Results for: you need help
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The Price I Pay For(ever) My Culture
Being a first-gen, Indigenous, queer, Samoan girl in diaspora almost cost me my Samoan culture. But one day, I’m going to be the queer Samoan elder who looks my grandchildren in their faces, and says: I was afraid the entire time that I was fighting for the world you deserve, but I did it anyway.
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How To Write A Spell Against White Supremacy
To me, magic means resilience and connecting to ancestors who survived the tragedy of the Middle Passage. Magic runs through my veins and feels like my birthright. It’s stronger than white supremacy will ever be.
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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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One American Goes to See “30 Americans”
“And I thought how interesting is it that America can be this dark star, death star, and also at the same time this incredible shining light.”
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I Never Meant for My Hair to Be the Way Back to the Lighthouse
“I thought changing something on the outside would change the wrecked ruin of me on the inside. I thought somehow the inside would get a memo from my outside and get into shape. It didn’t, but my hair is the first way I was able to gain autonomy over my body.”
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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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Mama Outsider: When Your Mother Thanks You for Keeping Your Baby
“Instead, I jump back into the mind of the girlish woman I was at 28, the one who didn’t know enough about the consequences for unacceptable motherhood to plunge headfirst into the fire. It has taken me much longer than my mother to see the gift of my own naiveté.”
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A Road Trip With Your Father In Honor of His 74th Birthday, In Playlist Form
A road trip which happens to coincide with the occasion of Prince’s death and the release of “Lemonade.”
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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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Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously
“But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.”
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We Cry With Charleston: How I’m Healing as a Black Queer Christian
“Now more than ever, I think it’s important to say alabanza to those who were slain, to lift their names up in prayer and to remind those of us still living that Black lives do matter — they’ve always mattered and will always matter.”
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Taco Tuesday: Finding Home Again
In the very first edition of a biweekly column all about tacos, Yvonne writes about her personal connection to the delicious, Mexican super food and her search for damn good tacos far away from home.
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A Trans Woman of Color Responds to the Trauma of “Tangerine”
“Why is it that trans women of color have to experience so much violence to remember that they have each other’s back?”
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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.
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Adventures in Baby Making as a Single Black Lesbian
So maybe my pregnancy path isn’t as simple and straightforward as baby books would have you believe it should be because I’m a poor QPoC with anxiety, but it has been an interesting worthwhile journey so far. I can’t wait until I can take the next step.
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Five Queers Of Color On What Connects Us To Our Complicated Or Mixed-Race Identities
Accepting ambiguity feels like being welcomed home.
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Unashamed To Be Fat: Wear the Shorts, It’s F*cking Hot Outside
“This is the root of the problem with fat shamers such as Kelsey. They are not worried about the health of others, they are angry that they must worry and we do not. They are people who fear becoming fat, have been fat or feel fat right now and can’t stand that there are fat people in the world that seem carefree. Don’t you know you are disgusting!!?!?!? You’re supposed to be unhappy being fat!! That’s why I work so hard to stay thin; because fat people should be unhappy!!! WHY CAN’T I HAVE MORE MCDONALDS??? The reason I know this is because I was one of these people for a very long time.”
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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.”
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Fear and Loathing (as a 21-Year Old Queer) in Singapore
“I am afraid help will come too late to someone in my life. I am afraid that closets become coffins.”
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Race, Class and White People’s Beach Houses: On Talking to Privileged People About Privilege
“The observation of white people actually grappling with ideas of class amongst each other empowers me, but it empowers me even more when I know they’re having the same conversation even when I’m NOT in the room.”