Results for: dead to me
-
Building An Altar to Honor Pulse on Its Fifth Anniversary
“Building ofrendas unite the living and the dead; they give space for our stories to be held. I light candles and kneel before them to say prayers because doing so reminds me, even when I’m my most lost – I’m never alone in this world.”
-
The Right to Breathe
I think of the moment I was born, how I must not have cared at all how loud I screamed. I needed to breathe. I needed everyone to know I was here.
-
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.
-
Straight, No Chaser
In the U.S., mass graves have been uncovered as developers unearth land for future projects. People claim we are experiencing the pandemic collectively — but economically, politically, and geographically, we are not. Look where we get buried. Look at who gets buried.
-
Queering Faith: Reclaiming the Holy of Sexuality
How do you tell them your poem about pussy doesn’t negate your love for God? That your spirituality isn’t separate but an extension of you?
-
Learning To Live After My Younger Brother Died
When I unexpectedly lost my little brother to cancer, I had to learn how to close out his unfinished business and live life again without him.
-
Reaching Out for My Queer Muslim Community to Hold Me After Christchurch
In times like these, when people don’t understand us and decide that this means we shouldn’t live at all, we need to connect with the people that do understand, even if just a little bit, even if peripherally.
-
Stories About Beyoncé That Are Really About the First Girl I Ever Loved
“I never could explain why my heart pounded when her soft hands reached out for mine. Why it felt like I was the only girl in the world, singing with her at the top of my lungs. The way my eyes would nervously glance down at her chest in that purple lace bra and white tank top. Until I could.”
-
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.
-
Digital Mixtapes and Protests: Oh, To Be A Queer Black Millennial
“For a moment, I forgot about the summer of 2015. I forgot about the panic I experienced, the insomnia, the depression. We watched the new season of Orange is the New Black together and by the end of episode 12, it suddenly all came back.”
-
Not Quite There Yet: Safety and Progress In Light of the Pulse Shooting
“The morning after the horrific shooting, and the days that followed, I understood part of my father’s fear. Animosity towards LGBTQ people has not gone the way of black and white T.V. sets, phone booths, or travel by horse and carriage. It was and is very much alive.”
-
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.”
-
Pulse, Pride, and the Police: Why Liberation For Some Isn’t Enough
Rainbow stickers on one car does not make the NYPD and the areas it patrols safe for all queer people, especially those of us who are the most vulnerable members of the community.
-
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.”
-
A Queer African Tale: On Trauma, Gender Transitions and Acceptance
“Dating broken white women became a way to reprise a powerlessness that years of sexual abuse and generations of blackphobia had tricked me into believing in. I drowned this feeling of powerlessness in weed and seeking out relationships in which I could engage in yet remain completely hidden from view.”
-
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?
-
Five Queers Of Color On What Connects Us To Our Complicated Or Mixed-Race Identities
Accepting ambiguity feels like being welcomed home.
-
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.”
-
Dust to Dark: The Colors of My Craziness
“It’s on my twenty-fourth birthday that I realize something is wrong. I wake up crying and I don’t stop.”
-
Estranged: How I Fell In Love With A Girl And Lost My Family
“When they see you happy, they’ll accept it,” someone told me once. When there are tears about something unchangeable, people can only be optimistic. It’s the only thing that is left.