Lost and Found in the Fish Sauce: How I Cooked My Way Back Home

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

At ten years old, I held a Cheerios cereal box featuring a white Barbie next to my face while I asked my mom, “Can I get this, please?” Without even looking, my mom responded, “Uh huh, học giỏi đi con, as long as you do well in school.” I felt like the happiest little kid on the block. I looked down at Barbie and saw her beautiful, fair skin. Later that year, I wanted to bleach the brown off of me.

As the youngest of seven kids, I felt the pressure to live up to the sacrifices my parents made for me and my siblings. My life was indebted to theirs and felt like it was never mine to own. The sacrifice of leaving their war-torn home. The abuse they endured trying to come here. The endless hours working to feed us and put a roof over our heads. My older siblings seemed to do a great job of proving that my parents’ sacrifices were not a waste; it only made sense for me to continue that.

A photo of Sal’s family. Sal and their twin Nancy stand at the bottom of the photo.

I did whatever it took to live the American Dream: you can be whoever you want to be with the right mix of ingredients. Add one cup of bleach, four ounces of internalized racism, a slab of self-hate, and let it all braise together, you will have cooked up the perfect child to conquer anything in the American concrete jungle.

To prove my dedication to this dream, I had decided not to speak in Vietnamese anymore. With every Vietnamese word that exited my mouth, I felt the weight of shame pull me away from my sprint towards whiteness. I refused to eat my mother’s Vietnamese packed lunches of cá kho, as beautiful as that braised fish over steamed rice was. I needed to play the game: Lunchables, Capri Sun, and English were all I would accept. There was no room for the smell of fish sauce on my skin. I would rather starve with my own ego.

One day, my mom came home from a long day of work as I came home from school. I was holding a stack of books and tried to explain what I learned in school today in English. She couldn’t understand a thing.“Cái gì? Mẹ không hiểu. Con nói lại lần nữa. What? I don’t know what you’re saying. Say that again.” I fished for a response in Vietnamese. My ego held me down like a rock. “No, mom, that’s not what I was trying to say. Seriously, mom, you don’t understand?!” Frustrated, I slammed my books on the floor and looked her in the eye. “MOM, YOU’RE SO FUCKING STUPID.”

Four seconds passed. Out of all the words I said in English, she heard the ones that mattered. She held back tears as her eyes locked with mine. I could see the same shame in her eyes like a mirror to my own. She slowly crumbled. “Con đúng. Mẹ ngu. Mẹ không đi học giống con. You’re right child. I am stupid. I didn’t get the chance to go to school like you did.” As my mom walked out of the room, all I could feel was the heaviness of her absence. Nothing could describe the betrayal I had committed. I never meant to make her feel so small — to have her believe the words coming from a child poisoned by whiteness. Did I poison her too?

I perfected the art of disconnecting myself from my own body in an attempt to survive. I adopted anger as a mechanism to protect myself. I held these two skills close to me as I entered one of the whitest universities in California. Being a student unearthed what whiteness had buried in me. It brought me back to the place I was avoiding my whole life — my body. I never realized how painful being in my body was until I had the language to describe it during my undergraduate years. I finally had the tools to articulate the hardships I went through growing up: the unresolved trauma that was carried, compounded, and passed down from past generations into my own DNA. The kind of trauma that lives within the body — and when it escapes the boundaries of our bodies, it can transform into violence in the form of abuse, self-hate and mental health challenges.

To be in my body felt like not only reliving the sexual and physical violence I experienced as a kid, but to finally accept that this pain was mine to hold. To hold pain meant to create space for emotions like grief, disappointment, and sadness. I never had the chance to embody these emotions because all I could feel was anger.

But holding onto anger felt like I was holding onto a burning skillet. I failed to realize how the tightness of my grip was causing myself more pain. If I loosen just a tiny ounce of the grip of my anger, all of the violence I experienced would disappear. Or at least that’s what I believed. Anger kept me alive but I failed to realize that it never kept me safe. Safety meant cultivating a space where I could feel the full range of emotions manifested by those past experiences.

I grieved the safety that I lost as a kid. I grieved the sexual and physical violence I endured. I grieved my hatred for my own brown skin. I grieved the time I used the words I inherited from people who hated us to make my mom feel uneducated and worthless. Slowly, I embraced my anger and grief as natural responses in my queer immigrant life. I remembered the kind of knowledge that no university could ever teach me: the wisdom my mother holds through her love, her stories, and her cooking.

My mother became my anchor during one of the most challenging parts of my life, as I learned to name and navigate my trauma. When she had to escape from her home in Vietnam with no belongings, she looked to the moon as her guide in the darkness. Now, I think of the taste of her food when I need to be guided back home. Not knowing how to cook during college, I would call my mother and ask, “How do I cook this?” She replied, “chút xiêu cái nầy, cái kia. A little bit of this, this, this, and this.” Frustrated, I replied, “But like, how much, Mom?” Without pause, she laughs, “Con sẽ biết. You’ll just know.”

Sal Facetimes their mom as they cook together.

As I figured out how much of each spice to add, the only thing I had confidence in was the memory of how the dish tasted and the happiness it brought me. I knew I only needed to add as much as it took to bring me back home to my mom’s Sunday morning meals. That is when her “you’ll just know” wisdom finally made sense. That is when I knew: I’d arrive home not only with myself but with my mother and with my ancestors.

Through my mother’s recipes, I’m reminded of the resilience that flows in our blood. Instead of disconnecting from my body to survive, I nurtured it. Like me, cooking is hella queer and fluid. Every time I reimagine a dish, it can taste different depending on my mood.“How spicy do I want this dish to be today? “How sweet do I want this dessert?” It’s never fixed or prescribed. That’s what makes these evolving recipes — and the queer experience — so delicious.

The family shrine, adorned with orchids, incense, and meditation bowls.

We can’t exist if we don’t nurture ourselves. I exist through the recipes passed down by my mom, that have been passed down by her mom, and so on. Our whole lives we’ve been fed things that have disconnected us from our land, our culture, and our bodies. I will never again get lost in the vortex of the American Dream, but I’m always down to get lost in the fish sauce. Because that’s where my mother and ancestors will guide me back.

For more queer stories, food, and tears follow me on my food journey on Instagram Television and YouTube.

What Being a Child of the AIDS Epidemic Taught Me About Coronavirus

This piece is part of a series on Autostraddle exploring the overlaps and divergences between the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic — many AIDS survivors have spoken out meaningfully about both the echoes of their previous experiences in the current moment, and the critical differences between the current pandemic (and the urgency of response) and the previous one and ways in which they can’t be compared. We want to highlight what there is to learn from elders and survivors of the AIDS epidemic, now and always, and to remember that HIV/AIDS and the state’s failure to support those living with it it is an ongoing reality globally, not a distant past.

Like a lot of adults that were once children living on the margins, I learned to cut and paste the photo negatives of memories into highlight reels, clip show episodes, bloopers, Vine comps — digestible bits of a life that keep some fictional audience entertained, but more importantly, comfortable. Who that audience is, I never really know, but I fall in love with personalities often enough to know I’m not crafting the feverish daydreamy Please know me right fantasy edit we all do, but something mundane, obligatory. Like a shortcut that makes the task of knowing me efficient and unobtrusive.

The audience, it occurs to me, like most things we accept as the blank default, is probably white.

So when I piece together the story of a too-loud, too-large Puerto Rican family crammed around a small wooden table in a narrow kitchen protected by the bright yellow walls of my childhood, the camera pans around my dad delivering the punch line of a joke, my uncle howling, tapping his beer bottle with the ring on his thumb, dancing to music no one can hear but him. And my aunts, grandmother, mom, and Godfather are mirthful from eyes to mouth, taken by my father, and as if charm was linked by blood, taken by his little brother moving to a tune whose rhythm is nothing like what’s on the stereo. Which is on full blast. Which is either playing Marc Anthony or Bachata Mix 1990-something, featuring Marc Anthony. The kids, all of us, are a smattering of ages in a scatter of places — on laps, under tables, over chairs. Dominoes litter the table, from a game that just ended or a game about to begin. And that’s where the memory ends. Fast forward. That’s enough childhood for someone to get the gist.

No one sees my dad notice that a plastic cup he’d been using was moved. No one sees his eyes dart back and forth between kids scattered in the room — who would put their mouths on anything, who would drink just about anything out of anything — and the cup. The clip ends before he lets conversation take over and walks away to obsessively sponge down the cup in the kitchen sink. Then stays there, as plates, cups, forks, spoons, everything makes its way back, playing the best kind of host — one who doesn’t leave room for offers to wash dishes. The clip ends before his mood meets the air — a dark, sad, worry, that hours from then will explode into an unrelated angry outburst. It’s uncomfortable, and not mine, this moment, so no one needs to sit with it, not even its witness. What right do I even have, having burned it into my brain so vivid? Snip.

The retroactive story often told of collective life in the US leaves out a distinctly dark undertone of the late ’90s — that of a population of people carefully emerging from the dark, shaking with the uncertainty over whether the monster they are afraid of is gone, really gone, eyes never quite adjusting to the light. It was a time where AIDS was no longer automatically considered a terminal illness — sometimes. It meant certain cocktails of medication were effective and attainable-ish, though nausea, vomiting, upset stomach, and diarrhea were more a certainty than a “side effects may include” label on pill bottles would have someone hope. A new generation, though it didn’t yet know it could be a generation, were living with AIDS, and living as HIV+ people, but living having had their nose stuck viscerally into the ways they could and might die. It meant there were suddenly many stories in the country that began with pneumonia and ended, for the lucky, with a diagnosis that made people hate and fear them. And for people of color in the Bronx, that story is more common than any of us will admit. Because if it happened to someone you loved, who made you who you are, did it really even happen to you?

It meant a lot of adults in my life had their own cups, never licked the same ice cream cone, never let me stand less than six feet away if they got so much as a paper cut. Not because they were overly cautious, but because no one knew, with certainty, that AIDS couldn’t be transmitted via small amounts of saliva, or intimacy, whatever a person determines is “too much.” Some myths are born of fear. Many are born of hate. Some are born, simply, because it is safer to believe that something which makes sense, however one turns a thought over in their mind, must be fact. There is danger in the unknown. And so there is fear in just the label: “unknown.” At least a myth repeated enough feels familiar.

I was raised by people living under the shadow of many myths.

So how jarring it is, to be a queer adult in 2020, finding the snippets of these memories I thought culled from my story and buried places I thought I’d never return. The spread of Covid-19 is just one among many things queer communities across the nation have had to fear, but it’s the ways in which those fears are taking shape that draw comparison to the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An illness for which there is no vaccine has already put hundreds and thousands in the hospital. The government, under-prepared, leaves victims in the lurch. Lives are lost, or upended. A marginalized group is blamed and victimized for the disease and its spread. And people, not yet knowing with absolute certainty every action that can prevent the spread, do what little they can that is known to prevent it. For queer millennial and beyond, the broad strokes of this narrative are our inheritance. And how singular it is to inherit something from the role-models and kin so many in the queer community, starving for community, never got to have.

It’s also a comparison I, and many queer people, have qualms about. Because it is different, this history so many have had to shave out of their life story, while others hunger to know more intimately. Unlike AIDS, Covid-19 runs little risk of making someone’s sexuality public. It does not (yet) so neatly serve as an example of cosmic “punishment” hatemongers can turn to when looking for evidence that queer identity is meant to be punished. But just like AIDS, it is spreading through a nation entrenched in white supremacy, already being twisted into an excuse for xenophobia. And like many on the margins now, just like those living through the AIDS crisis, I can feel the greater toll coming in the wind.

I am lucky. I’m spoiled for what many queer individuals spend a lifetime searching for (and greedy, I still wish for the big brother or sister that could have made me feel less alone). I had and have tangible queer role-models. I have also had queer and straight loved ones diagnosed with AIDS. Their stories are not mine, but the lessons are. If I have learned anything from the survivors who raised me that could prepare me for this very, very different pandemic today, it’s to fear for the most marginalized affected, because they will be hurt the hardest and forgotten the fastest.

It is no coincidence that low-income black and latinx communities have proportionally been most affected by HIV and AIDS, while the most sympathetic portrayals of people living with AIDS in pop culture have historically been white cis-gendered men. There is a reason the faces of our greatest triumphs and tragedies are white-washed, reimagined in cis and abled bodies. Marginalized people do not just edit down their memories and histories for the comfort of those in power. Those in power edit memories and histories down into what comforts them most.

Worse, the greatest lesson I’ve learned from what may generously be called my queer ancestors, is the hardest to swallow: No one is coming to save us but ourselves. That, more often than not, for those with power, our suffering, and even our deaths, are convenient. Even the organizations whose symbols we wear proudly today in the ’80s and ’90s were just people, often in the margins, terrified, not knowing what to do. ACT UP, whose work is the shadow so many queer youths in New York live in, did not begin knowing exactly what they were facing when they began facing it. They knew the myths, and the fear and hate and maybe-facts that gave birth to them. And they did what little they knew they could do.

When I think about the months and years spent as a child doing homework in hospital waiting rooms, eating stale vending machine Pop-Tarts as someone dear to me struggled on the precipice of life and death, in the years the word ‘terminal’ rose up too many throats like bile, I didn’t feel gratitude for a president or an institution, but for the friends and family who advocated for that person in the hospital bed — someone they knew on the margin, not knowing yet what precisely could save any of them, but knowing what simple facts they had: that the illness killed a victim’s hunger. That, when the end comes near, because they had seen it too much, its beginning often looked like a wasting away.

Today, because even having queer role-models doesn’t erase homophobia, transphobia, or white supremacy, I don’t have much in the ways of a queer community. Not in physical space. It takes work and bravery to seek that community, and to make it more visible by being a part of it. And it can be hard to feel visible. It can feel dangerous to be visible. It is, in many ways, dangerous and brave to be seen. I don’t lament my invisibility, but it does mean so much of the queer solidarity I’ve felt has been online. And when I think about the queer people that raised me, I think most of their journeys to find one another, and what a miracle the internet looks like from this end of history. I think, in facing a pandemic, it’s one of the strongest tools we have that they didn’t. We are the only ones that can save us, and we have little idea of what we can do, but we’ve never been able to reach each other more easily.

The Venmo money we pass back and forth, the self-care and contact we share online, the networks we make of people, using the tools they have to do what they know they can, are what we need now. After bitter fights with my brother, my mother would say: “Be better. All you have is each other.”

The visual for wasting away, for those on the margins — of poverty, of race, of gender, and many times, all three — looks so much like starvation. And in the private highlight reels of my life, the image of community will always be kind faces sneaking in pints of ice cream through hospital doors, delivering dime bags of pot with the reverence of a homemade casserole. It’s not my story, but I am its witness. And this is what I’ve learned:

All we have is each other. And we are the only ones we know, if we believe in the myth of ourselves enough to create truth, who will save us.

Stepping Out Of Silence

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

I know three different ways to say the word “love” in Hindi, but I’ve never once heard them spoken by anyone in my family. Nobody did anything for love but rather for honor. It seems like every South Asian story boils down to a story about shame and honor: the family’s honor must be protected at all cost – even, if necessary, that ultimate one — but if everyone would just hold onto their sense of shame, we wouldn’t have to go down that road.

So much went unsaid, and yet somehow the stories made the rounds. No one ever told me, but I always knew that my cousin, two decades my senior or more, put a lit cigarette out on his soon-to-be-ex wife’s hand. My mother reminisced about my cousin, her nephew, from time to time as I was growing up. How smart he was. How much potential he had. If he had become a black sheep, it’s because he had been sent to a boarding school for rich kids as a child and spent too much time around “bad” people. Lost in her memories, I was always afraid to interrupt and ask whether the shame of that incident was his fault for battering his wife or hers for deciding that she deserved better than a life of abuse.

Being in India often answered my questions without my asking them. I don’t remember living there, but I remember visiting it over the course of my childhood. One of my earliest memories is watching my father’s youngest brother spend an entire evening berating his wife because she talked to a man on the street that she — and more importantly he — didn’t know. My parents stood out of the way, saying nothing. That solitary, enraged voice, emboldened by the complicit silence around him, carried a clear message. Some people were in possession of honor, and others could only bring shame. Some people could say anything in defense of that honor, and others had to acquiesce into silence.

Some people were in possession of honor, and others could only bring shame. Some people could say anything in defense of that honor, and others had to acquiesce into silence.

No matter where we were, religion always elucidated the unspoken: the positions of honor and shame within a family are relative, usually assigned based on birth, marriage and — most of all — gender. By any account, Holi and Diwali are the two biggest Hindu holidays, but those aren’t the ones impressed into my memories. I remember Rakhi, where my sisters and I would be woken up early in the morning before school to tie beaded and decorated thread bracelets on my father’s wrist (in the absence of having a brother) to thank him for another year of protecting our honors. And then there was Karva Chauth, where our mother would join hundreds of thousands of women across the subcontinent and the diaspora in fasting food and water an entire day for their husbands. Some people were in possession of honor, and others’ lives only had value in relation to them. There was no escaping that.

But nobody uses the words “honor” and “shame” except in the movies, because if anything is said, it’s said indirectly. So shame becomes a matter of propriety and honor, respect. And in that translation, the burden shifts from how we are viewed to the lengths we must go to secure our place.

My mother always framed herself as more forward-thinking when it came to gender equity, although it was never clear to me who exactly she was comparing herself to. She seethed quietly about my uncle’s treatment of his wife on that trip. Such disrespect for women. My father’s eternal criticism of her is that she says too much. I’ve watched as she, often, silences herself in reply. Because the only way to compensate for behaving improperly is to recede into the silence.

Silenced feelings find their way out, in one way or another, and it doesn’t always end well. I grew up surrounded by a fuming anger that could ignite anywhere at a moment’s notice – including inside myself. But sometimes the silences were more terrifying because you never knew what was smoldering, just waiting to combust. And as the flames eventually burned themselves out, as they always do, we returned once again to our unstated familial obligations. Silence to silence.

At this point, the other first generation immigrants and the other Asians say to me, “Oh, but you know your parents cared about you. That’s why they immigrated. They just showed it in a different way. They did their best.”

Silence is about absence, so how can I possibly describe it to you?

What if we tried this: Think about every time in your childhood a parental figure told you that they loved you, in whatever language they spoke. Every moment of being cared for and knowing, truly knowing, that this person was putting your needs, interests and desires first and foremost. Every embrace, every caress, every pat on the back. Take all of those memories – can you hold them all? – take every single one of them and remove them from the narrative of your youth. Now look at the emptiness you’re left with.

That barren landscape is my childhood.

B. and N. and I broke the silences, in secret. We found solace in each other’s company because no one who didn’t live it could truly understand. And besides, barred from having friends, all we had was each other. We spent all our time together: after school, on the weekends, in the summer. Year after year after year. There was nothing else to do. We lost ourselves on the pages of fantasy lands. There was nowhere else to go. We had the closeness of people who shared everything.

But even among the three of us, the most important things were left unsaid. Growing up, anything that smelled of sentimentality was roundly mocked. When I was very young, I liked singing along with Barney, and my entire family teased me because, apparently, love was a ridiculous thing to profess. So I followed the example of all my elders, and buried that word deep inside myself, laughed at it — disbelieved it — if anyone dared to even imply it.

Oh, that we loved each other is undeniable. Love was always there: in the gifts we made by hand for one other, the letters we sent long after the world stopped using postage, the secret nicknames that no one else is allowed to use. Even through all the bitter fights that children and teens and young adults have, we found our way back to each other. We were never shown how to navigate those disagreements, how to put aside differences, how to apologize, but we taught ourselves bit by bit, for each other, because we were all we had.

“We’ll never be like them,” we used to say — still say — talking about our father and his brothers. “They fight about the favors they did for each other years ago and who still owes what.” In my family, the only understanding of love was as a price, once paid, you collected your dues ever after. But B. and N. and I wanted so much more than that.

You probably think I’m exaggerating. I’m given to talking in metaphors, after all. So, I’ll draw the curtain back just a little.

What if I told you about the time they threw N. out of the house because she couldn’t stomach the taste of cooked onions? Which time should I tell you about? It happened so often, I can’t even count how many times. Or how about the time N. and I got into an argument, and the only way they knew how to end it was by making her stand on the other side of the apartment door?

I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

Twenty-five years later, and I still can’t think of this without —

“Why are you crying? What’s wrong with you?”

“You don’t cry out there,” B. told me gently after she dragged me by the hand into the bathroom. I got upset that he yelled at me for crossing in front of the TV too many times.

But as we got older, B. couldn’t handle my tears either, probably because she has worked so hard her whole life to swallow her own.

Isolation is too small a word. To be left to navigate a storm of feelings in silence on your own – sometimes I think people use the word “alone” without ever really knowing what it means.

Everything I learned about love – including the words – came from Bollywood. So often, in those movies, love was about destiny, as in Devdas, a predetermined bond between a man and a woman that transcended the trappings of family, marriage or even life itself. At times, love for a woman was about being gazed at by the proper man, as in Pakeezah, although it was never clear to me what separated the hero’s leering eyes from the villain’s that caused the heroine to fall in love with one and live in fear of the other. And if that love was unsanctioned by family, it almost always ended in either exile, as in Mughal-e-Azam, or even death, which is the story Devdas was really telling.

In the nineties that unsanctioned love started earning the family’s blessing, as in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. But that rested on the strength of a familial love that felt like a fairytale to me. A mother who loves her daughter so much she defies her husband on her daughter’s behalf? A father who loves his daughter so much he acknowledges her feelings and allows her to follow them? This seemed more fantastical than all those books I read set in made-up worlds.

My parents vastly preferred Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, which begins with a similar premise but ends with our heroine realizing that the man she should have loved all along was the man her father had chosen for her. That told me everything I needed to know.

Desire was so obscene that anything even remotely connected to it was silenced out of existence. I grew up with three other women, and yet the only time we talked about our bodies was when my mother told us we couldn’t enter the temple in her hometown because, They’re a little old-fashioned. I did my best to hide it — practicing how to open pads while barely making a sound and burying them deep in the trash. But I couldn’t be sure when I was internalizing her shame and when I was acting in defiance of it.

My parents shamed us about our bodies endlessly. Those shorts are too short. Only skirts below the knee are acceptable. That top is cut too low. Bare shoulders are indecent. But South Asian women are placed in a paradoxical position. Hide yourself endlessly for shame. Protect yourself from being marred so you could secure a good marriage. And then, one day, emerge from the chrysalis in perfect, untouched beauty.

The only time I’ve been to a salon with my mother was just before B.’s wedding in India. After two decades of being told that a dressed up body was improper, suddenly now I was supposed to care about looking good. Suddenly now, drawing attention to myself in that way was acceptable, but just for that one day. I was uncomfortable and a little unnerved by all the watching eyes because I was so deeply conditioned to believe it was shameful. But this is the love that was sanctioned.

You can say that I never had any bruises or scars, that there really isn’t much to this story at all, so what’s the problem? But what can I say? How can I explain that the world terrifies me in its vastness? That the deepest truth I hold is that people are fundamentally scary, unpredictable and untrustworthy? That dreams are a luxury when the mere existence of feelings could compromise the only place I had in this world?

My family moved around a lot, especially when I was younger, as my father chased one dream job after another, but the one constant was that I was always drowning in a sea of whiteness. My classmates taught me, at a fairly young age, that all the things that made me different were sources of shame.

“Why are your jeans purple?” (Why are you wearing those hand-me-down clothes, those dated, out of fashion pants?)

“Your mother has a red dot sewn into her forehead, right?”

I wanted so badly to fit in. I dreamed of having different parents, parents who I could go to with the simplest of my wants: a wardrobe that at least wouldn’t make me stand out. “No,” definitively, and more silence. If I asked too often, “What’s wrong with you that you would think of something so stupid as to want this? It’s such a waste of money.”

