10 Unexpected Queer Girl Moments in Scary Movies

Queerness and horror have a long, fraught relationship. Take The Silence of The Lambs, the Sleepaway Camp series, It: Chapter II — I could go on and on. While mainstream horror sapphic representation is flimsy or outright awful, horror movies made by queer women and/or with explicitly queer female characters are thankfully on the rise.

We all know the classics like Jennifer’s Body, Black Swan or The Hunger, but what about movies with subtle or maybe lesser known queer girl moments? These scenes are not necessarily all good or all bad, but they sprinkle a little LGBT crouton packet onto a scary movie salad. Some of them are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter eggs, some are casual one-liners, and some are full-on sapphic puzzles.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

In the latest reboot, Chase Sui Wonders’ character Ava is bisexual, although they don’t use the word. In the beginning of the film, we see her pining for her ex, Milo (Jonah Hauer-King). Later, she meets true crime podcaster Tyler (played by Gabbriette of Charli XCX fame) and they fuck in an airplane bathroom. Hot. Then, Milo picks them up from the airport and the car ride is understandably awkward. Not because of Ava’s bisexuality, but because Milo’s her ex and she just hooked up with Tyler. (Gabbriette is very funny here.) I went into the movie not expecting any queerness and was pleasantly surprised to see that moment — and with Gabbriette, no less. (What can I say? I love a woman with pencil-thin eyebrows.)

Cuckoo (2024)

the kiss in cuckoo

One of my favorite performances of the last year was by Hunter Schafer in the movie Cuckoo. I can’t even explain to you what the film was about, and that’s fine because it’s better if you go in not knowing. While working at a resort in the Alps, Gretchen is approached by a gorgeous mysterious French woman named Ed (played by Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey). Ed asks if Gretchen likes music (an incredible opening line) and Gretchen is immediately in love. The two kiss and plan to run away together but are thwarted. Probably by a monster who hates music.

Hostel: Part II (2007)

Hostel 2

In Rome, Beth meets Axelle (Vera Jordanova) after sketching her nude in art class. She and her friends too quickly agree to travel to Slovakia with Axelle. (But I mean, who among us hasn’t done something impulsive for love?) There are a lot of queer undertones to Beth (Lauren German), but one moment stands out. In the pool, Beth swims up to Axelle, massages her shoulders, and kisses her on the neck. It’s really intimate for two presumably straight ladies who have just met. And spoiler: Hostel: Part II gives us Beth as the rare lesbian-coded final girl.

Aliens (1986)

This is one of my absolute favorite LGBTQ Easter eggs. In the file for the deceased Lambert, which is seen briefly in the sequel to Alien, it indicates that Lambert (played by Veronica Cartwright) is a trans woman. Her bio reads: “Subject is Despin Convert at birth (male to female). So far no indication of suppressed trauma related to gender alteration.” (Fans theorize that “Despin” must be the name of the surgery she underwent.) Lambert being trans is in small text and requires pausing to read the screen in order to catch it. Still, it’s a pretty cool little trans nod for 1986.

Get Out (2017)

photo from Get Out

It’s one of the most terrifying scenes in Jordan Peele’s masterpiece that is already filled to the brim with terrifying scenes. In it, Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris finds a box of photos of his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) romantically posed with each member of the staff at her parents’ home. He realizes she’s brought all of them into the clutches of her family to be brainwashed and kidnapped. In one photo, we see Georgina, the housekeeper, being hugged by Rose from behind. Rose used queerness to lure Georgina (played by Betty Gabriel) to her horrible fate. It is not a good inclusion — Rose is probably not actually bisexual, and Georgina’s been tragically taken advantage of by a racist. That one photo is among a sea of male victims, but it’s part of the smoking gun Chris was looking for.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

This one takes some dot connecting. In 1981, Ed and Lorraine Warren investigate paranormal mysteries: including the citing of a familiar totem at the scene of the murder of a woman named Katie. She was stabbed by her “friend” Jessica who she ran away from home with. In one of Lorraine’s visions, she sees Jessica was possessed by a demon when she killed Katie. The witch’s curse everyone is under predicts three possessions: the child, the lover, and the Man of God. By process of elimination, it’s pretty clear Jessica is the lover. This is also confirmed in the Conjuring comics apparently, but I haven’t read them. It’s not openly said in the film, but putting the pieces of the witch’s puzzle together makes Katie and Jessica’s coupledom undeniable.

Nope (2022)

Keke Palmer’s character Emerald Haywood in Jordan Peele’s Nope is definitely queer-coded. At one point she references a “girlfriend,” but that could mean someone who is just a friend. (Yeah, right.) The more explicit little moment comes when she and her brother visit Fry’s Electronics. In the middle of explaining her plan, she pauses to tell a woman, “How you doin’? You look pretty.” It’s implied she’s asking because the woman seems wealthy, but combining those two lines solidifies Emerald’s lesbianism for me.

Cult of Chucky (2017)

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers!! You’ve been warned. The big twist at the end of this film is that Chucky is now possessing the body of his long-time victim Nica. He’s using her to escape the asylum. When he’s picked up by his lover Tiffany (Bound’s own Jennifer Tilly), we’re not sure if Nica is herself or not, but once she starts speaking, we can guess. The two passionately kiss in the snow. Yes, Nica is Chucky. Yes, it’s twisted. But I like it for this line delivery that happens after the kiss. Nica/Chucky remarks on how different it is to kiss in these bodies. Tiffany replies sultrily, “I don’t know. Works for me.”

Miller’s Girl (2024)

Miller's Girl kiss

This movie, more an erotic thriller than horror, stars Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman as a student and teacher embroiled in a tense, sexual rollercoaster of fuckery. It is not good. However, Gideon Adlon’s performance as high school bestie Winnie is so endearing, gay and relatable. She is clearly in love with Ortega’s Cairo and, when the other girl suggests they make out to entice another teacher, Winnie’s wide eyes say it all. “For him, not for you,” Cairo clarifies. Winnie shyly responds, “Well, it can be a little for me.” They continue kissing even after the photo is taken, but Cairo is clearly manipulating her. Even so, I loved Adlon’s performance in this scene.

The Birds (1963)

Annie and Melanie in The Birds

Though not explicit in the film partially due to the era of its release, the female characters — Melanie and Annie — in The Birds have undeniable chemistry. In later interviews, Jessica Tandy who plays the mother of love interest Mitch in the film said Suzanne Pleshette (Annie) actually asked director Alfred Hitchcock if her character was a lesbian. Hitch allegedly asked her what she thought. It was either that or her character was jealous of Melanie (Tippi Hedren). Suzanne said she’d rather her character be a lesbian than simply “frustrated” by rejection from Mitch. Her take on the character gives us longing, sensual looks between the two, especially one as she leans in a doorway. Smoldering. Too bad their town is being attacked by killer birds. (And not in the fun “slang for women” way.)

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Gabe Dunn

Gabe (he/him) is a queer, trans writer and director whose most recent film GRINDR BABY was selected for Frameline Festival’s 2023 Voices. He is a best-selling author thrice-over, host of the podcasts The Knew Guys, Just Between Us and Bad With Money. As a TV writer, he has sold over a dozen TV shows to networks like FX, Freeform, and Netflix. His young adult sci-fi drama Apocalypse Untreated was released by Audible Originals in 2020. His latest TV project The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams is in development at Universal with Gabe set to write and produce.

Gabe has written 23 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. I never spotted that bit in Aliens! What a great little touch. Also this has made me want to watch several movies despite reservations (Hostel had me wincing for days) because october can start now if it’s for horror

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15 Great Queer Novels About Sisters

For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to stories about sisters. For much of my youth, this meant the Olsen twins and the television series Charmed had me in a chokehold. I think about the connection between close sisters a lot, how there’s a magic to it. My sister and I used to have the same dreams. We live many states apart, but sometimes we unknowingly cook the exact same thing for dinner.

My sister and I are close, but I’m also drawn to stories of sinister sisters, sisters at odds or in competition with each other. It’s all kinds of sister narratives I’m interested in — the loving, the tender, the dysfunction, the estranged — and I recently realized many of my favorite queer novels of the past couple years (All-Night Pharmacy, We Were the Universe, and Smothermoss, all featured below) are connected by the throughline of complicated sisters. So I thought I’d put together a little curated list for anyone else interested in reading queer novels that prominently feature sisters and stories of sisterhood. Anything I missed? Definitely shout it out, because I want to read it!

This list was originally published in January 2025 and has been updated in August 2025.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra at the Wedding by Doroth Baker

Originally published in 1962, here we have an early entry into the queer novels about sisters canon. (This was recommended by a commenter when this list was originally published, so I decided to add it with the update!) The novella has a delightful but also often sad (hey, it’s literary fiction after all) rom-com premise: Gay graduate student Cassandra Edwards returns to her family ranch determined to sabotage her twin sister Judith’s wedding.

Ghost Fish by Stuart Pennebaker

Ghost Fish by Stuart Pennebaker

The most recent release on this list, Ghost Fish is about a woman named Alison grieving the tragic death by drowning of her young sister. Adrift, she uproots her life from Key West to NYC and eventually becomes convinced her sister has returned to her in the form of the titular ghost fish. Like a couple other entries on this list (We Were the Universe and Helen House), this novel deals specifically with the death of a sister.

Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke

Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke

Protagonis Akúa returns to her hometown of Kingston, Jamaica following the death of her brother and attempts to reconnect with her estranged older sister Tamika. Akúa struggles to reconcile her queerness and the strict, religious upbringing of her youth as she and Tamika take a winding trip down memory lane.

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

Hey! It’s right there in the title! When We Were Sisters spins the story of three orphaned Muslim American siblings — Kausar, Aisha, and Noreen — in the aftermath of their parents’ deaths. Youngest sisters and eldest sisters will feel well represented by this novel of family, grief, trauma, and survival. Sisterhood is complex and varied and its dynamics can shift, and this is a novel that understands all that very well.

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

I will jump at ANY excuse to write about this novel, which I adore. At its heart is a toxic dynamic between the protagonist and her older sister Debbie, a character who can never really be fully known. I’ve pitched this novel to many friends as one with mommy issues and sister issues. It’s a drug and booze-filled descent into grimy LA haunts, but it’s a fever dream you won’t want to wake up from. The complicated queer relationship the narrator ends up entangled in is a wild ride, but I’m especially endeared to the wild sister dynamics here.

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

I adored this novel, one of my favorites from 2024. It’s very much about sisters, but specifically sisterloss, the sudden absence of a sister. Narrator Kit grapples with the death of her sister Julie and how her life has seismically changed since leaving the small Texas town where she grew up and becoming a mother. It’s a hilarious and delightfully horny book, despite being about such heavy topics as addiction, grief, and death. Parsons balances it all impeccably. And the novel also portrays the almost magical, supernatural bond that can exist between sisters — which I’ve experienced with my own sister — unlike any other I’ve ever read.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

Weaver of some of my favorite sentences of all time Julia Armfield is back, following up the melancholic and haunting Our Wives Under the Sea with Private Rites, which offers a speculative reimagining of King Lear and follows three sisters amid fractured family and climate horror. Like her first novel, it’s atmospheric and unsettling while remaining sharp in its exploration of interpersonal conflict.

Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

This was easily my favorite novel of 2024. Set in the 1980s, it’s about two sisters growing up poor in an Appalachian mountain town whose methods of survival diverge greatly. Their lives and home are quaked by a disturbing act of gendered violence: the murder of two young women hiking the Appalachian trail. It’s a modern day and wholly original fairy tale that’s immersive, strange, and striking. Just trust me on this one and dive right into its pages, because once you start you won’t want to stop.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Set in 1994 Jamaica, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s debut novel is about sisters Thandi and Margot and their mother Delores. The novel tackles sex work, class stratification, tourism, and racism and colorism, Dennis-Benn’s dazzling prose bringing every page to life. Margot is also in a clandestine queer relationship with a woman, and the novel explores queerness in nuanced and complex ways that go way beyond mainstream narratives of coming out. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous novel with a pair of sisters who are hard to forget.

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

Stone Fruit looks at chosen and given family with equal depth and care, centering gay aunties Ray and Bron who have wild playdates with Ray’s young niece Nessie. But the graphic novel also explores the relationships between Ray and Bron and their respective sisters, who they each have complicated dynamics and loads of baggage with. It’s very much a book about the ties between siblings and how to repair those ties when they fray.

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

magic for liars by Sarah Gailey

I thought it would be fun to have some fantasy on the list, and Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars immediately came to mind. It features a magical school, minus the transphobic overlord. And it focuses on a pair of sisters — one who has the gift of magic and one who does not — who are estranged from one another but are thrust together to solve a murderous mystery at the magical academy where one of them works. It’s like a hardboiled mystery with touches of the supernatural, but what makes the novel truly compelling is the familial drama at its core.

A Reason To See You Again by Jami Attenberg

A Reason To See You Again by Jami Attenberg

This novel is unique on this list in the sense that it isn’t either one of the sisters who is queer, but the Cohen sisters’ story is bolstered by queer side characters. Like many titles on this list, this is a matriarchal novel about multiple generations of women. Starting in the 1970s, it spans four decades and, amid its family drama, chronicles the creation of the mobile telephone. It’s about the ways we connect and don’t connect with one another, and it’s sharp, propulsive, and often humorous in its exploration of specific dynamics between female family members (mother/daughter, sister/sister, aunt/niece, etc).

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Matrix by Lauren Groff

So, I’m being a little cheeky here as this is a novel about sisters in the ecclesiastical sense. Yes, I’m talking about nuns. If you somehow haven’t heard of this much accoladed book, it is THE lesbian nun novel. This original and intricately layered work of historical fiction is steeped in themes of sisterhood.

Spitting Gold, by Carmella Lowkis

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis

If the historical fiction element of Matrix piques your interest, then perhaps you will enjoy this tale set in 1866 Paris about two estranged sisters who must come together for One Last Con. No one schemes sinisterly better than sisters!

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Yes, I am putting my own novel, which is actually a novelette — shorter than a novella! — on this list, because I am shameless. I do very much consider my book to be a sister book, even though the sisters in it are absent. It’s about two women in a relationship who both have lost sisters in very different circumstances but whose individual griefs nonetheless become entangled. It’s a sister ghost story, another story of sisterloss. The intimacy of sisterhood haunts the characters in different ways, leading to some nightmarish situations and psychosexual thrills. If you check it out, I hope you like it!!!! It’s short enough to be read in one sitting — perhaps even in the bath!

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. Thanks for this list, Kayla! My sister is my best friend, but I’m also super drawn to stories of toxic sister relationships. The only ones I’ve read on this list are Magic for Liars and your book (which I loved, and also loaned to multiple friends who aren’t big readers but were drawn in by the length and the images!). I’m really excited to have so many new recommendations to check out.

    My favorite queer sister novel is Cassandra at the Wedding! It’s from the 60s, so the queerness is discussed obliquely (but definitely present). It’s about twins–the straight one is getting married and Cassandra (the gay one) can’t handle it. I’ve read it a couple times and it’s an all-timer for me!

  2. The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar!

    This came out this year but it had the feel of an old fashioned fantasy. It’s about two sisters, 18 and 20, who live on the border of faire and sing to the magic willow trees on their family’s land. (As one does). They’re very close – one is queer and one isn’t. One loves riddle songs and the other murder ballads, and both come into play after something terrible happens.

    Highly recommend the audiobook for the singing!

  3. I would love to know if any of these novels include trans women in these stories of sisterhood? I’m searching for recommendations. That search is sometimes mystified by a lack of specificity.

    • Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom is INCREDIBLE, it’s a kind of surrealist semi-memoir, semi-poetry novel about a trans girl who runs away from home leaving her little sister behind. The novel is partly made up of letters home to her sister.

      Also Woodworking by Emily St. James is amazing and has a 17 y/o trans girl living with her sister as one of the two main characters.

  4. I mean, in a society that doesn’t want to celebrate homosexual love, the memetic pinnacle of relationships between two men or two women is going to be the pair of brothers or sisters who really love each other a lot. This is to the point that particularly strong same-gender friendships are treated as a sort of honorary siblinghood. The closest a woman can get to another woman in the straight world is to become her sister, and that’s going to form some confusing archetypes in the mind of the larval gay, especially the larval gay who doesn’t have close same-gender siblings in a more literal sense.

    And (while not defending any kind of actual coercive relationship happening in actual real life!) some people grow up in situations where being openly queer means having to accept that people will be disgusted by you. There’s a certain frustration in being expected to treat all other men or women as brothers or sisters categorically, you know?

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Must I Invite My Homophobic Stepdad To My Homosexual Wedding?

My Mom Insists He Wants To Come and Support Me

Q

When I came out to my family, my (now) stepfather was absolutely AWFUL about it, and afterwards we basically settled into not really having a relationship even though I’m close with my mom. I am 75% sure he voted for Trump. They live on the opposite side of the country so I don’t have to see him that much, my Mom comes out to visit me & my gf without him. When I’m back home for the holidays, there’s lots of family around and me and my gf stay with my Dad & stepmom so it’s easy not to spend much one-on-one time with him. (Officially the reason for this is that my mom & stepdad have cats and my gf is allergic, and bc my dad’s house has more space, but the other reason is that i don’t want to be around my stepdad.) Now me and my gf are getting married next year, and I don’t want him to come. My Mom is really upset about this and said he wants to come and support me, that he feels awful for how he reacted at the time, he was ignorant, and wants to make amends. I said that’s fine but i barely know this man and don’t want him there. She said it will be really hard for her to be there alone when my dad is there with my stepmom. my dad left my mom for my stepmom, so i get why she feels that way. My dad & stepmom have always been really supportive of me though, so I do want them there even though he did that to my mom. I just don’t want my stepdad there, it’s my wedding. What should i do?

A:

Summer: The final call is yours. It’s your wedding (and your girlfriend’s). I was ready for a less sympathetic setup but when I got to your mother’s expression that he wants to be present… Well that complicates things.

My first question is honestly why your stepfather hasn’t tried to bring this up himself. I know you and your girlfriend go through great lengths to avoid him, but are there barriers keeping him from expressing his regret and feelings directly? I’m not saying you shouldn’t trust your mother’s word about his regret, but this should be the kind of thing handled by him. Directly. To you. Strictly speaking, this is between you and him, so having a line with him would give you an idea of how to proceed, even if the interaction is unpleasant.

It’s clear that whatever you went through is deeply horrible and you can absolutely decline to invite him. But if you want to consider your options, how… out-of-bounds is it for you to try and locate more facts about the situation from your stepdad directly, rather than via an intermediary?

Valerie: Hot take from someone who has never been married but is advice I’ve given to everyone I’ve ever known planning a wedding: your guest list is up to you and the person you’re marrying, end of story. If you don’t feel like your stepdad has made any meaningful attempt to make amends, why would you want to invite him? Surely there will be other family and friends your mother knows at the wedding, so it’s not like you’ll be stranding her in a sea of strangers. Your wedding isn’t about her, and she’ll have to see your dad and stepmom regardless of who she’s there with. Probably what she really doesn’t want is to explain to everyone that her husband isn’t there because he’s homophobic. But that’s not your problem. Also seems convenient that he seems to want to make amends and you’re only hearing about it now that there’s a wedding invite on the line. Actions have consequences. He was homophobic, he doesn’t get to come to the gay wedding. She chose to stay with someone who was an asshole about her child coming out, and clearly never encouraged him to plead for forgiveness or build back up his relationship with you, so she has to go to your wedding alone. I seemed to have misplaced my teeny tiny violin.

Riese: I agree with Summer that if this man does want to apologize to you and is experiencing regret, for how he treated you before that is actually your first order of business here — he’s gotta say that to you! I don’t think you can make any decisions about this until he’s done so. This man being present at your wedding proper won’t make or break your experience, but I think it’s more like, the rest of it? I imagine he’ll be in town with your Mom, maybe there’s a rehearsal dinner, in your family photos, other family-only things happening? Idk I feel like when it’s been a family member getting married there are EVENTS besides just the wedding itself. If this man wants to be part of that inner circle, he owes you a conversation about that alleged regret, first. Also I think it’s fair, if he does end up coming, that you are picky about which wedding-adjacent events you want him at.

