefully through my mask on the train to 14th street, and then in the line outside the Standard. I keep my eyes away from the electric gray-orange clouds blocking out the tops of the highline skyscrapers. I lift my gaze no higher than the braids, locs, and afros of those in line ahead of me. I explicitly did not get a plus one with my invite, so I make awkward, raspy, off-hand small talk with the person next to me as we approach the front of the line, where three people in suits are checking The List.

I’ve never been on The List before. I can’t imagine why anyone would want an adjunct with a week-old creative writing degree and a private instagram on The List. I have to say my name twice when it’s my turn, and when I do, I find out someone else at the party also has one of my last names. “Isn’t that funny?” the person says with a smile before stamping a pole with legs wrapped around it onto the inside of my wrist.

The Boom Boom Room is the image of opulence. The greenery leaning in from the walls looks so real. I walk right up to the entryway arch, take an enormous bird of paradise in my hand, and tell the person standing next to it in a PLEASURE crop top that I know someone who loves this flower — can I take a picture with it? They laugh and say “of course, this is all for you!” I am handed a red-orange card titled Pleasure Guide. The rules are printed on it in warm yellow letters. They include: ‘Safety first. Fun next :), smile at a stranger, focus on the feeling, come dry leave wet, Unleash the ‘free azz mothafucka’ in you!’ A white fan with gold Age of Pleasure lettering on the side is handed to me next as I am guided to a round bar that looks like an upside-down gilded mushroom and am offered my choice of four different mezcal cocktails. I swear to myself that I’ll only have two; I must keep my promise to my sister that I’ll remember absolutely everything, but then the bartender walks away without asking for my card and I realize the drinks are free.

Above me, crystal chandeliers glow. In front of me, floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the rest of Manhattan, simultaneously glowing and fading in the post-fire-air. To my right is a fire-hydrant-red-lipped person in a pink jumpsuit with picture-perfect locs; to my left is her friend in a sheer black corset top, rolled cap, and a gold rope chain. “Are you in the industry?” they ask me, and I laugh too hard, too loud, for too long. I am nobody; I shouldn’t be here, I want to say, but the music is too good to shout over, so we dance instead. And then another person joins, we get another round of drinks, and she takes the words out of my mouth. “I can’t believe I’m here. I just moved here this week,” she says and we laugh in disbelief, turning back to dancing, but she grips my arm hard and points to show me that I am shoulder to shoulder with Alok Menon.

Moments later, Monáe appears in all of their glory. I hear her before I see her. I have just danced to Suavemente when a smooth “hellooooooooo” rings over the speaker in a voice I’ve never heard live but still recognize immediately — even through the haze of overwhelm. It rings exactly as true and clear as it does on their albums. Who is that. I scream before anyone else seems to have heard. Where is she. And then I see them, all 5 feet zero inches of them (excluding the jaunty black bowler hat), encircled in the light of everyones phone flash.

“Listen,” begins her address, “we are like, a day and a half before we are officially into The Age of Pleasure! This was my F.A.M. Free Ass Mutherfuckers. F.A.M.! Shout out to all the artsy kids… Living outside of all the boundaries this world has placed on us. Redefining what it means to be young, Black, wild, and free. This album is a love letter to us… Happy mutherfuckin Pride. It feels so good to stand up here as a Black nonbinary pansexual. F.A.M., it feels so good to be able to say that and to walk in that authenticity. Without further ado, I want to start by Float-ing into the Age of Pleasure.”

Embarrassingly, I was already weeping by “listen lil mama: you like shibari? Watch while I show you the ropes,” which is almost certainly not what they meant by “come dry and leave wet.” She danced alongside her own dancers through the flawless transitions from song to song, then pulled my dance partner up onto the bar to dance with her, took off their white cowboy boots and sent them into the crowd, and got off the bar entirely to vibe with us on the ground, barefoot, at one point leaning in within a foot of my face and mouthing something I could not process through the rush of emotion at their proximity. It should go without saying, but trust and believe: From every angle, “a bitch look pretty — a bitch look handsome.”

Float is exactly right — the whole album feels like watching a plane take off, the marvel of that disconnect from the ground that looks like an impossible divorce from gravity but is, in reality, working well within the laws of physics. After all of the Archandroid/Electric Lady/Dirty Computer/“she’s not even a person, she’s a droid” messaging, The Age of Pleasure is a fantastically deep breath of fresh air. What if, Monáe seems to ask, I was just a human all along? What if I fully embodied all that I am right now, in front of you? What if you did the same, and we did it together?

Since before its release (or any of the release parties), the album and its accompanying cover and video have been getting some predictable backlash from listeners who find Monáe’s newfound freedom from black and white suits alarming. It has also gotten plenty of praise for being so different, as the very first lines announce. But in reality, the album carries many hallmarks of Monáe’s previous music: sexuality that colors outside the lines, seamless flow from one song (and genre) into the next, an acoustic parallel to the message of the lyrics — freeing the mind and body from social constructs that just aren’t giving. I wake with a start in the middle of the night two weeks later with “Phenomenal” playing in my head and realize that the difference with The Age of Pleasure is that this sensuality is a fully embodied one. The see-through crop top is revealing more than just their whole chest; it is revealing them as completely corporeal. Inside a human form that grows and changes, not an extraterrestrial, mechanical, or metaphorical one. This acceptance of being nothing more or less than human is the kind of radical that heals like a balm, the kind that resonates deep, and ripples out through lines like “dance, ‘cause there ain’t nobody else in this bitch like you.”

“You want me to play it again?” Monáe calls into the mic at the end of the album’s first play through. “It’s only 32 minutes!” And after resounding affirmation from the audience, we dance to it all again. And even after they leave, floating goodbye kisses to us all the whole way out, my new friends and I keep the dancing going, the mezcal flowing, and the phone camera lights flashing, this time pointed at each other.

***I almost didn’t go. The leftover swirls of emotion from the sheer queerness of the event, of the attendees, of the joy, are still sustaining me, even as Pride month comes to a close. Halfway through the night, I leaned my back against the sink in the bathroom, staring out at the smoky, floor-to-ceiling view of Jersey across the Hudson and tried to forgive myself for that. Because it was the tension of the circumstances leading up to my attendance, the financial/climate/public heath barriers I had to negotiate with, the “fucked up shit we can’t erase”, as Monáe would put it, that brought into sharp focus how radical it all was. “Imagine seeing the most beautiful brown and Black people, free as fuck!” she said in her entrance speech, but I didn’t have to imagine. I was neck deep in a space that was as inherently queer as it was Black — one that was focused purely on pleasure.

One last confession: I am writing this three weeks after it has happened, in between Pride parties. I have left one early and am late for another. I am hungover from one and still prepared to toast at the next. I am texting “I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it — I’m on deadline!!!” to three different people, one of whom is family, and I am hoping these leftovers are enough to power me though this hour while being kind to my digestive tract. I shouldn’t be this frantic to get from one place to another — it’s New York City, there will always be another party. But please understand: I, too, once thought I wasn’t of this world. That I was somehow something other, something else, despite being so painfully ordinary to myself. Until I started finding the places like this party, where all of the parts of me were okay, were celebrated, and I found myself … relaxing. Calming down. It has taken time, and it still takes reminders, even today, to trust that I do fit here, on this planet and in this body. That even though (as a Black queer woman with a penchant for work that doesn’t pay) I gamble every day to live the life that’s worth it to me, neither I nor any of the things I desire are all that difficult to allow. The freedoms I need and want are so simple. Like Monáe, all I want is a little pleasure, all I want is my love — but made to measure.

Overheating: Leaving My Home State of Florida

A summer day in the Florida panhandle coats your body. Wraps sticky tendrils across your skin and into your crevices and pulls the sweat out of you within moments of stepping outside. The first day this happens after the too brief winter is the worst. But soon you know no difference. It’s the way it’s always been. It’s not comfortable, but it’s familiar. And besides, you’re adaptable. You have air conditioning and iced tea. Being trans in Florida was like one perpetual north Florida summer, until recently. Until the thermometer rose every day, every year, relentlessly. Until the power went out and the air conditioner shuddered off and the ice melted.

Until all I could think about was getting cool.

I drive west on I-10 through pine plantations and cypress swamps. Leaving doesn’t feel real until I cross the slow dark Apalachicola River and enter central time. Hurricane Michael left a path of snapped trees here. Formerly shaded valleys of fern and columbine now burn and die under unrelenting sunshine. The river flows south past Fort Gadsden, briefly a heavily armed refuge of free Black people before enslavers shot a cannonball into the powder magazine and killed hundreds. I leave a city named by people who were driven from the area by disease and violence long before I was born.  Most fled to Mexico, Alabama, and Louisiana. Others integrated with escaped former enslaved people and Creeks fleeing south. They found each other and formed a new community. The Seminoles were never conquered by the United States, but they were killed by the thousands, wrung out for their blood to feed the new expanding empire, to “civilize” Florida and turn it into a tourist destination. Paradise requires a lot of blood.

