A Letter to My Ex on the Occasion of The Danish Girl’s 5th Anniversary

I still haven’t read The Argonauts. I’m not sure if you have. I make a lot of jokes about it, but the truth is I think I’d like it. People always want the partner’s experience of a transition, the parents’ experience of a transition, a casual acquaintance’s experience of a transition, so even the best version of that makes me uncomfortable. But it’s not the book’s fault. I’ll probably read it someday and think, Hey that was pretty good. Way to go, Maggie Nelson.

I’m writing to you, because this month marks two anniversaries — two anniversaries likely celebrated by no one but me. Five years ago you and I met and started dating. And five years ago Tom Hooper’s film The Danish Girl was released in theatres. It’s weird to celebrate an anniversary of a no longer existing relationship, but it’s probably even weirder to celebrate an anniversary of a film that is at best an already dated work of Oscar bait.

This movie and our relationship share more than the opening date. Both are about two artists — an outgoing woman frustrated with her success and a sensitive man quietly creating. In both cases the man turns out not to be a man, but a trans woman who after years of clues finally accepts herself. Both are about how the couple adjusts to this new reality.

Since before we broke up I’ve been thinking about this movie and this story and you and I and how people talked about you and I and this story. I’ve thought about writing different versions of this for years. My dream iteration came soon after we split — I imagined us as friends, watching the movie together, discussing it together, getting insight from both sides. Alas we are not friends and that’s not possible. I feel uncomfortable telling our story without you, but if Maggie Nelson can write about her trans partner, I guess I can write about my cis partner. I know you hate when I write about you. I wish I could say that I’ll stop. But you were with me when I transitioned and, well, people love a transition story.

When I first watched The Danish Girl, I was taken with Alicia Vikander’s portrayal of Gerda Wegener. I went into the film with low expectations — Hooper’s resume of The King’s Speech and Les Miserables didn’t exactly illicit excitement. I was also aware enough to know that casting Eddie Redmayne was wrong even if I didn’t understand all the reasons why. For me, it came down to the artistry. Even then I could tell Redmayne’s performance as Lili Elbe was an affected take on femininity and womanhood. Every single choice felt false, as if being a woman was holding your hand just so, as if being a woman meant no longer being a person.

But Gerda! Gerda was alive. She was an artist, desperate to be recognized for her talents. She was an extrovert, exuding sex towards her husband, her wife. The first half hour of the film enraptured me. I felt it poking something I was still trying so hard to leave unpoked. But then the film continued. By the end my review could be summed up with — bad movie, but Alicia Vikander is amazing. I think I want to marry her.

Growing up I always had two types of celebrity crushes — people who I lusted after and people who I wanted to marry. I thought of marriage as the consumption of another person — a joining of bodies that went beyond the physical. I let our society’s conservative views of sex explain my gender. I didn’t feel lust, I didn’t want to admit envy, so I filled the gap by elevating these famous strangers to something like a soulmate. Of course you’re not horny for your soulmate, I told myself. That would be disrespectful.

These fantasy partners were always people who embodied a sort of casual hyperfemininity to me. People like Vikander. I don’t know if you remember, but when I was first parsing through my identity I made a list of the celebrity crushes I wanted to be with and another of the ones I wanted to be. I was finally acknowledging this separation and I wanted to better understand my desires. The Be list was filled with people like Audrey Hepburn; the Be With list people like Katharine Hepburn.

It’s funny looking over those lists now, because my current gender has nothing in common with Natalie Portman or Tavi Gevinson or all the other tiny cis white girls who I equated with womanhood. The list of people I wanted to be with is far more similar to me. You are far more similar to me.

My favorite parts of The Danish Girl are when Lili and Gerda are exploring. Lili is supposedly playing a character and Gerda is helping to teach her womanhood. Maybe this gives transphobes an easy talking point, but the truth is cis or trans we all have to learn. And the way Gerda pushes Lili to be her model, pushes her to play this character, pushes her towards her identity, all while providing herself as a template — she’s such a dream transition partner it’s almost a forced feminization fantasy.

I don’t think you ever worried about me stealing your womanhood. No, the hardest thing about my transition for you — and hopefully the best thing — is the way it forced you to come out yourself, to return to your sexuality, to consider your own gender or at least gender performance. You taught me how to dress and how to do make up all the while questioning the ways you dressed and why you wore make up. And that in itself was its own lesson. Through you, I found myself. Through you, I let go of my lifelong attachment to that limited idea of femininity. I’m not sure we ever embodied the simplistic joyful montage in the film, but in our own deeper way it felt like that sometimes.

When I think about that day at MOMA PS1 — the first day I went out dressed in women’s clothing — I feel heavy with happiness. It wasn’t even the clothes themselves — your blousey top, my shorts rolled up, your sunglasses and purse. It’s the way you looked at me. The way you photographed me. The way I felt desired. People were always so impressed that you didn’t leave me, but your gift wasn’t staying — it was seeing. Most people don’t get to transition under the pansexual gaze of someone who loves them the way you loved me.

The first time I heard about being trans was in 2005 when Jenny Boylan and her wife were interviewed by Oprah. At some point Oprah asked Jenny about bottom surgery and my mom turned the TV off in disgust. But before that Oprah asked what I would consider an even more personal question. She asked if they were still having sex. Jenny’s wife said no. “Because you’re not a lesbian,” Oprah offered as an explanation. Then she asked Jenny if she’s dating men. The assumption, of course, is that this cis woman is straight. The assumption,  of course, is that this trans woman is straight too. Everyone is straight. These people are partners and co-parents but not wives, certainly not lovers.

This is where The Danish Girl falters too. I can suffer through Redmayne’s awful performance and the flattening of Lili’s character and the emphasis on trauma and pain. But what upsets me most revisiting this movie is its heterosexuality — especially in the context of the real Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe. In the film, they move to Paris against Lili’s wishes, because of Gerda’s art. But in real life they moved, because they thought Paris would be less transphobic. In the film, Gerda works towards accepting Lili — it’s the film’s central character arc. But in real life Gerda was Lili’s fiercest advocate from beginning to end. In the film, Gerda finds comfort in a manly man played by Matthias Schoenaerts. But in real life Gerda was rumored to be a lesbian or at least queer due to her frequent paintings of explicit lesbian sex. In the film, Gerda and Lili’s marriage is shown to be a chaste and passionless few years after Lili comes out. But in real life Lili and Gerda were together for nearly two more decades and there is nothing to imply their marriage didn’t remain romantic and sexual.

I don’t believe that films need to stay true to the stories they’re based on. But it’s a choice to make the changes they make here. Just like it was a choice for Oprah to ask Jenny Boylan those invasive questions. It’s a choice to frame trans women as heterosexual, to frame partners of closeted trans women as heterosexual, to frame these relationships as sexless. Ten years later Jenny went back on the show for a Where Are They Now special to basically say: Yes, I’m still married to my wife. Yes, we fuck now.

The film characterizes Lili as shy and always hiding. They can’t possibly imagine a Lili who feels confident going out. They can’t possibly imagine a Lili excited to dress up and attend her wife’s art show. No, she stays home. She fails to support her partner. Gerda storms off in the rain and arrives in their living room dripping wet, face stained with tears. Gerda tells Lili she should’ve been there and when Lili tries to explain, Gerda says, “Not everything is about you.”

Fictional Gerda is in the right here, of course. But what an assumption on the part of screenwriter Lucinda Coxon. It’s an assumption we both know well. Of course, the trans woman is portrayed as selfish. Because transitioning itself is seen as selfish. It’s putting your partner, your family, your friends, even strangers, through so much. Especially your partner. People would always tell me to be more thoughtful about you — to remember how much I was putting you through. What they were really saying is how hard it was for them. Because never for a moment did you accept this narrative. You fought against it with a greater fierceness than I did. You found it insulting. It is insulting. It wasn’t challenging to be with me. You were lucky to be with me. And I was lucky to be with you. We were so completely in love. And what a gift for us to both grow so much and change so much while in love.

When I look at Gerda’s paintings, I see your eyes on me. I see your love and our love. I see this feeling we had that after years of conforming we were getting to create our own world. I see us meeting other queer people with the nerves of a first date. I see us experimenting with our sex life to varying degrees of success. I see the boring moments and the exciting moments and the years and years of connection. I see us fighting and drifting apart. I see the limits of the gaze.

When we broke up, people assumed you’d finally had enough. I think that’s why in my writing I always clarified that I ended it even though I knew that hurt you. But it felt bigger than us — it felt essential to rewrite the false trans narrative that I could only be left, I could never leave. The reasons I’d give for ending it were wanting to date as a woman and date as a queer person and be independent in my new identity and all these things were true. But ultimately I think we broke up because we met when I was 21 and you were 25 and most people who meet when they are 21 or 25 eventually break up — most people in general break up. What a beautiful shred of normalcy.

There’s a cruel joke in that without your support and your love and your validation I’m not sure I would’ve become the kind of trans person who could leave. The narratives cis people obsess over can seep into us. We can believe we don’t deserve sex or excitement or to follow the same mid-20s whims as anyone else. But I knew I did. I knew I could. Some of that is my innate stubbornness, but a lot of it was getting to transition alongside you.

The film ends with Lili’s death from an ovary transplant — with Gerda and that manly man together in mourning. But I dream of a film that focuses on those in between years. Those years in Paris where Gerda was painting Lili and they went out as their full selves. A queer cis woman and a queer trans woman creating a world together outside of expectations. When I think of them I think of those years. When I think of you I think of those years too.

Our world is so binary. Man, woman. Straight, gay. Together, apart. But what a beautiful thing to have decades. What a beautiful thing to have just a few years. I wish we focused less on the death. Hell, I wish we focused less on the beginning. I want to live in the moments that just were. What an exciting time for Lili and Gerda and you and I. What an exciting time to be queer and free and hopeful and in love.

Those years live forever in me. I hold them close in this next story of mine. I’ll hold them close in the one after that. I am a trans woman living in the year 2020. I am alive. I am living so many stories. Lili lived so many stories. We all live so many stories.

I’ll love you forever in ways Maggie Nelson could never understand.

❤️ Drew

Wild, Fat, Queer and Black: How I Became Free In The Mountains And Never Left

Photo credit: Mary and John Martin, 1995

I.
I grew up Black, fat, and girl less than ten miles from Washington, D.C. — a chocolate city infiltrated with whiteness, dirty politics, and money. My mama, the smartest person I ever met ran a homeless shelter and loved to read. Reading had been her ticket out of the projects. She loved words, so I do too. When I was young, my mama and I used to sit — me cuddled between her arms, her brown hands holding Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace and I’d ask her to read it again. In the book, a dark-skinned Black girl named Grace struggles after a classmate tells her she can’t play Peter Pan in the class play because she is Black. Grace’s grandmama shows her otherwise and Grace spends the book playing Peter. Grace taught me that little Black girls could fly and I did. The further I got from little and girl, the less I flew. When my mama died, I stopped flying altogether. Until this summer when I flew to Vermont and never left.

I spent the first three months of isolation shuffling between my bedroom and living room in our 600 square foot apartment tucked in a city adjacent to Boston. We moved there for reasons most millennials move places — community, coffee shops, and train stops. None of those reasons matter when you can’t go to brunch, when you can’t inhale without fearing it’ll be your last. During the days of March, April, and May, I was hyper-productive during the day and spent my nights oscillating between suicide ideations and hail mary prayers to a god I do not believe in.“Hey God. We haven’t talked in a while. Sorry about that. I’ve been busy. How are you? Busy, too? Yeah. Cool, cool. This may seem selfish, but I think I have suffered enough in this body. And death seems a bit excessive right now for me, ya know? Perhaps I could catch a break and just live through this one without more suffering.”

One of the many benefits of being a Black fat queer living with generalized anxiety disorder is that I am really good at imagining and dreaming of what could happen. I am a dreamer in all of the worst and best ways possible. Like “what if I die walking down the stairs?” and also “what if I don’t die? What if this pandemic is the tipping point and Black people get liberated?” Ain’t no better time to dream than in darkness, so when the pandemic hit, I dreamt of all of the bad things that could happen, but I also dreamt of possibilities — new programs for queer youth, rekindling old friendships, new ways of being and doing life that allowed us to take care of ourselves better.

When I dreamt of going to the mountains to write in July, I dreamt like most little white kids dream of ponies, unicorns, and world peace. It, a pipe dream, was mostly just an affirmation of being alive, of wondering “what if” aloud on the internet. The universe called me on my bluff and less than a week later, my friend Dulce-Marie and I had $12K in the bank from our friends, a swanky condo booked in the mountains of Vermont, and our bags packed for 28 nights in a town that I am still not sure was prepared to welcome two Black faces to their community.

II.
The week before we left, Amy Cooper called the police on perhaps the most handsome Black birdwatcher I have ever seen. To be honest, I have not seen any other bird watchers, but I spent two days looking at Christian Cooper and birds so it is true. My partner went to pick up our rental car for the month. She returned with a fully-loaded white Yukon. We named her Karen (pronounced CAR-REN), because she was white, ridiculous, and took up too much space. I have spent my life working on shrinking my Blackness, fatness, queerness in order to fit into the spaces I’ve been given. “You gon’ get over that shit, this summer,” Karen said like she knew me.

Photo credit: shea martin, 2020

Our condo we booked in the mountains was bigger than any place I’ve ever lived. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, two floors, and a fireplace we used just because we could. We filmed a Cribs episode we’ll never send to MTV because it felt like the Blackest, queerest way to say thank you to the universe for giving us more than we needed, but what we have always deserved.

That night, we searched for a writing table on Craigslist. I wanted something big — big enough to hold my dreams. I wanted her to be like I like my lovers — sturdy enough to hold me, new to me, but reliable and old enough to know better. We met a crotchety Trump supporter from Facebook at her consignment shop in a town an hour away. It took three of us to carry the table in pieces to the Yukon. Dulce-Marie named the table Doña because she said that way, we’d remember she was holy at all times— that we would recognize our writing, our creating as queer black queer folk as a reminder of our holiness in a world that says it ain’t so too much of the time.

Dulce-Marie was right. In the first week of our writing retreat, I stood up for myself. I sent a beautiful white woman a numbered list of all the ways she had treated me like trash. It was more than she deserved, but it was more than I had done for myself in a while. I pulled a Karen. “I hope you read this email over and over again,” I told her, demanding that I take up space in her consciousness, my Blackness, queerness, haunting her existence even after I blocked her. Later that night, we sat at Doña and drew a prompt from our bowl. “Write about what you love about yourself.” Doña had no time for my excuses about why I could not be loved. She did not want to hear what society thought about my fatness. She demanded I love my Blackness as whole. She said “being queer is being beyond, baby.” I listened.

I am fat in the ways beyond deemed beautiful. I am Black without reservation, which is to say I am just a bit more radical than most folks would like. I am queer in ways I cannot fully articulate. I am Black woman in all of the wrong ways. Most days I am more boy than woman. Never man though.

Three days later when the white woman replied with a 10-minute long voice message, I deleted it without listening and scheduled an appointment for the pool. I swam to the deep end for the first time and washed her sins off of my body.

The second Tuesday I woke up in the mountains, I put on overalls and a baseball cap before we went grocery shopping in the next state over. I spent my life searching for the perfect outfits to cloak the grotesqueness of my body as if to say “I know, I’m sorry” in cotton and polyester. But on that day, sleeveless and capped — I just was. And the mountains called me beautiful.

Photo credit: Jane Martin, 2020

Later that day, I navigated roots and rocks in the woods to meet a waterfall. I won’t exaggerate its majesty. She was small and underwhelming compared to the ones in National Geographic. I don’t think she cares though. I don’t think the waterfall compares herself to other waterfalls. She knows her being is enough. While my friends swam, I sat on boulders, admiring the fall’s audacity, dreaming of days when I would have some to call my own.

The thing about being in the mountains is that basically everything is a mountain. But then you are also mountains. I found out corporations own mountains. If you have ever met a mountain, you know that can’t nobody really own a mountain because they are too majestic, too strong, too beautiful to be tamed, owned, so I guess mountains are kinda like Black folk. White people always trying to own, control us — knowing good and well it can’t ever really work without them creating some systems to make it happen. I think that’s why I get along with mountains so much. I don’t quite understand them, and they don’t understand me. But game recognize game, strength recognize strength.

III.
Have you ever chased a sunset? I did.

On our second to last week, we drove up a mountain right before dusk. The smell of bug shit, figs, and grass hit me as soon as I opened the door. We had been here before — to the gate protecting lands that were stolen centuries before settlers, who looked like my wife, stole a home and left the family’s name above the door. The sign said no parking here. They got some nerve. This is not white folks’ here, so we parked without hesitation. In front of us, sounds I did not want to hear ricocheted off a gravel path sandwiched by trees. I hate nature because I am never prepared for her. No bug spray, no water, no food, and I am always hungry. I know that nature can feed me but I don’t put greens into my body because despite what they say — ain’t no cure for Blackness in this white America.

In the front, Dulce-Marie unbuckled her seat belt and stared me down.

“You ready?” she asked – her question, daring me to prove this mountain fucking wrong about me, about my hate for nature, about my lungs and leg capacity, my will to breathe at the top. Dulce’s people are Maroons from the Dominican Republic – strong and fearless motherfuckers who looked masters in the eye and left when they blinked. She comes from conquerors — people who climbed mountains to freedom and dared them people to make a liar out of the mountain. She, like her ancestors the day they climbed, knew that I would not follow.

Instead, I stayed behind and appreciated my breaths in the air-conditioned Yukon. I counted them – 1, 2, 3, 4. I am still counting.

IV.
I do not know when I decided I would stay. Perhaps it was when I decided I deserved to stay, which I guess came after I decided I deserved to breathe, which came after I decided I deserved to dream.

The next day, my wife learned she would teach remotely in the fall and we started apartment hunting. We started in the North, in a big city with a Target, community, and breweries. We ended up in the South — in an apartment nestled between a river, a lake, and a mountain. In a place with stars that look like airplanes in the night sky. In a town with less people than my high school. I haven’t seen a Black person in weeks, but when I look in the mirror I see the beauty in my own Blackness. In these mountains, I am in community with myself — taking care, uplifting, and loving unconditionally.

I am still adjusting to breathing freely. I am a suburb person who pretends to be a city person. Our apartment in the Boston adjacent city was full of Ivy League’s finest, tech bros, and people who work at startups that sound like energy, but reek of exhaustion. Even at home in a building where we knew almost no one, my community demanded my efficiency, perfection. In the city, the GPS says it’ll take an hour to get to the meeting and when your Uber driver gets you there in 53 minutes, you tip him for making a liar out of Google.

The roads in Vermont do not tell lies. They, as earnest as the mountains and water that interrupt them, demand you honor their existence. I have been taking lessons from them. In the city, we measure miles in time spent, city blocks, tracks on playlists, train stops, and the latest podcast episode. In Vermont, we measure miles in distance, in space that demands we honor all of it so much so that half miles feel like hours. I am learning to appreciate hour miles.

Photo credit: shea martin, 2020

The green mountains made space for my Black queer fatness to fly without fear. In Vermont, I don’t have to know a tree’s name to know that it is beautiful. I don’t have to know my name either to know that I am beautiful. The thing about mountains, waterfalls, and lakes is that they give without demanding anything in return. They do not ask me for labor. They do not need my help unpacking who they are. They only ask that I do as little harm as possible. We, separate beings, just exist together in concert. I am not the largest being here. Nor am I the loudest, darkest, or most necessary. Here, in my Blackness, I needn’t perform for the skies and earth. In these mountains, my Blackness breathes. My fatness breathes. My queerness breathes. Most evenings, I hide out in the open on the top of mountains or on the side of lakes where signals can’t reach, where insects and animals outnumber people and responsibility. Most days I write without wearing pants. If that ain’t a dream come true, I don’t know what is.

It has been three months since I never left. I am still flying, still dreaming, still breathing. I still don’t like bugs. I am still afraid of snakes. I have recently discovered that bears like to visit the houses of humans, which I assume is payback for Goldilocks and white folks stealing the land. I spend my days thinking about how I might befriend a bear if it decides to visit. How I can tell them that I like bears — teddy grams, stuffed, bearded. How I am mad about the theft too. How I just want them to be happy. How I hope my breathing here does not prevent theirs. How I just want us to be happy and alive forever.

V.
If a queer, fat, Black person breathes in the woods and nobody hears it, do they make a sound? It’s a trick question. The queer, fat, Black person needs no one’s permission or affirmation but their own.

Photo credit: Jane Martin, 2020

In Pandemic Times, I’m Having a Digital Victorian Gay Romance

In the summer of 2019, my girlfriend Plum came over to stay for a weekend and borrowed my copy of Casey McQuiston’s Red, White and Royal Blue. I had devoured it the previous week, and she powered through it on the couch in an afternoon while I sat next to her and binged through half a season of Great British Bake Off and entertained myself with her occasional reactions.

“This is so cute,” she said, halfway into the novel’s romance. “They’re signing their emails with famous love letter quotes.”

“Adorable,” I agreed, and she went back to the book.

If I had known then that we’d be spending most of 2020 in an unexpectedly long-distance relationship, I might have taken better notes.

Plum and I met on Tumblr in 2017 and started out as friends, bonding over fandom, queer poetry, and being absolute dweebs about social policy and literary analysis (truly, the coolest kids you’ll ever meet). We started dating in 2018 after she moved to New York for graduate school, and while she returned to Toronto during winter and summer breaks, we always knew about when she’d be back, and could plan a reunion.