Nico: Apologies not made directly to you are not apologies — they’re just performances for other people. Now, what would you do if he actually apologized directly to you? Is that something you want or something that would change things? I think these are important questions to consider. You don’t have to accept an apology as a game-changer. Your feelings and the ways your stepdad (and mom) hurt them are real and valid. You aren’t responsible for how your parents conducted their personal romantic business with each other, or the hurts that they should be managing between them. That’s not on you. You aren’t the one who cheated on your mom, and it’s immature to expect you to make up for that considering the circumstances.

This isn’t someone who makes you feel a little awkward. This is someone who you suspect (assuming reasonably so) voted for someone who represents violence and persecution for you, your girlfriend, and countless other people in the US and beyond. This is someone who was outright cruel to you and has never apologized, and if we’re talking about people who should be compromising for others — if he really cared about your mother, he would have compromised and swallowed his shit a good, long time ago. To me, it sounds like your mom should get a hot new boyfriend and bring him to the wedding, or maybe you could seat your mom with some actually decent single guys her age — just saying.

How To Friend My Ex Without Sending Mixed Signals

Q

My Ex and I dated for five years, we’ve been broken up for nearly a year and we are both in new relationships. I am very happy with my girlfriend and I wish them happiness as well, the breakup was not mutual as we both knew the relationship was over but I technically ended things and they did not take it well. We went back and forth for months before deciding to do no contact. We haven’t spoken since December, but I want to reach out to them. They were a huge part of my life for so long and we had a respectful, kind relationship. I am wondering how to approach a potential friendship with them in a way that makes my partner secure and doesn’t send mixed signals to my ex.

A

Summer: Huh. My first thought is whether your current partner would be okay with you reaching out to a no-contact ex. I would check with the current partner first and get their opinions before proceeding. But if you get the green light… I’d just be direct. Pick an avenue that you both feel comfortable with (probably online?), send a polite, but not overly friendly message about where you’ve been mentally and why you’ve reached out. Then wait. I advise against being overly MLM-scheme friendly because you don’t know for certain where their feelings have taken them during this year apart. It pays to not presume a positive or negative outcome.

I think a year is long enough for you to try and make contact, especially since you both have new partners. In your position, I’d just approach it like reconnecting with anyone: friendly, to-the-point, and with no expectation of instant gratification.

Valerie: You’re not going to like my answer, but my advice would be…don’t reach out to them. If you are the one who instigated the breakup and they didn’t take it well, I think the ball is in their court to break the no-contact rule you both set up. It seems like the boundary was set up mostly to help them come to terms with the breakup, and even if they have a new partner, you can’t be sure they’re over it enough to talk to you again without re-opening those wounds or rekindling those feelings. If you have mutual friends, you could drop something like “I miss being friends with them but want to respect their boundaries” and if that gets back to them, they can choose to reach out. But unfortunately, I think you just have to wait them out, and be open and clear about your feelings and intentions if/when they do reach out again.

Mal: This is a tricky one, being that the ‘no-contact’ was mutual and probably really hard but so emotionally responsible on your end. It’s clear you really care about them and are super considerate in thinking this through. I’d gently advise not to reach out to them. :( However, I’d take an honest inventory of why you want to reach out to them, log what’s going on when you have the urge to and sort other ways to quell what you’re desiring from them specifically. When I read “…approach a potential friendship with them that makes my partner secure and doesn’t send mixed signals to my ex” it communicated to me that it’s seemingly too early to attempt friendship at the moment. When you say ‘potential friendship’ what would the day to day workings of that look like? Is it wrapped in the subtle nuanced language of familiarity of 5 years? The very subtle things that kept you connected? The ways that only you know how to show up for? I do think safe friendship is possible for sure. I just think it might take a little more time and I think you will know without a doubt exactly how to reach out and when the time is right. A thing that helped me when I was in a similar situation was having one non-judgemental neutral friend that I deeply trusted that I could write an email or text to pretending like it was my ex unloading all the things I needed to say every time the urge hit me. There was something that felt cathartic about getting it out of my body, obviously not quite the same but extremely helpful. It helped me sort what I was actually needing and protected my ex at the same time. My fear was not wanting to be disruptive to the healing process of everyone involved. Eventually the desire calmed down and out of nowhere she reached out to me. We rekindled our friendship and I got to genuinely know her based on the newness that was grown without the ‘us’ undertone.

Nico: I think it’s probably a no and very likely too soon, but one way to look into this a little bit further is to see if a mutual friend is willing to poke a little for you. If/when they tell you that your ex would rather not break contact, it’s best to just let it go. If on the off-chance they say that your ex is actually open to talking again, well, there you go!

As far as not sending mixed signals goes, in any situation where you don’t want to do that, simply don’t! Don’t flirt! Don’t do any touching except for hello and goodbye hugs, don’t put yourself in make-out-vibe situations. Keep it light and clean and platonic. As for helping your partner to feel secure, I feel like that all comes down to how you treat your partner. If your partner feels like you’re not present with her in what is a pretty darn new relationship, then it’ll be difficult to help her feel secure. Similarly, you’re just going to have to communicate with your girlfriend, and to expect for there to potentially be some discomfort you’ll have to make some choices around.

Kayla: I am leaning toward not reaching out because of the mutually agreed upon nature of the no contact, suggesting your ex indeed does not want contact. That said, I do not know the particulars of your communication arrangement (or why you deemed it necessary in the first place) or the general vibe of the relationship. I guess I’m left wondering: Why exactly do you want to reach out and what is it that you’re hoping to achieve? Do you have concrete answers to those questions? I would sit with them for a bit before reaching out, if that’s what you decide to do. Also going from no contact to friendship is something that could very well take a lot of time, so if you do take the plunge, just know that it likely won’t happen overnight!

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‘Weapons’ and the Demonization of Teachers

The following essay about Weapons (2025) contains some spoilers.

In the already much-buzzed-about horror film of the summer Weapons, written and directed by Zach Cregger, schoolteacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) enters her third grade classroom one morning to find all her students except for one have disappeared. Our real story begins not with their disappearance but with the aftermath several weeks later, as our child narrator informs us. In that aftermath, the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania is shot-through with collective trauma and grief. How could 17 kids have gotten out of their beds at precisely 2:17 a.m. and run out of their homes, never to be seen again? Where did they go? Who made them do this? For surely, a bunch of third graders don’t just conspire to simultaneously run away. Something or someone made them do it, their parents are sure. And who do they suspect first? Why, their teacher Ms. Gandy of course.

Justine Gandy is an impulsive, paranoid, haunted alcoholic who likes to sleep with other women’s cop boyfriends and pour hard liquor into plastic gas station cups. She isn’t, as far as the text shows us, queer, but it sure is easy to map her experiences and position in the film onto what it’s like to be a queer or trans teacher today. As part of their multi-level attacks on public education, the religious right has demonized LGBTQ+ teachers. A teacher in Florida was fired for using the honorific Mx. to reflect their gender identity. When the Don’t Say Gay bill initially passed in Florida, it was designed to be confusing, making it unclear whether teachers could legally identify as gay. The religious right wants Christianity back in public schools and queerness and transness far from it. And the Trump Administration is pushing an “anti-indoctrination” agenda that would in turn implement racist, anti-trans, and ahistoric indoctrination in public schools. None of this is new; it’s just the latest escalation of attacks on queer teachers. Nearly 70 years ago, Florida pushed gay and lesbian teachers out of public schools. The sentiment then was the same as it is now: The right loves to chase after this boogeyman of immoral indoctrination in public schools. Of course the parents turn on Ms. Gandy when their kids go missing. It’s not textually because she’s queer, but she indeed does not fit their definition of an upstanding individual in society. She drinks, is unmarried, has a string of ill-advised relationships, lives alone in her sad little house. For all her faults, it’s always clear Justine cares about her students. She’s as devastated by their disappearance as their parents are, bereft of closure or answers.

At one point, the principal of her school — who himself is gay — tells her she couldn’t possibly understand the position of the parents. She isn’t a parent herself. Only their teacher. Here, we get an even more wholistic view of how society treats and views teachers. Because sure, we don’t know the politics of the parents in Weapons; they aren’t portrayed as overt right wingers. But all sides of the political spectrum devalue teachers and push parental choice, which is how we end up with bipartisan support for things like school voucher programs, which have devastating impact on public schools.

It’s these themes subtly threaded into Weapons that call to me most. The devaluation of teachers in general. The scapegoating of queer teachers. The demonization of public education when the real demons are so cartoonishly right there in front of everyone’s noses.

(I already warned you about spoilers, so I’ll do so again: SPOILER ALERT!)

The film’s real villain is a witch-like old woman named Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) who can — with some blood, some hair, the snap of a twig, and the ding of a bell — transform people into zombie-like creatures who either rest in the dark, not quite dead but also barely alive, or become laser-focused assassins who will stop at nothing to kill whoever she wishes to target. Like mapping Gandy’s role in the film onto the real-life scapegoating of queer teachers, it’s easy to map Aunt Gladys’ desire for power, control, and the weaponization of youth onto how the right wants to subjugate the youth of today by depriving them of personal liberties like gender-affirming care and by taking any real learning about history and society out of public schools. Aunt Gladys turns these children into docile, obedient, homogenized beings who exist solely for her personal gain. They do not get to be kids at all.

While the real witch works her evil, it’s Justine Gandy whose car is vandalized with the word WITCH painted in blood red. She is far from a perfect horror hero, but that’s a much more interesting choice than if her edges had been softened. Because regardless of some of the choices she has made in her personal life, she is not a threat to these children. The cartoonish Aunt Gladys is, and she capitalizes on making Justine into a target, deploying her latest weapon. Again, it maps well onto the scapegoating and diversion that happens in real life. The religious right’s obsession with villainizing queer and trans schoolteachers obscures one of the most disturbing calls coming from inside the house: the rampant sexual abuse that happens in U.S. megachurches, which are also sites of explicit indoctrination that often ignores or outright denies science, history, and reality.

Horror films often slash the picturesque portrait of American suburban life, but Weapons is at its best when it takes this one step further and really looks directly at the ways communities can tear themselves apart when focused on the wrong things. If Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children, had teamed up with Justine sooner, maybe they could have saved those kids before all the death and destruction of the film’s final act. If others had treated James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who lives in a tent in the town’s woods, like a real person instead of something disposable, then maybe he could have led them to the children, too. Aunt Gladys is the real villain, yes, but she’s able to operate in the shadows because of the systems already in place. Grief and fear are easy to weaponize, and Aunt Gladys uses that to her advantage. The most powerful villains in real life are getting away with it, too.

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

Netflix’s ‘Amy Bradley Is Missing’ Gives a Cold Case a New Queer Angle

Amy Bradley
Amy Bradley

“I think we stayed in that car for like, an hour, kissing. It felt like, finally. It was magical.” These are the words of Mollie McClure, a deeply important unheard voice of a ubiquitous true crime mystery that’s plagued the genre for nearly 30 years.

On March 24, 1998, Amy Bradley disappeared on a Royal Caribbean cruise she was taking with her brother Brad and their parents Ron and Iva. After a night of drinking and dancing, she and her brother returned to the room the family was sharing and sat on the balcony enjoying the sea air. Brad eventually went to sleep. By 6 a.m., Amy had disappeared. To this day, neither her clothes nor her body have ever been recovered.

Because I’ve dabbled in writing crime fiction, I’ve done my share of true crime deep dives, particularly into the stories of Jane and John Does and missing marginalized persons. Even before the most recent documentary about her case, Amy Bradley Is Missing, premiered on Netflix last month, I knew the basics behind Amy’s story. Or so I thought.

Amy Bradley Is Missing, directed by the duo behind the exploitative The Price of Glee, circles three categories fans of the genre can’t resist. The first is missing white woman syndrome. The second is the thrill of a “locked door” mystery. The third is xenophobic panic about the human trafficking of nice girls from the suburbs.

The most prominent photo of Amy distributed to the public is understandably from the night she went missing, though it isn’t what she went missing in. It shows her dressed up for a formal dinner, wearing a black and jeweled necklace, shiny earrings, and a black dress. It wasn’t until this new documentary that I — and even Internet experts on this case — saw more casual pictures and videos of her.

Amy Bradley in a backwards cap and sweatshirt
Amy Bradley in a black dress

I’m not sure how to explain the ‘90s lesbian je ne sais quoi but whatever it is, Amy has it. In these new photos, Amy is all baseball caps and shorn hair. She has a tattoo on her back of Taz from the Looney Tunes spinning a basketball. In videos of her doing the “trick shots” her friends say she was known for, she has undeniable swag. It turns out that in her everyday life, Amy Bradley was pretty butch.

Yet Amy’s sexuality was kept hush-hush for nearly three decades. (Even the subreddit dedicated to her case was rocked by the information.) Apparently, Amy had come out as a lesbian a few years before the cruise, and her Virginian family had not been thrilled about it.

Her mother explains in the documentary, “As her parents, we were concerned that in 1995, those feelings would not be welcomed by the general population.”

Iva isn’t wrong. Butch lesbians in the early 1990s are like gods to me. What must it have felt like to hear even the most liberal politicians slam gay marriage and vote for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Every single butch who was out in the 90s should be given the Purple Heart for their service.

Amy being a lesbian and the erasure of her sexuality matter to the case. No doubt there are people who know far more about Amy’s story than I ever will, but I want to speak to the queer reveal and why it wasn’t disclosed until 2025.

The film starts with Amy’s mother sobbing. She and Amy’s father have not moved on at all. They think about her 24/7. They’ve kept her car in the garage untouched, waiting for her return. They obviously loved their daughter. In an interview with one of Amy’s best friends Sarah Luck, she claims that Amy’s parents’ disapproval of her sexuality definitely bothered her. Their whole college social circle drank a lot, but it seemed to Sarah like Amy was trying to numb the pain of her parents’ rejection.

Kat Lovelace, the first of Amy’s ex-girlfriends interviewed, says their relationship is why each of them came out to their families. Afterwards, Amy’s father wrote Kat a three-page letter blaming her for making his daughter gay.

In the doc, Ron refutes this. “It’s Amy’s life. It wasn’t what we would choose for her but it’s her life,” he says, “and we loved her unconditionally, and I remember putting that in the letter.”

Amy’s brother Brad, in follow-up interviews after the documentary’s premiere, clarified that their close knit family was actually fine with Amy’s sexuality. But, he says, Amy was never a lesbian. Sure, she’d come out to them as bisexual, but at the time of her disappearance, Brad claims Amy had a boyfriend. (Her friend Sarah says that Amy self-identified as “gay.”)

This all would have been useful to determine Amy’s state of mind. She had allegedly had seven light beers and was feeling unwell when her brother left her on the balcony at around 3:30 a.m. Some theorize that she was drinking so much because it was stressful to be trapped at sea with her parents or that she was sad about her recent breakup with the aforementioned Mollie.

Her parents deny that Amy’s disappearance was an accident brought on by drinking away her pain. They also insist she did not die by suicide. To them, Amy did not go overboard at all. As the years crept on, why would her family want to think their harsh response to her coming out may have contributed to her disappearance? The guilt would eat me alive.

They say Amy must have been kidnapped. Amy must have been trafficked. Her family paints a picture of a woman that men flocked to. She was magnetic, they say. So much so that the femme photos she’d taken before dinner were stolen by an admirer and had to be reprinted. The waitstaff were at her beck and call. Every guy on that boat was flirting with her. Investigators wondered if she could have been lured by one who “sweet-talked” her into following him to a rough area of Curacao.

I also don’t think Amy died by suicide. I don’t believe her intoxication was connected to her family’s rejection, and I don’t think she was smuggled off the ship and forced into prostitution. I think she fell off the railing while trying to puke.

Still, we can’t ignore the world Amy was living in. Matthew Shepard was killed that year. Ellen DeGeneres coming out in 1997 had ruined her career. Conversion therapy was in full swing, enough for the 1999 LGBTQ movie But I’m A Cheerleader to resonate with the community. It would be understandable if her family felt saying Amy was gay would endanger her with her kidnappers, or make the general public uninterested in her case.

It would have cleared up one demerit against the case’s prime suspect: Alistar Douglas, the bass player from the ship’s band. People speculated that maybe she left to hook up with him because she was seen dancing with Alistar right before she went missing. He could have killed her afterwards. (A couple of teens claim they saw her on the upper deck with him.) Now that seems unlikely.

Her being a lesbian also sheds some light on the racist and sexist fetishization that has come out of Amy’s story. “Amy Bradley Is Missing” spends a lot of time dissecting a set of prurient photos of a sex worker advertisement that the family was emailed anonymously in 2005. The woman does resemble Amy even though she’s done up in teased hair and pink eyeshadow, but she doesn’t have Amy’s tattoos. Maybe they’re covered. It’s 50/50 on whether she’s Amy, but I lean toward no.

It’s interesting to note that being public about Amy being taken as a sex slave (on shows like Dr. Phil) was less harrowing to her family than revealing she was gay. It’s a better narrative that she’s being assaulted by men then that she may have struggled with her lesbianism.

When “witnesses” come forward in the doc, it’s men with rescuer fantasies, and one older white lady who believes she saw Amy being manhandled by a pimp in a bathroom. A guy who claims he saw her flanked by two scary men on a beach weirdly describes her as “tanned” and “in good shape.” A Navy seaman says he was a client of hers in a brothel and that she asked for his help. Another admits he talked to her over their shared balcony on the ship and that she was the quintessential “girl next door.” It’s an amalgamation of white fear that “good, Christian” women are being taken prisoner in foreign countries. The woman in the bathroom describes stereotypical Latin thugs threatening the hypothetical children Amy’s been forced to bear. Amy Bradley has been portrayed as a person she never was to serve a thriller novel narrative.

With the reveal of Amy’s authentic self, the 27-year-old cold case becomes 3-dimensional and warm. People can parse out some new theories. Gaps are filled in. Amy was a whole person, not some face in a spooky viral TikTok or a salacious podcast episode. Her ex Kat lovingly recalls the first time Amy kissed her. Her more recent ex Mollie takes out an eerie gift Amy gave her a few months before she disappeared: a message in a bottle. Mollie is reluctant to share it. She’s still raw all these years later. “I can see her, I can smell her, I can feel her,” Mollie says, letting herself remember those days. “Cause we’re bringing her alive, you know? We’re bringing her alive.”

Mollie and Amy met at a basketball tryout when they were 14. Amy had a full mullet. Mollie was shy. She would sleep over at Amy’s house, and her heart would be pounding. She was falling in love. After a night of dancing at a gay bar post-college, they hooked up.

Amy gave Mollie the handwritten letter in a bottle as an apology for drunkenly kissing another girl. I paused the screen to read the parts that weren’t being highlighted by the filmmakers and saw one of the most sapphic sentences I’ve ever read: “I would drive 400 miles to eat lunch with you.”

Mollie feels they would have gotten back together. On the same day she learned Amy was missing, she received a postcard from her that read, “Wish you were here.”

“It was the 90s,” Amy’s friend Sarah says, reflecting on the atmosphere of being a lesbian at that time. “It was taboo. It was difficult for a parent to say I have a child that’s gay, but [her family] loved her regardless.”

We’ll never really know Amy’s thoughts on that. The most important person in this documentary is Mollie, who through tears says that she doesn’t like to think about the theories of Amy’s fate.

“For me, and my making peace with that she’s no longer here, the one that I have loved is…” she trails off. “The fact is I’m living my life without her. That’s not going to change. That doesn’t change.”

