af+ personal essay

af+ personal essay

baby steps

af+

Our Birth Story Has Severe Features

Our birth story has everything: preclampsia with severe features, catheters, bloody explosions, ginger ale, nurses from heaven, a birthing ball used as a chair and the eventual debut of a…

Riese —

Apr 8, 2025

af+ personal essay

baby steps

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Baby Steps #6: The Best Laid Birth Plans

Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it — and if there’s anything I can say about our little Prenatal Birth & Labor class, it is…

Riese —

Feb 5, 2025

af+ personal essay

baby steps

queer pregnancy

Baby Steps #5: Fixing the Window

“If I’d made it this far into the pregnancy without being forced to face the reality that has inspired many of my generation to forego reproduction altogether, I could do…

Riese —

Jan 22, 2025

af+ personal essay

baby steps

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Baby Steps #4: And I Feel God At This Baby Shower Tonight

“When it comes to baby showers, my wife was pretty certain about what she wanted: not to have one.”

Riese —

Jan 8, 2025

af+ personal essay

baby steps

queer pregnancy

Baby Steps #3: Allegedly Essential Baby Products, Looking for Gays On The Baby App and Surveillance Anxiety

Of the many allegedly essential items we must procure for our baby — how many are actually essential and why do I feel so weird about surveillance products? Also: trying…

Riese —

Dec 17, 2024

af+ personal essay

baby steps

queer pregnancy

Baby Steps #2: Telling Chosen Family, Bonding With Heterosexuals and a Lot of Dog Feelings

When do you start telling people that you’re pregnant and how should you do it? Is pregnancy the great equalizer when it comes to the straight family gaze? Do unborn…

Riese —

Dec 3, 2024

af+ personal essay

baby steps

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Baby Steps #1: How We Got Gay Pregnant

My wife and I are having a baby and this is the first edition of Baby Steps, a column about the gestation and eventual birth of this human child who…

Riese —

Nov 19, 2024

af+ personal essay

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I Am Not Lorelai Gilmore But I Also Kind of Am

“Suddenly I was pregnant. And then I was a dropout. And then I was a single mother. I had no money or resources outside of my deeply evangelical family, the…

Kristen Arnett —

Sep 25, 2024

13 Days of A+

af+ personal essay

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The Eras of My Bisexuality

She was the straight, white, Christian girl who was so picture perfect no one could dislike her.

Em Win —

Jan 8, 2024

13 Days of A+

af+ personal essay

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Shame as a Black, Autistic Queer Elder

“Toward the end of our stay in Mississippi, a 24-hour crisis line started up. I called them almost every weeknight.”

Gloria Jackson-Nefertiti —

Dec 31, 2023

13 Days of A+

af+ personal essay

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Apparently, Shame Tastes Like My Cunt

“The other partners I had throughout much of my time in sex work were uncomfortable at best and shaming at worst. They were jealous and confused. ‘How can you interact…

Gia Jones —

Dec 30, 2023

13 Days of A+

af+ personal essay

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“Too Queer, Too Smart” for Abuse

“They didn’t hit me. They didn’t throw me. They didn’t throw the phones, the glasses, the blow dryers, at me. They were just near me and it was always somehow…

Holly —

Dec 26, 2023