Since the onset of COVID-19, it’s been an entirely different story. In early March, as cases and deaths were beginning to escalate in New York, Plum preemptively went home to be with her parents, anticipating—at the time—that she’d be back before too long. No problem, we decided. This is what WhatsApp and video calls are for, and she’d be back in a month or two. Easy! We do that all summer! We made a Skype date for virtual brunch, I made a note to send over extra pictures of the dogs, and we weren’t too worried. Things would be back to normal soon.

Oh, sweet summer children.

It was clear by May that she wouldn’t be back in the country before the start of the new semester, if her school returned to in-person classes at all. By the middle of the summer, it seemed like January would be the earliest chance she’d have to come back. As of this writing in October, we’ve still got our fingers crossed for January, but with flu season looming and the state of US politics being the state of US politics, we’re not optimistic.

Which, honestly? Sucks.

But we’re two empowered queers of the twenty-first century, so we adapted. Plum and I have always had a shared love of reading—one of our first dates was at The Strand bookstore in Manhattan—across genres from literary classics to fanfiction, but both of us have a shared place in our hearts for poetry. After a following spree of queer poets and the #queerpoetry tag on Instagram, I started sending poems that reminded me of Plum in our DMs and WhatsApp chats, from Andrea Gibson excerpts to screenshots from Chen Chen and Jericho Brown tweets to ramblings about my own scribbled-on copies of Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda.

In response, Plum began sending pen-and-paper letters. They took their time to arrive, but the envelopes that showed up in my mailbox were covered in watercolor and washi tape, lovingly decorated. I have lines of poetry in Plum’s handwriting tattooed on my arm, but something about seeing a piece of paper that she wrote with her own hands made me tear up. The letter she sent was just household stories—here’s what I did this week, here’s something I saw that made me laugh, here’s something that made me think of you. Not to be outdone, I sent back a response (in a very boring envelope, unfortunately; she’s the artist between the two of us), and, in the spirit of the boys in Red, White and Royal Blue, signed off with a quote from one of Vita Sackville-West’s love letters to Virginia Woolf: “I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”

Something about exchanging letters—we’ve kept it up throughout the summer and into the fall—feels sweeter, more romantic, than sharing digital poems and sleepy selfies. We joke a lot, in queer spaces, that yearning is sapphic culture: because we’re all disasters who can’t tell flirting from friendliness, because we’re all romancing each other over the internet and ending up pining from afar, because Sappho herself got us started with “Sweet mother, I cannot weave – /slender Aphrodite has overcome me/with longing for a girl.” Plum and I had a virtual date to watch Pride and Prejudice (2005) and joked about Lizzie and Darcy being the only valid heterosexuals because they were having a queer romance, full of yearning, significant hand touches (oh my god there were significant hand touches) and horribly awkward flirting, but really, there’s got to be some reason why queers love that movie so much.

In the past months of distance, I’ve fallen in love with her all over again. From her handwriting to her delight in my horrible selfies to her vicious sense of humor to her immense capacity for resilience and compassion, the letters and Austen watch-alongs and poetry exchanges have reminded me more and more of all the reasons we got together in the first place. We’re still counting down the days until the Canadian border reopens for casual travel, but in the meantime, I put another letter in the mail this week, signed, this time, with the words of Eleanor Roosevelt to her lover Lorena Hickock:

“Funny was that I couldn’t say je t’aime and je t’adore as I longed to do, but always remember that I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.”

I Stopped Tweezing in Quarantine and Realized I’m Nonbinary

Quarantine has a lot of downsides. The crushing isolation, the unfathomable grief of mass death, the creeping feeling that we’re living through the literal apocalypse, the constant unconscious work of repressing all that so you can cross something meaningless off of your to-do list. But I have managed to find one silver lining: longer showers.

In the early days of quarantine, most of my time was booked up by either a Zoom call or the spontaneous crying that always followed a Zoom call. Showers provided a rare opportunity to stop panicking about all of the work I wasn’t doing, slow down, and take a moment to panic about something else.

On the 24th day of quarantine, I decided to take a shower in the middle of the day. I know it was daytime because I remember the sunlight disappearing as I closed my curtains. When I felt like being kind to myself, I would do the next part by the dim light leaking through the “blackout” cloth. This time, I did not feel like being kind to myself. I turned on all of the lamps in my room and took off all of my clothes. Then I stood in front of the mirror and stared.

I can’t remember how I reacted that time. Sometimes I would just stare at my body for a few moments and then move on. Sometimes I would flinch, but I always forced myself to look again. Sometimes I cried. I think I may have cried that time.

With that ritual out of the way, it was time to tweeze. Every week for the last decade, I’d removed the excess hair around my bushy brows, the random thick strays that pop up on my nose and chin, and, most importantly, the thicket of eye-catching baby hairs just above my upper lip. That day, for the first time in six weeks of hardly seeing anyone, I skipped the most crucial step and left my mustache alone. Then I took a very, very long shower.

Ten years earlier, I got onto the always-packed bus that took me home from school and stood in front of two girls who were traveling together. At some point, their conversation slowed and I could tell they were looking at me. I started to sweat under my uniform. I don’t think I was wearing headphones, but they must’ve assumed I couldn’t hear them because one of them asked the other aloud if she thought I was a girl or a boy. Then they started to argue about it. The one who thought I was a girl brought up my hair, but the other one said, “My brother has long hair too.” I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. The argument continued until the one who thought I was a boy wordlessly traced her finger across her upper lip in the shape of a handlebar mustache.

“I can hear you,” I said, so quickly it was embarrassing. “And I’m a girl.”

They feigned surprise so poorly that I instantly realized they’d known that I could hear them all along. Then the three of us rode in silence until I reached my stop and squeezed through the mass of human flesh to the door that was constantly asking people to move away. As soon as I got off the bus, I headed to the nearest pharmacy-slash-convenience-store chain and bought a pack of at-home wax strips. That night I waxed my upper lip for the first time. It hurt so bad I cried. The next day, every member of my family complimented me.

For the next ten years, I made sure to keep my upper lip hair to a minimum. At first, I waxed it every other week, but eventually I got tired of the pain and skin irritation and the acne I got from the oil I had to use to soothe the pain and skin irritation. I switched to tweezing, which hurt even more because it took so much longer. In those years, I came out (as bisexual), dated and broke up with my first girlfriend, dated and broke up with my first boyfriend, came out again (as a lesbian), and started exclusively wearing men’s clothes. In all that time, I kept ripping that hair out every other week.

Now, I imagine an alternate reality in which COVID-19 had never appeared and quarantine had never happened. Would I be typing something like this right now? Would I have hair on my face, or would it be smooth, red, and stinging? Would I know that I’m trans? Or would I still be pointing to that last vestige of my feminine presentation, that stretch of hairless skin above my upper lip, and screaming “I’m not one of them”?

The precious moments between the end of a Zoom call and the beginning of my tears were always devoted to my phone. As soon as a call ended, I would grab that hunk of glass and metal as if it were a floating door in a shipwreck and immediately open Twitter. Sometimes I searched for hashtags like #transmanthirstdae and scrolled through pictures of shirtless men and envied their scars. But often I would search for something easier for cis people to guess, like #translivesmatter, filter for the most recent tweets, and skim for people who used “transgender” as a noun, cis lesbians who proudly proclaimed their lack of interest in trans women, cis gay men who congratulated themselves for being satisfied with the body they were born with. Sometimes it was easy to find what I was looking for: At one point, all I needed to do was search for “J.K. Rowling.” I told myself I was looking for glimpses of my possible futures, but I lingered longest on the posts that told me that the path I longed for would certainly end in rejection or death. I can’t count the number of articles I read about recently murdered trans women and men, or the number of posts that implied that that’s what we deserve.

When I stripped down and stood in front of the mirror, the disembodied voices of my online enemies ricocheted through my mind. I asked myself if the pain I felt looking at my reflection was worse than the pain I would be setting myself up for if I told the truth. I demanded proof that I was dysphoric enough to require intervention. I forced myself to perform the pain that cis people expect to see before they deign to admit that we might be justified in seeking out lives that fulfill us. I wondered if I might be better off dead.

Week after week, I watched as my baby hairs grew in and obscured the masculine hairline I’d tried so hard to maintain in my pre-COVID life. I watched my body shrink as I lost track of how many months it’d been since I went to the gym. The short expanse of skin between my nose and upper lip became one of the few regions of my own body I could still control. If I’m being honest, I think I grew out my mustache to distract myself from the rest of my body. I learned to look myself in the eye until I could see myself for the person I knew I was instead of the person other people said I should be. Without surgery or hormones, I couldn’t do much about my body—but I could stop punishing my face and torturing my mind for not being sufficiently feminine. I couldn’t stop other people from expecting me to be someone I never was, but I could stop asking myself to play along.

And once I did, I realized that the people who mattered most to me never wanted me to suppress myself. My little brother — the fiercest ally I’ve ever met — texted me to ask if I’d rather be referred to by pronouns other than she/her. I didn’t reply. My girlfriend and my best friend — both queer women — asked me the same question in person. I got spooked and half-stepped, asking them to switch to they/them but forcing them to swear they wouldn’t use those pronouns for me in front of anyone else.

I took a shower a few hours ago. I didn’t look in the mirror beforehand because I didn’t want to. Afterward, I caught my own eye in the mirror as I stepped out of the shower and began to cry. I looked at my own face contorted with pain and told myself, “You can do this.” And then I smiled.

Few living Americans have seen a more trying time than this one. But if there’s anyone who knows how to look at a hopeless, joyless present and somehow imagine a bright and beautiful future, it’s us. All of us.

Seeing the Wind: How It Feels To Be A COVID Nurse

I was lucky: I wasn’t one of the first nurses assigned to COVID patients. When I took my first COVID patient a few months ago, the nurse briefed me on things that were different and what she’d learned to make the job easier. As I charted my first assessment on the computer in the room, with my PAPR (powered air purifying respirator) hood, mask, and gown on, I noticed that no one had been charting breath sounds all day. I later asked my supervisor whether we weren’t supposed to listen to lung sounds on COVID patients.

“It’s a gray area,” she said. “Some people aren’t comfortable with it, because COVID can survive on objects, like the stethoscope in the room, and bringing an object to your ears could be an infection risk.” One of the Respiratory Therapists walked by and said, “I don’t listen to lung sounds for COVID patients. You can, but I’m not taking the risk.”

My supervisor reiterated: “You can if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

It took me a minute to think it through and realize that my ears were essentially the only exposed surface on my body when I was in the patient’s room. The only place it could approach my lungs. I’d never thought of listening to lungs as inherently risky — I wipe my stethoscope with alcohol before bringing it to my face — but, as a friend said early on, the pandemic is helping us all see the wind. The ways we are affected by each others’ breath, movement, and cells, are amplified by a virus that can kill us. We can actually see the invisible forces that have been affecting our lives for so long; we can see what we assumed to be normal.

It felt like my body was dangerous. The very things I’d learned to do to save lives and help out could suddenly kill the people around me.

That shift, I wore green, hospital-issued scrubs. Coworkers passed by and said, “Oh, you’re a dirty nurse,” with a scowl. They stayed far away. At that point in the pandemic, COVID nurses weren’t allowed to even go in the rooms for non-COVID patients, so if a nurse needed help for a non-COVID patient, or if an IV was beeping in her room and she wasn’t available, I wasn’t allowed to go in. My body moved to go help, but I had to stop myself. It was a physically jarring experience, like a pedestrian jumping out in front of my car. It felt like my body was dangerous. The very things I’d learned to do to save lives and help out could suddenly kill the people around me. Everything I’d learned about working as a team went out the window. I was a COVID nurse and could only attend to COVID patients.

I learned at my first job that nursing assessment was the cornerstone to my practice. My preceptor said, “When you enter a room, what are five things you notice?” I learned from her that we are always noticing things about other people’s bodies: whether their lungs move symmetrically, whether they make eye contact, whether they move their limbs and with what kind of strength, how awake they are, how the color of their skin reflects their lungs. “Is her skin blue or grey?” she asked pointedly. “If someone is dying, you’ll see it in their skin.” I learned how much the human body communicates if we’re willing to pay attention.

Lung sounds were a mindfuck. I struggled to discern between what the words “rhonchi”, “coarse” and “crackles” meant: the difference between congestion requiring suctioning, versus pneumonia requiring antibiotics, versus fluid filling the lungs, requiring medication to help the kidneys move fluid out. The sound I heard communicated the texture of moving air. When I finally got it, my assessment was how I felt grounded; it was how I knew I was doing my job. My assessment allowed me to speak with confidence about the condition of the patient with doctors, nurses, and the patient’s family members. Without listening to lung sounds, I wondered if I was even doing my job.

I felt fortunate when the pandemic hit: I work staff in a place where case numbers were initially low, at a hospital where I felt genuinely cared for and supported by the management. Despite that, the first weekend I took care of COVID patients was so hard because I had to reroute everything about how my body moves through space. I had to change my scrubs before taking report on the patients. I couldn’t help my coworkers; they couldn’t help me. I had to strap a mechanical filter onto my hip, weave the tubing up my back, and don a PAPR hood, before putting on a gown and gloves. I had to tuck the gown in extremely specific ways so that it wouldn’t get caught in the filter’s air vent.

Even if the patient was in danger, I had to put my PPE (personal protective equipment) on before rushing into the room. Putting PPE on itself was a process of trial and error – the filter beeped angrily at me while I was caught in the COVID room, unable to figure out which position I could stand in to free up the vent without touching my “dirty” gloved hands against my scrubs. It took minutes to enter a room and, when I was getting ready to leave the room, I found myself talking to myself. I triple-checked the volume left on all the medications running through IV pumps; I used my fancy nurse-walkie-talkie to call out for supplies if I’d forgotten something. I clustered care like I’d never done before because the stakes simply felt so high. Every time I left the room, I knew I’d have to go through the laborious process of donning PPE on my way back in. When I was finally ready to leave the room, I read the nine-point list of instructions on how to properly remove PPE to avoid exposing myself.

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking, this is kind of boring, right? The actual experience of what it’s like to be a COVID nurse in a pandemic isn’t particularly easy to talk about. It’s fucking hard. It’s hard in unexpected ways; it’s hard because I’ve been trained to care for others while using a framework of evidence to say, “This is why we’re doing exactly what we’re doing.” And yet, when there’s something so new that there’s not enough evidence to support any kind of interventions, or, when caring in the ways we’ve done before could put our lives in risk, or, when the government agencies that are supposed to guide us through evidence are being silenced, underfunded, and redirected because it’s an election year, well fuck! I feel like I don’t know what to do!

What I’m trying to say is I felt helpless.

What I’m trying to describe is that every professional you trust to care for you feels helpless sometimes.

What I’m trying to say is that our systems fail us, yes, but that when the foundation of my nursing care —assessment — is called into question, I feel like I’m failing myself. My patients. Everyone who’s relying on nurses to be “heroes” without acknowledging that within each hero is a human with emotions.

Nursing has taught me that care is the foundation of human connection. It’s how we are able to feel seen, held, and worthy of love; it’s when we are cared for that we become free enough to heal. It’s what allows us to rest, to receive, to recover. As a caregiver, this makes me feel both competent and connected to the hurt, pain, and vulnerability that all humans go through. I learn from the difficult processes that I witness. It’s an immense privilege to be able to offer someone the means to heal or a listening ear when they’re struggling, and I don’t take the power I hold, or the amount of trust that’s required for someone to be cared for, lightly.

The first time I took care of COVID patients, I felt helpless. I’d lost access to my purpose, to my spiritual practice that lives within deeply connecting to my patients and their bodily processes. I felt undeserving of human connection.

But, the first time I took care of COVID patients, I felt helpless. I’d lost access to my purpose, to my spiritual practice that lives within deeply connecting to my patients and their bodily processes. I felt undeserving of human connection. I’d become a “dirty” nurse. I cancelled plans with people because I didn’t want to put them at risk, even a little bit. I was cancelled on by people who I’d thought would pull through for me. It was only other nurses who physically showed up, who said, “We understand the risks, but COVID mamis need love too!” It was other nurses who also knew how important care is to both give and receive, and who saw me struggling with being able to receive care when I felt like I was so unprepared to give it. It was my nurse-friend Claire who cooked for me, took me to her lake, gifted me salmon she’d caught herself, and even gave me a masked head massage.

The week after caring for COVID patients, I developed hives with no discernible cause — hives which kept me up all night scratching, hives which made me scared to go to bed, hives which made it hard to even walk down the hall at work without tearing my skin off. Hives etched scars, built thick callouses onto my inner elbows and thighs. Hives made me turn the A/C to 63 degrees because it seemed like cold could help. Hives pushed me to the edge and made it hard to imagine living like this.

I woke up every night scratching and, in this space of unconsciously hurting myself, when I was simply trying to rest, I felt so, deeply unworthy of being around other people. I couldn’t think about anything other than the hives. For almost two months, I stayed away from friends, cancelled plans, or straight up didn’t respond.

The hives consumed my entire life and then, required I restructure everything. I’d had hives before in college, when I was trying to fit into a new vegan friend group and tried soy milk. I kept drinking soy milk and eating tofu, despite my obvious allergy, and waited for my body to acclimate to my desire to be liked. Now, as a COVID nurse in a pandemic, I was working harder than I ever had. Grief and despair and helplessness were bursting through my skin as I worked to save lives, but I gained a new understanding: I should not have to do anything to fit in; the world should be catering to me. I don’t deserve to be treated like shit anymore; I don’t deserve to spend my nights scratching so someone else can live; I deserve to be catered to.

Grief and despair and helplessness were bursting through my skin as I worked to save lives, but I gained a new understanding: I should not have to do anything to fit in; the world should be catering to me.

What do we do when we’re in crisis? When the challenge of caring for COVID patients is compounded by a physical crisis of raging skin? These last eighteen months of personal crisis — leaving an abusive partner, caring for a dying family member, helping my family completely restructure, confronting my own codependent tendencies, tearing everything away so that I might live anew — alongside the global pandemic and the Uprising for Black lives have made me somewhat of an expert in my own coping mechanisms.

A couple years ago, I would have spent my time at bars, gotten drunk and adventured on mountaintops, and pretended nothing was wrong. Now, four months into Pleasure Coaching with Che Che Luna, I turned inward. Pleasure felt so out of reach, but my skin was calling my attention. I foraged for wild medicines on Dena’ina Land. I looked at my own pussy every day. I drove myself to the ocean, so my skin might feel a blast of cool salt air. When I felt myself itching, I placed a hand over the spot and breathed deeply—sometimes grunting with each exhale—until the itch went away. I massaged poultices and salves and ointments and lotions on in half hour intervals. I drank lemon water. I slept with an ice pack at my bed so that, when I inevitably woke up scratching my broken skin, I could cool it until I fell asleep.

It didn’t take the hives away, but those self-soothing mechanisms made me not want to die. They required I become honest: I confronted dynamics at work that both frustrated me and compromised the safety of my patients; I opened up a conversation with lovers who I’d felt neglected by; I communicated with the people I’d been avoiding. I recognized that despite the immense amount of suffering in this world, my suffering also mattered.

I still have hives. I’ve had so many theories about them: that I’m allergic to my asthma medication, that it was all a healing crisis, that COVID nursing itself gave them to me, that I’m allergic to whatever the hospital-issue scrubs are laundered in. My unit still has COVID patients. More often than before, some of them get better. It feels like a miracle every time it happens — I’d gotten so used to misery and death. We know more about what medications to use, but many of us still don’t listen to lung sounds.

I’ve listened to breath sounds for a decade, but it wasn’t until a pretty girl asked about the stethoscope on my floor that I heard breath through a non-nurse’s ears. I bent the eartips into her ears and held the diaphragm to my chest. I took a deep breath and exhaled, letting her hear the whoosh of my clear lungs, air pushing only through the spaces it’s always known. I held my breath and let her hear my heart, just my heart, and then I breathed in normally. “It sounds like the ocean,” she said, and I physically leaned back because I knew then that I was falling in love. I smiled and said, “Yeah, you’re right, I never thought about it that way.” In the isolation that caring for COVID patients brought me, I’ve shed my own layers of self-protection and the assumption that I must give care in order to receive it. I’ve let myself love someone who is consistent, present, and caring, even when I’m crying over COVID deaths and scratching my skin off.

Since the night she heard my breath, I’ve listened differently. When I hear a heartbeat, a strong heartbeat, I feel all the fibers contracting and expanding that make that blood flow. In lung sounds, I feel the texture of air. I feel the reverberations against my ear, one person’s heart and breath transmuted into my own body, the vibrational impact of life onto life. My body has been imprinted with thousands of people I’ve taken care of. I’m only now seeing the wind.

The Angsty Buddhist: Learning Anger And White Buddhism

This is the second essay in The Angsty Buddhist, a series about being Chinese American, nonbinary, and finding my own relationship with Buddhism, in a country where so many of its ideas have been whitewashed.

My college roommate taped a poster of Dalai Lama quotes on the ceiling over her bed so that she could lie down and reflect on them. I didn’t think much of this at a time. She did a lot of things that I thought were odd, like drinking fruit-flavored tea and insisting we end each day by listing three good things that had happened. I was and still am the kind of person who copes by stress eating potato chips and making jokes about death and was kind of annoyed at being forced into gratitude by my roommate every night, but I just went with it.

Despite our differences, A. and I were close for our first year living together, mostly because we went to a school where neither of us felt like we fit in. A. was the child of Ukrainian immigrants, and I was a nonbinary Chinese American weirdo. The school we went to was named after a former owner of the East India Company who made his fortune off of slavery. The students there were wealthier than I had known was possible, the children of CEOs of huge corporations, and Wall Street bankers. One of the kids in our freshman dorm was the son of the third richest man in India. The university used the protection of the student body to justify the heavy policing of the Black and brown communities in the surrounding city. For those of us on financial aid, we were told both directly and indirectly that we should be grateful to the billionaires who had funded our education. Weren’t they generous for deeming us worthy of becoming like them?