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Gabe Dunn

Gabe (he/him) is a queer, trans writer and director whose most recent film GRINDR BABY was selected for Frameline Festival’s 2023 Voices. He is a best-selling author thrice-over, host of the podcasts The Knew Guys, Just Between Us and Bad With Money. As a TV writer, he has sold over a dozen TV shows to networks like FX, Freeform, and Netflix. His young adult sci-fi drama Apocalypse Untreated was released by Audible Originals in 2020. His latest TV project The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams is in development at Universal with Gabe set to write and produce.

Gabe has written 23 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. Hello,

    I just love that you guys always put a biased opinionated view to push a hidden narrative on real serious news topics! Will never come back to this site ever :)

    Thanks for your time!!!!!!
    Please do better :)

    Nunya

  3. If it were my daughter, I know I could never stop. I would sell everything, move to Barbados, change my name and appearance if that’s what it took , just to blend in , and search for my child every single day. Mother’s love doesn’t rest, and I can’t understand how you could ever stop looking

  4. This is the best article on the internet about this. I just watched the series and you touched on the very important topic of her as a full, real person, what was not said, what was denied and left out. I am the same age as she would be, graduated high school a year earlier and was busy with marriage, career, children; and I missed or didn’t take note of this case. My kids are grown and my youngest are teenagers in the Army, leaving for Italy and Hawaii shortly. I feel slightly safer in the age of cameras and digital tracking, but can’t imagine the heartache of not knowing where your children are. I think I feel the most sad for her brother, whose life basically seems to have stopped. Yes, I feel bad for the ex-GF too but she has the ability to move her life forward and Amy’s brother seems stuck living with his sister’s ghost and parents whose life stopped.

Comments are closed.

Hell Yeah, Brother! Trans Dudes Are Kissing in the Wrestling Ring

The following story is an extended version of a lead story from The Autostraddle Insider, Autostraddle’s new print zine. To find out how to get the zine — where you can see even more photos from this story — click here.

two transmascs kissing at TBoy Wrestling
photo by Pasha Silaev

I’m just over a year into my transition, and I find myself using the words “bro” and “brother” way more than I ever thought I would or wanted to. It’s not that testosterone has erased my vocabulary or made me forget everyone’s names. It’s that, for the first time in my life, I genuinely feel a sense of brotherhood with my transmasc friends.

So it only makes sense that a trans dude in Los Angeles would want to build something around that feeling. Enter: Adam Bandrowski, founder of Trans Dudes of LA (TDLA), who shares my adoration for trans brotherhood, but couldn’t seem to find it within his proximity. He found plenty of trans support groups but not as many trans dude social groups. In August 2023, he started organizing small meet-ups in Silver Lake and Echo Park like a beach day and a pumpkin carving night. It was during a billiards night that Bandrowski met his eventual TDLA co-director, Mich Miller, who had learned about the group via a flyer on a lamppost.

As it turns out, Miller, who was 30 at the time, also did not have a large group of transmasculine friends. Even more, he craved a mentee/mentor relationship that he hadn’t been able to find. Miller runs his own print shop called Print Shop L.A., which he describes as a community space, and even there he sometimes finds himself to be the only trans man in the room. That’s what drew him to what Bandrowski was doing with TDLA.

According to Bandrowski and Miller, they had “great friend chemistry.” They’re both artists, they’re creative and imaginative, and they know how to use humor to spark joy in each other. “Immediately we started thinking of really creative ideas like bringing a printmaking night to trans men or bringing tattooing and live music together and it’s all transmasculine talent,” Miller tells me. They also hosted Magic Dyke, a transmasc pre-party to lesbian-centric Dyke Day.

The boys love a good theme (last year’s Halloween party was called Trasmascarade) but more than that, they love to be of service to trans guys seeking friendship. “I think all trans men can benefit so greatly from having a shared community, from witnessing trans people of all ages, races, and walks of life in real time,” Miller tells me. I agree.

What started as one guy looking for people like him to hang out with has evolved into a full-blown coast-to-coast spectacle. TDLA is more than a social group; it’s a reminder that there’s still very much a need for intentional and protected spaces for trans men and nonbinary people, even in the most progressive of cities.

And nothing captures that better than T-Boy Wrestling.

someone injecting T at TBoy Wrestling
someone in a For Them jockstrap at Tboy Wrestling
someone at TBoy Wrestling in the ring
photos by Clark Stone

Bandrowski and Miller started to gain attention for their fun parties, but could they organize something that wasn’t just a party? That’s what they set out to prove, as both community organizers and business owners, with their inaugural T-Boy Wrestling event in September 2024. But how and why did they land on wrestling?

At the aforementioned Magic Dyke event in June 2024, Bandrowski and transmasc creator Noah Way “put on tiny little shorts and wrestled on the stage,” and the crowd went absolutely wild with transmascs dying to join in on the performance. After all, the goal after three rounds was a kiss pin.

two performers at TBoy Wrestling
someone is pinned at Tboy Wrestling
photos by Clark Stone

The raw reaction from the crowd that day made Bandrowski and Miller realize that this is what they needed to be doing with TDLA. “The way that it’s grown, and things have grown politically and as a society at the same time, have really affected each other,” Miller reflects. “At first it was really just a space for real wrestling and also real tomfoolery and sexiness and camp. And it still has those roots but it’s also a stage for political theater, it’s a stage for expression on all levels from the transmasculine community.”

A regular attendee and participant in TDLA events, Ashton, who does not identify as a trans man, but rather a non-binary, gender-fluid person, describes themself as “femme of center.” For Ashton, their participation with TDLA is not to specifically find trans masc friends, but to be in community with other trans and queer people, period. “In reality, finding that on a large scale is difficult,” Ashton shares, “but as a person of color, I find trans people in whatever pockets of the world that I can find them in.”

As a gender expansive person who does not fall into a binary gender label, the only wish Ashton has for TDLA and its participants is more pronoun checking and fewer assumptions. This is less a critique of TDLA specifically and more so a well-documented flaw within queer and trans communities. We’ve made so much progress to be inclusive that we’ve almost circled all the way back to assigning labels to folks based on physical attributes, thinking we’re affirming them. It’s a good reminder that transness can look like anything.

Tboys kissing at Tboy wrestling
someone in shorts that say My Other Ass Is a Dump Truck
photos by Clark Stone

TDLA doesn’t care where you are in your transition or if you’re transitioning at all. They know there are too many ways to move through transmasculinity to ever box it in. So they don’t try. If you identify as trans or transmasc, you’re welcome. To Bandrowski and Miller, T-Boy Wrestling is an athletic space specifically for trans poeple as well as a space for those who are more performative, who want to make a statement, and want to use wrestling as a critique of masculinity.

That openness matters, especially as some queer spaces get tighter with their gates and pickier with their labels. TDLA offers the opposite: an open ring.

I first heard about TDLA when an Instagram post of that very first wrestling match made its way into my transmasc comedians’ group chat in New York. We were instantly hooked and turned on. Sorry, I ended that sentence prematurely. It turned us on to some fantastic community programming for guys like us.

Though let’s be honest, it also just turned us on.

photos by Pasha Silaev

But the horniness of T-Boy Wrestling transcends simple attraction. It’s not just sexy…it’s liberating. It’s brotherly love, not born out of obligation or shared trauma, but a deep appreciation for co-existing experience and distinct individuality. It’s about showing up as yourself, in your body, in front of hundreds of cheering strangers. And feeling held — even if it’s in a chokehold.

Bandrowski and Miller know exactly what they’re doing, and when they don’t, they figure it out. The duo shared the philosophy behind their programming via Zoom straight through an active earthquake. When I asked them if they needed to pause or reschedule the call, they assured me they did not. If they weren’t L.A. boys, I’d accuse them of toxic masculinity.

TDLA is the first big job Bandrowski, 24, has had outside of a desk job at Nickelodeon, where he didn’t speak to anyone. But to him, event producing feels like a natural skill he stumbled into. He credits some of this skill to attending California Institute of the Arts, an experience that also helped him figure out how to up the production value of T-Boy Wrestling without breaking the bank.

Between the first T-Boy Wrestling tournament in September 2024 and the most recent one held in March 2025, the boys got an official boxing ring, legit bleachers, lighting equipment, and even a jumbotron projecting a livestream of the matches. “I wanted these guys to be seen in the absolute best light…” Bandrowski tells me, “I wanted them to have the experience of cis people in televised wrestling and sports in general.”

T-Boy Wrestling doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it does take trans joy seriously. In a moment where our bodies are legislated and debated, where being visible can feel risky, TDLA gives us something that’s both sacred and rare: a space to play.

In the future, Bandrowski and Miller look forward to developing their business minds so they can continue to make the money needed to continue their programming. Funding is a challenge many queer and trans groups face when scaling. It’s no surprise that grant funding for trans — and arts — programming is disappearing before our eyes.

two competitors at Tboy wrestling in a pin
two wrestlers at Tboy wrestling locked in fight
photos by Pasha Silaev

There’s a balance to strike between free and accessible events and ticketed events, and it sounds like TDLA knows how to execute it with the help of some “angels” along the way. The social group offers more non-ticketed programming outside of T-Boy Wrestling that serve the community just the same. Beck Williams, a trans actor in L.A., is used to making transmasc friends through film industry mixers and friends of friends, which is how I make most of mine, too. But ever since learning about TDLA, Williams frequents the recurring “Transmasc Thursdays” programming.

Williams jokes but also means it when they say: “[There’s] something about looking around (at people as short as me, too, lol) and seeing the beauty of trans expression and life that I never ever got to see growing up. And being immersed in that is truly special.”

I also spoke with a TDLA regular named Shayne, who emphasized they had never been to an event for trasmasc people, by transmasc people, prior to TDLA. In addition to Trasmasc Thursdays, Shayne attends T-Boy Wrestling, line dancing, and most events held by Bandrowski and Miller. “If the boys are pulling up, I probably am too,” they tell me. Even though he can guarantee he’d know at least one other person at a TDLA event, he feels empowered to show up alone, knowing he’d be just fine either way.

To Williams and Shayne, being in a space with mostly, if not all, trans people feels like home. I love it when trans people say this, because we all have such different definitions and experiences of home, but we still know it’s the correct word to describe that feeling. It’s where your siblings are.

So yeah. Maybe “brother” wasn’t always in my vocabulary. But it’s programming like Trans Dudes of L.A. and T-Boy Wrestling that have me saying hell yeah, brother.

someone doing a headstand at Tboy Wrestling
someone doing a lift at Tboy Wrestling
photos by Pasha Silaev

Shortly after concluding this interview to be featured in Autostraddle’s print magazine, I received a text from a friend asking if I wanted to apply to NYC’s TBoy Wrestling with him as a duo. I agreed without hesitation, and we got to work putting together our choreographed performance. We’re both stand-up comedians and thought doing a comedy routine would be a fun way to stand out. Fast forward a few months, some wrestling practices, and two pencil skirts later, we were ready to take the ring.

I can’t lie — I was a bit nervous leading up to the event. To begin, there were over 100 trans guys in a group chat, most of whom I had never met. And I thought I knew all the trans guys in the tri-state area! So to be faced with the reality that there are so many of us was so beautiful but a little overwhelming. I was certainly on the older end of the age spectrum for the group, and that brought a bit of hesitation and self-consciousness. I turn 29 next week, so I’m certain I’m due for a departure from TBoy Wrestling to TMan Doing Age Appropriate Things, and my body is certainly paying the price for that right now.

The nerves quickly dissipated once I arrived for the wrestlers’ call time. As soon as I saw the wrestling ring being erected in the center of a Brooklyn music venue and all different walks of “transmasc” rush by me — collecting wigs, blocking choreography, taking T-shots, rolling joints, chugging protein shakes — I was reminded that I am but one small part of the event. From then, all throughout the afternoon and evening, I was continuously reminded of the community aspect of the programming. At one point, I thought to myself, Oh my God, this must be how cis guys feel at a football game.

As an audience member, sounds and movements came out of my body that I don’t think ever have before and maybe never will again. In more than one instance, I threw my fist in the air, feet off the ground, and screamed, “LET’S GOOOOOOOOO!” I don’t know what came over me. At one point, I demanded, “MORE BLOOD!” and “KISS HIM OR KILL HIM.” Luckily for me, everyone else around me was experiencing the same kind of psychosis. It was cathartic and thrilling and so, so horny.

Since the event, I’ve seen more and more trans dudes demand that TBoy Wrestling go to their city. I have a feeling we’re seeing the start of a wide-spread, radical display of transmasculinity, and it couldn’t come at a better time.

You can own a very special print version of this story — plus loads more photos from it! — by snagging your copy of THE AUTOSTRADDLE INSDER.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!
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Motti

Motti (he/they) is a New York born and raised comedian, writer, and content creator. You can find him on Instagram @hotfunnysmartmotti or at a bar show in Brooklyn somewhere.

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The Formerly Poly Fortysomethings Who U-Hauled Into The Best, Wettest Sex Of Their Lives

Sex/Life is a series all about the secret sexy business of couples, throuples, exes who still fuck for some reason, LDR darlings, polyculites, and any other kind of amorous grouping your perfect heart can fathom. We send them nosey questions, they record themselves answering them, and we transcribe that conversation for all of us to enjoy. All names have been changed and any identifying details removed.

Reade (49) is a queer/non-binary human and Mack (46) is a trans man and they live together in Alberta after U-Hauling nine weeks into their now year+ relationship. They were poly but became obsessed with each other to the degree that monogamy became their new way of life. Mack’s a framer who is certifiably good with his hands, Reade does construction and customer service, and both are really involved in activism and community service.

And this is how they fuck.

What was your sex life like when you first started dating? How is that different from now?

Mack: So, it was a little scary at first because you don’t really know your partner. Definitely a lot different than it is now. We were just learning each other. It was good, but it’s way better now.

Reade: I think at the start, we were both kind of guarded.

Mack: We were definitely both guarded . Nervous. I held back, you know? You can’t completely be yourself with someone when you’re brand new. I mean the sex was great but it keeps getting better over time.

Reade: Can I tell them about farting? And how you used to leave the room? I thought it was so cute but not sustainable long term. He was so sweet, he’d leave the room in the middle of sex to fart.

Mack: Sure you can tell them whatever you want, it’s anonymous. Like when we first started having sex, I wanted to make sure that everything we were doing felt good and right. And it was. It was definitely a learning process.

Reade: We did a lot of checking in. It was lovely but sometimes I just wanted to get ravished. I’m glad we’ve moved past some of that. Mack and I still do lots of checking in but it’s definitely not as much.

We also didn’t have our own spaces when we met so it was hard to find ways and places to have sex. Which I think contributed to the guardedness and also why we moved in together so quickly. It gave us room to be loud and exploratory and brave.

We had sex in a bathhouse for a while and we also had sex on one of Mack’s job sites.

Mack: Yeah it was like an office though. In an office on an air mattress. It was nice to be allowed the space tho. Like the bathhouse and the work site.

Reade: I just remember how covered in sawdust we were. And I lost a sock at the bathhouse. It was kind of chaotic. Also the straight dude factor at the bath house got kind of creepy after a while.

Mack: Yeah I’m glad we stopped going there. I mean the job site does seem a little weird but the office wasn’t touched and it kind of made it into our own private space where we could hang out and get to know one another. It was safe, it was private.

Reade: One of my favourite earliest memories is you blowing up the air mattress for the first time. We couldn’t stop laughing.

Mack: At first I bought a single thinking that it would be fine and quickly realized that we at least needed a double with a pump. I remember having one of my team blow it up for me.

Reade: A lot of good times on that air mattress. I think we soaked the whole thing from top to bottom.

Our sex life now is chef’s kiss! It’s soooo good. I’m having the best sex of my life and I’m almost 50. I’ve never had a partner like Mack before who can keep up with my sex drive. He’s also really invested in getting me off. Most of my partners wanted to receive oral but didn’t give it me. Mack gets in there like it’s the best meal of his life. Every time. I really appreciate that about him.

Mack: Our sex life is phenomenal. I’m glad we took the time to get to know and understand each other. I really enjoy having a partner who gets me. Who knows what I like and understands me holistically. My partners in the past were clueless. It would always be me having to self advocate to get my needs met and I don’t have to do that anymore. My partner loves and understands me. Like, I like being touched. It was a fight with my past partners because they had low sex drives. They felt like it was all I wanted or that I was using them. And now it’s not anymore. Does that make sense? Like I’d go through long periods of time of abstinence so I wouldn’t have to fight to get my needs met.

Reade: I feel like I’m invested in his pleasure [laughter]

Mack: ME TOO! I love making love to you.

Reade: Same! It’s joyful. It’s fun. We laugh a lot. We play. We’re not afraid to be messy and loud and get what we need. And now he farts in front of me so I know he’s comfortable.

[laughter]

If you live together, how long into the relationship did you make this decision, and how has living together impacted your sex life?

Reade: We do live together. It’s been 9 months (Reade counts it out on their hands). We moved in together like seven weeks after we met. It was kind of ridiculous. I’ve never done something like that before. But we were so in love from the beginning. And we needed our own little corner of the world to be together in.

Mack: We got a kitten (laughs).. We’re pet parents.

Reade: We thought at first we’d move in together like six months into dating but—

Mack: Circumstances beyond our control lead to an early move date. I still had my apartment for 4 months so I’d sleep there on weeknights but go to our apartment after work and on weekends. I think it gave us the time to get to know each other better before living together full time. I’m glad we had that.

So it’s given us the privacy to be intimate. Be comfortable. Love. Laugh. Squirt.

Reade: I mean our sex life was good from the start but I think we were finally able to relax. It gave us room to really get to know one another physically. We learned how to sleep together. We had longer stretches of time with one another in a private space. We weren’t at the mercy of anyone’s time or space, just ours.

Mack: And a work schedule. (laughs)

Reade: I think we’ve been able to cover more of our home in cum.

Mack: Our poor couch!

If you are parents or caretakers, how has this impacted your sex life?

Mack: We’re pet parents (we have a dog and a cat) I know that’s different but they’re still interested in what’s going on.

Reade: Our dog forces us to take breaks, go outside, touch grass. I think it’s good. Our kitten has pounced a few times at inopportune moments.

[laugher]

Mack: Overall they don’t affect our sex life like a child or a senior parent would.

Do you have a top/bottom dynamic? Talk about that.

Reade: We’re both switches. I’m into letting him be toppy with me. Something I’m not normally interested in. I trust him in a way I haven’t been able to with previous partners. It’s really hot when he does some damage. I like wearing his marks. I like being owned a little bit. Again something I’ve never let another partner do.

Mack: Our relationship is different than any other relationship I’ve ever been in. I’ve never let anyone top me. But I enjoy being topped by my partner. So we switch it up. It’s quite fun.

Do you feel like your sex drives are well matched?

Mack: Absofuckinglutely! For the first time in my life I don’t feel like I have to go looking outside of my relationship for sexual satisfaction.

Reade: Yes! Fucking finally! OMG! It’s amazing! I never thought I would find this person and I’m so grateful I have. I feel like I have catching up to do. And same, I don’t need sex outside of my relationship.

Mack: For the first time I don’t feel like I wanna share. I’m happy being monogamous.

Reade: Same. Although I like to make room for other possibilities because I think it’s important. But right now I’m 100% obsessed with our sex life.

Are there specific things you like to do during sex? Things you don’t like to do?

Mack: Yeah. Things we don’t like to do: 69 unless it’s titty/titty. No anal. I dunno what don’t you like to do?

Reade: Yes agreed no anal. I feel like our yums line up really well. We discovered Mack likes to give a little light pain, it really turns him on. A little choking, a little biting. He likes it when I dig my nails in. I like being grabbed in a rough way. I have a lot of flesh, and I like it being pulled on and grabbed. I like it when he sits on my face.

I’d say we’re both into trying things. We’re comfortable with each other’s weird. I like using a q-tip in my ear and Mack wants to go down on me while I do it, but —

Mack: Oh my god! We haven’t even done that yet.