I turned, instead, to things seemingly more in my control. I remember looking at my hands and wishing with all my heart they were white, thinking that if I hid from the sun I could will my brown skin away. It didn’t work, of course it didn’t work, but as I grew older, I learned how to hide better. I spoke less and less about my family and anything that even hinted at culture, to the point that I still don’t use my sisters’ names when referring to them; sharing my own foreign name is more than enough to navigate.

But, as I grew older, the terms kept changing, and I couldn’t keep up.

“You’re a girl, why do you have a mustache?”

I couldn’t tell the other kids about the time they had yelled endlessly at B. because she dared to do something about her pubescent hair like the other girls in her class. How improper that is for an adolescent girl. Had she ruined herself on purpose, because every South Asian knows the hair will grow back thicker? That was a memory buried deep in myself, like so many others, surrounded by silence — all shameful topics, never to be discussed inside the family and especially not outside it.

And besides, by that point I knew that anything I said would only be fodder for further attacks. I tried throwing my own jabs, once — I called a boy “so gay” and felt terrible about it ever after. I learned, after hurting someone else, that the kindest thing I could do for myself and for others was to hold my feelings even closer.

Every high school rom-com I’ve watched shows teenagers fumbling through adolescence together. But I had bigger concerns, and love wasn’t real anyways.

Eventually, first B., then N. went to college, and so I was left to navigate the unpredictability of school and home life ever more alone. Oh we talked on the phone every single day, but it wasn’t the same. And then there were all those things — the most important things — that we had never spoken about at all. How could we start now, over a landline? How could we start now, when we never knew if they were listening? How could we start? Now?

That’s when the feelings began to just spill out. The harder I tried to hold them in, the more intense they became. Feelings I could never find words for, so I drowned myself in music to express the things I didn’t know how to say. Still don’t. I can make you a playlist of all the most desolate musical moments written by composers of the Western classical cannon. Would that make it any clearer?

I receded further into other people’s stories. Young adult fantasy novels became my guide, and I particularly loved books with women at the center of the action. I relished the works of Patricia A. McKillip, Robin McKinley and Diana Wynne Jones, who showed me that a woman could be seen for everything she was capable of, that a woman could be herself and still belong. But, they also, unwittingly, showed me that love was a foregone conclusion if there was a boy and a girl, roughly the same age, who spent an adventure’s worth of time together. That’s all it took.

So I romanticized those rare moments when a boy talked to me and didn’t make fun of how I looked or what I said. That’s all it took, right?

One day, I stumbled on an excerpt from Stone Butch Blues in an anthology N. had recommended to me. I remember the wonder, the utter beauty that reverberated through me as I read an intimate scene between Jesse and Theresa, and I needed more.

One day, I stumbled on an excerpt from Stone Butch Blues in an anthology N. had recommended to me. I remember the wonder, the utter beauty that reverberated through me as I read an intimate scene between Jesse and Theresa, and I needed more. But what left a much, much stronger impression were all of the graphic descriptions of assault, of being unaccepted, of being abandoned again and again and again. I didn’t remember that Jesse found a place at the very end.

I closed that book, and, with it, locked shut a door so, so deep inside me I didn’t even know it was there. By that point, I was so removed from myself I had no way of realizing what had happened. Those feelings had long since hardened into imperceptible silence, hidden behind a mask so close-fitting I couldn’t feel it on my skin and countless others I adorned meticulously because that is what I thought acceptance meant. Perhaps, if I made myself small enough, I could make it out of this life unscathed.

And yet, in spite of all that, I continued to despair at the lack of attention I got from boys and, eventually men, as one after another my sisters and then my closest friends entered into relationships and got married. When would my moment arrive to be seen, to belong? To be loved?

But, on the rare occasions I was noticed by a man, my feelings ranged from indifference to fear. Most of the time, I felt nothing.

When love is a matter of desperation, how do you even begin to know what it is you desire? It doesn’t matter what shape love takes. Or does it?

People talk about being closeted. “What do you mean you assumed you were straight until you were almost 29? Didn’t you have any inclination earlier?”

I refuse to fill the silence with a voice that was never there. There was a word that just didn’t exist in my world. Couldn’t. I was already burdened by too many other labels that prescribed who I was and asserted that I would always be worth less in this world. I simply could not add one more to the list.

Sometimes — I would argue most of the time — there isn’t a single, solitary closet. It is a door within a door within a door within a door, each chamber going deeper and deeper and deeper, and if you make it to the innermost one you just might catch a glimmer of your heart as your eyes adjust to the darkness around you. If you’ve been told your whole life that opening even the first door is an act of shame, that opening the second door results in derision, that the third door ends in violence and beyond that who even knows — would you open any of them?

It took years of unlearning and learning the many shapes of love to crack open one door and then the next, close it, reopen and try again. And I have always, always been afraid of darkness, of things that I can’t see, of paths that I don’t know where they lead. But no one makes such journeys alone. With B., with N., with people who have come in and out and into my life throughout adulthood, I’ve begun to build a place where I can be and always belong — a place that is much richer than the flimsy love any of those movies or books could possibly imagine.

People marvel that in just a couple of years I went from assuming I was straight to being so comfortable in my queerness, from how I dress to the fact that I write here publicly. But I finally have the words for what I’ve been trying to say for so long.

It has taken me three decades to find this voice. I will not silence it.

The Illusion Of Safety

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

Just about two months ago, I was driving up the 101 to record a conversation with Nicole Kelly for her podcast, The Heart, and Asha Grant, of the Free Black Women’s Library LA (a branch of Olaronke Akinmowo’s Free Black Women’s Library project). That afternoon we had a conversation on the topic of people pleasing, and how it has informed our youths, and the kinds of queer women we have become now.

I highly recommend listening to NK’s series, Divesting From People Pleasing, for a deeper dive, but “pleasing” as we’re considering it, is not about being nice. It’s about all of the ways that we, as queer women of color, deny, curate, bury, criticize and otherwise create a public presentation of ourselves in order to move through the world. It planted a seed in my mind about what it means to be Asian American: about the values that are most important in my family, about the ways I was taught to protect myself and succeed, about how those strategies are perceived by larger American culture.

After the the podcast episode aired, I got a text from an artist friend, Chloë Bass, that said, “My response thought (IN CASE YOU WERE ASKING, which you weren’t) to something you said is that actually we are being protected using strategies that people in the past wished they had known before the bad thing happened to them. If they had known to protect themselves from that thing, they feel like they would have been ok. So they imagine the thing they wish they had (long hair, correct clothes, whatever) and use that as the protection into the future. But in the future, we face different problems that need different protections that we don’t know yet. And it’s always going to be like that.”

“Does it have to always be like that?” I asked Chloë. I couldn’t help but wonder: Is safety ever more than an illusion? What is true safety?

This was at the end of March and COVID-19 was buzzing like a low ominous bass line beneath everything, shaking out a hysteria that was erupting in all sorts of ways, from hoarding obscene amounts of toilet paper and water to a rise in brutal violence and open hatred of Asian Americans in public. Plus, there were just a lot of people dying from illness. I kept thinking about what Chloe had said. I kept thinking about this present/future that I lived in. I was well aware that it was different from the past that produced my grandparents and my parents, that I wouldn’t otherwise exist.

But it was also true that the same discriminatory sentiments against Asian people, from the past, had been carried on, as a kind of cultural protection among The Rest, which is how I consider everyone else who isn’t “Asian”.

But it was also true that the same discriminatory sentiments against Asian people, from the past, had been carried on, as a kind of cultural protection among The Rest, which is how I consider everyone else who isn’t “Asian” — a designation that of course Westerners would make to attempt to homogenize the majority of the world’s population. So am I ignorant or optimistic for thinking that I am less vulnerable than my Japanese American grandma Sumi — Betty, as she called herself to please in white company (a name I used at the milkshake shack at my summer camp because Kamala was too pretty to let them butcher)?

I wanted to track down the past-future protections that had gotten me to where I’m at now in my identities. I also wanted to know how to better face the unknown of my own future — I don’t want to be caught parading around in last generation’s false sense of security. So last weekend, I got my parents and my sister on a Zoom call to discuss the values that had been instilled in us by my grandparents, and what the culture of our family was about.

I had an idea of the general values in my family culture — I did grow up in it — but it was illuminating to have my parents put these things into context for me. It boiled down to four main values: education, family, pride in your identity, equity & justice. There is a way that all of these ideas meld together to create the general container of the world I know. If I think about them as one protective strategy, the goal is to gather as much knowledge and legitimized qualification as possible, use it to enlighten your family in a cultural and social way, gain access to money and opportunity, and then feel confident enough to extend this same protection to as many other people as possible.

When I see it laid out like this, I understand how easy it would be to create the narrative that Asian Americans are complicit in upholding white supremacy culture. I know a lot of Asian Americans who do. I also see how easy it would be to cast this strategy as simply protective, conservative, self-interested, rather than forward-thinking or inclusive.

When I was in high school I found my family strategy constraining in its singular focus on academic achievement, with some room for sports, as the most important value in a person’s whole entire life — “what about the way I feel?” I was always writing in my journals and my creative writing classes, “what if succeeding means sacrificing who I want to be?” Then, in college, having been radicalized by a winning combination of campus orgs and post-colonial theory, and also starting to come out, I found this strategy short-sighted and arrogant. “How dare we find a comfortable life within the systems that oppress us while people continue to die?!” was my totally cliched, self-righteous college vibe. Without understanding that comfort is necessary to survival, without looking at how lucky I was to have been gifted an extremely expensive experience of learning to articulate who I was, how I thought, and what I stood for.

My parents met in my dad’s dorm room at Oberlin College in the 70s because he was a popular calculus tutor, and my mom and her roommate needed help with their problem sets. When it was my turn to go to Oberlin College (and my sister would join me three years later), I didn’t quite understand what a huge accomplishment it was for both of my parents to have been there, but also how well it fit their own parents’ plans.

My mom is sansei and grew up in California. When I ask her about what expectations there were of her growing up, she says it was very clear. “Just like you, we were born with college funds, and the expectation was that we would go to college. Sometimes, as a treat, we got to work to add money to our college fund.” My mom’s mom had grown up on a strawberry farm in Oregon and she’d told me about how much manual labor filled her life. “It was extra for the women and girls because we also had to do housework and take care of the men — don’t get married to a man, unless you want to waste your time,” my grandma had told me. I’ve taken her advice to heart.

I know my grandma saw education as her way out, as a means to develop her own independence and to fortify herself against inevitable racism and discrimination. Sumi went to college, and then in the midst of internment, was one of the few Japanese American women to earn a master’s degree, and went on to earn a teaching credential, so that she could influence as many young minds as possible. I read an essay she published in the 80s in a UC Berkeley review about how, when she was applying for secretarial work, for which she was overqualified, she was told that they didn’t hire Japanese people and she should “go be a waitress.” But she would just not accept that. It occurs to me that my grandma was accruing an official record to back her up when she went to break the rules. I come from people who never intended, I see now, to accept safety as enough.

It occurs to me that my grandma was accruing an official record to back her up when she went to break the rules. I come from people who never intended, I see now, to accept safety as enough.

My dad’s family did not have the discipline, steady-paying jobs nor the financial-planning that my mom’s did. But my dad says his own dad clearly had designs on him getting an education, and leading an intellectual life. We’ll be generous and say first that my grandfather is a charming, intellectual powerhouse with mastery of both the sciences and the humanities, and was a professor of Eastern philosophy for many years. But what is hard for me to forget is that he’s also a narcissist, philanderer, misogynist, party monster and just generally irresponsible. When I ask my dad about his dad’s expectations of him, he tells me this story: “My dad, first of all, did not come to the graduation ceremony when I got my M.D. Instead he asked me when I was going to get a Ph.D. and I had to tell him I probably won’t! I think he saw medicine, and all professional degrees, as technical work, as not requiring a great mind.”

At the age of 7, my dad came to the U.S. with my grandma and his two younger sisters to join my grandfather, who was teaching math and physics at Yankton College, in that well-known American city, Yankton, SD. My dad says Yankton’s small town Americana made it a really smooth transition, people were welcoming and helpful. When my dad’s family moved to Houston, TX in 1964, it was the first time they had experienced segregation in the U.S. and it shocked them. My dad says, “We saw the U.S. from an academic perspective, as this place of innovation and new ideas, and especially my mom, was horrified to see African American people treated so poorly.”

As a dark-skinned Indian person, my dad lived in this liminal space, where he was technically allowed into places that denied Black people entry, but everyone was angry about it, convinced he was lying, that he had snuck in and wasn’t supposed to be there. Both of my grandparents, my dad reported to me, held gatherings with Black leaders from Texas Southern University, where my grandfather taught in the summers, to organize around passing the Civil Rights Act. My dad says of my grandfather, “He was always asking, ‘Why do people stand for this, why do you let them treat you this way?’ and they’d say ‘Well, if we resist they kill us.’ So that was sort of our introduction to the U.S.” That my family has long seen their own proximity to Blackness as a relationship to consciously cultivate and build power with was news to me, but also a message I grew up with, that was always implicitly there.

All of this reframes the narrative I had of what my grandparents and parents were doing with their lives, and with me, their latest iteration. Before I began this mini-journey, I thought I came from a family that hung on pretty tightly to protective measures. It seemed like the risks I was willing to take in my own life were bigger than the ones that people had taken before me: I’m very gay with a mohawk, I’m a writer who doesn’t write for white people, I’m not invested in marriage or the couple form. I am actively looking to discard a kind of superficial safety for another that was built around being exactly who I am, to living the change I seek. That is what true safety looks like to me now: being secure in my ability to adapt, to create my own path where there is none, to set goals that nobody else can see, to pick the people who give me strength and bring them along with me. I’m starting to understand now that so many people in my family before me were taking these same risks, building this same kind of security, it just looked different then than it does now.

I can’t claim that this is how all Asian American families work.That would be as absurd as believing myself to be performing the role of model minority when I achieve success — and I maintain that I would be just as smart, as funny, as hot, if white supremacy never existed. I recognize the ways that my personal Asian American culture is strange, in my family we’re all weird, but we are also a part of Asian America and I know we aren’t the only ones.

I’m very gay with a mohawk, I’m a writer who doesn’t write for white people, I’m not invested in marriage or the couple form. I am actively looking to discard a kind of superficial safety for another that was built around being exactly who I am, to living the change I seek.

What I think I am saying is that so much of American culture is a performance. I was working with a hypothesis that a good portion of what we call Asian American culture, is a fearful protective response to living in the U.S. That living under capitalism, that contending with the prevailing notion that we were all the same and all expendable, had produced a monolithic Asian American culture meant to prove our financial value and therefore human value, to commodify ourselves in order to buy our safety in white America. In essence, to pretend that we’re committed to their rigged game. I don’t know, now, that it was always based in fear. I think so many of the best parts of our cultures, the most safe and the most dangerous, are still protected, just for us. But the performance worked, they believe it.

Some among us apparently believe it too. There are an unseemly number of Asian American people who are fully committed to the violent, tragic cause of the original America. When I see Asian Americans suing Harvard to get rid of Affirmative Action, because they see it as the highest level of protection I think to myself, “Oh shit, these assholes forgot that complete assimilation is a performance.” And when I see Andrew Yang wearing an American flag around and telling us to “prove our Americanness” I think to myself, “To whom does he belong?” I think somebody needs to remind them. I think they forgot. That you will never be protected, you will never be safe here, not by accepting values that don’t value you.

I used to think it was my own security and safety, my privilege, that allowed me to decide that I didn’t want to participate in anyone’s monolithic culture — queer, Japanese, South Asian, literary, womanhood, romance. In many ways, it’s true. My parents and grandparents have a built all kinds of safety nets to catch me, should I fall, and as long as we’re alive, we will have each other. But it’s also clear that they also passed down to me the permission to live beyond the things we know, to take the risks that I see fit, and to invent my own version of security and comfort in the world, because that’s what they did. That’s my family legacy.

I still agree that we can’t know what protections our future selves will need, but maybe we just don’t expect to hold on to safety, especially not to find it in the status quo. The version of safety that’s an illusion is the one that pretends to protect you no matter what. Instead, maybe we just accept that none of us are safe unless all of us are safe, that to keep living our cultures and identities comfortably, we’ll always have to take risks and keep looking out for the costs of our sense of security.

How to Quit Smoking

1.

Start smoking as a teen like your peers, because it seems rebellious, or cool, or your role models do it, or it’s available, or convenient, or you’re so bloated with angst and teenage self-loathing you have to do something. Or you’re bored. Or because your mom smoked, and though as a child you thought it was disgusting, it now feels familiar.

Or start drinking in earnest in college, and then bum a clove while you’re drunk, and recognize that the little scratch in the back of your throat gives you a thrill because of its self-destructive potential. Or maybe explore everything that you were prohibited from doing as a religious youth: sex, alcohol, tobacco. Just to see what all the fuss is about.

Or maybe you don’t even remember how it started.

2.

Smoke occasionally at bars when you’re drinking, because there are other people out there on the patio doing it that you want to sleep with, or impress, or be as cool as. Buy a pack even though you only want one cigarette, but keep the whole pack, because they’re kind of expensive, so it would be a waste to just throw the rest away. Smoke the rest of the pack, one or two at a time. Just like, when you’re at the bar, or once in a while at night or when you’re driving.

Be out at the bar, and when a friend goes out to smoke, ask to bum one. They’ll say they only have a couple they were saving. Decide that for once you can be the one other people bum off of instead of being a mooch. Don’t plan to smoke the whole pack. Hand a few out to friends. And then buy another pack. When those run out, buy another. Realize that you’ve actually smoked the last couple packs yourself, and cigarettes are kind of expensive.

Start rolling your own to save money. People who roll their own cigarettes are cool.

3.

When the doctor asks if you smoke, tell them “only socially.” When they ask how many packs a day, tell them you roll your own, so you aren’t sure, but it’s not that often. That there are days that you don’t smoke at all. Try to remember the last day you didn’t smoke at all.

Rationalize that you mostly just smoke at night and that it helps you sleep. Or it’s something you do to pass the time on long drives. Or when you’re feeling anxious and want an excuse to go outside for a few minutes and be alone. Or when you’re bored. Or when you drink. Which is every night.

Tell yourself that you’re not like one of those chain smokers, that you can stop whenever you want. Start smoking American Spirits, so it’s like, not even that bad for you because it’s natural, or organic, or something. You forget.

4.

Realize that you haven’t worked out in a long time. Imagine that if you started running again, the positive effect of the exercise on your lungs would essentially counteract the negative impact of smoking. Right? Commit to starting to run again. Don’t worry about when, or make plans, but know that when you start, it’s going to be great.

Think about how much money people waste on buying packs of cigarettes, but that when you buy tobacco and rolling papers you’re really only spending like $20-30 a month. Tell yourself you easily spend more than that on junk food, and you could eat fewer meals out and save that much easily. Commit to eating less junk food. Don’t make a diet plan, though, or any firm commitments.

Tell yourself your drinking is much more problematic than your smoking. That if you’re going to quit anything, it should be that. And speaking of drinking, how much do you spend at the bar every month? On beer? That’s a way bigger threat to your budget than tobacco. And probably your health. Commit to drinking less. Don’t worry about how much less.

5.

Go to the drug store and look at the nicotine gum. There will be the 2mg or the 4mg gum, and the box will say that the way you choose which is by whether you have to have a cigarette within the first 30 minutes after waking up. And you’re not anywhere close to that, so clearly your problem isn’t bad enough to need some kind of intervention like nicotine gum. Tell yourself it hardly even qualifies as a problem, really.

Tell yourself that you don’t have to take smoke breaks at work to function, and if you run out and don’t have a chance to smoke for a whole day it doesn’t cause you severe distress, and you don’t have like, withdrawal symptoms, and isn’t that the definition of addiction? Decide you’ll take a break from tobacco after your next bag is done, just to prove to yourself that you can. Last about three days before buying another bag and more rolling papers. Tell yourself that a smoker who was really addicted wouldn’t be able to even go that long.

6.

Find yourself outside a bar, huddled with a bunch of other miserable losers under an overhang in the pouring rain. Realize your friends are inside, warm, dry, having fun. When you tell them you’re going for a smoke break, you’ll see their faces register the slightest countenance of disappointment. Tell yourself you imagined it. Or maybe you’re projecting. Or maybe the one who’s disappointed is you.

Think about the politics of tobacco consumption. How you’re letting a massive corporation control your behavior and negatively affect your health—but voluntarily. How there’s not much you can do about gentrification, or environmental racism, or being broke and living in a shitty house with mold, and there’s not much you can do about your worsening mental health, or that your friends keep dying. But there’s something you can do about this.

Think about how LGBTQ people are far over-represented among smokers, and the degree to which this could technically be a slow but legal genocide. Consider whether you’re falling into a stereotype: one of your worst fears. Think about all of the menthol cigarette ads featuring smiling Black faces, and how your grandmother died of lung cancer after a life of smoking, and how bad your aunt used to smell as a kid and how you never wanted to visit her. And how unhappy she seemed.

Fret about how you sit out on the fire escape for 30 minutes every night at your girlfriend’s place smoking while she sits inside, alone. And how she said she’d never date a smoker, and how she makes you brush your teeth before you kiss her, and take a shower before sex, because the smell is in your hair. And how she doesn’t say it out loud but you can hear the disappointment and resignation in her voice when you tell her you’re going outside to smoke.

7.

Decide you could try the 2mg gum, since you don’t smoke first thing in the morning. Usually. Fuck up the first time by getting the flavorless gum, which means it’s actually flavored like spoiled milk. Be unsure of when you’re supposed to chew it. Realize you don’t really feel “cravings” because smoking has become so quotidian. Chew the gum throughout the day. Keep this up for less than a week.

8.

Attempt to read Alan Carr’s “The Easy Way To Stop Smoking.” Read the first few chapters. Understand the essential premise of the book: that smoking doesn’t actually do anything for you, that the feeling of relief and brief wash of pseudo-euphoria you feel with that first inhale is false, that it’s really just a self-perpetuating feedback loop because nicotine’s chemical makeup creates and then mitigates its own dependency. Understand that, according to Carr, once you quit you’ll find that you aren’t missing out on anything because smoking never actually did anything for you in the first place.

Read other quitting tips online: don’t hang out with people or do things that you’d normally do when you’d normally smoke, for example. Stop going to bars. Replace smoking with something else you enjoy: reading a book before bed. Remember how much you missed reading. Do things that smoking would normally prevent you from doing, like running again. Realize the “Runner’s High” is so much more exhilarating than those fleeting seconds after your first puff of the day.

Understand that Carr’s logic is airtight. Try to fully internalize this logic and “big brain” your way into quitting.

Fail.

9.

Get the gum that actually tastes like gum. Keep some in your car so that you can chew it on long drives instead of smoking. Tell your girlfriend that you’re quitting, and to raise a stink if you seem like you’ve smoked before seeing her, and to not let you go out onto the fire escape at night without a minor fracas.

Set yourself a challenge to start reading again. Realize that smoking reminds you of when your depression was at its worst and you could do little else besides sit on the porch and chain smoke for hours between naps. Think of your brother and what addiction did to him. And to his kids.

Realize that spending those hours working on art and writing projects instead of smoking is doing wonders for your mental health. Realize that you survived your suicide attempt but that you’ve been passively killing yourself with tobacco for almost 10 years, and if you genuinely want to live, you have to exorcise this demon too.

Realize the gum starts to taste like freedom.

10.

Tell yourself a week or so later that, since you’re sad, you can have just one smoke, to make yourself feel better, and it won’t be a big deal, since you haven’t smoked in weeks so obviously you’ve kicked the habit.

Realize it doesn’t make you feel better. After the first few puffs, tell yourself that you’ve already failed, so you might as well give up on giving up.

11.

Ask yourself: How did you get here? Has it really been more than 10 years? Realize how bizarre it is that you’re a smoker. That the entire time, you figured it was something temporary, or that you’d get back into shape, or get back to your real life, soon. That you kept telling yourself you’d quit eventually.

