Fighting Capitalism While Wearing Fenty Lip Gloss

I’m an avid supporter of Fenty Beauty and its creator, Robin Rihanna Fenty. When I used the Trophy Wife highlighter for the first time during my senior year of high school — there was no going back. I’ve been known to go on Fenty Beauty shopping sprees, complete with freebies and remarks of admiration (and concern) from Sephora employees. I once bought the equivalent of a full face of makeup — all Fenty— at the Brooklyn Heights Sephora on a random Saturday. You could say that with my regular purchases of Fenty Lip Gloss (always in the shade Fenty Glow), I’ve done more than my fair share to help make Rihanna a billionaire. That’s right — in 2021, Rihanna officially became a billionaire. The majority of her earnings come from the unparalleled success of Fenty Beauty (and Skin) and SavageXFenty, and both have taken the world by storm since their inception in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

Fenty Beauty’s continuous success came as no surprise to me. In a society where the odds seem to be stacked against us, seeing a fellow Black woman win was nothing short of inspiring. However, I started to wonder whether or not Fenty Beauty’s nationwide impact was a symptom of a bigger issue. In the age of Black Excellence and the rise of Rihanna’s SavageXFenty empire, I have to ask — is this just excess consumerism repackaged?

We say we want to fight against capitalism but we still buy from Black billionaires. I started noticing that some of my most class-conscious Black friends were taking Fenty glosses out of their Telfar bags during cookouts and birthday dinners. I also noticed that when we talked about eating the rich Rihanna was always the exception, and mentioning The Carters when talking about classism was almost sacrilegious. The realization that status matters a lot to us, whether we want it to or not, also didn’t go unnoticed.

We all see the flaws in the system and have conversations about how it needs to be dismantled, and yet we’re holding our contribution to it in our hands. Why do we as Black folks put so much stake in material things?

In The Burden of Excellence, Janelle Raymundo talks about how Black excellence is “largely based on its capitalist structure that values financial gain and relies on quantifiable measures of success.” But there’s something else to consider — that we are fighting traditional capitalist structures by rebuilding our lost empires. Movements like Black Girl Magic and Black Boy Joy are forms of resistance against all the negative stereotypes we get thrown at us daily. Flaunting our Black excellence by wearing the best clothes, buying the best luxury handbags, and driving the best cars, we’re reclaiming the opportunities that many of our ancestors never got to have. However, Black folks rarely get the opportunity to want an anticapitalist society and want nice things, especially in a system that continuously works against us.

Growing up, I could never find foundation and concealer that was exactly the right shade. I had to mix and match products like a wizard crafting a potion. That sense of being the norm or the standard in the beauty industry is something the Black community has been robbed of. As long as these capitalist structures exist, it’s important to have a brand that captures the Black experience. If we’re going to have to take part in these systems, then shouldn’t Blackness should be represented? We deserve to have a seat at the table and a wall in a Sephora. Brands like Fenty Beauty are an act of revolution.

Fenty Beauty has inspired and empowered so many Black girls since its creation. However, using consumerism as a form of Black excellence can only take us so far. It can’t be all about who has less and who has more, who can afford Fenty Lip Gloss, and who can’t. I felt like I was left out of the club before getting a Telfar bag, and buying one didn’t solve all of my problems. I was looking for validation, for proof that I was good enough or excellent enough to be accepted by my friends, my co-workers, and my family. We can combat excess consumerism and feelings of inadequacy while still making sure we have all we need to survive and thrive.

In order to stop relying on consumerism to make us feel whole, we have to support one another and our communities. Mutual aid has always been present in society, but Covid has caused the term to enter the cultural zeitgeist even more. Capitalism has created a cult of individuality. It’s seen as taboo to ask your neighbors and friends for help with a bill or to share resources. Websites like GoFundMe have the power to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for people who have lost their homes, received an unexpected hospital bill, or have no way to pay for their education. People are already fighting against capitalism and consumerism by sharing with their community. Mutual aid is far from a new concept in the Black community — my family grew up hosting neighborhood block parties and sharing their resources. The concept of Black excellence doesn’t have to be based on the brands you wear — but it’s also okay to buy things that make you feel fly if it empowers you. The more that we look to each other for reassurance and support, the less we’ll need material items to validate us. Building a community that you can lean on is Black excellence in and of itself.

There will always be people suffering — the system itself relies on it. However, the success of Black businesspeople like Rihanna and Telfar Clemens isn’t the issue. It’s still always better to shop Black than to aspire to buy from other luxury brands that are rooted in white supremacy. It felt wonderful to know I was supporting a fellow Black queer creator when I bought my Telfy! The issue arises when not having the latest bag makes you feel like you feel like you’re losing your Black Girl Magic.

Black Girl Magic has always been a phrase that has either empowered or intimidated me. With the growing presence of social media, I’ve felt pressure to stay “on trend” and buy the latest item to make myself feel whole again. Black girls are taught to be on point and put together at all times — full face of makeup on, nails done, and hair perfect. The rise of consumerism has only worsened this feeling for me and for my friends. When will we allow Black girls to be imperfect and magical? We have to embrace our imperfections and accept that no one will ever be able to buy the perfect outfit or set of shoes, or stick of lip gloss in order to finally “game” the system.

I’m not the same girl who tried on Fenty makeup for the first time in 2018 anymore. Experiencing adulthood, Covid, and everything in between made me realize that there is no way to “win” the game of capitalism. Instead, I believe that both things can exist at once. You can buy a new ethically sourced handbag that supports BIPOC business people while also questioning our relationship with fashion and consumerism as a whole. Makeup and handbags are designed to help you feel your most fabulous self, but shouldn’t make you feel like you’re missing out on some exclusive club. I’ve learned that I can create my own meaning of Black Excellence. Spending a Saturday looking for the perfect Fenty Lip Gloss is fine, as long as I continue to question the systems I’m part of while I’m perusing shades.

The Damage Fascism Has Done to Trans and Disability Research

One of the most well-known and -recorded outcomes of the historical period around World War II when fascism rose to world power was the horrific cultural effects on the Jewish population. From genetic studies of inherited trauma to the fact that most living people of Jewish descent today can trace at least one relative lost to the murderous desires of Hitler, we are a culture very aware of what fascism did to its main victims in World War II.

But two outcomes many know less about are the long-term effects that the Nazi Party’s sway had on the present day understanding of both autism and transgender identities. As we live through a time when totalitarianism seems to be rearing its ugly head again (from instances of people aligned with Nazism in parliaments worldwide to the terrifying swing to the far-right in the United States), it is important to discuss these two lesser-known outcomes.

The first historical instance of a mass-destruction through totalitarianism of the understanding of trans people was the burning of the library of Institut fur Sexualweissenschaft in Berlin during the dictatorship of Nazi Germany. The institute served as a hospital that did early versions of gender confirming surgeries, and also contained an extensive library of the existing science and world history of queerness. Trans acceptance suffered a massive blow when Nazis burned the institute to the ground, destroying all the work of pioneering gender scholar and doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, who refused to collaborate with the Nazis.

The rising fascism in the world is likely to, if allowed to grow unchecked, create more situations like the unthinkable choices the scholars behind the Institute and Asperger’s practice were faced with—how do we advance life-altering research under fascism?

Another significant research hospital in Nazi Germany was that of Hans Asperger, who studied autism. At the time, little was understood about autism, and the pediatrician Asperger’s work with such children was considered ground-breaking. There is proof of the fact that he both tailored his research to Nazi ideals (where we got long-standing designations like “high-functioning” to denote those with milder forms of autism from) and indefensibly turned at least two children over to Nazi death camps. Some historians claim that Asperger was paying lip service to Nazis so he could save the largest amount of children in his care from certain death. Whether it was true or not, we do know that Asperger’s research survived, which gave modern scientists and doctors a point from which to consider and correct it—we now understand autism as a spectrum of different needs and abilities rather than in terms of “functioning” or not in eugenic standards.

My point in comparing these two situations is to illustrate how very much trans and autism acceptance was set back. For years, we operated on flawed understanding of autism because it had been tailored to include eugenics—but because the research survived, we eventually arrived at a much clearer understanding of autism. Alternatively, with all medical and historical research destroyed by a refusal to tailor it to totalitarianism, we are still arguing the very fact that there is no one trans experience—medically and socially—just different needs within a wide spectrum.

It must also be repeated that, despite some of Asperger’s research surviving, it was forever altered by his collaboration with the Nazi Party. No matter whether his collaboration was intended to save as many children as possible, or to play along with Nazi ideals, Asperger’s remaining research set back the understanding of autism in massive ways.

Many people would read these two instances and say, “I would refuse to collaborate.” But many of the people who would say such a thing have never been in the unwinnable situation of living under a completely totalitarian state. The fact is, there is no way to fight fascism through either decision. The results we see are: collaborate and lose most things including your credibility, or don’t collaborate and lose everything, including all the research you have spent decades on.

This is relevant to the time we are living in when politics are divided so harshly in the US, and indeed the whole world. The right has been moving towards banishing trans people from public life through limiting access to sports, health, education, and more, while making life nearly unlivable for many with disabilities (as we’ve seen demonstrated clearly in the recent responses to the COVID-19 crisis). The rising fascism in the world is likely to, if allowed to grow unchecked, create more situations like the unthinkable choices the scholars behind the Institute and Asperger’s practice were faced with—how do we advance life-altering research under fascism? We may, some day soon, have to make them again.

Black, Trans, and Alive

The first time I ever met Ceyenne Doroshow we were at a birthday party. After being introduced by a mutual friend and noticing that I was keeping to myself she invited me to sit with her friends and children. In the span of five minutes she had called me beautiful and special more times than I had told myself that year. She spoke about the inherent power of black trans women, impressing upon me my ability to be anything I could dream of. I was geeked, and changed forever.

Ceyenne is one of twelve Black trans femmes, eleven of which are currently alive, depicted across two large-scale murals. Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, Tourmaline, Nala Simone Toussaint, Courtney Washington, Gia Love, Cayenne Doroshow, Joela Rivera, Qween Jean, Joshua Allen, Raquel Willis, and Aaron Phillip. Rendered in the style of historic black muralists Aaron Douglas, Kerry James Marshall and Ernie Barnes, they stand in fields of geometric hypercolor, surrounded by their faceless yet embodied kin. These are artists, activists, leaders, lovers, parents and caretakers. There is joy here. I have dreamed of this 100 times, prayed for it twice as many.

“The Black, Trans &” project was born from longing. There was an absence. My people had been smudged out in favor of a false narrative. There were dual realities: In the first I existed. Scores of women existed before me and I was but the current incarnation of a long and enduring legacy. In the other I stood invisible, peripheral if I was lucky. Labeled strictly as trendy and taboo. I was never allowed to be whole. I set out to create something that would not only serve as honest representation for my community. The project is also a thank you to people who have constantly been inspirations to me by being beacons of radical love.

I have watched each of the people depicted in these works pour into others in the same way. Give families and homes to children without. Give purpose to those searching and always fill in the pieces. These images were created with tenderness and admiration. I am ensuring these individuals enter into a long chronology of black portraiture. I have spent my life admiring the work of black painters who have come before me. But even in the most exalted retrospectives, the black trans body was missing. Where had we gone? Who had stolen us? And when we did appear we were drawn from minds incapable of imagination. In our own history we lived distorted. I was made to not recognize my own face. Somehow the narrative of what it means to be a Black trans femme had been subsumed into life expectancy statistics, disadvantage, and loss. I was tired of speaking of my sisters in the past tense.

As my grandmother would say, “Speak the truth and shame the devil.”

Black trans femmes have always been here. A constant source of inspiration, point of reference and beings of endless capacity. This work is for every black trans or queer child who is waiting patiently in periphery for someone to tell them they are worthy and loved. We are love. There is no corner of existence denied to us. We always have been everything and more. Never again will we allow that truth to be hidden. Through this project, I am taking power back into the hands of Black trans femmes, so we can answer the question: What else is true?

I am not the singular author of this story. “Black, Trans & Alive (Qween’s Song & Return Home)” are my visual contributions. But “Black, Trans & Heard” is an audio archive that allowed me to sit down with my community so we could collectively unveil what was true for us, truths that were intentionally buried by a dominant society built on lies. We are a collective. We are not a monolith. Each of the black trans folks interviewed for this had their own dreams and ideas for what the community and next generation needed to know.

“And I think the thing that we have– that we need to remember for ourselves is that our glamour is our armor. You know, and our glamour is our embodiment. Like when I wake up and I put on my earrings, I remember that I’m that bitch.” — Beloved Minah

“something that’s really striking me and staying with me right now is the way that Black Trans folks, especially Black Trans Femmes have always glamourized resistance. And not in a way that trivializes it or makes it less important or less dangerous, or less significant, but in a way that makes it exciting and enticing and beautiful.” — Jordyn Jay

“I think we’re so often told, or made to believe that being Black and being queer, being Black and being Trans, gender non-conforming, nonbinary, is a divergence, not just from blackness but from our lineage. And I want to tell you that it’s the exact opposite. It’s a returning and it’s a regrounding. “ — Benji Hart

“I love us. I love us so fucking much. I love us to the moon and back. I’m in awe of us. And the ways in which we move, the ways in which we love: radically, unapologetically. And the ways in which we teach other people to love. The way in which we have taught this world to love. To really love themselves, and through that love others. Forreal forreal, in the honest way. “ — Glori Tuitt

“Just remember to love yourself first because the love that you want to receive is a reflection of how much you love yourself and how you treat yourself. So if you want love– if you want to receive love you have to be love.” — Ivy Raheem

Lying’s the Most Fun a Girl Can Have

names and other identifying details have been changed. 

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This post was originally written in 2018 and republished in 2021

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Of everything I’ve considered saying about my former on-and-off employment as a sex worker in New York City for around five years in my twenties, the fact I find most difficult to articulate and remain conflicted to admit is that it did, inexorably, change how I felt about men.

It’s the politically incorrect gulf in my coming out story I inelegantly sidestep: I identified as a heterosexually-inclined bisexual when I started giving hand jobs for money, and I left more or less a lesbian. It wasn’t the only factor in that transformation, but it was a major one.

Things I feel better about saying: I often hated it, sometimes loved it, and always liked it better than working at The Olive Garden. I’ll tell you that I loved the money-to-hours ratio and the hustle and how I’d never endured a sexual-harassment-free workplace in my life and at least in this job, I was getting paid to entertain exactly that. I loved the girls I met and the girls I kissed because of it, even the one I lived with until we’d ruined each other’s lives. (That’s another story.) I’ll tell you that sex work gave me incredible confidence and made me a better, more perceptive and skilled lover, and also better at boundaries and walking in heels.

But it’s harder to say, for example, that I identify with the deliberately defamatory 1954 pop-psychology hate-read “Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism,” which noted, in the chapter on “Lesbian Practices Among Prostitutes”:

“…prostitution as a behavior deviation… attracts to a large extent women who have a very strong latent homosexual component. Through prostitution, these women eventually overcome their homosexual repressions.”

I usually avoid writing about my own experiences with sex work. At the time and for nearly a decade afterwards, I kept it a secret, like we all do. But it’s more than that. Sex work itself is a complicated conversation. It’s mostly illegal, but shouldn’t be. Many people in the sex industry are trafficked, many others do it under desperate or otherwise unideal circumstances. Feminists are divided over it, conservatives united against it.

So there’s a pressure on class-privileged voluntary sex worker narratives like mine to be, you know, “empowering.” We should be sex-positive happy hookers, adept at compartmentalizing, tucking sexual trauma and potentially misandry-inducing baggage away in a packing cube of the soul. We probably shouldn’t relate to Valerie Solanas. Sex work shouldn’t ever dry out our desire for recreational sex, even if just for a little while, and it definitely shouldn’t, above all, impact how we feel about men.

I know this work is fucking with me, I’d scrawled in the journal balanced on my thigh on the train from my part-time publishing day job to my secret sexy night job, gulping the canned champagne I’d deemed inconspicuous enough for public transportation.

I couldn’t do it last night, I wrote about the ex-boyfriend who’d come over, expecting the usual hook-up and, well, not getting it. That night would end up being my last attempt at unpaid sexual activity with a cis man. I think it’s ’cause I’ve allowed myself to be violated at work so much. Waves came over me — I wanted to cry, I wanted it to be over, I wanted it to be a woman. I don’t know if that’s because I’m gay — I still have so much desire for women, constantly — or because I’ve been fucked up by work. Have I displaced myself from my own body so badly this past week that there is no turning back?

I didn’t turn back. I plowed gamely forward, consenting to occasional low-grade trauma to pay off debt, have time to write, work low-paying media/publishing jobs and, eventually, start my own business. The trade-off was worth it. I wrote a lot.

That aforementioned ex-boyfriend was my actual boyfriend when I started out, in the winter of 2004. I kept it a secret until I couldn’t anymore, and then he shoved me and told me to get my dirty hands off of him.

Is this what I’m worth now? I wondered to myself, and then decided I didn’t care either way. As you can see, eventually, he didn’t either.

I’d blown through four waitressing jobs, assorted underpaid promotional modeling gigs, a dozen unsuccessful office job interviews and was a month into a blundering tenure at Banana Republic when I sent my photos and a cute email to a craigslist ad offering “artistic, college-educated women” “full-time money for part-time work, no sex.” I’d been in New York for six months and had accumulated nearly $20k in credit card debt. I felt swallowed by shopping-and-unemployment-related shame. I picked up erotic gigs off craigslist, like foot fetish modeling and filing topless for a very sad man, before landing at Serenity Spa.

I tell you this to bring you to the job interview at an East Harlem diner with Emily, a blonde filmmaker from Idaho who’d worked in Serenity during undergrad before buying out the old owner in hopes of financing her first documentary. The gist of the place was the girls were English-speaking and had gone to good schools, like what you’d find at a high-class escort agency, but provided a service more common to cheaper massage parlors — “bodywork” and “hand release.” So we could charge $220/hour + tips (which were significant), split between House and Girl. Blow jobs and sex (“full service”) were off the menu, but other acts were on it, each with an accordant monetary value.

Let me get one thing clear off the top: this industry is wildly racist and classist. The type of work I did is, for illegal sex work at that price point, probably the safest and cushiest type available, and my privileges, like being white and college educated, made that cushy work readily available to me. I cannot ever speak for any sex workers besides me.

“This sounds great,” I said when our plates had been cleared, and it was time to define the transaction. “I’m in.”

She smiled. “Good! Do you have any other questions?”

I had so many, but chose this one: “Does it — has it — like, make you hate men?”

“Actually,” she said, pursing her lips like it was a reassurance she’d given many times, “Actually it’s the opposite. You see an emotional side they don’t show everybody else. You know after 9/11, there were so many men on my table, just crying.”

I nodded, solemnly, trying to think about 9/11.

I’d just begun tentatively identifying as bisexual when I started at Emily’s, but carried internalized misogyny and homophobia inside me like kidneys. Ever since emerging semi-hot from an awkward depressive adolescence, I’d relished male sexual attention. I had sex with stupid gorgeous men and basic bankers who shaved all their body hair. I loved the vapid escape and thrill of seduction. As a lifelong too-smart very-weird girl attempting to pass herself off as a Cool Girl, I gathered “normal behavior” cues like lint. I ended up coated in “a woman’s worth is her boyfriend.” I watched Sex and the City like going to synagogue. So of course I thought I liked men enough to like men for a living.

I’d also just begun considering feminism, the concept, and its related literature. I’d avoided feminism’s stamp of radical un-sexiness for most of my life, preferring instead to sit on sagging couches with funny, unambitious frat boys — one of who’d, unbeknownst to me, photographed me during sex and, eventually knownst to me, shared the photos with his brothers — watching them play video games while they rhapsodized about who, of all the girls they had collectively fucked, had the worst boobs. When I’d get up to use their bathroom, its filthy floor always littered with Maxims and Playboys, which felt very on-the-nose, they’d each slap me on the ass as I passed, and I thought, “I’m doing a good job being normal.”

For almost an entire year, I loved sex work. I loved the fermented, stifled air of a two-bedroom apartment with sheets nailed three layers thick against the windows, spelunking through this underground economy, verbally sparring with potential clients on the phone. I loved Emily and the other girls in our perverted sorority, who were all a bit psychologically messy and sexually fluid; the newer girls had big dreams and the older ones, who Emily was slowly pushing out, had thwarted ones.

I felt empowered by the wad of cash snug under the arch of my foot. I loved watching myself in the mirror; my calves flexing in the heels I’d never wear in real life, the crest of my ass in the cheap, hyper-feminine thongs we picked up in handfuls from the Strawberry clearance bins.

I felt powerful, unstoppable, Robin Hood in a cocktail dress, like all these men had used me — not just me, but like every girl I knew — and now we’d hacked the system and we were using them. Sometimes, men paid me to make out with girls in front of them. What a gambit!

We got fake names — I picked Stephanie, the name of the first girl I’d had sex with (I know) — and became types easy to describe on the phone. Little loglines, really, that we’d sing to each other. It was polite to describe the other girl first, and then yourself, always in third person. “Tall, blonde, model-type figure,” Sienna would wink. “Beautiful long legs,” she’d smile.

I felt addicted to it sometimes. I think sex work is like, my calling, I wrote in my journal a few weeks in. Which is fucked up, I know, but it’s there, nonetheless. I felt hypersexual inside and outside of work. Spending so much time around unbridled lust kicked my responsive desire into overdrive. I’d regularly go directly from work to a girl’s house, eager to get underneath or on top of her, damp and starving.

You were supposed to create a fake self. At first, I didn’t. I barely kept my real name a secret. I was game. I talked about my boyfriend, liking girls, watching porn, publishing erotica. If the client was attractive or charming I’d skirt boundaries like a needle.

They wanted to get off but mostly they wanted to feel bohemian, young, alive, special, interesting.

Whatever they wanted, I gave it to them. I was a woman in this world. I didn’t know any other way to behave.