Reade: I know, but we will. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of the things we’re going to explore. I know we want to have sex in a park. I want to have sex in an elevator. I feel like we’re getting into the next question.

Mack: What’s the next question?

What are some things you’d like to try (or try again)?

Mack: Outdoor sex. Yeah!

Reade: What else?

Mack: Safe public play spaces. Ummm I dunno, your turn.

Reade: I think you mentioned being tied up at some point. I have some really nice rope made by a queer couple that’s perfect. I agree with public sex. I’d love to take him to a queer bath house.

Mack: Yeah, I’m into that.

How important are orgasms to your sex life?

Reade: I’d say pretty important.

Mack: They’re like the most important thing. I think. Like the whole idea of having sex is to get off. I mean it feels good but getting off is really important.

Reade: We’re really good at making sure we both get off. We’re both squirters. I know my orgasms have gotten better with Mack.

Mack: Yeah it’s extremely important to both of us. That we make sure each other gets off.

What role does masturbation play in your sex life?

Mack: It’s an important part. During penetration it’s extremely important. It’s masturbation but it’s Reade masturbating me or vice versa. I haven’t masturbated on my own since we’ve been together. Or very rarely. I mean we’re both ok with masturbation in our relationship. If I wanted to go masturbate right now I would. Same thing with you (indicating Reade).

Reade: I do it sometimes to get to sleep. But mostly I’d rather have sex with Mack. I’ve never had such free access to amazing sex with a partner and it still hasn’t gotten old in any way. I think masturbation is great and I think folks should do it if they want to but right now there isn’t much of a need for me as solo exploration.

Tell us about your favorite or most memorable time you’ve had sex together.

Mack: They’re all my favourite! (laughs) I dunno.

Reade: I think the first time you came on me, all over my tits and belly. Or when you first sat on my face and came all over me and in my hair. I think discovering that new level of pleasure was fantastic.

Mack: I was thinking about that! I like that time at work when I came all over you.

Reade: I think it’s the level of intimacy that we’ve built that’s the best thing for me.

Mack: I also like when we first started introducing the toy (a large silicone dildo) a lot. That’s when I knew we didn’t need a third party. With the strap-on it helped complete things we were missing in our sex life. It kind of felt that things were missing before, and I’m glad we were able to find something to complete that besides another person.

Reade: I just have so many great memories of fucking and making love.

Mack: We have such good sex!

Reade: It’s so good.

Mack: I keep checking in because it’s so hard to believe it’s as good for you as it is for me.

Reade: It really is. I love you.

Mack: I’m so in love with you.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Sex/Life

A series that gives readers a backstage pass into the sex lives of queer couples (and throuples, polycules, etc) around the world. To share your own story, email [email protected].

Sex/Life has written 10 articles for us.

I Was Already Afraid of My Inbox. Then a Death Threat Came

This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

My email used to mostly only contain bitter things. Like a mailbox stuffed full of overdue bills, it was only ever populated with people who had grievances. After burning out from overwork last year, I developed a phobia of the computer. I’d stare at the thin, hard line of its closed mouth. I’d let messages pile up, get to them late, sometimes never respond at all. It took me months to get to the point where I began checking my email every few days.

I check my email multiple times a day now, if anyone’s wondering. When I told a writer friend that I wasn’t checking my email every day, he had raised his eyebrows, seemed confused like I’d just told him I only breathed if I felt like it. I scuttled around the confusion. “I don’t have a computer job like you.”

But that’s not the whole truth.

This past Wednesday at approximately 5:30 p.m., I opened my email to find a death threat. Or at least an implied one. The threat had details about my home address, my car, even the names of my immediate family members and their locations. It had been sent on Monday. The deadline for my compliance with the “blackmail” had already passed. It was supposed to be noon.

I was on a date, or on a mid-way break during a day-long date. We’d made an Important Decision about what to do with the heat and so had gone back to our respective homes to retrieve our bathing suits to go to the city pool. The day had climbed to 96 degrees, and a dip was just it. I positioned my forearms on an old vinyl-upholstered bar stool in my kitchen and leaned forward — a favorite phone-checking position of mine — and braved my way into my email app. The unusual subject line stood out like a crooked tooth. A message had come through my writing website‘s contact form. The subject line referenced a local blog — not a blog of mine, mind you — but a local one I knew of.

I opened it.

With the self-serious gravity of someone who just watched V for Vendetta for the first time, who wrapped themselves in a new celluloid personality, they open with a real stunner: “Believe me when I tell you that I get no pleasure from sending this email.” This email could have been a not-an-email.

They continue after naming the Blog That I Do Not Run and telling me they definitively know I run it, which…let’s return to my computer-based-anxiety — this is definitely not a thing that is happening: “I know it’s you. Just like I know so many other things about you. It’s not great that you’re being doxxed by a Nazi. A Nazi pointed me to you.”

And, you know, I would agree that it’s not great to have “Nazis” focused on you, if that is even true. But also, it’s not like we’re ideologically aligned or anything. Said another way, I’m not…saddened by the prospect of Nazis disliking me, you know? They should hate me. I certainly hate them.

I return to that line again and again: “It’s not great that you’re being doxxed by a Nazi.” Okay, well, okay. I could have less cut and dry enemies, so actually it’s, in a way, expected if not fine.

They close the first paragraph: “I’m a finder. And as such, I found you.”

Cool.

The next paragraph lists my government name (misspelled), home address, phone number, the make and model of a car I had once owned, and a helpful note that there is rust on the rims. They tell me my hair is bleached (I thought everyone was fooled into thinking I was a natural blonde) and claim they saw me “step out of” my house in an outfit I wore recently. Then, bizarrely, they decide to name my ex-husband and ex-fiancee. And look, while I don’t want my exes to be hunted by Nazis, they’re not the nearest and dearest to my heart. Then, “The Finder” names my immediate family members and lists their locations. They also tell me the name of my divorce lawyer, which I’ll have to take their word for because I have long forgotten.

They then make their demands: “Delete the blog by the timeline provided unless you want to see Nazis at your front door.”

***
It’s a heck of a threat. A threat I am reading five and a half hours after the deadline.

At first, of course, the adrenaline pulsed. When that email first lodged in my diaphragm, the threat did the same.

I reached out to the blog. They had not checked their emails either. It turns out some people are busy! We have all been blackmailed and have not known about it!

However, the people running the blog are concerned for my well-being and take that seriously. They offer to take the blog down temporarily if deemed necessary for my safety. I pull them into a group chat with supportive friends of mine to talk about this.

Currently, a big question I have about The Finder: How often do they check their email?

Look, sometimes a hot bitch is busy. Too busy for blackmail.

Oh, right, they used the word “blackmail.”

“I need something from you, and I’m here to blackmail you for it [I really want to know what they were listening to when they wrote this…Evanescence maybe?] …You have until Wednesday, July 30th at noon to delete it [the blog]. If you don’t, I dox you.” [Redacted to protect my family’s privacy but there is more here about sending Nazis to visit my family members and also to send in my direction.] “Every single right wing idiot living in your city will know who you are and where you live, what you do and, and what you’re up to.  The Proud Boys that live in the North Hill. The Keystone State Skinheads in Mount Washington. I found you, so you know I found them, too. You will not see it coming, but you will have to leave your life in Pittsburgh behind.  You’re not the only person being monitored here. I will dox your exes. I will destroy your reputation as an activist and as a writer in your city. I will contact autostraddle and let them know I got your contact information from Nazis.”

I also don’t know what Autostraddle would do with an email like that. “Hey, queer and trans website. DID YOU KNOW that NAZIS do not like one of your writers?”

The issue at hand here seems to be a delusion that I “doxxed” someone to Nazis. Which, risk to myself aside, I do not have the time for, nor had I ever actually considered as a possible thing a person could do. It’s like they’re accusing me of baking feces into chocolate chip cookies. Like…I guess you could do a thing like that, and I had not considered doing so until now. And YET even having now introduced my mind to the idea, I am still confident I am never gonna do that in my life.

I’ll just give you the entire diamond-mine of a closing paragraph:

“Now, a few things to think about. Rest assured that no one you know has contacted me and knows me.  You can trust them. Not even your exes, even the ones that may have cause to hate you. As I said, you doxxed someone to Nazis, and those Nazis know more about you than you think they do. You contact anyone to ask who I am, or if they have hand in this, and I will know and dox you. You try to publish anything about this, and I will dox you. Blame someone other than yourself and Nazis for this, and I will dox you. The only way you have to get rid of me is by deleting the blog entirely. As I said, I don’t care if you put all the other information somewhere else. Once the blog is gone, you will never hear from me again. You don’t even have to respond here, but any pleas or attempts to figure out if I’m serious, and I will dox you. There are causes behind this that are way bigger than you are. I don’t care about what happens to you. This is not personal. You’re not stupid and you know this a throwaway email that you will never be able to trace. Delete the blog by the timeline provided unless you want to see Nazis at your front door.”

And I…well, they won for a second. This did freak me out.

Also, their double spacing makes me want to vom.

***
Elbows slowly adhering to the vinyl with sweat, I turned my phone screen back on, paused wondering if this was too much, and then just decided to be honest with my date about where I was at because how was I supposed to continue on with the date normally? They took it in stride that I’d received a threat during a very nascent moment in our extremely new knowing of each other. We discussed this heavily while sunning and swimming at the city pool, with their generously allowing me to check in with my newly activated safety crew group chat. Most of the time was spent analyzing the message and encouraging the idea that we do not immediately comply with anything, or else it may lead to escalation. My phone buzzed, the sun shone, my date smiled extremely cutely, the chlorinated waters lapped, I swam away from a Band-AID floating in the pool as fast as I could while squealing because doing that makes the discarded Band-AID kind of follow you.

I saw a ghost at my date’s place that night.

Stress wipes your mind clean. In subsequent days, I’d return to the same task four or five times, forgetting each time I walked across the kitchen that I had intended to get the scissors, leaving, coming back. I forgot I’d seen a ghost almost immediately after it happened, and only remembered while in the car with a friend a day later.

The ghost itself: a pair of legs. Dark pants. A torso, untethered, above. A hint of arms. A guess at a head. It took a scant couple of steps toward me before it steamed away.

My date and I did not fuck that night, but I slept like the dead there, with them and the ghost.

In a few days, when I remember it’s possible to do so, I check the activity log on my website. As I write this, I’m looking at it again: hits from Russia, Belarus, Gibraltar, and one from Pennsylvania. I have to wonder if there are either Autostraddle readers from these places checking my site or just bots.

I tell my neighbors and word spreads up and down my block to keep an eye out for anyone they don’t know who might come up to my house. A couple members of my ad hoc safety crew gave a door knock to someone we suspected was involved. Oddly, it couldn’t have been him directly, but there were echoes of his language in the doxxing threat, as though this person was someone he’d talked to, maybe even just online.

***
This also happened to be the week I finally arrived at the end of the gauntlet of joining a local gun club. Some people bemoan that it’s a cult, but also, their membership procedure does keep people who are potentially unserious — and therefore dangerous — out. After a two-hour orientation where the instructor mostly made eye contact with ME in a room of other people who were also options for eye contact — I got to pick up my gate card from a line of three men seated at a plastic table situated at the back of a squeaky-floored banquet hall. Shooting’s allowed at their outdoor range until dusk, so while the rest of the orientation attendees got into their cars and rolled away, I turned my car toward the gate and let myself in. A member riding a motorcycle gave me a funny look, but nodded. I nodded back. They’re just going to have to get used to me. I rolled down to where I knew the steel-target pistol bay sat. Steel targets are exactly what they sound like. Instead of being the kind of thing made out of paper and cardboard where the bullet goes through, these are made of steel, meant to be relatively permanent except for dealing with wear and tear. You can tell you’ve hit one because you’ll hear it, and sometimes because it’ll give you a brief flash of fiery light as the bullet hits the metal.

I parked at the bay, which was empty, and unloaded my gun and ammo, my ear protection that a friend gave me and my prescription safety glasses. Most indoor ranges won’t let you practice a concealed carry draw. Not here. I practice going through the motions, drawing my loaded Glock-19 from concealed carry, fixing it on a target, firing. By the end, I’m pleased that I was able to go from drawing to hitting five targets in succession without a miss. It’s all plinks and flashes and cicadas in the deep green of the Pennsylvania woods. The sun sets and I keep firing until dusk creeps in a little too closely over the targets. The steel target setup looks like a ghost town, or a carnival never taken down, left to rot, with each of the targets in all their different shapes housed in small structures to protect them from the weather.

I packed up and returned to the dogsit, where, luckily, this week I am watching a pitbull who we’ll call Kevin because he does indeed have a silly human name. Kevin loves me, and he does not like when other people approach me. In fact, he’d recently bitten a friend who tried to join us for a walk. Luckily, eir hand wasn’t punctured, no skin broken, and my friend was the definition of calm.

It’s better to treat a threat, though, however asinine, as real. I pay to have my data deleted. I’ve started concealed carrying much of the time, and for most of the nights at the dogsit, I fall asleep on the client’s couch with their dog resting protectively on me, some movie playing on their TV, my gun still on me, pushing into my ribs. For anyone who’s not clear, the threat to send fascists to my door is a death threat — because what else would they be doing there? Trying to sell me something, get my signature on a petition? No, it’s a threat.

Still, one thing I’ve noticed and trained myself to remember over my many years of working for Autostraddle and also writing on the internet is that a person can read the same piece of writing completely differently when returning to it multiple times. If something inspires reactionary anger or offense, a second read-through later on can reveal that the piece was not so offensive after all, that so much of that shit that made your adrenaline shoot through you like you’d just housed two Red Bulls is just not that upsetting. And upon re-reading the note from my blackmailer as I presented it to various people, it became more and more apparent that it was the most illogical, air-headed drivel sent to me in recent memory.

On a video call with my sister, while on that couch with that sweet pitbull in need of socializing and training, we cackle over this being some Burn After Reading shit. The logic is circular. They “got my name from Nazis” but they’ll GIVE IT BACK, and they’re here to blackmail me…with my…home address? That’s not blackmail except for their intent to blackmail. For all the time this person has wasted — both mine and my friends — their threat is ultimately so weak. If I was a militant Nazi or a militant anything or even just me, and someone told me to Definitely Go To This Address to deal with an enemy, I would simply not. That sounds like a trap! And considering how aware they made me of this possibility ahead of time, like some villain telling me the whole plan in advance, and the fact that Pennsylvania has a blend of Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws, it is now definitely a trap.

***
I work the door for the next Queer Fight Club with a dear friend. We do a “vibes-based profiling” with everyone who walks in. We tell them where to find masks if they don’t have them and such.

It’s the newly established monthly night to welcome newcomers to the club and get them caught up on all the basics, so the whole thing winds up being nice because I’m able to confirm at the door, with my entire queer-looking ass, that they are in fact at the right place for Queer Fight Club and that they should proceed inside.

At fight club, one of the instructors tells me, when I apologize for being a Problem Child who’s brought danger closer, “Don’t apologize for being you. We wouldn’t have you any other way.” She’s one of the most intense people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, and it means a lot coming from her. In the end, I’m held together, pieced back together by the connections and people around me, whether they’re adjusting to have heightened security, spending extra time with me to get me out of the house, or talking and strategizing endlessly in a group chat and ultimately calming me down and reminding me that giving into demands only invites escalation.

Unfortunately for the people who mean me harm, I think I’m the better for this experience. I’m heartened by the care I’ve received, I’ve intentionally accelerated my practice with pistol shooting (because I hope to be competitive by the end of the season this fall: let’s goooooo) — and, maybe most importantly, I am now checking my email every day. For every email-job worker who feels like they’re so burnt out that it would take having a gun to your head to get you to want to check your inbox, I can confirm that there’s nothing like a death threat to get you to regularly check your email.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Nico

Nico Hall writes creative nonfiction, cultural criticism and reported journalism — as well as fiction — and has appeared here at Autostraddle and at PublicSource. You can find them talking about butch/femme dynamics and queer history on the Unladylike podcast and about abolitionist approaches to queer breakups and queer divorce on the This American Ex-Wife podcast. They are currently at work on a longform nonfiction project. Nico is also haunted. You can find them on Instagram. Here's their website, too.

Nico has written 241 articles for us.

4 Comments

  2. I love every time I get to read your writing, but I hate the situation that inspired this piece. It is a helpful reminder, though, to use a service to delete my info from the web soon, hopefully before I have any issues. 🤞

    • I had actually been meaning to do it, too, and it was relatively painless. It really sucks that we have to pay for privacy, though!

      And thank you for saying that so much – it means a ton, especially during stressful moments like this <3

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No Filter: Stephanie Beatriz Ranked Bisexual TV Characters. Let’s FIGHT About Her Choices

feature image by Peacock / Contributor via Getty

Hello and welcome back to No Filter! This is the place where I tell you what our favorite gay celebrities were up to this week, via their Instagram! Let’s go!

If someone hurt my auntie’s feelings, I will have to come over there and do something!!!

I don’t know that I have the credentials to declare this but I feel I do, so: HIT ALBUM HERE TO STAY!

I would be a liar if I did not say a relationship book is a bold and brave venture!! But I approve!

This simply made me laugh, Keke keeping it real as ever!

LOVE the moth look, couldn’t love it more tbh.

I think the hardest part of being this level of famous would be having to attend all the free events you get invited to. Like how many festivals can a person attend!!

Important news!!!

okay HBO now it’s time to give my girl a rest from carrying your network on her back!!

this is giving Mary Todd as Anna Delvey and I like it??

Looooove to see a new artist book a sold out tour yes, that’s life!

Cardi will always serve a look and a catchy beat!

I love love! That’s all!

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Christina Tucker

Christina Tucker is writer and podcaster living in Philadelphia. Find her on Twitter or Instagram!

Christina has written 365 articles for us.

3 Comments

  1. I wouldn’t have included Jenny on the list at all (I know that wasn’t Stephanie’s choice!) as I don’t think she is bisexual. She dates men at the beginning of the series, doesn’t seem into it, and then realises she’s a lesbian. Alice or Tina would’ve been a better choice for The L Word, but I guess they wanted to include a more iconic character.

  2. #11 – Eleanor Shellstrop. Say what you will about the other characters on the list, their bisexuality wasn’t always treated as the punchline to a joke.

  3. putting both Eve and Villanelle at the bottom of the list is unacceptable, I’ve never seen Brooklyn 99 and now I never will because this person has deeply boring taste

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If You Don’t Already Have Your Halloween Couples Costumes Locked In, Are You Even Gay?

Recently, I was looking back on the previous month’s output on Autostraddle as we always do, taking a look at patterns, data, what readers did and did not respond to, etc. And when looking at some of the numbers for my own work, I saw something strange. The 15th most popular post written by me for the month of July was not, in fact, something I wrote IN July but rather my list of couples costume ideas for lesbians. Lesbians and queer people, it seems, were getting a proper good head start on planning their couples costumes for gay Christmas aka Halloween.

Now, this is delightful and relatable! My wife and I have an official household policy of knowing what we’re doing for Halloween in August. July is even more impressive in terms of Halloween forethought! But some costumes really do require more planning than others, especially if you’re going to DIY them. Take my coworker Motti’s couples costume with his girlfriend last year — the viral Chappell Roan x Passenger Seat costumes — for example.

But the fact that the queer masses are already Googling what to be for Halloween is also stressful, because fam! I have not updated that list yet! It has some evergreen suggestions, sure, like Morticia and Gomez, a couples costume option for femme/butch couples I don’t ever see going out of fashion. But it’s also full of 2024-specific costume ideas and options that otherwise feel dated. Should I update this list sooner rather than later?! Are we really already planning couples costumes?! DO YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO BE?

