Bubble Trouble // Header by Viv Le

This is the fifth Editor’s Notes I’ve written for Autostraddle since becoming the Managing Editor. I previously wrote them for Time Zones Week, for the 2022 Pride package, for Diner Week, and for Horror Is So Gay. They’re always a joy to write; it’s incredible to know our members care enough about the creative work we produce to want to glimpse behind the curtain a bit, learn about the editorial process, and see how the soda gets made. They’re also tricky to write. It feels navel-gazing to examine my own editorial process. It feels vulnerable, too. This job is hard! It’s also the best job I’ve ever had. As a lot of the essays and pieces in Bubble Trouble explore, many things can be true at once.

This is the work I most wanted to do when I stepped into this editor role, over a year ago now — wtf is time! Well, this and expanding our literature vertical. But publishing strong and strange works of creative nonfiction is absolutely tied to the goal of expanding our literary coverage. Working at Autostraddle means seeing how everything’s connected — in both the figurative sense of finding queerness in so many crevices and corners but also in the literal sense of seeing that every category and subcategory of this website, every department, touches all the time. We’re not a monolith of a magazine but, as Nico has been putting it so eloquently lately, a quilt. It’s patchwork, and sometimes you can see the seams, and sometimes not every patch is specifically for you, but then sometimes you’ll find a patch that feels as if it’s peering into your soul because it’s so for you.

Bubble Trouble is just one microcosm of that queer patchwork. In this weeklong series, we had stories of sobriety, a Willy Wonka-inspired satire, canned wine ratings, contemplations of individual identity, interpersonal relationships, grief, grind culture, youth, failure, and folly. Every piece had a different point entirely, a different vibe. And yet when I looked at them all together in the weeks leading up to the series’ launch, I felt like I had a coherent spread. A lovely quilt.

I say it every time, but it bears repeating: I can only do these “weird” themed packages because of the support from our A+ members. This is not work that sells ads or gets what I like to call “crossover clicks” (straights — perhaps accidentally — ending up on Autostraddle dot com). It’s work we do from a place of passion, curiosity, and playfulness. Broad prompts like “diner week,” “time zones week,” and “bubble trouble” (which started as “soda week” before I decided to spice it up) allow for experimentation, expansion, and exploration on the page. It’s so fucking fun to edit this shit.

And yet, every single time, there’s at least one writer who worries what they’ve written isn’t “gay enough.” It doesn’t matter how many times I say that isn’t really a thing; it’s an easy insecurity to have. As queer writers, we’re so often trapped in the double bind of feeling like we have to suppress our queerness in certain contexts or package our queerness into tight, pretty, digestible narratives. But at a publication like Autostraddle where the writers are queer and our intended audience is also queer, we can and should be queer on the page in the exact way we want to be. Loudly, at times. With more subtlety at others. We don’t have to over-explain certain language the way a mainstream publication requires, but we also don’t have to over-explain more abstract things. When a queer writer writes of struggling to differentiate between what she wants and what she believes other people think she wants, a queer reader intuits that THAT’S GAY — without it needing to be explicitly said. The queerness found in a lot of these Bubble Trouble essays isn’t necessarily surface-level fizz but something deeper in the gut.

I wanna keep making some weird patches for this quilt. Thank you for your support in helping me do so.

Bubble Trouble is a series helmed by Autostraddle Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about the nostalgia, effervescence, and never-ending appeal of carbonated beverages.

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