From April 26th ’til April 29th, 163 of you and 35 of us went to the mountains for a weekend of kickass fun and transformation. LET’S TALK ABOUT IT.

And so we talked all night about the rest of our lives…

“There was a deep sharing of emotion and feelings and we planned the future and organized and then shared opinions about finger-fucking and chlorine you know, very loudly, next to some children. “

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.

REI is doing so much to change the reality of being a human outside! Including sponsoring this very issue! Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about their Force Of Nature initiative and so much more!

“I think I’m willing to do this because I’m constantly aware that death awaits us all and I’m more inclined to want to heighten an experience if I can.”

“We both shipped Castle and Beckett. That was a strange time in my life, god. Beckett, what a babe.”

Rachel: “The writing & philosophy class I was required to take freshman year mostly sucked. But there was this one girl, Lizz, who seemed cool. She wore comic book tshirts and had beautiful shiny hair. One day after class, I announced to a friend, ‘Lizz is not straight. I can just tell.'”
Lizz: “There was something about Rachel that I just couldn’t shake. She spent a lot of time quoting feminist theorists who I’d never heard of and she had what I would later come to call ‘Congenital Gay Face.'”

“I’m really good at just torching a bridge and not looking back. And you are the only fucking person who has forced me to build the bridge back.”

Nothing stays the same forever, and that includes our bods; here’s the Autostraddle team talking about how they’ve noticed their bodies aging and what that’s like.

“My style icon is Nancy Meyers’ interpretation of a middle-aged white woman after she’s decided to pull herself together sometime in the second act. Wow that is… I feel very called out by own self.”

“My favorite thing in the world is when people ask if it’s a mood ring so I can say yes.”

“I’d actually never even seen a woman in a blazer before. Like a men’s cut blazer. It really was like Fun Home. Inside I really did feel like I KNOW YOU!”

“One time my coworker asked if I could dress any dykier and you know what? I don’t know. It’s pretty gay.”

“She doesn’t mean to be limiting. She just doesn’t see that the way she feels about her body is not the way that I feel about mine.”

Perhaps he would have loved me enough. I’ll never know, and my eschatology doesn’t include a heaven from which re-embodied souls watch over our earthly lives. All I have is speculation about how he might have reacted to his daughter’s bisexuality, and to his daughter not being precisely a daughter at all.

Forgiveness may be an attribute of the strong, but we also have the memory of an elephant.

“Life is hard enough, let me have this.”

“That’s when we slept in a bed together and when I woke up I said I missed you while I was sleeping.”

“If we were straight girls, I feel like we’d be THOSE annoying straight girls, like ‘look at me and my girlfriend!'”