I appreciated having A. around because even though both of us were bad at articulating why exactly we felt so uncomfortable in our environment, it was nice to have someone around who also felt awkward trying to make small talk with the children of corporate attorneys. For the most part, we were both absorbed in our own lives. A. threw herself into her pre-med classes and extracurriculars, always running between meetings and study sessions. Because I had grown up middle class, I had more wiggle room to make questionable decisions, like taking an ancient Greek history class and falling in love with a boy who kept miniature busts of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton on his desk. When our schedules overlapped, I liked hanging out with A. Mostly, we sat on our Ikea futon and drank cheap tequila out of mugs we’d stolen from the dining hall while complaining about classes.

A. had grown up Ukranian Catholic and struggled to find religious community during the time we lived together. Every Sunday, she seemed to go to a new church and reported back each week that something had felt off. At the time, I had started sporadically attending meditation sessions held by the campus Buddhist life organization, Indigo Blue. Indigo Blue was run by a white man but one that I actually liked. He was, for the most part, conscious of his privileges as a white man and didn’t presume to know more about Buddhism than any of the students — many of whom were Asian and Asian American. Instead, he opened up the space for people to practice the way they wanted, in keeping with their own cultures and traditions. We didn’t even have to meditate. I appreciated this because I had grown up with a type of Buddhism that didn’t center meditation and I’d felt alienated before in spaces where meditation and Buddhism were equated. Mostly, I spent my time arranging the candles into smiley faces and chattering at anyone who was willing to be distracted. I felt at ease there in a way I didn’t feel anywhere else on campus.

A. attended one of the meditation sessions one night I wasn’t there. Later, she told me, “It just wasn’t what I was looking for.” She seemed mildly offended by this. I remember thinking, So what? What does it matter what you were looking for? It wasn’t made for you.

A. said a lot of things I told myself weren’t a big deal, like the time she joked about me being a “generic Asian girl” or how whenever I tried to talk about race, she said, “That’s something you’re into. It’s not what I’m into.” I was used to dismissing my own anger.

I brushed this off, though. A. said a lot of things I told myself weren’t a big deal, like the time she joked about me being a “generic Asian girl” or how whenever I tried to talk about race, she said, “That’s something you’re into. It’s not what I’m into.” I was used to dismissing my own anger. Wasn’t she going through a lot? I should be less sensitive.

Eventually, A. found a church, sort of. One Sunday, she came back to our room to announce that she had gone to the Black Church at the campus African American Cultural Center. “I know it’s weird,” she said to my perplexed face. “But I really like the preacher.” There were many things I should have said to her then and every Sunday afterwards, when she came back complaining about how people didn’t seem to want her there. “It’s like I’m the white girl,” she said once.

You are the white girl is something I could have said. Maybe you should think about how you being there makes other people feel? What makes you think you’re entitled to be in a Black space? But by that point, our friendship was strained, and I had given up on feeling responsible for her, though in this situation I realize now that I should have tried. I still think about A. sometimes. About how white people turn to cultures and spiritualities that are not their own when they are looking for solace or trying to fill a void in themselves — how they do this carelessly without realizing how violent that can be.

In college, I was obsessed with white Buddhism in a wrathful sort of way. Whenever I heard someone saying something like “Buddhism is a peaceful religion” or “Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion,” I felt myself seething. Then I would tell myself to calm down. What’s wrong with them thinking Buddhism is peaceful? Think about Islamophobia. This is not a big deal. And I thought you didn’t like organized religion, so isn’t it better for it to be a philosophy?

I have always had a hard time allowing myself to feel anger. I always think that I am being selfish for expecting more of people, and I don’t want to center my own feelings when there are other people we should be focusing on. When it comes to the cultural appropriation of Buddhism, I feel this especially — if people are feeling like whatever version of Buddhism they’re practicing helps them, then why should I care? Aren’t there more important things to be thinking about?

Then around my junior year of college, Indigo Blue was suddenly shut down. Students arrived at the shrine for the nightly chanting session and found a sign on the door that said, “This event has been cancelled.” Later, we found out that all Buddhist life activities had been suspended without a replacement and that this had to do with some internal politicking and office drama. After a couple of weeks, a group of students got the head chaplain, a white woman, to meet with them. At the meeting, she started crying and said, “I didn’t know there were any of you going to those Indigo Blue things. How was I supposed to know?”

Eventually, they hired teachers from a nearby Zen center who came to give dharma talks and hold meditation sessions. These teachers were, like the head of Indigo Blue, all white and mostly men. I only went to one of their events, a dharma talk given by one of the white men. The talk started with meditation, but I didn’t feel like closing my eyes and relaxing in that room. I remember that it felt overly philosophical and that part of it was about dealing with anger. I didn’t like that a white man was telling me what to do with my anger. There were other Asian and Asian American students at the talk who I chatted with after, and they seemed to like it. But I never went back.

I remember that it felt overly philosophical and that part of it was about dealing with anger. I didn’t like that a white man was telling me what to do with my anger.

I hadn’t realized how much Indigo Blue had meant to me until it was gone, and the way it had been replaced by this whitewashed version of Buddhism made it hurt even more. Still, I felt self-conscious about how much this had affected me. Why are you so upset about not being able to go to meditation sessions where you didn’t even meditate?

At the same time, I got obsessed with proving that white Buddhism is bad. I took a bunch of classes on Buddhism and latched onto anything that suggested Buddhism wasn’t really peaceful or rational, that it was an actual religion and not “more of a philosophy.” I was really into Buddhist depictions of hell, which often involved demons dismembering humans, and would show pictures of Buddhist hell to people in the dining hall who annoyed me.

Courtesy of Uncanny Japan

But it was in learning about how imperialism has shaped Western ideas of Buddhism that I finally was able to articulate a lot of the problems I had with white Buddhism. In one of my classes, I learned about how Western ideas of Buddhism originated in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century. Leaders there decided to frame Buddhism as rational, not as ritualistic or spiritual as other religions, so that Sri Lanka would seem civilized and worthy of independence from British colonialism. Many of the cultural aspects were toned down in order to be more accessible to a Western audience, instead highlighting practices that we now associate with mindfulness and meditation. These ideas underlie why I think white people find it so easy to claim Buddhism. The version most know was made to appeal to them.I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority.

I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority.

I also learned about the violence Buddhists had committed and continue to commit against Muslim and Hindu communities in countries where Buddhists are the majority. Once in a class on Himalayan cultures, we talked about the ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa in Bhutan. Most of my classmates were white, and I got the feeling many of them were in the class because they wanted to go backpacking in Nepal or had gotten into Tibetan Buddhism. It was obvious that thinking about the atrocities a Buddhist country had committed against a Hindu minority made them uncomfortable, and they quickly rushed through the discussion and onto the next reading. It made me think about how people would rather cling to their orientalist fantasies than start thinking about the real violence that their fantasies obscure.

When I complain about white Buddhism, sometimes people ask me about white people who practice Buddhism respectfully. I’m not sure what people mean by “respectfully”, but I think they mean learning the correct practices and not simply buying into Western, commercialized ideas of Buddhism. I think this is important, but it isn’t enough.

Right now, I’m quarantining with family in San Francisco Chinatown. People have varying and sometimes infuriating ideas of what it means to behave respectfully towards other people in a pandemic, especially the white people. The white people are much less likely to wear masks, and they always seem to be jogging or walking their dogs, oblivious to the people around them. In the whiter neighborhoods adjacent to Chinatown, there are fewer people on the sidewalks. I guess that’s an excuse to not think about how your body takes up space. Occasionally, I’ll see a white person jogging mask-less towards one of the busier Chinatown streets, and I’ll wonder why I’m so conditioned to shrink out of their way than scream, “Wear a fucking mask!”

It is not just how much knowledge you have of the religion, how much you respect the teaching themselves, but also how we engage with the histories that have shaped our views of Buddhism and our relationship to it, how we take up space, how entitled we do or don’t feel to take up space — how this is related to legacies of white supremacy and imperialism.

Then there is the outdoor dining, the white restaurants that spill out on the sidewalks. I try to avoid the streets with lots of these restaurants because it’s impossible to walk on the sidewalk without passing through a large clump of laughing, mask-less white people. I don’t begrudge the restaurants this. It’s not like they have much of a choice. But most of the restaurants in Chinatown don’t have room for outdoor dining. The sidewalks are too narrow. There are too many people walking around. It makes me think again about who is allowed to take up space and the ways in which people take up space can be a matter of survival.

This is similar to how I feel about what it means to practice Buddhism “respectfully.” It is not just how much knowledge you have of the religion, how much you respect the teaching themselves, but also how we engage with the histories that have shaped our views of Buddhism and our relationship to it, how we take up space, how entitled we do or don’t feel to take up space — how this is related to legacies of white supremacy and imperialism. Grappling with this is an ongoing process, and it makes me think about the idea of interconnectedness, not in the white hippy way where we hug trees and braid flowers in our hair, but the kind where we refuse to ignore the complex webs of power that we are all oppressed by and complicit in, the ties that bind us all together.

When it comes to Buddhism and cultural appropriation, I still sometimes worry that I’m making a big deal out of nothing, that I’m angry for no good reason. But I also think that dismissing my own anger is dismissing the histories that have shaped our ideas of Buddhism in the West — that even if my own anger is only a small blip, it still points to a larger system. Ignoring it is not useful because then I won’t be able to see how I fit in.

I mediate now, not in a religious way but to manage anxiety and chronic pain. Sometimes, the meditation recordings will reference Buddhism, usually when they’re talking about finding calm or learning not to be attached to negative emotions. I’m often invited to “cultivate inner peace,” which I think is funny and kind of irritating. If Buddhism has taught me to cultivate anything, it’s anger, the kind that gives clarity. This isn’t always something that is easy for me to access, but I would never give up the moments I can touch anger, even in exchange for enlightenment or whatever. It is something I will hold onto, earthly and overly attached, as long as I can.

I Have IBS and I Still Want You to Eat My Ass

Welcome to Butt Week, friends! An entire week dedicated to butts and butt-adjacent stuff: how-tos, thoughtful essays, original art, pop culture critiques, music and more! You are absolutely not ready for this and yet it is happening to you, right now. Let’s just get down to business: it’s time to talk about IBS and butt sex. 

Read all of Butt Week

I have a friend who desperately wants to give me a fecal transplant.

Fecal transplants are real life medical procedures, where a doctor sticks a tube into your ass, and then pumps someone else’s shit through the tube. Usually, it’s shit that used to belong to a friend or family member. Familiar shit.

The idea is that the microorganisms in your healthy friend’s shit will recolonize your gut, leading to a better bacterial balance and a healthier gastrointestinal tract. People who suffer from IBS or frequent infections from the bacterium C. diff often find it helpful in treating their conditions. I qualify on both counts.

While most people choose to go through this objectively unpleasant procedure in a sterilized medical environment, some people choose a DIY route. Generally, this involves freezing a sample of your friend’s shit and inserting the popsicle as you would a suppository. Most people might want to do this alone, in the privacy of their own bathroom. But when your friends are dominatrixes and perverts, this chance to play doctor might be too good to pass up.

“Do you think he’ll notice if I just never come out of the bathroom?”

It’s the summer of 2016, and I’m having a crisis in the bathroom of a guy I just started hooking up with. With one hand I’m furiously attempting to unclog his toilet, and with the other I’m texting my best friend about escape options. I might be able to fit myself through the window above the shower, but we’re on the second floor, and my pants are in the living room.

She confirms that he will definitely notice if I never come out of the bathroom. He’s a chill guy, she says. You’ve pegged him. He’s had his tongue in your ass. He’s going to be fine.

I am not going to be fine. I am sweating, both from the cramps in my stomach and the intense embarrassment and horror I feel about what I’ve done to this toilet. I’ve already flushed twice, and the clog hasn’t been swept away. I’m staring at myself in his mirror and trying to practice what I’m going to say when I come out of the bathroom and have to ask where he keeps his plunger. There’s a Picasso print reflected in the mirror behind my head. A line drawing of a butt.

Before I can decide whether to risk flooding the bathroom by flushing a third time, he calls out asking whether I’m okay, and I know I’ve been caught.

It’s exhausting to pretend not to be sick. What takes more of a toll on the body, more than the cramps and the hemorrhoids and the bloating and the treatments, is the mental energy it takes to hide all of the symptoms.
I just have a tiny bladder.
I just don’t like to eat much on dates.
I’m just feeling a little under the weather.

“Sick,” is my code word. Nobody wants details about what kind of sickness. They assume you’re sneezing or you’re throwing up and they leave it at that. Maybe you have your period. Maybe you have the flu. Maybe you get migraines.

A few months after I destroyed my Instagram date’s toilet, I was getting ready for a date with someone else. We’d met at a play party, and hit it off after I shook my ass at her. She told me she wanted to bite it, and asked for my number.

We’d seen each other a few times since then for negotiated, formal BDSM scenes. I worked for a dominatrix on the weekends but rarely got to play. She was looking for a new play partner and had access to professional dungeons. The one we were going to that day was a 40 minute drive, and she had asked me to wear a short dress, tights and no underwear.

We’d only been in the car a few minutes before she pulled over into the parking lot of a local college. She put the car in park, tapped her fingers on the wheel, and then reached over to flip up my skirt and twist her hand into the crotch of my pink fishnets. They shredded with a skkkkrrritch, my twat and ass now bare against the heated leather seats.

On the rest of the drive, we talked about boundaries, limits, scene minutia. She reached her arm across the center console to play with the fraying edges of my tights. I couldn’t stop worrying about whether my hemorrhoids were bleeding onto the seats of her luxury car.

I’d almost texted her that morning to cancel. I’d been up half the night with cramps and a feeling of urgency in my bowels despite an inability to empty them. My body had finally decided to cooperate and expel the painful build up early in the morning, and then seemingly couldn’t stop. On the drive, I pretended that I was twisting in my seat out of squirmy anticipation, rather than a stabbing pain in my colon and a desperate need to find a bathroom.

When we arrived, I forced myself to make small talk and be appropriately gracious to the domme who was lending us her space before excusing myself to the bathroom to “freshen up.” The walls were thin, and I could hear them chatting in the kitchen over a spread of cheese, crackers, and wine. I was terrified that they could hear me too.

Later, my then-domme and now-partner will recall this scene as one of her favorite moments from our early days. She remembers the glint from the red pom poms she asked me to bring, the music she had picked out, the way she smirked at me over her glass of wine when she said,

“Do a cheer routine.”
“Dance for me.”

She was horrified when I eventually told her the truth, that I don’t remember anything about that scene, except that I used the bathroom three times before we played, and that the feeling of her teeth sinking into the cheeks of my ass made me sweat with humiliation. On the ride home, it started snowing, turning a 40 minute drive into an hour and a half. She wanted to come up to my apartment afterwards, and I wanted her to, but I made up some excuse. I almost shit my pants between closing the front door, and reaching my bathroom.

“What does it mean when you say you’re sick?”
We’re out at a restaurant. After a few months of just playing together, we’ve branched out. Once a month, we go out for dinner and see a play. She’s seen my apartment. It’s getting harder to hide things.

I take another sip of my cocktail. I don’t want to talk about this. Talking about the details of what happens is too real, too personal. I’d rather say, “I’m just sick,” and leave it at that.

She can sense that I don’t want to talk about it.
“I’m asking because I get sick too.”

“I had a surgery a few years ago, and things in my system got a little screwed up. So now I can’t eat very much at one time, or have too much sugar, or I throw up.”

She knows me well enough by now to know that now that she’s put herself out there, I’ll have to reciprocate.

“I get…the other kind of sick.”

“Elaborate.”

I play with the skewer of orange and cherry in my old fashioned. I have talked about so many nasty, dirty things with her. She’s described the way she wants to push her tongue into all of my holes. I’ve talked to her about my most humiliating fantasies. I’ve let her hold a violet wand against my asshole.

This feels beyond all of that. The intimacy of showing the really gross parts of myself feels so much scarier than any other kind of play we’ve done.

When it’s only me who knows what ‘sick’ means, I can remember that anal play is sexy. My past partners, left in the dark, didn’t know that when I said I’d left my phone charger in my car and I’d be right back, I was running around the corner to the gas station so I could shit. Or that as soon as they left to go pick up our takeout, I would be sick in their bathroom. When it was my secret, I could believe that it was hot to talk about taking a dildo in my ass, or take pictures of myself sucking on a princess plug. I could compartmentalize that part of myself as separate from the part that cried on the toilet when all that was left inside of me was bile that burned when it dripped out.

Part of the appeal of anal sex or rimming, for me, has always been the shame. The feeling of someone’s hand, cock, mouth, there. The excruciating knowledge that they could tell exactly how much I liked it used to be enough to push me over the edge. Desires are often the fetishization of some deep-seated shame. But now, I can’t separate the dirty thrill of feeling disgusting from the fear and anxiety of actually being disgusting. What if I get them sick? What if I give them C. diff? What if they don’t want to touch me there anymore, now that they know how dirty I really, really am?

I’d been honest about the potential risks with my partners, but I hadn’t realized about the risk to myself. When I decided to stop hiding the experience of existing in my body from my partners and friends, I found a deeper intimacy with them. But doing so also forced me to acknowledge the truth to myself. My ass has polyps. It has scars. It has internal and external hemorrhoids. The skin is delicate enough that I bring my own toilet paper with me on trips, to make sure I don’t have to deal with chafing. I am sick, and it is dirty. But I still really like having it eaten.

Giving Poppers to Cis Women

Welcome to Butt Week, friends! An entire week dedicated to butts and butt-adjacent stuff: how-tos, thoughtful essays, original art, pop culture critiques, music and more! You are absolutely not ready for this and yet it is happening to you, right now. Today Drew weaves her story of sharing drugs onto your brain loom, and you’re all the better for it. We’re all all the better for it.

Read all of Butt Week

From elementary school through college my backpack was always filled with extra pens. I never knew when someone might ask for one. “Oh I have a pen,” I could say, real cool and casual. It felt so good to be helpful. It felt like maybe somebody liked me. If it was a cute girl I’d dive for my backpack even quicker. Here is something useful. I am being useful. Please notice me. Please like me. Please accept me.

I’m thinking about this while drunk at a gay dance party with my crotch pressed against an Emmy winning actress. I’m thinking about this because I’m offering poppers to her and all her friends and I’m feeling cool and useful and like it’s possible I might belong. Twenty minutes earlier I was making out with my crush of eight months who two days later will be the first and only lesbian I have sex with — she won’t consider it sex because she’s cis. While I dance with the Emmy winner, my crush starts making out with my other friend — her ex, also a lesbian, also cis. I try to focus on the Emmy winner and her friends as I give them more poppers, but I feel sad about my crush. I feel stupid for feeling so sad.

At some point my crush and my friends leave and it’s just me and the Emmy winner and her friends. Then they start to leave too. The Emmy winner tells me she’ll be right back and to stay where I am. The thing is I really have to pee so I run to the men’s room — yes, gay bars in LA have gendered bathrooms — where I find a line of cis-appearing women waiting for the one stall. I do something I haven’t done in a public bathroom for years — I use the urinal. I’m fucking wasted and feeling irreverent and I say something about “trans privilege” before explaining who I was just dancing with and why I’m in a rush to get back. When I return to the dance floor the Emmy winner is gone and I dance with someone else for a bit and then go home.

That weekend there will be a lot of discussion about how this Emmy winner pulled me out of our friend circle to dance with me specifically. I will bask in these discussions not because I’m particularly attracted to this famous cis woman — there are no trans Emmy winning actresses, of course — but because it makes me feel cool and I want to seem cool in front of my crush and in front of all these other cis women who wish the Emmy winner would’ve danced with them. There will be a lot of drama and a lot of emotions and a lot of poppers and a little sex and then we will all watch the premiere of The L Word: Generation Q, a show with a lot of drama and a lot of emotions and no poppers and a lot of sex and no trans women and no trans women and no trans women.

I started giving poppers to cis women earlier that year. It wasn’t meant to be a thing — I just like poppers. I would explain this little bottle of mystery liquid with a matter-of-fact enthusiasm. Poppers are the chemical alkyl nitrate. They’re legal — sold as leather polish or room deodorizers — but they’re meant to be used illegally. Their intense high lasts about 45 seconds and it makes everything in the world feel good. Because it relaxes certain muscles, poppers are most commonly associated with anal sex, but they make all sex better. They make everything better. Inhale while on the dance floor and everything will be amazing for a brief moment in time.

I’m not a heavy drug user. I desperately want to shut off the anxious OCD voice in my head, but I also like to feel in control. This is why I love poppers; they take me outside my thought patterns so I can live in the moment without the commitment of a night on molly or acid. I can shake myself out of my own head, appreciate the specificity of the music or the colors or the people around me, actually find pleasure in sex, and then I’m brought back. I’m aware and present and can take control — if I want to. Often when mixed with alcohol or weed I can ride that poppers high through a few more songs or into a second orgasm.

Torrey Peters’ novella Glamour Boutique starts with the sentence: The poppers hit. Trans woman Amy has her mouth around trans woman Reese’s soft dick when the poppers kick in and suddenly Amy is sobbing. We learn that Amy has spent her life disassociating during her sexual experiences with cis women. Even with Reese their sex has been distant and boring and described as “camming, only in person.” Filled with dysphoria and years of supposed coping mechanisms, Amy doesn’t know how to let go. “The problem with the poppers is that it made her too dumb to keep all the cognitive machinery going,” Peters writes. “It all ground to a halt, and instead of the new lies, she fell into direct contact with a raw fact: she was a girl in love with a girl. It was overwhelming. It was all she had ever hoped for.”