Admittedly, my wife and I indeed had our costume ideas locked in by July this year, owing mainly due to my wife getting tipsy on a plane and then popping on the feature film Jaws as well as to my enduring obsession with Jaws that has recently blossomed into an obsession with shark movies in general. So in case you’re wondering: We are being Quint and Jaws. It’s unclear both how we’re going to execute these costume visions (I mean, my wife already kind of dresses like Quint, that part will be easy) and where we are going to wear them to, as we’ll be in a car and on an airplane for most of actual Halloween.

But who would we be if we didn’t already have an elaborate couples costume plan despite not having actual Halloween plans?! A STRAIGHT couple????? (Who knows, maybe straight couples plan their Halloween costumes together early, too, but in the first month of Q3?????? I doubt it.)

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. My spouse has a rule that we can brainstorm Halloween costume ideas as early as I want but I’m not allowed to get STRESSED about not having a good idea until Labor Day. (Our current leading idea is a very genderbent Clue group costume)

  2. Long live the DIY passenger seat!!! and stop I’m already stressed about how we’re going to one-up this year.

    • Quite possibly the biggest attack against single gays I have ever seen on this website… I am reeling! I am shocked! I don’t know if I will ever recover! I have never celebrated Halloween in my life and I’ve still got FOMO about couple’s costumes!!! PS: Does anyone want to dress up as Jesus and Judas with me

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‘How Do I Get My Ex To Stop Going To My Favorite Bar?’

Q:

I went through a really bad breakup earlier this year from someone who constantly made me feel bad about myself, lied to me, etc etc. I don’t need to get to into it because I’m processing it plenty in therapy and I know where I stand with her. Which is that we’re not on good terms! I would prefer to never see or speak with her again. She claims to want the same. We live in different parts of a pretty large city so this should be easy to do.

And yet. She keeps showing up at all my go-to places. In particular, she has been hanging out at my absolute favorite bar in town. It isn’t a queer bar technically but it’s mostly queer people who hang there. There are other queer spots to go to though. ((AND honestly I feel like I’M a big part of what turned it into such a queer place to begin with! I’m a longtime regular and I started bringing my friends there. They started bringing people, etc.)) I introduced my ex to it. She’d never set foot in it before. Now she’s showing up all the time and also seemingly bringing DATES there which bums me out. Not from jealousy clearly. Just from wanting to tell these women she’s on dates with to run even though I know it’s also none of my business.

I’m just so angry. Any decent person would let me have “custody” of the bar. When I see her there I end up leaving. It’s like I’m letting her win. I hate it! I want to ask her to just give me this one thing and stop coming to one of my favorite places in the world but I feel like that could backfire or like it also just isn’t who I am. Ultimatums and big demands are her bag not mine. Do I have to give up this place I love so much? That seems so unfair!

A:

You’re right, a lot of this seems unfair! I hate “losing places” in a breakup, though I can concede that a lot of the places I lost access to in my last big breakup belonged more to my ex than to me. I’ve never had to stop being a regular at a place I discovered first because of an ex. The exact situation you’ve described sounds like my personal nightmare! I get very attached to places! Especially de facto queer spaces!

Given where you’re at with your ex in terms of not wanting to speak or see each other, I don’t think this is going to be resolved by a conversation, especially if the relationship was as volatile as you describe. I respect your desire for firm boundaries with her. I also can’t fully know her motivations for continuing to go to this bar, but it’s possible she’s indeed courting drama and trying to get a rise out of you. So engaging could be exactly what she wants and also allow her to continue to have some sort of hold over you. I doubt she’d be surprised to learn how upset you are by her presence there. She knows it’s your spot, and she knows how you feel about her.

Unfortunately what this all comes down to is the fact that you can’t really change or control someone else’s behavior. But you can change or work towards changing your own behavior and in particular the way you react. There are certain situations where I’d say yeah you should just protect your peace by not going to the place your ex keeps showing up in. But in this instance, that indeed would be too big of a loss! You’re used to this place being a safe space for you, and even if you’re in a big city with plenty of other queer bars, this one is special to you, and having that sense of community and belonging somewhere is actually so important.

So, how can you get to a place where you get to keep going to this bar even if your ex shows up? One step may just be time. Maybe you do have to take a little bit of time off from going there. Not forever! Just for a little bit! While you’re still healing from the breakup, going to therapy, maybe talking about THIS in therapy. Time can help so much. Then you can try going back and see how you feel. You can also recruit your friends to help make it easier to navigate sharing the space with your ex. You could have a friend arrive a few minutes before you to give you a heads up about whether your ex is there or not so as not to be surprised by her presence. It’s not a perfect solution, sure, because your ex could always show up after you. But maybe you also have a friend sit facing the door to give you the heads up when that happens. Sometimes it can be easier to regulate our stress and reactions when we’re not totally blindsided. That little heads up from a friend is small but could make it so you have a second to check in with yourself before laying eyes on your ex.

It also seems possible to me that if you were to take a break from going or get to a place where you don’t have to immediately leave when your ex shows up then your ex might indeed stop showing up at the bar so much. She could be doing it all precisely for the reaction from you (or in hopes you’ll try to say something). If you stay but don’t engage, you take that away from her. I’m not sure how big the bar is, but are there different spaces in it? Like a patio or different rooms? Don’t stay if you feel like it causing you too much anxiety or anger, but if you can get to a place where you’re able to control some of your response to her presence, you might be able to take away some of her power here. Talk to your friends if you haven’t already. They can put themselves between you and your ex, distract you as needed, and remind you that there are still good people who love you in this space and she can’t change that.

I think you’ll get your bar back. I think it’ll just take time and for the wounds to feel less fresh. In the meantime, don’t feel bad for getting worked up about all this. A breakup is so disorienting and shattering on many levels, changing our contexts and associations with places. It sucks to feel like a place that used to provide you comfort is now a place of heightened emotions. You’re not letting her win; you’re trying to take care of yourself by removing yourself from a place when her presence makes you feel bad. It’s not wrong to leave when she shows up, but I do think it’s obviously hurting you to do so given how much you love this place. So if you can tip the scales a bit in order to be able to sit with some discomfort and quite literally reclaim your space, I do think that’ll also de-incentivize her to show up. If you were to stay, maybe she’d be the uncomfortable one.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

I Have Good Gay News and Bad Gay News About Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’

I’ll start with the bad news so we can end on a good note. The bad news is, despite the shippers’ desires, Wednesday and Enid (or “Wenclair”) are just friends, and the creators seem keen on keeping them that way. That said, they are not opposed to the shipping, saying, “people can read into whatever they want, which is great,” while doubling down on “they’re very much friends.” Which, frankly, is better than how some showrunners have treated wlw shippers in the past so, I’ll take it. We’ll always have AO3.

The GOOD news is, actor Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo, who plays Ritchie Santiago, now the Sheriff of Jericho in season two, is non-binary! I didn’t realize that in season one and am delighted to learn this fact. They say that, as opposed to Ritchie’s sheriff predecessor, their character Santiago doesn’t have negative feelings about the Outcasts, but instead can empathize with them as a Black woman who has experienced a similar type of othering. Of course, Lewis-Nyawo being non-binary also factors into their portrayal of the sheriff, saying, “Outcast is a facsimile for queer, trans, black, so many marginalized identities. I couldn’t separate that from the work.” They tease that the second half of the second season is sure to bring more mayhem, with Wednesday continuing to run into danger head first.

Also good news, Luyanda says they found the Wednesday set collaborative and welcoming, even when it comes to people using their correct pronouns, which unfortunately isn’t a given in any workplace.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo’s future projects, for example a “really gay” horror about late stage capitalism they’re working on.

Monday’s Child is Full of Links

+ Demi Lovato reunited with Camp Rock costar Joe Jonas to perform some nostalgic songs (Demi looks and sounds AMAZING, I think this performance healed something in me)

+ Goosebumps, whose first two seasons featured LGBTQ+ teens, was cancelled by Disney+

+ ICYMI, Lucy Dacus performed at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards

+ Honey, Don’t creator wanted a lesbian noir film with “a classic femme-butch attraction” between Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza’s characters

+ The Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That is officially over…for better or for worse

+ Bisexual artist Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, who played Lily on Modern Family, talks about her pivot from acting to music

+ Sue Bird recreated the Coldplay “kiss cam” fiasco with Seattle Storm’s mascot, much to Megan Rapinoe’s surprise

+ I am admittedly not a reality show gay but I had no idea there was a British Real Housewives universe and that they have a bisexual autistic woman named Christine McGuinness so learn about her with me, won’t you?

+ Last but not least, in case you’re not as chronically online as I am, please enjoy this trend of women dressing in drag as Alexander Hamilton to lip sync Best of Wives and Best of Women

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Valerie Anne

Valerie Anne (she/they) a TV-loving, video-game-playing nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories in all forms. While having a penchant for sci-fi, Valerie will watch anything that promises a good story, and especially if that good story is queer.

Valerie has written 662 articles for us.

1 Comment

  1. There’s a whole documentary on Christine McGuinness’ experience of being diagnosed as autistic (she came out as bi following that), but I had no idea she was in a British version of Real Housewives (or that that was a thing that existed at all)!

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16 Queer Road Trip Books To Adventure With

I’ve gone on four cross-country road trips in my life so far. Once from Long Island, down the east coast to Virginia, cutting across Tennessee and doing the southbound route largely dominated by big ass Texas, ending in Los Angeles. Once from Los Angeles to Virginia, driving in a straight line across the middle of the country. Once from Florida, along that southbound route again, to Vegas and then back with a slightly altered route to avoid Albuquerque after some superstition following a cursed night there. I’m sure I’ll do it again. I love long road trips. I’m sure I get it from my mother, who would always rather drive 16+ hours between destinations than catch a flight. I’m a pro at car snacks.

I don’t necessarily see any long car rides in my immediate future, but in the meantime, I can recommend some LGBTQ+ books that prominently feature road trips in their plot. Turns out there are quite a few of them! Road trips in general are fertile with potential for great fiction, much like dinner parties. Throw two characters in the confines of a car — or someone solo — and watch tensions simmer, realizations come to the surface, and changing surroundings shaping how people see and engage with themselves and the world. Here’s a smattering of road trip reads to perhaps bring on your next road trip or just escape into from the comfort of home.

A quick note: There is a tremendous amount of road trip queer erotica out there, to the point where I felt out of my depth recommending anything without having a chance to read them first, but search “queer” (or m/m or f/f or wlw etc, depending on what you’re looking for) and “road trip” on Goodreads lists, and you’ll find a treasure trove of self-pub and pulp erotica set around road trips out there!

This list was originally published in March 2023 and has been updated in August 2025.

Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland

Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland

This queer cult classic road trip novel recently got a new re-release with an introduction by Eileen Myles. It was originally published in 2001 and follows a gay man who graduates from his Kansas City high school in 1974 and then hitchhikes across the country with Ali, a fellow queer outcast from his hometown. Their adventures take them to New Orleans as well as San Francisco. Friendship, self-discovery, hedonism, and community are all destinations on this wild road trip.

Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom

Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom

With dark and humorous twists on the American road trip novel, Make Sure You Die Screaming sees its nameless nonbinary protagonist on a journey from Chicago to Arkansas on a search for their conspiracy theorist MAGA father who has gone missing. I mean it has one of the best blurbs of all time from Torrey Peters (“It’s Fear and Loathing for the generation devastated by the generation that brought us Fear and Loathing“). And if you’re not instantly hooked by the title alone, I cannot relate. Read more about it in our review.

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? by Anna Montague

How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

While going through her late friend Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers Sara’s grand plans for a big friendship road trip for Magda’s upcoming 70th birthday. So Magda takes the urn of Sara’s ashes with her on the road to do the adventure they never got to do together and uncovers secrets about herself, Sara, and the real depths of their relationship.

Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee

girls girls girls shoshana von blanckensee

I love how so many road trip novels are set in the past. This one is set in the summer of 1996, when two best friends and secret girlfriends Hannah and Sam decide to drive away from Long Beach, New York all the way to San Francisco.

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Obviously! An iconic lesbian road trip tale! I want to go on the Carol road trip and eat every place where they eat in the film. For now, I’ll just re-read the book.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Another iconic entry on this list, Nevada recently received a much deserved flashy re-release from FSG and continues to be a seminal work of trans fiction. You can read Niko Stratis’ interview with Imogen Binnie for Autostraddle as well as Drew Burnett Gregory’s essay about the novel.

Love Is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar

Love Is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar

This memoir by queer Muslim author Randa Jarrar follows her journey on a road trip from Los Angeles to her parents’ place in Connecticut. She writes on single motherhood as a queer parent, domestic violence, fat bodies, American racism, and so much more.

Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing by Erika Lopez

Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing by Erika Lopez

Playful in story and form, Flaming Iguanas is an illustrated book that follows Tomato Rodriguez as she rides her motorcycle all over, meeting girls, good post offices, and endless adventures along the way.

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden

Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden

This speculative graphic novel sees two young women, Bea and Lou, thrown together on a trip through West Texas, accompanied by a curious cat and haunted by dangerous men. It’s gorgeous and heartbreaking and alive in its art and language. It’s technically young adult, but I don’t read a ton of YA or a ton of graphic narratives, and I found myself completely immersed in this.

Melt With You by Jennifer Dugan

Melt With You by Jennifer Dugan

Speaking of YA, there are a lot of queer YA road trip books out there! This one follows Chloe and Fallon on a best friends to hookup to enemies to lovers journey as they drive around the country to various food truck festivals for the gourmet ice cream truck they work in together. Miscommunications! Tensions! Roadside side-adventures!

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner

When Cass’s best friend Julia is unexpectedly killed in a car crash, Cass becomes determined to still go on the road trip she and Julie had been planning — only, instead of taking a car, she only has her bike. And instead of having her best friend with her, she has her ashes. The book is about grief, friendship, and theater, Cass also keeping alive the project of the musical Julia had been writing when she died.

Kings of B’More by R. Eric Thomas

Kings of B'more by R. Eric Thomas

Another YA adventure, Kings of B’More is a Stonewall Honor Book about Black queer best friends Harrison and Linus, who embark on a mini road trip after Linus delivers the devastating news that he’s moving out of the state. R. Eric Thomas is also the author of the fantastic essay collection Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America.

Love, Misha by Askel Aden

Love, Misha by Askel Aden

While we’re on the YA train, consider this YA graphic novel mystery about Audrey, mother to nonbinary child Misha. They head on a road trip together meant to let them bond, but both are struggling to connect with each other and really see each other for who they are. Their parent/child journey gets a lot more complicated when a wrong turn leads them to the Realm of Spirits.

After the Parade by Lori Ostlund

After the Parade by Lori Ostlund

Lori Ostlund’s debut novel is about a forty-year-old man named Aaron in a relationship with an older partner named Walter for the last twenty years. Aaron leaves Walter in New Mexico on a path of self-discovery and reckoning with his past in the Midwest, traveling to a new life in San Francisco. I am also a big fan of Lori Ostlund’s queer short fiction.

We All Loved Cowboys by Carol Bensimon, translated by Beth Fowler

We All Loved Cowboys by Carol Bensimon

This short work in translation is a novel about recently fallen out friends Cora and Julia coming back together for a road trip throughout Brazil. It’s a queer coming-of-age tale and a debut novel steeped in themes of friendship, change, and self-exploration.

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán

A group of three friends in Chile embark on a road trip up the Andes cordillera after one of their mother’s remains goes missing in transit. The book touches on death, second-generation trauma, and friendship. Indeed, stories of intense friendship is a major recurring motif in these road trip books.

Have other queer road trip books you’d like to shout out? Drop them in the comments!

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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Related:

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

17 Comments

  1. nevada and flaming iguanas are both so so good, and i’m so glad autostraddle introduced me to them

  2. I’ve been looking for a travel memoir for the StoryGraph Genre Challenge! Thank you for Love is an Ex-Country.

    And if you’ve got queer “popular science” recs…

  3. If you like all vibes, no plot type road-trip romances, and read mm, Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian is really good.

  4. a love story starring my dead best friend is one of my favorites! i read it about once a month as a baby teen trying to find out if i was queer (spoiler, i was) and when i reread it as an adult last year i was surprised at how well it held up

  5. I’ve read Love Is an Ex-Country, and I feel like I should point out that it’s more of an essay collection than a memoir, and only two of the essays are about the road trip. Randa Jarrar also describes herself explicitly as an ex-Muslim atheist, so referring to her a “a queer Muslim” is a bit misleading.

    The marketing/jacket copy did that book a disservice, because it wasn’t the book I expected it to be, but on the flip side I think there are people who aren’t interested in road trips or the experience of queerness while religiously (and not just culturally) Muslim, who would have liked it but missed out.

  6. I feel the need to throw my own hat into the ring, with my 2019 novel, “The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus”, published with Atthis Arts. It is about a road trip, just one that happens to be taken on foot…by two ghosts and a mime. One of the ghosts, Chelsea, is trying to deal with her feelings about the girlfriend she left behind when she got hit by a train two years previous, and what it’s like trying to grow and change after your heart’s stopped beating.

  7. I just bought We All Loved Cowboys from Gay’s the Word last month! Now i’m even more excited for it

  8. Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun is my favorite queer road-trip book. I’m surprised you didn’t list it! It’s so good.

    • I loved Here We Go Again!

      Quick note – don’t believe the cover – this is definitely not a rom-com, this is a tear jerker. I mean, there is a very satisfying romance (between two former best friends / current rivals who go on a final road trip with their dying mentor) but be prepared to ugly cry over their dying friend / mentor.

  9. I adore Housemates by Emma copley eisenberg, one of my fave books from the past year + a road trip book!

  10. How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole is more of a transatlantic boat trip than road trip but I’m counting it because it’s great.

    It’s a fluffy, feel-good sapphic re-imagining of Anastasia. It’s very tropey and over the top, and it also gleefully explodes and subverts romance tropes – there’s only one bed, a fake relationship, etc.

    I don’t recommend this if you’re looking for realism but if you like ridiculous romances involving royalty from tiny fictional countries and especially if you’d like this sort of romance better if they were less straight / white / imperialistic, then this is the story for you.

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What Hot Queer Book Published This Summer Should You Read?

It has truly been a great year for LGBTQ+ books, and there are still so many more to come before the year is out. This summer has seen some particularly hot new releases, and if you’re looking for a read for your next lake or beach day or something to occupy your mind during the last gasp of summer, I’ve got you covered. Why decide for yourself what to read when you can let a silly little quiz decide for you! Answer the questions below, and I’ll match you with one of Summer 2025’s hot new queer books! For more recommendations, check out our most anticipated books previews.

What Hot Queer Book Published This Summer Should You Read?

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

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  1. Could we have a list of all possible results please? The answers make me think there’s some great ones I might not’ve heard of!

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24 Very Gay Excerpts from Eleanor Roosevelt’s Love Letters with Lorena Hickok

History here sourced from Empty Without You, edited by Roger Streitmatter; Eleanor Roosevelt, Reluctant First Lady, by Lorena Hickok; and Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts.

After learning of Eleanor Roosevelt’s queerness in a women’s studies class in college — which blew my at-the-time-closeted young mind — I researched everything I could about Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal life: her merely political marriage to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her circle of close friends who all happened to be out lesbians, and most importantly, Lorena Hickok.

Known as “Hick” to all her friends, including the First Lady, Lorena was the first woman to have her byline featured on the front page of the New York Times. She was a tough and smart journalist, writing about sports and news and covering some of the country’s top political stories for the Associated Press in the late 20s and early 1930s. By 1932, she was the most successful female reporter in the nation. She also dated women.

San Francisco, CA, 8/1/34: Mrs. F.D. Roosevelt and her secretary Lorena Hickok dining at a modest restaurant.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok dining. Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images

Hick came into Eleanor’s life in September 1928. Hick was covering FDR’s bid for governor of New York, but she purposefully avoided taking on assignments centered on Eleanor. The boundary-breaking reporter didn’t want to be confined to covering the lives of politicians’ wives. She knew that a story about the wife of the Democratic candidate for governor of New York would never make the front page. While she continued to cover FDR’s campaign and his tenure as governor, she avoided writing about Eleanor.