My goddess, if you will, was Natalie Portman’s Alice Ayers in Closer. I’d seen the play in college, and I saw the movie the same week I started at Emily’s, and then another three times. The topic of the movie is “love is a lie.”

Alice, a desirous and yearning girlfriend, is a bewitchingly withholding stripper. In the VIP room, she calls the shots, has the last laugh, is the one who leaves. Whatever happened at home, at work she controlled and extracted money from men, you do not need to desire me in order for me to know I am desired.

It gave her financial power that relied on male fallibility, rather than male sovereignty.

It gave her a secret, something to place on the table between her and the men she might love, who might try to take her powers away from her.

I never stopped thinking about Alice. Her pink wig, dead eyes, Dan licking his lips and telling her what to do, knowing that she makes the rules and he can’t touch. Defiantly spreading her legs as he angles for a closer look, repeatedly denying him full indulgence of his animal lust. I wanted to be Alice. I wanted power. I didn’t want to be what I’d been in my last year of college at Michigan, stuck in a fucked up relationship with a guy who made me feel weak.

Men rejecting women always felt fundamentally unjust to me, which was a clue I left in storage.

I’m suspicious of the version of me who asked Emily what I asked her, about hating men. I’d never ask that now, as lesbian. You know why.

I also started watching The L Word, via Netflix DVDs, that month. I thought about Shane constantly. She was so cool. Her confident pursuit of fleeting pleasure, desire that made her strong and had nothing to do with men. Bette, too, with her unapologetic rejection of male professional superiority and canonical inclusion.

I bought Whores and Other Feminists. Empowered by my new footing in capitalism, I stopped taking my anti-depressants and began making new queer friends on craigslist.

My boyfriend, a tender Republican who thought girl-on-girl affection was gross, decided to enroll in the Police Academy. We’d met at a restaurant where, upon learning of our relationship, the owner retaliated by giving us opposite schedules — lucrative dinners for him, sad breakfasts for me. So I yelled a lot and then quit. My boyfriend stayed. They never hired girls there anyways, I’d only gotten hired ’cause I showed up to apply when the owner was gone. So my days had been numbered.

At Serenity the day after we broke up, I felt like he’d followed me there, dangling my soul over my body like a goldfish over a toilet bowl. I didn’t want his judgement on me. We made plans to talk and I scribbled a feminist manifesto: my first. He accepted my letter gingerly, like the goldfish after it died but before getting flushed down the toilet. A few days later, he called, having confused my essay with a request for reunification. I just wanted him to agree with my thesis. He wanted to get back together.

“I don’t want a relationship right now,” I told him.

“Is that why you told me about your job?” he asked.

Yes. “No,” I replied. I was Alice, placing something on the table between us. Something I owned.

I had to go. I was doing a double with Alicia. She had an MFA from Yale and a girlfriend and blunt bangs and a face like a muffin and I was gonna have fake sex with her in front of a rich man for money.

I’d expected clients to demand sex or blow jobs. We were advised to “be playful but firm, like you were with your high school boyfriend.” And sure, they did that. I did not expect but did not mind the group of regulars I eventually acquired — kinky guys who wanted to be beat up or tied to stuff, men with waif fetishes, the academics, the orthodox Jews, the guy who wanted to wrestle.

What most of them wanted — and what I didn’t expect or want to give — was to “give us pleasure.” In sex worker language, “putting your hands wherever” is called “roaming.” You’ll see it on review boards, where “hobbyists” post evaluations of massage girls, ranking their appearance, performance and “sensuality.”¹

Every client believed himself unique in his desire to fondle our genitals in latex gloves until we “had an orgasm,” and that this desire was a specific reflection of their personal affection for women and attention to her pleasure. I. fucking. hated. it.

It was initially fine and eventually maddening. Worst was my own stubborn inability to entertain it, like the other girls could, seemingly without deep internal conflict. I understood the instinct — getting girls off turns me on, too! — but couldn’t abide the practice in this context.  Emily didn’t expect us to allow roaming unless we were comfortable with it, but also, I wanted to make money. How dare he presume that I’m an orgasm machine, damply awaiting his coin in my slot. How dare he assume I take his currency. I set up an L Word exclusive screensaver on my laptop, played Ani DiFranco during sessions, and told clients I was a lesbian, which was just a way of implying that I could be an orgasm machine if I wanted to, just… not for them and not like this. Sometimes, I didn’t even want to do the things I’d explicitly signed up for. I withheld, and was therefore often bad at a job that had once come so easily.

A lawyer regular had been tricked, bless this sacred whore, into believing girls could come from an aggressive two-finger rub on the small of her back. That was funny. Every time I see him on CNN, I chuckle like a man.

My other complaint, for which I blame Pretty Woman, was men refusing to abide the contract of it being a job — like a diner who imagines, after a few successful lunches with the same waitress, that she will agree to go home with him and cook and serve him dinner there, for free.

Listen: he wanted a blow job, I said no. His flimsy, oil-smeared card in our Rolodex was like this: DO NOT BOOK WITH VALERIE. DO NOT BOOK WITH GINGER. Blacklisting was a risk, he could get angry and call the cops.

He croaks at you to blow on his balls, you say no, but listen, the man wants what he wants, so he holds your head there until you make peace with dying that way, suffocated between the thighs of a terrible man. RIP your dignity. The smell settles into your hippocampus like a sofa.

Remember the one you told, back when you were new and easy, that your father, like him, had taught at Harvard Business School? Why you did so, I can’t tell you! That was really dumb! This man liked to grease you up like a pig and hump your back, a boomerang loop of a slip-n-slide, and normally your main concern is squeezing your buttocks together too tightly for him to slip in, but today he is yelling, “Daddy’s little girl likes to get fucked, you little professor’s daughter!” and you see your slimy face in the mirror and you think to yourself, “my Dad is dead” and then you wonder “am I dead too?”

Then it’s over, and you get your money and move on.

I started drinking at work with Camille, a raunchy brunette from New Jersey who wanted to be a screenwriter but got “caught up in the nightlife.” I was cleaning up after a client in the front room when her fake orgasm from the back got so loud I could hear it, and I edged towards the door, feeling wet and impressed. “So when I was done,” Camille told me as she microwaved a wet washcloth, “I bent over, like, panting, and said thank you so much for sharing that with me.” 

When it got late and the phones stopped ringing, she sent me out for a bottle of white and we drank it on the carpet, eating cheese cubes. It became a habit — the drinking — and then I started drinking with Bianca, and found out Paige had been drunk all along, and then, at the Midtown studio where you worked alone, I’d drink alone, which made it easier to act as fun as I’d formerly acted sober. Or I did coke alone — I had a brief requisite coke phase with my new lesbian party friends — or smoked weed on the fire escape. This all became routine.

I was not, eventually, a sex-positive whore.

It seemed to me at the time that the “feminist” aspect of sex work was necessarily limited to surrounding issues: labor rights, health care, bodily autonomy, police conduct/violence, the criminalization of financial need, cultural stigma. Sure, our work was feminist insofar as we redistributed wealth by flipping the model of economic exploitation to favor women instead of men, but the actual work, the meat and bones of the work, was stubbornly itself. “Nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle,” writes Andrea Long Chu. “You could sooner give a cat a bath.” We didn’t bathe cats, we fed them. We fed them food you’re not supposed to feed cats.

At first, I needed feminism to find the work “empowering and liberating.” Once that piece of self-actualization had been accomplished, what I wanted, but couldn’t find, was feminist permission to sometimes hate it. The right to consent to occasional disempowerment.

I couldn’t find that, so I kept it mostly to myself. I believed, and still believe, in the cause. I didn’t want to hurt it.

I stopped dating men in 2006, which I told myself was temporary. Besides, boys were never okay with their girlfriends being whores. In this way, sex work enabled me to do a thing I’d been afraid to do for a long time: be a lesbian.

Our clients were almost exclusively rich and white, sometimes racist, often misogynists. Many were genuinely hot. About half were kind, sweet and interesting, like the drug dealer who liked to masturbate together and tipped in incredible weed or the CEO of a major restaurant chain who read Gawker as religiously as I did.

I’d once admired men for being unemotional and controlled where I, and women, felt sloppy, irrational and “too much.” But I started seeing white cis straight men differently. I had, I felt, discovered the underlying mechanism of nothing less than the entirety of modern civilization: powerful men being fucked up about sex. Animals, the lot of ’em! Entitled, clueless. Compulsively sexual, resentful of the women they required to satisfy their compulsions. I felt that what separated good men from bad — and plenty of good men exist! — was not that they lacked those compulsions or desires, but that they’d adequately reconciled, controlled, or been socialized out of them.

Above all men were easy, and once men no longer felt like a challenge, the power dynamic dissolved, and with it, my interest.

You are weak because you can’t say no to your desire, says an anonymous sex worker to all men in a batshit interview loaded with incoherent generalizations and also that one perfect line.

Men would think I was looking at their face but I wasn’t, I was looking for what was simmering underneath. I was lighting a match.“I just think about how hot I am,” Celia advised me on my second week, in regards to dealing with insufferable clients. “Seriously, I just look in the mirror and get turned on by how good I look.”

“I just think about cabinets,” Jordan advised me in my third year. “Like I think about my house, and I focus on what I’m gonna buy with the money he’s giving me, and then I channel all the feelings about my new cabinets into him, as a person.”

Sometimes I felt like Alice Ayers.

Sometimes, I felt like Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol.

After two years at Emily’s, the L Word character I felt more like was Jenny. Self-indulgent depressive self-mutilating Jenny, who wasn’t suicidal, she’d just fucked up her life a little bit. Writing was all that made sense to her, even though she was very bad at it. Jenny began like I’d begun — swallowing her artsy wild crazy bits to appeal to a nice-enough man who eventually revealed his previously-subsumed brutality. Jenny evolved like I evolved — upon discovering the option of a life without men, she quickly saw her compromises, and fled.

Also, I started a blog.

“Can we stop talking about this?” Kat would beg of me, lying on the bed where we sometimes fucked even though she was straight and we fought constantly. I’d been complaining about clients, again, which I guess I did a lot. We’d met at Emily’s, her two youngest girls, went to a $pread Release Party together one night, fucked, became fast friends, started doing a lot of doubles together, and now here we were, roommates in Brooklyn.

I didn’t respond — I’d already gotten into the habit of withholding from her, at this point — just pursed my lips, nodded, and got off her bed.

“It’s just —” she said as I was already out the door, making the journey to my own room, “You don’t have to like men. I still want to.”

She was vulnerable, in that moment, authentic in a way we rarely were with each other anymore. I stopped. I considered, perhaps for the first time, that my apathy towards giving men the benefit of the doubt revealed more about me than general misanthropy or chronic poor performance in service industries.

I tried to imagine female clients. (I only ever saw one.) I tried to imagine a really gross female client — I couldn’t even say ugly because I couldn’t imagine a woman really being ugly. There was some base level approval of women, as a species, that I didn’t feel towards men and perhaps never had.

I’d loved men, sure, but conditionally. I loved beautiful men who kept me puppy-level attentive with idiotic mind games designed to preserve their pride and independence at the expense of my sanity. I loved men in cologne and crisp polo shirts, gay hair, like the teen idols winking at me from magazines I read in the ’90s. Not since high school had I dated a man who could match me intellectually. Just finding one I was genuinely attracted to was hard enough, so that had always been enough.

I imagined a woman paying me to let her “give me pleasure” and that was fine, too. I wanted women to feel good about themselves. Men, though? Didn’t they have enough confidence already? Isn’t that why they had their hands all over me in the first place?

It’s not like dating women is a fucking picnic. We have an emotional abuse epidemic, for one thing. But dating women does feel less like screaming across a vast canyon, even when we’re just endlessly hurling fists of sand at each other’s eyes.

Speaking of: Kat. She couldn’t afford misandry. But I could. So I stocked up.

Emily wasn’t wrong about seeing “another side” of men. I felt good about sessions where I counseled a man through shame, grief or insecurity, subtly steering him towards vulnerability, maybe some diet feminism or casual social justice, hoping my work would positively impact the women in his everyday life. I did the world a profound favor by explaining, to a client who’d eventually write me a ten-page love letter, what tampons were and how long periods lasted. (His guess was “two days.”) I enjoy, in general, giving advice, hearing others’ problems, helping people connect the dots.

Even when it was bad, it was fascinating. I regret nothing.Ostensibly, I left Emily’s for Eunice’s to get distance from Kat, and ’cause I’d been skittish since singlehandedly fending off a police bust. But I stayed with Eunice ’cause Luna Salon prohibited “roaming,” and had a generous blacklist.

Eunice was small, but made herself big when she trekked outside to re-con new clients: loosely-tied black combat boots, trenchcoat down to her shins, long black ponytail tucked into a Chairman Mao hat.

Inside, she had another personality. She was showing me. While wringing out a pair of exfoliation gloves that had soaked, briefly, in a silver bowl of Dr. Bronners-peppermint-scented water, she told me, My mother was probably a prostitute. It’s just likely. Sometimes when I do this I feel connected to her, is that weird?

She’d been adopted from South Korea as a baby. I play up the Geisha thing, she explained, shrugging. Guys are into that.

Eunice was training me. I’d been working for her for about a month when she pulled me aside after a team meeting and said, We need to figure out who Stephanie is. Eunice had Secretly Shopped me, sending in client-friends who’d reported back that I seemed bored and hostile, that I’d switch from massage to hand job thirty minutes in, then sent them merrily on their way. I’d told myself it wasn’t my fault they came so fast.

Never send a man home early, she told me. He wants to get his money’s worth.

She crawled on top of me, straddling my ass with her bare thighs while working my lower back with her elbows. You have to get on the table, she told me.

Won’t they try for more if I do that? I asked. I’d grown exhausted by all the groping at Emily’s and had begun administering massages from great distances, like a pre-teen babysitter changing a diaper.

Nope, Eunice chipped. Because you’re in control. You take control, you keep control.

She massaged me with her entire body with delightful, easy energy, showed me how to draw out the post-release body-scrub if they came unreasonably fast.

Now you do me, she said, hopping off, and I hopped on.

Fuck you! She said barely into it, slapping my thigh.You DO know what to do!

Eunice told me about some ancient civilization — details escape me — where certain groups of men were bred, en masse, to just build stuff. They were simple-minded, she said. Basic. After a long day of building shit and moving/carrying things, these men required sexual release, and thus sex workers existed to please them. I think a lot of these Wall Street Guys are like, the modern version of those guys. Not complicated, just laying bricks, being bodies. That framing made sense to me. The only problem, more generally speaking, was that capitalism made those bricklayers think they were gods.

I’d initially relied on instinct to guide me through flirting with strange men, a behavior I’d always enjoyed specifically for its effortlessness. But now that my interests had changed, I needed skills and guidelines, like a real job. I needed to grow the fuck up and try.

Eunice, who was the only close friend I made at Luna, was bisexual, but most of her girls were straight. They were more clean-cut, had their shit together, kept their work and outside identities strictly separated. Serenity had crept from the margins of my life into all its body paragraphs like a strong thesis, but I was always a step outside of Luna.

Emily was often traveling, and never physically present, but Eunice was right there, hands-on, aggressively booking back-to-back clients and screening new guys. We entered detailed session notes into an extensive Outlook database, and having all that information about a client changed everything. She ran a “tight ship.” There was no more smoking pot in the bathroom, doing lines of coke off a bench, showering with Kat, getting riotously wine-drunk with Remi before fucking on the massage table. Eunice was strict about cleaning, meetings, timeliness. She had a part-time “slave” who called me “Miss Stephanie.” Eunice told him what to eat for lunch.

I came to love the abstract athleticism of intense full-body massage, attempting when possible to think of clients as fleshy rowing machines. I learned to take control, and most of the time, that was okay. I liked it again.

I could’ve fought back in the spring of 2007 when my first serious girlfriend told me she was “disturbed” I’d chosen to be a sex worker, a vocation she deemed valid for her heroin-addict ex, but for me — “i just can’t imagine why you would do that work, if there’s no extreme reason.” But I didn’t fight back. She was incorrect, and I still believe that for some people, sex work and monogamous romantic relationships can coexist. I wasn’t torn politically, but I’d become emotionally torn, and couldn’t summon the energy to explain myself. I was sick of lying, of playing mind games with myself to endure even the occasional grabby client. I wanted to walk into the light. I wanted to hoard my body. I wanted her to be the only one granted access to it.

“You’re letting her judge you ’cause you’ve started judging yourself,” my best friend Haviland told me.

Sex work was not my calling, at least not anymore. I was burned out.

At this point, Eunice was making her own plans to get out of the business, gradually transitioning management to a new owner. My writing career had been gaining velocity, I was hopeful.

According to e-mails I sent to friends around that time, I’d been “physically assaulted” by a client the week before. I recall, vaguely, feeling shaken afterwards and recommending we blacklist him. I recall, vaguely, feeling that I did not feel quite shaken enough. Whatever actually happened in that room, I never wrote it down anywhere besides, I assume, the Outlook database. I have no memory of it. Regardless, my soapbox was a far-off mountain. My legs were sore.

I hadn’t saved a dime.

I quit.

Mid-summer 2008, after some unexpected financial catastrophes, I asked my then-girlfriend how she’d feel about me going back. “I feel good about you making money,” she said.

Eunice had sold Luna to an employee. My first night back I worked with a hot, chatty bisexual hipster who’d slept with a mutual friend. I made $750 that night, which was $500 more than I expected. My body felt electric, like cash itself. This time, I saved.

Eventually the recession would land, and I would start Autostraddle, and I’d start wanting to stab all my clients with a knife again, and then I’d get back into day-drinking through my shifts, and then I’d quit for good.

But that first week back? Those first months? I felt high as a kite. I missed it. I missed having a man under my control, I wrote in my diary while my girlfriend napped. I missed the cash, the thrill, and the comfort of a reliable income.

And then, finally: I could never love a man again. But I could jerk him off, take his money, and spend it on my girlfriend.  

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¹ SESTA/FOSTA has shut down myriad locations for sex workers to advertise their services, yet many of these review boards remain active. This law not only takes power away from sex workers, it gives a lot more power to anonymous men who often lie about their experiences and judge sex workers on their willingness to accommodate risk and break rules!

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For Trans Puerto Ricans, Passing Laws Is Only Part of the Battle for Liberation

On February 25th, 2020, Alexa Negrón, a Black trans woman experiencing homelessness, was killed in Tao Baja, Puerto Rico.

After police were called on her for using a McDonald’s restroom, patrons of the restaurant posted videos of the interaction on social media, spreading false rumors that she was a man in disguise, peeping on women in the bathroom — flames that were fanned by rightwing media.

Within 24 hours she had been shot. The horrific attack was also filmed, and widely shared.

Six known trans murders occurred on the island in 2020 — five trans women and one trans man—the majority of whom were Black, Indigenous, and poor, experiencing housing instability and supporting themselves through sex work. Trans and queer activists on the island say Alexa’s murder didn’t merely mark the beginning of this violent wave, but that it’s emblematic of the intersecting systems and struggles that coalesce to threaten Boricua trans lives.

Puerto Rico has been rocked in recent years by two major hurricanes, earthquakes, blackouts and other failures of infrastructure, all of which have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. The barrage of catastrophes—which resulted in thousands of deaths—left thousands more to process profound trauma, robbing many of any sense of stability.

While such events could seem merely unfortunate, activists say they are a predictable result of the island’s centuries-long battle against imperialism, most currently in the form of its status as a U.S. territory.

“Anti-trans violence is rooted in our colonial structures,” said Dania Warhol, founder of Espicy Nipples, a transfeminist network centering the Black trans experience in Puerto Rico. They cite religious fundamentalism—the remnant of Spanish colonialism that paints trans people as depraved—but also imposed legal frameworks that limit possibilities for how oppressed communities respond to crises that are often a direct result of U.S. exploitation of the island.

An example of this is the declaration of a recent state of emergency over gender-based violence—issued by newly-elected governor Pedro Pierluisi—a hard-fought battle won in the wake of protests responding to a sharp rise in intimate partner violence in the wake of Hurricane María, and then again during COVID-19. While Pierluisi has stated publicly that the executive order does cover trans and gender-nonconforming people, it does not explicitly say so in the law.

“We want the inclusion of trans people in this state of emergency, and we want their inclusion in writing,” emphasized Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of Puerto Rico Para Tod@s. “It is a victory, but we need to make sure it includes everyone targeted by gender violence.”

Dania Warhol remains wary of the state of emergency because of its focus on expanding the powers of government agencies. “When they declare a state of emergency, they usually want to take away our rights,” they said, noting that similar orders in the past gave disproportionate amounts of resources to law enforcement. “Giving more power to the government and to the state isn’t something we can afford right now.”

Many of the same laws outlined in the Biden administration’s touted Equality Act have existed in Puerto Rico for years. Out of all U.S. states and territories, Puerto Rico ranks 20 out of 56 in terms of legal protections for LGBTQ individuals. Yet, its inclusive laws are enforced unevenly, with police often playing a leading role in discriminating and perpetrating violence against trans people.

Puerto Rican police are described by trans activists as having a pattern of harassing and assaulting sex workers, immigrants, and women, defending perpetrators of gender-based violence while criminalizing their victims. In all six trans murders that occurred last year, police misgendered the victim every time. Activists claim officers regularly sensationalize trans survivors in their reports, which are often shared verbatim by local media, resulting in the exact type of misinformation that led to Alexa’s murder.

“We can’t rely on the police here,” said Joanna Cifredo, reigning Miss International Queen of Puerto Rico, and spokesperson for Arianna’s Center. She describes a protest she attended in October of 2020 at la Oficina de la Procuradora de las Mujeres (the Office of the Attorney for Women), drawing attention to government inaction on violence against trans women. Upon returning to their cars, which were legally parked in a nearby lot, all the participants’ vehicles had been ticketed.

“The police were standing there with their motorcycles just to see our faces when we got the tickets,” Cifredo recalled. “Just to see the joy on their faces, I’ll never forget it.”