Before I left Florida, I was first born there. Grew up there, went to school there, got married there, started a business there, bought a house there. I’ve tramped through remote hydric hammock, and dipped my toes into clear sandhill steephead streams not on the maps. I’ve been in more small panhandle towns than you can shake a stick at. I know the canal scars that crisscross the state as well as I know the scars on my body. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel a connection to the land like I do in Florida. Leaving wasn’t my first choice.

I walk my cat on a leash at the first rest stop after crossing into Alabama. He refuses to pee for more than 30 minutes, but I’m in no rush to leave the pine trees. When I moved back to my hometown during the so-called trans tipping point in 2014, I didn’t have a pet to worry about. Back then, Florida was a purple state. The big cities that stretch along the flat peninsula possessed moderate trans resources. The situation for trans healthcare outside of these large metropolitan areas was a relic of the 90s and 2000s era of strict gatekeeping. There were no hormones offered through the informed consent framework when I moved back to my hometown and stopped running from my truth. Planned Parenthood, a staple resource for informed consent hormonal care, didn’t start offering trans care in north Florida until late 2020. The health insurance I received through my wife had a blanket exclusion of all trans related care. The state was being sued over that when I started hormones, was being sued when I paid out of pocket and traveled to South Florida for surgery, is still being sued today after I’ve left. For electrolysis, I drove three hours each way to Jacksonville and paid twice the rate I do out west. This was the state of affairs before Florida started banning all trans healthcare for children and adults, before the steady beat of news articles and op-eds with “concerns” and “tricky questions.” Before opinion polls asked if acceptance had gone too far, if trans people had it too easy, if our healthcare was too accessible, if it was too affordable. Before pundits suggested it was unfair to be trans, was actually oppressive to everyone else. Before people called me a groomer online, dissected my pictures looking for proof of my essential maleness, and worked themselves into a slobbering orgiastic fury staring at my body. Before they sent me violent threats. Before a Florida congressperson mocked my fear after a man stormed into a queer friendly restaurant and screamed that we should all die.

As I leave Alabama, I’m stuck behind a truck with a large bumper sticker that reads AMERICA FIRST,  that ubiquitous regressive phrase originating from antisemitic opposition to US involvement in World War II.  The past claws at us, desperately desiring to bring us back, to roll back progress. I felt this sense of regression, moving home. Old habits and behaviors long thought lost slipped over my shoulders like a familiar coat. All transitions are in tension with regression. I lived with my parents for several months while I found work and housing. I couldn’t find silence. Even when I was left alone, overlapping anxieties and desires drifted into and crowded my mind. The build up to a declaration of transness is paved with unanswerable riddles meant to drive you mad: what if I’m wrong, what if I’m not pretty, what if I can’t trust myself, what if I stop liking women, what if I lose everyone and everything, what if I can’t afford it, what if they tell me no, what if they’re right about me and I am a delusional pervert, what if, what if, what if. Only later would I think to ask: what if I was never the problem? What if I deserve much more than this state has allowed me?

The month I moved home, the middle school I had attended banned a trans kid from using the bathroom and the local newspaper called her a man. When I was a trans kid, I thought I was the only one. I’ve since connected with another trans woman my age who went to another high school nearby. We were camouflaged by necessity, but we were there. After that incident the school board put in place protections to create basic respect for trans kids, including respecting names and pronouns and not outing a kid to a parent against their will. Something simple that would have improved my life had it existed when I attended those schools, would have let me know I wasn’t alone. This lasted a few years, until a local conservative lobbyist made her child’s transition into a national news story and the impetus for the states’ Don’t Say Gay bill. The protections were replaced with restrictions. The last of the coolant dripped out of the condenser and now only hot air blew over us.

I spend the night in Jonesboro, Arkansas with my parents-in-law. It is a typical American college town, which means it is unremarkable, like other places I’ve called home. Less than a year from now it will be illegal for me to use the bathroom here. A month after that, Florida will make it illegal too. A decade before the North Carolina bathroom bill made national headlines, Gainesville, Florida tried to pass a transphobic bathroom ordinance to overturn city non-discrimination protections while I was at the University of Florida. The political ad I saw back then as a closeted woman featured a man wearing sunglasses, black ball cap pulled low, following a young girl into a public bathroom. The entire scene was shot in a manner that can only be described as “imminent rape.” It could have been released today. The month before I saw that ad, I had thrown away the clothes and hormones I’d ordered from the internet. I’d vowed to stop trying. Concluded that my desires were disastrous and dangerous and doomed to fail. When I saw that man, I knew I was right to suppress myself. I did not want to be a monster. We are stuck in that dark moment from my youth. Even as I have moved on and blossomed, Florida has willfully not. Florida is stuck there at one of my lowest moments. Leaving, I hope, will let me move forward for good. I am tired of being forced to relive the worst moments of my past. I so desperately wish to worry about something else.

The towns are smaller now, scattered sparingly across Missouri. I stop for coffee in West Plains and chat with the purple-haired and septum-pierced barista. Thirty five anti-LGBT bills will soon be filed there, but we talk about our tattoos instead. Coffee shops: if you build them we will come. I kicked over enough rocks to find community. We are everywhere, afterall. We wriggle and crawl into protective shelters amid the turbulent flow of life and we find each other. There was no gender clinic, but there was a friend who knew someone else who knew a doctor who was nice, who would prescribe hormones without attempting to change your mind, and wouldn’t make you wear a dress to the appointment. There wasn’t a gay bar but there was weekly trivia that was not officially queer, but functionally was. I learned how to set my makeup with sprays and powders, to reinforce that fragile armor against the oppressive heat. Against the sweat that leaked from my temple and off my nose and dripped from my chin as I walked into familiar buildings to drop off forms and ran into classmates and family friends as someone else. I met a trans guy at trivia and went to his house parties and impromptu birthday orgies. I met a trans woman through Reddit and played board games and drank beer with her until she left for the West Coast a few months later. One by one, others left. As I grew into myself, the only constant was a sense of temporality. A sense of suspension. No sense of future stability. That’s only accelerated. Less than a year after I left, I now have more trans friends who have fled than remain.  Trans people are dwindling like the Florida panther, like unbleached coral in the Keys, like undeveloped wetlands and coastline. New Florida is invasive pythons and golf course neighborhoods and sprawling retirement cities larger than my hometown. They drive golf carts over a ditched, drained, and dried husk and kill the alligators that trespass their manicured lawns. But the cottonmouth that swims by me as I hold my breath in knee deep hardwood swamp is my Florida.

In Kansas I discover that some places are flatter than Florida. At a rest stop, I sit on a plastic bench atop an artificial hill overlooking hundreds of windmills that fade into the horizon. From this distance, I can’t see the dead birds scattered around their bases. The ground is littered with bodies which never got a say in the decisions that brought about their destruction. Florida might be focused on my destruction now, but it nurtured me too. There I first stared down into perfectly still ink black tannic water reflecting the towering cypress around me, reflecting the face of a woman to me for the first time. There I followed a secret path of footholds and handholds to the rooftop alley where my first girlfriend took me to makeout and draw graffiti. There I layed on a beach at night during sea turtle season between two lovers, became lost in the stars that emerge without light pollution. There I sent little oval green-blue pills to a newly out girl and answered her questions, assured her as best I could that it would be okay. Did anything I could to make her laugh, to give her relief from anxiety, to fulfill her trust in me and in herself. Don’t look at the news, sweetie. Let’s go to a party.

In Russell, Kansas, I take a picture of the Dream Theater, an art deco single screen venue built in 1949. I send it to my dad, who shares a name with the town and a love of art deco with me. I remember the first birthday with my parents and wife as myself where they gave me rainbow socks and shirts and buttons and I laughed because it was so cliche and cried because it was so sweet. I will miss our traditional Sunday walk through oak-shaded neighborhoods followed by biscuits and gravy at the vegan restaurant that is superior to every single place I’ve been to on the West Coast. No place here can make a decent biscuit, I’ll discover. When people ask me what I miss about Florida I will lie and say biscuits.

When I leave, I will miss thunderstorms. The slowness of an afternoon thunderstorm unfurling, the anticipation as I watch from my porch, observing how the storm glides towards me with familiar anger, releases large drops that percolate into the ground underneath the yellow wildflowers that spill over into the pebbled path next to my garden. I too unleash. Hot salty droplets and crackling screams. Perhaps if I could be so powerful, I could stay in Florida. But I am not a storm. I know my limits. The future I know is one I do not want.