In 1932, things changed. Eleanor had emerged as one of her husband’s top political advisors. She was more than a politician’s wife, and Hick saw it. She suggested to her editors that a reporter specifically be assigned to the presidential candidate’s wife for the first time ever. That assignment ended up going to Kay Beebe, another reporter at the AP. But that year, Hickok sat down for her first official interview with Eleanor, and a spark ignited. Usually a perfectly professional reporter, Hickok received a prescient note from her editor: “Don’t get too close to your sources.”

But Hick wasn’t going to get away with following that rule if the source had anything to do with it. Eleanor increasingly picked Hickok out of throngs of reporters, favoring answering her questions over others. She asked Hick to ride with her in a private car, and eventually asked her to have a one-on-one breakfast with her in her hotel room. After FDR won the election, Eleanor and Hick were both living in New York and spending most of their time together, attending concerts and plays and talking politics over late-night dinners. Sometimes, Hick made steaks for the two of them in her one-room apartment in midtown. Their “close friendship,” as many history books refer to it, flourished.

Eleanor and Hick. Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images

Eleanor and Hick. Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images

In 1978, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library uncovered 18 boxes of letters exchanged between Eleanor and Hick. During the 30 years they knew each other, the two women wrote nearly 4,000 letters to each other. After my crash course in Eleanor Roosevelt’s queerness in college, I knew plenty about Hick, but I didn’t realize at the time that so many of their letters had been preserved or that their content would be so explicit and definitive of their relationship. It wasn’t until later, in the fall of 2014, when I was sitting in my bed in Los Angeles, watching all 14 hours of Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts for work when I first heard a complete excerpt from one of the letters Eleanor wrote to Lorena. It was a small part of the documentary, but it gave me a rush. Eleanor’s words to Hick were clear, passionate, unsubtle.

In 2016, I read Empty Without You, a collection of over 300 letters exchanged between Eleanor and Lorena — mostly during E.R.’s years as First Lady — with annotations by editor Rodger Streitmatter. My mind was blown once more. Eleanor’s words to Lorena were more than just clear, passionate, unsubtle. They were visceral. They were sexy. They were… weirdly relatable? The letters don’t read like some subtextual lesbian romance buried under layers of insinuation and euphemism. They read like a modern-day romance.

I wrote and published this list of letter excerpts in 2016, and it has remained one of Autostraddle’s most popular history pieces. In the years since then, we’ve gotten a Gillian Anderson-starring on-screen representation of Eleanor and Hick’s relationship, which made knowledge of Eleanor’s queerness much more mainstream than it had been before.

I thought it was time to bring this list back to the homepage, and while most of this intro has remained the same as it was when I initially wrote it nearly a decade ago, I took out some of the especially 2016 stuff (like a reference to the television program Scandal and the musical Hamilton). It was a joy to revisit these letter excerpts, and if they’re new to you, I hope you enjoy, too!

And with that, I once again present to you some of the gayest and most romantic excerpts from the letters in Empty Without You. (Some of the most explicit letters Hick and Eleanor exchanged are lost forever, because Hick burned them.)

This piece was originally published in July 2016.

1. Eleanor to Lorena, March 5, 1933

“Hick my dearest, I cannot go to bed to-night without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving to-night, you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you even though I’m busy every minute.”

Most of Eleanor’s early letters to Hick as First Lady followed the same format. They began with some personal words to Hick, followed by a very detailed account of everything she had done that day, closing with some more personal words to Hick, usually about how excited the First Lady was to see her next. Eleanor’s fastidious recaps of her day suggest how desperate she was to let Hick know what she was doing at all times.

2. Eleanor to Lorena, March 6, 1933

“Hick darling, Oh! how good it was to hear your voice, it was so inadequate to try & tell you what it meant, Jimmy was near & I couldn’t say ‘je t’aime et je t’adore’ as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying.”

Our little saying. OUR LITTLE SAYING. For those of you who don’t read French, their little saying means “I love you and I adore you.” Eleanor often spoke to Hick on the phone and often made references to those phone conversations in her letters. Apparently, on this particular phone call, she didn’t feel comfortable uttering her affections, because Jimmy — her son, James — was around. But she repeated it like an incantation as she went to bed.

3. Eleanor to Lorena, March 7, 1933

“Hick darling, All day I’ve thought of you & another birthday [when] I will be with you, & yet to-night you sounded so far away & formal, oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort, I look at it & think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it!”

This was written to Hick on her 40th birthday. The two women were apart, and Eleanor was clearly having a rough time of it. She sounds a little insecure talking about how Hick seemed distant on the phone. Often in her letters, Eleanor would remark if she hadn’t received a letter from Lorena that day. Getting left on read hit different back then!!! She’s also writing about a ring Hick gave her here, a ring that reminds her of Hick’s love for her whenever she looks at it. As a bonus, that same letter also says: “What shall we read Hick? You choose first.” Here, Eleanor’s alluding to how she and Hick planned to read books simultaneously and then discuss them. THEY HAD A TWO-PERSON BOOK CLUB. And Eleanor even lets Hick choose the first book, because she’s a good and generous girlfriend.

4. Eleanor to Lorena, March 9, 1933

“My pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can’t kiss you so I kiss your picture good night & good morning!”

I am just picturing Eleanor Roosevelt making out with a literal photograph.

5. Eleanor to Lorena, March 10, 1933

“Remember one thing always, no one is just what you are to me. I’d rather be writing this minute than anything else & yet I love many other people & some often can do things for me probably better than you could, but I’ve never enjoyed being with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.”

This is actually the excerpt from their correspondence that is included in The Roosevelts, the excerpt that launched my initial obsession with these letters.

6. Eleanor to Lorena, March 11, 1933

“I miss you greatly dear. The nicest time of the day is when I write to you. You have a stormier time than I do but I miss you as much, I think. I couldn’t bear to think of you crying yourself to sleep. Oh! how I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit. I went & kissed your photograph instead & the tears were in my eyes. Please keep most of your heart in Washington as long as I’m here for most of mine is with you!”

In Hick’s letters and some of Eleanor’s, it’s clear Hick struggled with anxiety and volatile mood swings. Here, E.R. suggests her love is having a rather tumultuous time during their long periods apart. BEEN THERE, GIRL.

7. Eleanor to Lorena, November 17, 1933

“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”

Eleanor and Lorena were both fiercely anticipating seeing each other over Christmas. Throughout the late fall, their letters burst with longing for their reunion. This is one of the times when Eleanor’s lust makes it onto the page.

8. Eleanor to Lorena, November 27, 1933

“Dear one, & so you think they gossip about us. Well they must at least think we stand separation rather well! I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little what ‘they’ say!”

Hick had apparently expressed concerns about people whispering about the very close relationship between her and the First Lady, but Eleanor apparently gave zero fucks.

9. Eleanor to Lorena, November 29, 1933

“I wish you were going to spend Thanksgiving here, it surely would be Thanksgiving, wouldn’t it?”

Thanksgiving-themed yearning!

10. Eleanor to Lorena, December 3, 1933

“Darling, I feel very happy because every day brings you nearer. I love you deeply & tenderly & oh! I want you to have a happy life. To be sure I’m selfish enough to want it to be near me but then we wouldn’t either of us be happy otherwise, would we?”

I have never read anything gayer in my whole dang life.

11. Lorena to Eleanor, December 5, 1933

“Only eight more days. Twenty-four hours from now it will be only seven more—just a week! I’ve been trying today to bring back your face—to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips. I wonder what we’ll do when we meet—what we’ll say. Well—I’m rather proud of us, aren’t you? I think we’ve done rather well.”

Hick is quite familiar with the anatomy of Eleanor’s face… also, she’s literally writing about kissing Eleanor on the mouth, so anyone who doubts the physical nature of their relationship is a fool. Empty Without You contains significantly fewer letters written by Hick, as most of them were burned. It’s a shame, because she has a much more engaging writing style, and also because she writes more explicitly about mouth kissing. From that same letter: “Good night, dear one. I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now—I shall!”

12. Eleanor to Lorena, December 9, 1933

“Hick dearest, I can’t help wondering if my pencil note will reach you which I sent off last night! No letter from you to-day but I had two yesterday so I am just expressing a longing not a complaint!”

It’s safe to say at this point that Eleanor Roosevelt had no chill in the early days of her relationship with Hick.

13. Eleanor to Lorena, February 4, 1934

“Hick darling, I just talked to you, darling, it was so good to hear your voice. If I just could take you in my arms. Dear, I often feel rebellious too & yet I know we get more joy when we are to-gether than we would have if we had lived apart in the same city & could only meet for short periods now & then. Someday perhaps fate will be kind & let us arrange a life more to our liking for the time being we are lucky to have what we have. Dearest, we are happy to-gether & strong relationships have to grow deep roots. We’re growing them now, partly because we are separated, the foliage & the flowers will come, somehow I’m sure of it.”

Confusing punctuation aside, this is one of the more beautiful passages Eleanor ever wrote to Lorena. She insinuates their relationship was strengthened by the fact that it was long distance. Because Lorena and Eleanor spent such long periods of time apart, when they were together, they were really and truly together. They carved out time for each other. It’s not like if they lived in the same city they’d be able to live together, and so, the imperfections of their situation actually worked out. Still, Eleanor longed for more.

14. Eleanor to Lorena, February 4, 1934

“I dread the western trip & yet I’ll be glad when Ellie can be with you, tho’ I’ll dread that too just a little, but I know I’ve got to fit in gradually to your past & with your friends so there won’t be close doors between us later on & some of this we’ll do this summer perhaps. I shall feel you are terribly far away & that makes me lonely but if you are happy I can bear that & be happy too. Love is a queer thing, it hurts but it gives one so much more in return!”

The “Ellie” Eleanor refers to is Ellie Morse Dickinson, Hick’s ex. Hick met Ellie in 1918. Ellie was a couple years older and from a wealthy family. She was a Wellesley drop out, who left college to work at the Minneapolis Tribune, where she met Hick, who she gave the rather unfortunate nickname “Hickey Doodles.” They lived together for eight years in a one-bedroom apartment. In this letter, Eleanor is being remarkably chill (or at least pretending to be) about the fact that Lorena was soon taking a trip to the west coast where she would spend some time with Ellie. But she does admit she’s dreading it, too. I know she’s using “queer” here in the more archaic form — to signify strange. But please make me a t-shirt that says “Love Is A Queer Thing” on it right this second.

15. Eleanor to Lorena, February 12, 1934

“I love you dear one deeply & tenderly & it is going to be a joy to be to-gether again, just a week now. I can’t tell you how precious every minute with you seems both in retrospect & in prospect. I look at you long as I write—the photograph has an expression I love, soft & a little whimsical but then I adore every expression. Bless you darling. A world of love, E.R.”

Eleanor ended many of her letters with “a world of love.” Other sign-offs she used included: “always yours,” “devotedly,” “ever yours,” “my dear, love to you,” “a world of love to you & good night & God bless you ‘light of my life,’” “bless you & keep well & remember I love you,” “my thoughts are always with you,” and “a kiss to you.” And here she is again, writing about that photograph of Hick that serves as her grounding but not-quite-sufficient stand-in for Lorena. But I have buried the lede… this letter also includes a rare post-script from Eleanor that simply reads: “And will you be my valentine?”

16. Eleanor to Lorena, March 26, 1934

“Hick darling, I believe it gets harder to let you go each time, but that is because you grow closer. It seems as though you belonged near me, but even if we lived to-gether we would have to separate sometimes & just now what you do is of such value to the country that we ought not to complain, only that doesn’t make me miss you less or feel less lonely!”

Perhaps the most striking thing about these letters is Eleanor’s level of emotional honesty. These letters show Eleanor at her most vulnerable, her most undone, her most familiar. She’s unflinchingly earnest.

17. Eleanor to Lorena, April 4, 1934

“Dearest, I miss you & wish you were here I want to put my arms around you & feel yours around me. More love than I can express in a letter is flying on waves of thought to you.”

Can you believe there are history books that still characterize their relationship as purely professional and platonic?

18. Eleanor to Lorena, April 9, 1934

“This will be just a note to tell you I love you.”

To the point!

19. Eleanor to Lorena, April 18, 1934

“My dearest one, I got in early & then came at 8:30 to breakfast & I looked at all the new models. One corner cupboard I long to have for our camp or cottage or house, which is it to be? I’ve always thought of it as in the country but I don’t think we ever decided on the variety of abode nor the furniture. We probably won’t argue!”

Here, Eleanor is fantasizing about living with Hick. The models she’s referring to are furniture pieces from Val-Kill, the factory she established with her friends Caroline O’Day, as well as Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, who were on-and-off girlfriends for decades.

20. Eleanor to Lorena, February 12, 1935

“May the world be full of sunshine,
And our meetings frequent be
Hours of joy & quiet time,
Take us over life’s rough seas”

The poem above was handwritten by Eleanor on the back of a valentine card to Hick. On the card, a black and white puppy was holding a heart that had “To My Valentine” inscribed on it. The last line of the verse hints at the rough patch Eleanor and Hick’s relationship went through in 1935, when their letters became less frequent and Hick expressed agitation over the First Lady making less and less time for her. Yikes. The dyke drama!

21. Eleanor to Lorena, January 14, 1936

“Dearest, Darling, you were low & I know that in some way I hurt you & I am sorry & I wish I had not but all I can say is, I really love you.”

Indeed, the First Lady and her gal pal were growing apart. It’s unclear exactly what prompted the above apology, but Eleanor wrote the letter the day after she and Hick had lunch together in New York City. Clearly, it wasn’t the greatest lunch.

22. Lorena to Eleanor, December 27, 1940

“Thanks again, you dear, for all the sweet things you think of and do. And I love you more than I love anyone else in the world except Prinz—who, by the way, discovered your present to him on the window seat in the library Sunday.”

Though they continued to grow apart — especially as World War II unfolded, forcing Eleanor to spend more time on leadership and politics and less time on her personal life — Hick and Eleanor still wrote to one another and sent each other Christmas presents. Prinz, by the way, is Hick’s dog, who she loved like a child. Eleanor loved him enough to buy him a present, too. GAY!

23. Lorena to Eleanor, October 8, 1941

“I meant what I said in the wire I sent you today—I grow prouder of you each year. I know no other woman who could learn to do so many things after 50 and to do them so well as you, Love. You are so better than you realize, my dear. A happy birthday, dear, and you are still the person I love more than anyone else in the world.”

If Hick and Eleanor were indeed broken up at this point, they sure are fulfilling the stereotype of lesbians hanging onto their exes. In 1942, Hick started seeing Marion Harron, a U.S. Tax Court judge ten years younger than her. Their letters continued, but much of the romance was gone, and they really did start to sound like old friends.

24. Eleanor to Lorena, August 9, 1955

“Hick dearest, Of course you will forget the sad times at the end & eventually think only of the pleasant memories. Life is like that, with ends that have to be forgotten.”

Hick ended her relationship with Marion a few months after FDR died, but her relationship with Eleanor did not return to what it was. Hick’s ongoing health problems got worse, and she struggled financially as well. By the time of this letter, Hick was merely living on the money and clothing Eleanor sent to her. Eleanor eventually moved Hick into her cottage in Val-Kill. While there are other letters they exchanged leading up to Eleanor’s death in 1962, this feels like the right excerpt to end on. Even in the face of dark times for them both, Eleanor remained bright and hopeful in the way she wrote about their lives together. Never one to want to share her beloved Eleanor Roosevelt with the American public and press, Hick opted not to attend the former First Lady’s funeral. She said goodbye to their world of love privately.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!
Related:

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, fiction, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the former managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cake Zine, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. When she is not writing, editing, or reading, she is probably playing tennis. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 1073 articles for us.

40 Comments

  2. Love this. Also thing it should be on the big or small screen.
    By the way on #3, snail mail delivery was much much faster in the past, when it was the main form of communication. There were many more collections and deliveries and you could expect a much quicker answer.
    I should get out more.

  4. “Hick opted not to attend the former First Lady’s funeral. She said goodbye to their world of love privately.”

    slice my heart why dont you

    thank you for sharing this

  7. Letters will always be the most wonderful form of communication ever. There is nothing similar that comes close.

    Sometimes letters have a smell or certain way a person’s handwriting that makes it just so personal that nothing can compare. Reading and absorbing the entire letter envelope and all gives you not just information about the person but their feelings and mood when they wrote it. You don’t throw away letters. You keep them because they give you that same feeling when ever you read them.

  8. I’ve always secretly loved the quote “No one can insult you without your consent.” but this just made it 500% better.

    • Dunno I always thought that this quote came of a place of real privilege. It’s been weaponized against me more than once. But to each their own …

  9. “Remember one thing always, no one is just what you are to me.”

    This is the line I need to steal. ;-)
    Thank you E.R.

  10. Oh, to know what was written in those burned letters! Thanks so much for this article… I’m going to have to check out that book.

  11. It’s such an indescribable joy to find romance like this in the real world. It makes how we represent romance in our fictional formats more tangible.

  16. I also went to public high school in Southern Virginia. So, high five for us both surviving that!

  17. Thank you so much for this article- I am already a fan of the letters between Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert Dickinson (see the book “Open Me Carefully”)- and I am glad to know now of the book referenced in this article. Can’t wait to read it!

  18. My girlfriend and I just read this and we’re crying by the 3rd letter. So sad and beautiful.

  20. Although I’m so glad we have technology that makes it much easier to communicate, how great must it have been to wake up to a letter like this through the door?!

  21. Anyone else running out to buy the whole book with the sole intent of finding inspiration for online dating conquests or is that just me???

  22. Um thanks now I’m crying at work. This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read and I’m buying the book as soon as yesterday.

  23. “Maybe you had a super awesome high school history teacher who broke away from the confines of state-sanctioned education and actually acknowledged that not all of U.S. history’s influencers were heterosexual.”

    Well…sort-of!

    He WAS a pretty cool history teacher, but on the day he decided to make this mind-blowing aside about FDR’s wife carrying on an affair with a female reporter it was delivered as this jokey, bro aside. Like, “Haha. Schmuck can’t control his wife.” (He didn’t actually say that, but that’s how I remember it…) Still, my closeted 15-year-old self lit up like a lightbulb (completely invisibly, I hoped) and sent me scurrying online to find out more.

    Savoring queer scraps – even in homophobic contexts. That’s what I remember best about high school. :/

  24. Ugh I love this article so much! To quote Leslie Knope, ‘I’m feeling a lot of feelings right now’. I must admit that I wasn’t entirely sure whether Eleanor and Hick had a romantic relationship before reading this, but I’m sure now :)
    Also I would love to have a ‘Love is a queer thing’ shirt. Maybe I’ll design one at the end of the year when I’m done with high school.

  25. I have the book of their love letters as I have had a longtime obsession with the Roosevelt family. The letters are amazing and so sweet. This was great to find on AS.

  26. “Where were you when you first learned of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s queerness?”

    RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW AND I JUST SCROLLED DOWN HERE TO SAY SO BEFORE I COULD EVEN READ THE ARTICLE BECAUSE I’M SO FLABBERGASTED AND DELIGHTED

    oh my god i’m so excited to read this article now

  27. I’m an old, straight white guy (as the haters like to put it) but I must say the line “the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips” is a line that would make Puccini and Verdi smile, and frankly transcends any notions of gay or straight.

  28. I remember reading about them two in another book full of letters, this one of Wallis Simpson, who hinted about Eleanor liking “the gentle way” I didn’t understand what she meant by “gentle way” now kinda have sense LOL

    • Laughing.

      You’ll never think about Wallis Simpson the same way after reading “Gore Vidal Between the Sheets.” Try it!

  29. Thank you!

    It’s important to stretch beyond the horizons of an ageing generation of biographers who tend to dance around an important fact.