It’s worth noting that this moment does not happen while Reese’s cock is up her ass or even hard down her throat. It’s worth noting that what I’m talking about here isn’t fucking my prostate — but having one. I’ve used poppers while fucking myself, but that’s rare for me. I’ve used them far more while dancing. I’ve used them far more with a vibrator on the head of my penis like the clit it will someday become — God/finances willing. The only time I’ve ever used poppers during sex with another person was when I was with another trans woman and it didn’t involve penetration. The possibilities of poppers go far beyond anal, the possibilities of poppers go far beyond cis gay men. Poppers can be a tool, a relief, a point of connection.

It’s the summer of 2019 and I miss poppers. I’ve been in LA for a few months and I’ve been single and navigating cis lesbian spaces, all poppers-free. I’m with a cis woman friend of mine in West Hollywood and we’re planning to go out ostensibly as research. She’s a director and she wants to make a show that takes place in West Hollywood and I’ve started writing a pilot based on my new experiences as a trans woman in LA. I’m telling her stories that might possibly go into this fictional world and she says, “It’s wild because I’ve never seen anything like that on TV before. But for you, it’s just, like, your everyday life!”

I laugh because this feels like a very cis woman thing for her to say. It’s funny and it’s true and it’s othering and I laugh. I’m ready to go out. And if we’re going to be going out in West Hollywood I want to finally stop by a sex shop and buy poppers. My friend has never tried them and I tell her I’ll share if she wants. I’ve done a lot of research and supposedly they’re safe and also they’re low commitment so if she doesn’t like it, oh well.

We end up at The Abbey, because it’s a weeknight and we lack imagination and also we’re very drunk and just want to dance. I inhale, she inhales, and I’m delighted to watch her delight. Her initial fear subsides and suddenly she’s giddy in the way I’m giddy and we’re hot and we’re dancing and it’s fun.

I’ve spent months feeling like an outsider, desperately trying to pretend I’m not young and not newly out and not newly single and not new to lesbian spaces and not trans and not different. But with the poppers I’m the expert. I’m the one offering a new experience. It feels good to feel useful. It feels good to know what I’m doing. It feels good to let go of my anxieties. It feels good to keep dancing.

I started carrying poppers with me wherever I went. If I was going out dancing my pants would contain my house key, my cell phone with my cards tucked into the case, and the little bottle of poppers I always worried people would confuse for a bulge. I started using them more and I started offering them freely. I hoped to recreate the feeling I’d had with my friend and it worked almost every time.

I wasn’t the only trans woman in these spaces, nor was I the only one with poppers, but I did seem to be one of the only trans women committed to being out in the kind of lesbian-adjacent space where AFAB people had never even considered using the faggotty anal drug. It quickly became a bit and I loved it. My difference as an AMAB person in these spaces always felt like an inconvenience or something to hide or something to be fetishized. But now I was useful. A cultural exchange from a person with a prostate to those without.

One night I’m in a convertible with my roommates and my roommates’ hot friend and I’m in the backseat with the friend and Tove Lo’s “Disco Tits” is blasting. The friend is queer but not super experienced and I take out my poppers and the wind is fucking our faces and we’re leaning on each other during this 45 seconds of ecstatic sound and sensation. When we get to the bar she says to me, “You know the effect you have on people, right? You walk into a room and everybody looks at you.”

Suddenly, I felt like this cool, experienced queer who writes for a lesbian website and introduces people to new drugs. I liked thinking of myself that way. I liked to imagine that I wasn’t trying to fit within the confines of an existing queer community — I was adapting that community to me. On the good days that’s how it felt to give cis women poppers. On the bad days it felt like I was still merely tolerated because Twitter says trans women are women — the poppers were just my way of winning them over. Even if you don’t actually believe I’m a woman I’ll at least prove myself useful. I can be so useful.

I discovered poppers thanks to my first out queer friends in New York. Three cis lesbians — Kelly, Caroline, and Laura — and one cis gay man — Daniel. Daniel had given Kelly poppers and now Kelly was giving them out like a missionary. When Kelly offered them to me, I was a baby queer and lifelong goody-two-shoes who had never done a drug except weed. But she said they were safe and Daniel said they were safe and I was ready to jump into my second adolescence so I said yes. It was amazing.

When I look at pictures from these months I’m shocked by what I look like. I bristle when cis people call trans people brave but goddamn I was brave to go out in the world looking that ugly. This isn’t about femininity or passability or gender conformity — this is about puberty. I was new and I didn’t know how to dress myself or how to wear makeup and I was just going through a totally normal awkward stage. Yet here I was out in the world meeting lesbians and saying I was also a lesbian and asking to be referred to as such. And these lesbians just got it. They saw me and gendered me and then gave me a bunch of drugs.

This was not my experience when I first moved to LA. I didn’t even look awkward anymore and yet I suddenly felt so out of place. I met groups of queer cis women and AFAB nonbinary people who all looked the same. These groups welcomed me with their platitudes and invitations while rejecting me with their looks and body language and the little things they’d say. I experienced the sort of community that so many trans women fear. They weren’t TERFs, but you don’t have to be a TERF or overtly transmisogynistic to make it clear trans women don’t belong.

The months passed and I found new pockets within our community. I found people like my friends back in New York — queers who formed community based on an expansive notion of queerness, rather than a unity of identity. It’s why I bristle at the romanticization of t4t despite how much I cherish my friendships and sexual experiences with other trans people. The trans/cis binary is just another binary. I don’t think that limitation of thought actually accomplishes what we think it’s accomplishing.

The last two years I’ve been in a group chat with Laura and Daniel and it’s one of the spaces where I feel safest in my transness. More and more I’m finding, cis or trans, the people I’m closest with are those who have really thought about gender. More and more I’m finding, cis or trans, the people I’m closest with are other queers without boundaries who don’t cloister themselves in a single identity. It’s these things, not the specific label “trans,” that I’ve found matters. I feel more accepted in my group chat with a cis man and a cis woman who have very different relationships to gender and bodies and queerness than I have in rooms exclusively for trans women.

I love being a lesbian. I love lesbian spaces. Queer women and AFAB nonbinary people are who I spent my life looking up to and wanting to be. I love being a dyke and identifying with dyke culture. I don’t want to abandon those spaces by picking another of my insufficient labels to hide within. Instead I want all of our spaces to widen. I want all of our spaces to interact. I want more people to be together and more people to feel included. I want a big queer party with plenty of poppers to go around.

It’s January and I have no idea in two months I’ll be in quarantine. I’m with four friends I met in lesbian community, none of whom are lesbians. Three of them are faggoty AFAB nonbinary people and we’re at Flaming Saddles in West Hollywood, a country western themed bar with pole dancers that has since shut down. We’re already drunk from dinner and we’re getting drunker. An old cis queen hits on me and I’m friendly until he leaves. A beautiful cis woman tells me she can’t stop staring at me and gives me her number. Then she tells me she’s straight. I laugh and say, sure you are. And then we all get drunker.

We end up at The Abbey and I give poppers to my friends. It’s not the first time I’ve given poppers to nonbinary people but it’s the first time I’ve given poppers to nonbinary people that faggoty and their joy far surpasses any of my cis woman disciples. Drunk and high and in my own poppers daze, I’m struck with a simple thought that feels like the most important revelation of my life. “Dykes and faggots are the same!” I shout. I start running around The Abbey shouting, “Dykes and faggots are the same!” I tweet it. I run outside, still buzzing, and I hit my head on a tree.

Back at my friend’s apartment, I’m sitting on the floor in the midst of the third blackout of my life and my friends who are dating are making sure that I’m okay. I am. I feel great. My one friend is still talking about the poppers and I tell them next they need to use them during sex. I take the poppers out of my pocket and set them on the table. “Here,” I say. “Fuck on these.” And they do.

My friend will tell you that poppers have completely changed their relationship to sex and their body and dysphoria. They now own several bottles far more artisanal than my own. They’re worried they might use them a bit too much, but God it’s hard being trans so whatever works, you know?

The story is supposed to go: I’m a trans woman, I started using poppers, now I love getting fucked in the only hole God gave me. The story instead has gone: I’m a trans woman, I started using poppers, they help me have fun when I feel like an outsider, they make my orgasms better, my friend now loves getting fucked in their hole I wish I had. We’re all just trying to figure ourselves out and what a joy to be in queer community combining our cultures and tools and bodies and desires.

I want to live in a world where I’m not the only trans woman in dykey spaces or the only dyke in faggoty spaces. I want to live in a world where the terms AFAB and AMAB are obsolete. I want to live in a world that feels as queer as I do. I want to live in a world without dysphoria. I want to live in that moment I inhale chemicals out of a bottle. I want to live in those 45 seconds when it all feels possible.

A Scrutinized Body Becomes Art: How Makeup Helps Me Manage my Body Dysmorphic Disorder

All photos contributed by Olivia Zayas Ryan

I’m supposed to meet my friend for drinks in an hour. I already have my outfit on. Today, I chose to challenge myself: I am wearing a black body suit that fits snug against my skin, with a crop top that does nothing to hide the edges I’m afraid of. I look in my full-length mirror and I wonder if people passing by will stare at my curves and skin the way I do, and I try not to convince myself to change. Instead, I start thinking about what makeup look I can turn today.

When I sit down at my desk, instead of a place to do my work, I am met with an array of beauty products. Eyeshadow palettes pile in one corner, a collection of lipsticks and eyeliners clutter a basket that was meant to help me organize, unwashed brushes crowd a small pencil holder. On my desk, there is also a small beauty mirror — the kind with one “normal” side, and one side that magnifies your face by three times. For many years, I have often started my makeup routine in the same way: I sit down, I think about what I want to do that day, and I stare at myself in the unnecessarily zoomed in mirror, endlessly examining what I believe to be my flaws. I pick at the ever present whiteheads on my chin, I examine every pore on my nose, I play with the baby hairs that line my face, I pluck every stray eyebrow hair, I fantasize about getting a nose job and the next time I’m able to get my upper lip waxed. Time seems to stop as I sit there, examining every detail of my appearance, finding new things about myself to criticize.

On the side of my mirror, I catch sight of the newest makeup palette I bought, and suddenly I am lured out of this mirror-induced haze. I take a breath and open the palette. It’s colorful, with a rainbow full of matte shades and a column of chunky glitters. I prime my eyes and reach for the brushes in their pencil holder and dip the fluffiest one into a soft pink shade. I grab another brush and go into the brightest pink I have. I swipe gold glitter across my lids. I look in the mirror, and the skin that I once chastised becomes a canvas. I become art. I add more bright eyeshadows, I listen to music that makes me feel grounded, and I am lost as I put color on my skin that finally matches what I see for myself. In adding thick eyeliner and highlight, my skin feels my own, and I look in the mirror and I can truly see myself.

I have struggled with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) for as long as I can remember.

BDD is a mental health condition on the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) spectrum in which a person experiences obsessive thoughts about their own appearance and perceived physical flaws that cause severe emotional distress and/or impacts their daily life. BDD symptoms show up differently for everyone. For some people, BDD looks like seeking cosmetic surgery to fix a perceived flaw, for others, it looks like an obsession with a physical trait that causes so much anxiety that they avoid social interactions. For me, it has shown up as an eating disorder and obsessive skin picking that have interfered with my life for the last decade.

When I was nine years old, before I even knew my body well enough to hate it, I started developing disordered eating habits, which grew into a full blown eating disorder by the time I was 12. A few years later, I developed a skin picking disorder called dermatillomania that feels as integral to my identity as the color of my eyes. Dots of faded brown and red line my arms, my stomach, and my chest. Every inch of my body is scarred in some way. My skin picking knows no boundaries. I’ll spend important meetings for work picking at my arms, pick at my chest when I’m on dates, pick at my stomach while I’m just watching TV.

BDD also looks like having a very poor understanding of what I actually look like. This has gotten significantly worse since the start of staying home due to the pandemic. In addition to having more time to look in the mirror, through FaceTimes, Zoom calls, and even telehealth visits with my therapist, I am forced to look at myself in a tiny box in the corner of my screen constantly. Through seeing myself constantly, my perceived flaws become greater, and it has become harder to know what I look like. When I look in the mirror, I cannot discern if the flaws I am seeing are real, or if I created them. I am unable to accept them as a part of what I look like — instead, I obsess over them, and fantasize or plan out ways to change them.

My BDD doesn’t just impact how I see myself. It impacts how I see others, too. During the pandemic, we have lost the ability to see people exist as their whole selves in person, and instead, we see curated images of people on social media. The images of other people’s bodies are posed, edited, and specifically chosen. They are not candid. I know that the perception I have of my body is vastly different from what others see, and I struggle every day to find the reality of my body. When I try to understand what my body looks like in the context of other people, I am comparing myself to images that are color corrected and blurred and tweaked to allow the user to post themselves in a way that they like. Of course this comparison is going to leave me feeling even farther from the beauty standards I hold myself to. And on top of that, the pandemic has caused an increase in triggering weightloss memes and content. As I compare the body I see in the mirror to those that I see on a screen, I find more traits I hate about myself.

I was always fascinated by makeup, and began experimenting with it when I was elementary school, sneaking soft pink shimmer onto my eyes before I left for school. When I was in middle school, I was gifted my first “real” eyeshadow palette and played with different color combinations and styles I had seen on Tumblr. Once the era of beauty influencers and YouTubers began, I immersed myself in the online beauty community, spending hours watching videos and tutorials. I used what I learned and began buying more products, trying out new things, and spending even more time looking in mirrors. Slowly, makeup evolved for me from a fun pastime that I was good at, to a place of art and expression.

Often, use of makeup, especially as a way to cover up perceived flaws, is seen as a symptom of BDD. But for me, using makeup is not a way to hide what I look like. Instead, it’s a way for me to be seen. In the process of creating makeup looks, I am spending time with my face and my body in a way that used to make me uncomfortable, and in turn, I am celebrating the parts of my face that I once saw as flaws. I get to look within myself and express how I feel or what I’m thinking through the colors and textures I apply to my skin, transforming my skin from something I resent to something I am grateful for. For me, makeup is an integral part of my healing process — a way for me to express and see myself more clearly — not a symptom.

The makeup I wear also forces me to be seen. I often feel that everyone else in the world must share my perception of my body and thus see the same flaws I do, which has made me want to blend in with others in the past in order to avoid that scrutiny from others. But when I walk down the street with two-toned eye makeup and beaming highlight, my presence is known, and I know that people can see me. In this way, my use of makeup and its impact on how I view my body is also tied to my queerness.

My experimentation with colorful and over-the-top makeup began around the same time that I started living into my queer identity more. Before then, I was using makeup to conform to beauty standards, to make myself “prettier,” to become smaller and more attractive. Now, I use makeup as a way to explore and honor what queerness looks like for me. I play with the colors that I feel, I try out new ways to be femme, I look to drag and other aspects of queer culture for inspiration. When I look in the mirror now, the person I see is closer to who I imagine myself to be, and I attribute that as much to my makeup as I do to my queer aesthetic and identity.

The pandemic has taken away the outlets for queer visibility that I am used to, such as going to clubs or attending events with my community. As a femme queer person, I often try to signal and connect to my queerness through makeup, and it brings me joy (as much as it does discomfort) to be seen and read as queer. Now, I grasp at visibility through Instagram and social media, which means taking endless photos of myself. The only way I can see and feel seen is through social media — but the comparisons that brings can often make my dymorphia worse. I see beautiful photos of people every time I scroll through my phone, I follow makeup artists and other people I look up to, and I strive to make my photos match the caliber of theirs.

When my girlfriends or friends take photos of me, they know the drill: take 500, and I’ll like 5. I take these photos to feel seen, but more often than not when I see them I feel disgusted. I focus on the way my lips aren’t symmetrical, the way my skin looks covered in dots and lines, and the way extra skin gathers at the top of my underarms. When I feel this way though, I try once again to view what I’m seeing as a painting or an art piece — not an indication of my worth. I try to look at how I look as a celebration. I try to celebrate my art.

How Writing “The Ship We Built,” a Children’s Novel, Helped Me Come Out

It all began with a text message exchange with a big crush in January 2014. Or, it was less than a crush – it was more like “a handful of balloons,” as described in a later love letter I sent to them. They were someone who could not fit into one word. Here was the exchange:

Me: If there were to be a whole world inside of a snowflake that landed on your wrist, what would be happening in it?

Them: A penguin colony belly-sliding down the ligaments of the flake.

Me: My snowflake would have children in giant white and silver ballrooms swinging off of chandeliers and wearing tin foil hats. But sometimes the snowflakes are quiet.

Them: That’s good. Otherwise it might be overstimulating in there. You need to write a children’s book.

Me: I would like that. I think it would be about belly buttons and wishing wells. But maybe not. I also like the idea of writing a little book about girl crushes being the same as crushes.

Them: I don’t see why those things are mutually exclusive.

Me: I will send you the first draft.

And, indeed, I wrote that first draft in the backseat of a golden mini-van moving between Chicago and Indianapolis later that day – which later became the text for this animation I called The Ship We Built. As described in the original synopsis, the story follows two kids who could dream, learn, grow, and be together without the limits of words and empty homes. “They give each other an uncharted strength and magic that they didn’t know existed outside of their drawings. Together they build something new.”

I loved reading it out loud. I loved treating it as a lullaby. I loved sharing it with new people, and inviting them back into the refrigerator boxes they may have sat in as kids. While it started as a gift for one person, I quickly realized it could be a gift for many. This, I thought, would be a story centering youth, as a majority of kids books involving queerness was focused on the LGBTQIA+ identities of adults in a children’s life. At the time, me and my text message buddy were both identifying as queer women and I envisioned this would be a lesbian story told from a nameless narrator. Looking back, I realize that the narrator wasn’t ready to tell me his name – he wasn’t ready to name himself as a boy, just as I wasn’t yet ready to hear it about myself.

For the coming year or two, I became obsessed with the two kids that this first draft followed. Whenever I was on a train ride or amongst the luggage in a carpool, I would imagine myself knocking on the universe of the story’s door to ask “What has happened since I’ve been gone?” I’d imagine the narrator would bring me inside and tell me the amount he felt safe sharing. He told me about the rocks they leave on each other’s porches when they didn’t want to respond to “How are you?” He told me about the maps he draws to his favorite places when they felt far away. He told me about his baby teeth. Each time he’d tell me a different name for himself. I used gel pens and crayons to transcribe these into a series of about thirty nursery rhymes or poems.

He used “he” as a pronoun for himself before I used it for myself, but both of us were uncertain about our own growing and power alongside each other. He reminded me of what it means to share with the wrong people, and the right people. I was told from a family member that I was “wasting my potential” writing what I do — sharing what I do. In response, I printed all of my early drafts of The Ship We Built, put them in a box, and offered them as a Christmas present. In review of the folded pages, I was left with the remark, “I liked it better when it was a lesbian story.” Which was hard to not read as – I was liked better when I was a lesbian story, and not a trans story. This was within the same year I received an intervention for coming out as trans in the “wrong way.” The year where I realized that my own gender journey was treated with more urgency and overt fear than the sexual abuse I endured as a child. I brought balloons to this intervention to insist on the celebration of my own becoming.

In a way, I lent my balloons to the narrator who eventually found his name — Rowan, who writes letters to attach to balloons throughout the novel version of The Ship We Built. I wanted to give him a way to celebrate, connect, and release in the face of adversity that mirrored my own. This felt like the first real exchange I had with this narrator’s voice — a moment where it was clear what I could offer him something in return. I could offer a safe container for him to share more and more of himself and the questions most would be too afraid to ask out loud. Like, “Do you ever lie?” or “Why do parents think that kids don’t notice things?” or “Do you think I’m stupid?”

I felt so alone in my coming out process — enough to make me want to die. As time went on, he started to listen to me as much as I listened to him. I didn’t have the words for gender or sexuality at this age, the age of ten. Sometimes I still don’t as an adult, nor does he. We’ve both played our own versions of the “No Talking Game.” We’ve both felt the unique dangers of liking boys and liking girls. We both fear growing into the men who have hurt us the most. We both have used our imaginations as a way to ground ourselves in the futures we want.

Now that this book is available in print, I think of it as a valentine to LGBTQIA+ youth in unsupportive homes. It’s a valentine for people in old and new forms of isolation. It’s a valentine to those slow to trust. It’s a valentine to anyone who catches the balloons that I gave to Rowan.

Get your own copy of The Ship We Built here. You can also download a printable activity book made by Lexie here.

Coming Out Twice: On Being Gay and Asexual in a World Without Representation

The thing about coming out is that it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in stages. When I first said I was into girls out loud with any confidence, I was eighteen standing on a beach in Monterey after a rugby tournament. Before that I had known I was into women for about a year but had no idea what to do with that information. I had just moved to Sacramento for college and was on my own for the first time in my life. It had taken me joining a women’s rugby club and meeting people my age who were gay that led to me being more comfortable with how I felt. Coming out at that time was easy because I was so isolated, far away from my family. It’s easier to deflect prying personal questions over the phone than face-to-face.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that I came out a second time, and told my family. After college I moved to the East Bay, just outside of San Francisco. I got an internship for a gaming website which didn’t pay, but was really exciting. One day I was called away from my interning duties and asked to write something about one of my favorite video game franchises, Mass Effect. There’d been an article criticizing a recent promotional campaign getting people to vote on what the box art for the female version of the protagonist should look like in the sequel. Since the article had been written by a queer woman, I was asked if I wanted to write an article in response to it. It was my first opportunity to write an editorial piece — but writing it also meant I would have to reveal who I was in a very public forum for the first time. I made the decision to write the piece drawing from my own perspective and the day the article was published I called my parents and came out to them. They’ve been divorced nearly my entire life so that was two phone calls and a double dose of anxiety. Even over the phone it was terrifying, but it was a huge relief.

