“To understand my relationship with this symbol of masculinity, we’ll have to start with my journey of queerness I had no idea I had embarked upon until I was turning 28, the sleeves of my buba — the tailored Agbada shirt — all rolled up to my elbows and my fingers rubbing down on the clit of a girl I had only met a couple of times prior to that moment.”

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.

“I craved that isolation, that feeling of utter aching loneliness that I found inside houses where I did not belong.”

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.

Having the blessing – or curse – of lighter skin is a double edged sword. I never gave much thought to the idea that society needs positive cultural images of minorities until I came to embrace my Hispanic heritage and come out of the closet.

“I paid a dude to knock me unconscious, peel back my face, and cut out chunks of my skull and jaw.”

As with the meaning of written text, our bodies float somewhere between the author (ourselves) and the reader (those we encounter).

“If you do feel the need to ask if someone is transgender or not, first ask yourself why. Why is it your business? Why do you need to know? And will it change anything you think about this person?”

“I feel like yelling at people,” she told me. I didn’t really grasp then that she meant that. This was the very first time. This was the day after Easter.