Category Archives: GLBT

July Links Roundup: Hit Me, I’m a Writer

Happy summer! (Just kidding, I hate summer.) It’s time for my monthly effort to close all my open browser tabs before the End Times.

Bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress and many more) talks about being both Black and Jewish in this 2022 profile from The Jewish Chronicle (hat tip to Noah Berlatsky). What stood out for me was his tough-love advice about perseverance as a writer:

“I tell writers all the time: ‘Listen, you got to write every day, you got to just keep writing and writing and writing.’ They say, ‘Well, this isn’t any good.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good. You just keep writing.

“You think when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace — the first word he wrote down — that it was good? No, it was not!”

After close to 50 novels, he’s not stopping.

“It’s like people who love boxing,” he says. “Who loves being hit? There are people who really like it… and it’s like that.”

Yes, writing is my kink, and I bottom for novels…

At Electric Lit, Jacqueline Alnes interviews Sarah Chihaya about her memoir Bibliophobia, which, among other things, describes how academia engenders an extractive approach to literature that can kill the pleasure of open-ended discovery. Chihaya says:

Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.

This resonated with me because the self-hating voice in my head is usually nattering on about why anything I’m doing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

Lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage gave this inspiring 6-minute speech at Bar Harbor Pride about the link between joy and resistance. When we work together to resist oppression, we create a more meaningful life for ourselves, which liberates our capacity for joy. Gage reminds us to look up the histories of our queer elders for examples–a frequent subject of her plays, which have foregrounded historical lesbians and butches such as geneticist Barbara McClintock, Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and actress Eva Le Gallienne. She quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, saying that if we’re not uncomfortable with some of the people in our coalition, it’s not broad enough. I especially appreciate Gage saying this as a radical feminist, because that community has too often indulged their discomfort with masculinity to exclude trans folks.

Did you know that the term “drag queen” was pioneered by William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who organized pageants and drag balls for Black queer men in 19th-century Washington, DC? Watch this 3-minute video from the Black Gay History Channel to learn more. (Hat tip to Robert Jones, Jr.)

In this 2016 essay in Guts Magazine, “Forgiving the Future,” Laura Shepherd reflects on the Tarot’s Death card and the bittersweet emotions of transitioning in midlife.

In the wake of increased and widespread attention to the trans experience in popular culture, I began to feel like the future was already happening…

Suddenly, it seems, people don’t spend half a century in the closet for being trans anymore. The stories we tell now—of coming out loud, proud, young, and beautiful—render my own story a homely tale of timidity. That I climbed out from under the weight of an almost universal narrative of denial to become proud to be trans is, these days, like having taken the scenic route to travel a great distance—as though I was simply fearful of highway speed. That it was for a long time unfathomable to live as we do now is close to irrelevant. That’s what it feels like to me, at my age, being part of a larger movement so much younger, so brazen in motion, with more room to move—space created in part, I sometimes forget, by lived experiences like my own.

Instead, I grieve that I don’t get to be young and be me.

Social worker Griffin Hansbury writes about the value of bad feelings in “Be the Brick: Notes Toward Thinking About the Clinical Value of Trans Negativity,” published in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues last month. The brick, here, is the one thrown to start the Stonewall Riot.

As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance…

Trans people, like other queers, feel pressure to be happy, normal, assimilated; but rage, shame, alienation endure. Refusing such affects can mean feeling worse: I should feel okay (happy, normal), but I don’t, so something’s really wrong with me. But why should we feel okay when trans-antagonism persists (past and present)?

For a book-length exploration of this theme, see Hil Malatino’s Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which my transmasc book group read last year.

Some poetry that struck a chord with me this month:

“Fauna” by Richard Siken, at The Shore Poetry, makes the Elks Club more surreal by taking it literally, as a symbol of an older generation of men’s unspoken inner damage. “Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact.”

In Rattle, Cam McGlynn’s “Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits” is pure pun-filled fun about human and avian mating. “I’ve yet to check a European Shag/off my life list and now that I’m married,/I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance…”

Abby E. Murray’s “I Can’t Find My Gender,” in One Art, uses wistful humor to depict the gap between knowing one’s self and being legible to others. Hat tip to the e-newsletter from Perugia Press, which published Murray’s excellent poetry collection about being a military spouse, Hail and Farewell.

…I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be…

Another Perugia Press poet, Lisa Allen Ortiz, understands why new purchases can make me sad, because I’m already mourning their wear and tear, their future unwantedness. In “Furniture,” published in Sixth Finch, she muses:

Last week my friend Farnaz
taught me the term
anticipatory grief
meaning we’re sad now for a thing
that will happen
later.
Imagine that.

Thi Nguyen’s “In the Time of Tuberculosis,” at Frontier Poetry, describes intersecting assaults on her well-being, from the illness that the doctors initially dismissed, to being locked in the ward when it progressed to a dangerous point–all this occurring against the backdrop of the 2016 election.

She had forgotten
that when she left Viet Nam
30 years ago, she was once dirty.
Given the TB vaccine,
she was made clean.
She was once an outsider
allowed to be let in.

I was born in the US.
I was born clean
but now I am dirty.
I’ve dirtied others.
I am not allowed outside,
I am kept inside, the door locked
from the outside.

And finally, some fine prose links:

In “Residential School Requiem,” an excerpt from D.A. Navoti’s memoir-in-progress, published in Craft Literary, the author walks through a park on the site of the Phoenix Indian School that his grandmother was forced to attend, pondering what is memorialized and what is left out.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School.

In fractured lit, Anais Godard’s “The Clay of It” is a sweet and surprising flash fiction about the nature of intimacy.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

Queer nerd fan site Geeks Out interviewed Andrew Joseph White, whose horror fiction foregrounds transmasculine and autistic characters. I’ve read two of his powerful novels, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and an ARC of the forthcoming You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. Body horror in the service of social justice, these books hold nothing back.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially thriller and horror?

I’ve always been a writer at heart. I talk a lot about writing being my special interest as an autistic person, and that’s true. Writing is how my brain processes information and works through emotions, on top of it being my “safe space” where I feel seen, soothed, and understood. The fact that I write thrillers and horror seems like it should contradict that, but it doesn’t. I’ve always been drawn to horror—my gender dysphoria and social deficits have always felt “at home” in the horror space, so to speak, especially when I struggle to express my anger or upset in other ways. The tension and fear are cathartic.