Only weeks before, police had dragged their feet in an investigation after a 19-year-old cis woman, Rosimar Rodriguez, was abducted from in front of her home. Despite pleas from her mother, it took four days for officers to take any action. Her body was discovered only two miles from where she had originally been taken.

“When we protest in front of the governor’s mansion, police come out like G.I. Joes for people holding pots and pans, wearing flip flops. But when it comes to looking for a girl who’s been abducted, it takes four days.”

“Police are an instrument of oppression,” Serrano corroborated. “We’ve done trainings for them, passed laws, but they are not implemented correctly. I myself have been in the rooms, having these conversations with police chiefs. But it goes in one ear and out the other. It doesn’t trickle down to their subordinates.”

In addition to being targets for state violence, trans organizers also describe mistreatment from the Puerto Rican left. Though trans people have been integral to grassroots movements across the island, they say they are simultaneously left out of the work of mainstream feminist groups and treated as a distraction by radical organizations, who often see trans and queer struggles as secondary to Puerto Rican independence.

On July 25, 2019, trans and gender-nonconforming organizers staged the now-iconic Perreo Combativo, a raucous dance party in front of la Catedrál in Old San Juan as part of the massive #RickyRenuncia protests, calling for the resignation of then-governor Ricky Roselló.

“At the same time that we were having this big dance party,” Dania Warhol recalled, “other protesters were calling us names, saying mean things about the way people were dressed and about their bodies.” In response to threats, trans people and their allies formed a line between dancers and their harassers. “In that moment, we had to protect ourselves.”

While the scene Warhol describes is indicative of the violence trans Puerto Ricans face from all sides, it also illustrates the ways trans communities are organizing to provide each other with the exact spaces, protections, and resources the state denies them.

While recent tragedies on the island have hit already-struggling trans communities particularly hard, they have also led to an explosion of organizing. In the last five years, three new trans-run clinics have opened, and countless organizations have formed. Communities are employing a range of strategies to address anti-trans violence, including policy change, continued protest, and building solidarity economies on the ground.

“I joined the Ms. International competition because it provided a platform,” said Cifredo of her title in the popular pageant. “I see myself as a Trojan horse who can now get at these tables and be a voice for the community.”

On the one-year anniversary of Alexa Negrón’s murder, Cifredo organized a meeting between trans community members and candidates for public office. Some of the biggest issues they hoped to push were the decriminalization of sex work, providing housing for trans elders, and ensuring that gender-affirming healthcare is widely accessible—including in rural communities.

Espicy Nipples organized a Queer Brigade which did outreach to trans sex workers, distributing emergency resources, while also conducting surveys, gathering information on the most lacking supports. “People aren’t just telling us they need condoms,” Warhol said. “We’re hearing, ‘I need a house, a cell phone, to be included in a medical plan.’’’

Trans community members have created a host of projects to support one another during the pandemic, amidst a decided lack of aid from the U.S. government. La Laboratoria Boricua de Vogue offers voguing classes, and throws outdoor balls. Bartering systems where drag performers swap clothes, do each other’s makeup, and skillshare have become a common way to build networks and pool resources. Live streams where artists perform and give tutorials have helped trans people crowdsource needed funds.

After two trans women, Serena Angelique Velázquez Ramos and Layla Pelaez Sánchez, were found in a burned out car in April 2020, hate crime legislation brought federal charges against their suspected attackers. However, this legal action allowed the U.S. government to pursue the death penalty, overriding the Puerto Rican constitution which expressly prohibits it. Trans activists are calling against the use of capital punishment, demanding Serena and Layla’s lives be honored in the ways their community determines, not by further entrenching U.S. colonial authority.

“We want to take power away from the state and put it into our communities,” says Warhol. “Our community needs funding, education, housing, to create our own sense of security.”

Up to now, Warhol says the demand to defund police has largely been seen as a cry from U.S. activists, but Black trans Boricuas hope to shift that perception: “’Defund’ is not popular here. You don’t hear it a lot, but we’re trying to change that.”

Trans struggles in Puerto Rico demonstrate that inclusive legal language alone is ineffective at protecting trans lives. Approaches to liberation that focus on passing laws, but not redistributing resources, inevitably fall short. Expanding state power further cements the same inequalities that compound trans suffering, and fuel trans death. Only by placing needed resources directly in the hands of trans communities — healthcare, housing, food, education — can trans people finally have the autonomy they need to support themselves and each other, a task for which they have already demonstrated a profound capacity.

The political landscape remains fraught, but as leftist struggles across Puerto Rico and its diaspora seek true independence for the island, trans activists insist they are not a distraction, but central to Puerto Rican liberation.

“Trans people are modeling what it means to be authentic,” said Cifredo. “To fight for a better society, to heal, and to actualize love in policy and in space.”

The State of Trans Lives in the Birthplace of the American LGBTQ Movement

New York has long been heralded as a progressive place, especially for LGBTQ issues. Many youth born elsewhere come here looking for a space to define themselves on their own terms. I was one of them.

The history of the Stonewall uprising, the ballroom scene, and the extravagant Pride parades are just a few historical examples of why New York City has become an LGBTQ touchstone. But each year, New York state ranks among the highest in the country when it comes to anti-trans homicides. Between 2017 and 2020, at least nine trans individuals were reported murdered in New York state, making it one of top five states that are most hostile to trans people. It’s possible that more murders went unreported.

The numbers contradict existing stereotypes wherein the South is discarded as hotbeds of conservatism. One could argue that the way New York has branded itself as progressive allows it to conceal the violence that is inflicted on marginalized communities like trans people.

Cecilia Gentili has witnessed the true nature of New York’s violence for the past ten years as a community advocate. Prior to that, she was a long-time undocumented sex worker who had been incarcerated in a migrant detention center.

“We as a state like to be portrayed as the progressive state, but in reality, part of that equation comes from keeping conservatives from upstate content,” Gentili commented. “And that means not passing legislation that is supportive of sex workers or trans people or LGBT rights or women’s issues.”

Indeed, when examined more closely, the Stonewall uprising—which has now acquired international recognition as the impetus for the LGBTQ movement in the U.S—occurred because of the brutality of the New York Police Department during its raids of queer gatherings. Similarly, the underground balls were a response to widespread family rejection and poverty. Queer families became a source of abundance when LGBTQ youth were denied basic resources that anyone would need to survive.

The policing that forced a response from icons like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, and Sylvia Rivera is still a marked presence in the city. The NYPD is the largest police force in the country today, and is unique in that it has what it calls a “counterterrorism bureau,” something typically reserved for militaries. In 2011, former mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted the following: “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh largest army in the world.”

There is a history of NYPD targeting trans people for arrest, disrupting their lives and contributing to a cycle of poverty that entraps trans people in a web of violence. And state laws long supported the NYPD’s abusive behavior. Up until recently, Section 240.37 of the New York Penal Code allowed officers to arrest trans people if they suspected them of “loitering for the purposes of prostitution.” Community organizers called it the “walking while trans” law because of the way it criminalized trans people simply for existing.

“This is just another case of how much the lives of trans people are decided by cisgender people who have no idea of our experience. And it’s all a power game,” Cecilia Gentili told me.

As a response to ongoing violence against trans people and sex workers. Cecilia Gentili founded DecrimNY, an initiative helmed by a number of organizations working to end the criminalization of sex work altogether in the state.

As an effect of the heavy police presence, Black residents have historically been more likely to be entangled in the criminal legal system than their white counterparts. While Black people account for about a quarter of the city population, they make up nearly half of all arrests.

Black trans women face compounded violence, as they’re targeted in more ways than one. A legal case that rose to national recognition in 2019 was that of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, who was arrested on misdemeanor charges. Some of Polanco’s charges had to do with sex work. Her bail was set $500, an amount she couldn’t afford to pay. She was consequently jailed at Rikers Island, famous for stories of cruelty that occurred within its walls. The jail has in the past been nicknamed “Torture Island” and “Gladiator School.”

On June 7th, 2019, Polanco died from a preventable seizure while in solitary confinement. Video footage surfaced last year showing guards laughing at Polanco as she lay unconscious in her cell. Staff did not provide proper healthcare that may have prevented the seizure, nor did they fulfill their obligations to keeping her alive while she was unconscious.

Her death was one of the many that were commemorated in the Brooklyn Liberation March, on June 14th, 2020. The event is reported as having the highest turnout for trans lives in U.S. history, and it occurred during the ongoing Black uprisings. The thousands of attendees, all wearing white, showed up to listen to Black trans activists speak to how violence against Black trans people occurs from both police and civilians.

For many, the march was a return to the roots of Pride month, as a protest against state-sanctioned violence. But the event couldn’t have happened without the momentum built by Black trans leaders who’ve forced the mainstream to acknowledge the margins. While many point to the Trump administration as the source of violence, many Black trans people have been decrying their plight for many years.

“I think that they keep using Trump as the problem. And Trump was only a problem that they allowed to be a problem,” said LaLa Zannell, who has been a crucial figure in Black trans communities and has devoted over ten years of work to ending violence. LaLa’s comment speaks to the way Trump was an embodiment of a national culture that is bigger than any one president — a culture that disregards the value of trans lives.

Chin Tsui has experienced this throughout his incarceration after immigrating from Hong Kong as a child. After being kicked out of his family home for being trans, Chin was left vulnerable while living on the streets. Chin was repeatedly a victim of human trafficking, wherein his life was threatened and he was coerced into performing illegal activity for his traffickers. Eventually, Chin ended up in immigration detention. He was put into solitary confinement for 19 months, often 24 hours a day, because he is a trans man.

According to Transgender Law Center, “LGBT people are rarely screened for human trafficking and until an expert asks the right questions, victims suffer in silence and fear.”

“Being an immigrant and trans, you’re a big target,” Chin told me. When Homeland Security Investigations confirmed his convictions were tied to him being a victim of trafficking, ICE reconsidered his case. Chin was released in March of 2020, after over two years in immigration prison.

Chin’s life illustrates what happens when trans people are denied the resources they need to thrive: housing, employment, and adequate identification documents, among other things. The poverty rate in 2015 for NYC was 19.9 percent, but trans people experienced poverty at a rate of 37%, according to the U.S. Transgender Survey. When seeking housing, 27 percent of trans people found themselves homeless, and almost one in three avoided a shelter for fear of being mistreated for their gender identity.

“We’ve seen that for public shelters, when we sent community members to public shelters in the city, they experienced a lot of violence,” said Cristina Herrera, who founded the TransLatinx Network in 2007 to address the needs of transgender immigrants. “And some are at women’s shelters and we’d see that there’s a lot of violence coming from cis women.”

Herrera’s two decades of advocacy work has led her to witness how trans communities develop shame and self-doubt as a result of countless barriers in their lives. These internal battles become their own additional obstacles that trans people must overcome.

“Many times they choose not to report [attacks] because dealing with violence, being a survivor of violence, it creates a lot of shame. You feel a sense of guilt in a way, because you blame yourself for not putting yourself in better situations and better economic opportunities,” Cristina explained. “But our communities are set up to fail.”

In 2019, community members celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with New York City being chosen as the year’s site of World Pride. The resilience of trans communities had reverberated all around the globe. But it wasn’t without loss.

Trans communities shouldn’t have had to build resilience through suffering, through mourning.

I asked LaLa Zannell what gives her hope. “Every day I get up, I have hope. Because I know that somebody is not here no more,” she said. “I’m able to wake up and catch that first breath in the morning. There’s hope because I’m still here. It’s another day for me. I am honored to be here, still have another 24 hours. And there’s hope for me to get something done, to leave something here, to push something, to advance something, to combat something.”

Zannell’s words echo the signature exclamation from Miss Major: “I’m still fucking here.”

The cycle of loss makes it easy to forget that trans people have long thrived before the first police raid on Stonewall Inn, in cultures all around the world. And many years, from now, trans people will continue giving birth to social movements, families, artistic innovations, and more.

Just as Chin Tsui said to me, “I’m not asking the whole world to accept us, but they need to know we are here, we’re not going nowhere.”

The Barriers that Keep Trans People From Thriving in Texas

Before the end of the first quarter of 2021, twelve transgender individuals have been violently killed. Since 2017, there have been 139 reported murders of transgender individuals in the United States, according to research from Transgender Law Center. The murders in Texas over that time make up nearly 10% of them. These numbers do not just reflect the lives that were taken away, they reflect the lives that will continue to be in danger until further change is made.

The biggest threat against trans folks in Texas — and all over the world — isn’t just a weapon. It’s a wall. The barriers put in place to keep transgender people, trans women of color especially, from living within our society eventually keep them from living at all.

Like many Black trans women, Mya Petsche has dealt with these oppressive systems firsthand in Dallas, and shares her experience as a way to educate others to prevent that same hardship. Her activism began on Trans Day of Remembrance in 2019 as she read through the long list of names being memorialized that night. “I was thinking just how tragic it is that someone could take someone else’s life away because they fear what other people think of them or what they think of the other person.”

Petsche explained that fear is nearly inescapable for trans individuals: “We have to live in fear… having to watch our backs. We have to be silent or scared to go to the restroom or do anything that people could call ‘confrontational’.”

To Petsche, the violence ends where access begins. For trans people, that is making sure that housing, jobs, and gender-affirming identification documents are accessible. These are basic necessities for any human being before they can live a fulfilling life. Petsche isn’t the only one who believes that increasing access to resources will decrease anti-trans violence in Texas.

Verniss McFarland, a national community mobilizer, consultant, and local leader in Houston acted on that belief when they founded The Mahogany Project in 2017. The non-profit works to “reduce social isolation, stigma, and acts of injustice in TQLGB+ Communities of Color” by providing a safe and affirming space for trans people to be uplifted in the community as well as by increasing their access to resources and self-defense tools. McFarland makes a point that one of the primary issues that trans people face concerns body autonomy: the right to govern one’s own body without the influence of an external party.

“People telling people what to do with their body, how their body should exist, how their body is offensive to others, whether their body belongs…” McFarland remarked. “One of the biggest things that I think is wrong here is individuals telling another individual what to do with their body.”

Controlling trans bodies has long been the implied goal of the Texas legislature. In our current 2021 legislative session, several bills have been introduced that are either anti-trans or directly affect the lives of transgender individuals:

• House Bill 1424 would allow any medical professional to refuse care to a transgender individual by way of religious freedoms, even if the procedure in question is live-saving care.
• House Bill 3083 would legally protect any pharmacy or pharmacist who refused to provide medication due to “religious belief” or “moral conviction.”
• House Bill 1148 prohibits trans minors from amending their birth certificate to match their gender identity. Not having up to date identification makes it difficult to get a job or driver’s license. It also makes it dangerous to navigate spaces where you need to show ID.
• House Bill 369 aims to criminalize HIV, which would not only keep trans individuals with HIV from accessing treatment but would also keep sexually active trans individuals from getting tested.

This is nothing new. In 2017, there was a legislative attempt to prohibit trans people from using the right restrooms in schools and public buildings (like many hospitals, parks, DMVs, and government buildings) and additional bills introduced to keep schools and local governments from protecting trans people from discrimination.

The message sent to trans people? We don’t want you in our public places. The goal is to keep trans bodies from receiving care. The goal is to keep trans people out of society, whether that means scaring us into isolation or letting us die. The introduction of these bills encourages members of the public to fabricate “what if” scenarios to incite fear to and justify violence against trans individuals, specifically trans women.

“There’s a direct chain reaction… it’s another form of violence if we’re being honest,” said Emmett Schelling, the executive director for Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), a statewide policy, advocacy, and education organization has worked to fight laws and propositions as a form of harm reduction.

Schelling, who often testifies against discriminatory legislation at the Capitol recently found himself testifying in favor of a bill for the first time — House Bill 73. “It was a literal elimination of gay and trans panic as a legally allowable defense here in Texas and filed by Representative Gina Hinojosa. It sucks. That’s our good bill.”

Gay and trans panic is legal defense, which claims that a person’s sexual orientation or gender expression can trigger violence against another person. It was debunked by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, but continues to be used as a murder defense to this day. Schelling asserts that transphobia isn’t actually the main issue here; the violence clearly conveys the larger struggle of marginalized communities existing in a society founded on the systemic structure of white supremacy.

“We’re not just fighting a trans-specific oppressive system,” Schelling said. “We’re fighting a system that’s rooted in white supremacy because white supremacy is the brother of transphobia which is why when we see the manifestation of the violence is largely geared towards black trans women and trans women of color.”

Diamond Stylz, the executive director of Black Trans Women Inc., an organization that is dedicated to the socioeconomic empowerment of black trans women, takes it a step further. If white supremacy is on one side of the coin, she argues, misogyny is on the other. Just as the majority of murdered Black trans women are killed by their intimate partners, Black cis women are often killed in similar ways. “The CDC told us in 2015 that Black cisgender women have one of the highest rate of intimate partner homicide. Cisgender women and trans women need to get together and really figure out how are we going to stop the violence against us,” Stylz said. “Change legislation with sex workers. Decriminalize it. That will stop violence. Adding legislation that adds stigma doesn’t work.”

This stigma not only encourages police officers to mistreat trans women, but it also encourages to neglect them, which can lead to the police just allowing fatal encounters to happen.

“I’ve been in a situation like that where they spilled my tea, and the whole tone of the police change. Once they find out I’m not a cisgender woman, they say, ‘You should have fought back,’” Stylz explained.

The problems trans people face are not simple. They are deeply rooted in the American legacy of violence that have plagued marginalized groups for centuries.

In 50 years, I want us to be beyond fighting for the right to exist. I want us to be in a situation where resources are readily available, where some resources aren’t even needed anymore. When someone has the fantastic realization that they’re trans, I don’t want any feelings of fear or worry to follow. I want there to only be peace — something that in 2021, many of us can’t find in life or in death.

The answer is eradicating stigma through education and action. We need people to know what the problem is, we have to work together to dismantle the oppressive systems above us by being true allies to each other, by listening to each other, and by creating access for each other. We must break down the barriers that are intent on keeping trans people out of society and out of existence. Trans people should not have to show up to save our own lives alone.

The Roots of Anti-Trans Violence

Year after year, journalists reported the ongoing murders of trans people — the majority of them Black trans women — demonstrating the “epidemic of violence.” The reports of community members’ deaths caused continuous ripples of grief and fear.

Under the legal system, these homicides were interpersonal acts: one individual committing a crime against another. In reality, these deaths are not singular events. Rather, the theft of trans lives is made possible by the neglect and violence of many institutions. Murders are the result of multiple incidences over the course of a trans person’s life: every time we’re abandoned by our families, every time we are refused healthcare, every time we are denied access to a homeless shelter, every time the police profile us as sex workers and incarcerate us.

Trans people are trapped in a web of violence wherein the very entities charged with caring for us instead treat us as disposable.

Who has blood on their hands? Not just perpetrators of the homicide. The federal government, state legislatures, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, police forces, homeless shelters, prisons, healthcare providers, and discriminatory employers all contribute to making us vulnerable.

In order to end the violence, we have to understand its roots. We have to transform all the conditions that lead to the violence in the first place.

Autostraddle has partnered with Transgender Law Center to study how anti-trans violence is embedded in our society. We chose to feature four regions that are among those with the highest rates of anti-trans violence: Louisiana, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico.

We’ll present data and reporting that features local community organizers who represent the possibility of a future of interdependence and mutual care among all people. We’ve also included resources, organizations, mutual aid funds, and collectives from each region, majority trans-led, for readers to donate and support.

We must plant new seeds. We must water them so trans people get to bloom without fear.

How Louisiana’s Antiquated Laws Set Trans People Up for Violence

I originally moved to New Orleans out of desperation. Fresh out of the psych ward, and not long after going “full time” and leaving the career I’d spent tens of thousands of dollars in grad school money on – and maybe because I was feeling dramatic – I collected my cat, everything I owned, and dipped. If I was going to survive, it wasn’t going to be in the Bay Area.

New Orleans was a revelation. Even though it didn’t end up being my home, it was exactly what I needed at the time. I’ve never felt more connected to a community. Never felt more affirmed. Never met so many beautiful, creative, or kind queer and trans people of color. To some degree that’s by necessity. While New Orleans is, in some ways, a bubble of acceptance and freedom of expression, it’s still in Louisiana. Not that the South is uniquely inhospitable to trans people – when I lived there, I was never followed home by a threatening man in a truck, for example. This has happened to me at least four times in Oakland, California.

It is important to be honest about the violence that our communities – trans, gender non-conforming, Black, disabled, immigrant, sex worker, and/or people of color communities – face. But we’re more than just murder victims. It’s just as important to be honest about the beautiful and expansive organizing, mutual aid, and resistance work being done within those same communities. Some of it is explicitly anti-violence work, but some of it is just taking care of and loving one another. Some of it is just re-affirming each other’s humanity and our right to exist.

Because that’s not always apparent. Over the last four years, according to Transgender Law Center’s research, 11 trans people were murdered in Louisiana. All of them were Black. All of them were trans women. All were under 33 years old. That includes one woman who was just killed in January in Baton Rouge. We can’t talk about violence without talking about this reality. But, of course, there’s more to the story.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, and if it were its own country, would have the highest in the world. Of the 11 cases mentioned above, most remain unsolved. In some of the cases, alleged perpetrators were arrested and/or charged – but is that justice? It won’t bring our sisters back and will likely have no effect on the issue writ large. We know that much of the interpersonal violence our community faces is at the hands of intimate partners. We also know that Louisiana’s prisons and jails are disproportionately filled with Black people.

It also has the third-highest poverty rate in America. But rather than address that poverty – or the many reasons some Black trans women, often spurned by employers, turn to alternative economies like sex work – Louisiana simply criminalizes the problem. And according to the laws on the books, queer and trans people engaging in sex work is a major problem.

“Our system is operating under this Napoleonic law, right?” said Wendi Cooper, Executive Director of Transcending Women, with palpable exasperation. “It’s as if we’re stuck back into like, the 1800s.”

The Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) law is indeed a 19th-century law, still on the books in Louisiana, that criminalizes non-procreative sex. People convicted of exchanging oral or anal – but not vaginal – sex for money are charged with felonies and get longer jail sentences. Until 2012, it required anyone convicted under it to register as a sex offender. This was the “only instance in which an offense that does not involve children, the use of force, violence, a weapon or lack of consent required registration as a sex offender,” explains the Center for Constitutional Rights. While the law has changed in recent years, those convicted prior to 2012 are still registered as sex offenders (and charged with felonies).

“[Crimes against nature laws are] being used as a tool to target Black trans folks,” explained Nathalie “Nia” Faulk, a self-described ebony Southern belle who works at the intersections of history, performance art, and cultural organizing. “Anytime you get caught up in the crimes against nature laws, you get this scarlet letter that says ‘I’m a sex offender.’ It feeds into this ideology of trans people being predators.”

Sex offenders have to tell every neighbor, landlord, and nearby school about their status, and the law prevents them from accessing certain jobs. Over 40% of people on the sex offender registry in Louisiana were convicted under CANS.

It’s very dehumanizing, adds Wendi Cooper, to be told “we don’t deserve to get assistance with our needs. We don’t deserve to be able to walk the streets. Or to let our presence be known.” But violence and trauma aren’t the end of the story. We also build community with our peers, our affinity groups, our cities, states, countries, planet. With those who came before us – and those who have yet to arrive.

That’s why Cooper started Transcending Women, a newly-formed organization she hopes can be an “agent of change” to spread resources, knowledge, and survival skills throughout the community. She aims to share practical necessities, to provide legal services – whether a name change or to support folks who have been criminalized by the system – and an advocacy program, that aims to work on political efforts like getting rid of CANS. She was part of the original lawsuit that struck down the worst parts of CANS, and she spearheaded the “CANS Can’t Stand” Campaign as well, which aims to take it off the books for good.

But not every initiative is a non-profit organization. “Our people are so knowledgeable and so brilliant – period,” said Spirit McEntyre, a musician, organizer, and facilitator. “[We] have so much history of surviving beyond survival. Thriving.” We know how to pull together resources, to make things work, to take care of each other.

They tell me about some of the ways they’ve seen this take shape in Louisiana. Spontaneous, grassroots Signal groups created to redistribute wealth and facilitate resource sharing, without the fees of a crowdfunding site or the strings of a non-profit organization, for example. But some institutional funding doesn’t hurt.

Nia shared no less than a dozen organizations doing innovative, crucial work in Louisiana. BreakOut!, for example, works against the criminalization of LGBTQ youth and does political education. That’s also one of the pillars of The Southern Organizer Academy, which Faulk co-directs, and whose mission is “building the capacity of trans and queer folks to go out into the world and create the change you want.” Last Call works documents intergenerational queer and trans stories about the past, and uses them “as a catalyst to manifest trans futures.”

Speaking of the future – what does it have in store for Louisiana’s trans community? What are all of these organizations building toward?

“I’m thinking of reconciliation,” envisioned Nia. “Like, centers and programs where folks can go to heal harm with their families, with themselves, with the system. …I’m thinking of cooperatives. So there’s food banks, and gardens, and maybe even just regular monetary banks that are run by trans people for trans people, to hold their money and teach them investment. I’m thinking about spiritual wealth. Deep funding that goes towards increasing trans spirituality and wellness and wholeness. I’m thinking Black trans art filmmaking initiatives, oral history initiatives, where we can document the beautiful, rich history that transness has…”

Her vision was so much bigger than what I can relay here. When I talk to trans people about the future of our community, I’m often struck by the beauty and love of our visions for ourselves and each other. But I’m also often struck by just how doable it all really is. Nothing our communities call for, march for, agitate for, is anything other than what so many cis, straight, white people take for granted every day.

When we talk about violence, we aren’t just talking about homicide. We’re talking about dating in loving, respectful ways with people who will claim us. We’re talking about having the right relationships with our biological families, with our elders, with our youth. We’re talking about access to living wage jobs, and being able to choose sex work if we want without fear of being labeled a sex offender or otherwise being seen as disposable. We’re talking about being able to go to school and focus on learning.

Because when we talk about violence, we have to think bigger. About the conditions that create and facilitate violence – both for survivors and perpetrators – and the reality that structural, systems-level violence is what affects all of us day to day. And that struggle is less visible than homicide is. The standard answers to homicide, like hate crime laws, tend to reify rather than transform the harms of that violence.

All of the organizations mentioned in this article, and each of the people interviewed, are doing anti-violence work, even if none of them are naming it so explicitly. Part of the bigger thinking about violence we need to do is engaging with, celebrating, and supporting the people helping to create lives for each other, to share the avenues of survival we’ve had to adapt, to wring the myriad joys and glories out of our lives and share them with our loved ones.

Crafting The Narrative Of Abuse

Content warning: while not graphic, this essay does mention and discuss sexual abuse.

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“There is nothing abusive about this scene,” I typed in an email to a journal that wanted to publish my short story “We Had No Rules.” “I think there is a complexity around queer sex that you are missing.” The journal’s editorial board had some questions about the “sex” scene, as they called it. I fired off a response.

I started writing and placing stories from what is now my collection We Had No Rules (Arsenal Pulp Press, May 2020) in 2012, and at this point I was very used to getting what I deemed homophobic comments on my stories. I had a number of experiences where I was told “we need you to remove this scene or we won’t publish it” or “we need this character’s sexuality to be less foreground.” I was feeling exhausted and righteous from it all.

In the story in question, a sixteen-year-old chooses to run away from their homophobic home to live with their sister, who had been kicked out for being gay, 6 years before. There is one rule: the narrator can’t fuck their roommates. Then enter Jill, the twenty something non binary femme of their dreams, who brings the narrator’s hand inside her in a “purely instructional” lesson on how to find someone else’s g spot, insisting the whole time that what’s happening isn’t sex.

The journal agreed to publish it as it was, even though a board member insisted a few more times, that what was happening was abuse. I ignored it.

I consider fiction dangerous. Not readily because it is raw and pushes boundaries, but because it so often doesn’t. It is, more often than not, an opportunity to lie about what isn’t there or to manipulate the reader into thinking the world is more hopeful than it is. We want to be lied to. And as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I know clearly that there is no one who wants to be lied to more than the families where this happens. And, at least in my case, I needed to be lied to as a survivor for years.

This lying doesn’t always come out of cruelty, but out of a self-preservation or ignorance. For instance, the experience I had, of sexual abuse between children, as a form of care and intimacy, while surviving a parent who is violent and mentally unwell, can be flattened and brushed off as “just has bad blood” or a “is a nympho” or that I must have brought this upon myself. I think of this kind of narrative building when a five year old on my block screams out, “Happy Birthday, America” on the 4th of July. Despite the violence and horror that this country has always wrought, worse than anything I could see in a scary movie — there is a desire to believe that it is worth something. That we can be patriots, that we can manipulate the story of Thanksgiving into a day of sharing rather than a tribute day Puritans gave to their god for a plague that ran through the Wapanoag tribe.

I consider fiction dangerous. Not readily because it is raw and pushes boundaries, but because it so often doesn’t.

When I started writing We Had No Rules I was coming off of the realization that my homophobia and desire to be recognized by the homophobic mainstream literary world was keeping me from writing authentically. My imagination became radicalized and I delved into it to explore all the voices, all the aspects of my queerness that had been silenced by my fear.

I wanted to live through my fiction. So I took the kind of narratives that often held white middle class straight people and populated them with white middle class queers, and I suddenly realized our complicity in systems of violence were even more apparent. If a middle aged white lesbian abuses power just like a middle aged white straight man, does it get read the same way? If a twenty-something roommate who is a man “instructs” another 16-year-old roommate who is a woman on how to touch his dick and tells her it isn’t sex, how is it different than if we set this story amongst queer, woman-identified people during the current era of our nostalgia: the 90s? It reveals that even though the cultural story around abuse of power may have changed, the actual culture hasn’t yet. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, even though I was appalled by the actions of the characters in my stories, I didn’t get a little turned on as I wrote them.

A few years after I published my story — the one the editor had called out as including abuse — I was getting ready to go to a tribute reading for June Jordan. It was hot in my attic bedroom, when I dropped my towel and looked at my phone and saw a long text from a loved one apologizing for abusing me. I had confusing memories that I was just starting to recall. The story in my head always was that I was a disgusting sex fiend. I asked if they had been abused by a different person who I knew had caused me harm and we got on the phone.

“What I did was abuse,” they said. “I was a decade older than you. I was too young, they said, to be giving consent.” In fact, I was so young I couldn’t actually speak yet.

In The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson says of fiction, “I became a poet because I didn’t want to tell stories. As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain[… ]they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it.” As a product of the MFA, I can speak first hand about how we get away so often by just telling the story that people want to hear, with different characters and locations. We comfort each other by either confirming the stories we want to hear and are used to hearing, or creating stories that pretend the world isn’t crushing us.

Me and my loved one had the same abuser, though it took different forms for each of us. I sat there sweating, completely naked, my curly hair frizzing from the heat, and I felt my whole life story tip me over. I was nauseous, many thoughts spun through my head and one of the prominent ones that rose to the surface was:

That editor was right.

That scene might not be meant as abuse, but it borders on it because of the power dynamic and the uncertainty of consent.

I was sexual before I could talk. It was meant as care.

I don’t know the difference between abuse and care.

I can not put more stories out into the world that might confirm for someone that what is happening in their lives is better than it is.

I revised every story in the collection from this lens. I feel responsibility for this, but not shame. How would I know the difference between abuse and care in my life? Even if someone grew up in settings where this didn’t take place, it’s nobody is immune to American culture, where we are given a narrative of normalized abuse again and again. The abuse in the family, the abuse between one another is first learned by the abuse of the state.

I don’t only mean the abuse of power and violence of specific men against women, but the way in which the horrors of slavery have never fully been addressed with reparations to Black Americans, or how the American government continually initiates war, or the way that it completely ignores a public health crisis. Or the fact that the police force was created to patrol enslaved peoples and squash rebellions and keep all people — but especially Black and Indigenous people — in a constant state of terror. And public opinion is just now getting around to the idea that there might be a problem with police. If we all truly understood the difference between abuse and care, we wouldn’t demand prison for our enemies. We wouldn’t get away with ignoring survivors and we wouldn’t be so easily assuaged by someone getting cancelled.

We would believe the actual fact that, as Mariame Kaba put in her New York Times opinion piece “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” that “there is not a single era in United States History in which the police were not a force of violence against Black people.” I don’t know anyone who has ever been helped by the police, and yet this narrative that we will be in a crime-filled chaos if we don’t have the police pervades our thinking. Many of us literally can’t imagine it. For many Americans people being “helped by the police” means watching someone be criminalized, or carried off to jail or murdered. It is terrifying to think of the ways that the narratives we construct in fiction may enhance this inability to imagine anything outside of the systems we live in, or to even question them.

It is terrifying to think of the ways that the narratives we construct in fiction may enhance this inability to imagine anything outside of the systems we live in, or to even question them.

We are ready for the simplest storyline because we do not know how to hold the complexity of generations of hurt and trauma. The #MeToo movement has left me distraught whenever I go online. So often, we cause harm because we simply don’t know that it’s harm; we were treated with harm as children and translated it as care. We go to the narrative of cancelling and punishment because we are tired of being forced to forgive our abusers, when no one around us reckons with the initial hurt that was caused. And people rarely want to take accountability because they themselves were harmed in this way long — or not so  — long ago. We can consider Junot Diaz’s disclosure of the abuse he experienced as a child, and how it was presented as a way to absolve him of true accountability, rather than an owning of and calling forth of the cyclical nature of sexual violence in direct ways that validated the experience of those he later harmed.

The biggest way I’ve grown as a writer through this story collection, is to examine when I’m only telling a story on the surface, when I simply just want something to be true — when I don’t consider the ways that I might be crafting a narrative that recreates my own power, not seeing another character’s source of pain. I knew, at least in the short story “We Had No Rules”, that the older sister wouldn’t be able to put a name to the confusing scenario that had taken place between her younger sibling and the roommate. And that it was very likely she would come up with a more innocent scenario — a kiss, was that all? How quickly the younger sibling agrees.

In Kaitlyn Greenidge’s opinion piece for the New York Times “The Hollowness of This Too Shall Pass” she writes of our current COVID-19 crisis and our inability to say that this will pass, that things will go back to normal. “This crisis is different. First there is the reality of this virus, an infection that most reports suggest will not necessarily end, will instead recur, reverberate, return through our communities again and again. And then there is the irreparable tear to daily life that occurs under quarantine. For the millions of people who were just thrown into economic ruin, there will not be a return to normal.”

Now that mass media has opened up the violent narrative of current and past policing, there is no returning to normal. To do so is to be complicit in murder and terror. Murder, terror and “power over” is the water we drink as Americans and the air we breath. When our literature or media ignores this, does it reveal how much we are comforted by violence because it is familiar? How ready we are to accept the familiar, rather than confront the possibility of a new unknown?

I thought about this when I watched Portrait of A Lady on Fire. I’ve seen it three times, twice in the theater once at home on Hulu. I’m a sucker for desire and longing and how their push-pull is distinct yet linked, and this movie did everything right for me. I was ready for that lesbian gaze.

When it premiered on Hulu, I readied the house for a perfect viewing experience. I turned off all the lights, I arranged the couches just so, and everyone in my house came upstairs. None of them had seen it before and I was high off of their first time experience. I was so excited when it was done and they oohed and awed and then my best friend — who has the best brain I know and who has been working around the clock to ensure janitors are recognized as essential workers and receive pay and sick leave — brought up her criticism.

“I don’t like how that worker was treated,” she said. She is referring to the moment when the maid, Sophie, who has just had an abortion, is roused out of bed because her boss, Hélöise, has suddenly had the urge to recreate the abortion scene and have her other worker (and lover) paint it. “She’s not getting paid for that,” my friend said. “No one asked her if this is okay. She did it because she was supposed to.”

I thought about how I had gone along with it because the scene was beautiful and, of course, a worker who has just had an abortion would be roused by her mistress and be demanded to work. It was familiar and my brain was likely eased by that familiarity. There is a sense of togetherness in their shared moments, but in the end, the other two women are always in a position of power over the maid.

As a self-declared Sciama-Head I want to believe that the filmmaker knows this and saw this because it fits into the “Yes And” theme of her film. The anticipation and the loss exist at the same time, life and death nestle next to each other, inequality and moments of erotic creation pose in front of a fire. But what if Sophie had refused to be painted? What if she refused to be roused? What would that do to Hélöise’s idea of what’s shared? Would she see the illusion? To actually have equality, Hélöise would have to give up power and also be aware of how much power she has over someone else’s body, even in a misogynistic society that limits her own. Hélöise has more power than she realizes and her desire for equality is not amongst all women, but of women of her class.

In my story, I initially wanted a sex scene with questionable consent to be okay and be accepted as sexy and quirky. This is because almost every sexual experience since I was a child until I was 34 had questionable consent — I’m 38 now. I wanted to write this short fiction because I wanted to claim it and have power over it. It’s an understandable action, but I surrendered my power as a writer, when I allowed a narrative of joy to whitewash a narratives of harm. I relied on this society’s limiting view of harm to do the writing for me. The true work was in returning to that story, and every story in the collection, to examine where I was relying on something that was actually violence and taking control of the narrative by bringing the reader’s awareness to it. As a storyteller, I must be aware of the stories my characters are concocting of their experience. I have to manage perspectives so that the reader can see all the various stories at work, especially the systems of oppression that layer and blind fold us, the way we currently mask our mouths and noses.

I developed many stories to survive an abusive parent: that I came into the world too sexual, that my desire is too much and I need to hold myself back, that I don’t deserve to come, that it doesn’t matter if I don’t like something because I’ll learn to like it — I’ll learn. That I need to apologize and apologize, crying outside a door until I black out, because I need to be forgiven because “what will I do if you don’t love me anymore? I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for but I need you to love me.”

We know these narratives. They’re familiar. They set us up to believe it doesn’t matter when the police tear gassed the crowd marching in Seattle at 11th and Pine, that gas wafted up and choked people in their apartments. Because it was the protestors’ fault, wasn’t it? The rubber bullets, the missing eyes, the asthma attacks, the cardiac arrest. The police chief in Seattle stated, “if the City Council takes [teargas] away, we’re back to batons and devices like that.”

They’ll show us how to love it. They’ll teach us. We’re gonna miss choking on the gas when they’re done with us. I want to see these “devices” laid out on a table. How will we continue to codify these tools and when will the stories we tell finally betray them? 🌋

Edited by Kamala Puligandla

In Pursuit of a Pirate

This is an abridged excerpt from Anna Sansom’s latest book, ‘Desire Lines’ (published by The Unbound Press).

When I first met my Pirate, I desired to be hers. But she offered me friendship only. Friendship was a good start and I was pleased that she would even consider me worthy of that. She was older, cooler, wore leather; I was still youthfully naïve and sometimes liked to be home, for cocoa, by ten.

We were just friends the first night she stayed over. I only had a single bed and there was little choice but to press our bodies close together: one big spoon and one little spoon; synchronized turning in the night.

My desire for her followed me around like a lost dog. It would scratch at the door, whining and begging to be let out. The dog was my constant companion and came everywhere with me: including into the small office where I worked. One day I gave in. I opened a new document on my PC, decreased the font size so it couldn’t be read from the next desk, and began to type a story, shaping my lust into erotic sentences that I hoped would seduce her in body and mind. That first outpouring of emotion was a story that featured thinly disguised versions of ourselves. She was the pirate who sailed into town, fascinated all the ladies, and unsettled all the men. I was the maiden who looked her straight in the eyes and offered a complicit smile, before waiting for her outside of the tavern. I offered her willing flesh with no attachments. As Captain of her ship, her below-deck chambers did have enough room to swing a cat: she swished knotted leather tails over my back and buttocks before fucking me roughly with her fist. In return I drowned myself in the brine of her cunt, swimming without air as she rode my face and came with her fingers tangled in my mermaid-maiden hair.

She knew I wanted more than friendship. I had already declared my love for her in the kitchen of my shared flat. She had barely concealed her sigh, commanded me to sit down, and then straddled my lap. Taking my face in her hands, she summoned my embarrassed gaze to meet hers. “I am not the one,” she said simply. “But I love you,” I countered. “But I am not the one.”

I wasn’t able to tell her that I wasn’t looking for “the one”. I desired her. I loved her. And, still only in my early twenties, I wanted to shag her. She was the most sexually confident woman I’d ever met and I wanted to roll around in that confidence like a lottery winner on a bed of dirty money. I wanted to inhale her through every pore of my skin, absorbing the electricity of her self-assurance through osmosis.

The only spoken words I had to express the depth of these desires were “I love you”. Switching to my written voice I could say so much more. In the context of a story, I could describe to her the magnetism of her presence and the way I could feel her proximity in any room, even with my eyes closed. I could reveal how I danced my fingers over my pubic hair, imagining hers in their place and where else they would travel to. I could deposit myself at her feet, hands clasped behind my back, eyes lowered, heart pounding with impatience and fear, and know that – because this was just a story – there would be no shame to my capitulation.

Her response to my story surprised me: she adopted my characters and wrote me a tale of her own in return. Reciprocation was a potent aphrodisiac. Each new story we shared swelled the sexual tension between us. I didn’t need to be “the one”; I was the siren: luring her ever closer to the precarious position of friend turned lover.

When Fantasy Becomes Reality

It was theatrically fitting that our first time together was on an island: reached by ferry, not pirate ship, and in the pristine overnight accommodation of a four-star bed and breakfast. In contrast to the explicit scenes we had each imagined and penned over the preceding weeks, we made love on the floral-sheeted double bed, at three o’clock in the afternoon, with the TV on to disguise our carnal noises from the guests in the room next door. Audrey Hepburn watched on in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In our fantasies, the voyeurs had been the raggle-taggle bunch of the ship’s crew.

Reality and fantasy can be uncomfortable bedfellows. I couldn’t come. We were expected at dinner. The end of the movie signaled time up and quick showers before joining the other guests at the single, family-style, polished mahogany table. We went for a walk after the meal. Strolling hand-in-hand as we had done many times before, yet this time with the knowledge that my fingers, laced between hers, now held the memory of her intimate scent.

Star-crossed Lovers?

One day she invited me to a showing of Baz Luhrmann’s newly released Romeo and Juliet. We sat in the back row of the cinema. “Put your coat in your lap,” she instructed. I lay my jacket across my knees. It was my biker’s jacket: heavy, thick leather and shiny buckles. The weight of it across my shoulders was reassuring to me as I stomped my way through the streets at night. The smell delighted me every time I put it on: an acknowledgment of my own sexual truth and my desire to release my animal self.

The movie started in a blaze of sound and color. My Pirate worked her hand under the leather across my lap, and tucked her fingers between my thighs. She separated my legs a little more to her liking and began to stroke me, adding to the heat already residing in my crotch. Her eyes were fixed on the screen ahead, while her fingers played out their own story: easing open the button on my jeans and finding the elastic waistband of my knickers. Staring straight ahead too, I shifted a little in my seat, positioning my cunt closer to her fingers and allowing her to dip into the pooling moisture that she had drawn there.

The movie was beautiful, compelling, emotional: an MTV-styled telling of the classic tale of love found, love forbidden, and love lost. I was entranced by the story and by the intensity of the sensations deep in my belly and womb. Tears were rolling down my cheeks by the time the lights came up: equal parts grief for the star-crossed lovers and for the emptiness I felt when my Pirate had finally disconnected her fingers from me.

The clandestine meetings between Romeo and Juliet mirrored this afternoon cinema rendezvous. It wasn’t our parents who objected to our coupling, however; secrecy was required to protect our respective girlfriends.

