Results for: work in progress
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The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better)
Is a soft butch a soft butch if she can barely hold even herself together? Is a soft butch a soft butch without her swagger?
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I Have a Mild Case of COVID-19 and I’m Battling it Out at Home
When I told my partner I thought I needed to call the 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.
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How Queer YA Novels Taught Me to Write My Own Happy Ending
Maybe, she finds herself thinking, there could be space for joy in this new life. Maybe, she dreams, as she finishes the last page and immediately starts the book over again, this is not so hopeless after all.
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How to Quit Smoking
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.
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“Transparent” Changed Me (And TV) Forever
“Do you have something to tell us?” my mom joked. It was a joke, because of course I didn’t. “No,” I said with a laugh. And I thought I was telling the truth.
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The None-est of All: My Journey as a Reluctant, Disabled Athlete
Watching them sweat from my spa on the sidelines, I’d thank my body. On the one hand, so humiliating; on the other, its own defense mechanism against the wretchedness of exercise.
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The Might-Have-Been
I was only pregnant for seven and a half weeks before my miscarriage. There was no body, no breath; there was no measurable part of a lifetime spent together. I’d only known there was life inside my body for three and half weeks, and yet the experience seems to still have a heartbeat.
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Carrying Heavy Shit: Teaching and Unteaching Gender in the Wilderness
“There’s an easily accessible narrative in wilderness travel, to pretend we’re living outside of society, and to strive to create a better version of it. The temptation to argue that “x doesn’t really matter out here” rears its head in all of the usual places: race, socioeconomics, gender, age. What I’ve come to struggle with in the canoe, and years later, is which way to go. To continue my first argument, to dismantle gender, or to teach gender – to teach what it means to be a strong, dirty woman, to ask my co-instructor to teach positive masculinity.”
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How to Dismantle Your Imposter Syndrome One Episode of Murder She Wrote at a Time
Before Angela Lansbury told women they were partly to blame for sexual assault, she helped me with my imposter syndrome.
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Line Breaks for Resistance: How Black Poetry Lets Us Rescue Ourselves
If Alice Walker once said “hard times require furious dancing,” then hard times call for reading poetry, particularly black poets. Follow zaynab’s journey in reconnecting with black poetry as a means of daily survival and understand why reading the work of black poets can enhance our collective understandings of what it means to cultivate and sustain resistance.
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Birth of The Nintendo Generation
It was the end of my innocence when I realized that being Black or being Queer in this country could get you killed. This was the time before Hurricane Katrina, before 9/11, before Ferguson. Before. Before. Before.
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My Trans Body as a State of Desire
“My brain is lit like the map of a major metropolis at night. My body is, too. ‘I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire,’ Anaïs Nin wrote, and that’s pretty much it. Or, put another way: I have found an affirmation of selfhood, and I haven’t thought to immediately annul it.”
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Life, Death and Surrender: It’s Hard to Know When It’s Time to Say Goodbye
On losing a pet, resilience and vulnerability, human frailty and animal intelligence, and everything that goes into saying goodbye.
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Winter Is Coming: Diary of a SAD Girl #1
“Time Change Sunday is my personal gateway to hell. It gets dark earlier (and then earlier and earlier). It gets cold in the morning and night (and then stays cold all day and all day). I stay inside to keep warm and then I stay inside because I don’t want to leave and then I stay inside because I can’t get out of bed.”
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I’m Just A Small-Town Lesbian Wearing Flannel, Building Community
“But for change to happen, for the community I want to grow, someone has to stay. Someone has to wear the flannel not just because of its function.”
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She Wouldn’t Give Me Up
“I remember everything: what normal felt like all through college in my relationship with her — an attractive and charismatic woman who was also a compulsive liar and an abusive lover. Of course it didn’t start out that way. Insane realities rarely do.”
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Gay, Interrupted: On Navigating Gaybourhoods As A Queer Brown Woman
Gay districts are safer, more open and more profitable than ever before, but for whom?
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Seeking Queer Theology And Perfect Love That Casts Out Fear
If we don’t abundantly love each other, we can’t have an abundant relationship with God. I must embrace an interpretation of my faith that requires unconditional love for queer people because any less would be to deny my own humanity and that of my community.
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Because I’m Black, Too
“That risks making a wound of my blackness. My blackness is not a wound; it is a gift I’m trying, consciously and earnestly, to understand and protect and witness.”
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The Ersatz Emancipation of Femininity: On Being a Bulimic, Brown Lesbian
“When I was thirteen years old I began starving myself. I did so, in short, because I wanted so desperately to be thin. And by thin, I mainly meant white.”