At the time, I felt like that was it. I was out, and from that moment on things would be easier, no challenges, no roadblocks, nothing to hold me back. For a long time that was true. I felt more confident writing things from my point of view as a gay woman and felt a general comfort existing in the world. But in my late twenties that I realized something was still not quite complete. Although I was content with who I was, something was off, a thing in the back of my mind I couldn’t put a face to yet. The things I should have an interest in didn’t interest me. I tried dating apps for a while and never met anyone I truly connected with; I didn’t like going to nightclubs at all either. My sexual experiences ranged from good to bad just as much as anyone else’s but things were always slightly off. Nothing stuck.

I’d known about asexuality well before I identified as ace but I had never considered it for myself because I just thought I was too awkward or shy when it came to dating. I attributed my aversion to nightclubs and casual hookups to my social anxiety. Why else would meeting attractive strangers in dark rooms with strobe lights and deafening music not appeal to me? My foray into dating sites and apps was never really that successful either. No matter how nice someone was things didn’t click and most apps just felt like an extension of club culture. The whole idea of dating felt like a chore, and in a way, it still does. I also thought that my insecurities might be the product of sexual abuse I experienced when I was around the age of two. These things plagued my mind for years leading up to my thirties.

“I’m not much interested in physical stuff. Never have been. Leastways not like other folk seem to be. It’s not that I can’t? I just don’t care for it.”

One thing that helped me come to terms with my ace identity was delving into the experiences of other asexual people online. Although I had known what it was, I hadn’t truly taken the time to listen to the experiences of people who were asexual and why they identified that way until I was questioning things about myself. Once I did, I realized many of the aspects of being asexual applied to me. There is also a website, asexuality.org, created specifically to educate people on the topic. If you still don’t understand it or may be questioning if you fall into the asexual category, I would highly recommend checking that website out. By educating myself with their resources and listening to other people’s stories I found online, things fell into place. I slowly began to realize that while I initially identified as asexual, what I was feeling was more inline with being demisexual.

“Demisexuality is feeling no sexual attraction towards other people unless a strong emotional bond has been established. This is often included in or paired with the graysexual category because demisexual people may essentially feel like they’re asexual when they don’t have that bond with anyone, and the bond typically takes a long time to establish.”

There are some who do not see graysexual/demisexual people as a part of the asexual community but I certainly don’t agree with that sentiment. Sexuality being a spectrum, we can’t expect people to fall into one neat category all of the time.

I wish these resources had been available to me growing up. The internet was barely a thing when I was going through middle school and high school. The idea of going online was a luxury and there certainly weren’t an abundance of articles or video content explaining what being asexual was at that time. As a closeted kid there was barely any representation of queer characters on television or movies that I could identify with growing up. Stumbling across Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns felt like striking gold. These days you can watch compilation videos of the entire queer story arc of a show or binge watch an entire series in a day. Having had to scour and scrape for any drop of queer representation I could I’m grateful that a new generation has a broader range of sources for media and resources. Many of the things I’ve found helpful lately are short films and documentaries made by asexual people, explaining what it is and what their experiences are. Mainstream queer media isn’t necessarily delivering the goods when it comes to representing asexuality.

“Sex sells” is still a predominant adage in how things are marketed in the media. Once kids reach a certain age, things start to shift from stories of adolescence into stories about teenagers losing their virginity or aspiring to. I remember watching countless shows and movies growing up where having sex was the primary goal of the protagonist or at least a motivating factor in what they did throughout the story. I grew up with five boys during puberty — the year American Pie came out was particularly grueling.

It was difficult to escape discussions of sex even at church. During youth group one night our youth pastor delivered a candid speech about sex, saying how great it was and that we should all wait until we were married to have it. This idea of abstinence was another thing I drew upon to justify why I wasn’t asexual before I came to terms with it. Abstinence and celibacy are often falsely equated with ace identities because many people believe asexuality is anything that does not include having sex. In reality concepts of abstinence and celibacy are a conscience choice, whereas identifying on the asexual spectrum is more about your desires. Desires that are an essential part of who you are.

“Elena, there’s no rush.”

“We can do it next month, next year.”

“We can never do it if that’s what you want.”

An ideal pop culture representation of someone who identifies on the asexual spectrum should entail an honest conversation about how that looks in an adult setting, whether it be through a romantic relationship or a platonic friendship. While there are asexual people like myself who identify as Demisexual, and therefore still feel a form of sexual attraction, there are many asexual people who have no desire for sex or romantic relationships, additionally identifying as aromatic. Often, those who express lack of sexual/romantic interest are treated as if they have a mental illness, so portraying those characters that way won’t help things. Many problematic story lines involving people within the LGBTQIA community have used the depiction of queerness as a mental disorder as a plot device. This is something we’ve recently seen recede a bit in the past few decades, but it has not entirely disappeared. There are few moments in media that have resonated with me as an asexual person over the past few years.

To date, my favorite step taken toward asexual representation in major media came from the science fiction role playing video game, The Outer Worlds, released in 2019. Parvati Holcomb is the first non-playable character you can invite to accompany you through the story. Her personal quest includes her having a crush on a mechanic in one of the space stations you visit. It is up to you to help her pursue this person, and if you do Parvati gets very candid about how people have treated her due to her asexuality. While she never says it out right it is very apparent that is what she is talking about and seeing that kind of representation was very rewarding. Your character is also a bit asexual by default, being that you can participate in many side quests with your companions but you can’t romance any of them. Outside of games there are only a few examples from television I think that are equally as meaningful, and no, one of those moments does not include Jughead on Riverdale.

In episode seven of the third season of One Day at a Time Elena and her partner Syd hatch a plan to get a hotel room so they can have sex. When Elena finds out that Syd has already had sex, she freaks out a bit and starts going off about her insecurities. When Syd goes to comfort her, they say “We can do it next month, next year. We can never do it if that’s what you want. No matter what happens, I love you”. If you’re looking for an example of how to speak to an asexual audience even when your characters aren’t ace, this kind of dialog is important. Sending the message that you can be loved without having sex with someone you’re in a relationship is an important message to send especially to a younger audience. There can be a lot of peer pressure on kids to have sex as they go into their teenage years which can put them in very harmful situations if they rush into things before they’re ready and trust the wrong people. It was nice to watch a scene where a character who had already had sexual experience was conscious of another character’s apprehension and did not put pressure on them.

“I don’t want to have sex at all.”

“Sex doesn’t make us whole.”

“And so…”

“…how could you be broken?”

Sex Education, a show that predominantly portrays intense sexual relationships, managed to include a meaningful asexual storyline in its most reason season. When Jackson, the most popular boy in school, is cast as Romeo in the school play, Florence, who plays Juliet, is feeling pressure from her cast mates to put the moves on him. She seeks help from Otis, the main character, who dispenses sex tips for a nominal fee. Florence tells him that she got involved with the play because she thought it was all about love but in reality, it is all about sex and she doesn’t want to have sex.

Otis tells her to go at her own pace and maybe she just hasn’t found the right person yet. This advice falls flat for Florence and after more run-ins with her castmates prodding her to try and sleep with her co-star she seeks out help from Otis’s mom, Jean Milburn, a sexual therapist played by Gillian Anderson. When Florence tells Jean that she feels broken because she does not want to have sex Jean takes the opportunity to educate her, and in turn the viewers, about what asexuality is noting that it is a valid sexual identity. Jean also goes on to deliver a line that helps Florence come to terms with her asexuality and also serves as an example of what messages should be sent about sex in general. “Sex doesn’t make us whole. And so, how could you ever be broken?”

Regardless of how asexual people realize who they are, their experience is no less valid than any other coming out story. Every asexual person has a moment when the recognition sets in. When they finally see who they are and the piece to the jigsaw puzzle they’ve been missing their entire life finds its place.

For me that moment was almost three years ago, right after I’d turned thirty years old. I was walking along an elevated sidewalk overlooking the Las Vegas strip holding a giant alcoholic slushie. It was my second year attending ClexaCon and I had been lucky enough to find two friends to room with that year, whom I’d met through the convention. We had found a bartender who poured quite generously and made our way around town laughing and sharing in the feeling of bliss that comes from having spent a day celebrating the queerest shit that made us happy. It is a memory I hold very dear especially now, in these uncertain times of self-isolation.

We had been discussing our experiences at the convention as well as things we were excited about on television and film coming out later that year. Earlier at the convention, we had befriended a girl who we’d met in line waiting for something. She was cute and she and I had arranged to meet up for breakfast that morning which had been nice. My friends and I discussed it on our walk and it was pretty clear I kind of liked her as well, which led to some discussion of me seeing her again during the convention. It honestly was the furthest thing from my mind in that moment and it got me thinking.

This is what people are supposed to do right? Hit it off with someone they meet on vacation and hook up? She was cute and nice so maybe I should pursue it more, right? None of that seemed very important to me at all because it wasn’t what I wanted. That was when I uttered out loud, words I had been silently repeating in the back of my mind for nearly a year.

“I think I’m Asexual”

There was a short pause as my friends let the news settle. It didn’t take long for them to express their support and the fact that it was just something about me they accepted felt incredible. We stood in that spot for a bit longer, admiring the sight of the busy streets of Las Vegas at dusk.

I closed my eyes, and for the first time in my life, I was completely myself.

The Straight TV Couples That Helped Me Realize I’m Gay

Feature image from CBS

In the summer of 2010, I was 13 and The Nanny had been off the air about ten years, existing mostly through reruns on various cable channels, like Nick at Nite or Hallmark. It came into my life after a round of mindless channel-surfing, my discerning teen self settling on this wacky-looking sitcom from the ’90s. It was hard to miss — after all, Hallmark showed the same episode three times a day with the next episode premiering at midnight. When all six seasons had been shown, the whole series would start all over again. I know this because I spent that entire summer watching each episode of The Nanny at least twice every day, with the ever-frosty C.C. Babcock easily and quickly becoming my favorite character.

I shipped her and her sparring partner Niles before I even knew what the word “shipping” meant. Eventually, I stumbled upon The Really Unofficial Nanny Homepage, the show’s oldest and most extensive fansite, which also played host to a sprawling archive of fan fiction. The first piece of fic I’d ever read wasn’t even a story about Niles and C.C. — instead, it was a badly written smut piece about Fran and Maxwell. I was 13! There were no warnings, as far as I could tell. Even if there were, I’m not sure I would’ve understood what they meant.

2010 also marked the great fandom migration from LiveJournal to Tumblr, and even though I didn’t come from LJ, I arrived on the microblogging platform at about the same time everyone else did. In those early days of Tumblr, I reached the tail end of “tumblarity,” an algorithm that measured how popular you were on the site each day, photosets didn’t exist and GIFs had a 500 kb limit. My blog was called pepperlane, after a grad school nickname of Lauren Lane, the actress who played C.C. Babcock. On my iTunes library, I curated playlists filled with songs that reminded me of C.C. and her dynamic with Niles, like “Out of My League” by Stephen Speaks or “She’s Always A Woman” by Billy Joel. I made GIFs from low quality YouTube uploads of the episodes split into four barely watchable parts. By this point, there was no doubt about it: The Nanny was my first fandom, Niles and C.C. were my first OTP and that was all I thought of for an entire year.

C.C. — and by extension, Lauren Lane — was always at the center of my Nanny experience. Reading fic, I reveled in authors’ vivid descriptions of her, from the way her hair was always perfectly coiffed atop her head to the way her blue eyes always glimmered mischievously whenever she got Niles to shut up after a particularly great one-liner. Watching the show, I spent a little too much time looking at her stockinged thighs and the occasional cleavage, mentally chastising myself whenever I did. In the episode “Green Card,” when she stood at the kitchen counter while a Frenchman peppered soft, light kisses on her arm, I had the vaguest feeling of wanting to be in the Frenchman’s place. Whenever she and Niles kissed, whether in fic or on the show, I wondered briefly, for moments at a time — never verbalizing it, never letting the words leave my brain — what it must feel like to kiss her.

That same year, I started my sophomore year in high school. I had the same set of classmates, mostly the same teachers, Geometry instead of Algebra, Biology instead of Natural Science. As far as I could tell, it was just like freshman year — only this time I had a new favorite show to obsess over and a new English teacher to do much of the same. She had a name from the Bible, she was tall and beautiful, and the sound of her heels on the floor, coupled with the room quieting to a hush almost immediately, is a moment I have yet to forget, even a decade later. She was smart and quick and reminded me of someone I couldn’t quite put my fingers on. I spent the entirety of that school year in exquisite agony over her.

I wrote her letters and brought her cheesecake and coffee, a food pairing she told the class she loved. I kept a photo of her in my wallet, in the same way I did so with all my favorite actresses. “I know it’s creepy,” I wrote in a blog, and as if trying to convince myself that it was fine, I added: “But if it helps, it’s because she’s on the same level as Helen (McCrory) or Tash (Richardson) or Lauren (Lane).” That’s who it was; that’s who she reminded me of. In another blog entry, I listed down their similarities, from the way they pursed their lips to the way their hands looked. It made no sense, yet to my young mind, made all the sense in the world. “They are both beautiful (did I really have to state this?),” that list ended. Of course, I was too much — far too much, and when she left at the end of the year, she wrote me a letter. “You are a smart girl,” she said, “albeit an emotional one.” It was the first time I learned the word albeit, a word I would come to hate.

As she left, my Nanny phase came to an end, too. I had moved on to new things and obsessions. I became part of new fandoms and loved new ships and new favorite characters. In 2011, it was Harry Potter and Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. Soon enough, Doctor Who, the Eleventh Doctor and River Song. In 2012, I binge-watched all of Desperate Housewives and promptly spiraled over Tom and Lynette, leading me to watch everything Felicity Huffman had ever been in. I deemed each of these ships an OTP, just like I did with Niles and C.C. I made playlists and read fic, devoted a large part of my headspace to them and wondered again, for brief moments at a time, what it must feel like to be in the place of the man.

Those moments wouldn’t last very long, though. I made sure they didn’t. I called myself things like “creepy,” “weird,” “perverted,” even as I looked at men the same way I looked at women. But here’s the thing: I didn’t look at men the same way I looked at women — at C.C., or Narcissa, or River, or Lynette, or the actresses who played them. I thought men to be handsome or dashing, but I didn’t think of their hands, how soft they must be to the touch; their hair, how my fingers would feel running through them; their voice, warm and throaty and comforting. I didn’t think of their collarbones or skin or shoulders or eyelashes or lips or the way their noses would crinkle whenever they laughed.

The last F/M couple I shipped were Will and Alicia from The Good Wife. It was 2013, I was a freshman in college, and again in love with yet another English teacher, my first semester literature professor. Her first name, again, was biblical; her last name Spanish for “perfect.” Like clockwork, I began to come undone, just as I did as a sophomore in high school. But this was different — this felt like nothing I had ever felt. At first, it felt like a severe case of wanting to be the teacher’s pet, but it soon became clear it was more than that: I got up in the morning and put on lipstick for her, dressed a whole lot nicer on days when we would have class and burned a Neil Gaiman-penned episode of Doctor Who onto a CD for her because I knew she loved him. She always felt cold and warm at the same time, kind of like Alicia Florrick. I would never be so sure of what her disposition would be each day I’d see her; she was quiet, no-nonsense and brilliant, just like Alicia. I thought of Will Gardner and his longing, his ache, his pining. I understood him. I understood what he was afraid of and what he wanted.

I couldn’t say the same for myself. I kept telling myself it was nothing but a spiral — nothing different from my English teacher in high school, or Lauren Lane, or all the actresses I had come to love. But it was different. There was no way it wasn’t. After my semester with her, I began keeping a Word document addressed to her. It contained simple things, like how much I missed her, how much I wanted to be back in her class, how beautiful I thought she still was whenever I saw her on campus. It sat amongst fan fiction and that previous semester’s school requirements, left untitled. I wrote in it regularly: daily at first, when the ache was still fresh, then sporadically, as I thought less and less of her — something I didn’t think was possible back then.

I never told my friends just how much I had ached over her in fear that they would brush it away. I didn’t want them to brush it away. I wanted them to tell me what I had long suspected — that the fixation I had nurtured for my literature professor, this woman twice my age was, in fact, love — the kind that spilled through the seams and exploded in the messiest of ways, because I didn’t know how to hold it. I didn’t know what love felt like, and especially not love for a woman, so the feelings slipped out of my grasp.

That was all I knew then: how to spiral, how to give in to my feelings completely and absolutely and without regard for anyone else — not even myself. When I finally put a name to what I’d been feeling for years, heartache, things began to make sense. It came in writing, as many things always do for me. Somewhere in that Word document that I had been keeping, I used the word heartache for the very first time, and with it came clarity and understanding; with it came a revelation. Not only was heartache what set my attraction to women and my attraction to men apart, it’s what defines my attraction to women — something I’ve never gone through life without.

It started quietly at first. “I like ladies,” I’d tell myself, and by stating that truth I felt my confidence grow. It would turn into, “I am attracted to women.” I took all these tiny steps until I could finally say the word gay, which, when I did, felt like a release. It felt like freedom. When I finally came to terms with my sexuality, everything made sense. Everything fell into place. I could see things for what they were: This is a crush, not a girl crush. This is a crush, not admiration. This is a crush, not aspiration. These are, and have always been, real, valid feelings — feelings for women that I’ve been experiencing my whole life.

For 18 years, I never once thought that I could be anything but straight. I publicly proclaimed my crushes on actors and fawned over fictional men, even as I printed out photos of my favorite actresses and decorated my high school diaries and journals with them. I “fell in love” with any random boy who I thought looked decent enough, even as I spent a majority of my sophomore year in high school agonizing over how beautiful my English teacher was. I tried to catch the attention of older men, even as I did the same with a woman more than twice my age — only harder and more spirited. For 18 years, I never once thought that I could be anything but straight, but when I finally did, I had no one but my straight OTPs to thank.

I think about them now, these fictional couples of my formative years; made-up relationships I had once loved so deeply with my entire being. There’s still a lot of fondness attached to them, but what has withstood the test of time aren’t the ships. It’s not the fic or the fanvids or the playlists. It’s my ability to surrender myself to the love of and for women, their physicality, their presence. It’s the realization that my journey to self-discovery and self-understanding stemmed from these fictional characters and their fictional love that, to me, were very much real.

When I came out in 2017, I was in my senior year of college and The Nanny had been off the air about 18 years, now existing comfortably on the internet after experiencing a renaissance and renewed fervor, thanks to nineties nostalgia and Instagram accounts like What Fran Wore. Today, I’ve settled more comfortably into my sexuality, able to proudly say that I am a lesbian and that I, most of all, no longer have the need to project myself onto the male half of straight fictional ships. I still ship Niles and C.C., and the other previous F/M ships of my heart, of course, but if you asked me who my OTP is today and forever, I’d tell you without skipping a beat that it’s Gelphie.

Glennon Doyle’s “Untamed”: A Gay Love Story About a Grown-Ass Woman Who Does What the F*ck She Wants

I wasn’t out to myself, hadn’t even really considered the possibility that I was a lesbian, when Ellen came out on her sitcom in 1997. I knew, of course I knew — the intimate, tempestuous friendships. The way that picture of naked Teri Hatcher wrapped in Superman’s cape made me feel like throwing up. The baseball hat collection. The Indigo Girls CDs. Scream-singing, “Now you just turn away and say ‘Romeo, I think I used to have a scene with him!!!!” out the window of my pick-up truck. But my subconscious mind was — somewhat inexplicably — shielding my consciousness from it. I was a 16-year-old kid in a deeply dysfunctional family in rural Georgia. Surviving was already hard enough.

What I remember about the night of Ellen’s “The Puppy Episode” is: everything. Spaghetti and garlic bread for dinner, windows wide open in the muggy springtime evening, a cacophony of tree frogs and crickets, jasmine and magnolia, University of Tennessee Lady Vols orange basketball shorts and a too-big t-shirt, my sister on the small couch and my dad on the big couch and me sprawled out on the floor not looking at either of them.

I don’t know now if I can recall every plot detail, guest appearance (Oprah! k.d. lang! Laura Dern!), and line of dialogue because I remember it from then, or because I’ve watched it a hundred times since then, because I’ve been a professional lesbian TV critic for 13 years. Probably the second thing because I wasn’t really listening to what Ellen said on TV that night; I was listening to the way my family reacted to what she said. They laughed, a lot — with her, not at her. “I always thought Ellen might be gay,” her best friend Spence said. “I mean she could always run faster than I could, throw a ball farther, climb a tree faster…” My dad cackled. I did too. “Ha ha ha! How hilarious in a completely unrelatable way!”

Ten years later, at the age of 26, I found myself sitting again on the floor of a living room, intensely observing the reactions of the other people to what was on TV. The house was in my Baptist church’s backyard and had been converted into Sunday School classrooms. Our women’s Bible study group crowded in on a Wednesday evening to watch the next installment of Beth Moore’s “Breaking Free” Bible study, a deep dive into the 61st chapter of the book of Isaiah that promised to teach us how to find freedom from personal captivity. Moore is one of the most well-know, most prolific women evangelicals in the world. She’s written dozens of books, sold out hundreds of arenas, held the attention of millions of women in the palm of her hand. I was as close to worshipping her as I could get without breaking the first Commandment.