During the time that our friendship turned sexual, we had both acquired other relationships. We were both polyamorous, except I had no words for, or any understanding of, that concept back then. All I knew was that I loved my girlfriend, and I loved my Pirate, and I wanted to be in a relationship with both of them. The fact that my Pirate and I both had other girlfriends was not enough to deter us, but it did make us furtive. The only model I knew was monogamy, and that meant that the only way to have two lovers was to be prepared to cheat on one. My desire convinced my heart that betrayal was necessary.

Life in Another World

One day we sailed away together. I had a small rucksack packed with overnight necessities and had booked us a room in a hotel. The trip would take about two hours on the water with an easy wind. My job was to make tea and occasionally take the tiller, while my Pirate dealt with the sails and other technicalities. My hand rested on the tiller and I thought back to those first story exchanges. We always wrote ourselves as the heroines of the stories. In the realm of fantasy, I was sensuous and submissive; my Pirate was daring and dominant. In her story, she had straddled the tiller and fucked me with it, the smooth, polished wood sliding inside me, its passage eased by the slickness she had built between my thighs. Now here I was with my hand lightly gripping the shaft of the tiller, feeling the varnished surface cool against my palm. It was wider in girth than I could ever take in real life and had a bulbous head that would have been impossible for me. But my encounters with my Pirate were not limited to the confines of reality. They existed in my Otherworld: a place where we could meet, unencumbered by our other roles and duties. No longer girlfriend or daughter or lover. Simply she and me.

That was how I reasoned my deceit: Otherworld was my parallel universe; my Sliding Doors. In Otherworld, I could be the most authentic version of my sexual self. Here I was able to rub my cheek against the leather of her boots, crawl naked across a room, and welcome the sharp bite of her teeth around my nipples.

In the days before mobile phones and social media, it was easy to disappear and be left alone. Time had a different feel: there was no checking in to be done, no updating of statuses, no fear of missing out. This focused time was a gift. The evening and the darkening night stretched before us: me, my Pirate, and a bed. The only fly in the ointment was the unplanned arrival of my period earlier in the day. We looked at the white sheets on the bed and I fetched a towel from the bathroom: we were going to make a bloody mess.

Together Forever?

One day she sailed away without me, moving to another country and another time zone. We agreed that I could visit her for a few days and I packed my bag for a five-night stay at her small apartment. The length of time was significant. “Give me a week,” she’d once promised, “and you will be mine forever.”

We had dabbled with power and pain in our affair. My early stories had clearly stated my interest in sadism and masochism, domination and submission, and it was my Pirate who had first introduced me to the hardcore, leather dyke, erotica of Pat Califia. My Pirate was good with a flogger and excellent at giving commands and direction. I was open to discovering more of what my body and soul could take in pursuit of my pleasure, and hers. My orgasms were still unreliable, but my willingness to explore was consistent.

We pushed the boundaries first in our shared fantasies, and then in real life. One of her stories had featured a scene that initially shocked and then quickly captivated me. The story took place the night before the pirate was due to set sail once more. The evening had built to a crescendo and there was just one more thing the pirate wanted to do to the maid before she bid her adieu. The cabin was lit by candles. In the flame of one, the pirate placed her insignia ring, held in place by tongs until it had absorbed enough heat to show a faint glow. The maid, naked as per the pirate’s preference, was challenged to show her obedience and loyalty by pressing her flesh against the hot metal. She would be branded, like cattle, by the sign of the pirate.

She waited until the last night of my visit before showing me the shaped metal wire and the pigskin-covered journal that she had been practicing on. In the absence of those two extra days, she invited me to give her a piece of my skin in exchange for my freedom. This was her way of owning just enough of me to give us both the reassurance of the endurance of our bond, despite whatever circumstances life might throw at us. We had long agreed that a full-time relationship between us could not work. But, for a few intense days each year, we were magnificent.

She demonstrated the heating of the wire in a candle flame and the press and smolder as it made contact with the pigskin. We both looked at the permanent imprint left on the cover of her book and then I ran my finger over the mark. Her mark. What did it mean to want her to mark me? In the story it had been about self-sacrifice: the maid had to initiate the movement onto the heated ring. My loyalty and obedience were not in question. To accept a branding, though, would be to declare myself hers. It would be a mark of ownership – even if just for a few days or nights every year.

I offered her my arm and pointed to a patch of virgin skin between two freckles. “There.” “Are you sure?” I held my arm in place and nodded. She reached for a length of rope: “I don’t want you to jerk away.” “I won’t,” I assured her. “Just in case,” she replied as she secured my arm in place and held the metal to the flame. It only took moments for it to begin to glow. I closed my eyes. A moment of intense searing and then her hands undoing the ropes and her mouth on mine, kissing me deeply. We’d done it.

The scar is my permanent reminder of the love and passion we shared. We had over a decade of growing together before she was diagnosed with a cancer that quickly took her life. I was grief-stricken. It was so very lonely in Otherworld without her, and no one fully knew or understood what had gone on between us. The extreme lows I felt after her death mirrored the extreme highs I’d experienced during our times together. We were so very human in our fears, our fights, and our vulnerabilities, and yet – when we were together – we were also divine.

Following the path of my desire was messy and painful as well as glorious and courageous. It took me on numerous incredible journeys – journeys that I still make today as I continue to explore the ever-evolving landscape of my sexuality and how I need to express it. I regret the lies and secrecy that shrouded our relationship, but I do not regret one precious moment that I shared with her. She held the unique place of best friend and lover. A piece of my skin is forever hers and a corner of her heart will forever be mine. 🌋

The Private Activism Of Personal Connection

In college, there was an art studio class called Art As Activism taught by a well-known African-American artist. We shall call her, L.. When I mentioned my interest in the course, I was told immediately by my peers that the professor was tough. No one explicitly said what was difficult about her. The rumors were taken at face value, though I felt that they were evident of a larger issue of discrimination. I couldn’t help but notice how often students referred to Black women professors as difficult. This lady, here — she makes you do work, they forewarned. I mean, of course she does. We’re in college. So I signed up.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Art As Activism shook me. Not because of the amount of classwork
or the nature of her exercises. The demands were reasonable and measured. Her teaching style was frank, enlightened, and humoring. She was kind. This class was challenging, because activism is challenging.

When her assignments demanded disruption, I was outright hesitant. I did want attention. I did not like attention. Even if I were in the midst of a demonstration with hundreds of people, I barely muttered the chants. I really did not want people staring at me, especially while I spoke about subjects I cared about. To this day, my voice cracks. Sometimes I cry. Back then, at the tender age of 21, bursting into tears in front of my peers was unacceptable. However, I was an overachiever and wanted to do well in L.’s course. For the very shallow purpose of maintaining my GPA, I ignored my physical discomfort and lowered my personal guard.

After a few tough feedback sessions with the professor, I decided to rise to the occasion. There was an assignment that required us to orchestrate a performance that addressed a cause. I chose to highlight the missing Black women and girls in the United States. If I remember correctly, at that time, there were around 64,000 missing Black women and girls. I was a Black girl living in America. Neglecting their stories would be like erasing my own. It was unfathomable. There were two aspects of my project. The first was writing THERE ARE 64,000 MISSING BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA on the sidewalks and the walls. In a week’s time, the school ordered to have it washed away. The second part was gathering a group of students who were willing to count to 64,000 during lunch hour at the student center. The place would be packed. There were around 10 volunteers. The purpose of this, I reasoned, would be to feel the enormity of this number. To really register in our physicality how unattainable the number 64,000 is, to feel the weight of their absence.

So, we started to count. And slowly, others started to count too. They were on their laptops whispering numbers. They had sandwiches in their mouths, counting between bites. I walked around waving my arms to encourage them to be louder, fiercer and, soon, everyone in the student center was entranced. Synchronized chanting. An incantation. I assumed that very few people knew why they were counting and that made the moment even more beautiful. We possessed them; the women and girls possessed us.

Then, mouths got tired. Things died down. Only the volunteers were left. And soon after, we stopped too. I suppose that was the deeper, unintended message behind our small movement: the all too welcome return of the mundane. The volunteers gave me feedback. The feedback was very helpful. L. was pleased. I got a B+. Life continued on. I graduated.

College is a place of immense contradiction. A real, imaginary place. Pre-existing systems of oppression insidiously organize and educate a handpicked community. You are able to address actual affronts to humanity as a homework assignment. And sometimes you care more about the letter grade than you do the cause. Sometimes the cause is the letter grade. “Agh, everybody else is gonna pick climate change, so what’s left?” For this reason, I never called myself an activist. In spite of how good I felt bringing attention to the absences within our community, I identified as a performer. A poser. Activism to fulfill a college assignment is one thing. Dedicating my post-graduate life to the massive injustices wreaking havoc on our planet is another.

The stakes felt higher, and were higher, outside of the controlled campus environment. My financial well-being and personal comfort definitely outweighed my political stance. One could say that as soon as I officially settled into the job hunt, my interest in activism dissipated significantly and my values went to the wayside. I watched the women’s march trail down the street from my place of work instead of bounding out the front door to join, because well — I needed the hours. And with every job I took on — at one point I had three at once — the more tired I became, and the more my activism looked like boycotting morning television and leaving meat out of my diet.

I was overly concerned with two things: proving to myself I could be successful and proving to others that I was successful. That mentality of overachievement followed me right into the next phase of my life. Living in Washington, DC, I was surrounded by examples of successful Black women with their corporate jobs and shared apartments, and I craved not only the stability, but also the image. I couldn’t just leave college and become a hostess (which I did). I had to take an internship at a museum (which I did). I had to work for a start-up (did that, too). And I had to do it all while wearing a designer label. I had to secure the bag. Personal success and comfort overshadowed any political or social turmoil, because my grind dictated that it had to. If a sit-in happened to land on the time and date of a meeting, well I guess I’ll watch the footage on Facebook and send positive energy through the screen to the folks who made time. Interestingly, this method satisfied me for a while. It felt justifiable, unlike blissful ignorance.

So, yeah, I worked hard to stave off feelings of inadequacy and meet expectations. Real hard. I happened to land a few jobs in the process. Checks and panic attacks, too. Many tearful nights. And an updated resumé. Almost a year and a half out of college, I was shopping for rooms in shared basement apartments with bags under my eyes and doubts in my mind. My vision of success was actively being realized, and simultaneously fading. Was this vision mine or someone else’s? That was an easy question to answer. The real mystery was who I actually wanted to be, now that I finally understood who I was not. I was not the upper middle class Black women with a corner office and fifty unread emails. I was also not a prospective graduate student.

I find it difficult to put into words how I made my next decision. I suppose, I wanted to desire life again and for life to desire me. So, I saved 5,000 USD and left the country. I started in Paris, then went to Germany. Two years later and I’m still here.

There are a number of reasons why I decided to stay in Berlin. I could ramble on and on. The original deciding factors were: affordability, creativity, community, and safety. Within a few months, I was able to secure a Freelance Artist Visa and find odd jobs that strangely enough paid my rent, fed me, and entertained me. With my disposable income, I could reinvest in my interests as a creative. That was very pleasing. I also found a brilliant network of creative Black women who were more than willing to impart wisdom and lend a helping hand. When it came to deciphering Berlin culture and society, people who had gone through the expatriation and immigration processes made themselves available to a newcomer like myself. They sent legal contacts without hesitation and opened their homes to me during my 7-month bout of homelessness in the city. Don’t be shocked. Seven months is a normal, even gracious, time-frame.

However, one aspect of the city that truly appealed to me was the safety. I am not referring to how I feel walking home at night. I am talking about the comfortable and fluid exchange of ideas and culture. Exchange is an indicator of safety, because true conversation happens in a state of fearlessness. Exchange, free from fear, is mutually beneficial and inspires. Since moving to Berlin, I have had intimate in-depth conversations with people from all over the world. I have spoken — not “chatted up”, but literally opened my heart and mind — to individuals from: South Korea, Vietnam, Bavaria, London, Argentina, France, Portugal, Brazil, Mauritania, South Africa, Romania, Russia, Sudan, Pakistan, Algeria, Poland… That’s a short list. In almost every place I’ve visited in the United States, our supposed “melting-pot”, I had never experienced this level of organic exchange in which genuine connection form across ethnocultural and socioeconomic boundaries. By way of this heightened connectivity, I rediscovered my long-buried interest in activism.

Generally, people are afraid of one another. Afraid to be shot or robbed, which is a valid and unquestionable fear, but also afraid to connect. I don’t mean in public, or on television, or on the news. I mean the small revolutions that happen in private conversations, smiles, glances with someone very different from yourself. I mean apologies and sustained eye-contact. Non-flirty and sincere. Actively connecting in this way, I simply started to care deeply about other people again. And not only for other Black people, or other Black women, but everybody. Even those who I was taught to hate, I wanted to know and understand.

I remember a conversation I had with my boyfriend. We were on our way to Barcelona. We were tired from the erratic travel schedule, but somehow I had energy to ramble about social injustice. This is my Aquarian habit. On and on I went about East Turkestan and reverse engineering and “reeducation” and our complicity and how everything seemed to be made in China. How could we fight back if we’re actively contributing to their industrial revolution and neo-colonialist campaigns? I was frustrated. I was boiling. I was absolutely livid. My boyfriend suddenly turned to me and soberly declared something along the lines of: Why do you care about Uighurs when there are problems in the States you could be solving? He started to talk about public education in Washington D.C. as an example. “There are Black people in your very own country, in your hometown, who are suffering,” he concluded.

That’s when I realized what I stood for. In my country, everything feels so Black and white. The pre-meditated dichotomization of a very diverse nation, in which individuals collectively face complex and inextricably linked systems of oppression, is a capitalistic endeavor. Period. Everything simply is not Black/White. Man/Woman. Rich/Poor. Gay/Straight. Fat/Skinny. Us/Them. Yet, we celebrate and encourage loyalty to category even during our universal struggle for freedom. I am telling you like I told him: If it looks like injustice, I give a fuck. And I give a fuck, because we are all connected. Fighting against the unfair imprisonment of Uighurs is fighting against injustice everywhere. The spirit of change is boundless, borderless, nameless.

I know there’s a language and culture of allyship. I am not saying that I went through this entire journey just to realize that I could be a good ally. I’ve stood in protests as an ally for a cause I felt deeply about, and still had this feeling of remoteness and disconnection and awkwardness. My true concern is the way in which our identities preemptively limit who we decide to intimately connect with, listen to, learn from, and fight for. Instead of embracing plurality and cross-pollination, we blatantly erect borders and bar perspectives on our timelines and within our communities. And these borders just don’t break themselves down at a march. They cause our movements to become cold, mechanics of truth rather than a lived experience of unity. We go from holding hands in public to slandering each other in private. Our inner circles remain homogenous, especially in thought, while we scream for inclusivity on the frontlines.

I am an activist. As such, I meet duplicity with interconnectivity. I prefer a private conversation to a public demonstration. I am not going to play eeny-meeny-miney-moe with social justice issues to appease divisive, anti-earthling constructs. And being the introverted activist that I am and always have been, I will turn down a megaphone for the pen. 🌋

Edited by Kamala Puligandla

Rabbit Hour

I thought about the rabbits to distract myself as I drove; I would get to see the rabbits.

We had long ago stopped looking in this part of town. But the city aquatic complex was far enough away from where the loss had been anyway that it felt safe once I got to the sports fields, arrayed like pasture. The days were getting shorter, I usually didn’t get to the pools now until the enormous halogen towers were already on, though the sky was still peachy with everything else in shadow.

It took so little distance from the house to not feel anymore like I was someone who needed to be starting medication. It would be easy. I could cancel the next appointment; all that would take was another few embarrassing texts.

I avoided the men on the way back to their cars, sagging in their swim trunks. At that hour the parking lot didn’t feel unsafe, but it still looked like a place that looked like a person could be unsafe. The sense, from where? The movies or something, that a places that looked like that were where you were in danger.

The receptionist who took my five dollars didn’t recognize me without my mom standing next to me. My mom and I, who looked like the older and newer models of the same woman.

The receptionist took my folded bill, and found me in the computer, chewing on her lip. She had good makeup on, and the same logo-ed jacket as the bored lifeguards. I would have guessed she was in high school, though if I’d seen here somewhere else I wouldn’t have known her age. She looked like the twenty-two year old actress who played a high school girl in the shiny show I was watching, about teenagers doing drugs. Her makeup looked like she took beautiful photos over herself, and that she’d never been overweight. I imagined what her Tinder would look like.

Before I had come to go swimming, I had changed my profile photo, because it had seemed like everyone on there was ugly and frightening. But probably it wasn’t that the town was so bad, but that the algorithm must have brought me down a few notches.

In the earlier photo I had on a big puffy winter coat and glasses, my feet planted wide apart. In my face I could see what a great day I’d had, when the photo was taken, looking at the person behind the camera with love in my eyes on a cold street in a small town other than this one. I looked happy.

But I didn’t look sexy. Would I have swiped right on that confident person standing with her feet wide apart, looking like I knew I would inherit a kingdom? No. Even I wanted the look of the other kind of princess, the one who knows she’s valuable and about to be sold.

Alone I took a hundred photos of my face, adjusted the lights in my room, and took a hundred more. They all looked good as little thumbnails next to each other, but in each picture on its own I could see that my eyes were sad. When I tried to smile it got worse, the look I’d been avoiding in certain other women’s profiles. If I saw sadness was about to break through a face, I passed it by.

You think when you’re a teenager that you’re never gonna turn into that, one of the slumped adult just making do as best they can.

It seems like four photos and six sentences shouldn’t be able to contain all the complexities of a person. But it did, somehow. For example, when someone’s bio said, “these six sentences and this photo can’t contain all the complexities of a person,” I could tell that it had. Mine said, “want to get coffee?”

Finally one of the pictures I took of my face looked somehow sleek rather than sad, an accident of angle and lighting where you couldn’t see anything about me from my features, with a cascade of hair; enough of the right data points to be sexy.
Just the single photo, and within the hour, there were more pictures of men in suits, with six-packs, and with boats suddenly mixed in, and pretty women with good filters on, and what seemed like fewer car dealership guys and lumpy faces looking bleary in the flash.

But even then, it was always grotesque to look at that many different people in a few minutes. Especially the men who didn’t know how to objectify themselves, leaving folded chins and the blurred glass of their eyes, the grainy pixilation of upped-contrast veins in gym mirrors; as if none of us knew how to warp our images into anything except what men wanted them to be. Like video game characters, the males hulking brutes and the women creamy and hairless. Or they hid their faces behind expanded emoji and blurs and neck-downs, leaving just the folds of flesh and t-shirt. I didn’t understand why they were afraid, ashamed?

But when they didn’t know how to hide properly behind posing and lighting, it saved me from them. It was better that so many didn’t know how to hide the way I was trying to hide.

I didn’t know what anyone on Tinder would have looked like if they had known how to try to look the way I wanted them to look. I didn’t even know what I wanted them to look like.

Maybe if they had done it for me they would look like the snapchat filters where everyone was a cartoon animal, skin like pudding. No one wanted women with snapchat filters on their faces, but no one wanted them without it either.
Even me. When I came across another women’s profile who had come to it with honest rawness–intelligence in her face, the skin around her eyes faintly creased, pictures of her backpacking and dirty–even I didn’t want it, couldn’t want it, even though if you asked me what I wanted I would have said exactly that.

I looked back at the picture of myself in the poofy winter coat. No one wanted it, and so it gave me nothing. I switched my photos, and put a filter on the new one to change the colors.

The pools outside were glowing, as they always were. The sky getting dark didn’t effect the blue-blue water. And there were the rabbits. On the fake-looking grass, munching away. And then rocking in their strange rabbit walk to sip chlorinated water from the edge of the children’s pool. Solar lights in the landscaping made the whole place look like a well-lit Eden.

I wondered if the rabbits cared that they had no night, just a bright day, and a perpetual twilight. They had everything that a wild rabbit needed: grass and water and damp dark landscaping with wide leaves to hid under, and perpetual twilight. But twilight was their hour anyway, now they had more of it.

I imagined the things that came and chased them were human children, clumsy and slow. The rabbits were used to it now. You could get really close to them before they would bolt.

Did the rabbits know they lived in rabbit heaven, I wondered, or were they just as scared when they were spooked as their leaner kin elsewhere?

I felt lapine myself, swimming with a kickboard with just my nose out of the water. But I liked to put my eyes right at the waterline, where I could see the fake pool color and the extinguished sunset still reflected like printed silk.

I squeezed my stomach underwater. Since I’d lost weight, the skin pinched there weirdly, like a deflated balloon. It didn’t show up in photos; I had to take it in my hand before it deformed and mottled, and you could see how much of it there once had been.

I’d seen horrible videos coming up on pornhub recently, taken entirely in snapchat. Someone’s hairless vulva made all the more creamy, the penis weirdly mollified and smooth. I wanted to know what it meant that we had all collectively arrived at this place, though I couldn’t guess.

By the time I got out of the pool, I had five messages. Waiting at the light, the slivers of passing headlights passed over the hood of my car like sparks.

You’re hot. You have a pretty face. So you’re bi? You could have a three-way with us. What are you up to tonight? You should put up more pictures.

There were blocks upon blocks of neighborhoods over there that I’d walked through when we were still looking, when it hadn’t been so many days yet that we’d had to give up. I had left pain all over there, blotting out whole areas I was now half-avoiding on the route home.

Everything had already happened, we had already searched everywhere. There was nothing more to be done.

Before breaking up, my ex and I had housesat for someone who had a small pool, with a light you had to turn on yourself when it got too dark. He had gotten out of the water first, fumbled with the Bluetooth speaker to the soundtrack of a movie we had just seen.

And it was all still so sad, but it had made it feel better to dance slowly in the water, pretending I was just moving, until he said it looked just like dancing, and then I was dancing, dragging my fingers so they left smooth waves behind them.

I had always thought he was so pretty, but just out of the light of the pool he looked like a monster watching me. Just the wide shape of him, and the garden behind. I felt like an animal that was beautiful to be looked at. I felt wrong for feeling like that, and for liking it.