Think about how contradictory smoking is to your values. How you were vegan for years, but were also a smoker. How you organized your life around environmental sustainability, and against pollution and waste. That you were riding your bike in the snow in Seattle and 100 miles a week in Oakland and running half marathons. That you gave a speech at UM about sweatshops and fast fashion and recycling and how buying recycled was aligned with Jesus’ message. And you planted a vegetable garden in every house or apartment at which you had the opportunity. And you’d sit next to it and smoke. Realize that, because nature defaults to homeostasis, you eventually gave up the veganism and gardens and the cycling and caring about the Earth or your health or your self.

In favor of smoking.

Hear the voice in your head that tells you you’ve already lost, and effort at this point to change is futile. That the world is so shit you might as well give up. Realize that she’s the voice that haunted you for years during the worst periods of your depression. And that you hate her. And fuck her, she’s a fucking liar. Stop listening to her.

12.

Listen when your therapist reminds you that while it’s OK to not be OK, it’s also OK to be OK. That it’s OK to be a healthy, functional person. That not everything has to be crisis or drama or struggle, that being depressed and non-functional isn’t your identity and it’s not artsy or clever or unique. That it’s not assimilation or selling out to be happy. That self-destruction isn’t actually cool. That the most rebellious, radical thing you can do as a trans woman of color in America is love and take care of yourself and thrive.

Realize that for the first time you can remember you’re kind of excited about the future, that you see yourself growing old, that in fact you can’t wait to get older. Look at the wrinkles around your eyes. They look like promises.

Find a decent doctor. When she asks you about whether you smoke, say yes, and don’t qualify your answer. Tell her you want to quit. When she asks you whether you want to try Chantix, say yes. When she prescribes it, she’ll say that you need to pick a start date. Pick one as soon as possible.

Decide you genuinely want to be happy again, like you were before you started smoking. When you were a teen. Decide that you’re ready.

13.

Start taking Chantix. Twice a day. Decide you’ll genuinely keep up with this, and all your meds, for the first time. Realize that Chantix is like magic and that you don’t even want to smoke anymore. Wonder whether it’s really the Chantix, or that you’re just finally ready.

14.

Feel like a new person after you’ve been smoke-free for a month. Buy running shoes and start running again. Take genuine pleasure in the fact that you don’t have to go out on the fire escape anymore, or brush your teeth before kissing your girlfriend. Notice her quiet pride that you’ve finally quit.

Think about how easy it’s seemed. Find it hard to believe that it took 13 years.

Take your progress for granted. When it’s been, like, six weeks smoke-free—the longest you’ve gone without smoking since you were 20 years old—the enthusiasm will die down. Everyone will already know you’ve quit, so you won’t get the motivational flashes of pride from your peers. Get really stressed out about work, and tell yourself that you’ve earned just one little smoke. That it’ll relax you.

It will taste terrible and make you sick. Feel like a failure. Like an asshole. Like a loser. Like it was all a waste of effort. Wonder if you’re going to be a smoker for the rest of your life and die at 60 like so many other Black people, queer people, trans people.

15.

Relapse at least one more time. Maybe for a week. Maybe for three months. Don’t give up.

Keep swallowing down those magic pills. Keep replacing smoking with something else. Even if it’s watching YouTube and doing nothing productive and gritting your teeth and making fists over and over: it’s still better. The Chantix won’t feel like magic anymore. The cravings will return. Recognize that this is literally one of the hardest things you’ve ever done and one of the most important. That having a hard time quitting doesn’t mean you’re weak.

Remember that line from The Brothers Karamasov:

“Is such a man free? I knew of one ‘fighter for an idea’ who told me himself that when he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so tormented by this deprivation that he almost went and betrayed his ‘idea,’ just so that they would give him some tobacco. And such a man says: ‘I am going to fight for mankind.’ Well, how far will such a man get, and what is he good for?”

Remember that you are a fighter for humanity. That above everything else, your highest, most important value is freedom. Remember that in your youth, you were in bondage to the drug and alcohol addictions and mental health crises of your family members. In your adolescence, by the debilitating strictures of gender roles. In your adulthood, the ravages of mental illness. That you haven’t been free since you were a child. That this is your chance to get there, finally. That you’ve long fought for queer, trans, racial, economic liberation—for others. But this is your chance to free yourself.

16.

Realize that this will be your burden to carry for potentially the rest of your life—but that it’s worth it. After a few months “clean,” you’ll realize that you’ve happily forgotten what it was like to be a smoker. That it seems so foreign. That you’re ready to stop taking the pills, because the habit has been broken.

Keep celebrating each monthly milestone. When you relapse, take it in stride: you are not your minor failures, you are your minor—and major—successes.

17.

Realize that freedom is in your grasp. That you can do this. That you are strong, and beautiful, and powerful, and you’re bigger than this. That you have overcome worse things, and you will overcome worse things. Recognize that you have an opportunity, right now, to transcend all of the bullshit cards you’ve been dealt. That you’re finally taking control of your own life, and that you’re succeeding. That you’re proud of yourself.

Look at your own face in the mirror and cry because you’re happy with the look of your own face, and you’d forgotten what that felt like. And that you’re free.

Bipolar Disorder, Trans Dykes, and Celestial Catastrophe

Bipolar disorder first entered my world when my sister went away to college. I was about ten years old at the time, a reclusive, wounded loner, always looking for a way out. Her roommate that year was a lesbian. Months after moving in, she tried to kill herself. The girl went crazy, they said. She was bipolar, they said. All I knew was that she sounded evil, horrifying, demonic. Nobody could’ve guessed that I too would grow up to be that lesbian, most of all because I hadn’t told the world I was a girl yet. My gender simmered below the surface of my body, the same way my illness manifested in hyperactivity and suicidal ideation as a child, until the demons in me finally demanded to break free.

In my early teens, the mood swings bursted hard and fast. It wasn’t sustainable, but I was smart and resourceful and creative and independent, so I scraped by. My late teens arrived, and well-into my early twenties, the polarity of my emotions began to swing more dangerously. In the years that lead up to my coming out as trans, I floated through life as a brooding, scowling mess of a person, punctuated by bursts of energy, clarity, creativity, and dangerously felt love.

What exactly is bipolar disorder? As with many other kinds of mental illness, the full scope of how bipolar disorder operates is not entirely understood. Much of what is known is based on subjective research. Despite that, bipolar disorder has been found to have more of a biologically traceable basis than many other mental illnesses, in that it has been proven to be an affective condition that is genetically inherited.

Bipolar Disorder (or manic-depression, as it used to be called) is a neurobiological mood disorder which centers around an extremely labile and unstable mood, consisting of varying episodes of depressions and manias, or more bluntly, extreme highs and lows. A lesser known feature is experiencing mixed episodes, in which characteristics of both depression and mania occur at the same time. A core feature of bipolar disorder is that it is a problem with emotional regulation and information processing. It is also a stress related disorder, meaning that stress can exacerbate symptoms.

The DSM-V has rather rigid criteria for diagnosing bipolar disorder, ones that I dislike quite a bit. The DSM is no stranger to controversy, having had an adversarial relationship with the trans community for years. Having spent time in bipolar support groups, I can say that many people in the bipolar community agree with my opinions on the DSM. The psychologists I cite also agree with me.

The book I recommend for people to better understand bipolar disorder is Break The Bipolar Cycle. In that book, psychologists Elizabeth Brondolo and Xavier Amador list the symptoms of bipolar disorder that are newer discoveries: “Longer-term problems with mood quality, difficulties with mood regulation and stability, problems with information processing, [and] problems with sleep quality and with circadian rhythms” (10) They stress that contrary to popular belief, Bipolar disorder is more of a hard-wired cyclical predisposition towards disoriented information processing, manifesting in fluctuating moods, sleep cycles, and confusing interpersonal reactions.

The mornings, they come in scalding colors. Some days are muted blues and purples, somber and terrifying in their existential ennui. The mornings are pointless, the universe, irredeemably conspiring against me. Other days are careening reds, victorious greens. I slash out four thousand words in a sitting, I complete every chore that can be conceived, I hit up people on tinder for kinky sex with an unearned arrogance. Through midnight until the early hours of the morning, I scour the internet to illegally download entire discographies of distant side projects of obscure punk bands instead of fulfilling important obligations. Daily life is populated with grandiose ideas of all the projects I’m about to start that will make me rich and likeable. Divine, delusional power flows in fingertips that cannot finish anything. When I am in love, the world breeds pink flowers of fire around the periphery of my vision, obscuring my own identity and care in the process.

Every night, I stay up until at least 2, 3, sometimes 4 am. I think this is normal, that everyone does this. I sleep all day, I lose all motivation, I fail all my classes, I take a leave of absence, I drop out of college. I drink and drink and drink oblivion, until I feel pretty much nothing of me is left. My soul and and personality seep out like a spilled bottle.

These mood swings, they are intensely felt, by others as well as myself. Afterwards, every time, shame pours over me, whether it’s in regards to the passion or the sadness. The shame builds up so much that I learn to cope by hiding emotions like porno mags under my bed. Self-hatred becomes my own religion, a learned trauma-response to cope with such deeply felt shame. It collides with shame and trauma from growing up in a homophobic, isolating household where my needs were not met.

To carry out the machinery of this self-hatred, I teach myself maladaptive coping skills: binge drinking, erratic eating, reckless spending, emotional self-sabotage. Because I take no pleasure in the act of being an existing body, I place no value on my looks or hygiene. A favorite self-harming strategy of mine is inaction—staring at the ceiling all day, frozen, all while feeling an intense inwardly-directed self-hatred. Later in life, I add cutting to my repertoire as well.

In her memoir, I’m Telling The Truth, But I’m Lying, Nigerian-American writer Bassey Ikpi describes her experience with bipolar disorder, saying that, “Even when the best things occur, when the sun is angled just enough to offer light or there is beauty somewhere shining in the distance, the voice says—this will not last. You do not deserve this peace […] Remember how you break everything you touch. Sometimes it’s a fog. A quiet.” (186)

One patient in the study “Observation of Trends in Manic-Depressive Psychosis” by O. Spurgeon English recounted that living with bipolar disorder “is like opening all my pores on a cold day and subjecting myself to catastrophe.”
I too have felt like a catastrophe of a person, a catastrophe of a star, a catastrophe of emotions.

I was sunbathing during a lunch break in an open field, and a month later I found myself in the psych ward.
It was Spring, 2017. When the sun hit me, I felt something shift. Everything was vibrant and bright. My life became a divine, and I was living out a perfectly scripted story in which I was the heroine. It was a spring to my depression, and it catapulted me into a mixed episode. Boundless energy, coupled with undying despair. I grew a strange confidence in my self-loathing, a short-fused, anxious temper. My movements were snappy and impatient. I felt indestructible, even though I knew that most parts of my life were hanging by a thread—I was broke, in debt, an alcoholic, had no plans, no future. The confidence of mania did not cause me to fix my problems, it caused me to have a liquid gold anger coursing through my veins. Other times, I would completely break down crying for hours straight, succumbing to panic attacks and calling suicide hotlines.

Then one day I came into work and was told I was being fired. I had nothing left to my name but my motivation. That night I tried to kill myself by overdosing on my hormones. I became the sunlight in the psych ward, burning and burning. Seven days later, I got out of the hospital with a new name for my afflictions: bipolar disorder. The only problem was that I didn’t believe it was accurate.

Instead of accepting the diagnosis, I moved to New York City, stopped taking medications, and ditched all three of my therapists and psychiatrists. Amazingly, things went dormant. Somehow I got on my feet, found an apartment, and once again retreated to my old habits of compartmentalizing and denial. I was an unknowing kettle-pot of slashing self-hatred and negativity.

I’ve always had a grudge against autumn. When I was young, I had few friends, but in the summers I got to spend every day with friends I had met from another elementary school. When the autumn came, going back to school meant leaving those friends behind, and once again I was on my own. As the years went by, the cold laid a thick sheet of dark plastic over my life. It felt like the whole world existed in a perpetual state of night. In college, my winter depressions were legendary. Every winter break, I would stay in bed for a full two weeks.

I am not alone in these experiences. The most popular times for suicide are clustered around the spring and fall equinoxes. Manic-Depressive Illness indicates that “two peaks are evident in seasonal incidence of affective episodes: spring and autumn. This pattern tends to parallel the seasonal pattern for suicide which shows a large peak in the spring and a smaller one in October.”

In addition, Break the Bipolar Cycle states that changes in the amount of daylight “can trigger changes in our internal clock. These changes can affect the daily cycles of our neurohormones and affect the way we feel.”

I am not a psychologist. However, I am a trained writer, and if there’s one thing writers know, it’s the human heart in conflict. Seasonal cycles have fought against me for so long, I know the shapes of their colors well.

The sunlight came for me, once more, when I was bathing in a kiddie pool on a rooftop in Brooklyn. The dread finally cracked. It lead me down a spiral of outward self-hatred I had never experienced. My body shut down, I failed the people in my life, I made anxious and reckless choices that caused harm, confusion, and heartbreak. It was a mixed-manic state that Bassey Ikpi describes as: “You don’t know how to live like this but you don’t know how to stop and the need to convince your body to give up is visceral—it crawls through your being and your brain wants to stop it but your brain can’t because your brain is tired”

Autumn washed over me; my body vibrated with an ear-splitting nothingness. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t stop crying. The passing of seconds felt like hours. It was hard to tell if I wanted to isolate forever, or if I never wanted to be alone again. I became a celestial wreck. As my star burned out and collapsed in on itself, my body grew the self-inflicted scars along my arms to show it.

The second time I was in the hospital, they didn’t let me outside for seven days. No sunlight on my face, no open wind. Just stale air. I would ask for our scheduled outside time, but they would tell me it was “too cold,” even when it was warm. It’s one of the many abuses Gracie Square Hospital heaped on me when I stayed there. Particularly, I remember the time I had to shave naked in front of a nurse who started asking me “how long it takes for the hormones to work.” I was denied those same hormones for almost four days, leading to splitting headaches. They gave me medications I told them didn’t work for me, that made me twitchy and anxious (anyone who has been in a psychiatric hospital knows that taking your prescribed meds is the quickest way to freedom). The phone was broken for a whole weekend, so I couldn’t call for anyone on the outside and ask them to bring me things. No matter how many pillows and blankets I asked for, I still felt like I was sleeping on a pile of rocks out in the snow.
My window overlooked 76th Street. I saw people walking their dogs, commuting to work, skateboarding, heading to clubs. Rich people, living in excess. In that dim, depressing psych ward room, I made a promise to myself: I would learn to appreciate nature more when I was released. True to my word, the day I got out, I went to my favorite park in my neighborhood. I watched the dogs play, I laid in the grass, I burned once more with the sun.
There was still so much to do. It was the first of many promises I made, and the first of many promises I would go on to keep.

It seems like everything is on fire lately.

The forest fires in California and Australia, the Grenfell building tragedy due to capitalist incompetence, the Kyoto Animation arson attack in Japan. Then, there’s the metaphorical burnings: the seizure of the Standing Rock Sioux’s sacred water ground, the ICE concentration camps on the border, civilian bombings across the middle east, racist predatory policing in the New York City subways every day. The climate crisis grows ever more pressing as we enter one of the warmest winters I’ve ever felt. Politically, the world is on the brink of yet another war, and the poor, marginalized, and those abroad will be the ones to suffer.

Our socioeconomic conditions can greatly effect our mental health. Jamison and Goodrick’s studies show that while wealth, race, and class do not effect one’s chances of inheriting bipolar disorder, wealth and privilege can decrease intensity and instances of onset. Lack of access to life-saving care only intensifies symptoms. The wealthy can afford hospitalizations, expensive round-the-clock out of pocket therapy, detoxes and retreats, and are less prone to financial and housing stresses which can trigger bipolar episodes.

Writer and former somatic social worker Kai Cheng Thom stated in a recent article that through repeated trauma, “we become physically less capable of imagining a world where being with others is not synonymous with being unsafe.” Self-imposed isolation becomes the only warmth we know. These tragedies affect our bodies. Not only do they harm and decimate our communities, but the seeds of that hurt germinate inside of us. Many of us queers, we’ve been through trauma. Our bodies have tasted the effects of witnessing harm. The harm we witness reacts with the trauma inside of us. Being bombarded with the round-the-clock ramifications of capitalist imperialism is itself a kind of societal control. If we already feel defeated, like struggles against injustice are pointless, how can we muster the energy to fight back? It causes our bodies and minds to give up on themselves.

Psychologists Brondolo and Amador say that bipolar disorder “undermines your ability to regulate the physical responses you have when experiencing emotions.” In a bipolar person, moods transmute into widespread tumultuous states of being. Dysregulation of the brain forces a dysregulation of actions and expressions.

Environments feed panic and trauma and stress, and illness manifests in worse and worse ways.

Our environments affect us, but they do not have to condemn us.

The act of resisting is whats heals us.

Mine is the mind that exists on the blade’s edge of a cycle.

In the course of seeking treatment, I have realized I possessed a lack of faith. Most people turn to the Christian God, but I have a poisonous childhood history with Catholicism.

What else was I left to do but surrender to the cosmos?

Lately, I have been turning to astrology, the holy dyke cycle (with a sprinkle of gothic Satan thrown in). I am a person whose moods are ruled by intensely manifested circular patterns (I’m a sag sun, libra moon, aquarius rising/venus, for those curious). It’s a bit of a tired trope among those of us afflicted with bipolar disorder who take lithium, that we are ingesting stardust to save our lives. As the stars move, I know what powers they wield. I feel their energy, every night as I walk home and kiss the night sky goodbye. In doing so, I send prayers that I will not be a predestined disaster, that my future is my own.

I was reading about my star chart recently, and I came across the phrase “optimist.” I have been labeled a pessimist my whole life. To see someone apply the word of relentless positivity to me, it was healing, like laying old demons to rest.

I must admit, after finding quality mental health care, for the first time in my life, I am an optimist about our future. I have hope that I won’t die young. In caring for my self, in accepting that I had to save my own life and accepting help from professionals, in asking for friends to join me on suicide watch, I have made peace with the sun. As pieces of my body cease to wilt off of themselves, I have gained a confidence that I can become engaged with the world, a process trauma specialist Judith Herman calls “interpersonal reconnection.” I have hope that our mobilizations will defeat the corporate destruction of our planet. I can see it in the stars, in the streets, and in my body.

I Have a Mild Case of COVID-19 and I’m Battling it Out at Home

It took three steps — literally — for me to concede to myself that my cold and allergy symptoms were probably actually COVID-19 symptoms. Two weeks ago, I stepped up onto a rickety wooden lawn chair on the slab of concrete that counts as a backyard in New York City to hang up a t-shirt I’d just washed in my bathtub on a makeshift clothesline I’d constructed from old cable cords the weekend before, stepped back down, stepped up again to hang up another t-shirt, and had to stand still for a minute to catch my breath. I sat down in the chair when I stepped back down, breathing much harder than I should have been for such simple, every day exertion.

When I told my partner, Stacy, I thought I needed to call Mt. Sinai ER for a telemedicine appointment, her face was devastated but not shocked. We’d been listing off symptoms to each other for weeks — dry throats, tight chests, nausea — trying to decide if what we were experiencing was anxiety or the onset of the virus. My symptoms were progressing. We knew it. And so did the ER doctor as soon as I recounted the previous several days to her. Chills followed by a sore throat followed by coughing followed by shortness of breath. There’s no testing in New York City, of course, unless you’re in such critical condition that you’re admitted into one of our overflowing hospitals. All Stacy and I could do was accept what was happening, self-isolate, and wait.

Before my respiratory symptoms started rapidly escalating, which only took a few hours, I sat in bed with my childhood teddy bear clutched to my chest and counted and counted and counted.

25 days since I’d started social distancing; 12 days since Stacy and I had begun our official quarantine; five days since I’d developed that cough (but it wasn’t dry, and that was good, right? I had thought that was good). My symptoms came on seven days after we’d locked ourselves away (the average is 5.5) and it was five days from the start of my symptoms to the onset of shortness of breath (the average is five). Research from the World Health Organization-China Joint Mission on COVID-19 showed that, on average, people with severe cases of COVID-19 usually went to the hospital on day seven, developed Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) on day eight, and were admitted to ICU on day ten.

I didn’t have to look at a calendar to do any of those calculations. I didn’t have to look up any of the research. I’d been doing nothing but lying awake and reading studies and counting — the number of my comorbid conditions that seem to make COVID-19 worse (two and a half), the days of this and that reason for leaving the house (Stacy for work, me for picking up prescriptions for the aforementioned comorbid conditions), how much bread we had left (two fresh loaves, one frozen) — for weeks, as if my brain’s tireless vigilance and ceaseless quest for facts would protect my body from the virus.

It didn’t, but it did reward me with the knowledge that the next several days were going to be hard in ways I couldn’t anticipate, and that I couldn’t do anything to stop what was coming. I could rest. I could take Tylenol and Mucinex and drink hot tea. But every person’s body reacts differently, based on seemingly dozens of interconnecting factors, and I had no idea what mine was going to do.

That night, when the sun went down, my symptoms spiked. Before I went to bed, I sat on the floor in the hallway, leaning against our bedroom door, and Stacy sat ten feet away at the other end of the hallway, leaning against the bathroom door. We weren’t even supposed to be that close. I said, “I’m so scared.” She said, “I’m so scared too.” I said, “I love you so much.” She said, “I love you so much too.” She cried. I didn’t. Crying gives me a migraine. I worried if I started crying I wouldn’t stop.

My friends texted, and my family: You’re a badass. And: You can do anything. And: I’m praying for you. I laid in bed and tried to calm myself down with meditation breathing techniques but I was having a hard time getting a full breath. I clamped my eyes closed to keep the tears inside them. My legs were shivering. I covered them up with my weighted blanket to keep them still. “Come on, body,” I whispered. “You can do this. You’ve done so much these 41 years. God, can you even believe how much you’ve done! These mountain biking scars! The number of times you’ve been hit in the face with a baseball! Remember that spring in Germany when you fell into the Rhine River! We gotta go back there and see those tulips! I love you, body. I’m so grateful for you. You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.”

When I woke up, my chest felt like a rubber band was wrapped around it, and my shortness of breath was so pronounced I could hardly walk to the bathroom. I couldn’t project my voice past the end of the bed.

It got worse.

And then worse.

And then worse.

And then, a few days later, it got better. And better. And oh so very slowly it is getting better.

It’s gone like this: Chills, sore throat, cough. Cough, shortness of breath, chest pain and pressure. A headache unlike anything I’ve ever experienced (which may have been due to the fact that I couldn’t eat; I’ve lost almost ten pounds over the last two weeks). Cough, fatigue that feels like gravity is working doubly hard against me and there’s no bones in my body. Two steps forward, one step back. Lemon-lime Gatorade. Eucalyptus tea with raw honey. Orange gatorade. Lemon tea with raw honey. Texts from people I love. My house is on the street most people take when they’re driving from Manhattan into Queens. It’s never quiet. Now there’s nothing but sirens outside my window. Panic and counting my breaths and Gatorade and texts from people I love. Yesterday, I almost could not get out of bed. Today, I am able to sit up (in bed) and write this essay.

The hardest part, by far, has been not knowing what to expect next. My body has no context for this virus. I was shocked by how fast the respiratory symptoms came on and escalated. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I haven’t known, from hour to hour, what was going to happen next.

Most people who are battling COVID-19 are, like me, doing it at home. Excavating symptom patterns from strangers on Twitter, taking over the counter medicines, sleeping, hoping, praying, sleeping. The telemedicine doctor I spoke with told me not to go to the emergency room unless I couldn’t breathe. If I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest, or if I couldn’t finish my sentences, the next stop was to call a private walk-in urgent care clinic and try to get a chest x-ray. Not the ER. The doctors and nurses in New York City are stretched to breaking, running out of supplies, and the city hasn’t peaked on cases yet. We cheer for them at 7pm on our stoops and out our windows. Over the internet, we lean on and cheer for each other.