    ER’s marriage to FDR was not just political. I’m fact, it was not even mostly political. It was first and mostly dynastic. Politics came second in the family. As it still does today.

    She was a great woman and a great leader. Let’s do ourselves a favor and examine her choices and her leadership fully. We need to lift the veils. Only then will we really understand how important domestic realities are in shaping the leadership we want for the future from great women like ER.

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  34. I’m surprised you didn’t reference Susan Quinn’s 2016 book “Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady“. It’s a fantastic history of their relationship and I enjoyed reading about the ways they managed to intertwine their lives, considering the common and unique challenges they faced.
    There’s also a digital zine/photoessay called “Eleanor Studies the Female Gaze” that expands on Eleanor’s interest in women – specifically lesbians – and includes essays about (and very sexy photos of) film stars of the early 20th century, feminist film theory, the 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform, as well as profiles of Amelia Earhart and Helen Keller. On top of everything else, it gives the zodiac signs for most of the women in the book and a ton of references and resources at the end. So far, it has only been distributed by email – individual to individual – so it’s still quite rare.

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How Magazines Served As Sites of Trans Community-Making 50 Years Ago

On December 4, 1971, Drag Magazine photographed what it called New York City’s first drag wedding. The bride, Liz Eden, wore her “expensive ‘especially made’ wedding gown” and married John Basso at What’s Inn A Name Cafe. Surrounded by friends and family, Eden and Basso were married by an ordained minister.

“Here Comes the Bride” feature piece in Drag magazine, Volume 2, No. 6 (1972). Drag was a cultural magazine published in the 1970s and 80s. This magazine and the other periodicals in this post can be found in the Archives Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Collection. (NMAH.AC.1146).
“Here Comes the Bride” feature piece in Drag magazine, Volume 2, No. 6 (1972). Drag was a cultural magazine published in the 1970s and 80s. This magazine and the other periodicals in this post can be found in the Archives Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Collection. (NMAH.AC.1146).

In its very next edition, the magazine provided a sequel. Readers learned Basso’s real surname was Wojtowciz; he used his mother’s maiden name as an alias while involved in the Gay Activists Alliance. They also learned Wojtowciz and two others were found trying to rob a bank to get money for Eden’s gender-affirming surgery.

“Since early childhood Liz [Eden] always had an uncontrolable [sic] desire to dress in women’s clothing,” Drag reported. Despite Wojtowciz’s arrest, Eden used the money she and Wojtowciz received from Warner Brothers for selling the rights to their story to fund her gender affirming surgeries, completing the final operation on November 14, 1972.

The foiled heist made national headlines and sparked Hollywood’s attention, inspiring the 1975 hit Warner Brothers film Dog Day Afternoon starring Al Pacino. While the movie connected with mainstream audiences, the marriage ceremony likely resonated more with Drag readers, despite the short and rocky relationship between Wojtowciz and Eden.

The magazine was a vital lifeline to people who might today describe themselves as transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive. People across the country — many of whom might today describe themselves as transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive — saw Drag Magazine as a vital lifeline. Drag‘s readers faced systemic violence and discrimination, and they found visibility, hope, and connection in the magazine’s pages. And Drag was not alone in fostering community among these people. Magazines such as New Trenns, The Tranvestite, The Cross-Dresser, and others offered visibility, hope, and connection for trans and gender-expansive individuals who faced systemic violence and discrimination.

These magazines are vital parts of the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center’s collection. Most of the magazines examined in this post were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Like other ephemera of American culture, they offer insight into the lives of everyday Americans: how they discussed their identities, how they connected with their communities, and how they transmitted information across the entire United States.

Left: The Transvestite, Issue No. 40 (1974). Right: The Cross-Dresser, No. 3 (1975).

Note: These magazines are time capsules that demonstrate how language changes over time. When these magazines were written, they frequently used terms like “transvestite,” “he-she,” and “lady boy” — terms that are today considered transphobic slurs. Like the term “queer,” some of these terms were reclaimed by community members as a form of resistance. These magazines appealed to and were read by wide audiences, but this article will specifically focus on responses from trans women.

Left: He-She magazine, Volume 1, No. 1 (1966). Right: Trenns Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 3 (1969).

Seeing Themselves

A profile piece on Gigi Duval’s “transformation from male to female,” featured in the Volume 1, No. 1 issue of He-She magazine (1966).
A profile piece on Gigi Duval’s “transformation from male to female,” featured in the Volume 1, No. 1 issue of He-She magazine (1966).

These magazines provided critical representation for trans and gender expansive individuals across the United States who saw themselves represented in their pages. A large part of their output included sharing photos and real-life stories of trans women. A 1966 issue of He-She magazine shared photos of readers who wrote to the editor from Chicago, Milwaukee, and even West Berlin.

“There are far more of us than is generally realized,” R.K. from Chicago wrote, “but many of us don’t realize that there are others with the same taste for changing roles as we possess. To know we are not alone is to improve our mental outlook.”

Seeking Connections

Trans women and other readers could share personal advertisements in the magazines as a way to connect with one another. The ads contained photos and written descriptions of readers seeking romantic and platonic connections. People interested in connecting with others could send a letter to the magazine with money and instructions to pass their communication onward. This helped keep their names and addresses safe and secure.

Letters to the editor section titled “the readers always write” in Volume 1, No. 1 issue of He-She magazine (1966). Some notes included pictures, which the magazine applauded. “We hope our readers will follow your example and send in pictures of themselves in costume,” the magazine wrote to the right of R.K. evening dress photo.
Letters to the editor section titled “the readers always write” in Volume 1, No. 1 issue of He-She magazine (1966). Some notes included pictures, which the magazine applauded. “We hope our readers will follow your example and send in pictures of themselves in costume,” the magazine wrote to the right of R.K. evening dress photo.
Excerpt from Volume 1 issue of New Trenns magazine (1970). As the introduction notes, the “next fourteen pages are photographs of transvestites from about every state in the country. All of which are anxious to meet new friends.”
Excerpt from Volume 1 issue of New Trenns magazine (1970). As the introduction notes, the “next fourteen pages are photographs of transvestites from about every state in the country. All of which are anxious to meet new friends.”

The publications also supported other communication networks. One advertisement in a 1966 issue of He-She promised readers that “Club Wow is not only an excellent correspondence club,” but “a club for people with unusual interests and for broadminded people everywhere.” One 1970 issue of New Trenns Magazine included a more direct advertisement asking readers if they wanted friendship, love, or marriage.

An advertisement for “Club Wow” in Volume 1, No. 1 issue of He-She (1966).
An advertisement for “Club Wow” in Volume 1, No. 1 issue of He-She (1966).

Magazines promoted large community events as well, such as the First Annual Costume Ball in 1972 at the Church of the Beloved Disciple in New York City. Just a year before, the congregation had 600 members and founded its own LGBTQ+ religious order: the Oblate Companions of St. John.

These magazines served as news bulletins, sharing major life events (including Eden’s wedding) and legislative changes. The articles discussed topics that affected readers beyond gender and sexuality, including religion and spirituality, sex work, protesting, healthcare, and other resources.

Article showcasing Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church Fellowship, wearing drag at a fundraiser for the MCC fellowship Prison Ministry. As the article writes, “Rev. Perry discloses that his first lover was a transsexual who and wanted [sic] to love more and more as a woman before they separated.”
Article showcasing Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church Fellowship, wearing drag at a fundraiser for the MCC fellowship Prison Ministry. As the article writes, “Rev. Perry discloses that his first lover was a transsexual who and wanted [sic] to love more and more as a woman before they separated.”

Sharing Resources

While flipping through pages of articles and advertisements, readers also learned about safe spaces called “transformation boutiques.” These boutiques and cafes were places where people could find both emotional support and healthcare. The Dressing Room in Clinton Township, Missouri provided the “complete shopping experience for a discriminating cross dresser.” The store even held a Lady’s Night in their private party loft the third Saturday of each month.

Magazines became central spots for advertising gender-affirming services available across the United States, including laser or wax hair removal, liposuction, silicon breast prosthetics (called “falsies”), and custom underwear. Letters to the editor also became helpful guides about what products and techniques work best for different body types and custom underwear.

“Do-It-Yourself Kitt” article written about and featuring photos of Kitt Rogers in Volume 1, No. 1 He-She (1966). As written in the second image caption, “just 19 years old, Kitt has been experimenting with the props and devices of female impersonation since he was 16 years of age. However, it’s strictly a hobby with him and he has no ambition towards a career.”
“Do-It-Yourself Kitt” article written about and featuring photos of Kitt Rogers in Volume 1, No. 1 He-She (1966). As written in the second image caption, “just 19 years old, Kitt has been experimenting with the props and devices of female impersonation since he was 16 years of age. However, it’s strictly a hobby with him and he has no ambition towards a career.”

For many people, their exploration of gender identity and expression was — by necessity — deeply private. The magazines shared at-home resources, which provided readers with safe ways to express themselves in private.

Some magazines provided step-by-step guides on wearing contouring makeup, creating “falsies,” tucking, and wearing girdles and custom underwear. Kitt’s Roger’s “Do It Yourself Kitt” provided photos of the end products.

An advertisement for Drag Magazine in Vol. 1, No. 3 issue of The Cross-Dresser (1975). On the opposite page is an ad for an audio cassette led by CONFIDE director Garrett Oppenheimer and associate Fae Robin answering common questions. More covers of The Cross-Dresser are visible on the lower right page.
An advertisement for Drag Magazine in Vol. 1, No. 3 issue of The Cross-Dresser (1975). On the opposite page is an ad for an audio cassette led by CONFIDE director Garrett Oppenheimer and associate Fae Robin answering common questions. More covers of The Cross-Dresser are visible on the lower right page.

Affirming, yet exclusionary

While the magazines served as critical spaces to build community and share resources, they were themselves exclusionary, often centering white, skinny trans women as the ideal. Trans women of color, critical activists in the community during this period, rarely appear in these pages. When they did, it was typically in photos of local protests.

The magazines often conflated the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity in ways modern readers would find surprising and contradictory. For example, Transvestia magazine specifically advertised itself for heterosexual cross dressers.

Cover of Vol. 18, No. 106 of Transvestia (1981).
Cover of Vol. 18, No. 106 of Transvestia (1981).

Performers cross-dressing as men have been a key part of American entertainment as long as performers cross-dressing as women have. But these magazines focused on the latter, prioritizing sharing resources for people who openly identified as men and often only for white men.

In many ways, these magazines offer a view of people living authentically at a time when sharing this information via the mail was punishable by jail and people dressing to affirm gender identity were targeted by violent transphobia. Still, with the help of these magazines, trans people across the United States fought to build communities that would protect and celebrate their identities.

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Emma Cieslik

Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent museum professional and writer based in Washington, DC. She is interested in the intersections of religion, gender, sexuality, and material culture, especially focused on queer religious identity and accessible histories.

Emma has written 4 articles for us.

4 Comments

  1. Super fascinating to see these “time capsules” and would be very interested to see how things changed in subsequent decades!

    What I love about queer magazine history is it’s one of the few ways of looking back at media that’s super specialised for the audience, rather than mainstream media giving their slant on things, which would often be sensationalised or weirdly medicalised, or both.

    Thank you for curating and contextualising these for us!

Comments are closed.

Can’t a Lesbian Enjoy a Little Straight Porn Around Here?

My Best Friend Is Shaming Me For Watching Straight Porn

Q

I recently disclosed to my best friend that I watch straight porn and she was massively icked out and now I feel gross and sad. We were having an intimate conversation about porn preferences and I told her something I’ve never told anyone else: that even though I’m a lesbian I watch and get off to stereotypical straight porn sometimes that has certain power dynamics. She literally recoiled and then tried to insinuate this is like rooted in trauma or something fucked up from my past, that it’s not normal for lesbians to watch only straight porn. I felt judged and insecure and tried to walk it back. I feel like she’s questioning my lesbianism. We became best friends in the first place because we were the first lesbians each other knew. It’s why I felt safe telling her.

A:

Riese: We did this massive lesbian sex survey a long while ago which included a whole section on porn. Something like 15k people responded to the survey so it’s a pretty solid group sample-size-wise. 45% of those people —all of them queer women and/or trans people —said they mostly watched straight porn. FORTY FIVE PERCENT. Your friend is just like, profoundly incorrect. Within the group of lesbian-identified people specifically, 41% said they watched straight porn. There are so many reasons for this, but in general there’s not really always a correlation between the porn you watch and the sex you like to have. One thing that came up a lot is that lesbian porn often feels like it was made for straight people anyhow and queer porn that actually has queer people in it tends to cost money (as it should, of course!) and doesn’t just exist on pornhub.

A lot of the porn people watch tends to be more about dynamics rather than gender. Apparently the porn-watching habits of lesbians, in general, tend to go against common wisdom and patterns more easily discernable in other groups. So idk, your friend is wrong and I’m sorry she made you feel that way. I wonder if there’s something else going on with her that she reacted in that way, some nerve you hit. It might be worth asking her — get it out in the open, tell her how her being appalled by you made you feel and dig a little deeper into why she reacted that way.

Summer: Hot damn look at Riese swinging the numbers! I’ll bring a psychosocial perspective since that’s what I’m good for.

Yeah, nah. She’s in the wrong here. For one, it’s just patently uncool and a violation of Girl Code to denigrate a friend who discusses something to you from a place of vulnerability. Especially if that discussion topic doesn’t immediately affect you.

Beyond that, viewing porn that does not conform to your sexual alignment or interests is not inherently a sign of emotional distress, trauma, or even a statement about your sexual alignment. A huge chunk (if not the majority) of fanfic authors who write and get off on M/M fanfic are heterosexual women. Heterosexual men regularly watch porn involving femboys or feminine men. Bisexuals often have a porn preference that doesn’t reflect their actual interest. The thing that binds all of these groups together? Porn is fantasy. Most porn consumers use the content to realise fantasies or indulge in experiences they otherwise don’t need or can’t have.

Whatever your reasons are for watching porn don’t call your sexuality into question any more than a straight girl who reads gay smut is not straight. Your identity is not something that ought to be questioned, especially from someone else who should know better. And it’s not something that requires special justification or living in a specific way to uphold. Gay is not a prestigious, exclusive club. Any club that I’m part of can’t possibly be that cool.

Valerie: I agree with Summer that regardless of her opinions, it is really shitty of your friend to make you feel bad after sharing something so vulnerable and personal! There is no “right” way to be a lesbian or any other label for that matter; in fact, the only way to do it “wrong” is to try to police other people’s identities. This is not what you asked, but something to consider…sometimes the first queer people you meet are great as you first come out, and are who you need to gain the confidence to be you. But as you get older and more and more comfortable with who you are – in ways related to your sexuality and in every other aspect of your life and personality – you’ll learn that “we’re both gay!” is not actually enough to keep a friendship together on its own. And it’s okay to grow out of friendships and grow apart from people, even if they were vital to your journey.

Nico: I’ve known lesbians and queer women who watch straight porn and even who almost exclusively watch gay, cis-dude porn! Like, porn preferences do not necessarily correlate with real-life sexuality. The real question here is what made your friend so okay with making you feel this bad? I’m concerned about someone who would make you feel this way. Maybe this is a friend who you can’t actually have these kinds of conversations with. It might be a good idea to think back on other interactions you’ve had, and to see if you’ve felt like your friend was trying to see and support you for you — or if she just expected you to be exactly like her because you’re both lesbians. That doesn’t mean you have to have a friend breakup or anything, but some friends really are better put in a just-for-fun category, where we trust them with fewer pieces of critical information and also don’t let their opinions carry as much weight.

We Had a Great Threesome. How Can We Have Even More?

Q

My girlfriend and I just had our first threesome with a friend and it was easy and amazing and hot! We are both very monogamous in terms of dating other people or having sex with other people alone but a foursome with a hot couple or a threesome like we had are both super interesting to us… We have both only been in monogamous closed relationships before so this is new territory and I was wondering if any of you have advice for hookups like this to make sure everyone keeps having the the best hottest time.

A

Summer: I’m glad you had such a great time <3. My go-to here is to get your communicatin’ gloves on. Even though you’ve been monogamous until now, something’s happened to change that set of facts. There may be some ambiguity at the moment about what we are but you need to establish ground rules before ambiguity becomes confusion. In your position, I’d highly recommend a what we are now conversation that establishes rules and intentions for your new non-monogamous relationship. Or if necessary, to leave it as a one-and-done thing and return to monogamy. No matter what you both want out of it, your intentions and feelings should be clarified.

Riese: Yeah just set up some expectations and boundaries! Once you’ve had great sex with someone —even a third person, as a couple —that dynamic lingers and can inspire future flirtation and sexual tension whenever you’re around them. Maybe that means you don’t want to hook up with people you’re going to be around a lot, but if you are, prepare for that, even for the possibility that one of you may have a stronger connection with that third than the other. What kind of behavior is ok when you are not actively having sex? Do you want to have one-night stands with thirds or couples, or incorporate someone else into the relationship more regularly? How deep are you willing to get with these external people? You know, stuff like that!

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The Married New Englanders Debating an Erotic Tattoo Gun Situation

Sex/Life is a series all about the secret sexy business of couples, throuples, exes who still fuck for some reason, LDR darlings, polycules, and any other kind of amorous grouping your perfect heart can fathom. We send them nosey questions, they record themselves answering them, and we transcribe that conversation for all of us to enjoy. All names have been changed and any identifying details removed.

Violet is 38 and Taylor is 31 – they’ve been together for 3.5 years, married for 1.5, and currently live together in a house in New England. They both work in tech sales and are passionate about television and their dogs.

And this is how they fuck.

Taylor: Are you nervous?

Violet: Yeah.

Taylor: Don’t be nervous.

Violet: I’m always nervous.

Taylor: I love that about you. Okay.

What was your sex life like when you first started dating, and how was that different from now?

Taylor: Well, I cried a lot.

Violet: You did cry a lot.

Taylor: Yeah.

Violet: It wasn’t because you were hurt or anything like that.

Taylor: No.

Violet: I think that, well— maybe you were internally.

Taylor: No, it was more the trauma, baby, because of my upbringing in the evangelical church, and purity culture, and all of that shit, plus a previous relationship had made it so that I was not… I wasn’t ready to receive it. I felt guilty receiving, and that’s where my crying came from and why you were…

Violet: I’m crying right now! I would stop and hold you every time. I just want that to be clear. I didn’t just keep going.

Taylor: No, you did not. In fact, I was the one that begged you to have sex with me the first time that we had sex, as I was enthusiastically consenting. I don’t cry anymore, unless it’s from joy.

Violet: Yeah, and it’s beautiful. I love that. What else is different? We live in a home that we bought together.

Taylor: We do, so we don’t have to be quiet anymore.

Violet: That’s true.

Taylor: We used a lot of different toys in the beginning, and I think that was because I personally had a lot of toys that I wanted to share with you to be like, “Is this cool?” You had one purple that would—

Violet: It was pink.

Taylor: Oh, and it would die halfway every time.

Violet: She was a trooper.

Taylor: It really depends on your definition of sex too, and in queer spaces we’re always redefining what sex means. The first time that we were intimate with each other was over the phone, because our relationship was long distance for ten days, which was excruciating.

Violet: Well we met each other prior to that—

Taylor: Yeah, we had a first date, and then I immediately got on a plane and went to my parents’ across the country for ten days.

Violet: Yeah.

Taylor: That meant we were already hooked and we were FaceTiming for three hours every day, but we were having FaceTime sex before we had “real” in-person sex, I should say. Do you wanna talk about being demisexual? And what that meant for you at the beginning of our relationship?

Violet: I just need to have to have feelings for a person before I want to have sex with them.

Taylor: I was away for a second so we were able get to know each other. Such a lesbian timeline! Ten days! But it’s Autostraddle, so everyone understands.

If you live together, how long into the relationship did you make this decision, and how has living together impacted your sex life?