And these days, I’m not just writing for myself anymore. I’m writing for my readers, especially my younger ones. It’s amazing how you can connect to the roughest, messiest parts of yourself and others through the lens of fiction…

***

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers, especially queer ones out there?

Be ugly.That’s the advice I give to every young writer, every queer or disabled writer just starting on their journey: be ugly. I was held back for years by a fear of being “bad representation”—I threw away complicated characters, flinched from messy topics, and denied myself the chance to become a better writer because I was afraid of how my work would impact the reputation of my identity group. But you can’t do that! You can’t let yourself become beholden to a bigot’s perception of you. You cannot make art attempting to stave off every single bad-faith perception that could ever be made of you. Tell the ugly truth of the situation, be honest and unashamed and unflinching, and you will go far.

Thanks for talking back to my brain worms, Andrew!

June Links Roundup: Ungovernable Pride

It’s June–that month when we shove our lifestyle down your throat. You know you want it, baby.

Via the novelist Robert Jones, Jr.’s Substack, I discovered another Black queer radical newsletter, ToussaintF12’s notes from the edge of empire. His latest post, “queer as in ‘rocket launchertttt'”, is a snappy and well-researched battle cry for the current resistance. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a highlight:

…empire, liberalism, and corporate agendas flatten all forms of deviance into marketable identities. specifically, a distinction between “gay” as an imperfect umbrella term and “queer”, as a term that alot of people still draw a false equivalence with. gay usually refers narrowly to sexual orientation, while queer functions more as a political orientation: a refusal of normativity in all its forms: gender, family, citizenship, economy, whiteness, nation-state, even time itself.

the difference matters because we live in a world where u can be gay and uphold carceral logic, imperial war, and racial capitalism. queer, signals something deeper than who u fuck or love. it signals how u resist. it pushes us to interrogate what we’re aligning with and what we’re opposing. without making that distinction, we risk reducing queerness to aesthetics, visibility, or lifestyle, and stripped of its insurrectionary potential.

the empire has learned to neutralize queerness by flattening it into mere identity. being gay is not a choice. it’s a biologically-influenced orientation shaped by complex interactions of genetics, hormones, and development. but queerness is not the same tho. queerness is a political decision, a social posture, a structural antagonism. it names a refusal to comply with the systems that manage and discipline sexuality and gender. to be queer, as in radical as fuck.

queerness is a mode of war against the social, political, and hegemonic order. it’s the art of becoming ungovernable while keeping love intact.

I found the above to be an enlightening framing for the dynamic between choice and innate identity with respect to my own transition. Because I’d already stepped (or been pushed) outside certain systems of normalcy, I was able to recognize who I wanted to be, and had some practice with putting my existing attachments at risk in order to thrive.

Speaking of Robert Jones, he is a very well-dressed man. His essay on the Met exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is a delight.

While it’s not often the focus of mainstream conversations, dandyism, as an identity, is a precursor to queerness; and many of the Black men (and others) who embraced the style were not just making fashion statements, but sociopolitical ones as well. They were attempting to break free of the patriarchal expectations regarding gender, gender expression, race, and sexuality that were (and are) forced upon Black men.

And they did so with enormous sartorial flair! Oh the drama, honey! The draaamaaa!

Also linked in Jones’ article, check out playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ Vogue essay “On Being a Modern Dandy,” archived here. Harris’ works include Slave Play.

A dandy, at his or her core, is a rewriter of narratives—the narratives carved into a society’s understanding about the communities from which the dandy has emerged.

…to be a Black dandy is to dress as though you know you’re loved and therefore have no use for shame. Shame is the enemy of all exuberance. Shame comes from fear, and fear is the enemy of style.

In an interview by Stephen Meisel at CRAFT Literary, poet and prose author Jesse Lee Kercheval discusses the mechanics of visual storytelling in her first graphic memoir, French Girl. I read a lot of graphic narratives, both for pleasure and for the Winning Writers self-published book contest (still open through July 1! send us your comix!). Something I’ve noticed is that text and image can wind up battling for dominance. Especially in nonfiction, the words may take over the page, reducing the visual element to static illustrations that leave me wondering why the memoir or exposition was put into a comics format at all. Conversely, an image-heavy story may lack verbal connective tissue to explain plot and setting. Kercheval talks about leading with the image so that it actually adds new emotional information to the text.

Most of the pieces in French Girl did begin with drawing rather than writing. After so many years as a writer, if I start with words, I end up with way too many words for a comic. And if I write first, then draw, I end up drawing the very thing I write… The idea is for the words and images to be different, for each to add something new to the whole.

…you can’t just say “apple” and draw an apple. Unless you are doing a children’s alphabet book. Something in the art has to fill in the scene, the character, the mood. Add what is not in the words. And the art needs to do a lot of work because the hardest thing for me with comics is how very few words you get.

In Electric Lit’s personal narratives column, Michelle Gurule makes a heartfelt case that “My Uncle Doesn’t Need to Die in Prison to Learn His Lesson”. Gurule humanizes her aging uncle before revealing more details that would lead some to deem his crime unforgivable, an effective rhetorical move that reminded me of Sister Helen Prejean’s philosophy that a person is more than the worst thing he’s ever done. Whatever we conclude about his worthiness for medical parole, we can’t see him as anything but a fully rounded human being, forever altered by decisions he made as a traumatized and impoverished 19-year-old.

The Guardian has a name for why I’m feeling crazy: “hypernormalization,” a Soviet-era term for dissociating about the collapse of society so that we can function in daily life.

For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, [digital anthropologist Rahaf] Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”

Hat tip to Charis Books & More, a feminist bookstore in Georgia, for the link. Donate to their fundraiser.

Practicing Candor: Don't Pretend Everything is Fine

You know the meme.

In honor of Father’s Day this month, a couple of literary links. Hayan Charara’s poem “Translation” in Jewish Currents cleverly uses line breaks to bring out layers of meaning from an immigrant father’s misspoken idiom.

Get the get out of here my father
said to men and women he wanted
gone from his world By his world
I mean the beer and wine he built
and ran in Detroit And by beer and wine
I mean the convenience store he wanted
to call Father & Son but went with
Beer & Wine which is also
the prison he made for himself…

Winner of the Palette Poetry 2024-25 Previously Published Poem Prize, Ollie Schminkey’s “My Father” is an exceptionally successful contrapuntal. I’m never sure whether to read these two-column poems across, like lines with a large break in the middle, or down, like a newspaper. When they’re written properly, as here, they work in both directions. The form is perfect for this poem about losing his father to cancer. The father is both absent and present in the speaker’s mind, like an optical illusion flipping back and forth.