It appears — hopefully! — that I am over the height of my symptoms and out of the respiratory danger zone that seems to happen for the most severe cases. I’m still counting.17 days since the onset of my symptoms, 13 days since my telemedicine call, eight days since my respiratory symptoms started abating. Stacy’s 35th birthday was four days ago. We had a dinner of two courses: mac and cheese, and black-eyed peas. Today I ate my breakfast outside on my back slab of concrete, ten minutes in the sun, as she smiled fondly and cheers-ed me with her coffee mug through the glass door.

What Self-Quarantine is Teaching Me About Gender Dysphoria

I shaved my legs a month after coming out to myself. Following the directions of an article on Deadspin titled “The Reluctant Man’s Guide to Shaving Your Legs” I first trimmed with my retired beard trimmer, then exfoliated, then shaved the right leg, then shaved the left leg, then exfoliated again, and then applied a heavy dose of lotion. Yes, I bled. Yes, it took hours.

I put on shorts that I’d force-feminized by folding them up a few times and was amazed when I looked down. Red polish on my toenails, smooth skin, my makeshift short shorts — I had women’s legs.

I began taking frequent pictures of my lower half, especially once I bought skirts. The process of transition seemed so impossible, so arduous, so slow, but this had been so easy. I could even tuck my penis between my legs when I was in the shower and with a full bush it seemed like I was years beyond my first steps.

A couple months later I shaved my armpits, my chest, and my stomach. Around the time I started hormones I shaved my arms too. Exhausted by the length of this semi-daily process I switched to epilating. I got used to the pain of having my hair literally torn out because it saved me hours each week.

Unwanted body hair certainly isn’t a trans-exclusive problem — cis women love to remind me of this — but the gender dysphoria it can instill in us is unique. The cis women in my Jewish family are hairy, but it’s nothing compared to the thick, dark AMAB hair all over my face and body, and the way it makes me feel is different than the way it makes them feel. I’m petite and because hormones gave me a C cup — the upside of my Jewish genes — hair has always been the primary source of my physical dysphoria.

As the years went on, I became more comfortable in my body and self, and I started to wonder: Why did I feel self-conscious about my body hair, while finding it hot on other women? Why did I apply societal rules of womanhood to myself that I didn’t actually believe?

Then three weeks ago I began my Coronavirus self-quarantine. Faced with the reality that I wouldn’t be seeing anyone except my roommates and twice a month grocery trip strangers, I decided to begin an experiment. I wasn’t going to shave or epilate, I wasn’t going to paint my nails, and I wasn’t going to put on makeup — until I wanted to for myself, and only myself.

I only lasted two days before shaving my face. This wasn’t surprising. My facial hair is easily what makes me most dysphoric. Over the past three years I’ve spent thousands of dollars I barely had on electrolysis and laser. The last activity I did before starting my quarantine was go to electrolysis.

Electrolysis is painful and it leaves my skin visibly irritated for the entire week in between appointments. But the promise of someday not having any facial hair — and not having to shave — makes it worth it. I don’t hate my facial hair because “women don’t have beards.” I hate my facial hair, because I, a woman, don’t want to have one. People who have known me for years tell me that it’s become so much thinner, that they can’t even tell once I’ve shaved, but I don’t care. This isn’t for other people. It’s for me.

A few days later, I epilated my chest and shaved my stomach. I don’t have much hair on my chest after hormones and years of epilating, but during sex my chest is the most mindlessly gender euphoric part of my body — sex with other people and myself. That gender euphoria is lessened by the hair that remains, so I removed it. I’d like masturbation to be as pleasurable as possible during quarantine celibacy, thank you very much.

Next, I trimmed my bangs. As much as I hate my body hair, I cherish the hair on my head. I was supposed to have a long scheduled haircut a week after I started quarantine, but I canceled it for obvious reasons. I still planned to pay my hair stylist, so I asked if he might be willing to coach me over FaceTime on trimming my own bangs. He did and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. It had been a very tough first week self-isolating but getting my hair to look the way I wanted made me feel so much better.

Those first couple weeks, I realized that not wearing makeup and not painting my nails didn’t make me feel dysphoric, but something doesn’t have to feel dysphoric to not like it. I enjoy wearing makeup sometimes and I enjoy painting my own nails and having them painted. It was nice to realize that I didn’t need to do these things, but I started doing them again anyway.

And that’s it. Three weeks in I still haven’t shaved or epilated my arms, legs, or armpits. Hormones have thinned the hair considerably on my arms and combined with feeling more confident in myself I think I’ll probably stop removing that hair altogether. I’ll shave my legs again at some point, because I do still feel sexier with them shaved. But the acuteness of the dysphoria around it has drastically decreased.

I’ve realized I actually feel sexier with armpit hair.

It was always important to me that I transition on my own terms. I’ve never understood why I’d go through all the effort of getting out of one box only to put myself in a slightly better one. I have the privilege to not look cis and to still be relatively safe. I intend to utilize that privilege.

I don’t know why my facial hair bothers me but my Adam’s Apple doesn’t. I don’t know why I plan to someday get bottom surgery but have no interest in FFS. I don’t know why some days I feel as uncomfortable in a dress as I do in clothing made for men.

It’s much easier for me to disregard the judgments of my family or straight society than it is to ignore messaging from my own community — especially people I want to date. Whether it’s body hair or makeup or clothing, if I presented like a lot of cis queer women, I would read as male — not masc. This isn’t fair or unfair, it’s just how it is. The question is whether I let that impact how I present.

When I first started dating in queer community I was desperate to determine if I was femme or butch. Obviously, being femme was easier — it’s what was expected of me as a trans woman — but it didn’t feel right. I relished the possible rebellion of being a butch trans woman, but that didn’t feel right either.

I realized that the only words that fit are gay, dyke, faggot, gay, gay, and gay. When I present according to these words — whatever that means to me on any given day — I feel less dysphoric. I don’t necessarily feel like there’s a map for me and my gender presentation. I’m not going to pretend that I have the same ease of presentation as cis lesbians. Maybe some trans women do! But for me, personally, certain acceptable things in our community are going to make me feel dysphoric.

The goal is never assuming that dysphoria is forever. The goal is making sure that dysphoria is coming from my gender and not from the messaging of others. It’s always going to be both, but, in the moment, I want to locate the truest source of the feeling.

Quarantine has provided an opportunity to check-in with myself at the three year mark of my transition. I feel so grateful to be weathering this moment of collective trauma in the body I currently have – even as I still long for certain changes.

I like that people think I’m attractive, but that’s not a new feeling. People thought I was attractive before I transitioned. What’s new is the experience of finding myself attractive. It’s invigorating.

Two weeks before quarantine, a date asked me how I’d describe my style and presentation. All of a sudden it dawned on me: flamboyant dyke. I still feel that way after my weeks of experimenting. Now I’m just a flamboyant dyke with armpit hair.

I Tried New Trans Dating App Fiori and All I Got Was This Personal Essay

Cis people are known for their stupid questions.

One particular question I’ve been asked a lot since I broke up with my ex a year ago is: “Would you ever date another trans woman?”

Sometimes it’s a genuine inquiry. Sometimes it’s framed as a gotcha. How can you expect real lesbians to have sex with your penis if you won’t have sex with someone else’s? I can feel them salivating with this follow-up question. Of course I would date another trans woman, I reply. That’s when they clarify that they meant a trans woman with a penis. Of course, I say again. And then they stop talking.

The fact is dating other trans women was a major factor in opening and then ending my last relationship. Yes, I generally wanted the experience of dating for the first time as a woman and a queer person. But I also explicitly wanted to explore my sexuality with someone whose body was more like mine – and, more importantly, whose experience of gender was more like mine.

It took me a damn year.

Sometimes it feels like nothing scares trans women more than queer cis women.

Considering the physical danger, explicit transphobia, and array of other bullshit my trans women friends who date men receive, I’m always fascinated by their morbid curiosity around my dating life. But – whether fairly or unfairly – the reputation of cis lesbian community is not a positive one. And while cis straight men certainly aren’t better, there’s a specific pain of being told you aren’t a woman from other women.

I constantly remind people that TERFs on the internet are not indicative of the average cis lesbian. But the truth is in my year of dating I’ve encountered plenty of transphobia and cissexism – it just tends to be more subtle. From queer cis women – and AFAB non-binary people – I’ve been explicitly rejected due to my transness, implicitly rejected due to my transness, listened to a barrage of genital-based microaggressions, and had sex with people who – sometimes in the moment – I realized were fetishizing my trans body in a way we usually only expect from cis men.

This isn’t everyone, of course. I’d say the vast majority of AFAB people I meet in lesbian community are trans women-inclusive – even if they don’t always say the right thing or haven’t had sex with any trans women before me. But it’s still pervasive enough to make my desire to be with other trans women all the more present. And it’s still pervasive enough to scare others away and make that difficult.

Being in lesbian community was never a question for me. It was my raison d’être for transitioning. Sexuality and gender are not the same, but my sexuality is explicitly tied to my gender – if not in who I’m actually having sex with then the culture and presentation that tends to accompany it. To put it simply, I identified as a lesbian long before I identified as a woman. I didn’t know what that meant and felt guilty for those thoughts, but I always surrounded myself with queer women, dated queer women, and cared about queer women culture. My transness does not preclude me from the same coming-of-age fascinations as cis women queers.

Trans women are just as likely to be queer as cis women – in fact, more likely. But many don’t share my love of this culture opting instead to form community with each other or separate from queer community altogether. I’m certainly not the only trans woman to wade through specific lesbian world transphobia – trust me, I am like other girls – but it’s not common enough to create a vast dating pool. Within the trans women inclusive spaces I spend my time, I’m not always the only one – but I’m usually one of two or three.

This is one reason I feel so invested in trans women characters appearing on shows like The L Word: Generation Q. Lesbian community desperately needs a rebranding. These spaces actually are safe for trans women and I want people to know that.

Please. Join us. Date me.

I stopped using dating apps in November, because they were making me miserable. Before my breakup I had never used them and – while exciting the first few months – I quickly remembered why. Maybe an oversaturation of media consumption has me tied to meet-cutes or maybe it really is the limitations of a dating profile, but I’m rarely drawn to people on apps the way I am literally everywhere else.

I found myself only swiping right when I was drunk and depressed and then I’d wake up the next morning and feel dread with every match. My first year post-breakup I’d only had one good experience from a dating app. Everyone else I’d met in person. Apps are just tools and this tool wasn’t working for me so I deleted it.

But over the next three months I didn’t find myself dating organically – I didn’t date at all. Except for a long overdue hookup with a friend and one surprisingly delightful one night stand, I wasn’t even having sex.

Then something strange happened. Sober, during the day, not particularly struck with loneliness, I had the desire to redownload Tinder.

I had a message from November already waiting for me – from a trans woman.

I told her that I’d been off the app and then responded to her opening line three months late. We chatted a bit about astrology – both Capricorn suns and Taurus moons, she an Aquarius rising, me a Leo – and then she asked if I wanted to hang out. She clarified that she had no expectations beyond new friends.

I told her I would love that adding: “I do think you’re cute too for the record, but no expectations :)”

We scheduled drinks for the next day.

I walked to the bar thinking what a welcome change a trans woman Capricorn was from all my AFAB air and fire signs. I wondered if maybe it was time to abandon the pride I take in my attraction to signs astrologically worst for me – Geminis, Libras, Aquariuses, Aries, Sagittariuses – and instead connect with someone supposedly more like myself.

The date was lovely – conversation was easy and comfortable. She invited me back to her place and I said yes. When she turned on her record player and Anti was playing I knew we were going to have sex.

Afterwards I found out that she’d mistyped. She’s actually an Aquarius sun, not a Capricorn. Not just an air sign – my ex’s air sign. It made sense.

That’s as much as I can share about the experience, because it doesn’t feel like my story to tell. Earlier in the night she revealed that she’s only been out for a year and that she has no trans women friends. My first encounters with other trans women were so meaningful – I can’t even imagine how I would’ve felt if sex was involved.

It was also my first time being with another trans woman, but the night simply wasn’t about me. And that’s okay. First times don’t have to be anything other than a first time.

I may not have felt what I wanted to feel. I may not have left her house knowing whether or not I wanted to see her again. But our night together had confirmed what I’d assumed for over a year – I wanted to have sex with other trans women.

Two days later an ad popped up for a new “trans-friendly” dating app called Fiori. I immediately downloaded it.

Fiori is a mess.

The first question the app asks is for you to choose your “Gender Identity or Expression.” You can only choose one and the options are as follows: trans woman, trans man, xdresser, nonbinary, queer, woman, man.

Apparently this trans-specific app isn’t familiar with the word cis. I don’t even know where to begin with the inclusion of the word queer.

I made my profile with the same five pictures I have on my Tinder and the app said my last photo didn’t pass moderation. I’m topless lying down on my bed, but not even a nipple is showing. I found a way around it – taking a screenshot during the upload process seemed to stall their moderation – but I was still annoyed.

The interface looks similar to Grindr – you browse profiles and can send “Wows” or messages to anyone you like. There are ways to filter which identities you see, but you can’t filter from their preferences. The vast majority of trans women on this app are only looking for “men” – some looking for “trans men” as well – and you have to individually click on their profiles to see if someone might be queer.

Expecting a lot of cis men to message me I made this my bio:

I write about movies and TV shows for a lesbian website.

You wouldn’t believe how little I care about cis men.

Cap sun/Sag Venus

I immediately got a “Wow” from several cis men, and one messaged me saying, “I hope you’re someone I can always talk to and get to share my deepest feelings with.” Okay, buddy.

I found two queer trans women relatively in my area but I wasn’t into them. I had to scroll all the way down to Mexico City and Ivano-Frankivs’k, Ukraine to find people I wanted to message. Neither responded which is probably for the best – if I could afford to date trans women a plane ride away I’d just date my number one Instagram crush.

I had to scroll to Philadelphia and Utica, New York to find two cis women on the app. Utica asked, “So you’re a trans?” and Philadelphia asked me what cis meant and then said she was a “transfan” but had never dated anyone trans – she had hooked up with “a nonbinary.”

I also got a message from a nearby twenty year old cis queer woman. My age settings are 25-42 on all my apps, but that didn’t show up for her, because the other thing about Fiori is its functionality is low to say the least.

The “Wows” and messages from cis men continued rolling in and I began to write a simple negative review of this app with jokes like, “Okay you’re sort of cute, but you only have one picture, no info about yourself, and you live in fucking Long Beach.”

But then someone new joined the app and messaged me.

I’m going to call this person Van, because she lives in Van Nuys and it’s a testament to how hot she is that my Echo Park-living, no car-having self was willing to travel to her.

After complimenting each other, we slipped into easy messaging small talk – how’s your day, where are you from, what part of the city do you live in. Then she said we should grab a drink sometime and despite it being 8pm I suggested we do it now.

I’ve never met up with someone from an app like that. I’ve never gone directly to someone’s apartment either. I’m usually a very cautious Capricorn. But I have electrolysis on Wednesdays and knew I wouldn’t be able to shave most of the week. And my roommate was filming a movie in our house so it was too loud to get work done anyway. I downed two shots of tequila and ordered a car.

It wasn’t until I was in the Lyft that I realized I probably should’ve asked for her Instagram handle or some sort of confirmation of her identity. She was certainly hot enough to be a catfish. I shared my location with a couple friends and hoped for the best.

I walked into her very dark apartment complex, made my way up the stairs, and knocked on her door. My stomach tightened as I waited for the door to open and reveal a middle aged man. But no. There she was – exactly like her picture.

Van invited me into her studio and I met one of her cats and sat on her bed as she uncorked a bottle of wine. She mentioned she was an escort and then apologized for not telling me ahead of time. The thought flashed across my mind that this wasn’t actually a date and that’s the explanation for why this incredibly hot person was into me – but then I realized she was just apologizing for not telling me, because some people are really whorephobic. I told her it was obviously fine and then we chatted a bit about the clients she’d seen that day.

We started talking about astrology and added each other on Co–Star. Then this Sagittarius sun, Scorpio Venus kissed me. We kept talking and kissing and talking and kissing each as easy and pleasurable as the other.

She went to pour herself another glass of wine before saying that she shouldn’t drink too much, because another date said it made her really loud and a lot. I laughed and told her she should feel free to be loud and a lot. And she was – in the best way – and it was adorable.

We kept hooking up and she told me she was a switch but wanted me to fuck her. I told her I was also a switch, but had never done that before – never fucked someone in the ass with my penis. I don’t usually fuck people with my penis anymore in general. But with her I wanted to. She asked if I was sure and I said yes.

I didn’t quite fit and it was a bit painful for me – some sort of epic irony that cis men everywhere are desperate for an extra inch and I have a decently-sized penis I couldn’t care less about – but with enough lube we eventually got it and it started to feel good. It was also just so hot to be there with her and be inside of her and watch her feel good.

The last time I fucked someone with my penis was this summer with a cis woman. It felt fetishy and made me dysphoric. But with Van we were just two people using our bodies to give us pleasure.

Neither of us came, but everything we did made me feel present. The last year I’ve only felt that way two or three times during sex – the fading of my anxious brain. And there was something unique about that happening with another trans woman. She admired my tits like only someone else on estrogen could and then she grabbed them harder than anyone had before. It was so nice.

We naturally started to slow down and get back to just kissing and talking. And then she asked if I wanted to watch Myra Breckinridge.

I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly. Myra Breckinridge? The trans cinema classic starring Raquel Welch and Mae West based on the book by Gore Vidal? She said, yes. She loved the movie and had been meaning to rewatch it. I told her I’d owned the DVD for awhile unwatched and would love to.

You haven’t seen Myra Breckinridge until you’ve watched it cuddling with another trans woman pausing to make jokes and make out.

The most iconic scene of the movie finds Raquel Welch as trans woman Myra fucking a hunky young man with a strap-on to rid him of masculinity. It’s a wild, campy movie that deserves celebration in all its problematic glory. It’s meant to be transphobic, it’s meant to be shocking, but it’s also the only piece of media I’ve ever seen where a trans woman wears a strap-on – even if the moment is less than consensual.

The movie features a lot of cutaways to classics of Hollywood cinema and in her commentary it quickly became clear that Van was a full-on cinephile. I wasn’t looking to catch feelings on this impromptu app hook up, but when a hot woman has very strong opinions about Bette Davis movies you have to succumb.

We ordered delivery from IHOP and after finishing my waffle I felt like it was time to go. I started getting dressed and she said we should hang out again and I said definitely knowing it might not happen. She’d mentioned that she wasn’t much for commitment and was usually only into people if they were unavailable. Sagittariuses.

I gave her my number and left around 2:30 in the morning. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see her again, but I felt happy either way.

There was always a part of me that wondered if those inquisitive cis people were right. The more time that passed the more I wondered if I couldn’t blame the scarcity in my community or my pickiness – maybe it was just internalized transphobia. I wondered if maybe I would get turned off by penises and suddenly justify all the transphobic talking points I’ve fought against. That wasn’t the case at all.

The most surprising thing about these encounters wasn’t that I felt less self-conscious around other trans bodies – it was how similar these experiences were to the sex I’ve had with cis women. The acts were different, but when sex is good you’re just a body connecting with another body, listening with words and touch – hoping for some sort of connection and pleasure.

Trans people are forced to experiment, try new approaches, work around dysphoria, push through dysphoria, check-in as certain things that used to feel good stop feeling good and certain things that didn’t suddenly do. This shouldn’t just be trans sex. This shouldn’t just be queer sex. It’s nice to know what makes you feel good and it’s nice to know what generally makes other people feel good. But every new person is a new person and every new connection is a new connection. Every new body is a new body.

Fiori is not an inclusive utopia here to solve the difficulties of dating while trans. But you might meet someone just like you might meet someone on Tinder just like you might meet someone on Instagram or Twitter or – gasp! – in person.

There’s never going to be an app that’s not transphobic until we live in a world that’s not transphobic. But we have the apps we have and we have the world we have. We have the bodies we have too. Use what you have and, if you want to, fuck.

Courting Loneliness

It’s I Think We’re Alone Now Week at Autostraddle — a micro issue dedicated to being on your own, whether on purpose or by chance, and all the ways we’re out here making it work.

Last summer I was entangled on the couch with someone of whom I was enamored, and we were playing with each other’s hands, as we do, endless waterfalls of long fingers, the dance of fingertips pressing and releasing. I don’t remember what we had been talking about as we passed a joint back and forth, but then she caught my eye, lifted a gorgeous eyebrow and said, “You know, sometimes it’s lonelier in a relationship.” It was a hot night in Brooklyn, all the windows were open, and there we were, legs wrapped around each other, sweating on the couch, and I thought to myself, “Is this what loneliness feels like?”

I’d always thought of romantic attraction as containing the same magic as complimentary colors — the contrast, the balance, the pop — and that the glow between them created a certain space that couldn’t be filled. I’d been in a tumultuous relationship with the yellow to my purple for over a year, and there, on the couch, I felt the promise of something different: the blue to my purple, a slight overlap. Maybe my couchmate brought up loneliness as a gentle way of showing me my own, but I think she was also warning me, that despite the sweaty evenings we’d just discovered we wanted to share, she too, wouldn’t promise any better.

I don’t relish talking about love as a house, but I’m going to do it anyway. One of my past girlfriends used to talk about her heart like a Victorian home. I always pictured the one she lived in with a porch swing, an old clawfoot tub she adored, and a giant fireplace. It was an apt metaphor: there were porch-only friends, people allowed into the foyer or living room, and I, who wandered the kitchen and bedroom freely, but would never make it into the attic. Carmen Maria Machado added to the lesbianess of this motif with her memoir, In The Dreamhouse, which my complimentary yellow left for me as one of the greatest impending-break-up gifts I’ve ever received. What begins as a house full of hope and desire, swiftly turns into a place of haunting and menace. My yellow and I were always talking about what we were building together, and it was in the empty rooms of our overly-ambitious, half-finished mansion — velvet, rococo loveseats in some places, the walls still a maze of bare studs in others — that I learned the exact loneliness to which my blue was referring. It was no secret that I had spent many foggy evenings out on the widow’s walk, waiting to see a light in the distance. There was something comforting about someone else recognizing how that looked on me. To this day, I like to think that my blue and I are good at keeping loneliness company together, inviting it in to get to know it, entertaining it for a while. Sometimes it feels like an extension of my own home. “You would never put a wet spoon in my sugar bowl,” my blue observed with fondness one morning, as I stirred my coffee and went for a pinch of sugar with my fingers.

But what had I been doing in that half-built mansion? How did I not see that it was only a mansion because we were building so many different things at once? That’s what I consider now that I’ve come home. These days, in the absence of a woman who can regularly undo me, floor me, enrage me, send me over the moon (though let’s be honest, many still send me right up to it), I walk around the lake at night, eyes on the stars, and want for nothing. I sing loudly at my kitchen sink, letting my heart careen around swoony, sentimental, nostalgic songs, with no fear of what hidden desire or despair I might discover in myself. I return home to my apartment in the evening and marvel at the warmth inside, the elaborate world that exists just for me, the way my slippers are perched under the coffee table, just where my feet instinctively fall. “What loneliness?” I ask myself. “Where?” But it’s not gone, per se, it’s just a different shade.

I was on the phone with Audrey, my first girlfriend, who had recently sent me a package that included a padded silk eye mask to wear to bed. “So you don’t have to wear that ridiculous bandana over your face like a kidnapping victim,” she wrote me on an intricate piece of stationary. Do I even need to tell you how much I like a properly incisive read — the amount of love I feel in its bite? Over the phone she was lamenting that her boyfriend had recently left to spend three months snowboarding in the mountains, like he did every year.

“One of these days, he’s gonna come back to find I stopped caring to miss him anymore,” she said. “Do you know that feeling?”