I had left for feeling like that. That pool had been so shallow, only up to my chest until the deep end.

“It will just sand the rough edges off,” the new psychiatrist had said, as if I was a piece of driftwood being shaped into décor.

How quickly was I supposed to bring that up if I went on a date with a stranger? I am a person in the process of having my rough edges taken off. You may find me more fun in four to six weeks. I could pretend until then.

You look like a fucking bitch, the first of the five messages said.

Yeah you too buddy, I wrote back. He unmatched before I could hit the button first, which felt like I had lost a small battle.

Laugh it off. How funny it was how little it took for violence to drip out of my screen. Maybe I could have turned it into a joke, somehow.

I hated that it made me feel bad, my heart beating faster just to think about it. I knew assholes exist. Why do I still care? This isn’t something worth caring about, I told myself.

The internet said that anti-depressant’s main negative symptom was “emotional blunting,” and that only half the people who reported it said it was a bad thing.

The internet said there were three-hundred and five breeds of domestic rabbits in the world. Wikipedia didn’t have images of all of them.

The air was just cold enough, the outdoor shower just far enough away to make me shiver by the time I got there. I got cold so easily now. The water ran across my scalp, getting warmer, until it was warm enough, and then delicious. The palm trees sounded like glossy magazine pages.

The municipal pool was deep everywhere, since it was only for adults. The kids had their own special pool, set into the concrete so even the rabbits could reach it to drink.

I turned off the water. There were two rabbits on the grass, jaws moving. The grass made them look so cute, like they weren’t real animals. As I got closer, one of them froze. The other one kept chewing. When I got a little closer, they both froze. Run, I thought. Why don’t you run?

They ran, but not very far. I walked away from the light with my flip-flops going slap, slap, slap, my shadow stretching in front of me.

First it was just my shape on the concrete, and as I got farther away it lengthened first into a fashion model, and then even father. The outline of a glorious, dripping Amazon, which stretching even father from that, until I became a ribbon of a dream-walker, sliding over the land, looking down from a great distance.🌋

Boyshorts and Girltrunks 101: Your Queer Underwear Guide

Boyshorts and girltrunks are increasingly common in the drawers of women and otherwise-identified people. I’m very passionate about always having cute underwear in general and this specific style of underwear specifically — especially these days when a solid boxer-brief can completely eliminate the need to ever wear pants! My underwear drawer is half thongs and half “girl trunks” — two styles that also meet my other intimate need, which’s no panty lines. Boxers for women are where it’s at.

Now, as a lesbian, I find myself often surrounded by others with similar preferences for boxer-briefs and boyshorts because LGBTQ Women and non-binary people have, historically, been especially inclined to wear boys/men’s underwear or “boy” cuts from the women’s section — and these days, unisex items produced by gender-expansive clothing brands. Back in 2015, we asked our readers what style of underwear they wear: 12% said boxers, 22% said boxer-briefs and 33% said boyshorts. I have no data to compare this to but I feel like this is probably more than the heterosexual and/or cisgender population.

What are Boyshorts and Girltrunks?

For years we’ve seen boxer-briefs or “Girltrunks” made for people who are not adult cis men (as in; no pouch for external genitalia) consistently get discontinued, but a new awareness of the market for this style has transformed the field in recent years. Especially of course TomboyX.

Also, I know that gender is a spectrum and a solid quarter of you likely don’t identify as female, but those words will come up a lot in this post because that is how fashion describes itself!

Underpants who identify as “boyshorts” run the gamut, especially with respect to coverage, so when I say “girltrunks” I’m referring to “boyshorts” (and sometimes men’s boxer-briefs) that cover your whole entire butt and then some. Here, I made you a graphic to explain the different types of underpants!

As you know, we like to diversify the imagery as much as possible here, but unfortunately underwear vendors prefer to focus on skinny white cis girls exclusively, even when modeling plus-size underthings! So that’s how that is.

Let’s begin!

Traditional Medium Coverage Boyshorts

The most common style of boyshorts stops just short of full ass-coverage. What makes this style different from traditional women’s underpants is the cut — they generally reveal less of the thigh and ass than traditional women’s briefs and have short, straight-cut legs and usually a lower waist. They’re exceptionally flattering and also very sporty/sexy. Sportysexy, if you will.

High Coverage Boyshorts

Depending on precisely what you’ve got going on w/r/t your body and butt size, these boyshorts might cover up your whole damn butt!!!

Girl Trunks / Boxer-Briefs for All Bodies

But the fullest coverage of all — a pair of underpants that will encase your entire butt and encircle the tops of your thighs — are boxer-briefs. Boxers for women! For centuries, intrepid lesbians have been scouring mens/boys underwear offerings in search of something that’ll do the trick. In addition to being super comfortable and nixing bunching up or panty lines that divide your buttcheeks on a diagonal plane, this style enables you to safely slip on a banana peel in a dress without letting the whole world know whether or not you wax your bikini line. Over the years, many women’s takes on this men’s classic have come and gone, mostly from Hanes and Calvin Klein, but it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and we’ve got plenty of options.

At the top of the pack is, of course, lesbian-owned TomboyX, who sells the exact style of underwear I’ve always dreamed of in a variety of colors and cuts. But they are not the only horse in the race anymore!

Mens / Boys Boxer Briefs for Women

Prior to TomboyX entering my life, I got my underpants from the H&M boys section (size 12-14Y) because they’re completely a men’s style, but were spandexy enough to wear under leggings. Unfortunately H&M appears to be OUT OF STOCK of this item. Other longstanding favorites from the other side of the aisle, like Uniqlo’s seamless boxer-briefs and Target’s Mossimo boxer-briefs, have vanished from the earth. American Apparel had a very popular boxer-brief situation we even printed our own words upon, but apparently under new ownership, quality has degraded, and the new owner’s shop is currently sold out of the item. But we’ve still got American Eagle boxer-briefs, a consistent staple of a masc lesbian wardrobe, remains tried and true!

Some styles of men’s boxer briefs basically count as shorts as long as you never leave the house (which, these days, well). Depending on your between-the-legs situation, you may or may not be looking to avoid a generous penis pocket. I personally eschew boxer-briefs that offer “enhancing” or “sculpting” or even “support,” which means I generally stick to 95%-100% cotton boxer-briefs. Again I tend to loot the boy’s section for these (Fruit of The Loom), but here are some grown-up sized options:

Funderpants

Who doesn’t love fun? Everybody loves fun, and that’s a fact!

Fun Patterns and Graphics: Trunks and Boxer-Briefs

Funderpants: Boyshorts Edition

Rainbows!

 Okay what are you waiting for, TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS!!!!

Hurtling at Full Speed Toward the Present

If there is one thing I can recommend, it is the simple pleasure of screaming in your car.

I discovered this pleasure on a summer day in 2014, somewhere on I-80 between Sacramento and Yosemite. Despite my environmentalist disdain for cars, I enjoy driving. I like the contradictions: that my body is moving 80 miles an hour and yet totally still. That I am surrounded by dozens of fellow travelers and yet totally alone.

On that day I was, as I often am, skating on the edge of a panic attack. I don’t remember why, if there even was a reason. Whenever my therapist asks where in my body I feel anxiety, I think of a parasitology course I took in college. The textbook described a parasitic mollusk that attaches to the underside of crabs. The parasite grows long, thin arms that penetrate the host’s underbelly and extend deep into its legs and claws and brain, controlling the nerves themselves until the crab is a brain-dead husk that obsessively cleans the parasite, even as the rest of its body deteriorates.

I usually tell the therapist I feel tightness in my chest.

Screams are often ripped from us, either through fear or fervor, but rarely does one think, soberly and with intention, “I would like to indulge in a scream,” and then do it. This reticence is a mistake. There are healthier ways of coping — exercise, journaling, meditation — but these often feel like solving a gas leak with a box fan. Far more satisfying to drop a lit match down your throat and feel the tension evaporate all at once, lungs and throat bathed in a cleansing flambé.

Screaming is, however, venue-limited. Pillows are useful in a pinch, but they deny you the pleasure of hearing yourself. On the freeway that day, I realized that the air whipping against edges of my Subaru creates a makeshift padded studio, rendering me acoustically isolated. I can scream at full volume mere meters from other drivers, completely unnoticed.

It’s possible that I’m wrong, and other drivers have heard me. If so, they’ve been kind enough not to stare.

“The year 2010 still sounds far off, almost unreachably far off, as though it were on the other side of a great body of water. If someone says to me that a very bad thing will happen in 2010, I may feign concern but subconsciously I file it away.”

Bill McKibben’s words in The End of Nature, one of the first books to seriously consider the long-term effects of climate change, read 30 years later as charmingly dated and worryingly relevant. A very bad thing did not happen in 2010, but it has been happening, slowly, during the thirty years since the book’s publication. More than half of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions have occurred after 1988, the year climate change became widely known and discussed in the scientific community. If high-consumption countries had started reducing emissions that year, they could have done so at a relatively leisurely pace.

You can track three decades of government inaction through the mounting exasperation in the epilogues of climate change books: Everything will be okay if we start now. If we start now. If we start right…. now. In 2020, that’s probably not true, depending on your definition of “we” and “okay.” Even in the most optimistic predictions of emission reduction, the carbon humans have already emitted will continue to impact the climate for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Today, the year 2050 is commonly used a marker for the mid-term effects of climate change. If current trends continue, warming will have caused unimaginable human suffering and the extinction of thousands of species.

A great body of water stands between me and 2050. I try to force my vague sense of dread into concreteness: if I got a mortgage now, I’d still be paying it off. A timber pine planted today will be just ready for harvest.

I will be 56 years old.

My screaming epiphany occurred during the first summer I worked outdoors, gathering data for ecologists. I worked similar jobs for the next six years, driving all over California: Sacramento to Arcata, Oakland to Fresno, Yuba City to Martinez. I found climate change in every landscape, in every season: Suspiciously fog-free coastlines, bone-dry riverbeds, almond trees blooming months ahead of schedule. A rouge April heatwave leaving my sweaty thighs stuck to the seat.

I still have the same car I did then, an old Subaru Outback with a leaky head gasket and a busted A/C. After half an hour on the freeway the catalytic converter will blink out, leaving the engine trailing smog and reeking of sulfur. I fret over my tailpipe emissions, but it’s a repair I can’t afford. Fretting is cheaper.

The only time I don’t smell sulfur is when I smell smoke, which is at least a week out of every year. A major fire, even one hundreds of miles away, can grey out the horizon so completely it seems like reality extends only fifty feet in any direction.

Last fall, the sky was still blue when Pacific Gas & Electric announced it would preemptively shut off grids across California. Unseasonably strong October winds were whipping through power lines, begging sparks to land on the hot, dry grass below. The risk, the company said, was too great.

I was driving through downtown Santa Cruz when the outages hit. I’d been warned repeatedly, but I still froze in momentary confusion as lit storefronts flickered off. At intersections, robbed of stoplights and streetlights, cars inched forward, each making its careful way in the dark.

In a few months the blackouts will likely return. A few years, and they’ll become an accepted part of our annual rhythm. PG&E says it will be ten years until they’re able to adapt the grid to our new, fire-hungry climate. I will be 36 years old.

I don’t drive much anymore.

A month ago, moving the last batch of clothes out of my old house, I took a left turn too quickly and busted a tire against the curb. My car is all-wheel-drive, meaning I should replace all four tires. Instead I limp by on a spare, ignoring the pained creaks of the misaligned suspension system. Mostly, I don’t drive.

Instead I walk. Being outside helps my breath find its proper pace, a process my therapist calls co-regulating with nature. The walk is supposed to help me maintain a sense of normalcy, though since the onset of the pandemic, even my walking habits have changed. I cross the street to give a wide berth to chalk-drawing children and fellow pedestrians. I allow wandering cats to brush against my shins but not my hands. When I intercept a friend on a run, I offer a tight smile, suppressing the urge to wrap my arms around his sweaty shoulders.

Passing a low-hanging branch of a loquat tree, I consider abstaining, then impulsively grab a fistful of fruit. I work out the large, hard seeds and drop them into my pocket before savoring the juicy mass of flesh. In early summer the Sacramento streets are warm, the loquats pleasantly sour. In a few weeks, the fruit will grow honey-sweet and wrinkled. The pavement will get hot enough to melt cheap sneakers. Each summer, the heat finds new records to break.

As the pandemic throttles the global economy, carbon emissions for 2020 are on track to decrease by eight percent, the most precipitous drop in history. If emissions decreased by that amount every year this decade, we could prevent the worst effects of climate change. That’s not a scenario most climate scientists anticipate. In all likelihood the economy will rebound, and carbon emissions with it. The pandemic could be, as author Arundhati Roy has written, a “portal,” a chance to remake our world and “rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.” It could also be a momentary pause before the gears realign and the machine resumes its work.

I use to believe that mental illness would prepare me for a world drastically altered by climate change. It was a seductive idea: all my life, before I worried about or even knew about climate change, I felt a vague sense of impending doom. That my catastrophic daydreams have some empirical backing, I thought, was a lucky coincidence. My nervous system had spent years anticipating disaster. When the wheels came off, I thought, I’d be ready.

Three months of living through a pandemic have punctured my confidence in this theory. Anticipation of suffering, it turns out, does not prepare you for it. For all that has changed, I feel much the same: I startle at loud noises, I twitch in my sleep. My worry helps no one.

Walking doesn’t help anyone either, but it feels nice. Whenever I can, I walk to a little stretch of the American River about a mile from my house in Sacramento, scrambling through cottonwood groves and patches of mugwort until I find a length of shore free of stereos and sunbathers. After a record drought year, the river is so low that anyone trying to launch themselves off the rope swings would break an ankle on the bare riverbed. I can walk a good thirty feet before the water reaches my shoulders, water so warm that my body slips in with ease.

As I push my feet off the sand and begin to float, a sluggish current tugs my toes backward, aligning my body with the river. A moment later I let my neck relax and my face finds the surface of the water. My head is ear-deep, so that one moment I barking dogs and shrieking kids, the next only the padded silence of submersion. In the moments between scissor-kicks, I feel my body slowly drifting seaward.

I turn my head for a deep breath and dive, emptying my lungs into the water. The scream, when I hear it, seems far away. I can hardly tell it’s mine. 🌋

I Grew Up In A House That Was Haunted

It was my first month living in a new city. I was 18, and in a freshman seminar called Race & Class in Los Angeles. One day, our queer Brown TA took us we went on a walk around the neighborhood. We started in the epicenter of my university’s fraternity row, where tanned blondes rode pastel beach cruisers past mansions with manicured lawns. In a loose pack, we walked to the end of “The Row” and crossed Figueroa, a main thoroughfare lined with fast food restaurants and gas stations. We crossed under the elevated 110 freeway.

On the other side, the Black and Brown people waiting at the bus stop were clearly not on their way to see what the sorority chef had made them for lunch. We arrived in a neighborhood with rows of small bungalows. Most houses had front yards with gardens and citrus trees. Wrought-iron fences lined the sidewalk. The TA pointed out gang-affiliated graffiti. We were less than a mile from the stately sorority houses, but it felt like an entirely different world. The idea was not for us to be gawkers, we were there to see firsthand the lasting effects of racially restrictive housing covenants. Our TA explained that the stark difference was in large part because of redlining, a four-tiered system the federal government created in the 1930s to determine access to federal home buying loans.

In 1939, the government agency’s description of the fraternity side said that residents were “professionals, retired capitalists and white collar workers.” It stated that the proximity to the University of Southern California and the area’s 0% “Negro” and 0% “foreigner” population gave the tract a “high yellow” grade according to their system, which was visualized through maps with tracts colored in green (neighborhoods where potential buyers would have the easiest time getting a mortgage), blue, yellow or red (where no mortgages would be available.)

Documentation for the neighborhood on this side of the freeway said it was a neighborhood of workers who were 40% Mexican, Japanese and low-class Italian and 50% Negro. The neighborhood was described as a “fit location for a slum clearance project” (a large portion was cleared to build the freeway in the ‘50s.) It got a “low red” grade.

Standing on the sidewalk and staring up at a palm tree, I felt guilty for being surprised that a low-income neighborhood looked so beautiful. My mind rushed to my hometown, Kansas City, a much smaller city than LA, where there was really one notable street starkly dividing the city’s Black and white residents. I had always been told that’s how it was, but I hadn’t been aware of the underlying political campaigns that established and maintained these boundaries. I knew which side I grew up on, but I didn’t want to think too hard about what that meant about me, standing here now, attending this university.

It’s embarrassing to admit now, but it hadn’t really occurred to me how my family’s property ownership on the predominantly white side of town was connected to the white supremacist historical events that created these divisions and continue to uphold them.

This essay is part of a radio series called Race Traitor, airing on the Heart.

There’s obviously a long, white American tradition of diminishing, denying or completely ignoring racial injustice. Even for those who are aware and do feel guilty, there’s an entrenched belief that letting yourself feel ashamed only produces defensiveness and disengagement. But this feeling of shame actually propelled me to find out more. I wanted to take inventory so someone else wouldn’t do it for me.

Growing up, I was told that when the house we lived in had been built, Black people and Jews would not have been able to live in it. It became a bit of a family joke, that we were Jews hiding in plain sight. We were able to joke about it because this exclusionary rule had been abolished, and hadn’t been enforceable for decades. But when I did some digging with this new information about redlining, I learned that not only was the neighborhood where my parents live and where I grew up a definite green in the redlining system, but the developer who built the neighborhood actually helped write the federal housing policy that became known as redlining.

And this man, J.C. Nichols, had been revered in my childhood, for dreaming up and building the lush, idyllic neighborhood where we lived. In finding out that the legacy of redlining was so connected to my childhood home, I started to wonder what else I harbored that no one had ever thought to explain to me. I wanted to understand how my family and I became this way: so oblivious to our direct complicity in white supremacy. I understood that white value systems are inherited and passed on, but I wanted to know more about how.

When I went to my mom, distraught with this new story about J.C. Nichols, she nonchalantly told me she already knew. “It’s no longer enforceable,” she said repeatedly. We argued about it, but my mom’s sense of herself as innocent was impenetrable. I needed backup.

I interviewed a sociologist, Margaret Hagerman, who spent years embedded in a white affluent community in the Midwest not unlike the one I grew up in. She wrote a book about her research called White Kids, which delineates how kids build their beliefs about race.

She told me, “I think there’s a commonsense understanding — and also some research, certainly from fields like psychology — that kids learn about these things as they trickle-down from their parents, right? That they’re reproducing how their parents think about the world and that’s how these ideas are passed on. So I actually try to resist that a little bit because what I find in my research is that while parents are shaping what their kids think, they’re doing so through the ways that they are setting up their kids’ social environment.”

A social environment, or the world parents design for their children, is part of what Hagerman calls the “racial context of childhood,” which is dictated by the set of decisions parents make for their children — where they live, who they’re friends with, where they travel, what media they watch, what conversations about race sound like.

“And so it’s less that the kids are just mimicking or reproducing their parents’ beliefs, it’s that the kids are interpreting the social world around them. But the cues that they are getting are certainly influenced and purposefully designed by their parents,” said Hagerman. “So if they don’t go to school with anyone who is different from them in any way, really, whether it be race, class, religion, politics… then they’re going to develop a particular set of beliefs which might connect very clearly with what their parents think but is also formed by the kid’s own participation in this learning process.”

What I took from this is that white parents can tell their kids that diversity is important, but when they raise them in all-white neighborhoods and send them to all white schools, if kids don’t experience diversity themselves, then the value of diversity is subsumed by what they do learn and see affirmed around them — whiteness as the norm.

I went to my mom armed with this information, prepared to kindly explain that not only were all the choices she made for me political, but they shaped my understanding of race and facilitated this blindness to my own position as a white person. I wanted her to understand that even though she purported to have anti-oppressive beliefs, her choices had undermined her good intentions.

I wanted to use my neighborhood as an example: she had raised me in this white enclave with a violent history that didn’t just happen to be that way — it was designed to be so, and I didn’t develop a sharp critical lens for seeing it until I’d left home.

This fit into a list I made of what I saw as the tenets of white motherhood:

• Your child’s comfort, safety and potential is a priority, even if securing that has negative effects on someone else’s child’s comfort, safety & potential.
• You say you believe in equality or anti-racism but you make choices that support racist & unequal systems.
• You think that your worldview is somehow neutral, universal or should be considered the default.
• You sometimes assume everyone thinks like you do or shares your experience.
• You expect people to empathize with your experience.
• You are rewarded, socially and financially, for appearing normal or good, and you believe in this as an acceptable strategy for people to get what they want or need.
• Wealth accumulation is a justification for your choices.
• You can become outraged when asked to divest from oppressive structures that benefit you.
• You believe or have felt the urge to treat gender as the primary power dynamic to struggle against.
• You feel entitled to safety.
• You think safety is a good alibi or justification for making choices, but you haven’t unpacked what safety means to you & how it might rely on racist stereotypes & fearmongering or propaganda supporting the existence of police.

I felt that it was important to define white parenthood — the set of ideals and ideas that white parents have historically shared. The choices white parents have made based upon these tenets have shaped and upheld many of the oppressive systems we live with, and they need to be interrupted.

Initially, my mom balked at the list. But over time and many conversations, with both my parents, they began to talk openly about their feelings. My dad admitted that knowing more about the man who created his neighborhood ruptured his emotional connection to living in that neighborhood. He didn’t feel like he could indulge in the same daydreams he always had, staring out the window and wondering what people had been seeing for the past ninety years the house had been standing.

My mom is less nostalgic. She was firm in not feeling bad about owning valuable property in her neighborhood, she says it’s because the exclusionary rules are no longer enforceable. But despite all my effort, my parents just don’t see the need to do anything to address the harmful effects of redlining, or to offset owning this property, whose value has benefitted from racially restrictive housing covenants.