Another cancer poem, sorry, but this one is beautiful too: Geoff White’s “To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God,” at Frontier Poetry. Similar in its use of duality as a formal device, the poem repeats variations on “And I did. And I didn’t.” to express the contradictory demands of witnessing a friend’s death. One cannot do anything to stop it, perhaps one cannot consistently have faith, yet one must do something to acknowledge and be present with this awful/awe-full passing.

…They said she was still listening though I didn’t
remember the last time
I saw her awake.      And I didn’t
Then I did.     Then I didn’t
Then that wasn’t the point anymore.

In response to RFK Jr.’s eugenicist statements, Illinois has taken steps to shield autistic people’s medical records, Noah Berlatsky reported last month for Prism.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed an executive order safeguarding the medical records of autistic people in Illinois. The order follows a recent federal proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a national autism database. It prevents state agencies from sharing autism-related information with anyone outside of state government without a clear reason and informed consent.

The order also clearly states that “autism is a neurological difference—not a disease or an epidemic—identified by trained clinicians and healthcare professionals, with rising identification rates attributable to improved practices, greater awareness, and expanded access to screening tools.”

Support Noah’s freelance journalism on Patreon.

March Links Roundup: Fictional Truths, Factual Lies

Two months into the regime described by the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog as “Triumph of the Shill,” we hear the word “fiction” thrown around a lot as an insult, the devil on the shoulder whose nemesis is the angelic “fact”. At the same time, this administration seems grotesquely afraid of the ethical and historical truths that fiction and the other imaginative arts can reveal.

Neuroqueer author [sarah] cavar’s Substack alerted me to Hannah Kim’s Aeon article “The truth about fiction,” which explains that the metaphysical assumptions behind our genre classifications are not universal. In modern Western thought, fiction is distinguished from nonfiction because the latter is true and the former is invented. However, in classical Chinese literature, genre divisions pertained to the significance of the topic.

Analytic philosophy came to ask the questions it asks because it inherited the ancient Greek idea that some things are less ‘real’ than others. In Anglo-European philosophy, ‘fiction’ is closely connected to what’s imagined – that is, what isn’t taken to be real – because the tradition inherited the appearance/reality distinction from Plato. Fiction occupies the ‘appearance’ side of things, whereas nonfiction occupies the ‘reality’ side…

In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.

Recall how Plato relies on the appearance vs reality distinction to argue that what’s ‘really real’ (the unchanging Forms) are beyond our sense perceptions. Humans were meant to use the intellect, and not their senses, since sense data mislead us, while philosophising gives us a chance to grasp what’s beyond phenomena. In contrast, Chinese metaphysicians didn’t think ultimate reality is unchanging. Instead, the dominant view was that reality, including nature, follows consistent patterns (the Dao). What is ‘empty’ or ‘unreal’ was seen as the generator of all things, and all things were considered equal in significance since they are all manifestations of changing patterns…

… Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ [fiction] and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived.

Kim argues that beneath our supposedly objective tests for fiction versus fact, the genre border is a political battleground. Classifying a work as fiction can allow more leeway for controversial takes on current issues…or it can be a rhetorical device to undermine narratives that challenge us.

cavar is editor-in-chief at manywor(l)ds, an online journal of creative writing by neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and Mad writers. I learned a lot from this poem in Issue #7, “plurality: a personal primer,” by rose& elysium. The author(s) are members of a plural system, i.e. several personalities sharing the same body.

…many professionals promote final fusion, becoming a singlet,
as the ideal outcome for Plurals; to us, it’s a nightmare, another
type of conversion therapy entailing the fundamental loss
of separate, functional identities as we would merge into
an “original” self, a singlet who none of us remember being…

Plurality threatens Western metaphysical beliefs about the One being more perfect than the Many. A lot of psychiatric professionals are too uncomfortable with that critique.

Lu Chekowsky’s essay in Pigeon Pages, “How Sex Work Prepared Me for a Career in Advertising,” has sharp humor with the ring of truth. The hermit crab structure of a resume adds to the satirical edge.

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. ​You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything. 

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.

March Xness, the tournament of literary essays about pop songs, took a break from competition this year to showcase a month’s worth of favorite first-round losers from previous years. Writing about the song “She’s Like the Wind,” Erin Vachon’s “Swayze ode to queer failure” won my heart yet again. “Dirty Dancing,” like “Jurassic Park,” was one of those iconic Gen-X movies that I only watched for the first time recently, when I had the tools to perceive its gender-expansive subtext. (Dr. Ian Malcolm will forever be a trans man in my head canon. Life finds a way!)

Take an hour out of your doomscrolling to watch this interview with novelist Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, on Wesley Dixon’s Vassar College series Conversations @ the Salt Line. The Prophets is a brilliant, beautiful, tragic, yet inspiring novel about two enslaved young men in love and how the purity of their relationship disrupts the plantation’s ethos of sexual exploitation. The interview touches on such topics as having empathy for your villain characters and  recovering the history of queer-affirming and gender-expansive African cultures before colonization.

Need something lighter? Check out Elizabeth Zaleski’s playful essay “Hung Up” at The Missouri Review, a compendium of penises she has known and their importance, or lack thereof, in her relationships with the men attached to them. If you’re more of a back-end person, see “Great Farts of Literature”.

Poetry by a Mom of Queer Kids: “Why I Want to Resist”

The author of this poem is a fierce mom in Florida protecting her queer kids from legalized bigotry. She shared this poem in an email to me on the weekend of the inauguration, and has kindly permitted me to publish it here, without attribution to protect her kids’ privacy.

Why I Want to Resist

Why do you want to resist?
You, of all people?

You’re white,
From the more privileged class,

All these minorities are wanting to take away all our gold,
Is the message I heard from my dad growing up,

God rest his soul,
Banker of a third generation,

So why do I feel like all the lights are going out in the world?
They’re taking away our safe spaces.

Please don’t let them blow out our flames,
Goddard College, they accepted me there to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing,

Amongst all the cool intellectuals there,
I felt imposter syndrome,

Why did they accept me here?
We met at Fort Warden, a former military base in Port Townsend, Washington.

It was an eye-opening experience,
I fit in here.

I’d finally found my tribe.
Goddard closed last year.

