Results for: queer parenting
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Gender Fluidity and the Black Atlantic
I always wonder what words my ancestors had for someone like me. In embracing my genderfluid identity, I’ve found great comfort in the deep and wide of the Atlantic — the way the water connects me to kin, named or unknown.
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The Angsty Buddhist: Growing Up Kinda-Sorta Buddhist
At my Catholic all-girls middle school, I liked to tell people I was Buddhist. It was my feeble attempt at preteen rebellion. I enjoyed interjecting, “Oh yeah? Well, I don’t believe Jesus was real because I’m Buddhist!”
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The Birth and Death of a Name
This is the story of the birth and death of my name, which means that it is a story about transition, which means that it is necessarily a story about the border between two places and the force with which one rends it.
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Wrestling With Kamala and Beyond: Reckoning With Blackness, Womanhood, and What Comes Next
I am ready to be fearless. To dream beyond Black womanhood and know that I — Black, queer, and not-quite-sure — am worthy, so worthy of all of the love, affirmation, and power the universe can muster.
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When Love Is A Matter Of Desperation
Loneliness is an old bedfellow of mine; despair, my oldest friend. If I can come to embrace those parts of myself I’ve always tried to push away — perhaps, that is the only lifelong love I can count on.
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Making Amends with Valentine’s Day
I hid behind instruments, computers, Whitney’s voice, Prince’s guitar. I sat in front of my computer surrounded by cassettes, illegally downloading songs, awkwardly whispering “I love you more than I know how to explain and I’m scared so here’s a mixtape I made you.”
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Growing Up With “Mucho Mucho Amor”: How Walter Mercado Defined My Life
I grew up in a conservative family so I never really knew the words to describe who I was but when I saw Walter Mercado in his finery and elegance, I knew I was like him.
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The Labyrinth Closet
We’re always coming out. As an: anime fanatic, manga-collecting Pokémon plushie hoarder; as a giddy, youthful ray of sunshine and not just the dense, American Dream-deprived immigrant, prompted over-thinker — I realize I am more than any of these individual rooms at all times.
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Finding My Own Chinese American Community Through KTV
I’ve heard so many times that Asian America is about being caught tragically in the space between, never fully accepted in the U.S. and too Westernized to ever be Asian. Listening to my friends, I thought there was something defiant about singing in languages that we were told would never be ours, languages that this country wanted to force us to forget.
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The Illusion Of Safety
I don’t want to be caught parading around in last generation’s false sense of security. I’m kicking off Autostraddle’s first Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) Heritage month by exploring the values my own South Asian and Japanese American parents and grandparents imparted to me, to learn to carry them forward.
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Mud Wrestling Showed Me How To Want
Our thighs slapped against the tarp as we threw each other across the floor. Our eyes and ears were painted in mud like two casts of the human form. The thing that pulled me into the ring that night was desire itself.
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Six Black Trans Women on Sending Abundant, Overflowing Love to Zaya Wade
I pray that all my little trans sisters receive this love, this support and that more broadly in the black community we can make sure all of our children grow in love and kindness.
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Anatomy of a Mango: Flesh
It seems contradictory to say I learned how to view my body as my own by sharing it with strangers and friends, but it is a truth that I revel in. What I love and learn about these encounters are the parameters of my body, its strengths, and boundaries, what pleases it.
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Shoulder Pads and Short Cuts: How Grace Jones Made Me Powerful
A love letter to the only woman that stole my heart and snatched my scalp at the same damn time.
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How Whitney Houston Taught Me the Greatest Love of All For My Queer Black Self
My journey to self-love through the influence of Whitney Houston’s life and music.
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Queer Latinx Love is Resistance: A Collection of Vignettes
“There’s nothing more I want to remember than every moment and sensation we shared. Our grinding hips at Queer Cumbia, feeling your drunken sweat drip onto my freshly implanted tits. The way we sloppily made out and smeared our red and burgundy lips all over our mouths, noses, forehead, and neck.”
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Mama Outsider: How I Learned the Definition of Obscene
“I was unstable and grieving and more suited for a patient friendship than the dramas of new love. But I loved her and in thirst, I acted unlovingly by climbing into a lap in which I wasn’t welcome. My behavior is the definition of obscene.”
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I Didn’t Know How to Be Poor, Black, Biracial, AND Queer; So I Wasn’t
“I wasn’t in denial, I had just become extremely successful at compartmentalizing difficult emotions that I had no idea what to do with.”
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If I’m Queer But I’m A Preacher, Maybe He’ll Love Me
“My father has very few admirable qualities when it comes to our relationship: he doesn’t follow through on his promises, he doesn’t compromise, and he has a God complex. “
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Graduation to Womanhood: Navigating Trans Identity at a Southern College
It’s as if I had just discovered a new color and now had this entirely new dimension to my life. I was able to paint a holistic portrait of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like.