The crowds of women Beth Moore spoke to on her Bible study videos didn’t react much outside of occasional chuckles at her anecdotes about being a wife and a mother and this and that Texas thing (big hair, high humidity) — but that night, on that VHS tape, the women Moore had in her audience rose up as one and jeered, boo-ed, growled their outrage and disbelief. She stopped them. She held up her hand and asked them to show compassion. But also, yes, she agreed with them — the sin she’d just mentioned that set them off, the sin of homosexuality, lesbianism especially, was one of Satan’s primary agendas in keeping women captive. The gay rights movement was propaganda, a satanically induced web that was methodically woven around them, and once they were trapped — KABLAM! — a full scale demonic attack on their minds and emotions. Gay relationships, Moore went on to write, “are not love. It may feel like love because it is an overwhelming takeover of the heart, but it is not love.”

The women in my Bible study murmured their agreement and disgust at the TV. “I heard in lesbian relationships, one has to be the man and one has to be the woman, which proves God’s plan for marriage is between a husband and a wife,” one woman said. Another had a lesbian cousin and could confirm the rumor that gay women wanted to disrupt God’s natural order by axe-murdering all men.

I’d been out of church for over a decade by the time Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle announced that they were in a relationship. I knew everything about Abby Wambach, had been following her career my whole adult life, but I’d never heard of Glennon Doyle. I felt an immediate fondness and protectiveness of her, though — first of all, because every headline kept calling her a “Christian Mommy Blogger,” when even a cursory Google search of her name revealed her to be a #1 New York Times best-selling author; and second of all, because I’d also one time been a Christian Blogger who fell in love with another woman. I jokingly wrote a headline about it that made some people mad — Abby Wambach Infiltrates Blonde Christian America — because it tickled me to read the way people were talking about the news, as if someone as huge as Abby Wambach (physically, culturally, athletically) had stealthed into a church and bamboozled a naive woman whose book titles all include the word “warrior” into falling into sin with her.

Anyway, it turns out all Abby Wambach had to do was walk through the door.

There. She. Is. Glennon wrote in her new memoir, Untamed, when she recalled the moment Abby Wambach entered her life by entering a restaurant where she was eating. She’d never met Abby Wambach, had no idea she was going through a huge crisis because she was recently arrested for a DUI, that it was trending on Twitter, all over the news. Glennon got up from her chair and reached out for a hug. Abby Wambach quirked her eyebrow and smiled across the room. Glennon thought Fuck fuck fuck Why am I standing? Why are my arms open? What Am I Doing?

It was a fair question for a lot of reasons, including that Glennon was still married to her husband Craig, the father of her three children, and a central figure in her previous best-selling books, at the time. In fact, she was on a book tour to promote Love Warrior, a memoir she calls “the story of the dramatic destruction and painstaking reconstruction of my family” after her husband’s infidelity when she met Abby.

I assumed that would be the central conflict of Untamed. And in some ways it is — but not the ways I expected. Doyle’s first two memoirs were marketed, in many ways, to the women who crowded into that Beth Moore Bible study with me over a decade ago, straight Christian women with husbands and children who wanted to understand what was keeping them captive and be set free. And so I thought there’d be excruciating inner turmoil, hand-wringing about sin and are gay relationships really love and the axe-murdering misandry. Nope! Glennon worries about hurting her children by divorcing their dad, she worries about physical intimacy which she realizes she’s never really experienced with a man, she worries about her career and her parents and her friends. But she never worries that her desire is sinful, that her blossoming love for Abby is anything other than real; holy, even.

I fell in love with a woman for the first time in my mid-20s; we were co-leaders on a mission trip, in charge of a group of college-age girls who felt called by the Lord to spend their summer building churches, volunteering in schools, visiting the elderly in state-assisted nursing homes, and flirting with the all-boys college groups who came to work for only a week at a time. I wrote in my journal the day I met her that she was going to be trouble for me. I didn’t mean it in a gay way. I meant it in a disciple-y way. Like she was going to distract me, time-wise, from my prayers and Bible study.

I liked her immediately, more immediately than I’d ever liked anyone in my life. She was the kind of person who gave everyone nicknames as soon as she met them; laughed freely and loudly and often; told wild stories about the ways God had engaged with her on a personal level, and listened to other people’s stories with exactly the right amount of awe and “mm-hmms!” Her eyes were the color of the Cornflower crayon from the Crayola 64 box of my youth. Not the wrapper of the Cornflower crayon, but the actual crayon on paper, the hazy days blue of a summertime breeze. I’d never seen eyes that color before.

The first time we held hands, we were in a pool at a hotel on our off-day. Ostensibly, we were measuring the difference in size. My hands are huge. Hers were tiny, which I said was weird for a water polo player. How did she even grip the ball? She didn’t let go of my hand when she answered. She said she’d teach me the freestyle, the backstroke, and how to do the “egg-beater” kick to stay above water. I grew up with a pool in my backyard; I was the best swimmer I knew. I told her she could teach me anything.

When she kissed me, I thought of Isaiah 61. Not Beth Moore. Just Isaiah 61. “Freedom for the captives… release from the darkness for the prisoners… oil of gladness instead of mourning… garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair…” She’d called me Hoagie since she’d met me, which was nothing new. She whispered my name that day. Heather. When I stood with her, in a bridesmaids dress, while she married her fiancé six months later, she read her part of Song of Songs: “I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey; I have drunk my wine and my milk.” I looked right at her, right into her Crayola cornflower eyes and read mine: “Eat, friends, and drink; drink your fill of love.”

Glennon Doyle falling in love with Abby Wambach isn’t the whole story of Untamed. It’s the catalyst, really, for Glennon Doyle to relearn her life, to examine the “spark that was always inside me, smoldering.” That spark doesn’t spread a linear fire, from Abby to Happily Ever After. Untamed grapples with body image, racism and the place of white people talking to other white people about it, parenting, sobriety, divorce, forgiveness, jealousy, sex, church, faith, religion (three different things), activism, Knowing, Becoming, and the life of caged cheetahs.

Anecdotes are stitched together with object lessons and wrapped in stream of conscious ruminations. One chapter might explore Glennon’s childhood bulimia, the next a present-day struggle about allowing her daughter to join a soccer team at the behest of her wife (one of the greatest soccer players in the world), the next a story about how a house is a metaphor for something else completely, and the next a confession about not being a good friend. Doyle is deft at self-deprecation but never veers toward self-loathing, disarmingly earnest and vulnerable, and unafraid to own her own contradictions. “I don’t know if I would call myself a Christian,” she writes at one point, a stunning revelation for a person with her built-in audience.

It’s been a long time since I read a book that even nudged up against Christianity, and I confess that Doyle’s blunt, clear-eyed pragmatism about it left me feeling pretty giddy. Here is a woman who has raised $25 million for people in need through Together Rising, her non profit organization; a woman who seems completely free from personal captivity; a woman in a relationship with another woman who knows, unequivocally, that it is love. A woman who isn’t challenging God with her sexuality, but who has come to believe that God was challenging religion inside her. An oak of righteousness, Isaiah might say, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.

“I left my husband and I am building a life with Abby because I’m a grown-ass woman and I do what the fuck I want,” she writes, 200 pages after Abby walked into that restaurant.

In the end, Doyle comes to understand that being untamed isn’t about choosing Abby; it’s about choosing herself.

Harden/Soften: Finding Sensuality After Top Surgery

After years pockmarked with epilepsy, I’m too aware of what dry mouth signals, especially when my fingers tingle too: another full seizure is coming. The peach fuzz on the back of my neck rises, my fists clench into rocks. You’re the year of the dog, like your ông ngoại. Is this really a seizure? Instead of fighting spasms, I come into a deep, trembling awareness of my own breasts. Heaving, snarling breathing. So stubborn, both of you. The shuffling of bodies moving near me and the whispers and loud cackles alike start to sound filtered through cup-and-string calls, fading into the background. My breasts are still on my body, somehow. I cannot fall apart. No one around me knows what’s happening, no one can know. Stubborn, but always loyal.

When I dreamt of coming home to my chest without fear, I thought of a flat and bony chest, of showering at age eleven. After that first panic attack, dread bubbled in my stomach and I doubted my body’s ask. I bargained repeatedly with my body to keep my breasts, to find compromise. But binding didn’t stop the panic attacks. I stayed up late scanning top surgery forums, a few minutes at a time before an internal voice shamed me to stop. But I couldn’t fight against gut instinct forever. At each stage of exhaustion from fighting my body, more of that dread gave way to relentless focus on an escape. Like a working animal, I followed the learned motions: herd the feelings, corral them into a plan, get the job done. I forced myself through the stomach-turning diagrams, learned the procedures. When I think of dogs, the one chained outside the family farm near Hà Nội comes to mind. At age seven I lurched back when he snarled at our eager approach. A decade and a half later, as I hardened against my body, I understood. Don’t bring softness here. It’ll ruin what I know.

attr: author

The goal with double incision is like plastic wrap over leftovers: keep the surface taut, the edges from shrinking into one another, the layers separate. The nipples cannot speak, and the shifted pigment and hard scar tissue suggests they will never quite be the same. The fixation on ‘contouring to the pectoral muscle wall’ is so clinically precise that the simple goal of warm and feeling human flesh seems an afterthought. It evoked numbness, lovers’ hands finding no reaction, unchanging in cold rooms. The surgeon’s gruff explanation that any surgery option risked losing sensation let me breathe easier, as if he could release me from the responsibility for what would change in me. To move towards a “masculinized” chest as someone with breast tissue, then, is inherently to sign up for a possible loss of all sensation. We harden, agree, move forward. This feels like a familiar reflex of how we survive. When I gather with queer Vietnamese people my age, it’s clear how many of us live with shields up, learned stoicism against the outside world and within our homes. Even now as we come together and learn anew how to laugh and love, we still know the bitterness of watching our families clench their jaws and forgo vulnerability. In the face of this country that never wanted us, we harden and move forward.

The night before surgery, I was to drip an antiseptic solution all over my body and come out smelling like a hospital tray. I ran my hands in figure eights and held my breasts as the shower poured onto them. A chest in its “original” form was the only one to feel soft about. I braced for the last time I would look down at my chest and see it as a place of living, breathing sensation. I could seek relief in surgery, but mostly as an end to pain. This is what has to be done. My body as a tool, with no real space for care, tenderness, or questions of what leads our bodies to burnout in the first place. Don’t bring softness here. It’ll ruin what I know.

As my inner working animal ran out of steps to plan for surgery, I readied myself for an easier life. After painful, constant focus on it, I looked forward to ignoring that part of my body entirely.

Then, smearing lotion one night, I trace fingertips along my chest. A new spot activates sensation closer to my armpit, far from where my fingertips moved. It echoes under my left scar, sends tingles along an entire belly fold. There are rivers running under my skin. I felt there was nothing else in this world but the entire village underneath my skin, lit up by flashing festival lights. The previous time I’d been so taken by my reborn chest also caught me by surprise. When the shower hissed on for my first unassisted wash since surgery, I stood with my back dutifully against the water stream, ran soap over my stomach and looked down. My cells remembered the thousand showers I’d taken before—my last memory of being flat-chested at eleven, this moment now. The wind blew out of me as I started laughing, laughing so hard I started to sob. When I looked through the curtain at the fogged mirror I asked how that reflection could be mine. Full-bodied laughing again, and through the gap in the curtains I saw my little dog, adopted the month prior, poke his snout through the steaming door frame, curious. I’m sobbing again.

The author and their dog, meeting at the animal shelter. attr: M. Kidd

My chest continued to breathe new life, even when I was no longer alone. Physical affinity suddenly cropped up in corners I never anticipated. A coworker put their palm on my new chest and playfully pushed me away. My chest kept the outline of that electric handprint. Did they feel that lingering sensation too? In intimate settings, I felt brighter and more myself, but had yet to know how that’d feel with someone else. A year after recovery, I was under covers with someone who doubted I could want them, when their dysphoria didn’t let them want themselves. I wanted to show them how when I woke up with heavy eyelids and hot nostrils, I’d lifted the neck of the hospital gown, tucked my nose below it and saw — YES. How the only sound was my own internal voice, saying “this is right.” I’d let out a contented puppy sigh thinking: this is right. I thought about telling them that their nipples looked like mine did, before everything changed. Back in that bed, I saw their body, one that had every nerve intact. I asked them to kiss not just my unfeeling scar lines, but the whole valley of my chest, even though I doubted it would feel like much. It’s ok that I won’t meet you in that tingling place, just kiss me so I know I’m here in this moment. The kisses found sensation across every inch. The rivers ran down my spine, through my fingertips. The kissed spots bloomed outward, like drops of food coloring that have just touched the water’s surface. Squirming, my back arched like that farmhouse dog did, years ago.

Softness does not come easily into my quiet talks with myself. If I prayed regularly, it would begin with: is that you, ancestors? Do you see me easing open? We harden, until spring blossoms into our very bodies. When I first noticed spring flowers coming up in my chest, I tore out the young stems. Yet every time, they emerged more determined and multiplied, until I couldn’t rip out the flowers fast enough to keep them from sprawling all over me. Giving in to what my body demanded, I let that garden grow, and saved my life. I thought saving my life was about cutting away tissue and more pushups. Every day, I learn how wrong I was. What saved my life was an opening to every feeling that I have yet to experience. I wonder how many ancestors chuckle, or knew all along that the answer was to let yourself feel it all. To drown in the soft, sobbing joy of being alive. I think of my small dog, sprinting down the sidewalks with me as if to say, Can you believe it? Another day, we’re here another beautiful day. His soft animal body knew long before I did.

My First Pride Was About Building My Queer Future and Mourning a Past I’ll Always Long For

Four days after my mom’s funeral and eleven after her death, I went to my very first pride parade. I spent the night with one of my best friends (who is also queer) to have a mini getaway from all the turmoil. The day of the parade, we spent the morning and early afternoon getting ready and choosing our outfits, getting ready with the rest of our queer friends over FaceTime. My friend’s mom dropped us off a couple blocks away from the actual parade. We piled out of the car and poured into the streets with the rest of the crowd, instantly swept into the pulsating party. Queer men were wearing crop tops and shorts while holding hands with their partners. Queer women strolled across the street, limbs interwoven and eyes gazing upon their partners lovingly. Large groups of friends chatted excitedly. My ears were happily set abuzz as I overheard non-binary and gender non-conforming people correcting or introducing others to their pronouns, and receiving kind responses. As soon as I set foot in the parade, multiple rainbow-colored beads were adorned across my neck. A few moments later, I was pulled into a warm embrace of free hugs from volunteers, the first of many which were set up all along the festivities.

I walked around downtown staring in awe at a gazillion rainbow flags and the most beautiful and most queer faces I’d ever laid eyes on. A mix of many emotions flushed through my mind — relaxed, energized, comfortable, overwhelmed, safe, fun, celebratory, defiant, and most of all affirmed. I was in the midst of thousands of people and I wasn’t thinking about whether they were going to accept me for who I was. It was like being around a group of friends that I haven’t gotten to know yet. My friend and I made our way to the main stage as the vocal stylings of various pop stars their way into my eardrums. The two of us ended up standing next to a group of butch and stud lesbians that danced with my friends and I, one of which I cheered on as she got twerked on by my friend. We backed away from the main stage, and a group of drag queens flashed me a reassuring smile and head nod. As the sun dimmed and the moon began to show its face, we saw old classmates and friends who congratulated me on this milestone. We closed out the night, by grabbing some turkey legs from one of the various food trucks available. As we walked back and waited for my mom’s friend, my eyes found their way to a group of friends dressed up in BDSM attire. My eyes made their way up to the overhanging street sign which read, “Stonewall.” I was home.

My mom passed away in August of 2019. Two months after my high school graduation; one month before my nineteenth birthday; two weeks before I began my first semester of college, four days before that pride parade. She had stage two breast cancer, but was cancer-free thanks to a double mastectomy. Her doctors had suggested preventative chemo as a precautionary measure. My mom wasn’t feeling very well one morning and called in sick to work. A couple of hours later on her way back to bed she laid down on the floor. ‘’I don’t know what’s going on with me today, sweetie.’’ She asked me to let her lay down on her floor for a few minutes before helping her back into bed. I thought the request was odd, but obeyed. I went to go help her up five minutes later and noticed she was shaking uncontrollably, mouth open, unable to speak, and her eyes bleeding and fixated on me. I called 911 and started to do compressions. 45 minutes later, when the paramedics came down the steps of my house to tell me that despite their best efforts, my mom had passed away, I felt as though that my entire world was crashing down at lightning speed. I had no parents left. My dad had passed away ten years earlier. 3827 days. Or ten years, five months, 25 days apart. But who’s counting.

I was no longer anyone’s baby girl. No one’s pumpkin. As my mom drew her last breath, my safety net exited through her lungs, and my sense of security vanished with the very last rise and fall of her chest. My mother took our language. Our inside jokes. Our songs. Stories and anecdotes about my adolescent and her own that became running gags for years to come. We built a language together. A special rhythm with its own ebbs and flows. A rhythm that showed me a reflection of a young woman who was capable and strong. I feel hollow in her absence. Without the person that brought me into this world, I do not know if I have a place in it. No one will ever love me unconditionally and only ask for my own happiness in return. I will never put that pure sparkle in anyone’s eye again.

When you lose a parent in your teens, you immediately imagine all the milestones you’ll hit without them: graduation, a first job, first apartment or house, a wedding. Every day since the day my parents died, I am one day further away from them. It enrages me that I will have to recycle my childhood and teenage years like a broken record for the rest of my life in order to have my parents present in my life. Most people are saddened by the ending of their adolescence because adulthood brings responsibility. I am sad because that is where my parents are frozen for eternity. On the bright side, I’m also one day closer to my most authentic and most queer self. I could finally consider getting the bisexual bob™. But even that’s a double double edged sword. I started to realize that at some point, as years of my life went on… my parents might not even recognize me anymore, because of who I’d become.

I am queer. I identify as both bisexual and pansexual. This is something that I’ve always known about myself since the age of five, thanks to a friend from kindergarten named Jasmine who I obsessively slept next to during nap time and played with during recess — what I realize now was a crush — to the beautiful dentist assistants from my dentist office that made my heart palpate in my chest. Plus, of course, my very first and most beloved celebrity crush… Tessa Thompson, whom I first fell in love with while watching her play a badass 1930’s masculine-of-center lesbian on an episode of Cold Case.

In the years to follow, there would a cycle of taking “Am I gay or bisexual” quizzes, reading Autostraddle, and watching The L Word and Pariah on illegal sites before quickly deleting my search history.

I would discuss my opinion on topics concerning the LGBT community with my mom but always making sure to distinguish myself as an ally. She would often say that I was “changing her mind about gay people” and seemed to actually be unlearning her homophobia and transphobia.

My mom and I were inseparable from the moment I was born. That only intensified after my dad’s death. We did almost everything together, FaceTiming each other throughout the day when we were separated during work and school, having heartfelt discussions about our respective days and knowing that neither of us would be judgmental. We shared clothes, cooked together, had dance parties to my curated playlist as we drove during road trips or to the grocery store. She had this infectious playfulness, style, and spunk that drew everyone to her. I always knew that my mom and our home was a consistent safety net where I could let my burdens go and be myself.

But I will never know what her stance would’ve been had it been her own daughter. So often we hear stories about struggling to be queer because immediate family is unaccepting, especially in communities of color. So much about blackness across the diaspora, but especially for us as African-Americans, is about community. Being in close contact or proximity with family members other just your nuclear family, having aunties and uncles that aren’t blood relation, coming together and screaming at the top of our lungs at graduations. The flip side of that close-knit community is that when you’re queer, you’re often collectively discarded. The pain is just as difficult when you’ll never truly know what the outcome would be had they known.

I often have dreams about reuniting with my parents and bringing them up to speed with what has gone on in my life. My mom welcomes me with open arms and holds me close with one of her warm and maternal hugs. She coos, ‘’There’s my baby girl.’’ My dad, in his true fashion, is more laid back but just as excited to see me, quietly smiling and nodding before pulling me in for a hug of his own. I tell them about my writing, my friends, and therapy. They smile proudly and are engrossed in everything I have to say. Then I bring up or introduce them to a non-cishet male partner and their expressions visibly morph into disappointment. In other dreams, they walk right past me and don’t recognize me at all. I wake up each time discouraged and disoriented. On top of the expected layer of grief that washes over me, there’s an extra layer that is inevitable as a queer person: disguising your true self or burying any reminiscence of self for acceptance, and having the experiences of self-discovery customary to cishet teenagers as a young adult.

Those feelings are ever-present. At that pride parade, I felt relaxed and affirmed walking the streets with my queer friends, as I wore my blue, purple, and pink beads, watched a beautiful group of butches and drag queens in awe as they smiled at me, a baby gay, knowing. It hit me, as I watched a vogue competition on the main stage of the parade. How would my parents feel right now if they knew I was here? Would they come to accept it in time? My exuberance faded. In that moment I felt the happiest I’d honestly ever been, and neither of them would ever experience this with me. They not only lost the opportunity to see me into adulthood, but to see me in my totality.

This knot in my stomach came again as I finally attended a meeting for my college’s pride alliance club. I was welcomed in and accepted instantly; everyone shared their pronouns openly. There was no judgement. I hung out with them after the club meeting ended. We exchanged social handles and phone numbers. As I ordered an Uber home, I felt salty tears running down my cheeks. I was standing in the same part of campus that I walked with my mom a couple of months earlier as she helped me sign up for classes. Where she had shared her excitement about watching me embark on this next chapter. Little did she know what this next chapter would include.

Two hundred and four days after my mom’s death, I met with the program associate of my local pride organization. As we sat in a cafe, I opened up to her about realizing I was not straight at five, consuming queer media in secret, and now finely trying to venture out to create chosen family and queer community after my parents (particularly my mothers) passing. I discussed my fears about moving through the world as an out black queer person means. We locked eyes. She listened to me intently; I asked her about her journey. She explained that like me, she at one point feared being out, but also like me, began to explore in her freshman year of college. She understood the struggles I was facing as a black queer femme, ressurred me that I would find my tribe, and that she’d be there along the way.