The lights are going out,
Fort Warden announced they’re no longer hosting events there,

Another light went out.
Oh how I long to bum an American Spirit off a fellow classmate-writer,

Oh how I long to walk the foggy sidewalks,
As a distant ship sounds a melancholy foghorn.

Goddard College was a safe space,
Not only for queer people, but simply for an artist such as myself,

Born into a family in which I did not belong,
Why do I want to resist?

What forces are bringing darkness into my life?
Why do I want to resist?

What forces of evil and darkness
Want to put out my light?

You’re of a privileged upper class,
Why do you want to resist?

I want to resist. I need to resist.
How can I not resist?

The memories flash through my head like a slideshow of oppression,
Yes, me.

The memories flash through my mind like a slideshow of oppression,
The moment my baby girl was born into this world,

A tiny, precious doll,
A light entered my life, a light I thought could never be extinguished.

Precious baby girl; teasing, dyslexia,
Remove her from the public school system,

She has dyslexia,
She’ll never be able to read normally,

She’ll never be able to do math.
“That homeschooling is a bunch of bullshit,”

Were the words of Cruella de Vil,
My own narcissistic mother,

“You’re educationally neglecting her because the doesn’t know how to read.”
She’s a brilliant artist, mom,

Look at her now,
She’s a lesbian, mom.

When I left an abusive marriage
And you refused to help to the fullest capacity to which you were able with all your wealth,

Then no, we couldn’t afford fabric or clay
For her to make her art,

“You’re projecting oppression,”
Someone who’d once been a dear friend of mine

Told me when I dared speak out against the Monroe County Sheriff Department
On social media.

He refused to speak with me ever since,
He returned a bag of gifts I’d gotten him as a peace offering to the store Mother Earth.

He has friends who are cops,
All hail the men in blue,

All hail the enforcers of corrupt and unjust laws
In this Florida.

The dictators are taking their place in the Oval Office,
They wear their bigotry and hatred like a crown.

The slideshow of memories,
My firstborn child, my son,

I didn’t know about gender identity
I did not know

Until he told me at 18, mom do you love me?
Yes.

Do you love me mom?
Yes.

I bought a skirt,
I like to wear it in my room.

Accused of being transphobic,
My ignorance was bliss.

I learned, I educated myself,
My daughter is a lesbian.

I take them shopping,
I don’t care which department they buy their clothes from.

She wears his hand-me-downs.
I was asked once by someone looking at my children from a distance,

‘You have two boys?’
‘No, that one’s my daughter,’ I proudly replied.

I could give two shots
What anyone has to say about it.

Slideshow, my son is standing in the streets of our neighborhood
Between two deputies, a third looking on,

On a mental health call,
After he’d been left home with his abusive father,

Claire and I had been gone.
Why do I want to resist?

The slideshow in my mind,
My ray of sunshine is lying in the back of an ambulance,

I’m in front with the driver,
Half the motherfuckers won’t even pull over.

“That’s my baby girl lying in there.”
When I finally told them at the hospital, “she’s not pregnant, she doesn’t like boys.”

The slideshow in my head:
“Please, can you take the handcuffs off him?

He’s unarmed. He was just crying out for help.
Take the God damn handcuffs off my beautiful baby boy.”

Slideshow:
We’re at the ICU with Claire,

She didn’t know that OD’ing on Tylenol could be so serious,
Could cause her organs to shut down.

Jacob and I were texting, if our sunshine didn’t make it,
The Lord forbid, we were gonna’ protest

All over the streets,
Bail each other out of jail if we had to.

Slideshow of memories:
They put my child in the back of the squad car still in cuffs.

Would you want to resist if you were me?
Ask yourself this; how could I, in good conscience, do nothing?

I want to resist.
My two amazing kids were my only support

In leaving my marriage,
My two amazing kids who the world loves to hate,

My two amazing kids who saved their own mom’s life,
That’s why I will never stop resisting,

Because I love my two babies too much
And I love all the other kids like them,
Trying to make their way in this harsh, cruel world.

December Links Roundup: Living in Boxes

As a very strange year comes to an end, and a disruptive and destructive one is likely to begin, the question with which I begin this links roundup is: why can’t we Make Architecture Great Again? Megan Gafford’s Substack newsletter Fashionably Late Takes laments that “America was supposed to be Art Deco”. Iconic early 20th-century skyscrapers married ornamentation and the machine-age aesthetic to produce a distinct American style. But soon the Bauhaus style of flat, featureless prisms took over, responding to a postwar malaise that was suspicious of beauty. Gafford’s historical essay explains why, “for a hundred years, Modernist architects have been stabbing the world’s cities repeatedly with their glass shards.” Nostalgia has been weaponized by the Right, but the average person’s sense of alienation is not wrong.

A couple of related stories came to my attention this fall about crackdowns on political speech. Since the election, lots of social media users have shared On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder’s first directive, “Do not obey in advance.” Authoritarianism advances when people preemptively try to placate the dictator. Sometimes I’m glad I grew up in an abusive home, because I already know that this never works. There is no moment when the Dear Leader will say, “Thanks a lot. I guess I owe you a concession now.”

I would like to tattoo this message on the forehead of every mainstream cisgender pundit (I’m looking at you, New York Times) who’s suggested that Democrats should abandon transgender human rights in order to build a winning centrist coalition. What are you winning for? Once you concede that one minority group can have their children taken away, their healthcare criminalized, their jobs and housing dependent on the goodwill of the majority, and the very mention of their existence expunged from school curricula and libraries, you’ve created a repressive state apparatus that could chew up anyone next.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Belliot reflects on the Kafkaesque sensation of “Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America”.

America’s rigidity about categories betrays the conservatism that underlies much of it, and with conservatism comes an obsession with ideas about how families are supposed to look and how men and women are supposed to behave. Conservative outlets repeatedly broadcast to men, in particular, that they will be lesser, weaker, somehow more “effeminate” if they are queer, and they turn this toxic idiocy into homophobia and transphobia—both of which were darkly alchemized into votes for a man who wishes to end our existence.

To accept us, by contrast, is to accept wider possibilities of being. To embrace the idea that binaries are too restrictive, that life, at its core, is a curious flowing thing that cannot fit our simple human categories. To accept us is to reject a frighteningly powerful myth.

At Xtra, Jude Doyle tries to sort out facts from improbabilities: “Could the Trump administration criminalize queer speech online?” Infamously, Project 2025 seeks to redefine any positive portrayal of queer identities as pornography, whether or not it has literal sexual content. Doyle is less worried about book bans than about erasure of LGBTQ internet archives.

