Experiments In Sobriety or “This Is When I Admit That I Have A Drinking Problem”
“It’s like I’ve got an internal switch that flips and not everyone has it, and if you don’t it’s almost impossible to explain.”
“It’s like I’ve got an internal switch that flips and not everyone has it, and if you don’t it’s almost impossible to explain.”
“It’s like diet-cunt, because cunt is the Queen Bitch.”
“The summer after I turned thirteen, I decided that exactly two things needed to happen in order for my life to matter: I needed Rosie Collins to like me, and I needed my parents to send me to Bible Camp.”
“I wanted this camp to turn me into a rock star.”
This is a poem about kissing.
We wanted to sit down and share stories with you around this virtual campfire to somehow express one little piece of what it means to be queer and a person of color in this crazy, crazy world.
Activities include eating mystery meat, re-enacting the holocaust, performing 15-minute Shakespeare adaptations on a cart, writing in my diary, and crying. Mostly crying.
“My awkwardness should have followed me along to Girl Scout camp, but somehow I managed to shed most of it in the 40 miles between the city and that patch of unremarkable forest.”
“I don’t remember the names of most of the people I met that week. Except for his: Tuck.”
“I would’ve cried if someone hadn’t started singing, and then someone else joined in.”
“Within the violence of invisibility there was also a sense of liberation and expansiveness, like we could just make everything up as we go along.”
Even when someone doesn’t know the range of the artistic revolution that was the Harlem Renaissance, they know the name. They know writers like Claude Mckay or singers like Ethel Waters but they may not know them as Queer Black Americans. Why is this?
“I feel like yelling at people,” she told me. I didn’t really grasp then that she meant that. This was the very first time. This was the day after Easter.
I was so lucky to grow up in Ann Arbor, but now I’m afraid I’ll never leave.
Once upon a time I married a man, had kids, and realized I was a lesbian. Here’s what happened and what I wish somebody had told me at the time.
“Things seemed so big out there and we were just waiting for life to begin properly. I felt electric with anticipation.”
A story of an almost implausibly perfect Christmas with extended family who hadn’t seen me since I transitioned.
“I kept MapQuest directions to Albuquerque in the glove compartment of my car, just in case I needed to run away. When I graduated, I moved to upstate New York for college.”
“Did I mention that I saw Kylie, the Queen of the Gays, perform as a child? What chance did I have?”
“China is beautiful because it’s not like anything you’ve ever known before. There is nothing that reminds you of home, and when you get home, everything will remind you of China.”