After hours of driving through rural middle America, Denver is shocking. I go out to a lesbian bar and makeout with a bass guitarist who invites me to visit her cabin. I feel in my element. Later she’ll post a transphobic screed on Instagram, and I’ll shower until the water runs cold. The evil in Florida is not confined to its borders. The next day I drive through mountainsides spilling over with golden aspen groves and decide that there is a lot I won’t miss in Florida. I won’t miss the new suburban development with a private gate that fills in a wetland. That springs up next to the previous development that filled in another wetland protected by another gate which is also next to another sprawling development that filled in another wetland. The confederate flags on trucks and houses and next to highways and the man with the rifle sneaking up behind me in the woods while I work who demands to know what I am doing. Who remarks, his eyes tracing over my emerging curves, that the woods are dangerous. There are bloodthirsty snakes, don’t I know? The snakes are scared of me, I reply. I won’t miss that the woman who sells me the sweetest and juiciest mango in Homestead has to take the bus two hours south to Key West to work a minimum wage job serving snowbirds. I won’t miss the sheriff who buzzes me with his SUV, leaving my arm scraped from his rear view mirror. The other sheriff who tells me he will cover up my death when his friend runs me over for the crime of cycling on a public road when I’m 16. Everytime I see rotting roadkill, I remember his words. I remember those words later, when yet another sheriff with a rifle stares at me with a scowl from the rooftop as I protest in the street when I’m twice that age. Nor will I miss the thumping drone of the new police helicopter circling the city constantly as it beats the air into submission, peering into my backyard and shining a spotlight through my windows and into my soul. Florida has a seemingly unlimited supply of angry men with guns. Who arrest women like me and put us in men’s prisons. Who kill us and record our deaths under the wrong name and gender. Who shoot strangers who make them uncomfortable. I won’t miss the government that thinks this is too kind a way to treat me. That enacts bills to kidnap our children, to cancel Pride, to make it a crime for me to pee. That eliminates access to hormones and replaces it with protected discrimination by healthcare employees. That bans the simple joy of participating in a sport. I won’t miss my existence being made illegal and unspeakable, that my future child will grow up with a more trans hostile government than I did.

I pose in front of a covered wagon in Glenns Ferry, Idaho, where soon providing gender affirming care for minors will result in ten years of jail. The testimony and language used to justify the extreme bill is the same I heard in Florida. The witnesses flown in by conservative organizations to testify in favor of it are the same people too.  Florida reaches for me even out here, but I’ve shed the weight of past shame, and it cannot grasp ahold of me anymore. In Florida I leave that shame, accumulated while seeking belonging in an unaccepting society. They want us closeted, afraid, exploitable, and despairing — like I used to be.  In Florida, I leave the woman who invited me over with the promise of doing my makeup, who instead pressured me to go down on her boyfriend while she watched. I leave my regret of turning her down because who else could ever understand me, could give me the permission I sought, could look at me as my true self and get aroused instead of disgusted. I leave sneaking into a construction site and climbing the tallest crane on a balmy fall evening. My flip flop slipping from my foot, watching it fall away from me towards the dark pavement far below and wondering how it would feel to follow it. How it would feel to not feel anymore. I leave watching the years pass by and the businesses rotate through the corner lot of the strip mall where I first worked up the courage to wear a dress I later threw away during an episode of self revulsion. Returning to that corner six years later as a woman and hoping for what, closure? A revelation? I could stand in that parking lot baking in the late summer heat and never be done, never fully thawed.

People move all the time, I remind myself. Stop thinking you’re a victim, I say to myself. I am weak. I am pathetic. I am too emotional and melodramatic. I suppose these toxic thoughts affirm my womanhood in a misogynistic way, and I do live for affirmation. If anything, I conclude, I am a coward. I am a white tailed deer that outruns my friends and family, leaves them to be torn open, to let their blood sink into the sand and down deep into the aquifer that supports the tens of millions of people in that state. Do you think they know it will run dry? That the state is already building pipelines to transfer water to lakes that are drying up? That the salt water is intruding higher and higher through the porous limestone and no wall will keep it out. Florida will flood while the government polices bathrooms. But no, do not be absurd. I am a vital resource to be extracted relentlessly and fed to the people with blood soaked teeth who invade school board meetings and public workshops. Who sit on boards of medicine and of universities, who sit atop the phallic Capitol that looms over my former home. Who loudly declare that I am a threat, a corruption of nature, a mutilation, a devil, a demon, a disease in need of a cure. Who proclaim that the younger version of me is a degenerate creation of a vast conspiracy, a confused object without free will, a precancerous tumor. Who declare that we are both something in need of purification, cleansing, and removal by any means necessary.

But each of us only holds so much blood, can be squeezed only so much. We are not a renewable resource and I do not want to be squeezed anymore. They will always need more blood, and when our bodies are bled dry they will replace what they’ve extracted with embalming fluid.

I arrive in a Seattle smothering under wildfire smoke. A yellow-orange tinge drapes the city, and I wear my N95 mask outdoors. I meet a new friend for a beer, and we watch the Mariners lose on TV. I’m in an unreal state, still ready to wake up and drive eight hours the next day into yet another state, but knowing I finally don’t need to.

That evening I call my parents and cry for the first time since leaving. We understand, they say. I hope they do. This is for the best, they say. I hope so too. The first mail home I send is a package of blue-green ovoid pills for a friend who stayed. Build up your supply, I tell her. The parties aren’t as fun now, she says. She leaves a few months later as my social media feeds fill with gofundmes to escape the state. Pride flags are seemingly in every window here, and it takes me a month to stop nudging my wife in excitement when I notice one. In six months, I’ll be strategizing safety and exit plans with those trans friends who remain in Florida after the latest restrictions are enacted. Do you think I should take my pride flag down, one will ask. When I check my former local paper, I’ll see violent rhetoric  on road signs and worse in the replies under any social media about us. It was never about protecting children. It was never about women’s sports. It’s always been about our existence, and it was never going to stop with trans people. Trans and gay and lesbian and bisexual and any other out group. The anti immigrant laws, the anti abortion laws, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Florida are part of the same project. Their hatred has an ever expanding need for fresh fuel. Left unchecked and without organized resistance, it will consume us all in an indiscriminate inferno.

But right now, I walk up steep hills and my hot blood pulses, rich and thick and mine. There is still hope, still occasionally good news. Perhaps there will come a day when I feel welcome back in my home state. I have not given up on Florida, even if for now it is best we spend time apart. In a week, a gray cloudy drizzle will replace the smoke and block out the hot sun and I won’t drip with sweat even once. The heat will come for me here eventually, and wildfires will choke the sky with smoke. But summer here, for now, is downright pleasant. I have air conditioning and iced tea. At least for a while, I’ll stop overheating.

Porkchop’s Odyssey: On Fatness, Transness, and Pants

I. Prelude

II. Lil’ Elliot and his damn euphoria

III. The Quest for The Perfect Chinos

IV. Returning to Fat Lady Land

• The belly area of the pants — right above/around your crotch will loosen throughout the day
• Your thighs will rub and so you’ve got to be mindful of the quality of the fabric between your legs.

V. Broken Promises of Online Sizing Charts

VI. Thick Thighs and Fat, Transmasc Dreams

VII. Post-script

Making An Independent Documentary About Queer Women Is Like Jumping Without A Net

When I met my partner Beth in February 2020, she was working on a documentary. I had never known someone who was working on a documentary before — they seem like so much more work than a narrative story. The documentary, called Feeling Seen, focuses on the representation of queer women on television. It was a topic I found really interesting; when I was younger, TV had been a big part of my life, and some of the earliest confirmation of my queerness came from there. We started dating right before the pandemic, which shut down any progress she had made with filming. The more we talked about the project, the more intrigued I was by it. Eventually, I became part of the team.

Beth started conducting interviews for Feeling Seen in 2017, but there were still things she was trying to work out. Since I’m a writer and write narratives, we decided my best use would be to come on as a co-writer, helping her flesh out the story of the documentary by creating a narrative structure. The thing I loved the most was that TV fans are a huge part of the story of the doc. She had interviewed actors, showrunners, and writers from several television shows, but she had also connected with people who watch television about how the depictions of queer women on television had informed their own queerness or perceptions of what queer life could look like. There have been several documentaries on LGBTQ+ representation on TV, but none of them talk to the regular people who watch TV. It really does change the depth of the story. I decided the best way to tell the story was to follow a linear timeline of representation but focus on key shows that changed the conversation, using the fan interviews to bolster the things the creators of the show had to say.

In 2021, Beth asked me to sign on as Associate Producer of the project. It made sense since we lived together and often had conversations about the doc after hours, mostly in bed. I can untangle her thoughts and execute them in ways someone who doesn’t know her as intimately can’t. In 2022, I took over as the main producer and social media manager. I continue to also help Beth with the narrative plot of the film, using my understanding of not only more recent television, but the larger conversations around representation that are happening in a variety of spaces to craft a well rounded story. Because I’m a total research nerd, I also do a lot of the historical research that will inform the early parts of the film. I had never envisioned myself as the producer of a documentary, but I believe in this film so much that it felt like a no-brainer when I was asked. However! I will admit that this project is an absolute labor of love. Emphasis on the labor part.

We are doing this project completely independently, which is a lot harder than people think, especially when you don’t have a lot of money. The bulk of the interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 were done after a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000. We were able to raise about $7,000 last year after mounting another crowdfunding campaign, but we were so unprepared for it. Crowdfunding is like jumping without a net; you really have to trust that people see enough of your value to give you money. There is a vulnerability to asking people for money in that way. What if people don’t donate? What does that say about us and about the project? We have heard from so many people that this is such an important and necessary film, and that doesn’t seem to translate into money when we need it. There have been many nights where Beth and I have sat up and wondered what it is about the project that keeps people from donating. Of course we know that some people simply aren’t in a position to, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

Finding funding for independent projects is really fucking hard. If you’ve never done it before, you cannot fathom how exhausting and demeaning the process can be. Crowdfunding is just one (very important) part of making an independent project happen. It’s stress-inducing: The lulls in donations sit like a pit in my stomach as my thoughts swirl with what happens if we can’t make it happen. It’s hard not to take it personally, even if half the audience is strangers.

