Hate Actually: Can the Holigays Heal a Gay Grinch’s Heart?
I didn’t always hate Christmas.
How Leslie Feinberg Changed Our Lives: The Autostraddle Roundtable
“I could feel the power that came from being butch, the paradox of growing up a girl and then becoming the suited partner of a beautiful woman, the torture of being such a social outcast, and the deep craving hunger for being accepted.”
Some Things Are Impossible: How A Rural Queer Lives With Depression
“Farm work was everything my depressive body was screaming against: sunlight, physical activity, and tiny symbols of the fragility of life all around that I couldn’t remember how to value.”
Getting Cruised In the Heights
“Who are these men noticing me? Who are these men giving me the long, soft stare, eyes holding mine like they got something for me, something they can’t talk about, something only eyes can pass along. Who are these men whispering ‘hi, papi’ to me? I don’t think I look more male today than I did yesterday.”
The “Book of Life” Gave Me My Anything More
“Book of Life” posits that my father is in a place more vivid than memory, which is is just a medium between the man who raised me and the man who waits for me in a place beyond time.
Fumigation: A Love Story
“Delilah takes up mansion-sized space in your head. She bought property the first time you kiss in Adams Park.”
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Or How I Divorced Jesus and Learned to Love Sex
“I didn’t know much about gardens, in general, but what I was working with seemed less like the married person’s vegetable patch the church described and more like a Narnian wonderland full of infinite magical possibility.”
We Still Need Spirit Day: Remembering How It Started and Who It’s For
“We have to show them we want them to live. We need to advocate and fight for justice and for resources and for safety for our youth.”
Because If I Was Honest, Everything I Knew Would Explode
“That instinct, to lie or protect the men who abuse us, is hard to explain. It comes from being afraid of the person who is abusing you, of course, but also afraid for the changes that honesty will force. We don’t want to endanger the men who hurt us, because we love them and we don’t think we can live without them… If anything, my identification as a feminist made the idea of disclosing the abuse even more difficult, because I thought it was something I was letting happen to me and it embarrassed me.”
The Big Reveal
“In fact, the strain of hiding my illness would likely have caused me to break down with even more frequency. How would she have coped with those dysphoric, hallucination-ridden breakdowns — and how would I have dealt with her uneducated reactions?”
Bisexual Awareness Week: We See Each Other, And That’s Something
The first ever Bisexual Awareness Week created space to organize resources, initiate connections and speak about our experiences in a new way.
Calluses and Cow Sheds: How I Found My Queerness in Rural America
“That year I spent a lot of time watching the goats and cows eat grass. Mostly because I found their single-minded focus incredibly comforting. Also because our fences were shoddy and I had to figure out how they were constantly escaping. I was learning to care for animals like I was learning to listen to myself: in silent and slow observation.”
Because I’m Black, Too
“That risks making a wound of my blackness. My blackness is not a wound; it is a gift I’m trying, consciously and earnestly, to understand and protect and witness.”
Dear Queer Diary: So Long, Farewell
There’s something strange about ending a journal.
Drinking My Way Through Texas: A Beer Diary of Sorts
I can’t tell you about the head or what it has “notes” of. But I can tell you about some beers I really enjoyed, a few I didn’t, and the things that happened along the way.
Learning to Use Chopsticks: Coming Out as Korean-American
“At 27, I came out as Korean-American. I was always Korean, of course. I checked the “Asian” box when filling out a form. My ethnicity was written on my face in the shape of my eyes and my small flat nose. But until a few years ago, it wasn’t an identity I felt connected to. There were many identities that came first — poet, bisexual, queer, feminist, activist, organizer, fattie, vegan. Being Korean was a fact, but not an identity.”
The Ersatz Emancipation of Femininity: On Being a Bulimic, Brown Lesbian
“When I was thirteen years old I began starving myself. I did so, in short, because I wanted so desperately to be thin. And by thin, I mainly meant white.”
Nothing Is Off Limits: How Queer Brunch Raised This Queer Feminist Fagette
“We partied during the week and met up between classes, but brunch was where we let our queer identities free in a way that was more natural and less defensive compared to who we were in public.”
Dear Queer Diary: Notes From An Inveterate People-Watcher
Some of my favorite places to people watch include the grocery store, where I am fascinated by the contents of people’s carts, and the airport, where I have been known to spend layovers wondering where that man in the three-piece suit is going and what possessed him to wear a vest in the middle of July.
The Disappearing Act: Fighting Disordered Eating as a Masculine-of-Center Woman
I got a taste of something I had never known — shopping in the men’s department afforded my body the opportunity to take up the amount of space it actually takes up.