One way Trump has already moved to enact Project 2025 is in his pick of the FCC chair Brendan Carr. Carr wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025, and as chair, he would be in a position to enact at least some of the criminal sanctions proposed—specifically, the bit about shuttering telecommunications firms that allow queer and trans voices to proliferate. The way he could do this is to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would make it an intolerable legal risk for internet platforms to host content by queer and trans people.

The article links to some guidelines for saving your materials offline and protecting your digital privacy. Remember that you don’t actually own the books on your Kindle. Save those paper books!

Meanwhile, some of our universities have already lost sight of their mission to protect free expression and teach critical thinking. This blog is a Harvard haters safe space. My alma mater makes it pretty easy to bash them, with increasingly absurd interpretations of its conduct rules in order to stifle pro-Palestinian activism. Max J. Krupnick reports for Harvard Magazine:

Last December, approximately 100 pro-Palestine students filed into Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room, taped flyers to the back of their laptops, and read for an hour. This “study-in,” billed as “silent” and “non-disruptive” by the student organizers, was not the largest or highest-profile protest of the year. But that event set the scene for this semester’s most significant challenge to the University’s efforts to curtail disruptive student protests.

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech…

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon…In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.”

…The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

These faculty members, too, were banned from Widener for two weeks following their study-in. Participating professors were especially upset to be punished for speech that was not controversial—in some cases, for displaying quotes from sources published by the University itself.

A similar faculty solidarity action took place at Northwestern University in Illinois. The campus newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, reported Nov. 21:

Around a dozen Northwestern tenured faculty members rallied by The Rock on Wednesday afternoon in protest of the University’s new demonstration policies. The demonstration drew a small crowd as faculty members marched with signs and spoke out against the new policies.

In September, the administration rolled out the new demonstration policies, which prohibit protests at The Rock before 3 p.m. on weekdays and the use of amplified sound in the area before 5 p.m.

…English Prof. Sarah Schulman, who is the faculty advisor for NU’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, condemned the University for disciplining students for putting up two “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” on campus.

This policy “criminalizes” and “alienates” students from the University, Schulman said.

“Instead, we should be listening to our students, supporting them and praising them for having the integrity to stand up against this violent status quo,” Schulman said to the crowd.

Follow queer historian and AIDS activist Sarah Schulman on X because she doesn’t seem to have jumped ship to BlueSky yet.

November Links Roundup: Counting Down the Days

Well, it’s November. Yay. Tonight we turn the clocks back an hour, and Tuesday we find out whether America will turn the clock back to 1850.

In case you’re Jerry the Vampire and only just woke up from a 50-year nap, don’t burst a blood vessel trying to read all 900 pages of Project 2025 before Election Day. Instead, consult the Stop Project 2025 Comic, an online anthology of graphic narratives that summarize the Trump team’s plans to destroy fair elections, internet freedom, reproductive and gender rights, the environment, and pretty much every other good thing in America.

Read Susan Perabo’s devastating flash fiction “The Life of the Mother” at Fractured Lit, inspired by the many real-life news stories about women dying from pregnancy complications after Dobbs. For some resistance vibes, read G.H. Plaag’s poem “Televised” in the journal ANMLY:

…we are posting this
to TikTok so the Chinese government knows
that we are hot and young and slutty
in our artificial cages, in our handcuffs,
in our straps. we need the spies
to learn about femdom and
the Wednesday Dance. we know,
we know—this could threaten everything
that makes this country great, our security
could be at risk, but we don’t care. we don’t believe
in borders or in anything. you have taken that
from us, belief. and you only have
yourselves to blame.
…

Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn’s feature essay “Ghosts of the Groves”, from the Summer 2024 “Florida” issue of Jewish Currents, takes a deep dive into the political history of orange cultivation, connecting the crop’s rise and climate-change-induced decline in the Sunshine State to Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian orange groves. With agriculture worldwide under threat from global warming and new insect-borne diseases, Florida looks to Israeli technology as a savior. Meanwhile, Palestinians saw their former cash crop being recast as a symbol of Israeli “improvement” of their land.

This budding partnership is a natural extension of the parallel histories of Israeli and Florida citrus. In both places, generations of settler colonists have valued oranges not only as a source of wealth, but also as a treasured part of their mythology. Early Zionist settlers in Palestine saw their agricultural output in morally and socially redemptive terms; their famous promise to “make the desert bloom” positioned cultivation as a route toward seizing the land, and oranges, in particular, became a narrative device to scaffold claims of rightful occupancy. In Florida, where oranges were likely introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, they came to represent the idea that the terrain was a potential paradise that only Europeans could bring to fruition.

As far-right political projects have consolidated power in both Israel and Florida—with Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration openly working to push leftists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other minority groups out of Florida’s social body, and Israel currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, seeking to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that it embarked on more than a century ago—shared politics have become the basis for an agricultural alliance.

And what are our preeminent universities doing in this time of crisis? Telling teachers and students to STFU about anything controversial. “Faculty Members Suspended From Harvard’s Main Library After ‘Study-In’ Protest,” The Crimson reported on Oct. 25.

The faculty study-in protested the library’s decision to similarly suspend student protesters who conducted a pro-Palestine study-in last month. The University’s decision to suspend students from the library had already come under fire from free speech groups, including the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

During the faculty study-in, professors silently read materials on free speech and dissent while placing signs related to free speech and University policy on the tables in front of them. As they did so, Securitas guards noted down their names and ID numbers…

…Though the University has previously disciplined faculty members for academic misconduct or violating policies on sexual harassment, the decision to suspend professors from a library for protesting appears to be unprecedented. The Crimson could not identify any past cases where Harvard barred a group of faculty members from entering a specific campus space as a result of their activism.

Along the same lines, “Yale College admin direct Women’s Center to institute policy of ‘broad neutrality’,” The Yale Daily News reported Oct. 15. Staffers are understandably concerned that this vague, sweeping directive would interfere with their choice of invited speakers and their advocacy for women’s issues like reproductive rights.

The News spoke to three Women’s Center board members about the “broad neutrality” directive. The students were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs as board members are employed by Yale College.

The three board members all emphasized that a policy of “broad neutrality” would be a drastic change from the Women’s Center’s feminist mission since its founding.