“You mean,” I said. “Becau­­­se you don’t actually need him, you just create the need for him because you love him, and when he’s gone too long, the need disappears?” I asked. “Like you decided to live in a mansion together, and you brought some of the best pieces from your personal collection into the living room, except when the other person doesn’t show up, you can’t help wanting to bring them back to your own place, where they honestly match the walls much better?”

Audrey laughed. “Yes. Like that. Except I don’t have my own place anymore.”

“Well, you could always move,” I said. “You’ve always wanted to live in a big city.”

I knew what she was saying. It was like saving a seat on the bus for someone who routinely happened to never show up. It was like setting the table for someone who decided to eat an hour before coming over for dinner. “You can’t take it personally!’ so many of my friends had told me before, but I’ve never quite understood what’s left in a personal relationship if things aren’t meant to be taken personally. We didn’t have to save seats and set extra settings. It was, in fact, the act of doing so that created both a sense of belonging, and a specific kind of loneliness, a sense that something was missing.

I know — as a person who bothers to be disappointed with loneliness, who lingers in the absence of missing — that I have only myself to blame. “I could be even more annoying, so you’d want me to go away,” my complimentary yellow had offered before. She’d even given me a t-shirt that proclaimed in large bold print that I missed her, to wear when she was gone. It was pointedly hilarious because it was so true. Because neither of us knew how, exactly, to recreate, on purpose, those endless nights where we’d drive through downtown Los Angeles at 2 in the morning, lost in meaningful conversation, laughing at each other’s every word, wrapped in the delight of the particular way the world unfolded for the two of us.

What I can’t forget in our final romantic weekend together, was the dry, windy plateau that opened up inside of me after she’d fallen asleep in the middle of my read-aloud to her. As I listened to her deep breaths, the sharpness of the moon and stars shone through the skylight over our bed, so crisp, so bright, I could see my own shadow pressed onto the covers beside me. More clearly and acutely than ever, I felt the desolation of loving her. Of the negative space I created around me, trying to leave room for overwhelming joy. And at that moment, I knew I had gone about this wrong, because that night, it didn’t have to be devastating that the person best-suited to enjoy my own voice incanting Ocean Vuong’s words on his frustratingly distant white lover, laughing knowingly at our shared loneliness, all while bathed in silver moonlight, was me.

Back at home, I stare out of my bedroom window at the perfect palm fronds waving against the electric sky. Who gave us the idea that loneliness was unexpected, a sign of incompletion, something to be solved, a ghost to escape at 2 am in the heart of something transformative? It’s always here. It never leaves. It doesn’t have to haunt me so badly. It can, indeed, feel like elegant hands sweeping over mine, fingers braided together in a jacket pocket. It can, too, sound like me rereading my love letter to myself on my 34th birthday, in tears, as I fumble my way through making my favorite curry. My point, I suppose, is that there was never any less love because loneliness was there, never any less beauty. And if I had the chance to build that mansion again, I’d still aim for something stunning and grand, I’d just not make the mistake of thinking that I could fall in love with someone, without each of us falling in love with our lonelinesses too.

I Just Want to Look Like Greta Garbo: On Icons

all illustrations by Aubrey Casazza

I have loved my face and I have hated my face and I have been confused by my face. For a stretch of years in late adolescence I thought that perhaps it was important for me to forgive my face. I remember taping my ears to the sides of my head while I slept when I was in middle school, worried they stuck out too far. When I started wearing glasses in high school I realized for the first time how easily I could change my own face, how I am perceived. Reorient my appearance and how I saw even myself. My face has always felt malleable to me. Unstable. Unpindownable. But in an interior way, I can feel always feel my face changing when I identify strongly with someone—a singer, a character on screen, an author’s photo on the back of a book that speaks right to me.

It’s happened as long as I can remember. I am watching something: a show, a movie, a commercial. I am studying a face on screen, its manifold expressions, its folds, and I can feel it. My own face as a mirror. My own face shifting and mimicking and, yes, practically identical to the face on screen. I have been Meryl Streep and Meg Ryan and Monica Vitti. Tyra Collete and Tim Riggins and every other character on Friday Night Lights within the space of an episode.

The first time I saw Jenny Lewis, I didn’t see her at all. It was her name in a comment on a photo on Facebook, back in the days of highly-erudite-indie-song-lyric-captioned photo albums. “You look like Jenny Lewis in this picture,” my first girlfriend had written. The girl in the photo had her face tilted down and her arms out as she walked through some ruins in Greece, perfect sun shafts on her long dyed-red hair, heavy bangs. Who the fuck was Jenny Lewis? I asked Google, as a way of asking who the fuck was this cute new friend my girlfriend made while studying abroad. And why, by the way, didn’t I look like Jenny Lewis? Alone in New York at the time, I became obsessed with Jenny. Maybe if I knew all her songs, every sardonic, split-lip brilliant lyric, maybe then I’d be enough. I cut bangs and never cut the rest of my hair. I sang and sang into the mirror. I longed to feel my face transform into her tiny elfin grin. I considered dying my scraggly hair red.

When I feel my face in the face of someone else, it’s not a kind of empathy; it’s a kind of obsessive visual association. I do not feel that I am the person on screen, or that I know what they feel or feel it myself. It is at once more internal and more external than that: I feel that I look like them. I feel that when others see me, they see me as I see the person I’m looking at. It happens with people I know, when we are in conversation face to face.

Perhaps this is what is meant when people refer to the gaze.

Perhaps more to the point this is what is meant when people say vanity.

An icon is both personal and shared. When you are listening to them, reading them, watching them on screen or stage, it is like they are singing writing talking just to you. For you. At some point, at the time or decades later, you’ll finally see the crowd of others who idolized the same person—listening to Jewel under the bleachers with their headphones, too—or maybe you found the person through someone else. But we each worship alone. That’s not quite the right word for it, though. This relationship is about someone you can see yourself in, not a person on a pedestal. Jenny Lewis soon became something else to me, not a look to emulate, but a voice for all the longings and rages still percolating from my stifling suburban teen years. She spoke to me—directly to me—about how to be a woman and how be vulnerable and also badass, angry and joyful, sad and so funny. She became mine, which matters more to this story than how I found her, but how I found her illustrates how close envy and desire live to one another in our world of public images.

My partner Chelsea and her best friend, Borden, were obsessed with Andy Warhol and his troupe of superstars. In high school in Alabama in the 90s, they read all the memoirs and did all the drugs from the Factory era, looking backwards to find—to make—themselves. Reading Chelsea’s copy of Gender Performance in Photography, thinking about icons, a photo of Borden falls out. He’s swaddled in towels, mimicking a photo in the book of Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy, a 1940s queer icon. For the umpteenth time, I feel my adolescence pale in comparison. Who were my gay icons? Why didn’t I miss them, why wasn’t I looking for them? We don’t always know what we’re looking for, what we’re missing, until it finds us.

Chelsea reads Warhol to me: “So today, if you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went to the store and bought the look that you both like. So forget it. Just think about all the James Deans and what it means.”

Since 2012 I’ve been deep in research and writing about Carson McCullers, a writer who has come to be defined and known as much by her look as by her fiction. In most of her author photos, she is wearing a crisp white button down with massive cuffs and collar, and she’s holding a cigarette, and she looks sullen, sad. Like so many queer authors, she is coming out to readers (some of them, the ones trained to read the signals) through these photos. In her author photos I can read other biographical details: when she chopped her hair, when the left side of her face fell from paralysis. After she died, her face became—as it often does—the selling point for her books, and her photos appeared no longer in thumbnail on the back, but covering the front cover. The publishers were selling a persona, a character, the author’s likeness first, the book inside second. The overlap between author and work was complete. The same thing happened with Joan Didion’s work in her lifetime, her face behind giant sunglasses a substitute, a visual representation the work, its attitude, its pose.

With an author photo, we are asked to see all the language and feeling that the writing contains in the still image. Maybe it’s a candid photo, the author’s hair swooping across their face, or maybe it’s a highly posed, serious portrait, the face turned forty-five degrees from the camera and the eyes piercing back. The photo is always trying for something, and always just missing it.

The way we try to look, try to appear, muddies this line between self and other, between identity, longing-to-be, and longing-for. When Richard Avedon took Carson’s last author photo in June 1958, Avedon says, “I remember her saying to me, ‘I just want to look like Greta Garbo.’” I know from my research that she would have pronounced this Greeta. Who was Greeta to Carson? A queer icon? A glamorous movie star? A concept, as Roland Barthes would have it? What did she want to look like, when she asked to look like Greta Garbo? Avedon writes, “Even though she was in pain, she couldn’t have been more giving of herself. She had complete understanding of the complexity and complicity between the sitter and the photographer and the fact that a portrait has nothing to do with the truth.” I’m struck by this insight into portrait photography, and how it reflects Carson’s approach to writing her autobiography and to narrating her life. Except the “complexity and complicity” was between her and herself, a fact that any would-be memoirist wrestles with. Who am I vs. who do I want to be, who am I vs. how do I appear.

An author’s photo can allow a slippage, one that I suspect is queer, between self and other that literature demands or at least allows. The photo lets us have a crush on the person, fall in love a little, and who’s to say whether we’re really falling in love with them or with ourselves? Who’s to say whether we want to be them or be with them? I feel this, alternately, with Carson and with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, her early love. Not always the jealousy, the blinding fury I felt at a woman who looked like Jenny Lewis, but the easy slip of identity, identifying. Envy undercut by desire. A feeling of boundaries pleasantly overrun.

When we see the author’s face, what are we seeing? What are we looking for? The author photo, like memoir, like any personal writing, is a construction. A constructed, fashioned self. A setting, a camera angle, a gaze. A haircut, a face, made up or not, shaped or not, an outfit. The author, as with memoir, controls much of this. Can edit. But something slips through, betrays them, too. We notice: bad fashion, bad haircuts, eyes. Wrinkles. We notice, perceive a pose. We aren’t fools. I lived for a month in a museum that used to be Carson McCullers’ childhood home, and her face was everywhere. Photos, posters, so much fan art. A terrifying portrait of her over the mantle. A life-size illustration of her face hanging above the desk in my downstairs bedroom. I couldn’t be anywhere without her face. It became like family, like furniture. Like things I can certainly no longer see clearly. Like my own face, or the face of a beloved.

I’ve always loved a profile, or an in-depth interview with Terri Gross, some way to get a person encapsulated, like a little pill I can swallow. Here’s a life, here’s another. Try this one on. It’s curiosity, but I don’t think it’s the prurient kind. More like: who/how is there to be? I never had a sister, so it could be I’m always looking for role models, but I don’t want to change myself, these days. I just want to see their world from their eyes for an hour. An icon is less someone for me to emulate, now that the maudlin throws and quicksilver personality changes of adolescence have passed, and more an addition to my mental closet, something I can try on with my imagination as a way of seeing the world beyond myself/outside the limits of my own experience. A face with a name. We get this kind of access to the lives and formative thoughts of celebrities and authors in a way we don’t get access to people on the street—those I just have to wonder about, and wonder I do. I like a profile, because like a photo it tries to capture the person in a single sketch, a condensed portrait, rather than say a chronology or bio. It says everything you need to know about this person can be seen and felt in this walk through their neighborhood, this conversation, this description. A telling detail as insight to a soul. Like Carson’s cufflinks and cigarette holder and saggy cheeks—what else do you need to know? She’s all right there. A way of knowing, being close to someone, recognizing and being fully recognized.

Biographies typically use the same method, capitalizing on a face, and the face, the photo, is metonymy for the whole person. The photos, the likeness, become the person depicted. We are living in a time when appearances are shorthand for beliefs, for personality, for personhood, when a photo says more than anything written about it, says more than actual words or actions.

I’m getting bangs. I’m trying to look like an Instagram picture of myself from 2014 or so. Former self as icon for the aging. There’s still a copycat deep down in me—in all of us?

I’m no longer 19, I’m in my 30s and Jenny Lewis is in her 40s. Seeing Lewis in a hilarious New Mexico art deco theater as she performed an unspoken Vegas lounge act tribute to her dead mother, I felt the familiar itch of my face longing to transform. Loving her and also a sense of becoming her. Embodying her. Feeling understood by her and that I understand her. I tried to catch her squinting eye as she raised her arms skyward. “Don’t fool yourself,” we sang, the audience’s cellphone flashlights playing over her gold sequined gown, giant pink and blue balloons catapulting back and forth overhead, “in thinking you’re more than you are with your arms outstretched to me.” To me.

Wear the Band Shirt, Make Your Own Rules

One of the best things about being queer, I think, is wearing a band’s t-shirt to their show. The thing is—and in your heart, you already know this—a band’s show is literally the perfect time to wear their shirt. Nothing could be more correct or appropriate. Wearing a band’s shirt to their show is like wearing a team’s jersey to their game, or a reindeer sweater to a Christmas party. Why else do you even have it?

I was introduced to the “don’t wear the shirt to the show” rule in high school, by one of the older guys my friends and I dated—because of course twentysomethings who hook up with teenagers are the arbiters of cool. At first I adopted it wholeheartedly, out of a deep-seated adolescent need to be seen abiding by the unwritten rules, to be in the know. My friends and I passed this bit of wisdom back and forth the way we shared the names of those rare stores where you could buy black lipstick outside the month of October—like bestowing sacred knowledge, an initiation.

It’s a strange, arbitrary guideline, though, even more so than most unwritten rules of coolness. The only thing you gain by following it is the knowledge that you’re following it, and the only thing you lose by flouting it is literally nothing because no one cares. The Band Shirt Rule has no clear genesis; like so much apocryphal “common knowledge,” everyone who knows it just heard it from someone. It’s one of those rules that absolutely only exists for the sake of differentiating between Those Who Know and Those Who Don’t, and allowing the former to talk shit about the latter.

Today, I’m thirty-two years old and have two children, and it is no longer desirable or even possible for me to pass as cool, which frankly saves me a lot of time and energy. In the years since I’ve given up following the Shirt Rule, I’ve found myself paying a lot of attention to who else is breaking it, and I’ve noticed something. At shows where women and LGBTQ people predominate, the Shirt Rule is seldom enforced or even acknowledged. Sleater-Kinney, Janelle Monáe, and Betty Who shows are packed with people stunting in their old tour merch, freshly purchased souvenirs, and even DIY fan gear. And whenever I talk about the Shirt Rule, the discussion splits almost perfectly between cishet guys who follow it like scripture, and the rest of us, who are like, “why is this even a thing?”

The rationale for the Shirt Rule is muddy at best; some adherents say wearing band merch to a show is “trying too hard,” others that it’s “redundant,” because you’re obviously a fan if you’re at the gig. Beneath all that, though, it’s just a tautology of social acceptability: you’re not supposed to because you’re not supposed to because you’re not supposed to.

Band t-shirts are a way of both presenting and defining acceptable enthusiasms, and the baseline for what kind of enthusiasm is permitted is always socially established by straight men. There are good and bad kinds of fandom; there are valid and invalid ways of liking things. There are rules about where you can wear a band shirt, of course, but there are also rules about how many of a band’s albums you should own before you wear their shirt in public, or how much of a TV show you have to watch to be considered a fan—and so on and so forth. I grew up in a time of robust public discourse about “posers” and “fake geek girls,” which were basically attempts to quantify how much you had to like something before you were allowed to like it, combined with frequent goalpost moving to make sure that women never quite met the requirements. If a girl liked something that boys considered their territory, they’d find a reason to push her out.

Male fan culture tends to be concerned with legitimacy, with establishing qualifications: knowledge of trivia, longevity of enthusiasm, collection of paraphernalia. It’s about loving something, but it’s also about proving something, about being observed expressing enthusiasm in the best, most correct way. And the more countercultural or unorthodox an interest is, the more invested male fans seem to become in legitimacy, in underlining that they may like weird, socially marginalized things, but they like them properly.

LGBTQ people and women, however, have a different relationship with fandom, because our fandom is always at least a little stigmatized. Anything associated with femininity or “fangirls” is inherently socially devalued, becomes frivolous, comical. It’s like a pop culture version of how the pay scale for a job decreases as more women move into the field. Bands women and queer people like aren’t as serious as those beloved by men. Female artists are “cute” or “hot” while male artists are “great,” except male artists with a primarily female fanbase, who are something of a joke.

Women and queer people find ways of expressing their love outside the male-arbitrated mainstream. Since we’re often de facto pushed out of more male-dominated forms of fandom, scrutinized and judged rather than accepted, we have a sort of freedom to treasure the things we love in our own way. Fanfiction, for instance—one of the most derided and stigmatized forms of fandom—became a recognizable genre almost entirely thanks to the dedication of women writers, and LGBTQ people make up a large portion of the fanfic writing community. Queer and female fans practice various kinds of reinterpretation of the art we love, from making playlists for our favorite fictional characters to creating our own band gear.

At a Hayley Kiyoko concert last year, I saw fans not just proudly wearing their brand-new t-shirts emblazoned with the image of Lesbian Jesus, but twisting rainbow flags from the merch table into skirts and capes. For lots of women, band shirts are a canvas for expressing creativity by cutting, braiding, and upcycling—my friend teaches a T-shirt DIY workshop at Girls Rock camp every year. From fashion to fan vids to collages to zines, LGBTQ and female fans create not just our own rules, but our own culture out of bits and pieces of whatever joy we can find. Remixing and improvising and making things our own.

As a woman, a queer person, a trans person, loving what you love without regard to the standards of “coolness” requires a rejection of the heteropatriarchal gaze in all its arbitrary bullshit glory. So wear your band t-shirts wherever and whenever you want, with pride. It’s rare enough to find a piece of art that makes you feel at home in the howling chaos of the universe—when you do, it deserves to be celebrated.

“Work in Progress” Is Too Much and So Am I

Whether you’re a dyke or a faggot or both you’ve probably been called too much. It’s a two-word shortcut that means you’re queer and you’re doing a bad job at hiding it.

Why do you have to wear that? Why do you have to insist on some new name or pronoun? Why do you have to bring up politics? Why do you have to exist?

Most of my too-much-ness was removed by the time I left middle school. My long hair had been shorn. My clothing had been simplified. My energy had been muted.

I was never the most flamboyant child, but I was myself and then I was not. I learned not to show emotion. I learned not to cry. I learned not to acknowledge my depression or suicidal thoughts or self-harm. All of that was too much and I needed to be normal. I needed to not stand out – to be an average, happy boy. All that remained was a simmering rage and a desperate need to fix the world. If I couldn’t ask for what I needed, I could at least try to predict and satisfy the needs of everyone around me. I wouldn’t admit that I was queer and I wouldn’t admit that I was suicidal but I would, for example, scream about the epidemic of queer suicides sweeping the country.

During those moments my mom wouldn’t say I was too much. The word she used instead was intense. The subtext – occasionally clarified as text – was that being intense meant being unlikeable. So much effort went into ignoring my desires and quieting my personality, but even this small allowance was seemingly too much.

Abby McEnany’s semi-autobiographical show Work in Progress is about a fat queer dyke named Abby who falls for a young trans man right after deciding to kill herself – if her life doesn’t improve by the time she makes her way through a bag of 180 almonds.

My mom would call Abby intense.

It’s not just that Abby is visibly queer in a way we so rarely see on TV. It’s not just that she’s loud and has no filter. And it’s not just that her depression, anxiety, and OCD is often all-consuming. It’s that alongside these identities, this personality, her mental illness, Abby can be selfish, cruel, and, despite being 45-years-old, deeply immature. Abby’s socially frowned upon character traits are not compensated with respectability – they’re paired with actual flaws, a depth of humanity.

Abby is an anti-hero. We don’t root for her because she is good. We root for her because she’s our protagonist. We root for her because she is human. And because she is trying. And because we are human. And because we are trying.

Last November there was an eruption of Twitter discourse about boundaries. Feminist wellness educator Melissa A. Fabello tweeted a thread where she praised a text from a very close friend checking on her “emotional/mental capacity” before confiding in her.

Her proposed template for when you don’t want to provide support even turned into a meme. Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity etc. etc.

A week later user @YanaBirt tweeted a screenshot of a message that read, “Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you?” and the discourse began all over again.

Some people praised these messages as thoughtful, while many others wondered if the misuse of the term “emotional labor” was turning every relationship into a series of transactions.

While I understood the desire to set boundaries as someone who has often struggled to do so, I agreed that these messages went too far. Relationships are more complicated than a template. Sometimes we’re at capacity, but a situation is serious enough that it calls for going beyond capacity. We want easy answers on how to behave, how to receive those we love, and how to treat those who love us. We want clear rules to decide when someone is worth keeping in our lives and when they’re asking too much – when they are too much, when we are too much. But there are no answers. There are no rules.

Throughout its eight episodes Work in Progress revealed this truth. It showed the value in being there for people even when it’s hard – and the importance of knowing when to walk away. It showed that the answers to these questions change for every person, and, more importantly, for every relationship.

When Abby and Chris (Theo Germaine) first start dating he only sets one boundary: never ask his deadname. Despite being 23 years younger than Abby, Chris consistently seems more mature. He’s patient with her and meets every revelation about her with love. Why is this hot twenty-two year old interested in Abby? Well, because he likes her. And, because, as his friend King says: “Chris loves a project.”

Abby doesn’t realize Chris is trans when they meet. She calls him a baby dyke and even misgenders him when he first asks her out. But once they start dating, she’s quick to clarify her identity as not-lesbian and go about educating the clueless cis people in her life – even as she herself is learning. As a gender-nonconforming woman, she relates to many of Chris’ experiences, but there are still limits to her understanding. And this culminates when in a moment of drunken weakness, she reads Chris’ pill bottle and learns his deadname.

There was never a moment in my last relationship when my transness felt like too much for my partner. She didn’t even misgender me in the first months after I came out. My transition was a given, an obvious next step for the person she loved. Once I came out to her, I made more sense than ever before – and so did she.

People often praised her for staying with me and she was quick to reject this suggestion. She was indignant that she wasn’t doing any favors simply by being with the person she loved – transness wasn’t a defect she was tolerating. In fact, my transition helped her get back in touch with her own queerness. There were external reasons my transition was difficult, but, more importantly, it allowed both of us to become more authentic and with that authenticity form a deeper relationship.

But as the years passed, I changed. The narrative that people are the same before and after transition is false – or, at least, it was false for me. Transitioning changed more than my gender and more than my body. It changed how I acted. It changed my personality.

Gradually I became too much for my ex not because I was trans, but because once I allowed myself to let go of the secrets of my gender I also allowed myself to let go of the other walls I’d put up around my personality. I became louder, more extroverted, more demanding of attention, more willing to assert the depth of my wants. Once I became the entirety of myself I was just too much – we were too much for each other.

After learning Chris’ deadname, Abby begins ignoring him. She’s filled with shame and a deep fear of what will happen when he finds out. She understands the severity of her action, even if she doesn’t understand the reason for that severity – if she did she wouldn’t have looked in the first place.

Days pass and tempted to cancel yet again, she seeks help in her best friend Campbell (Celeste Pechous). Not only does she not send a “do you have the emotional capacity” text – she doesn’t send a text at all. She just shows up smoking outside Campbell’s workout class. But Campbell is totally unfazed. Sweaty and in gym clothes she insists Abby get a drink with her.

At the bar, Campbell gives Abby some “tough love” explaining that the not-telling has become the real problem. She cracks jokes about being unshowered and speaks freely as she tells Abby a “normal” person wouldn’t be reacting this way. She doesn’t say all the right things, but she’s there. And she continues to be there as she offers to accompany Abby to her plans with Chris and his friends. Once they arrive, Campbell leaves, needing to return to her own life – and probably to take a shower. She’s pushed Abby to do what she needs to do. She can’t force her, but she’s helped her. She’s done what she can.

Chris, understandably, does not react well when Abby tells him what she did.

Abby spirals. She goes from ignoring Chris, to ignoring everyone else in anticipation for Chris to call. She locks herself in her apartment and speaks only to a projection of her dead therapist. Campbell texts, “How are you?” but she ignores it. And then her sister Alison (Karin Anglin) rings her doorbell and she ignores that too.