I feel like it’s my responsibility to continue to guide my family through these questions, and keep having hard conversations. I’m grateful that interrogating my parents choices does not put me at risk of being disowned by them and I don’t fear their retaliation. I’m grateful that over time, it’s becoming part of the love between us to explore these questions. That’s how I want love between white people to look in my life.

I’ve now lived in LA for almost ten years, and I’ve figured out some ways to both acknowledge my complicity in oppressive systems and work to fight their root causes.

There are impactful and subtle ways to disrupt the lasting impacts of redlining. It was arguably the greatest white wealth generator of all time, and had devastating impacts for communities of color, which are still felt today. One way is redistributing white wealth. I like to give recurring, monthly donations to queer Black and Brown people and projects. Some young people, who stand to inherit wealth, have pledged to give it all away through Resource Generation. There are collectives like Make Yourself Useful in Chicago that encourage their community to give tithes, most recently focusing on white people redistributing some or all of their IRS Covid relief checks. Yes, our government should have already made reparations payments and plans, but instead of waiting around for that to happen, we should give now, and not expect anything in return.

Another strategy is supporting organizations like Moms For Housing, which, with the help of The Oakland Community Land Trust, successfully bought vacant housing from a predatory speculative real estate company to keep it permanently affordable for their community. White people should divest from profiting off a housing market that continues to be rife with injustice. Belief in land ownership supports erasure of Indigenous people’s rights and justifies racist policing. If you are a renter, you can join tenant organizing groups like the Los Angeles Tenants Union and KC Tenants in Kansas City.

Overall, we should be extremely educated about the history of where we live. When was the land originally stolen from Indigenous tribes? Which treaties were broken? What is your role in local gentrification? There are ways to lessen our harmful footprints as gentrifiers. There are obviously many other ways to stop or detour the subsuming and colonial logic of white supremacy and capitalism.

It’s also as simple as the stories we tell ourselves. Would people continue praising the beauty of the neighborhood I grew up in if they were forced to acknowledge its racist history and its very present effects? What do the stories we tell ourselves about our family history leave out? 🌋

Edited by Kamala Puligandla

Cutting Out the Middle

All the names have been changed.

Amanda and I had our first real conversation at an art opening. I was going up the stairs in the gallery, and she was coming down. We met in the middle – somewhere between a life-size dollhouse and a performance artist who had been washing her hands for three hours straight – stopping each other at the landing.

You made it! — I had

Have you seen the pornographic knitting? — I hadn’t

You need to. — She didn’t take her eyes off me.

Up to this point I had only known Amanda as a classmate, a student in our writing course at the university we both attended. She was also the curator of the art show. Now we were sharing a small square of wood as people squeezed past us, pulling their red solo cups closer to their chest.

Amanda used to say she “knew” from the moment she saw me. Equal parts romantic and skeptic, I never believed this, but I wanted to trust in the affection behind her words. For me, if we had a story, that night at the gallery would be our beginning. It was the stage in a blossoming attraction where everything the other person did felt like a miracle: her unfiltered passion for what she loved/hated; her way of jumping up and down with excitement one second, settling into a concentrated pool of seriousness the next.

As I found out later, Amanda really did know. She knew what would happen from start to finish, having sat both dangerously close to each other.

The night she bought me flowers, she told me I didn’t mean anything to her.

When she asked “could we actually date?” she answered before I could respond: No.

And right after we planned a road trip to Vancouver, she said we had to be “just friends,” moving forward. When we arrived on the Pacific Northwest Coast, it was clear this new Chapter — this “just friends” — was another ending disguised as a beginning. On our second night there we met with some friends at a pub. It came out of nowhere: “Why are you looking at me?” Amanda was facing me, her voice was serious and loud. Everyone at the table stopped talking.

“You’re always looking at me,” she repeated.

She took another swig of beer.

“Go home.”

Her words hit my chest. They were slurred, but it was the clearest thing she’d ever said to me.
Still, I didn’t listen.

Whether we were in Vancouver or in her driveway, I always clung to the words with which she shot me down – because I knew she’d follow them with something to pick me up. In my haste to enter the revolving door to “get back to where we were,” I missed that “we” hadn’t gone anywhere. I was just a static object, rotating in someone else’s orbit.

It’s not uncommon for a first-draft of a story to have a strong opening and an even stronger ending. What’s uncommon is a strong middle.

The saggy center is what you always fight as a writer: that urge to rush past the complex and nuanced middle to jump to the big, flashy finale.

But what of the real-life stories that don’t have a middle? Like the relationship that breaks before it even begins; the absent parent you grieve without knowing; the baby shoes Hemingway wrote about that were never worn? What do we do with these experiences that skip the milestones and hurl themselves straight into oblivion? Surely there’s a queer space on the pages for these ghosts?

These questions have burned in my body for years.

First, when I was trying to make sense of my relationship with Amanda. And again, when I was 23 and admitted to the hospital for an undiagnosed disease.

In the University of Alberta’s gastroenterology ward I learned the substance of those gaps that stretch between an unknown and understanding, the beginning and the loose end: a chasm of fire strong enough to tear a whole network of tissues apart.

I couldn’t tell you when exactly I was diagnosed with colitis, an inflammatory autoimmune disorder of the intestine, but I could tell you about the fleeting moments that led up to the prognosis.

I could tell you about filling the toilet with blood; thinking I was hemorrhaging and going to the hospital. I could tell you how I shuffled over the linoleum of the emergency room; hot, white pain splitting me in half; taking the room with it; pressure in my belly building. I could tell you about the sweat twisting around my neck; the nurse unwrapping the blood pressure monitor; and me, stumbling into the washroom to throw-up.

I could tell you how I woke up: eyes, pulled back; insides, deflated. I was lying on my back, flying down a dark hall; turn left, turn right; IV bags swinging above my head; a glimpse of the nurse pushing the bed. I watched them come in and out of sight. The ceiling ended; burst upwards into a glass rooftop; we were in the hospital atrium. Plants and stars rushed past; floating through space and time. Ding! An elevator. Inertia. We were at a full stop; my broken body kept rushing forward.

I could tell you about my hospital roommate. Kind, gentle and warm — a mother. Every day, her husband and daughter visited her; voices competing with the TV; crinkling paper; ripping tinfoil from cheap burgers and fries. She had a new liver, navigating a body that wasn’t her own, far away from her home.

After all these years, those details remain with me. I believe it’s because they were coterminous to the most intense pain I’ve ever experienced. Like the internal scars I accumulated during that time, these memories exist in my body as a self-contained code.
Their cohesive meaning? None.

Rather, they were the things I used to fill the liminal space between knowing I was sick and not knowing what was wrong with me. Every time I almost fell into the vacuum of “what ifs” that anyone awaiting a diagnosis experiences, I instead drew every breath into the flare-ups that filled my gut. This was my response to the burning questions that couldn’t be answered, and for a while it worked.

This was also a skill I’d honed with Amanda, when I rode the highs and lows of our relationship, so I could distract myself from what was (and wasn’t) lying beneath the surface.

It became obvious when we had our last real conversation. We were in her driveway, deep in the suburbs. We sat in the car. Outside, a crystalline snow fluttered to the ground; it piled higher, filling the spaces between every object on the lawn until all their edges disappeared.

I was always self-conscious the few times I rode in Amanda’s car — aware of the breath that separated us. That night drugs also came between us as a bag of coke sat on the armrest.
I was pressing her on something. I don’t remember what she had initially said. “I was in love with you”? “We were never a thing”?

Was I a “diamond in the rough” or the first woman she had felt that strongly about? Was the problem that I was a woman?

Regardless, whatever she said, it contradicted the thing before, and I needed answers. For all the time I spent reminding Amanda of her own words, I never learned that even if I could weave the competing stories she wrote about the past into a cohesive narrative, it wouldn’t change the present.

“I can explain…. after this one line,” she finally said.

I watched her bend over the white powder, splitting it into thin strips with a credit card. Her other hand was held up to my face: the pause on the conversation that would never happen. She did one line, and then another and another.

As she plugged one nostril and snorted through the other, the car lost its heat, and a cold prairie winter moved into the cavity.

I wondered what she’d do if I left. If I got up out of the car and started walking. If I wrote everything she’d ever said to me in the snow. I wondered if she could stomach her shittiest words. If she could handle someone else controlling the script.

When I went into hospital, I hadn’t heard from Amanda in two months. Our goodbye was unspoken — neither neat, tidy nor conclusive. All I knew was that the thin thread, which connected our first meeting to our last, had been cut. I would spend many hours trying to diagnose the emptiness left in its wake.

I had lost something, but didn’t know what.

When I was released from hospital, I left with the disease and none of the symptoms.

Most of the time my colitis lays low, but everyday I live with the knowledge that a flare-up could be around the corner. My shit could turn to liquid; my stool could fill with blood; and I could have to get my colon removed. Could, could, could.

Like an undefined relationship, a life-long illness is as full of holes as the body itself. It’s a lesson on how to heal, even when you don’t know what’s broken. And above all else, it’s the story that couldn’t find it’s footing on the page because it didn’t have a middle. 🌋

Edited by Carmen

The Poet’s Choice

I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Alison’s car and we’re making small talk. The conversation we want to be having — we’ll soon be having — simmers under every word. Finally, there’s a silence and I fill it with meaning.

“I guess we should talk about the letter,” I say softly. I feel myself starting to shiver, but it’s not cold. It’s June. It’s two days before their high school graduation.

Phrases from the 7.5 page typed single-spaced letter they taped in my yearbook race through my mind. I think what they were trying to say — two months after my own love confession — is that they love me too. They think I’m attractive! They said I have stunning wolf eyes. Sure, they’re two years older and they’re about to graduate and they’ve had a lot of life experience and I’ve never even been drunk or had my first kiss and they just don’t think we’d work. But they love me too! That’s my interpretation. That’s what I want to focus on.

They start to repeat some of what’s in their letter. I listen closely. I stare at them closely. I’m so used to listening to this voice and staring at this face and smelling the distinct scent of their perfume mixed with stale cigarette smoke. The passenger seat of this car is the closest thing I have to a happy place.

I’m sixteen and no one understands me, but them.

We pull into the parking lot of a restaurant called the Natural Café. We’re talking in circles. I’m not arguing. I’m just confused. If they love me why does anything else matter? I’ve had my feelings for almost two years and I never imagined they’d be returned. But they are, so why worry about the rest? I don’t care if they don’t know where they’ll be next year. I don’t care that I’m young. I’m so young.

They start to tear up and I realize I shouldn’t say anything more.

“I really do love you,” they say to me, and a single tear slides down their face. I wipe it away like we’re in a movie.

We drift into silence. They lay their head on my lap. We’re like that for minutes, for hours, for months, for seconds. They’re looking up at me. I’m trying so hard to stop shivering.

I finally say what I’ve been fighting back: “I know we’re being smart about this, but I really want to kiss you.”

“You can kiss me,” they say with a smile, their eyes still glossy with tears.

And we kiss.

Alison and I would kiss only one more time. Two days before they left for their Senior Europe Trip, they came over and we made out on my bed. My hands hovered six inches from their body, because I was terrified I’d accidentally touch their boobs. They placed my hands on themself for me.

I’d been anxious about kissing for years and as I watched my peers gain experience, my insecurities only deepened. But like our first kiss, this was so easy. It was everything I ever wanted.

Then they burst into tears.

I held them as they told me things about themself they hadn’t shared before. They were begging me to understand why even though they loved me in their own way, this couldn’t work. But they didn’t say that outright and I didn’t understand. Or they did say it outright and I chose not to understand. They loved me and I loved them. And now we’d kissed. Twice. As far as I was concerned, we were dating.

Away at my own summer program, I wrote them verbose letters filled with my adolescent love and — when my own words failed me — quotes from John Keats. They didn’t write back. The last day of my trip they sent me a message on Facebook ending whatever it was we were doing.

I returned home determined to still be their best friend. But then I found out they’d already started dating someone else.

I’d spent a month thinking we were a couple while they were off cheating on me. I was so sad. I was so hurt. The narrative quickly spread that Alison had cheated on sweet baby Drew. Our mutual friends chose me and stopped talking to them.

They obviously had not cheated on me. We weren’t in a relationship.

I hadn’t wanted to hurt them. I’d just wanted to control them. I wanted to control our relationship. I wanted the acknowledgement that these feelings I’d had for two years were not one-sided. I wanted our romance to last forever. I wanted to take care of them. I wanted to hold them. I wanted to hold onto them.

If I’d accepted it was over that night in my room, it might not have taken so many years for us to reconnect and be friends again. But when you’re young you know very little about love. You certainly don’t know how to let it go.

I didn’t understand the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice until last fall when I saw Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Around the time I was pining over Alison, the myth consumed me. Folk singer Anaïs Mitchell had just released her Orpheus-inspired concept album Hadestown and I latched onto its story of art and romance. But as much as I loved this album and the myth itself I hated the ending. And as I began to imagine turning Mitchell’s album into a musical film I decided I’d have to change its tragic conclusion.

Flash forward a decade and I’m sitting in a theatre watching Sciamma’s masterpiece about an artist named Marianne who is hired to paint the marriage portrait for a stubborn woman named Héloïse. Héloïse has refused to sit for a previous painter — doing all she can to avoid wedding a stranger in Milan — so Marianne must pretend to be her companion on walks and paint in secret.

As Marianne watches and studies, she falls in love. As Héloïse is watched and studied — and watches and studies — she falls in love too. The hook of the plot disappears and the women form a sapphic utopia in Héloïse’s mother’s absence. They become lovers. The whole world is just Marianne, Héloïse, and Héloïse’s servant Sophie — their surrogate daughter.

Marianne brought one book with her and Héloïse has been reading it. The book is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains, of course, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. One night Héloïse reads the passage out loud to Marianne and Sophie.

The tale is about a musician, Orpheus, who marries the beautiful Eurydice. When she dies, Orpheus performs his way into the underworld desperate for more time with his love. But when faced with the decision to keep her forever or steal a glance at her as they escape he chooses to look. He defies Hades’ one command. He dooms her life — and their love.

Like my high school self, Sophie is incensed by the ending. Why would Orpheus look behind him? Why would he kill her with impatience after all that effort? It doesn’t make sense.

“That’s horrible,” Sophie says. “Poor woman. Why did he turn? He was told not to but did, for no reason.”

Marianne says there are reasons. She seems delighted by Sophie’s innocence.

Héloïse rereads the passage and Sophie still doesn’t understand. Héloïse explains that Orpheus’ love is simply too great. He can’t resist. But Marianne disagrees with that too.

“Perhaps he makes a choice,” she explains. “He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.”

Héloïse finishes the passage, her face lost in melancholy thought. She searches for the deeper truth beyond the feelings and adds: “Perhaps she was the one who said, ‘Turn around.’”

Marianne’s confident grin falls slowly away.

We’re walking around the museum and I’m worried Rachel is annoyed.

NYU students aren’t supposed to go below Canal Street or above 59th and here I am dragging us out to Queens. It’s February and it’s cold and the least I could have done was look up how far the museum was from the subway – the least I could have done was not gotten us lost.

I’ve lived in New York for less than seven months and Rachel and I have been dating for less than three. I’m navigating my first serious relationship and she’s navigating hers. We’re both having sex for the first time and it’s somehow the greatest thing ever and also highly distressing. And now here I am at the Noguchi Museum trying to interpret her body language like she’s another one of the abstract sculptures.

There are moments where our eyes catch or she makes a joke or she grabs my hand and I feel an excited tingling. This is what I was waiting for all these years. This is a real relationship. This is what it’s like to have a girlfriend. But every warm feeling is met with a breeze of panic. If I’m not perfect I will fuck this up. How do I not fuck this up. How do I figure out exactly what she wants so I can make that happen and she will love me and never leave me and I will be a good boyfriend and this will be good. She can’t read my mind but she can read my energy. And each one of these thoughts pushes her away.

We decide to leave the museum and I’ve decided the day is a failure. This time I’m determined to return to the subway without any detours. But after walking a block in the right direction we stumble upon a gate labeled: Socrates Sculpture Park. I look to Rachel for approval and she’s already walking inside. The sun has started to come out.

The space is filled with the oddest collection of sculptures. Some are figural, most are surreal, and then there’s a big white gazebo with white plastic chains hanging down. Rachel goes inside and I take her picture.

We walk towards the edge of the park holding hands, delighted with our surroundings. At the water, we look out and see Roosevelt Island and in the distance the bigger island we both call home. She wraps her arms around me, burrowing into my coat, and we just stand there. I can feel her body move with each one of my breaths. I know that I am breathing.

It feels so nice to be breathing.

The spring and summer quickly passed. A week before Rachel left for her year abroad in Florence, we went to her favorite bakery uptown. We got their special chocolate chip cookies that were so thick they looked like scones. We walked to Central Park and sat on the ground. I started to cry. I remember nervously plucking grass and struggling to swallow the cookie as I tried to say what I wanted to say. I didn’t think we should stay together. I didn’t think long distance would work. She teased me for my tears.

We spent the next six days grasping for every second, until finally it was the night before. We stayed up late watching movies we’d already seen. We talked about our past nine months together. This time we both cried. We had sex for what should’ve been the last time.

The next day I walked her to the subway and we said goodbye and we cried and we cried and we cried. And I cried and I cried and I cried. And it should have been goodbye. It should have been goodbye.

Four days later she called me from Florence and said she wanted to try long distance and after four days of depressing solitude I gave into my loneliness.

As she settled into her new environment, she started to pull away, as I’d expected. But not before I moved my own study abroad up a year, so we could spend the spring traveling around Europe together.

The fall semester was miserable as communication grew increasingly strained. I pretended that everything would be okay once we met up in Paris. But then she missed her flight. A few days later she sent me a 2am text message ending the relationship. It was long overdue. And yet I still spent the next four months pining over her and relishing in Parisian melancholy.

She fulfilled her long-promised visit at the end of the semester and stayed with me in my tiny studio apartment. All my friends told me it was a mistake. I didn’t care. We spent the first few days fighting. We spent the next few days fighting and fucking. Finally, the last night, there was no fighting. We treated ourselves to a nice dinner, and we reminisced about those same nine months as before. That night the sex was sad. It would be the last time. But we still didn’t accept goodbye.

We spent the whole summer back in New York in something we called a friendship, but more closely resembled a sexless codependent relationship. We fought more than we ever had when we were together. Finally, a year after our first break up attempt, we stopped talking in a huff of anger.

The night before Rachel missed her flight to Paris she had sex with a friend of mine. I didn’t find out until years later. And while I was hurt she and my friend had lied, I found myself straining to care about the cheating itself. At that point why did it matter?

The first time I was cheated on it was fake, because we weren’t together. This time it felt fake because we shouldn’t have been. But it takes effort to choose an ending. It’s a lot easier to get back together, to catch a flight, to miss a flight, to fuck someone else.

It’s easier to be with someone until you hate them than to walk away with love.

Marianne and Héloïse have kissed and fucked and done drugs together and Marianne has painted Héloïse and spit an entire glass of water into her mouth and they have watched each other and watched each other watch each other. Days have passed and days will pass again, time is always slipping slipping slipping.

There has been an understanding. Marianne and Héloïse will enjoy each other — enjoy the fantasy they’ve created — and then they will say goodbye. But the day before Héloïse’s mother is set to return, Marianne begins to falter. She tells Héloïse she wishes she could destroy the painting. She wishes she never had to give Héloïse to another — as if Héloïse is hers to give.

“It’s terrible. Now you possess me a little, you bear me a grudge,” Héloïse says her eyes brimming with tears.

Marianne denies this. But it’s true. She wants Héloïse to resist her fate — their fate.

Facing the impending reality, their unspoken agreement starts to crack. The impermanence of their affair no longer feels inevitable. Marianne imagines there must be something they can do. And when she can think of no solution, she grows bitter towards her love.

But the impossibility is neither of their doing — it just is. If only they could blame each other. That would be so much easier.

Sophie tells Marianne that Héloïse’s mother is set to return and Marianne realizes what she’s done. They have mere hours together and Marianne is wasting time with her petty attempts at control.

She begins frantically looking for Héloïse. She makes her way down to the beach and sees her standing by the waves. Marianne runs. She grabs Héloïse from behind. She holds her. She asks her for forgiveness.

They kiss. They cry together. They let go of blame. They start to accept.

I’m waiting for K at Grand Central Station. We’ve only met once before.

The way we met was a fantasy come to life: a one-on-one at New York’s biggest immersive show Sleep No More. But I’m trying to move beyond fantasies. I’m looking for something real.

And yet I was the one who suggested our first date be an hour train ride upstate. K wanted to spend time in nature before winter came and I said I knew a perfect little town called Cold Spring. I didn’t tell her my ex Rachel had taken me there.

It was a bold first date suggestion and I start to think she’s changed her mind. I wouldn’t blame her the way men can be. The train is leaving soon and I’m about to give up when she texts me. She’s five minutes away. I tell her I’ll buy our tickets.

She runs up to me with a minute to spare. She looks the same as she did at the Sleep No More bar but she’s bundled in coats and jackets. We run onto the train and gasp for breath as we settle into our seats.

We’re strangers. The absurdity — the commitment — of our day weighs on our first attempts at small talk. But God does that fade quickly. None of my usual first date nerves exist. I just enjoy getting to know her.

We get off the train. The small town is engulfed in fall leaves still burning with color. I buy K a coffee, because it’s cash only, and she doesn’t have cash. We pop into thrift store after thrift store, every trinket offering a new conversation starter. Not that we need it. Conversation comes easy.

We make our way to a hiking trail and we end up along the water. It’s cold and the wind whips at our faces. The air is so fresh. I remember that the person next to me is a stranger. She doesn’t feel like a stranger.

We walk back and get a late lunch. She insists on paying, because I got the train tickets and the coffee. Later, my sister will tell me that if a guy didn’t pay for her entire first date she’d never talk to him again. But I have nothing to prove.

K has a performance that night, so we head back to the train. She spends a half hour enthusiastically describing beat by beat a concept she has for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. She talks for so long, totally unconcerned.