“The Yale Women’s Center was founded in 1970 when a group of the first women undergraduates staged a sit-in, occupying a space of their own. At the time, their feminist demands were divisive. What is divisive changes over time, and through the decades, the Women’s Center has continued to be a feminist space on campus, working towards collective liberation,” one board member wrote to the News. “Neutrality would contradict our purpose and compromise our daily functions.”

What could possibly have prompted this policy? Three guesses:

Last year, an annual event planned by the Women’s Center titled “Pink-washing and feminism(s) in Gaza” was indefinitely postponed by the board amid threats of disciplinary action from administrators, following their failure to respond to a Jewish student leader seeking to “meet with a representative from the Women’s Center to talk about how Jewish women can feel included and represented in our Yale community,” per the student’s email.

Doubling down, Yale’s Committee on Institutional Voice has extended the gag order to deans, top administrators, and faculty who head up departments or programs. “Yale leaders advised to refrain from statements on issues of public significance,” the Yale Daily News reported Oct. 30. While there’s something to be said for caution and humility in speaking for an ideologically diverse intellectual community, this move feels to me like preemptive compliance with authoritarianism. Yale leaders may fear retaliation from a Trump administration, similar to Jeff Bezos blocking the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. It’s still cowardly. If America’s most powerful individuals and institutions knuckle under to the Mob, who’s going to help the rest of us stand firm?

How about Trans Godzilla? Jude Doyle at Xtra Magazine playfully explores the monster’s many gender possibilities. A gem in this article is the link to Cressa Maeve Ainé’s “Coming Out,” a stop-motion short in which a Godzilla couple affirm their child’s transition.

For more trans joy, read the story “Circles, Triangles, Squares” by Charlie Sorrenson at Electric Lit. My favorite part is towards the end, where the narrator realizes that mutual oversharing isn’t the same as a trusting friendship.

Britney Spears GIF - Britney Spears ...

October Links Roundup: Hermit Crabs and Other Art Forms

Pagan god or Eastern States Exposition parade float? You decide!

Welcome to spooky season, readers. This month there will be two links posts, this catch-all literary and cultural one, and a forthcoming one to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza.

To start the Halloween pumpkin rolling, let’s appreciate Taisiya Kogan’s flash fiction “Mrs. Morrison Proofreads Her Obituary” in Electric Literature. This is known as a “hermit crab” piece because, like the crustacean who lives in other species’ discarded shells, the author borrows a non-literary writing template to contain emotions and occurrences that don’t normally belong in that template. The disjunction between form and content, used brilliantly here, is a way to restore honesty to language instead of allowing received forms to numb our perceptions.

Also from Electric Lit, this horror-satire by Mary Heitkamp takes the metaphor “House Hunting” completely literally. While competing offers aren’t usually settled with crossbows in real life, the gore in this story forces us to feel the life-and-death desperation of our scarcity-based economy, which  makes us crazy no matter how many resources we have at the moment.

My 12-year-old son wants to be John Wick for Halloween, but you know what’s really scary? School bureaucracy! FYI, I love his new school and I have nothing but awe for the number of state-required IEP forms they must complete every year. But McSweeney’s understands the dread we parents feel when we receive an email like “A Note from Your Child’s School About Its Apps and Websites”:

Sports Apps
Register for athletics on SportsStarter but pay for the activity on PayBall. Message team parents/guardians on CrowdChat and coaches on CoachBabble. Find your team’s regular season schedule on YouthSked and its playoff schedule on TourneyTime. Buy tickets to athletic events on GameTix, but only after you’ve topped off your recently hacked School Wallet.

I recognized my own complicated gender feelings in essayist Oliver Radclyffe’s “The Sum of My Parts” at The Gay & Lesbian Review. A midlife transitioner, like me, he talks about the difficulty of forming a “cohesive narrative” that would include his female-presenting history, his gender role models, and the body he chose for himself now.

I always knew that “acting like a girl” felt wrong, but in order to compensate for the parts of my body which were still female, I was now trying too hard to “act like a boy.” It seemed that performative masculinity felt just as inauthentic as performative femininity. I wanted to stop performing, and just be.

It was only after a year of obsessing about whether or not I should start testosterone that I began to wonder if the problem was my sex, not my gender. Perhaps it wasn’t my femininity that caused of my dysphoria, but the fact that my body still retained traces of the female sex. Irrespective of how nonbinary my gender felt, my body wanted to be fully male.

At CRAFT Literary, Jennifer Springsteen’s speculative story “Corpse Washer” is a surprisingly tender and uplifting post-apocalyptic narrative about people caring for each other, medically and spiritually, in a time of plague. Race and class inequalities are not elided here, but neither are they insurmountable.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the season!

Date night at the Big E.

ICYMI: Watch Video of Jendi Reiter and Ella Dawson Reading at the BGSQD

Autumn-time, and the living is spooky… Happy October! I’ve just returned from New York City, where I had the privilege of reading with Ella Dawson at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division. In the Q&A session, we discussed how humor and romance leaven the portrayal of healing from abuse in our new novels. Mine, of course, is Origin Story (Saddle Road Press), perfect for fans of butt sex, radical Judaism, superhero comics, and hating adoption social workers. Ella’s debut novel is But How Are You, Really (Dutton, 2024). A bisexual love story with a theme of healing from intimate partner abuse, Dawson’s witty novel is set at a 5th-year college reunion where journalist Charlotte Thorne must contend with her bullying boss, the friend group who wonders why she ghosted on them, and the lovable almost-boyfriend who got away.

Watch our video (1 hr 7 min) on the BGSQD’s YouTube channel, admire our fit, and buy our books from their store. The BGSQD is located in the LGBT Center at 208 W. 13th St. off 7th Ave. in Manhattan. (Contact them for ordering if you are not able to visit the store in person.)

 

September Links Roundup: Boobs Week and Dad Caps

Autumn is on the way! Soon it will be time to switch from my closet of 50 short-sleeved button-down shirts to my closet of 50 long-sleeved ones. This makes me not-so-nostalgic for a problem I had from the ages of 12 through 50: Boob Gap! I’m talking about that awkward pulling between the second and third buttons that anyone not built like a supermodel or a washboard has likely experienced. As part of “Boobs Week” at Slate Magazine, Shannon Palus wrote this feature on Aug. 15 about clothing companies that are trying to, well, fill that gap.

Left adrift by most (though not all) major clothing retailers, some women, like Allen, are taking matters into their own hands. A decade ago, as an adult, Allen started her own brand, Exclusively Kristen. Using herself as a fit model, she created a pattern for a button-up shirt that would neither pop open at the top nor leave extra fabric hanging around her midsection: a shirt that would just fit. The design achieves this with princess seams, which trace the body in a curve from the armpit, over the breast, and down to the hemline. This, Allen said, accentuates the figure, “without being inappropriate for work.”