But Alison comes upstairs anyway and opens the door. She’s brought scones. “You said that you wanted to talk and you never do and then you never called,” Alison says. “And then you won’t return my calls so I’m here to tell you that whatever it is it can’t be that bad.”

Abby tells her sister to fucking leave, but Alison says no.

Alison cleans Abby’s apartment, she gets her some real food, they watch Young Frankenstein together, and then she tucks her into bed.

Abby is not an easy best friend or an easy sister. Her anxiety, OCD, and depression often leave her appearing beyond help. But Campbell and Alison help her anyway. They care about her and she cares about them and while they both sometimes can’t be there as much as Abby needs, they try their best. They show up when they can, and, most importantly, Abby shows up for them when she can too. It’s not always equal, but, again, relationships are not transactions.

My ex and I broke up right after I moved to LA. As I began meeting people in my new city, a voice in my head told me not to be too much. But no matter how hard I tried I could not get my personality to fit back into the boxes that had been built for me. Everybody I met kept meeting me, not just me, the trans woman, but me, in my entirety.

The only part of myself I continued to hide were my emotions. It’s one thing to be what my mom, my ex, and lots of society might describe as annoying – it’s another to pair that with the vulnerability of needing help.

Since I was in high school I’ve been very vocal about my experiences with depression, anxiety, OCD, and suicidal thoughts. But talking about these experiences is its own kind of defense mechanism. It gives an impression that I’m comfortable with these parts of myself – that I know how to get the support I need. But it’s not true. I can talk about these things in the past tense, but when I’m feeling bad I disappear. Or, if I have to be around people, I pretend. I still feel like if I ask for help – on top of being loud, opinionated, trans – people will leave me. They’ll finally realize I’m too intense.

I spent most of last year being more myself than ever before – all the while feeling lonely due to this lack of vulnerability. It wasn’t simply that my ex had been supportive of my transness, she’d also been supportive as I gradually revealed my emotions, shared the extent of my mental illness, and even learned to cry in front of her. I started to wonder if in her absence I wasn’t being truer to myself, but simply trading which part of my too-much-ness I was hiding.

While panicking about Chris needing space, Abby decides to get a drink with her ex Melanie. She hasn’t seen her in eight years.

We’ve watched their relationship in flashbacks. We’ve watched Melanie’s negative reaction to Abby’s herpes. We’ve watched Melanie’s horror at Abby’s obsessive journaling. We’ve watched how hurt Abby was by their breakup. We’ve watched all of this in contrast with Chris’ casual acceptance.

After some friendly banter, Abby tells Melanie that she wanted to see her, because she’s trying to be a better person. Abby says that she thinks she’s ruined yet another relationship and she’s trying to figure out why this keeps happening to her.

Melanie says she can’t fix Abby. She says that Abby refused to open herself up and yet everything was always about her – everything is still clearly always about her. A new narrative of their relationship starts to form. It’s less that Melanie wasn’t accepting of Abby and more that Abby was so concerned with the possibility of not being accepted that she created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or maybe it was a combination of both. Relationships are complicated.

Melanie says she’d hoped they could move forward, but now she’s giving up. She says they shouldn’t try this again in eight years. It’s easy to understand why.

Instead of taking some lessons away from her brief drink with Melanie, Abby goes directly to Chris’ work. She frantically asks for some reassurance that they’re okay. She asks for him to listen to her – she thinks she’s communicating but all she’s doing is speaking. He reiterates that he needs space and that he’s just asking for time.

Chris sends Abby away, but he gives her what he can. He kisses her on the cheek to remind her that she’s loved. It’s the only promise he can make.

The next night he meets her outside Julia Sweeney’s misguided “woke Pat” show – Abby has chosen not to attend in her own example of setting boundaries. It’s started to snow and Abby sees Chris through the crowd. She realizes he’s about to break up with her and she pleads with him not to. She says she’s out of almonds and he can’t do this right now.

Chris tells Abby he adores her, but he can’t be the thing that keeps her going. He can’t be the reason that she doesn’t kill herself after running out of these arbitrary almonds. He needs to figure out his needs and Abby is too – she interrupts and guesses old, fat, loud, needy, and insecure. Chris interrupts her back – no, too much. She’s just too much.

He hands her an envelope which we’ll later learn contains a stolen almond, another day to live, without him, beyond him. As he’s walking away Abby does the unforgivable – she shouts his deadname.

Chris stops, tears forming in his eyes. His face is filled not simply with betrayal, but with the painful confirmation that ending this relationship was the right decision. It’s one thing to know when it’s time to walk away. It’s another to feel that you were right. The latter is so much harder.

When Chris calls Abby too much my stomach dropped. When Abby deadnames Chris the rest of my body went with it. The difficult part of a show that presents characters so willing to be there for one another is that when the limitations are reached it feels all the more painful. Ultimately Chris and Abby couldn’t meet each other’s needs. It’s not just Chris who can’t be everything Abby needs – Abby can’t be everything Chris needs. In fact, it’s her failure to be there for him that leads to the realization that he can’t be there for her. It’s powerful to see Chris recognize that for himself, but it’s devastating to witness – for both of them.

I wish alcohol didn’t free me from my walls, but it does, and in September it did. My yearly end of summer depressive episode and a mix of other things, forced an emotional breakthrough at, you guessed it – a season finale watch party of a reality TV show. I’d had an immense amount of tequila on an empty stomach and I was feeling the expected mix of good, bad, and unhinged.

My friend Gaby and I were sharing a Lyft back to our respective homes when I started sobbing. I immediately began apologizing and trying to make light of it. But Gaby insisted there was no reason to apologize. She asked me to talk and, reluctantly, I did.

The next morning filled with a vulnerability hangover and a hangover hangover, I apologized again. And again Gaby insisted there was nothing to apologize for. Instead she checked in with me. And sober, I started letting myself talk to her more.

A couple months later, Gaby called me crying on Thanksgiving. I talked her through something, and she apologized to me. Now it was my turn to insist that there was no reason to apologize. After all, Thanksgiving seems like much a less embarrassing time to be upset than after a reality TV watch party. And neither was embarrassing at all. We’d both been conditioned to fear this kind of vulnerability, but with the right person there’s no reason to be afraid.

When Chris and Abby have their final talk in the snow, he doesn’t actually tell her she’s too much. His exact words are: “You’re too much. For me. This is too much.” Just because she’s too much for him doesn’t mean she’s too much for everyone. Just because we’re too much for one partner or one friend or one family member doesn’t mean we aren’t deserving of love and compassion and even appreciation.

Sometimes people need to walk away. But there will be other people out there whose too-much-ness fits your too-much-ness. Chris will find a partner who understands his transness. Abby will find a partner who is better equipped to help her in the ways she needs. And until then they have friends who love every part of them. I do too. More and more, the people in my life are like Gaby – people who I can trust, and lean on, and not feel embarrassed to be myself around. And while I’m certainly not writing this essay from the other side of self-acceptance, every year I’m doing a little bit better. After all, I’m just a work in progress.

I Remain A “Catfish” Queer: On Love, The Midwest, and What We Think We Deserve

The summer before last, I was stuck in my Wisconsin hometown. I’d just graduated with an MFA in creative writing and I couldn’t figure out my next step. I spent my days carrying an oscillating fan around my parent’s house—from the dining room where I pecked at job applications, to the kitchen to make smoothies, and then to my room, where I lay scrolling listlessly through Instagram. I frequently went to the gym in the middle of the day on a month-to-month membership. The elliptical running machines faced a wall of windows. Outside I could see a padlocked dumpster, Karate America, and a paint store. Beyond this small pocket of development lay cornfields and a road named after my great aunt’s husband’s family. It was too much corn, too much Wisconsin. I turned instead to the gym TV. To my surprise, I found a show that reflected my queer spending-the-summer-in-my-hometown sadsack feelings — Catfish: The TV Show.

Catfish is an MTV original series about online relationships. Since its premiere in 2012, Catfish has become a full-fledged reality television phenomenon and inspired spinoffs like Catfish: Trolls and Ghosted: Love Gone Missing. Even if you’ve never watched the show, you’re probably familiar with the term “catfish” to mean a person who creates fake social media profiles and talks to people online under the guise of being someone else. A typical episode begins with the show’s hosts, Nev Schulman and Max Joseph, introducing that week’s “hopeful.” The hopeful is the show’s word for someone who’s in an online relationship with a catfish. When the hopeful tries to connect with their online love in real life – sometimes going as far as buying a plane ticket or relocating to a strange city – the catfish is nowhere to be found. The catfish supplies excuse after excuse: their car got stolen, their mom is dying of cancer, they got kidnapped, they moved to Switzerland to pursue a modeling career, they stayed in California because they had a prophetic dream that they would die in New York. (These are all real examples from the show.) The hopeful realizes that something is fishy and calls Max and Nev for help tracking down their catfish and uncovering the truth about their online relationship. Is the catfish who they say they are and if not, who have they been talking to this entire time? Did the catfish ever really love them? Can their love survive this deceit? It’s a weird ride.

Catfish is populated by fat queers, rural queers, poor queers, disabled queers, and queer people of color. There are queers who live in mobile homes and work the night shift. There are queers who have been disowned by their families and queers who are supporting their families on minimum wage jobs. In the episode entitled “Blaire & Markie,” we meet a young lesbian who lives in a motel with her best friend and her best friend’s toddler nephew, who they’ve committed to raising together. I don’t see many queer chosen families on TV, let alone a multiracial queer chosen family formed by homeless teen parents. The episode “Aaliyah and Alicia” also follows a homeless teen, Aaliyah. When Aaliyah and her mom are evicted from their home in Oakland, Aaliyah finds comfort and stability in an online relationship with Alicia. Alicia is an obvious catfish – she demands money from Aaliyah and only provides a handful of photos. She lives nearby, in Oakland, but tells Aaliyah that she’s too busy to meet in real life. Aaliyah is too exhausted balancing school and homelessness to question Alicia’s motives. The hopefuls on Catfish are frequently contending with unimaginable stress: the loss of a parent, bullying at school, or homelessness. When each day is a struggle for survival, you don’t have the mental capacity to think critically. It’s enough that another person cares about you, or at least pretends to.

The relationships featured on Catfish are far from casual. There are proclamations of love and marriage proposals. Hopefuls describe their catfish with words like “my soulmate” and “the one.” Many of these relationships have been going on for over a year and in a few cases, over a decade. In the episode “Kiaria and Cortney,” a woman sends her girlfriend $1,000 to have a baby via a surrogate mother (a quick Google search quotes the cost of surrogacy as $90,000 to $130,000). This episode is one of Catfish’s brazen and unimaginable deceptions – Kiaria and Cortney have never met in real life, despite both living in Virginia Beach and dating exclusively for two years.

My favorite episode of queer Catfish, hands down, is “Whitney and Bre.” Whitney and Bre are black queer women who have been in love for over four years without ever meeting face-to-face. Whitney lives in New York and works at Wendy’s six days a week to support her mom and four brothers. Bre lives in Los Angeles and is unemployed. In a truly genius plot, Whitney pretends to be a hopeful so that MTV will pay for them to finally meet. “I just get so freaked out when people can just sit across from you and lie like that,” says host Max, after uncovering hundreds of messages and video calls between Whitney and Bre. After much deliberation, the hosts decide to be chill because Catfish is a show about love and sometimes love makes people lie on reality TV. In the episode’s epilogue, we see Whitney and Bre strolling through a Los Angeles park. Their joy at finally being able to kiss and hold each other is palpable. I love Whitney and Bre. I hope they always love each other. I hope they never stop scamming corporations.

Despite all my praise, Catfish is far from perfect. There is a lot to critique. The hosts often use dismissive language to describe sex workers and strippers. It must also be acknowledged that Nev, the host and executive producer, has a history of assault accusations (including one against a lesbian) that can be easily Googled. But I do think the show, generally, walks an impressive line of alchemizing relationship drama into entertainment without mocking or further marginalizing those involved. The hosts give everyone a chance to explain their actions, even the catfish. Oftentimes, catfishing is an act of self-preservation. The catfish feels guilty about lying, but does not believe themselves deserving of love as their authentic selves. In “Dani and Kya,” for instance, social media is a safe and accessible means of gender expression for the catfish. The hosts dispense some solid relationship advice — namely, don’t make excuses for your partner’s bad behavior, every relationship is an opportunity for growth, and healthy relationships aren’t built on deceit. There’s an emphasis on shared responsibility — Max and Nev are just as interested in the catfish’s motives as they are in why the hopeful falls for what is usually a blatant, painfully obvious lie.

Every episode of Catfish promises intricate lies and deceit, but the actual experience of watching an episode from start to finish is kind of boring. Reveals are strategically placed after increasingly frequent commercial breaks. Every ounce of conflict and intrigue is discussed and stretched too thin, like a friend who gets a cryptic text from their crush and can talk about nothing else. When I was researching this piece, I fell asleep in front of my computer and when I woke up, the episode entitled “Vince & Alyssa” was playing. Max and Nev are helping Vince, an earnest young man who loves his grandma and exclusively dresses in basketball shorts and t-shirts. The three men drive to Jasper, Indiana – a farming community with a population of 15,000 – to find Alyssa, the shadowy internet woman who ended Vince’s relationship with his irl girlfriend. I wonder if this is the first time anyone has undertaken a road trip between Cincinnati and Jasper. At the very least, this is the first time anyone has filmed or otherwise documented a road trip between Cincinnati and Jasper. As someone who spends a lot of time in farflung places, this feels important to me.

All this to say that Catfish has been serving diverse, bittersweet queer representation for almost a decade and it seems like nobody notices. The most recent season of Are You the One? received endless praise from the queer internet. If you don’t know, AYtO is another MTV reality show. The premise is that a bunch of people are placed in the same house and must pair off into “perfect matches” as determined by scientific algorithms and relationship experts. Season 8, which aired this summer, made waves because every cast member identified as pansexual, bisexual, and/or sexually fluid. Therefore any two cast members could potentially be each other’s perfect match. Whereas Catfish depicts bodies as complicated and painful questions to be answered – what does it mean to love someone and build relationship in the absence of their body? What body would you chose if you could? What happens when people feel that their body renders them underserving of love? – the cast members on AYtO are uniformly thin, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive. Their bodies are sites of joy and pleasure, always on display in swimwear and lingerie. One is not more radical or truthful than the other, but I just relate a lot more to anxiety and weirdness when it comes to bodies.

The cast members on AYtO are removed from their everyday lives and placed in a beach house that looks like it was decorated by a cool middle schooler with full rein of a Pottery Barn Teen catalog. Unlike Catfish, nobody on AYtO is a parent or a caretaker. Nobody is living in poverty or working a minimum wage job. There is zero tolerance policy for shame. Even Max, the only cast member openly struggling with shame and internalized homophobia, is given an easily digestible narrative of self-acceptance. We watch as he receives mentorship from the other cast members and finds a loving, supportive queer community. The beach house has an entire room dedicated to queer sex — it’s called the Boom Boom Room and it’s located right off the living room. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. There are orgies and drag shows and group therapy. On AYtO, being queer means having more options for love and intimacy.

I have never catfished anyone. I have never been catfished. As a white cis woman with a lot of structurally affirmed power, I am unlikely to get a visit from Max and Nev. Still, Catfish resonates with my queer experience in a way that AYtO never will. The opening paragraph of this piece, I realize, makes it sound like being in Wisconsin was a temporary space for me. In actuality, most of my adult life has unfolded in snowy, midwestern cities with more steers than queers. As a result, most of my romantic relationships have been LDRs with people I met online. I make deep emotional deposits in these relationships. Sometimes after a few weeks of texting, I’ll suggest meeting irl and the person will become evasive and shifty and I’ll realize that I am just a placeholder to them, a nice person to text on a long bus ride or a lonely night. But about once a year, whether I intend to or not, I board a plane to meet someone for a weekend. Sometimes there is even a follow-up weekend, but never a third.

The logical side of me knows that it’s not my fault. If conventional wisdom says that the perfect first date is something easy like coffee or drinks, then meeting someone for the first time and spending an entire weekend together is a fool’s errand. Expectations and nerves run high — it’s stressful to spend unmitigated, continuous time with someone new. Money is emotional and plane tickets are expensive. It can be difficult to navigate the financial implications in a fledgling LDR. But the emotional side of me is left feeling gutted and insecure. I worry that my mannerisms and personality are off-putting in real life. Without a screen, I am boring and ugly and overall a huge disappointment. I describe myself as “fatter irl” jokingly but it’s true, I am fatter irl. My online relationships make me feel like Kimmy Gibbler — an unwanted visitor, a girl who climbs through your bedroom window for a few moments of comic relief.

This summer, I lived in a big city with lots of queers and no shortage of places to meet and hook up. Once a week, my friends and I gathered to watch AYtO. We lingered afterwards to laugh about the show’s most ridiculous moments. Did Nour really call Paige a “giraffe ass bitch”? Why does it fall on Basit to educate Jonathan about they/them pronouns? How old are these people? Eventually, the conversation would turn to me and my love life. My friends would ask if I was on Tinder, if I was going to go on any dates while I was in the city. And in truth, I really wanted to take some fresh photos and put myself out there. Really! But I just kept hemming and hawing and not downloading Tinder. At my core, I realized, I believe dating should be difficult and wildly inconvenient because some part of me still views my queerness as an obstacle. I don’t know how to go on a normal first date – one where we don’t exchange one million texts beforehand, one that doesn’t begin with me getting picked up from the airport. Maybe someday I’ll embrace the Boom Boom Room and oceanside dance parties but for now, I remain a Catfish queer.

There Are Some Ghosts I’m Still Waiting For

My Parents Made Me Gay

I’ve always been a major dyke. My friend is writing a podcast, and her producer, within minutes of hearing about me, nicknamed me “Maj Dyke” just to be super clear about my role in the show as an aspirational lesbian figure. So it’s no surprise that when I examine my childhood, it’s laden with all of the usual clichés: my early penchant for vests, my massive rock collection, years and years of soccer in the 90s, my vocabulary-enhancing addiction to Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple, my love of all the ocean foods that have ever been compared to vaginas. How many kids did you know begging their parents for more raw hamachi from their high chairs? Which really makes you wonder, what were my parents doing feeding sashimi to a two year old? “You always wanted more,” my mom reports with a shrug, as if that addresses the question.

The thing is, I had no idea growing up, that I was in training to become a radical dyke, and already far down the path to becoming a lesbian. Which is not the same thing as saying, “I didn’t know that I was obsessed with women,” because I did know, and I most certainly was. What I am saying is that I was oblivious to the fully formed gay identity I’d been cultivating until I stepped foot on my college campus — and suddenly, in a new light, against the backdrop of queers doing cartwheels in the grass at Oberlin College, it was obvious that I’d always been a major dyke.

There are ubiquitous reasons for disbelieving one’s own queer identity, in the same way you don’t recognize, as a child, that racial epithets are meant for you, until somebody explains to you why and how you’re connected. It’s unavoidable, of course, that I intuited from the world, a sense that being queer, gay, a dyke, a lesbian, was associated with difference at best and powerlessness at worst, and it wasn’t until my twenties that I learned I might just be a faggy dyke princess. But my family wasn’t anything like the rest of the world, and my parents have always been open to the new, the strange. So how did my family manage to both give me my “major dyke” status, while also obscuring that fact from all of us? What was going on in the culture of our family that this key fact managed to escape all of our attention?

To this day, I’m baffled by my parents’ reaction when I told them I thought I might be queer. I was nineteen and working an internship with one of my mom’s mentees, a gay Filipino poet named Joel, who had, sensing my major dyke vibes, invited me to write a piece for a queer erotica anthology he was editing.

“You know that anthology is only for queer people,” my mom began. “Who are sure they’re queer,” she added.

My dad hopped in too. “You know, just because all of your friends are gay, doesn’t mean you have to be too,” he said. “Being gay isn’t the only way to be cool.”

It was good to know that my mom was already defending the queer community from exploitative interlopers, and that my dad already saw queerness as the ultimate social climbing tool. But their reaction stood in stark contrast to my best friends from high school, who hadn’t even bothered to pause between passing the joint and chewing on burritos. “Yeah, dude, we know,” said my friend Maggie, patting my shoulder. “Would you like to revisit the essay you wrote about Erin in 10^th grade English class?” she asked. “It’s a whole essay, there’s a full page about her ass.”

While I unfortunately don’t have that essay, I did recently stumble upon an old journal, when I was digging through my desk at my parents’ house. “Oh, let’s see what kind of juicy gossip you were spilling in 7^th grade,” said my friend. Aside from the rants on girls I couldn’t stand because they were insecure, and a short list of unconvincing crushes I had on boys with “really awesome” older sisters, the journal was primarily pages devoted to my obsessions.

May 5, 1997

One of my biggest obsessions is Alicia Silverstone. She’s such a babe, a great actress, the most perfect Cher, plus from what I’ve read in her biography she is so sweet and wonderful. Did you know she’s a vegetarian in real life because she loves animals? I love her! I read her biography and now I’m obsessed. I feel like I know her. I sleep with her book under my pillow. I want more than anything to meet her.

 June 15, 1997

I LOVE Lisa Kudrow! She always plays such hilarious characters and she’s so good at it. Plus she’s really pretty too! Her character Phoebe on Friends is so zany and always makes me laugh, I love her. I could watch Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion 20 times in a row and not get sick of it. I’m also absolutely crazy about Jennifer Aniston. She’s so beautiful, sometimes I just sit staring at her picture, wishing I could touch her hair.

As it turns out, the only hot gossip in my journal was that at 13, I had already committed the sin of confusing conventional white hotness with personality. Otherwise, unbeknownst to me, my journal was proof that I was just another oblivious preteen girl, with the totally unselfconscious desire to catalog my deep-rooted fixation on women.

But honestly, being focused on women never seemed remarkable to me. I grew up in a household with my mom, my younger sister, and my dad, so even if we were just being fair, 75% of our time was focused on women. And we were not fair. “What does dad know,” my sister would scoff as we walked down the aisle of the grocery store, picking up the Cinnamon Toast Crunch our dad had proclaimed was too unhealthy to take home. Which was just a variation on my mom’s light-hearted, “Your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” After which she’d go get tacos from the truck on International Boulevard, a place my dad found iffy, or take us to ride on BART, which my dad found too chaotic and noisy, or buy me new set of taiko drumsticks, even though my dad said playing would ruin my hearing.

If I’m choosing a parent who ushered in a dyke spirit early in my life, it was my mom. She was the one who started a feminist club in high school with her sister. She’s the one who taught me at age 3 that I wasn’t half of my ethnic backgrounds so much as my own whole. She was the one who volunteered at the Asian Women’s Shelter and explained to me why women and children had to hide from violent men in their own family. She also went to Oberlin College in the 70s, where upon arrival, she promptly stopped shaving and wearing a bra, joined the crunchiest co-op on campus, and became their head tofu maker — a position that became Harkness royalty.

When my sister and I were in elementary school, my mom would only pick us up if we paged her first, and then waited an hour and a half, even though she only worked 15 minutes away.

“How does everybody else know when to come pick up their kids?” I stupidly inquired one day.

“Do you know what feminism is?” my mom snapped. “I’ll tell you! It means women don’t have to stop being who they are because they’ve become mothers. It means I do things outside of our home that are more important to me, and I don’t have to stop working because you need a ride home from school. That’s your problem, not mine.”

She wasn’t wrong. And soon my dad had arranged to pick us up, or to sign us up for ceramics and cooking classes we could walk to. “Your mom was always a little stubborn and cold,” my Auntie Anne, my mom’s only sister, likes to recount to me. “She’ll always hold her ground.” And if that isn’t a solid foundation for a radical dyke ethos, I don’t know what is.

But we can’t leave my dad out of this either. He’s where I get my soft, dainty side. When people first meet me, they’re generally surprised to learn that despite my short hair, I scream hysterically when bugs fly at me, and that I don’t like to get dirty unless I’m in the right clothes.