And people who try to offer advice often mean well but only make it worse. We recently had someone suggest we simply release what footage we have now and start a new project to fill in the gaps we’re missing. As if it’s that easy! “Well, why don’t you just ask the celebrities you interviewed for money?” Okay, first of all: These people are doing these interviews for free. We cannot then turn around and ask them for thousands of dollars. It doesn’t seem right. A few have offered help in various ways, and we do try to take them up on it, but they’re also impossible to get in touch with, especially when you have to go through a manager or an assistant. People ask why we don’t apply for grants and we do! But after the pandemic, there are less of them to go around, and many of the ones you’d think would be available for us just aren’t. Plus there are a lot of equally deserving people who are also applying for the same grants. There’s only so much money going around, and even though we believe in the strength and necessity of our documentary, we’re small fish in a big pond full of fish. I can write an amazing application, but again, I have no control over their decisions. We’ve applied to several large grants in the last couple of months, and now we’re sitting on pins and needles waiting to see what happens.

Feeling Seen is as relevant as ever; we’ve all seen the shows we love either end or be canceled in the last couple of years. Each loss has been devastating to our community, and to each of us personally. Since Beth started this project in 2017, almost all of the shows she discussed are off the air. By our hopeful release year of 2025, there’s a chance that all of the shows we plan to discuss in depth will be off the air. And the way things are going, there aren’t going to be a whole new crop of shows popping up in their place. It’s fucking depressing.

When we interviewed the inimitable Lea DeLaria in the summer of 2022, she said queer women are being written out of their own narrative, and I couldn’t agree with her more. As part of my research, I watched a lot of documentaries that focused on LGBTQ+ representation, especially on television and it was an eye-opening experience. I watched Visible: Out of Television, which explores similar subject matter to take notes. In five hour-long episodes, the mentions of queer women were only enough to fill one sheet of notebook paper. And despite being produced by high profile LGBTQ+ actors, there were so many queer women who were left out of the conversations completely. It was so disappointing to see.

For so long, we have had to feast on scraps, and when we finally did have good representation, it was systematically taken away from us. When we create things for ourselves, that gets destroyed too. We can’t win, but we can keep trying to fight. That’s why it’s so important to us to not only finish making Feeling Seen, but to get it out into the world for others to see.

We’re currently fundraising to finish filming the last 10-15 interviews we need to be able to tell the full scope of the story. Shooting an interview (or several) isn’t cheap; each shoot costs us anywhere between $1,500 and $2,100 between crew fees and rentals. This means that if we want to finish, Feeling Seen needs to raise $30,000 in the next month. We want to have filming finished before the go into the Christmas season so that we can start 2024 in post-production. We’re determined to get as far into this project as we can independently so we can maintain our artistic vision and integrity without compromise. But we can’t do it alone.

I intentionally chose Pride month for our fundraiser for two reasons: making so called “allies” put their money where their mouths are by asking them to donate and to show that, no matter what, we’re committed to this project. Pride is about the riot but also the resilience of our community, and no one has to be more resilient than a couple of independent documentary makers.

We need to take back control of our own narrative. I will never stop trying to tell our stories.

Top Surgery, Magnolia Trees, and the Trans Art of Letting Go

I snuck into my landlord’s garden to write about my tits when the sun came out in Brooklyn after what felt like 700 years. I’m writing about my tits because tomorrow I’m having gender-affirming chest surgery that I’ve been waiting just about as long for, whether I knew it or not (I knew it). The surgery I’m getting has lots of names, none of them quite right, which is fitting. I cycle through them all though, like I’m on some kind of transgender merry-go-round, where instead of riding drunk carnival horses, I’m riding “aggressive breast reduction” “non-flat top-surgery,” “mastectomy,” or — my personal favorite, “boob job” — until I feel queasy. Phoebe would probably say, leaning over a dinner candle, that all merry-go-rounds are inherently trans. Like soil, like The Little Mermaid, like those mobiles that sound in the breeze.

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This is the spring of my 33rd year, and the extent to which my psyche (like yours) has been ravaged by capitalism is evident in both how long it took me to get here and also how mean I can be to myself about how long it took me to get here. But then again, I tell myself I’ve always been a late bloomer. I had my first depressive episode at 21 (seems like a fake age to develop chronic depression?), kissed a woman for the first time at 23 (celibate and fearing hell for the following two years), and I was flat chested until I was 18, when I just woke up with double Ds one day, jangling in my purple T-shirt that did not used to jangle. My mum called them “comedy breasts” because we were all adjusting, and I was very polite about it, but I noticed the top of buildings a lot more after that, because I was always looking up.

In my landlord’s garden, I kick the folding chair into a shape that can hold me and position it in the sun patch, of course. I type away, refusing to admit I can’t actually see the laptop screen, when I’m disturbed by a gentle, but defiant tap on the head. The petal — something between a sliver of ancient pottery and a gaudy wedding cake topper — is undeniably the buttery scoop of a Magnolia tree. We are not strangers. Soha became attached to this tree quickly when we moved in upstairs, evidenced by the countless mornings I’d roll over in search of the warmth that has taken itself to the window, to look at the tree and the creatures that call it home through binoculars or a camera or sometimes just as it is.

“Aisha! You won’t believe this…”

I have been in numerous relationships during which my partner oozed into a version of their rightful gender and I would feel proud of them — of us, of me — for carving out a space where that was possible. I was smug, but I was also jealous! And while jealousy is an absolute horror to behold, doesn’t it just have so much wisdom if you’re honest about what it’s saying you need? This relationship is the first time someone has doula’d me into new life, ushered me from where I was busy hiding, said, “I’ll wait.”

Soha feels everything in as much detail as she sees that tree, a disheartening gift at times. For example, when a too-warm winter weekend edges a Magnolia’s buds into a premature sense of security and they begin peeking out, to bloom, only to be stopped in action when Monday rolls round and everything returns to frost, I watch her watching them, frozen in that vulnerable moment of becoming, like telling a joke that no-one laughs at, or another thing I have no personal experience of. Is it humiliation or transcendence? Is transcendence always humiliating? We root for them.

YouTube came out in 2005, when I was 15, and, boy, did I find those transition logs quick. I was insatiable for records of other people’s transness — transfixed, in awe, comfortable in something familiar — despite the thing remaining a deep secret, even to myself, until at least a decade later. My mum seemed to join the dots quicker, crying one night by my childhood bedside at the thought of me becoming a boy. Please don’t make me grieve my daughter. “I won’t” — an easy promise. Too young to say I am just as disgusted by the idea of me being a man as you are. Could it have been easier though? To present to her — from devastation, finally — a son, instead of this ever-changing in-between thing? I’m so malleable I can’t even claim lesbianism (embarrassing), so if you’re looking for the ways I’m a failure, mother, I welcome you to start there.

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I can’t focus on writing because all around me this tree — ready to bloom giant, candy-mouse colored petals upon first sight of the spring sun, after weeks of lying in wait half out, half in — is absolutely throwing down. Petal after petal, in a dull, laid-back rhythm like a heavy flogger in the hands of an effortless top. Each petal is delicate and sure in this dance with the breeze. Every petal that falls feels so loud. I stop what I’m doing and honor each one in turn as they start to sing in chorus. Petal after petal rains pink onto me, waiting peacefully to become mulch or to be cradled by Soha’s hands for her annual batch of pickled magnolia, because that’s the kind of thing that happens when two miracles come together.

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The good thing about having the same therapist for eight years is that they can tell you when you’ve been thinking about something for eight years. They can suggest that feeling uncomfortable consistently for at least eight years is probably worth approaching with gentle curiosity or whatever a therapist would say. That just because you can tolerate something doesn’t mean you should. I want to say a lack of curiosity is not the problem. That, in fact, a significantly lower curiosity drive could have probably saved me a lot of trouble in this life. Does everyone need to know what it feels like to have their dick get hard in their trousers?

It was easy to gaslight myself for a decade because I actually love my tits, especially when they’re in your mouth. There is no peace like when they’re in your mouth. I still have thank you notes from men smothered to near death by these tits. These tits could feed queer America. These tits are the after photo. They are sun-drenched buoys in the Arabian Sea, saving and ending lives in equal measure, full and heroically resistant to even the most suffocating binder. Beth texts me: “I love my body, I’ve worked so hard to love my body and to specifically not want to make it smaller. But my gender presentation has shifted and I want to wear button ups without straining the laws of button physics.” I reply, “These tits shall not be silenced and they shall not be hated, but what’s transness if not a long lesson in choosing which beautiful things are meant for you?”

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Magnolias set their flower and leaf buds in the late summer and autumn, soaking in energy and then waiting patiently for the following spring’s flowering. A Magnolia flower has both a functional male stamen and a female pistil. Bees and other browsing insects transfer pollen from the stamen to the pistil of a single flower. You know what they call flowers like that? Perfect.