…Even if you are a pro at shopping, finding clothes for an ample rack can be impossible. Alice Kim, another fashion entrepreneur, spent years employed as a buyer for major brands like Victoria’s Secret and Prada, working her way up to be a vice president of merchandising at Diane von Furstenberg. “And I still can’t find clothes that fit my body off the rack that I don’t have to tailor,” she said, recalling her frustration. In 2020 she founded PerfectDD, pronounced “perfected.” (Kim said that she is a 28I—but that she often refers to her own cup size as “DD” because “that’s what people understand.”) PerfectDD’s offerings, which include button-downs, scoop-neck tees, a lace corset top, and a jumpsuit, are designed for the titular DDs to M cups. The first time she tried on a sample of PerfectDD clothing, she “literally cried,” Kim said. Not having to size up into something baggy just so the clothes fit her breasts was a huge relief. “I was like, I look my size. This is the actual size of my body.”

If you’re not following Menswear Guy (@dieworkwear) on Twitter, you are missing some of the shadiest shade on the Internet, not to mention an entire education about men’s fashion history and the elements of a good fit. At Politico on Aug. 8, he explained why “Tim Walz’s Camo Cap Is More Important Than You Think”. Unlike a lot of politicians who dress down in an inept attempt to appear like Regular Joes, Walz comes by his “remarkably unremarkable look” naturally.

Walz’s avuncular outfits are visually successful because they are culturally coherent — teaming workwear with workwear, rather than mixing suit jackets with jeans, as DeSantis was wont to do. They also rely on classics from American heritage labels, such as LL Bean’s barn coat, Carhartt’s utility pants, Filson’s Mackinaw and Red Wing’s work boots. But most of all, they possess a quality that style writers have spent generations trying to dissect: authenticity. Walz grew up in small town Nebraska, where his high school graduating class included about 25 students. He earned his bachelor’s degree from a small public state college before going on to serve in the Army National Guard and then working at Mankato West High School, where he taught geography and coached football. His hunting get-ups don’t look contrived because he’s an actual hunter.

This critical dash of authenticity is why Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who served in the military, looks natural in his bomber jackets; why former President George W. Bush could convincingly pull off cowboy boots; and why New England-raised John Kerry and Mitt Romney look at home in preppy barn coats.

It’s also why former President Donald Trump stands as a unique figure in today’s dressed-down environment. Except for when he’s on the golf course, Trump is rarely, if ever, seen in anything but a navy worsted suit, white spread collar shirt and crimson, satin tie. The uniform burnishes Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman.

Walz is doing the same, but for the opposite effect.

I got a kick out of this flash fiction by Karen Heuler in Electric Literature, “So Much to Know”. The narrator’s deadpan observational humor creates a perception of her as a dotty older lady, which works to her advantage when confronting a mugger.

I’ve learned that new experiences keep the aging brain on task. I don’t worry about myself as long as I stay interested in life. Actually, I think I worry less than most people do, and that’s reassuring.

I was robbed one night, at knifepoint, and the knife interested me. I asked about it.

“Forget the knife. Don’t ask about the knife. Or I’ll use it,” my assailant said. He was getting nervous.

“But isn’t it a kitchen knife? Can you really just grab a kitchen knife and run out the door like that? Won’t it cut you just as likely as it cuts me, for instance? You should have a holder.” That was obvious, and the obvious deserves recognition.

“Give me your money,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “I certainly will. I have a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, but I’m afraid that’s it. I was just going to the drugstore to get some soda. Funny isn’t it, that we go to drugstores now instead of delis? I grew up when there were delis.”

Daniel Lavery mashes together two of my special interests in this 2020 article from his Substack archives, “Which Misconception About Testosterone Therapy Does Each Character from the Popular TV Show ‘The Sopranos’ Subscribe To?”

PAULIE: T, all due respect — all due respect — the Bada Bing is a women’s space, and I think you at least gotta take that into consideration before you make a decision.

TONY: You saying I can’t come into the Bing? I created the Bing.

SILVIO: No one’s saying anything, Ton. You go wherever you feel led to go.

PAULIE: You just gotta be mindful, T.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Bellot’s essay “The Joys and Fears of Trans Motherhood” reflects with humor and poignancy on her own mother as a model for the devotion she will show to her future child, and their subsequent estrangement when she transitioned. Some of the obstacles faced by Bellot and her partner are familiar to couples coping with the uncertainty and cost of IVF, and some are unique to queer folks surrounded by right-wing propaganda that we’re a threat to “The Family”.

When we first became serious about trying, my wife and I decided to go through sperm banks. I hadn’t imagined just how much like online dating sperm bank sites could be. I also never imagined I would say the word sperm more than a certain chapter of Moby Dick.

I didn’t realize how unprepared I was until our first try, when we received the sample in a heavy luggage-like shipping container that had the distinct appearance of biohazardous cargo. When we opened it, we found another container inside, this one arctic from dry ice; frigid air unfurled when we unlocked it. We then had to thaw the sperm and, nurse-like, prep a long syringe to transfer the sample into, which ended up being the trickiest part.

Everything, we quickly learnt, had to be clinically precise: when you order the sample relative to when you assume you’ll be ovulating, when you open the inner container, how long you let the sample thaw, how you transfer the semen to the insertion tube, how you lie on your back and for how long after the insertion, how you repackage the imposing shipping container to be returned.

We tried a few times, and although we thought we got everything right—minus the unfortunate time that I dropped most of the sperm on the kitchen floor—it felt like stumbling in the dark, hoping for the best. We switched to IUI, which involved a doctor performing the whole, slightly more in-depth ritual, but even then, we had to deal with mishaps and ignorance, including a doctor seemingly shunning the advice not to thaw the sperm in water, while another seemed cavalier about missing an ovulation window or differed sharply about how to position your body after insemination.

The whole process soon started to feel horribly biased against queer couples, in part because the language in almost every fertility guide we read was explicitly tailored to straight couples who could keep trying even without the donor material. For us, though, each expensive effort was the only shot we had, so it mattered to get it, well, right. And while the odds for IUI are never sky-high, it’s hard not to blame yourself (and differing doctors) each time it fails. The pregnancy test has become a sort of scrying pool, a future-reflecting thing you approach as much with dread as hope.