Taylor: Immediately, essentially.

Violet: No! Babe, come on.

Taylor: Well, we were spending more time in sleepovers than apart pretty immediately.

Violet: We didn’t live together until we moved into [redacted] together.

Taylor: No, I was full-time living at your apartment in February when we got together in November. I remember making that decision, like, “I don’t want to pack a bag anymore.”

Violet: Then I moved into your place that you lived in. Officially. In June.

Taylor: That’s just like apartment leases.

Violet: Man….

Taylor: We functionally lived together.

Violet: Man, what is wrong with lesbians?

Taylor: [goofy voice] What’s the deal?

Violet & Taylor: [goofy voice, altogether] What’s the deal with lesbians?

Taylor: … Okay so we functionally lived together essentially immediately, which meant we got to have more sex. That’s how it affected our sex life.

Violet: Beautiful!

If you are parents or caretakers, how has this impacted your sex life?

Taylor: We have dogs that love to get up in our business.

Violet: Don’t say that! Don’t say “business” like that ever again! Just say, “we have dogs.”

Taylor: Business.

Violet: Some of them like to snuggle in weird places, and some of them like to just be bosses of us, and it’s pretty bad, actually. One of them’s in between us right now.

Taylor: Yeah, post-coital, like coming to you live post-coital.

Violet: It’s true. It’s true.

Taylor: We used to have three dogs. Our eldest passed away a few months ago, but they’ve always been a big part of our life. They all sleep on the bed with us. That’s why we have a Cal king. It’s just kind of like, we don’t kick them out for sex—

Violet: No, but they know where they should be on the ground.

Taylor: Yeah, they know when something’s going down and they need to give us some space.

Violet: They’re classy.

Taylor: Or horrified. One of those, classy or horrified.

Do you have a top-bottom dynamic? Talk about that.

Violet: Oh, we’re a bunch of switches.

Taylor: We both identify as switches. Yeah.

Violet: I love that about us.

Taylor: I do too, and I think it plays with gender as well, where there’s traditional masculine and feminine roles tied to top and bottom, and we so fluidly go back and forth within the same sexual session. You know what I mean? It’s not, “Okay, you’re the top tonight.”

Violet: In one session we can be two totally different people and that’s beautiful, we understand one another, but I love when I’m able to call you Daddy, and then also in the same session— we don’t call it sessions, but whatever.

Taylor: I don’t know what else to call it.

Violet: Same. Anyhow in the same, whatever, I ask if you like to feel my cock in your mouth.

Taylor: Yeah. I think even tonight, you said, “Is this your pussy or your cock,” or something to that effect.

Violet: I think I asked one of those, and then you responded with, “No, it’s this,” and then I switched it up.

Taylor: Yeah.

Violet: It feels so good doing that.

Taylor: It feels really good.

Violet: I love doing that.

Taylor: I feel really comfortable with you, and exploring all the different facets of our identities together.

Violet: I do too!

Do you feel like your sex drives are well-matched?

Violet: I feel like they are.

Taylor: There are times where one of us is tired and the other is not, but that’s showbiz!

Violet: We have fun.

Taylor: I feel like I am easily turned on when you’re feeling it, unless I’m fucking exhausted, but I feel like that’s pretty rare these days.

Violet: Yeah. If you’re exhausted, you’re done. Yeah, you don’t want it.

Taylor: If I have the energy, if you’re initiating, I am pretty immediately responding. I feel like we’re so in sync.

Are there specific things you like to do during sex and things you don’t like to do?

Violet: I like doing everything with you.

Taylor: Yeah. Nothing’s really off limits.

Violet: I love everything about it.

Taylor: Yeah. We’re always trying, willing to try new things if we found — [pauses, gets serious], Like, OKAY, this sounds crazy — [starts laughing]

Violet: What is it?

Taylor: It’s not bloodletting, but bloodlining…?

Violet: Baby, what!!?

Taylor: My friend was telling me.

Violet: Who?

Taylor: My internet friend.

Violet: Okay. Your internet friend.

Taylor: [Redacted], but don’t say [redacted]’s name, but they got a tattoo gun set and they’re practicing…

Violet: Baby, I don’t want to play this game!

Taylor: What game?

Violet: I don’t know. Something about bloodletting?

Taylor: No, it’s not bloodletting! but let me finish. I think it’d be like — you know, the feeling of getting a tattoo?

Long pause.

Violet: Yes, I do.

Laughter.

Taylor: We could have that at home!

Violet: Keep going.

Taylor: It’s okay.

Violet: Bloodletting!

Taylor: You’re using water!

Violet: All right, let’s keep going. Just keep going.

Taylor: Okay next question is—

What are some things you’d like to try or try again?

Violet: Oh, Jesus Christ.

Taylor: You use water rather than ink! It’s like blood and then it just — it heals because it’s just like —cutting your skin?

Pause

Taylor: Okay, you’re telling me no. Are there other things you’d like to try?

Violet: Wait, why do you want to do that?

Taylor: I think it’s just something crazy that might be of interest. You practice on a little pad first! You don’t just go on somebody’s skin.

Violet: Wait, so you’re saying that you’re going to do this on my skin?

Taylor: Well, no. Maybe you do it on mine.

Violet: With a tattoo gun?

Taylor: Yeah. Then it heals within a couple of days. It’s like a hickey.

Violet: I love you.

Taylor: That’s my best description of it. It’s like a hickey. Just consider it.

Violet: Okay. I absolutely will.

Taylor: Are there other things that you would like to try or try again?

Violet: Just always having sex in public-ish areas, not public, but I wouldn’t want people to discover it, but in areas that are considered public.

Taylor: Can you give an example?

Violet: Yeah, like a vehicle at night, or down a hallway that nobody’s going to be going into. I have no idea.

Taylor: Yeah, no, I was thinking about that this morning, actually, of places where you could potentially get caught. I don’t know, that adrenaline rush is of interest to me. We haven’t done straps in a while, strapping me to the bed, but that’s always a good time.

Violet: Oh, you love that.

Taylor: Blindfolded? Count me the fuck in.

How important are orgasms to your sex life?

Taylor: I feel like I can pretty reliably orgasm and squirt if given the right kind of toy. The Satisfier Pro II, actually, we call her MVP in our home.

Violet: Are you trying to endorse this?

Taylor: I may or may not receive commission from this link.

Violet: You don’t receive any commission from that.

Taylor: It’s true. I don’t even know if they sell it anymore, but anyway, I don’t need to orgasm, but it’s like, if I’m bringing a toy to the equation, then it’s going to happen. Whereas for you, it’s very different, I feel.

Violet: Why?

Taylor: Well, you don’t orgasm or try to orgasm as much as I do.

Violet: Maybe, but I think that whenever you’re orgasming, or not even that, but feeling pleasure, I get so turned on, and that does it for me.

Taylor: You don’t feel the need to orgasm because —

Violet: I do most of the time, by the way.

Taylor: You do?

Violet: Yeah.

Taylor: Wow. Without any assistance?

Violet: Well, I’m thrusting usually.

Taylor: I didn’t know that.

Violet: I’m using my fingers too.

Taylor: Did you come tonight?

Violet: No, I didn’t, because we’re in a small bed tonight. Are they going to listen to all of this, babe?

Taylor: Yeah.

Violet: I don’t think they are.

What role does masturbation play in your sex life?

Taylor: When we were away last week and I got back to the hotel room, and you said like—

Violet: Oh my god, I masturbated so much. Yes, and then I got the flu.

Taylor: Okay. That’s not relevant.

Violet: I’ll never do it again, but yeah.

Taylor: No, but that’s very hot to me. Not the flu, but it’s very hot to me that you were alone in the hotel room, getting off while I was at work.

Violet: Yeah, I was getting off. Well, yeah, I was working too, but from the office. Yeah, I definitely… I don’t know. I went on a binge. I need to come every other hour. It was weird.

Taylor: That’s beautiful.

Violet: Thank you.

Taylor: It’s also, there are probably some people who like to come in other… Well, I feel like our go-to rhythm is sex of whatever it is, and then ending with a side-by-side masturbating.

Violet: Yeah.

Taylor: Sometimes we’ll try and plan it to come together by doing a countdown. That’s a fun time.

Violet: Oh, I love that.

Taylor: Yeah, me too.

Tell us about your favorite or most memorable time you’ve had sex together.

Violet: I have it!

Taylor: What if it’s the same?

Violet: I don’t think it’s the same.

Taylor: No?

Violet: I know what mine is.

Taylor: Okay.

Violet: I can write it down if you’d like.

Taylor: We can just say it.

Violet: Trust me.

Taylor: Mine is Santorini, on our honeymoon, when we had a personal hot tub in our…

Violet: Oh, my God.

Taylor: … area.

Violet: Maybe that is the one, actually.

Taylor: Yeah, that’s where I fucked you in the ass for the first time.

Violet: Oh, my God. Yeah.

Taylor: That is a semi-public place to me, but it was completely secluded.

Violet: Yeah, nobody was out there.

Taylor: Because we were outside.

Violet: We were facing the ocean.

Taylor: That was very hot.

Violet: Oh, my god. Yeah. That’s mine as well.

Taylor: What else were you going to say?

Violet: I was just thinking about the strap-on in the tiny house that we’re in, and your back was right up against me and I was just like, “Oh, my God,” but Santorini. Yeah, Santorini was…

Taylor: That’s good too.

Violet: I know, but you were like, “Oh, my God, this feels so good.” I was like, “Ugh. Finally.”

Taylor: I hadn’t found a dildo that fit me.

Violet: Yeah, you didn’t like any of the ones that we had. Then you were like, “This feels amazing.” The way you were just riding it was, I think about it often, but I also think about Santorini, so I don’t know.

Taylor: Well, that’s the last question.

Violet: Yeah.

Taylor: What have you learned from this activity?

Violet: I like having sex with you. I love it, and I want to have more.

Taylor: Me too. For the rest of our lives.

Violet: Yay.

Taylor: That sounds incredible.

Violet: All right, let’s do it.

Taylor: Let’s do it right now. Okay, bye.

Violet: Bye.

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What Is Queer Generational Trauma, and How Do We Tell Stories About It?

To be queer is to reinvent yourself. To toss aside the self-image that was handed to you as an infant, to craft a new identity — and maybe even choose a new name. And yet, anyone who joins the LGBTQIA+ community has to reckon with the weight of the past.

Lately, I’ve been obsessing over the concept of queer generational trauma: the pain passed down to us from our ancestors, which we bequeath in turn to those who come after us. It feels like a strange concept at first. Most of us aren’t necessarily raised in queer families, and we don’t grow up steeped in the history of the struggle for liberation. (In part, because the rich and powerful do everything in their power to keep it that way.)

But if queer culture is real, something that is passed down and continues across lifetimes, then queer generational trauma must also be a thing. You can’t pass down culture without also sharing the pain that birthed it. And the same way that queer culture infuses us with resilience and strength for the battles ahead, embodying the pain of our forebears reminds us of the reason we have to fight in the first place. Both things are gifts, in different ways.

In my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster, a trans woman named Jamie teaches her heartbroken mother Serena, a lesbian, how to do magic. The more I wrote, the more I delved into Serena’s grief and rage, which meant doing some research about the challenges lesbians faced in the 1990s and 2000s. That gave me insight into the transphobia Jamie faces here and now. I started reading up on the subject of  Jamie’s PhD dissertation, which deals with (almost certainly) queer authors and artists of the 1730s and 1740s.

What I found knocked me sideways: an ornate tapestry of repression and punishment, stretching back 300 years. Same shit, different decades (or centuries). In particular, I was startled to discover just how similar the fuckery aimed at 1990s lesbians was to the dehumanizing tactics trans people are facing today. People warned that lesbians could not be trusted with children, and in some famous cases like Bottoms v Bottoms, courts took children away from their lesbian parents. Lesbians were threatened with violence, and one lesbian bar was fire-bombed in Atlanta. Books like Heather Has Two Mommies faced the same attempted censorship as Genderqueer.

Meanwhile, artists of the Georgian era, like the gender-nonconforming actor/writer Charlotte Charke, had their gender expression and sexuality scrutinized and faced similar punishments as today’s queers. At one point, an utterly penniless Charke could only get work as an actor if she wrote to the newspapers reassuring audiences she was no longer performing male roles, in male garb.

My small, intimate family story was becoming something much bigger: a document of historical pain.

Obviously not all queer people have queer biological parents. Still, making Jamie a second-generation queer, raised by a lesbian couple among other queer families, turned out to be a fruitful way of thinking about how the weight of past moral injury seeps into our bones and sinews. The struggle for liberation carries on from generation to generation, and the scars of past battles continue to affect us in the present. Jamie says she was raised in a household that was warm, loving, and paranoid — because of the ever-present fear that the shitheads could arrive at any moment. Because your family might not be safe even in a progressive city. Jamie’s queer birth family felt like a way of literalizing a metaphor, or making an abstract phenomenon more concrete.

The framework of “generational trauma” (also called “legacy trauma,” “transgenerational trauma” or “intergenerational trauma“) was developed to talk about the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese internment, chattel slavery, and other atrocities. There’s some evidence suggesting trauma can actually be passed down epigenetically to one’s descendants, because our bodies store and transmit stress, but the science on that is far from settled.
Social work professor and mental health expert Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart defines historical trauma as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma,” such as massacres and other genocidal acts aimed at Indigenous people, and adds that this trauma is accompanied by unresolved grief.

In my experience, queer generational trauma seems to operate in a few different ways:

1. Many of us have depended on elders for guidance and encouragement. These elders put on a brave face but inevitably bequeathed to us their memories of past mistreatment, often in spite of their own best intentions.

2. There’s the gagging ouroboros of history: At a certain point, you have to realize you’re beating your fists against a wall that bears the indents of countless fists, going back forever.

3. And finally, many of us struggle to find community and feel disconnected from those who came before, which ironically makes the weight of history harder to bear.

When I started volunteering for tiny indie queer publishing ventures 25 years ago, I loved the intensity of the people I was working with. The whimsy, the hunger for transgressive storytelling. It took a long time to realize how many of the people around me had been through stuff I could barely imagine and had lost more than I could ever know, including the AIDS pandemic and the Reagan-Bush onslaught. All around me, people were devouring life as if they’d been hungry forever.

But when I think about encountering the lingering toxic waste of past trauma, what I remember is being around trans people who’d transitioned earlier than me, and feeling like they were kind of uptight. Judgy, even. The ways they tried to police my own self-presentation and instruct me on the “right” way to be trans and to talk about myself. One trans woman, only a few years further along in her transition than me, refused to be seen in public with me because two trans women standing together would attract too much of the wrong attention. Trans women lectured me on the foundation garments I should wear to pad my hips, as if there was something wrong with my own pre-estrogen body shape. They obsessed about “passing,” about embodying various femme stereotypes.

I found myself rebelling against my own elders by being more outrageous and colorful, not less. I slowly came to understand they were trying to protect me — albeit in the most fucked-up way possible.

Some of this behavior was because they’d come out during a time when trans people had to follow a strict rulebook or else be prevented from transitioning. But much of this was rooted in hypervigilance, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression. The memory of past discrimination and abuse expressing itself as a kind of grouchiness and strictness. It took me a long time to realize the bad advice I received from older trans people was their own long-buried stress bubbling up to their surface. As with all trauma, generational trauma causes all these — hypervigilance, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem — which can appear outwardly like being a tightly-wound jerk.

Coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant I arrived at the start of a long period of greater acceptance, peppered with setbacks like the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition H. The people who came before me were burdened with the knowledge that this never lasts.

It’s not that queer history repeats itself; it’s more like queer people are trapped on a super heavy pendulum that swings back and forth between acceptance — or perhaps indulgence — and hatred. Like the Scissor Sisters, people simply cannot make up their minds whether we should live or die.

And I’m starting to feel as though we have a very limited ability to shift the momentum of that pendulum. In this, we are in the same situation as many other marginalized groups, except that there is a particular disgust and loathing buried in many people’s psyches for those of us whose sexuality or gender expressions challenge easy expectations about what our bodies mean and what they are for.

Nobody ever told me the pendulum would swing back in a hateful direction. Nobody told me not to take the good times for granted, not to count on more and more acknowledgment of the vital role that queers creators play in shaping culture.

What I did hear, again and again, was: Don’t sell out. Don’t compromise who you are to go “mainstream.” Do not ever turn your back on your community or take your community for granted. Those tiny indie queer magazines and book publishers I mentioned earlier, whose editorial stuff I was fortunate to join, were constantly sending out warnings about the folly of assuming that white patriarchal capitalism could be on our side.

So now I’m in the position of trying to be there for younger trans people, or in some cases, trans people my own age who are just starting their own transitions. I organize local get-togethers for trans folks, and I also try to be a comforting presence in other ways. What I try not to do is overwhelm anyone with the shit I went through back in the 2000s: the microaggressions and macroaggressions, the job discrimination, the stalking and harassment. It’s not like they don’t know or as if this isn’t still happening to lots of people today. But the last thing I would ever want to do is make already anxious people more anxious in service of centering myself. (And of course, I try extra hard not to judge or police anybody, because fuck that.)

Still, mentorship necessarily involves an element of sharing trauma. To let people know they’re not alone and they’re not imagining any of this bullshit. Part of being supportive to newer trans and queer people is teaching them whatever survival strategies I’ve learned, and those survival strategies are rooted in trauma. I’m trying to be there for others, the same way others were there for me when I started out, but hopefully without sharing quite as much pain along the way.

I started out by saying queer generational trauma exists because of the same reasons queer culture exists, but I want to turn that on its head and point out that along with the memories of hard times, we are also passing down generational wealth.

I can read about Miss Major and Sylvia Rivera. I can read the writings of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Justin Chin, and countless others. There is so much beautiful artwork, so much indelible music. The riches we share are so much greater than the memories of hardship. And I see queer artists today building on that legacy in so many ways, saying: Let them try to erase us. We are handing down our stories and dreams along with our trauma, and those things are often inseparable.

Even the realization that we are the inheritors of pain is its own form of treasure, because it’s a story about survival, and it reminds us to be kinder to ourselves.

Every generation wants, and deserves, to live freer than the last. We don’t just fight for our own ability to breathe easy, but also so that the people who come after us won’t ever have to deal with the shit we’ve marinated in.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders comes out August 19 and is available for preorder.

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Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

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4 Comments

  1. Thank you for writing this :) it was that special feeling when you’re reading something that puts it into words just right. Most especially the line — “At a certain point, you have to realize you’re beating your fists against a wall that bears the indents of countless fists, going back forever.” Which I’ll be ruminating on for a minute.

  2. “California’s Proposition H”

    Um, it was Proposition 8. It was the proposition’s *opponents* who added the H, to make: Prop H8.

  3. So glad to see your work on autostraddle! I love your books, and can’t wait for the new one. As someone with historical trauma from growing up in a holocaust survivor family, I really appreciate this perspective on queer generational trauma, and definitely see it in both the pain and connectedness of our communities. We’ve had to stick together to get through generations of transphobia and homophobia, and that relational connection seems just as powerful as the trauma part.

    • At first i didn’t know where you were going with this, and

      “In particular, I was startled to discover just how similar the fuckery aimed at 1990s lesbians was to the dehumanizing tactics trans people are facing today. People warned that lesbians could not be trusted with children, and in some famous cases like Bottoms v Bottoms, courts took children away from their lesbian parents. Lesbians were threatened with violence, and one lesbian bar was fire-bombed in Atlanta. Books like Heather Has Two Mommies faced the same attempted censorship as Genderqueer.”–

      This made me actually angry, because how could you not know this. Everyone knows this–

      But then it became clear where you were going and it’s super important stuff.
      It’s also happens to be a good explanation for why women oppress each other and police each other, something i didn’t understand my whole life. So thank you for that.
      Awed by your other work, i will def check out your comics!

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