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I thought grief was about death before witnessing my mother grieve me while I stood there in front of her (awkward). I wanna be righteous about it, but I grieve me, too. Or maybe not me, ‘cause this is me, but something. I grieve the child who stood up, tall as a Magnolia in the middle of a family function, caught their own reflection and declared without hesitation that they would look amazing with a beard. I grieve the pure confusion they felt amidst the dramatic shushing that followed. You shouldn’t say things like that. I grieve innocence. I have been locked into a years-long grief process, grieving things I barely had words for. You know it’s deep when you overshare for a living, but there’s this thing that’s the only thing you haven’t written about. It finds a way out though, with strangers in Facebook groups or the holy agony of a nipple piercing or another night, untouched.

Probably my most lavish and successful grief ritual was my time as a stripper. I made a pact with myself that if, after dancing naked in an extremely sexualized environment, I still wanted them gone, I would have genuinely tried my best (not to be trans? idk) and could proceed. Somehow I could feel better about retiring the knockers if half of East London had paid to see them. What I didn’t expect was this time to allay one of my biggest fears — that with the reduction of my breast tissue would come a loss of power. The tits run in the family, you see, and the family is chock-full of beautiful, powerful women. What I discovered, though, as objectively one of the ugliest strippers at the club and yet one of the most popular, was that my power was in no way limited to my accouterments.

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Jacqui leans back at the wheel, wide-mouthed, and says, “Let me tell you something about Magnolias: They’re fucking old.” And I wonder how 33 years feels to a 300-year old tree whose ancestors reach back 95 million years to a time before bees. How those Magnolia petals evolved to be so hardy to withstand the beetle-like critters that would pollinate it. How scars are built into the fabric of survival.

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The list of fears that came up for me upon finally accepting that at some point I was going to need gender-affirming surgery is exhaustive: How do I explain to medical professionals that I’m looking for a mix of top surgery and a breast reduction in a way that yields the results I want? What if I regret it? Will the change trigger a depressive episode? Will I have trouble breastfeeding hypothetical children I may not have and may not have been able to breastfeed, even if I didn’t have the operation? Will an astrological curse befall me? Am I just fatphobic?

The good thing about having a trans therapist is that they can reassure you that the ambivalence doesn’t go away. They can share that they were ambivalent until they were put to sleep on the operating table. That you’re allowed to not know the answers, and you’re also allowed to trust the part of you that picked up the phone and booked that first appointment, and then that second. With each day that I get closer to my surgery date, I bow deeper to that wise part and the ways it has lived inside me, waiting for this very moment to unfurl. I expected my ambivalence to last forever, for the surgery to be a somewhat begrudging act of desperation. However it’s (somehow) not an exaggeration to say in the weeks leading up to this surgery, as my body has taken control, preparing me calmly and diligently, that I have felt something like solid ground under my feet for maybe the first time ever. Something like peace.

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Across the street from Herbert Von King Park in Bed-Stuy sits one of only two trees in all of New York City that has been designated as a New York City landmark. The 140-year-old magnolia tree’s conservation and preservation campaign was led by founder of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee, Hattie Carthan, who in 1968 at the age of 67, stopped the tree from being felled for an apartment complex. Shortly after, she established the Magnolia Tree Earth Center in the Brownstones behind the tree, now one of the oldest African American-led environmental centers in New York. She continued campaigning for beauty until her death, throwing block parties to raise funds to plant and grow trees. The weekend before my surgery, Soha and I walk over to the tree, boarded up and standing magnificent amidst scaffolding. A weather-beaten mural of Carthan beams. Look at god.

In my landlord’s garden, the petals keep falling, and it’s clear there is no fear or grief in the way this tree is transforming, so soon, once again. It’s hard to explain the exquisite freedom felt in watching the tree kind of casually, kind of flirtily discard these petals. I mean, obviously, I can’t speak for the tree, but it’s safe to say it’s not writing a think piece about the experience. In the garden I feel those lingering vestiges of fear leave my body and I wonder if nature is the truest form of unconditional love we experience. Doesn’t it show us everyday? I tend to feel critiques of the scarcity mindset are a bit overdone, but as someone who will literally package and transport luxury candles back and forth across oceans instead of just using them, this lesson in trusting in abundance is key for me. And I do.

On Facetime I tell my mum I’m writing about Magnolias. “I went on a tree walk,” she says, rummaging for a notebook. ”I learnt this word — what was it? About how trees only let go of flowers and leaves when they’re ready. They aren’t just falling, you know, they’re being let go. Abscission, that’s it. They know when it’s time to let go.” I ask, “Do you? Could you trust that I do?” She says trees are wiser than humans.

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At brunch with Farah, I joke that I want to push my surgery date back. Not because I’m scared, but because I want to revel in this BBE (before boob-job energy). That even in the disappointing, silent places where I would have hoped for rambunctious joy and support, I can make peace with the quiet because I can hear myself. Lit by the orange sun they say, “You have your own back.” Is that what this is? That in taking this impossible step for myself towards comfort, I am asking myself, what other ways do I wish to be comfortable? In what other parts of my life shall I demand it? This is what they don’t want us to have?

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By the time I finish writing this, the Magnolia has shed all of its petals, so much quicker than the time it took for them to bloom, making way for fresh leaf sprouts, which will now take over. A pair of Blue Jays are busy making a nest in a light fixture shielded by the tree branches. I prepare for recovery in the bedroom I’ll be spending the spring in — heart full, tits forward.

10 Things I Spend My Money on Now That Isn’t Drugs or Alcohol

This February I celebrated five years sober. There were many things I thought would happen to me after I got sober in 2018. I thought I would lose my ability to write. I thought I would lose all my friends. I thought I would lose some weight (the opposite happened lol), and so much more. What did happen is that some of that stuff came true. I did lose some friends. I started writing in a different way. Started telling the truth more in my writing and in my life in general.

It’s been a difficult yet beautiful journey with lots to learn on the path. When I first got sober, I downloaded an app where you can track days sober but the app also asked you to track how much you were spending on drinking or drugs. My drinking habit outsized my yearly income by a long shot. I often relied on friends to give me money for my drinking, or hung around people in the service industry that got drinks for free at the bars they or their friends worked at. I would say (on the conservative side) I spent around $20 daily on drinking. Whether that was literally going out and spending $20-$40 drinks at the bar, or loading up at my local Wine and Spirits a couple times a week.

(I also did drugs at this time, but to be quite honest I never really had to buy my own. The people around me were always willing to share and when I did buy it was rare and discounted so I don’t factor it in here.)

$20 a day is around $140 a week. I made roughly $400 a week at the height of my drinking so that’s a pretty sizable chunk out of my budget. I’m tired of doing math already so I’m going to stop now and say that when I got sober, I also thought I would be saving so much money. What happened instead is that I found different ways to spend my money. Here are a few:

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1. Sparkling Bevvies

I love a fun bev. I recently wrote about my new obsession which is prebiotic sodas, so I drink those quite a bit now. I also love a sparkling grape or apple juice. Even better, a sparkling lemonade. What I mostly spend my money on in this category is sparkling water. Whether it’s unflavored, (or my new favorite drink the Aura Bora Lavender Cucumber sparkling water), I’ve got a taste for the finer flavors. I’m bougie. When I am budgeting, I get the Yuzu Mandarin flavor from Target which is about $4 for a pack of 8. I love Yuzu, so this one is an easy winner for me.

The Aura Bora sparkling water is $10 for a pack of 6 which is like… it’s water babes. But guess who’s spending that money?? ME!

2. Makeup

Sometime during the pandemic, I decided I wanted to get into doing a full face of makeup that wasn’t just eyeshadow and a lip. When I moved to South Carolina in the fall, I filled a large makeup bag and a smaller one with my new collection. Most of it is lipstick. I have around 60 shades of lipstick. Some of them are old and need to be thrown out but I can’t let go of Bite Beauty just yet! I also love a good eyeshadow palette. I have fewer of them now and use one pretty regularly (the Makeup by Mario Ethereal Eyes palette). I have a couple of Pat McGrath palettes now that I make more money and I recently bought an eyeshadow pot from Kulfi Beauty that was a whopping $30 for ONE color.

The thing about makeup is I love looking pretty. I love how bronzer adds sun to the face and snatches it. I like how blush adds color back. I love having big juicy lips swathed in a bright color and a shiny gloss. It’s just fun! Don’t judge me! For every luxury item I have there are two more products from e.l.f. or some other drugstore product. I have restraint sometimes!

3. Skincare

I only recently started caring about skincare very deeply. I used to have horrible acne, but then I got on ProActiv and most of it cleared up. Getting off ProActiv was harder than most things I’ve ever done because those motherfuckers really don’t want you to leave once you start.

My skincare routine now consists of some things you’ve probably heard of. Products from e.l.f., Versed, Cocokind, Thayers, and Sweet Chef line my sink. I also have one splurge item: a moisturizer from Tatcha that I find really hydrates me. I have mostly oily skin, so I used to think I didn’t have to worry about hydration, but I know that’s wrong now.