Speaking of parent-child relations, novelist Jessica Pegis (The God Painter) sent me this provocative essay from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America/Metropolis of San Francisco website, after she read the queer midrash on the Binding of Isaac in my novel Origin Story. Rev. Fr. Seraphim Ivey, the writer of “Blessed Abraham: The Troubling Narrative of Abraham, Isaac, the Sacrifice, and the Missing Bits Between”, observes that there are problems with reading this Genesis 22 story as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion:

First, Abraham is known for seeking counsel and talking about his plans with those closest to him – Sarah, Lot, the Lord, etc. For him to not enter into discussion about anything God has asked him to do, even in passing with his wife or the Lord Himself in depth, is challenging to say the least. This is especially so in light of how much Abraham loves them both. Didn’t Abraham dialogue with the Lord over Sodom and Gomorrah and about Lot’s fate? Why would he not have done so over Isaac’s even more so? What about Sarah? Isn’t Isaac Sarah’s son as well? Where is the love being expressed between the two of them?

Second, if Isaac is the prefigurement of Christ, then shouldn’t there have been dialogue between the father and the son about the impending sacrifice? If the sacrifice is to be the proper and right kind of sacrifice, then it must be voluntarily given. This is not an animal being offered up, but a human being. So it can’t just be Abraham offering to sacrifice his son. Isaac too must be given the opportunity to voluntarily lay his life down. For this to happen there must be some informed dialogue. This is seemingly absent from the text. Even the ending is challenging. Rather than the son returning home with the father, the father comes home alone.

I was impressed to see this priest bringing up the issue of consent, which is so often sidelined in Bible stories as compared to its centrality in modern psychology and ethics. Fr. Ivey hints that perhaps not everything in the Bible should be read straightforwardly as a go-and-do-likewise: “We might also look to extra-biblical texts, including Jewish sources, for commentary on these texts, trusting God will help us discern which are from Him and which are not.”

Sources, perhaps, like the book reviewed in this 2012 article from The Times of Israel, “When Abraham Murdered Isaac”. Biblical scholar Tzemah Yoreh believes that the happy ending of the ram in the thicket was tacked on later, to an original narrative where Abraham did in fact sacrifice his son.

One eye-opening hint at what he believes is the original story lies in Genesis 22:22. Previously, in verse 8, Abraham and Isaac had walked up the mountain together. But in verse 22, only Abraham returns.

…That strange contradiction, Yoreh says, may be why a few ancient midrashim, or rabbinic homilies, also assumed Isaac had been killed.

In one homily quoted by Rashi, the revered 11th-century French rabbi and commentator, “Isaac’s ashes are said to be suitable for repentance, just like the ashes of an [animal] sacrifice.”

Yoreh also relies on the widely accepted hypothesis that the Torah consists of several narratives from different time periods braided together, identifiable by the different names they use for God, e.g. YHWH or Elohim.

The Biblical text calls the God who instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son “Elohim.” Only when the “angel of God” leaps to Isaac’s rescue does God’s name suddenly change to the four-letter YHWH, a name Jews traditionally do not speak out loud.

Elohim commands the sacrifice; YHWH stops it. But it is once again Elohim who approves of Abraham for having “not withheld your son from me.”

…Indeed, Isaac is never again mentioned in an Elohim storyline. In fact, if you only read the parts of Isaac’s life that use the name Elohim, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see the story as one in which Isaac is killed in the sacrifice and disappears completely from the Biblical story.

You won’t find that on a flannelboard in Sunday School, kids. (At least I hope not!)

 

Cummington Fair Blue Ribbon!

They’re strawberries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Best in show! My poem “Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair” won first prize in the 2024 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for LGBTQ Poetry. You can read this poem and my finalist poem “Why the Sunrise Is Trans” in their online journal ArLiJo, Issue #201.

The Cummington Fair is a real event held the weekend before Labor Day in the Western Massachusetts town of Cummington, also home to the Cummington Creamery, I kid you not. It’s a great old-fashioned country fair with an amateur art exhibit, antique cars, midway rides, a petting zoo, and great Polish food. One year they had an acrobat who took breathtaking dives from a tall metal pole, telling the story of his sobriety journey between feats. Lest I be accused of smuttifying this family event, the Japanese dumpling vendors at the Nom Nom Hut this year had to wear shirts saying “Put our balls in your mouth”.

I wrote this poem after the 2023 fair, where they did hold a Golden Wedding Award contest for couples (presumably straight) married 50+ years. The country singer covering “Gentle on My Mind” was also real, though I can’t recall her band’s name. Around this time, my mom’s lesbian movie club was on a Bloomsbury Group kick. We saw the 2018 film “Vita and Virginia” followed by the 1990 miniseries “Portrait of a Marriage”, which was based on Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson’s book of the same name. For those who don’t know, chaotic bisexual novelist Vita was married to British diplomat and moderately discreet homosexual Harold Nicolson. Apparently they were deeply devoted to each other and found a way to express their sexual complexity while maintaining a strong partnership. I was yearning to make some space for this kind of marriage to be recognized as praiseworthy, or at least possible.

Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair

An optimistic alto covers Gentle on My Mind

in the bandshell by the chicken barn.
Her calves chunk-chunk in floral-stitched boots.
Is the idea of a woman less demanding than her pussy?
Twinned oxen yoked to concrete

blocks pull through dust
to cheers. Desire anything

because it’s in front of you,
soap, mortgages, and dyed quartz flowers
sold from white wooden stalls

at the bottom of the hill. Ideas don’t tire,
rub themselves to rash, or bleed like roast beef dinner
that’s promised as a prize over the loudspeaker

to the best couple fifty-plus years wed.
Man and woman is understood
by the burlap-faced leaders of the two-step, gently
resting their chins on their wives’ tucked curls.

Slow, slow. The alto swings
long molasses hair back from her cheeky face
singing that not-like-other-girls song.

The oxen win a ribbon. The boy who hits
the bell with the hammer wins a ticket to do it again.
His mother sticks her face into a cream puff
the way Vita would have

tongued Virginia Woolf’s cunt. To be pleasant
memory, to be covered in art,
don’t cry at leavings. Blame

is a trash barrel of single-use knives.
Ideas are insatiable. Vita and Harold died

one anniversary short of golden,
she with her tea cakes, he with his Persian boys.

And Virginia, when she weighed down her pockets
with tickets for the final carousel,

what vows held her up so long?