My dad was very early to the idea that traditional masculinity is a sham, and he was vocal about it throughout my childhood. I’m not quite sure exactly how he came to this conclusion himself, but I have a feeling he was just smart enough to see the contradictions in people like his own father, like the men in the Navy where he did his medical training, like the jock bullies who gave him a hard time in school — that he noticed their fragility, the extreme lengths required to maintain the façade of masculine power. And he decided he could not care less.

My dad wears women’s sunglasses because he likes the greater variety of shapes available than for men. He does pilates because he’s looking to tone his muscles, and because my mom was annoyed when he took an exercise class that woke her up at 6 am. My dad has been pushing moisturizing, skin care and sun protection on me and my sister since we were kids — “especially on your face, hands, and neck,” I can still hear him saying, “that’s where aging shows the most.” And I’ve never met anyone, with such a fondness for gay resort towns, like Palm Springs and Provincetown.

In all the ways that my mom is stubborn and cold, my dad is sensitive, sentimental even. This is a man who wouldn’t let me watch The Simpson’s or read the Berenstein Bears when I was little, because he didn’t want me to get the idea that dads are not quality, trustworthy people. When I was born, he bought an expensive bottle of Port that was meant to age, so we could open it together on my 21^st birthday. And after I graduated from college — the one where he and my mom met, that he convinced me to attend so we’d always have our coming of age in common — he stood in my doorway and cried because he was filled with the very real fear that he’d given me everything he knew how, and now I’d have to figure the rest out myself.

Don’t get me wrong, my dad still had to be told to stop making comments on women’s appearances, and his assumption that any of my friends have a remote interest in hearing him talk about sports is pure hetero-patriarchy. But seriously, my model for manhood was my dad in women’s sunglasses and a printed designer cardigan, sipping a coconut rum cocktail, while excitedly watching the women’s world cup. These were the things he taught me to enjoy.

Taken in context, I can’t even take credit for the kind of dyke I grew up to become. To this day, my mom is on queer trends faster than many people my own age. She asked me last week if assuming a person uses “they” as a pronoun is more or less inclusive than just asking. And my dad is the one who insisted I get a Subaru, when my last car was on its way out — it’s reliable and fun to drive! Who else could I have possibly become?

Looking back, I can see now, how we all missed it. Because unlike so many of the queers I know, who have been rejected or alienated by their families, who have to move miles away to learn to who they are, and who dread the indignity of going home, I followed so closely in my parents footsteps — we still have most things in common. It strikes me every time I see them, but especially around the holidays, that despite our myriad differences, we’re still so much of the same stuff rearranged. “She used a store-bought pie crust,” my sister reports about a party she attended, and everyone shudders in unison.

This evening my mom gave me a pair of metal glasses frames she bought, but then decided were too weird for her. As we looked at them on my face in the bathroom mirror, I understood for the first time that I’m truly an iteration of her, the softer, bolder evolution. “These are the glasses of the person I want to be someday,” I heard someone say at my favorite fancy optical boutique. And I wondered if that was what my mom had been giving me all along. Which leaves me with the inevitable conclusion that I’m a major dyke, just like my parents, who simply happen to be straight.

From Willow to Waverly: A Decade of Being Out and Me and Queer TV

Ten years ago today, on December 27th, 2009, I was in the car with my parents, about two hours into our five-hour trek from Boston to New York, when I told them I’m gay.

I always claim this as the date of my coming out, even though they weren’t the first people I told, nor the last I would have to. It wasn’t the day I figured it out, or the day I accepted it. It was just the day I told my parents, so it was the day I stopped hiding it, so it felt like an important milestone in the journey.

But if I’m being honest, I have at least two decades of milestones. And most of my other milestones involve fictional characters’ milestones.

I Think I’m Kinda Gay (1997-2004)

I was basically raised by TV. My dad had a full-time job and my mom worked two jobs from home, so the TV and I got close really quickly. Elmo taught me how to read, Barney was my first babysitter. Kimberly from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was my first crush, though I wouldn’t realize that until many years later.

Though I’m sure I was exposed to LGBTQ+ characters before this, just by the sheer amount of TV I watched, the first real queer characters in my life were Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Bianca Montgomery on All My Children. Funnily enough, Tara first appeared on Buffy in December in 1999, ten years before I came out, twenty years ago this month. I was twelve years old, and I had already been loving Willow (and the rest of the Scoobies) for two years. A kind of awkward nerd whose intelligence was her superpower? I loved Willow — and when Tara appeared and her chemistry with Willow sparked on my screen, I was enamored. Enchanted. Here was one of my favorite TV characters falling in love with another woman, and it was beautiful. It probably helped that my dad, my Buffy buddy, and the reason I was even “allowed” to watch the show in the first place (I found out later my mother had declared me too young to watch it but my dad and I had already watched half a season and he didn’t want to keep watching alone) didn’t really react to it.

When I did come out to him, in that car in 2009, he claimed to have always known. “I watched Buffy with you,” was his response, when I asked how he could possibly have known what I was only now coming to terms with. And in retrospect the drooling over Faith I thought totally normal and the heart-eyes over Willow and Tara were probably a dead giveaway to a perceptive father.

In December 2000, I was sitting at the kitchen counter watching All My Children with my mother (a common activity of my childhood, which in retrospect is a little ironic considering her chiding my father for letting me watch Buffy), when Bianca Montgomery came out to her mother. My eyes grew wider and wider as I watched Susan Lucci lose her mind about it. I asked my mother why Erica was so upset, and her explaining that some people approve of girls liking girls, or boys liking boys. I didn’t ask any follow up questions, this answer rattled around too loudly in my brain to process any more conversation.

When Tara and Willow kissed on screen for the first time a few months later, it was a warm, bright light in the middle of the darkest hour of television I had seen to date. It hit me hard like the truth, like a lightning bolt right to the heart.

At the time, I was in eighth grade at my small Catholic school. There were 18 kids in my class, most of them I’d known since I was five. We were at the age where the girls had moved on from the boys having cooties, but I was still there. They teased me for not having a boyfriend to the point where the year before, a friend of mine said he’d pretend to be my boyfriend so they would leave me alone. Despite having so few girls in the grade, cliques were starting to form anyway, and while I used to be able to seamlessly shift from one group of friends to another, I was feeling more and more isolated from my peers. Until she showed up. We’ll call her Madeline. She was new and she was different and I was fascinated by her extra-long hair and her unencumbered laugh and the way the bangles on her wrist tinkled when she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She wasn’t hyper-feminine like the mean girls in my class were trying to be, rolling up their uniforms and coordinating matching hairdos. She was unique.

Every year, my elementary school took the 8th graders on a trip to Washington, DC. Despite the fact that the majority of us had known each other for 75% of our lives, it was the longest most of us had spent together at one time. We were all at the precipice of change in so many ways. Puberty was running rampant. We were weeks away from leaving the only school we’d known and splitting up to go to different high schools, where our homerooms alone would have more students than our entire grade. We were in a different state and staying in hotels and barely supervised. Our very skin was thrumming with the excitement of it all. On one of the last nights of the trip, we went on a dinner cruise. We got all dressed up and got on a boat that would sail out for a few hours before redocking. It all seemed very grown-up and romantic. We were on the cruise with other eighth grade classes from other cities around the country, so it was basically like the biggest middle-school dance we’d ever been to.

Maybe I should have known because of how Willow and Tara made me feel. But watching my friend kiss someone else was the tipping point. The moment I knew that I liked girls in a different way than my friends did.

At one point I lost track of Madeline, and asked another kid in our class where she was. He pointed, and I looked, and there she was, slow dancing with some boy from another school. And kissing him. It hit me hard like the truth, like a lightning bolt right to the heart. That was the moment I knew. Maybe I should have already known. Maybe I should have known when I started hating the Green Ranger after he started dating Kimberly. Maybe I should have known because of my recent investment in Bianca Montgomery. Maybe I should have known because of how Willow and Tara made me feel. But watching my friend kiss someone else was the tipping point. The moment I knew that I liked girls in a different way than my friends did.

It would be a long time until I really came to terms with it. While it never really came up in elementary school, my Catholic high school did the work to let me know that being gay was wrong and really barricaded that closet door for me. I spent those four years in extreme denial, though in retrospect it’s almost laughable that I thought I was fooling anyone. I was still obsessed with Willow and Tara; before “Once More with Feeling” aired, the WB released “Under Your Spell” early and I listened to it non-stop until the episode aired. I was obsessed with the ladies of Buffy and Charmed and Roswell. Where my peers had boy bands and teen heartthrobs, I had the mythical ladies of The WB’s supernatural shows I ripped from magazines plastered all over my bedroom walls.

But still I fought against it. The guilt and fear was driven deep in me, and while I’d be the first to point out to my religion teacher that saying we should love our neighbors but then have exceptions for non-Christians and gay people felt counter-intuitive, I was also the first to deny it when anyone so much as hinted on me and my best friend being an item, despite the fact that she was always sitting on my lap or holding my hand. Though I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to daydream about kissing girls, I wouldn’t even let my imagination get away with being gay, not fully. I would always imagine scenarios where we had to kiss. Usually truth or dare or spin the bottle. It was the only way I could let myself imagine it, if it didn’t really “count.” It’s not like I WANTED to kiss girls… but on TV plenty of straight girls kissed girls during party games, and it was fine. No one made a big deal of it. No one had to come out and cause drama and lose friends. I was in denial so deep I was hiding the truth from even myself.

Women Who Long, Love, Lust (2005-2008)

When I got to college in 2005, I didn’t have a TV, so I wasn’t really watching the weekly serial dramas anymore. (I call it “the dark years” when people now ask me if I’ve seen shows that are absolutely in my wheelhouse and I 100% would have loved if I saw them, like Fringe and Dexter.) But I didn’t avoid TV altogether. My friends had OC watch parties, and while I mostly avoided them, I did “happen” to catch all the Olivia Wilde episodes. I went to NYU, in the heart of New York City, where somehow being into girls didn’t seem like quite as big and scary as a concept as it had for years. So I slowly started to experiment with telling my friends I might be into girls… to mixed reactions. Mostly hand-waving “everyone feels that way in college, you’ll get over it” kind of reactions. And then, in my freshman year I heard about this show called The L Word. (Funnily enough, according to my LiveJournal, it was December 2005. There’s just something about December…)

I quickly became obsessed. The first two seasons had already aired, and I watched them both by the time the third season started airing in January. I devoured the episodes in my dorm room, hiding under my covers and making sure I had my headphones in so my roommate didn’t think I was watching porn. I liked it in a different way than I liked other shows, and it came to me at the time I think I needed it most. My friends weren’t being particularly supportive of my newly expressed queerness, but this show was validating my feelings in a way they weren’t. It still felt scary, though.

One time I got in the elevator and there was a girl there with a bleach-blonde pixie cut and a nose ring and she was just holding the bright pink case of The L Word DVDs and my heart almost beat full out of my chest — and I wasn’t even the one holding them! I had a crush on a girl in my Spanish class, and we ended up having an entire coded conversation where we came out to each other by comparing ourselves to L Word characters. (She ended up having a girlfriend so nothing happened but it was kind of validating to have the first girl I openly admitted to having a crush on actually be queer.)

At the end of my Freshman year, I mentioned something about being into girls again, and one of the friends who had been hand-wavey about it all along scoffed. “You’re still going on about that?” I had finally taken down the bars my high school experience had built across my closet door, but as soon as I started to creep the door open, I had it slammed in my face. I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, and I stayed in that closet for a few more years.

One time I got in the elevator and there was a girl there with a bleach-blonde pixie cut and a nose ring and she was just holding the bright pink case of The L Word DVDs and my heart almost beat full out of my chest — and I wasn’t even the one holding them!

But then I met Bernadette. It was fall 2008, the first semester of my senior year of college, and I had just started a job at Barnes & Noble. I don’t really believe in love at first sight, but something definitely sparked in that first interaction. Something about her intrigued me. Something inside me was screaming for me to continue the conversation, where normally my social anxiety would be screaming for me to get out of it. So I did. I started talking about something, anything to keep talking to her. She must have felt the magnetic pull too, because before long we had exchanged numbers and became Facebook friends. I saw on her page that she liked Buffy, and I told her I had all the DVDs, so we made plans for her to come over to my dorm and watch.

The night before she came over, I was a wreck. I cleaned more than I had ever cleaned before, I was a bundle of nerves, I couldn’t sleep. We had only known each other for a few weeks but I couldn’t stop thinking about her, thinking about every time she put her hand on the small of my back when she walked by me, thinking about every time she brushed my hair out of my face and tucked it behind my ear. I Googled “what does being in love feel like” and read that it felt sort of like being on cocaine, which I had never done, but the symptoms tracked. When she came over, we watched hours and hours of Buffy, sitting closer and closer on the bed every time one of us got up and sat back down, eventually ending in our hands brushing over each other’s. At 4am, we decided it was time to stop binge-ing but also too late for her to come home, so she stayed over. She fell asleep with her head resting on my shoulder and for the second night in a row, I was wide awake.

The next morning, I thought about kissing her. As we took the elevator downstairs, I thought about kissing her. As we hugged goodbye in the lobby of my dorm, I thought about kissing her. But I didn’t kiss her. I regretted it for so long. I don’t know that it would have changed anything, but it might have.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have, because a few weeks later, we were at work talking to a group of people and she casually mentioned that she had a boyfriend. It hit me hard like the truth, like a lightning bolt right to the heart. Did I imagine everything between us?

Well, it turns out I didn’t. We eventually talked about it plainly, and she told me that she liked me, but that she’d been dating this boy for years, that they had been friends for longer before that, that he was living across the country right now, and that she just needs time to end it. She asked me to wait for her.

So I did. I waited. But in the meantime I was out of my mind in love and in torment so I started “coming out” to my friends. I put it in quotations because it wasn’t the way I would eventually come out to my parents, with a serious conversation and a declaration. It was “I’m in love I need help” and then casually mentioning it was a girl, allowing space for any surprise (there was little) and rambling on about my confused heart. I still wasn’t sure if I was bisexual or gay, I just knew I loved Bernadette.

I went home for Christmas break that December, and they didn’t have space for me at the Barnes & Noble when I got back in January, so I got a different retail job, but we kept texting. A group of cashiers from my semester decided to get together at the end of the month, and she was acting a little strange. She wasn’t being as warm as usual, it almost felt like she was avoiding me. And then someone asked her if her boyfriend was coming. It turns out she forgot to mention that he moved to New York. The conversation shifted but she could tell I was upset. We did that thing that people always think is so sly but is actually very obvious and annoying where we texted each other despite being in the same room. She told me she had to give it another chance with him. She told me she was sorry. I told her she broke my heart. She kissed me on the cheek before she left and I thought that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t. Months went by and she still would tell me she missed me all the time. She was living with him and telling me not to give up on her, that we could still happen someday. She was still asking me to wait for her, while she did nothing to prove she was going to make good on her side of the deal. But I waited, of course I waited.

But in the meantime I had my own sexuality to reckon with. I had started telling my friends I liked girls, but what did that even mean to me? In the Fall of 2009, I moved back to New York, into my first non-dorm apartment. I was starting grad school, but it was still just the start of the semester, so I had some time on my hands. I went searching for a show that would give me the answers I sought — and honestly probably something to fill the gay void The L Word ending left — and ended up finding South of Nowhere.

I’m Not Going To Apologize For My Heart (2009-2019)

South of Nowhere ended up being a turning point for me. In one episode, Spencer talks to Ashley about maybe being gay. About how it scares her, but she thinks it’s true. Ashley tells her the truth of it: it can be great, it can suck, but one thing’s for sure, you can’t fight it. If you’re gay, you’re gay. And that’s okay. Spencer’s line of questioning mirrored my own so clearly that I knew then. I knew the truth. As the show went on, Spencer and Ashley’s relationship unclouded my vision, unmuddied my heart. I remember little moments so vividly — like Ashley kissing Spencer on the shoulder while they looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. This is what I wanted. And I wasn’t afraid of wanting it anymore.

So in December 2009, I came out to my parents. I said it plainly, and I meant it. “I’m gay.”

And then in 2010, TV started to follow suit. While South of Nowhere was really all I could find when I was looking for my next gay show in 2009*, the following year starting bearing more fruits. Lost Girl came to town with a bisexual succubus, Pretty Little Liars apparated into our lives with lesbian swimmer Emily Fields. Santana and Brittany started making out on Glee, I discovered (albeit a little late) the magic of Naomi and Emily from Skins. TV recaps and Twitter were starting to pick up popularity, so I started to find friends online who liked the same things I did. People who would squeal with me every time Santana and Brittany locked pinkies. People who also watched the Emaya Popcorn Kiss a hundred times. People who also had to find creative ways to get their weekly Doccubus fix because they didn’t live in Canada.

*It’s worth nothing here that Callie Torres was already Doing the Work on primetime TV at this point, but I hadn’t fallen into my Grey’s Anatomy addiction quite yet.

I remember little moments so vividly — like Ashley kissing Spencer on the shoulder while they looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. This is what I wanted. And I wasn’t afraid of wanting it anymore.

Pretty Little Liars fandom ended up being more important to me than the show itself. We had our own language, thanks to Heather Hogan’s recaps we all shared a love for. We had our own corner of the internet, #BooRadleyVanCullen, where we could be as weird and gay as we wanted, no judgement.

The more I was able to see myself on TV, the more I was able to see myself, full stop. I was finding context and language for things I’d always felt but never knew how to express. I felt less alone in my feelings — and even referenced Santana’s famous, “He’s just a stupid boy,” moment in my final email to Bernadette, where I explained why I couldn’t keep waiting for her.

And still, despite this uptick in queer TV, when I first started writing recaps of my own in 2012, there weren’t enough shows to cover, so I was writing about a show that only had a subtext femslash ship at the time. But then the next year, Orphan Black started, Rookie Blue‘s Gail Peck came out, and the ball kept rolling. We lived through the best of times

It’s hard to imagine that ten years ago, when I came out, I was so desperate for queer content I had to look to Canada to find anything. And while today Canada still gives us some of our queerest content, it’s not all we have. Now, when I’m with other queer people and we’re trying to describe ourselves to each other, we don’t have to do it in L Word characters alone; we have a much bigger pool to select from. Instead of trying to explain all the ways I’m like Dana Fairbanks but also not quite exactly like her, I can say I’m two parts Waverly Earp and one part Cosima Niehaus. Waverly spoke to me in similar way to how Willow spoke to me all those years before, but I know this story won’t end quite as tragically.

In fact, there’s so much queer content now that it’s almost impossible to keep up with it all. And sometimes it can feel frustrating — especially after years of being able to consume literally any and all queer content — to have to pick and choose, but at the same time it’s kind of liberating to not HAVE to watch a show just because it has queer content. It makes me so happy to think of the kids who won’t have to hide under the blankets to watch The L Word afraid people will figure them out, because there will be queer content on every channel. Teenagers won’t have to feel so guilty about wanting to kiss girls they can’t even imagine what it looks like, because they will have a wide variety of examples of what it could look like everywhere they turn.

It’s also hard to imagine that a decade after embracing the thing I had been fighting for a decade before that is now my entire life. I joke sometimes that I’m a professional lesbian because my queer identity is part of what qualifies me for one of my jobs. I get asked to be on panels about LGBTQ+ representation in the media, I’ve interviewed and met some of my favorite creators and portrayers of queer content. I’ve met most of my best friends through the TV shows we love and the queer characters we saw ourselves in. Basically what I’m saying is, in the past ten years, TV got gayer, and so did I. And I can only hope the pattern will continue in the next ten years.

Prone to Wander

The church in Brooklyn where my choir meets was dedicated in 1891.

We’re not a church choir, but we’ve gathered here for years. It’s vibrant, cozy, a community space: a purposeful home where we sing together for a few hours every Wednesday. Early arrivers arrange more than a hundred chairs in five long rows. We wear name tags on lanyards color-coded by voice part. Someone always brings clementines; someone else always brings fresh cookies.

I feel most at home when I’m singing in a space like this one, often a church or other place of worship where the rental fee is reasonable and the acoustics are dreamy. I’m a good enough singer, but nothing special. I thrive in singing groups because I’m a fastidious rule-follower: The notes on the page go up, and I move my voice up. The hairpin crescendo marking tells me to get louder, so I do. Discipline is key to successful choral singing, and I am the alto section’s Hermione Granger.

More importantly, choir is a welcome distraction when my brain wears thin like the threadbare elbow of an old sweater. Learning tough music can be frustrating, but it’s a thousand times gentler on my heart than the anxious rituals and unmoored sadness that often make up my daily life. I have been a musician for as long as I have been depressed: most of my life, with varying degrees of gravity. I took my first piano lessons in kindergarten; I joined the school chorus when I was 8; I saw my first therapist when I was 9; I considered suicide for the first time when I was 10; you get it.

Choral singing can do wonders for your health, according to a trove of research from the last 20 years. The physical mechanics of singing and the social connectedness of participating in a choir are apparently very good for you. The small army of devoted singers I spend Wednesdays with can confirm this, at least anecdotally. I feel in my core that there’s power in what we create when we come together every week.

But despite the comfort and joy I feel here, the stories we raise up through music don’t always feel like mine to tell. I’m queer and an atheist, two things that on their face might preclude me from something like choral singing, a practice with its roots in piety and prayer. The most storied choral works are masses, requiems, and other tributes to God, largely written by old white guys. Ave Maria and the Hallelujah chorus are so deeply ingrained in our culture, they’re the backgrounds to Black Friday commercials.

To be sure, the puritanical church choirs I’m calling to mind are not the only force in choral music. Choirs created by and for LGBTQ singers flourish around the world. Secular, pop, and world music have had profound influences on the genre. But all of these remain minorities; at choir, God reigns in more ways than one.

I sat in on an LGBTQ choir’s rehearsal before finding the group I sing with now. Everyone was warm and kind, but something about it didn’t feel like the right fit. My current group, unaffiliated but still welcoming, felt like home right away. In my choir, we talk — and argue — about what it means for everyone to feel like they belong here, from diversifying our repertoire to choosing not to divide singers by gender. The church where we rehearse is vocally pro-queer.

Still, I grapple with my participation on a regular basis: Am I upholding something archaic by giving so much of myself to a tradition that grew from faith? Would this composer have wanted someone like me singing his piece? Am I doing someone, something, a disservice?

Selfishly, I’m worried about what will happen if I say out loud that I’m uncomfortable with all this God, if I let my brain run its anxious course. If my atheist, queer, bipolar self comes to choir with me in all its unkempt glory, will I lose my safest place?

Because more than anything, I love to sing: the community of it, the music-making, even the minutiae of music theory that can turn people off from large, organized choirs. Music nourishes me; it’s why I spend three hours a week at choir rehearsal, even though my school days are far behind me. You’d think I would have learned to love around the God stuff — to focus on the soul-sustaining richness of music itself, rather than the implied deference to a belief system that’s not mine. For whatever reason, I love that too.

I came into atheism first as a convenience. The short version of the story: My dad is Jewish, my mom is Catholic, neither is particularly religious, and so they let my brother and me figure out faith ourselves. For many years, I celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah, both Easter and Passover, but never understood what either really meant.

Growing up, I accepted that most people were religious. My closest friends in middle school — the first time I had close friends — were devout Christians. One bought me a Teen Study Bible, a shiny violet book that told me my parents’ interfaith marriage was a bad idea. I started wondering if I might be queer soon after, and my Bible took a hard stance on that, too. It didn’t take long to shift from not believing in anything in particular to affirming that I didn’t believe in God at all.

At my early, middle-school choir concerts, the repertoire was formulaic: an upbeat gloria to open the show, a praiseful laudate after that, perhaps a psalm in the middle, and a crowd-pleasing gospel tune before the final bow. I loved to quiz my parents in the car on the way home from those concerts, eagerly asking about their favorite songs, their favorite moments, whether this chord or that one gave them chills like it did for me.

