Results for: a-camp
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Butch Please: Butch Goes Camping
Camp is family, after all.
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This One Time At Queer Writing Camp: All About the 2013 Lambda Literary Retreat
What I learned from a week on a hilltop with 50 queer writers.
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I Spent the Summer Screaming in My Car, What About You?
When the sound of a scream leaves my throat, it is a choice. I am never accidentally screaming. I scream in the car and it is on purpose.
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Here’s What I Learned By Choosing to Step Away from Productivity For a Whole Day
I did nothing “productive” for a whole day: no email, no phone calls, no work, no cleaning, nothing that fuels my inherent Capricorn desire to win at Capitalism. Here’s what happened.
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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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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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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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Bipolar Disorder, Trans Dykes, and Celestial Catastrophe
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. -
How I Claimed Being Thirsty as a Personal Lifestyle and Learned to Live My Dreams
The more I allowed myself to want, the more I realized I wanted. The more I leaned in to my desires, the clearer they became.
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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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You’re Just You: An Accidental Love Letter to Los Angeles
“Towards the end of the night you fall and tear the skin on your knee. But you pop back up and keep skating. You’re relieved. Now that you’ve fallen once you know you’ll be okay.”
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20 of the Best Personal Essays on Autostraddle in 2018
We published so much good work this year, and here is a fraction of it we think you will particularly enjoy reading back through!
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How I Learned to Tie a Tie Without My Dad
Perhaps he would have loved me enough. I’ll never know, and my eschatology doesn’t include a heaven from which re-embodied souls watch over our earthly lives. All I have is speculation about how he might have reacted to his daughter’s bisexuality, and to his daughter not being precisely a daughter at all.
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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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Food and Water, Silence and Solitude: The Bike Trip That Returned Me to Myself
In 2014, after learning how to care for a person on the edge between life and death, I went on the bike ride that would, ultimately, return me to myself.
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How to Be a Grown Woman
“Maybe I could teach you how to do that and you could teach me a couple of things I’ve been wonderin’,” I told her. She shook my hand. It was a deal.
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Brown, Queer, Sad, Strange, and a Skilled Practitioner of Each
I found a different self slowly, learned to exist as if with many different goggles on at once. Always speaking from my mother’s kitchen in the Silicon Valley and, at the same time, my grandmother’s crowded living room in Punjab. In these years, I would feel the sharpness of many kinds of difference, marginalization. But when I looked down at myself for signs of why I felt so other, all I would find was the color of my hands.
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Still Reeling That I’ve Made It
“No one knows, including me, that my overindulgence and competitive drinking is an attempt to assert the only masculinity I know. Toxic.”
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Bad Religion
“Here was a community where race apparently didn’t matter, because we were all humans, made in the image of God. Where a pacifist, sensitive, caring Jesus was the primary male role model. I finally felt at home. I was promised complete acceptance and understanding, and all I had to give was… well, everything.”
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How to Make a Meme: A Tutorial With Instagram Lesbian Superstar @xenaworrierprincess
Maddy Court, the creator behind Instagram lesbian meme sensation @xenaworrierprincess, teaches us how to make a meme and shares her own meme origin story.