Now that I’m thirty I’m told that I should be worrying about anti-aging ingredients, but I don’t buy it. You think I give a fuck about a wrinkle?!

My greatest skincare concern is dark spots from acne scarring that I have now and keeping the oils in control. I’m still working on those dark spots so, if you have any suggestions please sound off in the comments. Please don’t say chemical peel. I’m scared.

4. Coffee

I still have my trusty espresso machine, but I’ve recently gotten into making or buying syrups to make even fancier lattes. I used to get a pistachio latte from Redstart Roasters in Pittsburgh (shout out to the homies there!), but I haven’t found a pistachio syrup I like as much yet.

Sometimes I go to the Starbucks near me — which I believe is the first one that was unionized here where I live now, so I don’t feel as bad supporting them. But I did find a very cute independent shop here that I’ve gone to once and plan on going to again very soon.

I wished that I was a wine snob when I drank and now I’m definitely a coffee snob. I found my trusted roaster in Pittsburgh and haven’t strayed from them since.

5. Clothing

I try to only support sustainable, ethically made clothing now and that comes with a hefty price tag sometimes. After gaining weight because of meds and being less active during the pandemic, I started to rethink my wardrobe. I used to dress to cover my body and my fatness, but then I swung in the opposite direction and was desperately worried about being sexy to other people. Now, I wear things that I find cute, sexy, or comfortable. Sometimes that is very high femme looks and sometimes it’s more middle-of-the-road looks. Either way, I love to look good and feel good about my purchases.

If you have money to spend or want to splurge once, some shops I like are Mien Studios, Curator SF, Field Day, Lucy and Yak (UK based so the shipping can take a while), and Wear Consciously — which is a storefront that sells products from a few different shops.

6. Food

I eat out more than I’d like to admit. And I spend lots of money on groceries because I mostly get them delivered to me. I’m trying to shift into cooking for myself more and I love really rich, decadent, umami flavors so I can spend quite a bit on something that will be excreted from my body eventually.

I found the cutest vegan bakery in town and they have the best cakes and these things called Doozies: chocolate chip cookies with a buttercream frosting in the middle. They can be made gluten-free too which is cool.

I’m also a sorbet slut so I like eating mango sorbet on hot days or any other vegan ice cream alternative. Van Leeuwen makes some of the weirdest flavors that I can only enjoy a couple of bites of before I get overwhelmed. I also have my tried and true Oatly brand or So Delicious that I go to when I’m craving something cold and sweet.

7. Dog Treats

I haven’t written about it yet, but I’m a new dog mom. My dog (now named Cashew) has an expensive taste like me. He loves the Bocce’s Bakery treats, but especially the brushy sticks. They have mint and spirulina in them so I’m like… ya sure buddy? Do you like that flavor? But he practically jumps into the air when I pull the package out.

8. Art Supplies

I’m into watercolor now, so I spend a bit on paint and paper. I plan on taking a watercolor class in the future at a community museum in hopes of meeting some cool people so that is in the works.

9. Homewares

Up until a couple of months ago, I was still using the same Target Room Essentials bowls and plates that I bought in college, so I decided I just needed an upgrade now that I’m 30. I bought new bowls and plates from Our Place and they are to die for. I think they are so pretty and cute. I also have new drinking glasses and cookware from places like Crate and Barrel. My apartment still isn’t where I want it to be decor-wise, so I’m looking for a few things like a coffee table, lamps, and plants to brighten up the place.

I spent most of the money on upgrading my kitchen and getting new bedding, so every other room is like “Pay attention to me!” Hell, I still don’t have a dining room table or chairs! But that will soon be rectified.

10. Rent

Before I got sober my rent was around $400. Then I upgraded to a one-bedroom that was inexplicably only $600 a month. In my four years there, my landlord raised the rent once to $625. I’ve never paid more than that for rent, but I do now. Granted, I have more space and amenities but damn does the South love some big ass bugs as well! I don’t mind paying as much as I do for what I get, but I’ll probably move again when my lease is up.

I entertained Zillow for a hot second and then laughed and laughed and laughed. I’m not buying a house, not yet. I watch my brother, who lives here, go through things like a flooding basement and a leaky roof and I’m like “I’m just a single woman I can’t handle that by myself!”

Maybe I could? Who knows? But I know I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility.

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I may not always have the money I have at this moment to spend and save, so I’m living it up for now. Responsibly. What do you spend your money on now that you are sober? Let me know!

I Still Pray After I Masturbate

It’s Masturbation May! Once again, we’re publishing a sticky handful of articles on the delights and the woes of solo pleasure-seeking. This one covers masturbation and religious trauma.

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Most people who masturbate have a routine: Step one — find some sexy inspiration to get in the mood. Step two — go to town. Step three — ideally, pee to prevent a UTI. Well, for me, there’s a fourth step. After I masturbate, I pray.

I grew up in a Black Christian household, and I’m not talking about one of the new queer-accepting ones — I mean one of the OG, guilt-them-till-they-die Christian households. I also went to Catholic school, so instead of learning about actual sex during sex ed, I was told that sex would turn me into a crumpled up piece of paper.

My schools and churches framed sex as an addiction that could pull you from the “right path” and push you closer to hell. This lesson was especially pushed onto us “fast-ass Black girls,” who were hypersexualized from the moment we hit puberty, if not earlier. So when I — the little closeted Black girl who was already trying to solve her budding sexuality through prayer — started masturbating, I tried hard to fix my “addiction,” even after I left home and Catholic school.

I downloaded an addiction-tracking app. I created a complicated prayer to ensure that no one would be hurt by my unforgivable actions. I was ashamed and scared, but also, masturbation was undeniably good for me — I was having actual orgasms while my peers were having climax-free, unsatisfactory sex. Still, I couldn’t shake the “addiction” narrative — that is, until I realized I was queer and let go of the lies I’d been telling myself.

When I came out, I realized I didn’t like the churches I grew up in, and I didn’t agree with the lessons they taught. If their God banished people to an eternity of torture for being themselves — well, I didn’t want any part of that. I knew I wasn’t doing anything hell-worthy by being queer, so sex was probably okay, too.

My guilt around sex and self-pleasure started to melt away. Eventually, I forgot about my addiction app and just let myself masturbate when I wanted to. I bought my first vibrator and lube. I also had sex for the first time. I was feeling sex-positive as hell — well, mostly.

Sex doesn’t feel wrong to me anymore. I’m having fun with different people, and when we’re having sex, we both get something out of it. But when I’m masturbating, I’m the only one getting any pleasure, and that makes it feel selfish and sinful, even though I no longer believe in sins. A little voice inside my head reminds me of all the lessons I learned growing up — that something horrible will happen to myself, to others, even to the whole world, if I indulge in self-pleasure. It’s hard to ignore that voice, so here I am — a no-long-Christian, sex-having adult — still praying after I masturbate.

I know I am not the only religiously-traumatized queer out there who feels shame around masturbation. Erasing decades of religious trauma doesn’t happen overnight, so while I haven’t cut prayer out of my masturbation routine just yet, I know I’ll get there eventually. I try to remember this: If I hadn’t started masturbating, I probably wouldn’t have known how to advocate for my pleasure once I started having sex. I was able to start my sexual journey with someone I trusted — me — and that’s a beautiful thing.

Old Gal, New Tricks: Queer Menopause and Masturbation

It’s Masturbation May! Once again, we’re publishing a sticky handful of articles on the delights and the woes of solo pleasure-seeking. Here’s one about menopause and masturbation. Stay tuned for more!

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Forgive me for stating the painfully obvious: There’s so much shame and bullshit that surrounds our relationships with our bodies. Thankfully, as a woman north of 40 who’s done a lot of inner work, I’m so (mostly) over it.

The sad irony, though, is that just when I’ve finally started feeling confident in this perpetually full-figured body, just as I’m finally (hallelujah!) deprogrammed from my Bible-Belt-toxic-purity-culture-upbringing nonsense, just as I’m fully accepting my identity as a bisexual woman, and just as I’m eager to give and receive pleasure on my terms — it feels like my body is betraying me.

The same old, tried-and-true rub-one-out-before-bed to lull myself into a languorous sleep no longer works. Most of the time, a late-night solo sesh triggers the non-sexy kind of sweat, and I’d rather be sexually frustrated than change the sheets after a disastrous hot flash. (Y’all, wet spots have absolutely nothing on the utter wreck of a post-hot-flash sheet soaking.) To add insult to injury, every lube I’ve ever loved is now causing some kind of weird reaction. And WTF is up with this uptick in UTIs? I’m really struggling to find new ways to chase pleasure when my head is totally in the game but my body isn’t, and, conversely, I’m struggling with the times when it feels like all I want is orgasm after orgasm and I’ll die if I can’t lie in bed with my hands between my legs for hours a day.

This is what we don’t talk about when we (don’t) talk about menopause.

