“We spoke up. Hell, this was post-#MeToo era. We were heroes. I was… a hero. So, why did I feel so much shame when, a year later, a woman sexually assaulted me?”

“Thank you for pushing me down a ramp so quickly that I slammed into a wall.”

“I’ve always loved the water. Before top surgery, when my discomfort with my body was at an all time high, swimming was the one thing I could do that gave me a sense of freedom. It felt safe to connect to my body in an environment where I could be weightless and enjoy moving with ease. I could be held by something when I was too self conscious to be touched by other people. I learned to swim in the pool at a hotel gym near the house I grew up in. My father taught me…”

“I drove so fast away from her, that house, that man, that job, those lost friends, those queer dance parties, that supportive church, the community I created, without a single sound.”

“I could start a Youtube channel or a blog about disability rights and monetize it. FUCK. I don’t know how to turn it off.”

“I wanted to have nightmares about monsters or mass shootings. It was too embarrassing — in the midst of global catastrophe — to be concerned with something as frivolous as high school.”

Or, the queer urge to almost form a cult with a straight woman.

“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 my fault.”

For a split second, I thought about her racial calculations, not because I felt I needed to know, but because maybe, finally, someone might be like me. I knew our skin colors carried the weight of the same questions.

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

“Legislators pass laws enabling families to control children and defund social services that support them, all in the name of protecting the wealthy, white, girl body. These policies, which are part of the theater of stranger danger discourse, endanger children by isolating them in their homes, where Lego fortresses can become wine cellars, tombs. JonBenét as a symbol becomes the sacrifice used to sustain this system. Her story becomes a dark illustration of the consumption of the violence and abuse inflicted on girls and women.”

“My wife and son didn’t know; no one knew. The guilt crept up when I unloaded the groceries in the kitchen, stolen and paid-for alike.”

“I identified as a heterosexually-inclined bisexual when I started giving hand jobs for money, and I left more or less a lesbian. It wasn’t the only factor in that transformation, but boy was it a major one.”

“You’re at a party; you’re on vacation; it’s your lunch break. You feel good, or maybe just bored, or maybe a little reckless, and you scan the room, the beach, the restaurant. You stop scanning. And she winks, or he grins, or they realize you caught them staring and blush awkwardly at their own feet for a thousand years, and when they finally look back up, that’s it.”

“It was a predatory smile that he flashed at us, the rest of his pack, expecting us to become predators with him and start howling along.”

The entire story of our entire trip from California to Michigan and also all the bigger stories and the smaller ones, too.

Rachel: “The writing & philosophy class I was required to take freshman year mostly sucked. But there was this one girl, Lizz, who seemed cool. She wore comic book tshirts and had beautiful shiny hair. One day after class, I announced to a friend, ‘Lizz is not straight. I can just tell.'”
Lizz: “There was something about Rachel that I just couldn’t shake. She spent a lot of time quoting feminist theorists who I’d never heard of and she had what I would later come to call ‘Congenital Gay Face.'”

“The threat to move to Michigan was always made in a specific context: some element of my life fell apart and I didn’t know how to fix it or myself.”

This is a story about the family that I lost and found and almost found at various The Cheesecake Factory restaurants across America.

The absolutely true autobiography of a liar.