“I always went the extra mile for you and did so gladly because I loved being around you. You never returned these more concrete gestures, which should’ve been the first sign that things were not reciprocal between us, but I was oblivious and idealistic. I genuinely believed I had found love.”

I looked less and less like my mother— the image of womanhood I grew up with — and I was scared. Was she disappointed that I wasn’t like her? Did my femininity disappoint her? At the same time, I worried about being too masculine: people would know I wasn’t straight. I was angry: my mother taught me to be proud of who I was, but what if who I was becoming wasn’t good enough?

In the pool hall, my sweetheart and a close friend tease me one night: “unimpressive,” “pure luck,” “you aren’t that good.” They were trying to get my ire up so that an hour later when I told them to stare into each other’s eyes as I fucked my sweetheart’s body, I would mean it with a snarky competitive vengeance, I would mean it with power and control, I would be pushed to take what I want.

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

“Your truth is always your truth, whether said or silent. It just might not be the idea of your truth that somebody else has in their mind.”

“I wanted her to smile at me that way. I wanted her to say my name. This turned out to be easy.”

“I am 12. I have never thought of the idea of being gay. I am the only one being called gay at school, that I know of, and I am learning very quickly that it is the worst thing one could possibly be. It feels contagious, like I’m walking into school every day with a giant, hideous cloak of gay-ness, and everyone knows it.”

“Presenting as male every day hurts. When the ship is in port, it’s not as bad; I grow to hate coming in to work, but once the day ends I can go home and be myself. When we’re underway, it’s worse. I’m stuck being ‘him’ all day, every day. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks… once, for months.”

“Zoey and I tried to feed our cravings for simple American cuisine, but despite our clever substitutions and meticulous adjustments and innovative ingredients from the bazaar, nothing tasted quite right. Not bad, just not what we’d been looking for.”

“We rarely left the bedroom and when we did, we quickly returned. We called in to work and on one occasion we both no showed. It was heavenly, but as the old adage says all good things must come to an end.”

“Other people built a gender for me and trusted that I would defend what they built. But what I was handed never made sense.”

Maddy Court, the creator behind Instagram lesbian meme sensation @xenaworrierprincess, teaches us how to make a meme and shares her own meme origin story.

“Loving women and loving the land are the two things I told myself I would never do, and somehow, they got all tangled up in each other.”

“Here was a community where race apparently didn’t matter, because we were all humans, made in the image of God. Where a pacifist, sensitive, caring Jesus was the primary male role model. I finally felt at home. I was promised complete acceptance and understanding, and all I had to give was… well, everything.”

“There’s an easily accessible narrative in wilderness travel, to pretend we’re living outside of society, and to strive to create a better version of it. The temptation to argue that “x doesn’t really matter out here” rears its head in all of the usual places: race, socioeconomics, gender, age. What I’ve come to struggle with in the canoe, and years later, is which way to go. To continue my first argument, to dismantle gender, or to teach gender – to teach what it means to be a strong, dirty woman, to ask my co-instructor to teach positive masculinity.”

Before Angela Lansbury told women they were partly to blame for sexual assault, she helped me with my imposter syndrome.

“Who was this country-music-loving New Englander? I both hated and loved that she seemed to be playing this garbage as if to impress me.”

I was a newly minted queer and everything I knew about queerness was rooted in coming out. I’d heard about the relief that came with coming out from everybody. If TV was to be believed, I would feel free even as my parents stopped looking me in the eye.

When the world feels dark, we have to find the light where we can and hold onto it. This is a story about a bright, shining spot of goodness: My Granny.

The women I kiss like to drink red wine, and I drink them in. I taste red wine and I move past it; my deliverance lies elsewhere.