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I’m no stranger to self-pleasure. I was probably five when I discovered the fantastic fluttery sensations that sometimes happened in my body. The fleeting, unpredictable moments of feeling something — something really good between my legs. Like when we were hanging onto the side of the pool, giggling in striped suits before swimming lessons, and I just happened to be in front of the jet. Like when watching TV, sitting on the arm of the recliner (a forbidden activity), and scooting off quickly so I wouldn’t get caught on the armrest meant, oh, something happened. There was no shame in these discoveries, just curiosity. But I also didn’t share it with anyone else. I somehow knew that whatever that something was, it wasn’t something we talked about.

At some point, I started connecting the dots, understood that I could be in control of the sensations, and started seeking out the unbearable pleasure of water rushing between my legs during bath time. I got really good at it. Chasing wave after wave of something big and wild inside of me while lying on my back, legs in the air or my feet on the side of the bath, hips dancing. Feeling something glorious wash over me until I fell with a dramatic splash back into cool water in the tub. (I’d later say I’d been playing mermaid and apologize for the water on the floor and promise to be more careful next time.)

I remember literally burning up the squiggle pens that were so popular in fifth and sixth grade. My mom would mutter about the pens being pieces of crap when I begged for another one because mine wouldn’t squiggle anymore. “Just use it without the batteries. There’s still ink in it and it writes fine.”

Uh, that’s totally not why I needed it, but I couldn’t say that. By then, I knew enough of the world — through movies and soap operas, not through actual sex education, mind you — that what I was doing was related to sex. Though exactly how, I wasn’t sure. I certainly never inquired, because I knew that if finding pleasure in my own body was connected to sex, then what I was doing was wrong. And then I’d have to stop.

That’s what we don’t talk about when we (don’t) talk about menopause. The ways we’ve known our bodies, the ways we’ve learned their multitudinous pathways to pleasure, and how those pathways sometimes — for reasons out of our control — are suddenly blocked. Or seemingly not on the map anymore.

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Dr. Jen Gunter, who has become America’s menopause doctor with her earthshaking The Menopause Manifesto, notes that what is happening to me now is basically “puberty in reverse.” When I first read that, I felt all the gears in my brain grind to a halt. Then they frantically began moving forward at warp speed. Everything confusing that’s happening, that seems to not be happening to other people — if we even begin to talk about it in the first place — it all makes sense. Dr. Gunter’s book showed me that I’m not broken, so there’s still hope that the longest sexual relationship I’ve ever been in (the one I have with myself) can still thrive.

I’ve learned to chase pleasure before, and now, during menopause, I have the opportunity to do it again, to find new ways to connect with my body — so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

It’s worth noting I’m not technically in menopause, since the medical definition is when a menstruating person ceases having a period for at least one year. Everything after that is, technically, post-menopausal, and I’m sure some new fresh hell will be revealed to me then.

What we think of as menopause is really the “menopause transition” or perimenopause — that horrible (okay, fine, it’s not so bad — wait, no this is the worst!) time that can last anywhere between two and ten years. Whatever you call it, it’s 100% the pits. (Probably more like 1000%, but I’m a writer, not a mathematician.)

And through it all, some people with uteruses will experience changes in the vulva and vagina. Dryness and itching are apparently par for the course, and, as estrogen levels drop, even thinning skin. All a recipe for sexiness, right?

Well, yes. Because desire is a mindset not a biological imperative. So this time of chasing pleasure is what we make of it. And I intend to make a whole lot out of it. Maybe not in public swimming pools or under my desk with a vibrating pen, but with an open mind. Because whatever else is going on between my legs and inside my veins, my brain is still the sexiest part of me.

The Need for Trans Girl Trash

feature image photo by Maryna Terletska via Getty Images

There are days when I just need some good garbage. Look, I love prestige dramas, arthouse independent movies, meticulously researched journalism, and literary fiction as much as the next writer. I adore media that challenges or surprises me. But sometimes, especially in these last few shit-burger years, I find myself really craving the entertainment equivalent of a handful of fast food fries. It’s a hunger that’s best filled with reality dating shows, sexy novels, slutty dance music, and sloppy teen dramas. When I just couldn’t bring myself to watch Station Eleven or to finally make a dent in my ever-growing TBR pile, I turned to Love is Blind or a marathon relisten of the Normal Gossip podcast. My addiction to absorbing as much gossip, drama, and mess as possible is maybe my biggest personal vice and my number one way to drown out our uniquely terrible moment.

When I say I want good garbage, I’m asking for something that is melodramatic, sexy, or scandalous in ways that don’t ask me to engage more than the simplest parts of my brain. I’m not looking for comfort media that makes me feel soothed and wrapped up in a warm, sentimental blanket. The best trash media feels like jaw-dropping, “shut-the-fuck-up” second hand gossip your half-drunk friend offers up about some couple you’ve never met and likely never will.

The problem I keep bumping into is that the best media junk food is overwhelmingly cis. Hell, seemingly all of the shitty junk is cis. Finding quality trans trash is surprisingly hard, and it really shouldn’t be. My trans friends, and I say this lovingly, are some of the messiest people I know. When I hang out with other trans girls, the topic of conversation inevitably spills over into our own personal stories of ill-advised hookups, nights out filled with bad decisions, comedically disastrous early attempts at exiting the closet, or just gossip we’ve picked up about some other equally messy t-girl. Sure, we also chat about art we like and, if we’re up to it, the anti-trans panic sweeping the country, but more often than not we spend our time sharing trashy (often self-mocking) stories.

But for whatever reason, there just isn’t much good trash out there for trans people. Sure, there are plenty of trans novels like Nevada or Detransition, Baby that tell the stories of aimless, disaster trans women, but I could never in good conscience call these books trash. They’re too thematically rich and formally inventive to illicit the sort of head-empty thrill I look for in my junk entertainment. Especially with the fact that horny novels (even queer horny novels) seem to be the top-selling works of fiction at the moment, I kept hoping there would be something for us messy transes to sink our lecherous teeth into.

I thought I had found my trans trash when I picked up the regency romance novel A Lady for a Duke. I’m normally not a bodice ripper girl, but I’d loved the raunchy sexual drama of Bridgerton (especially when it was paired with string covers of Taylor Swift songs), and I figured maybe the fact that the protagonist for Alexis Hall’s book was a trans woman would win me over. And for a while, it was working on me. My heart fluttered at the first kisses and tender hand holdings. (By the way, that heart flutter is really only something I’ve felt myself in the last few months after having been on hormones for about four years? Bodies are wild.) I bought into the will they/won’t they of this Victorian trans lady and the moody Duke her childhood best friend had grown into. I couldn’t wait until the two finally fucked. A Lady for a Duke made me read well over 300 pages before any steaminess happened. It was a buildup I tolerated, because I had convinced myself I would be rewarded with some sex that was at least as lengthy as the teasing that came before, even as that seemed less and less mathematically possible. But what I got was a single hookup that was so stilted, awkward, and outside the experience of most trans women I knew that it ended up ruining the entire thrill. While Alexis Hall had done a serviceable job at writing a trans character up until that moment, it was in the messy intimacies that the illusion shattered, and I could no longer ignore the fact that this was a book written by a man who mostly wrote romance fiction for cis women.

I left A Lady for a Duke feeling so deflated that I found myself looking up the bylines for many of the raving reviews I’d seen logged for the novel online. Most praised the novel for its supposedly  great representation and romance, but I struggled to find any published by a trans femme critic. It was hard not to read the praise as a bunch of backpatting cisqueers applauding themselves for reading a decidedly okay love story about a trans woman. And while I do know that there are horny novels written by and about trans women, none of these have received remotely the same level of public praise, attention, or marketing that A Lady for a Duke and its many, many cisgender siblings do.

The TV landscape doesn’t fare much better. Despite the massive landscape of reality TV, you’d be hard-pressed to find a trans feminine person on any series that wasn’t about drag. And that’s not to say that there shouldn’t be shows about trans drag queens, but when do we get to be included in the seemingly hundreds of real housewives and dating shows? Yes, I am absolutely excited to binge The Ultimatum: Queer Love with my girlfriend, but I did spend a good hour going frame by frame through that recently released trailer looking for any visible trans femmes without success. The cast has been announced, and while the show’s description notes that it features nonbinary people, it’s unclear if anyone is trans feminine. I’m not getting my hopes up, especially considering the first bit of marketing for the series literally opens up with a Harry Potter reference. Given that reality television spent much of the 90s and aughts exploiting trans women for shock value and cheap thrills, reclaiming this genre feels oddly necessary and not just for the drama hungry souls like me.

I’m equally starved for scripted trans trash. While The L Word: Generation Q included trans femme actresses in its cast, I was and continue to be put off by its commitment to creating a cis unless otherwise stated status quo for its characters. Yes, in some ways I understand the importance of a trans actress playing a cis woman, but at the end of the day, its most empowering first and foremost for the performer. It does little for us at home, especially viewers like myself who want to see trans femme stories incorporated into the narrative. I was a bit more encouraged to see there was a trans woman as one of the principal cast members of Showtime’s Queer as Folk reboot, but I dropped the show after the first episode closed with a mass shooting at a queer nightclub. Look, I’m not violence-averse in my escapism. I’m down for some murderous love triangles or revenge killings, but I’m not necessarily looking for hate crimes to serve as a major plot point in my junk TV. Even when Euphoria decided in its second season to make every plot point that wasn’t about Rue’s drug addiction a glitzy, high budget soap opera, Jules, Hunter Schafer’s trans sex worker who was at one point billed as one of the show’s leads, barely appeared outside of being a prop for the creation of drama for the series’ cis cast.