The thought flashes across my mind that this is the moment I’ve fallen in love with her and I’ll need to remember it forever.

I tell myself that’s absurd.

It wasn’t.

Seven months after our first date, K and I went to see the stage adaptation of Hadestown at the New York Theatre Workshop. I still hated the ending. I still hoped to someday make it into a movie and change it — two millennia post-Ovid I would be the one to fix the Orpheus myth.

I was about to graduate college and I was confused about a lot of things, but I wasn’t confused about my relationship with K. Despite the heightened romance of our first encounter and first date, this was by far the most mature and stable relationship I’d ever had. I loved K so much and it was all so simple. It wasn’t perfect, but the imperfections seemed to come from the outside. When it was just her and me it worked so well.

The years passed. I came out. She came out. We moved in together. We tumbled into our queerness as we stumbled through our careers. The harder life became the harder it was to sustain a relationship — and the more essential it felt to try. I don’t know how I would have made it through those years without her and I don’t know how she would have made it through those years without me. I’ll always love her — or, at least, I’ll always love the memory of her.

K booked a show out of town. At first I planned to move with her for the year, but then decided against it. Instead we were going to try long distance and open our relationship.

Both of us knew we had queer exploration left to do — she hadn’t dated as a queer person since high school; I’d never dated as a queer person or as a woman. We’d discussed opening our relationship in the hypothetical, but now we were presented with the perfect excuse. We could postpone all our other plans — buying a dog, getting married, leaning more into our nascent domesticity — and have a sort of queer rumspringa. If we still wanted to be together after a year of long distance — and a year of casual sex with strangers — then we could build our life together without regret.

Then her job got canceled.

I’d been so nervous about her leaving that I wasn’t prepared for the disappointment of her staying. Flushed with guilt, I suggested we still open our relationship. I loved her. I knew that I loved her. For three years she’d been my partner. We lived together. We made friends together. We made work together. Our lives — our names — were linked. But I wanted more. I wanted less.

After K’s job got canceled, I booked a job of my own, and we ended up spending December and January in Los Angeles. I was working and she was not and she was bored and I was tired and she wanted me and I didn’t know what I wanted. The fights we used to have once a season then once a month began happening once a week and then every day.

I got another job in LA and she went back to New York and I wanted that to make things better, but it just made things worse. The truth is I didn’t want to be in the relationship anymore. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself. I wanted to find a way for us to be together and not be together at the same time. I was busy and eager and confused and I hurt the person I loved most.

Three weeks after starting long distance, she told me that our new normal of distance, and non-monogamy, and me being busy, didn’t feel sustainable for a relationship. I said I was sorry. I said that I knew she was right. We both cried a lot. I said I couldn’t believe we were breaking up. She said we didn’t have to break up.

But I knew that I wasn’t going to suddenly be a better partner to her again. I finally accepted that what we had — as special as it had been — was over.

I spent the next few weeks fighting back tears at my desk — running to the bathroom so I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of new coworkers. K kept wanting to talk. She kept wanting to get back together. And part of me did too. But I knew it was over. I’d learned my lesson. Once something feels done, denial will only make it worse.

But by the time we ended our relationship it was already too late. It’s not actually about learning to let go at the end — it’s about learning to let go the whole time. It’s about not trying to control someone or your relationship from the moment you meet until the moment it’s over. It’s about being present and trusting. It’s about appreciating the other person on their own terms. It’s about not making the lover’s choice — greedy, possessive, timeless — and making the poet’s choice — grateful, accepting, temporary.

As the months passed and I reflected on this relationship — this partnership — I realized we’d never done that. I realized how in supporting each other, we controlled each other. I realized that we found comfort in codependence. Maybe that’s what I needed during those years. Maybe that’s what she needed too. But maybe if we’d respected each other’s independence we could’ve found a partnership just as loving and even more fulfilling.

Maybe our relationship would’ve been more sustainable beyond romance. Maybe we’d be friends. Maybe we wouldn’t still be drowning in all this bitterness.

The night before Héloïse’s mother returns, Héloïse and Marianne lie in bed. They stare at each other feeling the weight of their last night. I thought of Alison. I thought of Rachel. I thought of K. Those last nights. You can always feel it. Héloïse’s eyes begin to close and Marianne wakes her back up with a kiss.

“I feel something new,” Héloïse says. “Regret.”

“Don’t regret,” Marianne insists. “Remember.”

They begin to share details from their time together. They reminisce. Héloïse says she’ll remember the first time she wanted them to kiss.

Marianne asks when that was and she inches her body closer. She’s sinking into this moment and so are we. Héloïse doesn’t say, but she asks the same question back.

“When you asked if I had known love. I could tell the answer was yes. And that it was now,” Marianne admits.

“I remember.” As these words leave Héloïse’s lips we cut to the harsh daylight of morning.

Almost every moment in the movie ends this abruptly. The scenes in the present are the only times we settle. Most of the film is a memory and most of the film is fleeting. That’s how time works. It’s impossible to grasp. Love will always end too soon. Love will always become a memory. The choice is whether we cherish the memory or fight until it sours.

Heavy with morning, Marianne gets up and dresses. She goes downstairs. She sees a man eating a meal — the first man she’s seen in days. He’s the captain of a ferry. He’s the captain of her ferry.

The next moments ache with time. There is no lengthy goodbye allowed for our lovers — just a brief hug. Marianne must leave. She walks down the same stairs where she first saw Héloïse.

As she’s about to exit, she hears Héloïse’s voice of Eurydice.

Turn around.

It’s been almost a year since K and I broke up and I’m sitting on my couch next to someone new. She doesn’t feel new. It feels like she’s been in my life for a very long time. It’s so rare to connect with someone — really connect with someone — and I feel that scarcity fighting its way from my stomach to my brain.

One moment we’re making out, the next she has to leave. One moment her hands are on me, the next she has to leave. Maybe there will be a tomorrow or a next week or a next year or a never, but now she has to leave. She’s standing in my doorway and we’re looking at each other and we’re kissing again and then she’s leaving, and then she’s left, and then she’s gone. And I let go, and I say goodbye, and I let go. I try.🌋

Edited by Kamala Puligandla

The Public Education System Sucks (Especially for Queer Black Femmes)

I’m a former high school teacher. I taught in an “inner city,” or my favorite ambiguously racist moniker “urban,” school in the deep south. I’m talking about deep. The very bottom of the United States. Even in a mostly Black school, participating in countless and horrid systems of inequality is always expected of teachers; i.e. using orange vests as hall passes instead, teachers cursing out students, rumored (though likely true) coerced adult-student sexual relations — you know, the usual.

Discipline is a tenet of the education system that can’t be avoided for obvious reasons. Corporal punishment has been outlawed for (hopefully) obvious reasons. However, standards such as detention and parent phone calls are constantly enacted. This is reasonable, yes. Yet, as most teachers will tell you, it’s often certain groups of kids who get a pass when it comes to punishment from the administration and discipline teams. At my former school, it was boys. The boys got away with a figurative slap on the wrist for nearly every misbehavior, no matter how major the offense. The girls were punished harshly. Unfairly, at times. It was illogical how some of their punishments were constructed. Once a student of mine left class to go to the bathroom briefly and came back outside of the designated class minutes for bathroom use. From what I understand about this student, it was an actual emergency. Instead of something like a simple verbal warning, the Dean (what most schools here call a person whose designated job is to stand in the hallway and correct misbehaviors as well as student flow of traffic) howled at her and gave her a Saturday detention. All for having an emergency situation.

Excessive much? Most of femme student interactions with the disciplinary staff go this way. In the words of the Deans, they’ll give too much “attitude” and the deans will be forced to respond negatively, and excessively at that.

This phenomenon is surprising, but at the same time it’s not. In the culture of the deep south, tradition dictates certain modes of general behavior for each gender, as do most cultures. Men, as most of us know, are considered the heads of households: the providers and protectors. Women, on the other hand, are mannered and maidenly. This is true most places, but the South tends to be excessive in its execution. The discordant ratio of behavior to punishment Deans dole out is based in this chivalric order. Because women are considered to be the “Angel in the House”¹ and the purer, sweeter beings out of men and women — especially for young girls — any action outside of that is considered disrespectful. Therefore, a girl who may rightfully speak up “too loudly” goes against traditional social standards, and is threatening to the natural implied (read: not so implied) hierarchy of man.

Black southern culture also contributes additionally to the threat of a young girl with too much to say. We teach Black women to be fiercely independent. Most parents have a discussion with their young girls that entails not only the importance of being independent, but making their voice known and relying on themselves to get places in life. (Think Scandal, Season 3, end of Episode 12) As much as we force feed this information down the throats of Black femmes their entire lives, we’re surprised when they regurgitate it. Black femmes become independent and fiercely autonomous beings, and then are punished for becoming what we’ve taught them to be.

And don’t ever think about becoming masculine. It’s the ultimate disruption of this order. Especially when it involves sexuality. We’re taught to be autonomous, however autonomy should be limited when it comes to everything other than needing a man. When you’re a loud Black lesbian, not only are you aggressively betraying your social role as a quiet and well-mannered woman, you’re also completely independent of needing a man in your life. You don’t need them for sex or pleasure or love, and you’ve completely abandoned the most womanly of duties: procreation. And masculine-presenting lesbians have not only done all of this, but very outwardly abandoned the feminine to embrace (in traditional eyes this reads: steal) masculinity. A woman’s masc presentation and behavior, in the construct of chivalry, are the ultimate disrespect. The hierarchy of men is not applicable to lesbians — women who purposefully agitate the social order.

Now, if the Dean positions are largely dominated by men, guess who the most punished group in school is. In my time teaching, I had never seen anything quite like the obscene treatment of young queer black girls. And I’m ashamed to say that I was part of it. Initially, I was naively unaware. In my first year teaching, I was at odds with a group of girls in my third period. It seemed like they did everything I said not to. And I found out it wasn’t only my class, they acted like this in most of their classes. In many teachers’ opinions, they couldn’t be dealt with unless the discipline they received was extremely harsh. I found that most of them responded well to teachers with a mother’s aura. Most white teachers couldn’t give this to them, but even as a Black woman I also couldn’t — I was only 22 years old and knew nothing of the trials of Black motherhood, nor did I look or sound it. I did everything I could to discipline them: assigned seats, gave them detentions, called parents, wrote discipline forms, assigned Saturday school, and got them suspended — a few times. I even yelled at them once, which was much out of my character. After a number of times passing by their disruptive conversations in the back of the class, I focused in on a conversation that made me realize why their group was so hard to break-up.

“How you a stud with a perm?” The girls laughed raucously in the back of the class, loud enough for everyone to hear and get distracted.

Shocked, I snapped out of it long enough to tell them to be quiet, but I started to realize what most of their conversations had likely centered around. After that, I listened to their talks a little more each day. Their vocab revolved around lesbian culture. It was language only queer people would recognize, and I after listening to a few more conversations, it became easier to discern that school was the only place these girls were allowed to be out. Sure, some of them looked more masculine, but most households in a Southern community like ours would try to pass it off as being a tomboy. However, parents know it’s something larger, yet they choose denial instead of acknowledgement.

School is the only place where many queer kids get the acknowledgement and freedom they deserve. Yet, many of them are passed off as “problem children” with no room for growth or correction. And they know this. Many of the Deans in our own school come down the hardest on these Black queer kids, specifically the girls — especially when dealing any form of PDA and more masculine modification of the uniform. I’ve heard them say disgusting and shameful things about these kids in passing outside of the workspace. And it’s not only restricted to the kids, it encompasses the queer faculty as well. For some faculty, they won’t discipline the kids those teachers refer to them, as a punishment for their audacity to be outwardly queer. They believe that any form of homosexuality is a joke, especially when it comes to women.

This is the reality for Black queer girls in education. And it is ongoing. Though I’m not a teacher anymore, I’m left with the knowledge of this phenomenon. And as a queer person, I aim to fix it. When children aren’t seen, they cannot take part in the education system because they are not comfortable. The lack of vulnerability leaves creates an environment where you’re not allowed to fail; this is essential in a functional classroom. But how can you fail when you’re worried about looking weak? Educating educators is essential to creating inclusive learning environments that promote actual growth and learning. And those types of environments have been stolen from Black and queer people for so long that they reinforce the disparities we receive to this day. The American education system must uphold its promise to provide an education to all, and a large part of that is spreading awareness that it isn’t doing the very thing its meant to do, especially for Black queer femmes. 🌋

*An important note to add: These observations are simply based on my viewing of queer cis femmes in public schools. Imagine the trans experience.
1. “The Angel in the House.” The Free Dictionary. Farlex. Accessed February 28, 2020.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the angel in the house. 2. Scandal, “It’s Handled”. YouTube, n.d. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgpq2Rqjg4c.

We Deserve To Be Selfish

I learned at a young age that anger was acceptable if you were displaying it on behalf of someone else. I learned at an adolescent age that if I was going to be angry then I had better be ready to deal with the consequences. What I am learning at this somewhat moderate age in my early 30s, particularly at a time of staying home and really getting to know one’s self, is that my anger ebbs and flows like an inner tide, rises up and tumbles hard, like a toddler, trains for sprints as well as marathons, and floods through me as an undercurrent of unexamined ancestry. My anger contains multitudes, my anger is an Aries.

I often find myself considering a hypothetical History of Anger; I like to imagine that I can trace it back to the origins of all emotion. I am something of a prolific casual emotional historian, if you will. I imagine that at the beginning of time our anger originated toward the earth. In my knowledge of my Personal History, anger runs through my maternal bloodline, can be traced back to being taught violence and hatred during slavery and rejected by society in the aftermath of “freedom,” can be traced further back to being shown malice and treachery during the rape and pillage and takeover of the Americas. I imagine we have been shown violence and now it is all we are supposed to know. For me and mine, it’s a painful, palpable substance that has yet to be spoken of under proper conditions and as such runs unchecked in the pipes, within the walls, dismissed as fact and foundation. There are few stories passed down in our family that do not involve anger in some form: betrayal, deceit, abandonment, punishment. I imagine we were shown hideousness and expected to pass it on amongst our own, become our own undoing. I don’t actually do any research about it, have not read the book on Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder, certainly can’t ask my family about it. I imagine I come from a long line of taking issue with authority figures. It figures.

I learned around age eight that there was no room for my anger. It was not simply useless, but in fact quite dangerous, could trap me and did, many times, in my pursuit of my desires. I imagine my mother taught me to squelch my anger so that I wouldn’t grow up to be seen as an Angry Black Woman. But I found it quite effective when used in defense of others, befriending a bullied classmate, stepping in to prevent my mother from beating my little sister. Anger for others seemed to have a place, a function, afforded me a voice that I lacked for myself. Agency snuck in through the side gate and found stability along the neighbor’s fence. It never seemed safe to approach my own personal anger, so I developed a dance with it in which I could imagine it never really existed. What I did come to know about myself and those feelings developed through my obsessive journaling, the only practice I knew of that would actually hold my feelings without punishment.

It was getting to know anger in my 20s that proved most interesting. I was angry about my own work and its lack of reception. I had been writing flash memoir exercises, excising a single imprint in time and creating fullness in a brief space. Acquaintances who asked about this practice seemed puzzled, inquiring about its purpose. This was 2014, the same year I read an interview with a Canadian literature professor who proudly boasted his refusal to teach any works by female (and with no justification, Chinese,) authors in his course, and the same year publishing around the world was made up of nearly 80% male authors. The anger stirred within me organically. I felt the match strike.

In the late fall of 2014, my missive launched into the inboxes of approximately 50 creative women I knew. Smack in the middle of the call to arms was a bold(ed) phrase:

What would our world be like if women were encouraged to be selfish?

I was coming into my own as a fully fledged Woman in my own right, accepting myself where I had felt rejected in my younger years — denied full status and relegated to the sidekick position, the nice for a Black girl to whom boys only came around after battling their inner demons of inherited racism and figuring out how to contort them into a fetish. I was ready to declare myself and to bring everyone else who was ready along for the ride. I thought, I’m going to put as many women as I possibly can into one publication, and they’re gonna get to say whatever the fuck they want. And Selfish the magazine was born.

• 

• 

• 

The funniest thing I’ve learned about anger is that it can burn out just as quickly as it’s lit.That the power it generates at the onset can leave a void after it’s gone. And mastering it doesn’t translate into the glimmering fierceness that the power of its image presents. Sometimes it just burns. Other times it is drowned by our disbelief in its potency, or our inability to find actionable purpose. For an idealist like me, I found that my anger lost steam when it encountered the oppressive environments it rose up against. Time and time again it was met with the patriarchal attitudes it wanted to dominate. My anger may be an Aries, but my heart is a Pisces through and through, and my drive takes time and trust. It feels incompatible, to be so angry and so sensitive. That my own fragile mixed race tears could be complicit in deflating my trajectory.

Several amazing things about Selfish are true: it caught right away, sold out its first issue, introduced me to friends of friends and community, gave me agency to speak my voice, drew submissions from around the world, launched a successful Kickstarter, spawned cross-country literary events. Several less celebratory things about me became evident through Selfish, too: that I buckled under the pressure to make it financially viable, had no idea how to ask for help when I needed it, recoiled at the rejection of supposedly forward-thinking art fairs, developed envy for my peers who were clever with marketing strategies, alienated myself from support because of the shame I developed. What happened to that fire that had set everything alight? When I looked for it, I came back with a deflated, whiny ego, my enthusiasm snagged on reality, my dreams of elevating literary society crushed by the persistence of backwards politics and my own lack of stamina.

Many of these obstacles were real. At the time of the launch of Selfish, I was dating an amab white man who was a staple at the best-known annual art fairs. I was present at those fairs only because he was willing to share his table with me, a table he was entitled to year after year despite the fairs boasting “diversity.” I had Black women come up to my table and purchase issues and merch because I was literally the only person of color vending, had amab white men blink at me as I explained why women, and all marginalized artists, needed a dedicated space to tell their own stories. Thin, able-bodied mothers asked me why it was necessary to promote nude images of plus-sized women. Privileged white girls submitted unwittingly racist stories in which they claimed to play sole hero to younger girls of color. Every misfire chipped away at my determined facade, pointing out to me the nuanced ways in which the world did not always want to make room for those trying to make a place for ourselves.

Some of the obstacles were indicative of my foolhardiness. I like to imagine that we’ll be able to change the game. I went in wanting to believe that the pure rebellion of our mission would be enough to elevate us to immense popularity. I wanted to believe that I could start with the fuel of fire and figure out how to keep it going along the way. I wanted to believe, too, that I could somehow maintain this evolving being on my own, that asking for help was weak. Most foolishly, I wanted to believe that niche interest in print and print alone was sustainable. When I saw other publications charging money to submit work, I balked and refused like a noble naif. When I saw others ramping up merch production, I cringed and doubled down on the integrity, making only what was essential to the cause. When I saw projects asking readership to commit to more than one round of crowdfunding, I judged and promised myself we would never go there. Instance after instance arose when I clung to my underdeveloped values, yet lamented missed opportunities, lapsed progress. I saw the miles stretch between Selfish and peer publications, their audiences expanding by the hundreds while we remained firmly in the hundreds.

I struggled to properly determine the identity of Selfish in a world of rapidly evolving standards and call-out culture. As my consciousness expanded beyond the experience of womanhood, as I explored queerness in me beyond my right to femmehood, so too did my desire to expand our demographic of readers and contributors. But I never landed on a strategy, and my tepid attempts to proclaim us different but united brought me questions from my POC community about representation. I responded as responsibly as I could while acknowledging my limited capacity to force engagement from desired demographics. I welcomed input and guidance, while accepting that it wasn’t anyone’s job to take the time to give it. I admit that this was perhaps the point of no return. It only took a handful of fractured relationships to snuff my flame. if I couldn’t represent our values, if I couldn’t reflect the voices and faces of our community, was I doing my job as editor-in-chief?

I only knew how to fight for a we and I was failing at it. My anger was shrinking by the moment, replaced with defensiveness. Without warning, three years into our run, I stopped responding to emails, took weeks to fulfill orders, and eventually dropped out of public view entirely.

Three years later, I’d assumed the fire was all but smothered, but I felt it again, a flicker, last summer.

It tasted different, curious, nascent. It had layers. I didn’t just feel the anger, I felt questions developing around it. How do other people process this? I realized I needed to hear stories. I hungered to see failures as well as successes. I wanted to see my experience contextualized by the experiences of others. And suddenly I found myself drafting another email.

I am interested in engaging in a conversation about how anger affects you as a person and as an artist.

I wasn’t the only one. The team was back. The artists were in.

My favorite response, from editor Kelsey Nolan:
“THANK GOD I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS EMAIL.”

Every step toward producing another issue has been tentative. I am still unsure that I can get the machine going again, that I have the drive to dig it up — especially now, at a time when nearly everything has become uncertain, and where money has become nonexistent. There is lingering shame about what came and went. But that little flicker keeps fluttering even on the days I let pass without addressing it. Perhaps this awareness is key to the very phenomenon I hope to observe and witness. I imagine we must each have our process.

Part of my process is letting myself understand what the process is day by day. There is the commitment to clearer conversations, to facing what can feel like a mountain and chipping it down to a molehill. There is accepting what is within my limits and embracing what I can allow myself to approach differently. Yeah, there’s some talking myself through it, too. Asking myself a volume of questions that one might receive from an insatiable child, at times. How can I guarantee I won’t buckle again? Is there still a place for this? What have I learned that will help me do this better the second time around? Do I have a thick enough skin to bear what I couldn’t before? But each patient step is a brick laid into a fireplace built to sustain an ongoing inquiry, a passionate search.

I stepped away from expectation when we opened submissions for the sixth issue. Whatever world is coming next, we will still need art. We will still need reflection, practice, a space to develop the self. A place to practice self-ish-ness. We will still need space to celebrate our experiences, to share our voices. I imagine we will still need process. I may not know toward what we are headed, but I’m excited to strike the match to light the way. 🌋

Edited by Kamala Puligandla