A couple of days later, I spoke about the meeting with my wellness coach, another black queer femme. She echoed the same excitement, told me how proud she was for taking the leap to find queer activites. As looked into her eyes and thought about all the black queer femmes I’d connected with in the wake of this tragedy, I felt genuine love and support, acknowledgement and acceptance for all that I am. That moment brought one of my favorite Alice Walker quotes to mind: ‘’I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can’t live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers’ hearts.’’

I have slowly started to build a new home. I will forever long for and crave the one I lost, but I must find the strength within myself to be myself, without longing for a definitive answer from the person I most want to make proud, because she has left this realm. I have to find some kind of comfort in this life without either of them, that will involve building a queer future and striving for a better world. A queer world for myself and my fellow black and brown queer people. Fighting for health care, anti-policing, housing, mutual aid, labor with dignity, and resisting state sanctioned violence. Speaking out against the systems that harm and kill queer Black people, people of color, and the most vulnerable in our community. While I hope to live a life alongside a chosen family, have a partner (that may not be a cishet man), engrave tattoos and piercings on my body that they may have not understood, and make art that may have confused them. It will be a world that won’t involve my parents. At some point, I will be okay with that.

How Queer YA Novels Taught Me to Write My Own Happy Ending

I.

The Girl knows there are no happy endings for people like her.

For girls who sit in cars with other girls on a dimly-lit street in Harlem and wonder why they want so badly to whisper a barely-there Yes instead of I have to go home when asked: Do you want to spend the night? The apartment is free. In the breaths between that question and The Girl’s answer is possibility. The type of possibility The Girl has never so much as allowed herself to imagine. The moment is so still, so quiet, it renders itself almost dreamlike in quality — a scene stolen out of time.

The Girl — who idles in the bus lane while the rain pelts her car, watching the person she will grow to love dash across the street, hands acting as a poor substitute for an umbrella — is our main character. Her story is one that you won’t find in any novel, because she, of course, has yet to write it. But she will.

Here, though, she is resigned. She is afraid. The blueprint that has been laid before her for what that almost-yes would mean for her life, for her happiness, has been clear. People like her do not get happy endings. This fear looks like a man on her college campus shouting that God hates queers. This fear looks like her mother’s face when she tells The Girl at fifteen to return the book to the shelves because the jacket copy mentions a lesbian character in the text. The fear looks like the movie with the queer character whose body is left broken by shame and violence.

There is no happy ending for a girl like her. She’s watched this story play out before.

When her little sister tells her she’s reading a new book¹, the first YA novel that has managed to capture her attention in months, The Girl buys it from the bookstore off Central Park Avenue immediately, without stopping to look at the synopsis. She’s searching, desperately, for lightness, for joy. What she doesn’t expect is to be lured in by the text so quickly, so seamlessly.

The novel centers two boys, falling in love via email. The setting is a suburb far from where she currently lives, and even further from where she’s from, but she finds herself templating her experience on top of this white, teenage boy. It’s a coming-out story, a closeted kid in a backward place, holding the biggest secret of his life to his chest with both hands. This, she understands. This, she feels acutely.

What she is less familiar with is what comes next. The family who embraces him. The friends who come at the end of the novel to defend him. The happily-ever-after.

Maybe, she finds herself thinking, there could be space for joy in this new life. Maybe, she dreams, as she finishes the last page and immediately starts the book over again, this is not so hopeless after all. Maybe, she journals, when the main character in the book — the young boy who was, at first glance, so different from herself — says: We are out and we are alive, and everyone in the universe is out here right now, a line can be a type of instruction. Her story can be a new roadmap. A fresh blueprint. A different ending. She doesn’t quite believe it yet — won’t for some time.

But.

Maybe.

II.

In this one, a girl gets sent away.

The Girl left her hometown two years ago, fresh out of college and fresh out of ideas for how to fashion a life for herself out of a vain hope of becoming a writer. She landed at a school where people didn’t assume anything, least of all sexuality — a place where it was simply expected that one would ask questions of themselves and the world around them. For the first time in her life, she had the space to explore what it could look like to be anyone, herself, at least, without the artifice of who she’d always been.

Now, fresh out of the grad school that changed her life and a newly-minted New York City transplant, The Girl writes. She signed a contract for her debut novel months ago, mumbled what the plot was about as she celebrated the deal on the back porch of her parents’ Midwestern home with her mom and sister. It’s about a girl who runs for prom queen who falls in love with her competition, she explained, sped past, teary-eyed with joy and a terror she was still too afraid to name.

It’s months later and she has yet to finish her first draft — stalled by exhaustion and the city and no money and fear masquerading as writers’ block. She thinks she must not be queer enough to write the book she’s expected to write. She’s an imposter, a fraud, waiting to be found out by an editor who will see in her prose that she’s not the writer she purported herself to be.

She prays again, in this season, like she never has before. Over her contract. On the train headed to Manhattan. With people from a friend’s progressive church she seldom attends. These are not like the prayers of her childhood, self-assured in her place in the world and the one that will come after. These prayers sound like apologies, like concessions, to a God and a home that she’s not sure have room for her anymore.

When the prayers produce no answers, she researches. She walks from work to the bookstore that has loomed large in her imagination since she was sixteen and hopelessly bright-eyed about moving to the city one day. She goes to the second floor, to those messy, colorful shelves marked Teen and Young Adult LGBTQ Fiction.

She pulls off a thick paperback², one she’s heard about for years but never had reason enough to read, hoping that somewhere deep in the canon of queer YA is the answer she’s been looking for to a question she doesn’t have the language to ask. The book is adorned with the theatrical poster cover of the book’s recent indie film adaptation and she buys it without hesitation.

It’s widely hailed as a Sad Book, one of those novels where you must brace yourself for impact the moment you flip open the front cover. But she reads on. A teenage girl, a conversion camp, complicated webs of religion and desire and fear and emerging sexuality weave themselves throughout the pages. The Girl reads it in two days, and is moved by the prose — the sheer scope of the novel — but is rendered speechless by the friendship narrative once the main character reaches the conversion camp.

There is a pain in the main character’s exile from her home and what she’s expected to do and become in the camp, that is to be sure, but there is kinship as well. There, in a hyper-religious almost-prison in the rural heartland, she finds her people. She lives amongst the children of the discarded, the Island of Misfit Toys, the ones they want to “fix.” In the midst of great pain, trauma, she grows closer to the people who reveal her to herself — who finally give her something to cling to besides the rejection.

The Girl wonders: What does it mean when leaving the place where you were raised is something like coming home to yourself?

III.

The Girl’s fear has changed its face.

It no longer looks like the Evangelical man on her undergraduate campus or the rejected book in the library or the movie with the battered body. It now looks like the preacher in the pulpit on Father’s Day, telling the congregation what he’d do to another man in the event that they propositioned him. His glee in describing the way the blood would spill over his knuckles — the way that blood would be an act of God, of holy retribution. It looks like the nods of God’s people, the collective hum of their pleased agreement.

The preacher says queerness should be met with brutality, and that brutality is in and of itself an act of mercy. The preacher says that to go against the will of God is to incur His wrath on earth, and that wrath be justified. The preacher says to be soft, to be sweet, to be crooked is to condemn oneself to hell, forever and ever amen. The Girl sits in the congregation and has yet to free herself from the belief that the preacher might be correct. This, her relationship with God, is one of the remaining barriers she has yet to clear.

The fear looks like a secondhand YA paperback³ she picks up from a bookstore months later that sees her too well. She reads its dedication on the back patio of a cafe in Union Square: To those who believe in a loving God and those who struggle to love themselves. The pages are tear-stained before she even begins the story itself.

To believe what the book wants her to believe would be to finally release herself from the most potent vestiges of her fear — that the God she has spent her entire life reaching towards has already deemed her unclean, unsavable, unworthy. But the book says she is still deserving of love. The book says God molded her and shaped her in His image and to this end, God could not have been wrong. The book says she deserves to be held, to be cared for.

The book says she can stop holding onto the shame that she has carried with her for too many years of her adult life. The book says she is finally free.

Forever and ever, amen.

IV.

The Girl wrote the queer Black girl joy, happy-ending novel of her heart, but she couldn’t out-write her shame.

She recalls a scene from the book⁴ she carries with her these days like a Bible, well-worn and oft-referenced. There’s a moment in it, two boys under the stars, friends-but-perhaps-something-else, laying in the bed of a truck. It’s a turning point in the novel, this moment of clarity, of honesty. One boy says: I have to tell them, of his parents about his newfound queerness. He’s been holding on to this secret for too long, the reader intuits, and it’s time to let it go. Quickly, the other boy responds with a simple: Why?

Because I have to, the first boy answers. It is definitive, final — the last of the walls between himself and living the rest of his life honestly. He won’t waver. There is a life for him outside of these moments of openness he pilfers away with this almost-more-than-a-friend. It is a reckoning.

The night after The Girl’s book gets announced to the public, she’s at a tourist trap of a restaurant in Times Square, sitting across from her mother. Because I have to presses against the bounds of her chest; a levee, barely contained. When the truth rushes forth, unbidden, it’s over a plate of oversized barbeque chicken wings. She apologizes for being an embarrassment. For going against what she always believed was the will of God. For being the type of person her mother might not be able to love anymore. For not being able to change. And when she’s done, her mother watches her for a moment. Silent. Considering.

She says, There is nothing you could do that would make me ashamed to have you as a daughter. I love you. I’ve always loved you. I will always love you.

The Girl had held tight to the idea of love as transaction for so long, the boundlessness of this extension of grace stuns her silent. In this story, the mother was bigger than the cardboard cutout The Girl had made of her. In this story, there was character development past what The Girl could have imagined.

In this story, the happy ending wasn’t just wish-fulfillment, it was real.

1. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda x Becky Albertalli
2. The Miseducation of Cameron Post x Emily Danforth
3. The God Box x Alex Sanchez
4. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe x Benjamin Alire Saenz

Leah Johnson’s best-selling debut YA novel You Should See Me In A Crown is available everywhere books are sold.

How To Write A Spell Against White Supremacy

This piece was originally published on 10/9/2017.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

Author’s Note (06/19/20): Since writing this story three years ago, I’ve acquired more reverence for my family’s Southern Black Baptist traditions—because at least they’re ours. We’ve retained them despite oppression and white supremacy. They’ve sustained us thus far. The Black Church is an undeniable part of my culture. So, nowadays, I’m most interested in syncretizing elements from the Black Church and my witchy spirituality. I’m not returning to Christianity, but rather borrowing aspects of my family’s religious practices that feel good and right to me. Still, my steps to writing a spell against white supremacy apply, especially in these tumultuous times. I hope you glean something from them.

Magic is rarely portrayed as a wholly positive thing. Even the lovable witches in my childhood favorite Hocus Pocus sucked the life out of kids to preserve their youthful looks. Witches, from Tituba of the Salem witch trials to the Wicked Witch of the West, are generally maligned as evil women who need to be destroyed or controlled.

Although magic’s viewed as the immoral sister of religion, both have rich histories in historically oppressed communities. We turn to them for healing and miracles, but there are some key differences between the two. Most religions require worship of a patriarchal figure who punishes you for doing wrong, while magic allows us to harness our power within. Religion, prayer specifically, has been offered as a solution to Donald Trump’s nightmare presidency and white supremacist terrorism, but what if we looked to the power of magic instead?

I define magic as creating desired change by performing rituals for those who guide and protect you, whether they be ancestors, goddesses or a natural wonder.

My altar

Magic is easier for me to digest than the Southern Black Baptist tradition that raised me. This tradition taught me to depend on cisgender heterosexual men to guide my spirituality. It taught me to be ashamed of things that I find pleasurable. When I think about the Black Church, I can’t help but think of white slave masters pacifying “savage” enslaved Black folks with the lessons of Christianity. I often feel nostalgic about the Black Church, and I honor its participation in social justice movements. However, I don’t feel welcome there anymore as a genderqueer feminist since most Black churches adhere to gender roles that disempower women and LGBTQ+ people.

Alternatively, the word “magic” fills my head with images of enslaved Black people preserving their ancestral deities in the Americas by practicing Voodoo and Santería. Magic is an ancestral practice that transcends time and oceans. To me, magic means resilience and connecting to ancestors who survived the tragedy of the Middle Passage. Magic runs through my veins and feels like my birthright. It’s stronger than white supremacy will ever be.

White supremacy forces us to draw our strength from anti-Blackness, heterosexism and patriarchy. I use magic in my everyday life to combat individual and systemic oppression. Being a writer, it’s no surprise my favorite magical practice is writing spells. I write spells to manifest positive things in my own life and the lives of my beloveds. I write spells for the healing and liberation of my communities. The first thing I do when writing a spell is find out what’s happening in the sky. Sometimes the planets are aligned just right to cast an effective spell. Major celestial events such as lunar eclipses amplify the potency of our magic.

Then, I decide who to direct my spell towards. I choose the ancestors or spirit guides who have the power to give me what I need. I’m always adding new names to this roster. Lately, I’ve been learning about Obatala, a West African orisha (saint) who is said to have created humans. I feel a kinship with this androgynous orisha who completely disregards gender and protects disabled people. I see myself in Obatala’s image, and I feel held by them as someone living with disabilities. I hope to incorporate Obatala into more of my spells in the future.

Someone else I honor during spells is Nyabingi, a Rwandese/Ugandan woman warrior who fought fiercely against European colonizers in the early 1900s. My Rwandese partner introduced me to Nyabingi, who’s now a possibility model for the both of us.

My grandmother, an OG witch.

When performing spells together, my partner and I also invoke our late grandmothers. My maternal grandmother Carolyn was a devout Christian, but how she lived her life was magic. Grandma was a compassionate lady whose many gifts were stifled by Jim Crow and patriarchy. She accepted everyone for who they were, grew thriving plants despite living in a small apartment and whipped up soul food that tasted like love feels. Wherever she is, my grandma is shaking her head at Trump. I see her face every time I stand at my personal altar, adorned with photos (including hers), trinkets from friends and family and art made by queer and trans people of color. This is where I cast my spells.

While casting spells, I channel the strength that allowed my grandma to survive during an era when Black women were disenfranchised at every turn. The words in my spells are less important than the intention behind them. My spells are straightforward, stating exactly what I want to manifest and calling on the power of spirit to make it happen. Spell-writing is my time for reflection, meditation and gratitude. I cherish my ritual of casting spells at my altar alone, with my partner and other loved ones. I’m hungry for more opportunities to do magic in community.

What would it look like for Black, Brown, trans and queer folks to include magic in our resistance against white supremacy? I’m hoping that we can begin reclaiming magic and redefining it for ourselves.

One American Goes to See “30 Americans”

This piece was originally published on 12/14/15.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

“The holidays are a tough time to release your inner child into the meadowlands of black conceptual art.”

The “30 Americans” exhibition now showing at the Detroit Institute of Art is an extraordinary opportunity to see the work of some of the most important contemporary artists working today. Everyone who can see it should. Take your nephew. Take your grandmother.

Carrie Mae Weems brings some Susan Sontag-style Regarding the Pain of Others analysis to a series of slave daguerreotypes. In a small screen in the corner of a room, William Pope.L crawls along the sidewalk in a Superman costume to inspire someone, somewhere, to think about the lived reality of homeless people. Iona Rozeal Brown helps us navigate our complicated feelings about the fact that sometimes, Japanese hip-hop artists wear blackface. Kara Walker still wants you to go ahead and try to act normal in front of one of her murals. Just try to smile politely at a stranger while you are standing in front of one of her murals. Hank Willis Thomas does not seem like the kind of guy who thinks that black athletes, by being rich, negate questions about branding and ownership. I have loved so many of these artists for so long. Kehinde Wiley? Kalup Linzy? Lorna Simpson? They deepen our conversations about race and gender and violence and value in a moment when we direly need to deepen our conversations about all of these things. Etcetera, etcetera.

Viewer feedback at the DIA

This is not what I’ve come here to talk about.

As I listened to the audio tour, narrated by Touré, I felt a few things. First, I was underwhelmed. I mean, I loved Touré’s profile of Lauryn Hill in Never Drank the Kool-Aid, but it’s not like he had a whole lot of creative control in this audio tour. The snippets were short. A lot of them involved student responses to the art, when I wanted to hear more from the artists themselves.

Let me preface this by saying: I wasn’t in a great mood that day. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and I was visiting my family — going to a midwestern winter climate from a desert “winter” one. When this happens, I forget how to exercise and I don’t understand what to eat for breakfast. Upon entering the museum, my father and I got into a minor scuffle with one, then three security guards over whether or not my dad’s selfie stick was indeed a selfie stick if he thought it might be used as a “unipod.” I hissed at him, “don’t make a scene,” and then I realized from the way they were looking between me and my dad and back again that the security guards weren’t so much comforted by my presence as they were invisibly sucking their teeth at this coddled biracial kid who didn’t know how to respect her elders. Somebody looked scared—like she was shielding her son’s body from us. Also: there were about five hundred student groups that day. I kept doing that thing adults do in the face of adolescent swagger, where you act like you’re so above it and then you walk into something.

As we got our tickets, my dad nodded his head in my direction and said, “she’s five” in the hopes of paying a cheaper fee, but also in a way that, in retrospect, may have been revenge for me not siding with him in the selfie stick situation. Then, a woman told me, with very intense eyes, that I looked just like Frida. I love Frida Kahlo, but do you ever feel like when a white woman gives a young black woman a compliment with a certain expression on her face you can hear the soundtrack to The Help playing in the distance? Or, I don’t know, Out of Africa? See, I told you: I WAS IN A BAD MOOD. The holidays are a tough time to release your inner child into the meadowlands of black conceptual art. I tried to eat a rootbeer flavored taffy, but my inner child stayed put. So, maybe I was looking for a fight.

On Facebook, I was about to the make the mistake of engaging with a racially charged comment thread. I would actually have to post that Thanksgiving Adele Saturday Night Live video in a gesture of peace. More globally, though, in about twenty-four hours, a white supremacist would be shooting five Black Lives Matter protesters in a city I always thought of as exceptionally tolerant. Paris happened. Beirut had happened. Donald Trump exists. There was something in the air.

From Carrie Mae Weems’ “You Became a Scientific Profile/ An Anthropological Debate/ A Negroid Type/ & A Photographic Subject (from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried series), 1995-1996” with Kara Walker reflected

So, as I walked through the exhibition, I started to wonder: what exactly is it about this show that feels funky? There was a missing context. It felt, somehow, opportunistic. Vampiric in a way, as if the premise was, simply: black is hot right now. But that couldn’t be it — not realistically. Shows like this take a long time to plan, and this was a travelling exhibition that only just now got to Detroit. The Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t even a glimmer in Patrisse’s or Alicia’s or Opal’s eye when the show came into fruition. So why was I not convinced?

Something flickered for me around the time that, in my ear phones, one of the collectors who put on the show, Mera Rubell, asked Shinique Smith about her piece, “a bull, a rose, a tempest.” The work consists of a collection of items—a shoe, a bag, some kind of camouflaged fabric — hanging from the ceiling. When something hangs from the ceiling like that — lumpen, hogtied, reminiscent of a body — there is a visceral quality that makes you want to spend some time alone. In the interview, what Mera Rubell decides to ask is, “Do you go to specific places to get these rags?” And Smith responds, “I don’t really call them rags.”

Now, the kind of frustration I feel toward Mera Rubell’s interview style isn’t on par with, say, the frustration I feel toward Ted Cruz’s homophobic pastor affiliations. The Rubell interviews hold many moments of racially complicated dissonance similar to those Facebook arguments you might have with somebody who does not seem to have encountered any race theory or even considered the possibility that there is some literature to have read up on before diving into that Meryl Streep suffragette tee-shirt kerfuffle. Just, like, five minutes of bell hooks. The frustration I feel toward Mera Rubell’s interview style is rooted in the experience of listening to someone who holds a lot of power, whose title is “owner,” ask questions they don’t care to hear the answer to of people whose intelligence feels tripped up and cornered by the mediocrity of the asking.

Film Still from Kalup Linzy’s “Conversations wit de Churen” Series

In “America,” Glen Ligon created a neon sign wherein the tubes are painted black, while the light is bright white. The effect is that the lettering is outlined, limiting the incandescence. Mera Rubell says, “This piece — you wouldn’t make this piece today.” She says, “somehow this piece is a pre-Obama moment.” When somebody says “pre-Obama,” I don’t feel far from the phrase “post-racial.” Ligon explains that the piece was inspired by Charles Dickens. When he says, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Mrs. Rubell joins in. Yup. He continues,

I started thinking about the moment when we went to Afghanistan, thinking how interesting it is when they go to Afghanistan, these reporters go and they interview people on the street who say “Your bombs dropped here and killed my brother and destroyed our house and I want you Americans to live up to your ideas of democracy. We believe in America.” And I thought how interesting is it that America can be this dark star, death star, and also at the same time this incredible shining light.

Viewer looking at “Hotter than July, 2005” by Mickalene Thomas

At a literary conference last March, Eunsong Kim gave a talk about the trials and tribulations of Carrie Mae Weems and her series, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.” Apparently, Harvard University threatened to sue the artist for using the daguerreotypes of enslaved people originally commissioned by Louis Agassiz because Harvard owned these images. Kim challenged the audience to think about the question of ownership here, given that the images themselves portray the bodies of slaves. When encouraged by Weems to have this conversation out in the open, the university declined.

My sweet father purchased for my spoiled ass, “The Conversations,” a DVD about the “30 Americans” exhibit including extended interviews with the artists, and I have been watching with my face contorted into a grimace, the way you would watch, perhaps, Khloe and Lamar. Or certain episodes of The View.