Oddly enough, the most I’ve enjoyed the depiction of a trans femme character in a show like this was Josie Totah’s Lexi on the reboot of Saved by the Bell. While you could debate the merits of a Gen Z reboot of a classic 90s teen sitcom for hours (I personally found it surprisingly funny), I hope you can see why Totah getting to play an explicitly trans queen bee, mean girl archetype is so great. Lexi gets pissy zingers, has romance story arcs, and gets roped into the same stupid shenanigans that the rest of the ensemble does. In terms of head empty comedy escapism, Lexi inhabits a space I don’t get to see many other trans femme characters do: be undeniably trans and entertaining. Much of this is likely due in no small part to Totah serving as a producer for the series’ regrettably short runtime. But no matter how refreshing a character I find Lexi to be, she’s still a supporting player on a streaming only nostalgia reboot comedy series aimed at teens. I wouldn’t blame many trans viewers for deciding to sit this one out.

At my most cynical and frustrated, I read this overall lack of trash aimed at trans femme people as profoundly trans misogynistic and gender essentialist. Cis women, especially cis het women, are pitched a veritable feast of delightful garbage media from their preteens all the way through adulthood. I mean, the CW and Freeform practically created an entire subgenre of steamy, back-stabby, pulpy teen dramas. And sure, there’s a lot to unpack about the fact that these are the kind of stories American media corporations have decided are what girls and women want — I still want to be included in that cohort. If we insist, as the most basic of pro-trans adages say, that trans women are women, then how come women like me never seem to be in the conversation when these shows, even the queer ones, are created? If media that’s traditionally targeted at women, whether they are queer or not, isn’t making a space for the girls like me, then where exactly are we expected to look for entertainment that keeps us in mind?

At the end of the day, it seems like we have to be the ones to make our own trash, but I’m not convinced that there are many avenues for trans femme media that aims only to entertain. I’m grateful for the existence of Pose or the many trans writers I know who are telling inventive and artistically daring narratives in fiction, but what trans narratives get released and marketed to the mainstream really seems to come down to having the right ally to champion your work or perceived palatability for a cis audience. There’s apparently little room there for mass market trans trash.

It’s partly why I always find myself returning to Kim Petras for my hot girl walks or suffering woman runs. Even though a voice in the back of my head reminds me there are plenty of trans music artists who aren’t working with industry predators like Dr. Luke, Slut Pop was still one of my most streamed albums of 2022. I love that Petras not only releases incredibly catchy dance pop, but that so much of it is unabashedly sexual and risqué. Sure, you could call it vapid, but if we are going to cheer on songs that reclaim cis women’s sexuality, I sure as hell am going to be here for my trans bangers about boobs, blowjobs, and BDSM.

I know when the existence of trans people is under attack throughout the country, the need for trashy trans media may seem like a low priority issue. I could even understand members of the community arguing that media centering sloppy trans women making bad choices maybe isn’t the best content to pump into the cultural ether right now. But when things are awful and I’ve done everything in my power to fight and scream for our rights, I sometimes want to stuff my face filled with microwave popcorn and binge watch hours and hours of trans femme melodrama.

In “A Recipe for More,” Sara Elise Asks: Who Do You Want To Become?

The following essay is excerpted from A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease by Sara Elise, published by Amistad and out today, May 2. You can buy your copy from Bookshop, or wherever books are sold. 

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RECLAIMING AGENCY AND VISIBILITY

Moving through my life as a multiracial, autistic, femme woman means that the world is told that it has access to all of me, all of the time—access to my smile and my interest when I’m walking down the street to get home, access to my labor when large brands ask me to “collaborate” with them for free in exchange for “promotion,” access to my cultural traditions when white people decide to wear Native ceremonial headpieces for Halloween, access to my mental energy and expectations of my patience when I’m expected to “be less sensitive” when a restaurant is blasting music and has just turned on strobing neon lights above the bar. But I am able to reclaim agency over my body in my visibility, especially through practices such as BDSM.

BDSM helped me more clearly realize who I am. In BDSM, I can consensually choose to use my body for submission or service. I name myself as “kinky” and as a “leatherdyke” as a means of visibilizing myself and honoring the history of my ancestors and elders in these communities who came before me, and who oftentimes themselves did not feel safe being visible. As a femme-identified person, I am told that my “beauty” is of the highest value and importance, so I am able to reclaim for myself the power in that through “dollification,” using my looks for play and fantasy. Fariha Róisín, in her most recent book Who is Wellness For?, says, “I think part of unlearning these vast and failing systems is to learn to trust ourselves and our own wisdom, but we must also challenge the status quo and unpack how we play into domination.” It’s important to remind ourselves that we have the power to decide what we do or don’t do with our bodies always, and can determine when we want to engage with the structures that society has deemed useful or valuable (like in fantasy make-believe scenes), and when we want to fuck around with them, queer them, and ultimately dismantle them and anything else that doesn’t serve us. And the first step in doing that is the claiming and the naming of ourselves, for ourselves.

In 2020, I was interviewed for a feature article for Playboy in which I talked about what it means to be Black and in the BDSM community. In it, we discussed that often, after playing, visible marks might be left on my body:

Elise’s visible scarring is something she finds beautiful and a marker of both her Black and Indigenous heritage where scarification in certain communities is symbolic of a life lived, traumas survived and earned positions in society. “I find I am often expected to act ‘lady-like,’ meek, and shy. But having scars makes me feel strong. It’s when I feel most like my outsides match with what my insides feel like.

My interviewing journalist, Tarisai Ngangura, agreed that “everything about living and breathing as a Black woman is politicized, making it an act of self-deception to believe that the bodies we are in do not determine the ways we perceive and are perceived by others, even in our most personal and sacred moments.” The marks and scars are another act of living loudly in my truth. I go on to share that “being a Black woman in this world is definitely a very tough embodiment. One of the most beautiful things to me is looking at my Black body and seeing it in rope or seeing the marks that the rope, knives, or impact tools have made on my body. When I play, I feel like the fullest embodiment of myself.”

SHAME

One reason that we resist visibility is shame. Similarly to the way self-internalized ableism affects autistic masking, many of us invisibilize ourselves, even subconsciously, because we feel shame about aspects of who we are. And it’s not our fault! We’ve been bombarded with information our whole lives telling us that we are not good enough, not rich enough, not healthy enough, not straight enough, not white enough—so it makes sense that even the most radical of us have still internalized this messaging. Shame and vulnerability expert Brene Brown says, “We define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.” Whenever shame arises on the surface, it’s a signal that there might be something else happening several layers deeper.

One of the gifts of my autism is that I don’t think I have ever actively experienced feelings of shame. I experience other feelings intensely, but not experiencing what folks describe to me as feelings of shame means that I haven’t ever believed that I am unworthy of love and belonging because of something that I’m doing or experiencing. This gift helps me to clearly detect when people are experiencing shame and then give them the love and affirmation that they need, because what they’re experiencing in that moment feels so clearly like disillusionment to me. Logically, we all need inclusion and affirmation and belonging, no matter what we’ve done (in other words, fuck cancel culture). So when shame comes up as a natural defense mechanism, could it be possible for us instead to get into practice of shifting feelings of shame toward ones of self-compassion? I love what author and illustrator Yumi Sakugawa says:

Shame is a self protective learned behavior that gives you conditional safety. You are safe if you hide, play small, blend in, please others, stay silent according to the expectations of others. You learn to self-shrink and dim your own lights to steer clear of conflict and pain. But self love is a self protective, learned behavior that gives you unconditional safety. No matter what others may think of you, you give yourself the space to be seen, follow your desires, and speak your truth. This is expansive safety where you are protected by your own radiance and self-acceptance.

You are trusting yourself to be able to count on yourself, and in that act of trust, you are telling yourself you are enough and allowed to be present, public, and fully you!

We do not have to do anything more to be worthy; we are worthy just because we are.

I am Black & Indigenous, queer, autistic, a leatherdyke, femme, an energy worker and mystic, a womanist, and probably many more names and signifiers that I’ve yet to discover. When I talk with some folks in older generations, they’ve expressed frustration about millennials needing to have so many identifiers. And now Gen Zers seem to be even more into labeling themselves! Some elders ask, “If we’re trying to get away from discrimination, then why do we all need to focus so much on our differences?” But the act of naming is both a conclusion as well as a beginning. It implies a process that first starts with encountering—a learning of self and a writing of your narrative. We are in survival mode when the recipe of our life is of someone else’s choosing. But visibility helps us more clearly define who we aren’t, so that we tell the story to others (and to ourselves) about who we are. Visibilizing and naming our differences for and with one another can help us to celebrate them, and ultimately our whole and full selves, more honestly.

So, I must ask: Who are you in the recipe of your life? And who do you want to become?