“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.”

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.”

There is a different level of intimacy and affirmation that I have found when having sex with other fat people. Thin people approach the fat body like a series of insecurities. They see the swell of a stomach or rolls of fat on the back and assume that you hate those parts of your body. When another fat person touches me, it is to be made whole.

I’ve been told I should try to reclaim my ancestral healing practices, and this is something I would like to do. When I try to learn about Chinese things, it feels performed. I wonder if me learning qigong is any better than white lady yoga.

Because of the positive affirmation I received during sex, I began to believe it was all I was good for. When people wanted me, I assumed it was my job to provide joy for other people. I gave myself to a lot of people in that way. I had to remember that I had a right to pleasure as well.

Once I was out of an emotionally and sexually abusive queer relationship, I realized how lesbian memes can support unhealthy relationship dynamics. U-hauling and codependency didn’t feel like a joke anymore. I had to unfollow lesbian meme accounts to heal and learn new ways to approach queer love.

When it comes to Buddhism and cultural appropriation, I still sometimes worry that I’m making a big deal out of nothing, that I’m angry for no good reason.

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!”

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.

Even one-night-stands have a spirit to them, but I wasn’t willing to confront that until I stopped drinking. When I did, I was finally able to place my mind right within my body, to touch and be touched without fear. Having sober sex was a way for me to unravel the contempt I felt around my body and my sexuality.

I’m not coming out to you as a lesbian, umma, I’m coming out as your daughter. I’m tired of being a stranger to you and I’m tired of tripping over boxes in my living room because you’re incapable of just being vulnerable with me.

“I loved the Church, and I loved the gospel. I was the kind of Mormon who politely dismissed myself from classrooms when teachers showed R-rated movies. At my first and only high school rager, I texted my mother to pick me up because I felt out of place amidst the drinking and smoking. That was me, Straight-Edge Dera, except apparently I wasn’t so straight.”

“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.”

“For me, as a Black Trans Woman, to find her body not only as something worthy and magnificent (as it is), but to find someone to share that magick with, may very well be one of the only moments she has to enjoy a trying and very taxing life — one that’s always trying to kill her.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

It felt important for us to have a voice somewhere, so we’ve gathered a few of the Black queer voices and put them together here. We want to offer this as a place of healing for QTPOC in this time of tragedy.

I remember the day I found out that Ilana from Broad City wasn’t biracial. I Googled around until I found evidence that there were others like me: biracial girls who felt a little bit incredulous; just a hair shy of betrayed. To this day I haven’t been able to convince whatever part of my brain that initially projected that identity onto her to unclench.

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.