Some artists do a beautiful job of owning the awkward room in which they have been beckoned to perform this chit chat. I say “perform” and “chit chat” because these interviews feel perfunctory rather than curious, contained and at times corrective when the artists have so much more to say than the space knows what to do with. If you want to know what the subtext of this interaction looks like, check out Rashid Johnson’s “The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood)” — in which a black man stands with an expression of utter imperviousness as smoke rises around his Frederick Douglass-style hair.

Rashid Johnson’s “The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008”

I give credit to Jennifer Rubell, the daughter of the collectors, for editing the video in such a way that tries to honor the manner in which these artists assert themselves. The film begins with Kerry James Marshall energetically questioning the concept of power. “There are no black collectors that I know of that can do what you just did in having an exhibition like this,” he says to the collectors’ faces. And, “How much analysis, how much criticality are you bringing to the essays in the catalog?” He goes on to say that the title of the exhibition, by avoiding mention of blackness, feels like a lie: “You’ve tricked them into coming here.”

After we leave, my father and I get some hot and sour soup. We visit Dell Pryor’s gallery on Cass Avenue, where the work of Kara Walker’s father, Larry Walker, hangs on the wall. During Thanksgiving dinner, my (white) mother will ask my (black) great aunt if she is tired. To which she will respond, “That’s why the white man don’t let the n***** eat until after he works the field.” The room will be quiet for the smallest second before exploding into laughter. It always fascinates me that in the humor of this 94-year-old woman, the ante-bellum era exists in present tense. The owner and the slave and the field as clear as day.

Learning To Live After My Younger Brother Died

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

We pray to our ancestors asking for guidance and protection. So rarely do we imagine our ancestors to be younger than us. When my little brother unexpectedly passed away last November from cancer, he became the youngest ancestor I’ve ever known.

It started with a missed call and finding out that he was in the ICU. Several BART and bus rides later, I made it to O’Connor Hospital where he was born 22 years ago and would die four days later. See, grief doesn’t start in the present. It starts in the past, right with all the shoulds and could have beens. The frantic replaying of everything that has happened on double the speed, skipping from one frame to another in a wild hunt for answers. Why did this happen? Why couldn’t I stop it from happening?

That week in the hospital, I felt pain at every sight of him lying in that bed. His body was swollen from head to toe, especially his face. He lied prone with a tube down his throat to stabilize his breathing. He was covered in wires that monitored his vitals. We called Cha^[1] to xức dầu cho em Nguyên^[2] and prayed incessantly. My prayers carried manifestations for his recovery with no doubt in my mind that he would make it through, but by the end of the week, I learned that some things just can’t be manifested.

If death is a silent reaper, grief is the piercing wails of everyone I love in the same room, desperately clinging to a body that no longer carries a soul. It is giving myself 3 seconds, if even that, to let the news sink in before rushing over to hold my mom, already collapsed on the couch and wailing repeatedly, “Ta không chịu được đâu… Nguyên đâu rồi? Nguyên đâu rồi?”^[3] It is forcing myself to be strong though I am in indescribable pain, because the elders who have always been my pillars of strength have crumbled.

I let my face drown in tears as I explained his death over and over again in Việt^[4] and English to everyone that came—and over the phone to everyone that couldn’t. As we viewed his dead body for the first time, we soaked our love into him through tears and prayers, clutching onto whatever life was left. I held his hand until it grew cold, making a promise loud enough so my mom wouldn’t feel alone in speaking to the dead. I promised him that I would take care of our family and make sure everyone was good. I tried to reassure his spirit in case he was scared of what lay ahead—but how could I possibly provide him guidance for somewhere I’ve never gone?

For the next several months, I replayed this nightmare of his death and cried my heart out every night. Gut-wrenching sobs tore through my chest and became my lullaby. They drenched my face in tears and snot, making it hard to see or smell anything no matter how many tissues I used. I didn’t care for connecting with my senses anyway though. I was trapped in a spiral, thinking, If I had known he was sick, I could have protected him. But the truth is that no one knew he was sick, even himself and the doctors, until it was too late. I refused to accept that he had passed away even though I spent every day handling logistics about his death. I learned how to plan and negotiate the cost of a funeral and close out financial assets of someone without a will. I offered comfort to others as they processed his death, though I didn’t have space myself to scream. I needed to break down, open my mouth wide, and release the thunder from the bottom of my lungs in one loud, piercing cry. I’d just lost one of the most important people in my life. With every message, call, and saying of chia buồn^[5], the sadness multiplied rather than divided. It added anger to the equation, and I was angry that I was alone. I was alone in a world that “could not imagine” my grief even though I was waving it right in front of their faces.

I dove into stories that his friends, students, colleagues, teachers, family, and I shared. He was down for anything: hanging out, completing silly dares, and staying up late to listen and give advice. He built a magical haunted house for his students to enjoy on Halloween and looked forward to helping with their homework. He paid attention to the little things and always made sure to take care of set-up and clean-up at events because he knew how much it helped.

Through these stories, I called upon his spirit to give me strength, and this is how his past became the guide for my future. It became impossible to forget how much he loved and believed in me. Every story about him from the people in his life was a love note he had left for me—to guide me day by day. They reassured me that people remembered so much about him and wouldn’t forget him. They reminded me of how far the impact of his kindness and service went. It was the proof I needed to know that although I couldn’t follow him into the afterlife, he was settling in just fine as an ancestor. I didn’t have to worry about him so much anymore.

As the tasks for my em^[6] dwindled down, the relief of not having to deal with them anymore mixed with a different kind of heartache. Carrying what remained of his world on my shoulders wasn’t easy, but letting it go felt even harder. I feared that there would be nothing left for me to do for him. If there was nothing left I could do as his chị^[7], then what do I do now? How do I live when the one I always guided in life no longer needs me? How do I move forward when I still need him to support me as an ally when it comes to queerness, mental health, and social justice in our family?

In trying to figure it out, I cried, prayed, and wrote a lot. I prayed for the peace and protection of his spirit, for guidance, and for my family and me to be okay. To balance out the tears, I soaked up laughter whenever it came. I changed my phone’s wallpaper to his photo. I hoped he would visit my dreams though I never knew if I would wake up the next morning. Nothing made me sure that I would be granted another day because he wasn’t.

Yet somehow, the mornings kept greeting me.

As much as I still don’t know how to live life without him, I know I just have to keep going. While he was alive, he hoped for me to be well, live my best life, and always find happiness. I can’t imagine that he’s changed his mind now that he’s an ancestor. So for today, I choose to focus on that. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll choose something different. But I hope one day, when it’s time for us to finally reunite, I can share with him that all his hopes came true.

Artwork by Danthanh Trinh depicting An and her brother Nguyen on his graduation day.

^[1] Father (Priest)
^[2] “anoint my little brother Nguyên” (Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick)
^[3] “I can’t take this at all… where is Nguyên? Where is Nguyên?”
^[4] Vietnamese
^[5] condolences, to share sadness
^[6] younger sibling
^[7] older sister

The Price I Pay For(ever) My Culture

Welcome to Autostraddle’s APIA Heritage Month Series, about carrying our cultures from past to future.

For Aunty Hauani
her words, my final resting place one day:
“upon the survival of the Pacific
depends the survival of the world.”

We, the biggest region on the planet.
The oldest ocean.
The heart, if this world ever had one.
How dare anyone look at a map
with Oceania sliced in half
hanging on the edges of it and say:
I know what the world looks like.

For everything that fractured us.
For my severed island,
once belonging to itself
for my chest, where Samoa is whole always
where Guahan is demilitarized finally
Hawai’i too. Northern Mariana Islands too
where the Marshall Islands is nuclear waste free
and the sins that bombed them 67 times
1000 times bigger than the one dropped on Hiroshima
remain America’s judgement day explanation,
and never theirs.

For every misspelled / mispronounced attempt
at our family heirlooms.
How people will suggest that I
introduce myself
before giving my keynote address,
rather than trouble their lazy tongue
with learning how to say it
out of respect for my ancestors.

No.
You say it
so there’s no mistake
that you can see me
and the village
I’m standing in.

The audacity
has always been violent.

The honeymoons
timeshares
family vacations
spring breaks
violence done to us
masked as gaslight

but this is for the lighting
of the match.

For the spark of my generation
settling for nothing less
than our due.
For the aloha spirit being sharper
than you last remembered.
For the locals no longer willing
to tourist trap for you.

For the love of my ancestors
how once, I read that when our colonizers
came back to Samoa the second time,
their boats were capsized
by our sea.

Oh well.
For that too.

And as always & forever more:
for the culture.

The one I come from
and the one that had no choice
but to come from me.
Indigenous diaspora finds home everywhere
my people survive.
From Cali’s coast to Oceania’s edge
from my swollen heart to the valley in my voice
the one that my love echos between forever
for the ones I intend to die for
and the ones who now understand
why they’re alive.

For the lengths I will go
to tell the truth
in this lifetime
in my writing
for us.

Photo by Kara Schumacher, Collage by Melissa Aliu

I was a third year student at UC Santa Cruz when I fell in love for the first time. The U.S. was in the heart of the 2008 recession and my then-lover and I were at the end of Fall Quarter — just around the corner from my 21st birthday in February 2009. That love held many of my firsts in the palm of its warm hand: my first real kiss, my first serious relationship, my first time having sex, and my first queer love. That was the year my queerness gained its footing long enough to experience a love that I thought could withstand my family and our Samoan culture. I was wrong. Against my decision to come out on my own terms, I fell out to my parents five days before my 21st birthday, and if I run through the vivid details of it long enough, it’s still one of the most painful days I ever experienced in my life.

I don’t make my way through that trauma the way I used to. Partly because I don’t have to, because it doesn’t traumatize me anymore. My parents and I have healed over the years long enough to own the apology I was afforded by them and honor the time (years) it took for them to not just accept me, but nurture me (and my relationships) as well. After 11 years and many poems about my queerness posted all over the internet, I’m at a place in my life where I can look back at that period of time, the language that was unspeakable to name in the midst of it, and put to rest things that I no longer feel shame or responsibility for.

But one thing that I remember vividly, as the truth about my relationship with my first love was unraveling for the first time, was something my mom asked me. At that time, it made me feel guilty, but now makes me feel more curious to unlayer and reckon with it: amidst (her shock about) me coming out, she asked, “What will the church think?” To someone who isn’t Samoan (or Pacific Islander), it’s safe to assume that she was referring to what our church would make of my queerness in the context of religion, but that’s not all that she was worried about at that moment. She wasn’t just asking me about our church, she was asking me what our Samoan church, a pillar within our culture, would think. She was concerned about the repercussions I might face not from the institution of church: but from our own culture.

One of the most remarkable things about being Samoan in diaspora is that — despite all that colonization robbed us of when Germany and the U.S. partitioned our islands into countries, declared one of them a U.S. territory, and militarized us to the point of imperialist ownership — despite all of this, we’ve still been able to maintain a strong connection to our rich heritage and sacred traditions. I absolutely love that about us. Go us! I love that I was born into an intergenerational, multiracial Samoan family in the Bay Area back in the late 80s, with our culture as my first crib. My grandparents (may they rest in peace) as our family’s culture keepers, as all Samoan elders are.

Photo by Melissa Aliu

But to understand the Samoan culture and why my mom (or any Samoan parent) would worry about it in relationship to their daughter’s queer identity, you must first understand that as Samoans, our community is a collectivist people. When we say “it takes a village”, we say it in unison and in harmony, with our entire chest. We say it standing for the actual villages our families are indigenous to. Our identity is interdependent. There is no sense of “self” without or even before the collective self. When people say, “You have to love yourself in order to love anyone else”, that’s not how Samoans move in the world (or how any Pacific Islander culture moves).

We derive our understanding of identity through the collective in order to understand who we are individually. Even in diaspora and post-colonization, Samoans live and move through life in a way that emphasizes collective cooperation over independence and self-fulfillment. We have a sense of responsibility to one another, to our families, our genealogies and to Samoa that is defined by the socio-political practice of our cultural values that we call Fa’a Samoa, or “the Samoan way”.

Our identity is interdependent. There is no sense of “self” without or even before the collective self. When people say, “You have to love yourself in order to love anyone else”, that’s not how Samoans move in the world.

Fa’a Samoa defines not just what our culture is, but the structure and codes on who we’re supposed to be in our culture, and if you’re Samoan, Fa’a Samoa is always on. We’re always moving through the protocol of it, or at least that’s the expectation. The cultural code of Fa’a Samoa is as complex and strict as it is powerful and sacred. Much of it revolves around particular behavioral expectations around showing our deep reverence for our elders, our families, our High Chiefs, our ceremonial practices, and our churches. Respect is the cornerstone of Fa’a Samoa, and is oftentimes met with strict consequences when not practiced the way it was taught to us.

It’s in the way I bow my head when walking in front of elders in my family. Or in the way I immediately sit at the feet of my parents or outside of the room that the elders and Chiefs are gathered in. It’s in the dos and don’ts of how food is served during a ceremonial gathering, and in the way I’m expected to dress depending on the formality of the event. Fa’a Samoa is all of this and more. And no other place in our lives is Fa’a Samoa expected to be upheld with the utmost respect than at church, in the presence of the faifeau (minister) and church officials.

As the granddaughter of a minister and the daughter of a deacon, I grew up attending a Samoan church, which means I grew up deeply connected to my Samoan culture through Fa’a Samoa. My upbringing as a Samoan girl, navigating both Fa’a Samoa and a world that didn’t understand it, certainly left me feeling proud for knowing how to articulate my culture to an outside world. But it also left me with a lot of questions that I felt guilty about, because it always felt like questioning my culture was its own world of sin. Plus I was questioning my culture as a Samoan-American in diaspora, another layer that leaves me wondering, if I wasn’t born and raised in Samoa, what “authority” I even have to speak on Fa’a Samoa.

To question Fa’a Samoa felt like a betrayal of the village that raised me, as valid as the questions were, or as valid as simply having a question is. Questions I had around power dynamics between authority figures in our community, gender roles and expectations, or simply why I couldn’t wear what I wanted to wear at times that called for specific attire. What I wasn’t allowed to explore out loud, I worked out on the pages in my journal in isolation. But even that had its limits. I remember times where I’d find myself in arguments with my parents, trying to understand why our culture called for certain things to be the way they were, and was met with “that’s just the way it is.”

But if Fa’a Samoa is what makes us Samoan, and I was struggling with feeling like I could be my full self — my queer, feminist, inquisitive, outspoken, independent, critical self — because of it: what did that make me? Am I any less Samoan because I challenged what constitutes being Samoan? And will my culture still claim me if I’m struggling to claim it? Does being Samoan mean I can be who I truly believe that I am, even at the risk of not being what is culturally expected of me?

And just like my mom asked me the day I came out to her and my dad: what will the church think?

Until it happened, I never realized that the very thing that would help me answer all of these questions, would come from the first poem I wrote 14 years ago, in my dorm room during my first year of college. When I finished writing it, I felt like I’d deeply exhaled, letting out a gulp of air I’d held in for far too long. When I wrote my first poem, I gave myself permission to stop paying the cost of staying silent about things that mattered to me. Even if those things were the very foundation of who I am. My earliest writing focused a lot on my experience with being a first generation queer student of color on campus. And then from there, I started writing about my Samoan identity, the utter devotion and pride I have in being Samoan, while also writing my way out of the fears and guilt of being seen as a disrespectful daughter. It felt scary to be a Samoan girl from a culture I loved and was so devoted to, while also defying expectations by voicing my opinion and expressing myself through an art form that encouraged it.

I started performing these poems all around campus. With every stage I performed on, I felt our Pacific Islander ancestors giving me permission to stretch the muscle of my voice around every microphone I spoke on. When I wrote and performed my poetry, I imagined being this brave for the rest of my years in college: brave enough to feel as intelligent as my palagi (white) classmates, brave enough to fight my insecurities with the reassurance that I deserved to be a student there, brave enough to quiet my own demons that tried to punk me into believing that what I had to say wouldn’t matter to anyone else but myself.

I also imagined being this brave in the face of my family and my culture.

I had to face the fact that it was more important to speak up and use my voice to tell my story, than it was to stay silent about the things that affected me. If I were silent about it, there’s no telling where I’d be today. If I were silent about it, no one would know when I was hurting or when I needed support. I know too many young people in my community, both in diaspora and in the islands, who have taken their lives, who suffer from depression and anxiety, who fear rejection from their families and culture, because they never had a healthy way to express themselves nor people they could trust to listen to them.

Poetry reassured me that my voice is necessary, and that what I’m speaking about is important because it’s rooted in a radical love I have for who I am as a queer Samoan woman, and who I belong to. Poetry was what helped me to speak to my parents when we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, especially after I came out to them. It helped make our relationship stronger, and helped make it easier for me to express myself with them. There was a time in my poetry career where my parents didn’t always support how open and honest I was in what I wrote and shared with the public. They would ask me questions like: “What is the church going to think about your poem?” or “Why do you have to tell all our family business?” But just like I had to do with myself, they had to ask themselves: would they rather I kept secrets from them about things that I was struggling with or things that were important to me, or would they rather I feel comfortable enough to come to them in those moments?

Thankfully, my parents are now my biggest support systems, and have come to enough of my poetry performances and watched enough of my poems go viral to realize that I’m not going to stop speaking my truth. More importantly: they’ve realized that where I speak from is rooted in where we come from.

I have poetry to thank for being my entryway to critical conversations in my community. Topics that I never believed would be on the table are now finding their way into the open, even as we fear the cultural repercussions of doing so. Topics such as sexism, gender roles, anti-Blackness in our families, domestic violence in our homes, mental health issues in our community were once things I would write about in private, but am now seeing come to light in dialogue and in action, and I can’t help but think outlets like poetry, art, and the power of social media have played a part in making that possible.

Photo by Youth Speaks

In making a career out of poetry over the last 14 years, that’s what was stuck with me the most: that as terrifying or uncomfortable as it is to speak your truth, or to listen to someone speak theirs, the cost of staying silent is too high a price to pay. Many of us have spent our lives paying for it with a currency that doesn’t even exist, and have instead jeopardized our mental, psychological, spiritual, and physical health for the sake of believing that we were better off silent and in pain, than we were vulnerable and free. We did it for reasons that make complete sense to a people who move in the world as a collective: as the village we come from and the village we will always be to each other. We did it out of protection for one another. We did it out of deep respect for our elders. Out of respect for our parents. And most of all: we did it for the culture.

Many of us have spent our lives paying for it with a currency that doesn’t even exist, and have instead jeopardized our mental, psychological, spiritual, and physical health for the sake of believing that we were better off silent and in pain, than we were vulnerable and free.

But as my professor in grad school once said as I was earning my Masters in Marriage/Family Therapy at USC: “Just because it’s cultural, doesn’t mean that it’s sacred.” The very purpose of culture is to shape itself into protecting those that depend on it to live. To thrive. Culture is supposed to evolve, because we do. I am not the same Samoan girl that I was growing up living by the values of Fa’a Samoa, and Fa’a Samoa isn’t the same either. If anything, my challenges to my culture are what deepened my devotion to protecting it for the remainder of my life. Even if it almost cost me my family. Even when my parents get frustrated at the questions I have about why we do what we do. Even in the shame and pain that I still harbor because of my inability to speak my Samoan language fully. Even through all of that, I still plan on dying for the sake of protecting, defending, and living for my Samoan people and the complexity of the culture that defines us.

Until then: if my Samoan culture is passed down through me, may it be the parts that want me alive. May it be the parts that see my future lover(s) woven into the fabric of queer Pasifika love. If my culture is to be one that I inherit, may I take the parts of it that see us wholly and call us kin, and shed the parts that our colonizers wanted for us more than we wanted for ourselves.

I carry Fa’a Samoa in my mana (power) in the face of a world where white supremacy, anti-Indigenous/anti-Black racism would rather I turn on myself and on my people than on the systems that keep us chained to our fear of fighting for a world we deserve. A world where respecting my culture means ending the anti-Blackness within it. A world where respecting my culture means gender equity towards the matriarchy that we’re indigenous to. A world where respecting my culture means going to therapy. Taking my antidepressants if it helps me to heal enough to show up for my life, so I can show up for my people. A world where respecting my culture means taking care of our youth and creating spaces for them to finally write and speak their truth, is treated with the same reverence as taking care of our elders.

A world where respecting Fa’a Samoa means one day, I’m going to be the queer Samoan elder who looks my grandchildren in their faces, and says: I was afraid the entire time that I was fighting for the world they deserve: but I did it anyway. I did it, afraid. I did it at the mouth of a mic. I did it in every poem I wrote for them. I want to be able to look our future generation of Samoan culture protectors in their faces and tell them that I devoted myself so deeply to our community, that I decided to break the cycles that we no longer need to be in survival mode for. I did it because I loved the promise of them more than I loved my silence. I did it because I couldn’t stop dreaming of our liberation, even as I know that I won’t be around to see it in my lifetime. At least I dreamt it. I want to be the Samoan elder who lives long enough to write/say:

It’s okay to have traditions that stay the same and remain a pillar within our people, but our culture around how those traditions are carried out are destined to change, and the best we can do to prepare ourselves is to be open when it does. There are parts of Fa’a Samoa that couldn’t make their way intact across the Pacific. We’ve had to adjust and adapt in order to make those aspects of our culture work for us. But as we change, and discover ourselves, and speak up, finally, and return deeply to our ancestral roots, my hope for us is that we do so in a way that never leaves any of us questioning whether we’re “Samoan enough”. You are enough. Our ancestors made it so. And as a first-gen, queer, indigenous, Samoan, woman of color in diaspora, not only do I now stand firmly in the notion that I am Samoan enough, but I am Samoan, and more. All of us are.