Both my parents noticed, lightheartedly, the overly religious makeup of the program. “Lotta Jesus in that one,” my dad would joke, and I felt bad for subjecting him to two hours of proselytizing.

My middle school choir director would ask our permission to pray together before every concert. If nobody protested — and nobody ever did — we’d bow our heads as he thanked God for bringing us together and asked for us to sing as best we could. My high school director didn’t ask permission. He would simply say, “Let’s pray.”

I knew all of it made me feel weird — this was public school, after all. But I loved singing too much to make a fuss, and I didn’t want to call attention to myself by dissenting.

So we prayed. And instead of ignoring the omnipresence of God in the choir room, I fell in love with it.

It started song by song. My school choir, or one of the extracurricular choirs I begged my parents to pay for, would learn some classical, praiseful piece, and I’d listen to nothing else for weeks on end. Despite my strict godlessness, I heard my own stories — and my own anxieties — echoed in the sacred texts.

When my best friend and I had an irreconcilable falling out, for example, I repeated the text of the Prayer of St. Francis in my head like a mantra: “Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace / where there is hatred, let me sow love.” I auditioned to sing that opening phrase as a solo, knowing his mother would be sitting in the audience. I made eye contact with her as I sang, begging forgiveness.

I’ve sung a dozen versions of Psalm 23 (though my favorite is a treble arrangement by Z. Randall Stroope): “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Maybe I didn’t see myself at the table prepared so carefully by the Lord, but I clung to the refrain like a cry for help, a plea with the universe that everything would work out in the end: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” When I sang it, I added a question mark.

High school also invited my first real mental health breakdowns — the kind where my classmates reported me to the guidance counselor, worried for my safety. Pre-internet and without any mental health education, I had no vocabulary for the terrible feelings I couldn’t shake. When I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the words choked in my throat, too big to speak into reality. I looked for language in choral music, but still something seemed wrong — like overstepping, like taking something that’s not mine.

The song that’s stayed with me the longest is “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” an 18-century Christian hymn popularized by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and arranged by its longtime director, Mack Wilberg. (This performance of the piece, with its swelling string accompaniment and palatial acoustics, is one of my favorite musical moments ever recorded.)

I heard a high school choir perform the piece at a state festival when I was in the ninth grade. That same night, I downloaded it on iTunes and got a copy of the sheet music, which I played over and over again on my piano at home.

Of course the music affected me; the melody catches in my ears for days at a time even some 15 years later. But more than that, the lyrics glued themselves to my heart, especially the resounding chorus: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it / Prone to leave the God I love.”

“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” is canonically Christian: a retelling of 1 Samuel 7:12, in which the prophet Samuel gives thanks for God’s divine grace. (To be clear, I Googled this.)

The text is dripping with God: precious blood, streams of mercy, a promise of judgement by courts on high. Still, I hear it as something more fundamental even than faith: a gut-wrenching pleading with the self, a distraught inner monologue that mimics the anxiety I have every day. What if I’m not worthy? What if I ruin everything I have, everything I love?

In overanalyzing this song for this essay, I realized how much the text reminds me of something entirely but maybe not unrelated: iconic lesbian pop song “Back In Your Head,” and the moment when Tegan and Sara sing, “I’m not unfaithful, but I’ll stray / when I get a little scared.” They’re singing about a relationship, about glancing toward the door when things get hard, but what if they’re not talking about a relationship at all?

What if we’re all saying the same thing?

Two years in a row, the first weeks of my Brooklyn choir rehearsal coincided with the unexpected death of a young queer person in my life. By the second year, the weight of the losses sent me into a depression so intense, I became a phantom of myself. I hovered through the motions of my life detached and blank; for months I tiptoed around suicidality.

When I was in middle school, a local family was involved in a horrific car crash that killed three people: a student from a nearby school’s choir, her sister, and their father. The student’s choir director, Dr. Jeffery Ames, composed a piece titled “In Remembrance” mourning the lost family members.

In the score notes, Dr. Ames wrote: “This piece reflects my sadness, for I know I will never see their smiling faces again on this earth. However, this piece also reflects my joy, for I know they are at rest and I will one day see them again in Heaven.”

I listened to “In Remembrance” a lot after my friends’ deaths. Again and again, the emotional power of the song pummeled me: “Turn to me and be gracious, for my heart is in distress.” “Oh God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In the final line, Dr. Ames makes a humble request of God: “Lord, in your infinite mercy, grant them rest / rest forevermore.”

I am the type of atheist who recognizes, with great dissonance, that believing in God could smooth out a lot for me — big, weighty questions whose answers I can’t find in the science I know and trust. What if I believed there was a purpose behind the heartsick I feel almost every day? What if I knew, with Dr. Ames’ admirable certainty, that Peter and Casey are at rest? Why, with all my self-sabotaging disquiet and doubt, am I here?

I long for that kind of clarity, but I cannot bring myself to find it in God. Singing this text is a sort of comfort — an acknowledgement that someone believes this — but it’s a compromise nonetheless.

The thing is that I can’t let myself get too comfortable; not even here. It’s too easy to feel like I’m intruding or co-opting in this space, like at any minute someone will find me out and expose me as a fraud.

After all, it was a former choir director’s spouse who picked a fight with me on Facebook recently about some social issue — abortion or marriage equality or fair pay, I can’t remember — making it clear I wasn’t ever really welcome where I thought I once had been.

After all, the songs I cherish most are performed at churches where my marriage couldn’t have taken place, heralded at services where pastors warn their congregants about people like me, played on car radios of the voters who think I’m a danger to their children.

After all, when I came out late in high school, the few friends who disappeared were Christian friends. Choir friends.

But I love singing for what it is. God or no God, music supports my well-being, so I make it a priority, even if I second-guess myself with every breath. (I realized recently that I’m exactly 100 years younger than the walls that contain our voices every Wednesday night. Who am I to tell them what it means?)

Sometimes when anxiety overtakes my day, my wife nudges, “Why don’t you go sing in the shower for a little bit?” This has always been the case. Singing is one of the few coping mechanisms that can uplift my mood or snap me out of a panic attack. And so I drag myself to rehearsal through my depression and my anxiety and my doubts, even on the days I can barely leave my bed for work. There are songs to sing, downbeats to follow, measures to mark. Distractions. There’s no time for self-loathing at rehearsal.

A few months ago I felt so unworthy of my own life I could barely move. I went to choir anyway. We were polishing Stroope’s “Caritas et Amor,” a haunting setting of a classic text about God’s charity and love. I adore this song; it’s my top Spotify track of 2019. For weeks, it played in the back of my head as I wondered quietly how long I could keep this up.

More than once I waded through a thick black cloud of depression to rehearsal just to sing this piece, whose forceful magic transported me someplace else, someplace far away from the church and my body and my broken brain. More than once I shook with tears at the song’s booming crux: “Gaudium quod immensum est.” A joy which is immense.

At the end of this particular rehearsal and the walk to the subway afterward, I wept and wept and couldn’t stop and knew it was time for something to change. I could not make sense of the sharp split down the middle of my heart — the rapid-cycling effects of bipolar made tangible, audible. I loved this piece so much I wanted to die in it. I felt so sad all the time, all the time, all the time.

I hadn’t made up my mind yet as I veered off course, away from the train station, toward a narrow turn I know Brooklyn drivers take too fast. I stepped toward the glow of approaching headlights — and then back to the sidewalk.

I got home fine, like it had never happened.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.

At rehearsal a couple of weeks ago, I stood up to practice a solo and botched it — really, utterly made a fool of myself in front of a lot of people I respect. On my way out, I kept apologizing to my peers for how messy I’d sounded. I had a panic attack when I got home and cried in the shower until it passed.

It’s not that I take mistakes too seriously — I do, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is what happens if I let my guard down too much. One slip might betray all the truths about myself that I work so hard to leave at the church door. And then what?

I know I won’t find the answer in songs about God. What I’ve realized is that I never have, not really. The library of text I hold so dear is a container for questions I’m already asking, something I mold like soft clay in my hands until it’s familiar to me. It’s not mine to redefine, but it doesn’t need redefinition. Maybe it’s enough; maybe I am too.

The singing itself is the real answer: this ritual I’ve cherished since I was too young to know myself, this constant that’s outlasted any lover and stayed by my side for 20 years as others have come and gone. It’s okay to let myself love something. It’s okay to let it love me back. A joy which is immense.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d call it sacred.

Uncovering My Secret Queer Family History

I was sixteen when my mother received a phone call informing her that Marge, the woman who had named me, had been dead for three months, buried without fanfare in a cemetery the caller would not name.

The news of the death arrived with the ostentatious dread of an old prophecy, something that had been expected and prepared for despite our fervent hopes. Marge, my grandmother’s best friend, was old enough that her death was inevitable, a life that had grown smaller and smaller as she tallied each and every passing death of almost everyone she had ever known. She tallied the deaths of friends, casual acquaintances whose absences made each room she encountered in her day-to-day seem both emptier and smaller, her unmarried siblings, the people she loved.

The reward for outliving everyone was hardly one at all: a room in a nursing home only made bearable by the things she had brought with her, ordinary comforts made meaningful by the mythic pangs of memory. Marge was utilitarian by nature, a natural aesthetic leaning encouraged and honed by her years as an Army Corps nurse in Korea and Vietnam. I imagine a lined drawer or keepsake box filled with well-ordered rows of insignia ribbons, badges festooned with the thick metal wings of hawks or angels, each of them kept guarded not only against thieves but to some extent from herself. When touched, each of them unpeeled a memory, raw and unsoothed, a bandage thick with a bloodied unchanged dressing. One would evoke the gunmetal smell of a surgical tent and bright open wounds, another the marrow-breaking cold of a Korean winter, which no training program could have ever prepared her for.

Here were her keepsakes, her family of ghosts. When she died, these items were taken out and disposed of one by one, emptied and scrounged and sanitized for the next person to pass through, as if she had never been there at all.

It was my grandmother Madeline who knew Marge was gay but never quite unlocked a way to tell her that she knew it, the pieces of her knowing as unfathomable as a polymath’s codex. I didn’t find out myself until years after she had died.

When I think of Marge now, her hands are as interchangeable as my grandmother’s: veined, soft, sallow. I took a photo of her on a manual camera the morning of my b’nei mitzvah, all jowls and half-lidded eyes frustrated by the stories they somehow could not tell. She was the woman who served as a proxy and conduit after my grandmother died when I was a baby. Marge’s mere presence in my life linked me to my grandmother through bearing witness as her best friend, stories of the banal and the extraordinary.

They had met while working in a hospital in Miami in the 1960’s, my grandmother a head radiographer and Marge a head nurse, and together they bonded over how to solve and mend the inner-workings of the body, and perhaps in a way themselves. In refitting a femur pulverized like bottle fragments against brick, maybe Madeline told Marge about how her first husband had left her with three young children and no forwarding address, or how her second husband had fractured parts of his spine after hitting his head on the bottom of a swimming pool and her daughter, her youngest, had pulled him to safety. Or perhaps Marge told Madeline of her tours in Korea and how after the war, one soldier’s mother had asked her if Marge had been the one to hold him as he died; how Marge had told this mother yes, even though it was a lie, because she knew that somewhere, another nurse had held this soldier in the exact same way as his eyes glossed over and his hand fell away from his final wound, as the Korean winter settled into his deadened lungs. She knew this in her marrow to be true: that this soldier had died with someone holding him, and that lies are sometimes told with kindness.

In these stories, both Marge and Madeline chose to find family within each other, and from there I understood, as I heard these stories from Marge after my grandmother had died, and then from my mother after Marge had gone, that such a thing could be done. It is why in that photo from my b’nei mitzvah, time happens in reverse: the yellow frock Marge wears begins to thaw from her body and the constraints of time, rearranging the seams and stitches into the uniforms of her past, as her wrinkles recede and smooth themselves on a same but younger face, and I look to understand why Marge’s last secret was kept by her and her alone.

When I was born, it was Marge my mother spoke to on the phone after telling my grandmother the news, announcing my way into the world. Already, my mother was worried, she told Marge. It was about my name.

What’s wrong with the name? Marge said, impatient. The name my parents had given me sounded fine. But my mother was worried it was too cute, she told Marge. She was worried that I would never be taken seriously. There were so many things already stacked against me in this world, my mother knew, even if she wasn’t aware of all of them quite yet. There were so many ways in which the world could hurt a person. Though unspoken, both knew that Marge was a person who knew that better than anyone.

What if they become a lawyer, a judge? No one is going to take them seriously as a judge, not with that name, my mother said.

Marge paused, her breath filled with portent.

J.E. Reich, she said. They’ll call the kid J.E. Reich. The Honorable J.E. Reich.

And with that, Marge hung up, as if imparting a name to someone was as simple as threading a stitch through an open lesion, sore with light; as if the act of giving a name could never do something as drastic as determine a future.

My mother only told me this story after Marge died, the same year I came out to her, the same year I adopted J.E. Reich as my pen name. After Marge’s death – after I came into my own, a thing she never did, inept, stumbling and earnest to be anew – here I was, born twice.

My mother told me Marge was gay during an afternoon at her house we spent rifling through photographs. Until then, I had always thought my family was one bereft of photographs, the kind passed down in leather-bound albums and shoe boxes older than grandparents. There were reasons for this, but the main one was that I am the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and the very few things that had survived that genocide were people, not things. I imagine that my father’s parents knew the burden of artifacts more than most people – that in their experience these things were so easily destroyed – and that worse than the unnerving burden of preserving them was the weight of their inevitable demise.

But this wasn’t the case for my mother’s family, a fact I so easily forgot, and so there we were, sorting through piles of photographs I had never seen, organizing them and placing them into newer, sturdier boxes in anticipation of my mother’s move from her house in Pittsburgh for a new job in Miami.

Unearthing the photographs was its own kind of ritual. My mother pointed at the faces of each person in each photograph and paired them with the names of long-dead relatives, conjuring anecdotes only recited at infrequent family reunions.

That one’s your great uncle Frank, said my mother, identifying a middle-aged man in a dark, high-collared suit whose only imprecision was that the wearer slouched like an insecure teen boy in a prom photo. The little I knew of Frank could be summed up in a brief list of secondhand intimacies: that a spinal defect made him drag one foot when he walked, that the kisses he gave my mother as a child were wet and were meant to overcompensate for what little they had in common, that the only person he ever told secrets to was my grandfather – his brother – and that those secrets were never repeated.

He was probably gay, you know, she said offhandedly, passing me the photograph. Frank had been a self-described lifelong bachelor, a man who pointedly came to functions without a date on his arm, a man who, when asked about his prospects, would answer with coarse rejoinders, proclaiming that all a wife would do would steal his money.

I stared at the photo of a man I would never meet, a man I barely knew, and a relief fluttered somewhere behind my clavicle. What I felt was something beyond recognition, beyond the tight coil of genetics. What I felt was proof that I wasn’t the first one in my family, that this isolation had been felt by someone who came before me. I wasn’t alone.

Aunt Marge was gay, too, my mother added after the brief discussion of Frank had passed, after I asked where the photographs of Marge were. (There weren’t any.)

Mom knew. We all knew, my mother told me. It wasn’t that she had the proclivities of a tomboy well into adulthood, or that she was tall, that her jaw was narrow and masculine, or that her dates with men were few and far between, that maybe those dates never happened at all. It was the silence around the subject that made the unspoken all the more true. The things we knew about Marge only added up to a shadow of a story, and now here I was, determined to recover the rest.

Later, my mother would tell me that she had never said that about Frank, that it had been a concoction of my own romanticism. And maybe that’s true. When you’re queer, a part of you is disinherited from family folklore. Instead, it’s replaced with a dreaded contemplation: if your ancestors were to meet you, would they hate you for who you are, despite the blood that binds you? Maybe, in Frank, I was looking for another kind of certainty.

After that, I tried my best to piece together the fragments of the woman who gave me my name, which I did with the clumsiness of an amateur archaeologist. I dove into an endless loop of fruitless internet searches for her military records, all of which were, in the end, out of reach – I wasn’t her next of kin, after all, not in the traditional sense, so whatever records there were could legally not be released to me. I had always been told that Marge was one of a handful of Army nurses in the Korean War who served as the basis for the character of Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the television show M*A*S*H, and so I streamed hours upon hours of episodes on Hulu, hoping to catch a glimpse of Marge in the way the actress who played her tilted her head, hardened her mouth, called other people to attention. The irony that Hot Lips Houlihan was a character that was desperately heterosexual throughout the series’ run is one that isn’t lost on me.

One hours-long session at my computer yielded a photograph of a handful of women during the Korean War known as the Lucky Thirteen, members of the 1st Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit who were part of the first to be dispatched onto the front lines in 1950, made famous for surviving an attack while en route from Inchon to Pusan by hiding in a roadside ditch. One woman in the photo smiled with an open mouth but refused to show her teeth: the same way Marge used to smile. I called my mother, my voice trembling with discovery, and sent her a screenshot for confirmation. I had found her, I had confirmed her heroics, her uniqueness, and this revelation would lead to others, I was sure of it. I would find the missing pieces to a life once lived, my queer mirror.

Later, I would find another photograph of the Lucky Thirteen, ones that listed their names in accordance with their faces, from left to right. Marge’s name was not among them. The closest I had come to her story was not her story at all, but someone else’s. Here I was, failing my queer foremother, the woman who had given me my name. Here I was, with nothing to give her in return.

It seemed like an unspoken given in my family that my grandmother’s best friend was in love with her, a thing we all knew about and agreed about, a thing of lilting futility.

When I first started to wonder about the story of Marge and the secrets of my queer family history, this is where I thought I’d begin. These were the words that came to me when I looked at a picture of a woman I thought was Marge. I wished I could give her a love story, the way a scallop offers up its own opalescent, trembling flesh after a knife cleaves open its shell.

Now I realize that this thought was a selfish sort of mythmaking, or something even worse: it was erasing her story a second time for the sake of my own comfort. I wanted an ending, or even a beginning, that would counteract the empty spaces where her stories should have been. I wanted something neat and lyrical and episodic, something that would have done justice for a woman who died alone, the woman who gave me my name. Instead, all I can give her is my grief and apologies she will never hear: that I never heard the love stories she might have once had, and that no one is left to remember them.

Here is what I didn’t tell you I found: the place where she is buried. All of my internet searches and research yielded that final resting place. Her body lies in a verdant green square in a cemetery for veterans in South Carolina. The words on her gravestone are sparse: her name, her rank, the year she was born and the year she died, and the words “Korea” and “Vietnam.”

One day, I will travel to this place, where I will finally say goodbye to the woman who named me. One day I will place a stone on her marker, a Jewish custom of remembrance, though Marge was brought up Catholic. I will trace her name etched in stone with my thumb and apologize for a world that left her silent, and promise that because of her, I will fight. And after that, I will sit, and listen, and wait.

Getting Stonewalled at Stone Mountain

Stone Mountain is located in Stone Mountain Park, 3,200 acres of forest speckled with outdoor attractions, dining, shopping, and even golf. Amidst all this natural beauty is the highest relief sculpture in the world: the Confederate Memorial Carving. Towering four hundred feet above the ground ride three Confederate figures on horseback, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The carving of these Southern Civil War leaders began in 1915, spearhead by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). That same year, the then defunct Ku Klux Klan proclaimed its modern rebirth with a cross burning at the summit of Stone Mountain. But it would take decades of work before UDC’s vision became Georgia’s unfortunate reality. Even when the park officially opened to the public on April 14, 1965 — the hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — its anti-Civil Rights centerpiece was incomplete. Two years after the 1968 publication of “The Confederacy Rides Again—In Granite” in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10,000 visitors attended the memorial’s dedication on May 9, 1970.

Today, the largest Confederate monument in the world is a homing beacon for modern Ku Klux Klan activities; for over fifty years it was the location for an annual Labor Day cross-burning ceremony, all in the name of hate and white supremacy. In 2016 the mountain and its sacred history to second and third national Klansmen drew a number of Confederate flag welding radicals for a white power event. As recently as last year, Klan organizers were planning a pro-white rally known as “Rock Stone Mountain II,” but were denied a permit by local authorities who cited the event as a “clear and present danger” to public safety. Despite the breadth of news articles and opinion pieces, this monumental dilemma remains protected by state law — in 1958 the state of Georgia bought the dome monadnock and all the surrounding land. Post the Charleston church shooting in 2015 there emerged a nationalwide movement to remove monuments, flags, statues, and public works that pay homage to the confederacy. Yet, the Confederate carving on Stone Mountain remains unaltered.

I knew none of this when I agreed to go to Stone Mountain Park. I was just a recently transplanted northerner working in the south looking to celebrate the Fourth of July with a backyard barbeque, like any good American. And yet there I was, at the suggestion and accompaniment of a friend, staring at an Americana mosh-pit. Necklaces and toys intermittently glowed red, white, and blue: a constellation of stars and stripes pulsating on earth. Families on red and white picnic blankets strained against the humidity, excessive body heat, and restless that comes from waiting.

After a brief welcome and service announcement The Star-Spangled Banner began to play. We all rose to the overwhelming sound of the national anthem, the lyrics filling the space between us and the rock face. Supposedly the Fantastic Fourth Celebration at Stone Mountain, is an epic firework display with state-of-the-art visual effects. Though to be honest, I can’t recall the actual show itself. I know from YouTube and conversations with past attendees that the ending is Elvis’ “American trilogy.” That at the moment when the pyrotechnics can’t get any more mind-numbing “Dixie” also known as “Dixieland” or “I wish I was in Dixie” — the best-known song to come out of blackface minstrelsy — animates the men on horseback.

I don’t clearly remember this macabre display of revisionist history because at one some point in that patriotic experience my friend began to get restless. During the National Anthem, as we shifted from one swollen foot to the other, my friend leaned in to ask if I thought this was an extended version. Just then, in the midst of shrugging my shoulders, I heard, “What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

I wish I could tell you he was white. That he wore red, white, and blue, starting from the vizor of his MAGA hat down to the confederate belt buckle looped through his denim jeans. That’s the image we want to see when we think of racism; it’s the snapshot of a person that we can compartmentalize and file away under white supremacy, fascist patriarchy, and “to be avoided.” But he wasn’t white, and his clothing was innocuous. And yet, maybe we should have been more cautious. How were we to know that we were being watched? At what point should we have realized our conversation was being listened to? What was it about a question exchanged between two friends, that gave him the right to make us feel unwanted? There he stood surrounded by his family, all of them girls, just like us, only younger and with darker skin. “What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

That question, despite the heat, caused the hairs on my forearms to rise. Could I have misheard? It rang ceaselessly in my ears, echoed on. It bounded off the faces of President Davis and Generals Lee and Jackson to come back and hit me squarely in my colored stomach. I didn’t know a microaggression could have such a bodily impact. An almost gelatinous weight, not unlike the patriotic Jell-O molds surrounding me. It gathered in the pit of my stomach and made me acutely aware of the space my body was taking up — my presence in relation to my location.

This was a dangerous place. I absorbed the realization from the ground up; the baseness of the mountain and all it commemorated sucked up into my Fourth of July flipflops. I wanted to kick them off, to run along Stonewall Jackson Drive as fast as I could and leave that Southern experience behind me. But I didn’t run, and every Fourth of July I see that towering monument, I hear the bitter question, “What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

I don’t live in the South anymore. My relocation is not in direct correlation to my experience at Stone Mountain, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t rejoice at the distance put between me and the sweet tea States by my new appointment. As for my experience, there are always people of color who can relate, who have a similar story of their own. In fact, many said, “Well, that’s to be expected.”

There was that word again: Expect.

“What, were you expecting it to be sung in Spanish?”

“Well, that’s to be expected.”

“You went to Stone Mountain, did you really expect anything different?”

Yes, I did. Internalized white supremacy cannot and should not be expected as a fact of life, nationally memorialized, and played to the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner.