We all begin in water and are called back to water. Blue Blood challenges the rhetoric that trans people are “unnatural” through captivating verses about metamorphosis and meditations on the concept of home. Robin Gow invites readers to celebrate identity; to question what their own body means to them. […]
I was inspired to write this piece about homophobia when my partner and I were treated very differently from the customers in our small shop that she has used for years. Even in a place I consider mostly liberal, we encounter homophobia often. We figured we could hide, or just be proud of who we are. So, we decided, fuck homophobes! We are not going away! If even one young person who feels alone can see us and feel less alone, then the discomfort is worth it. This piece was aired on BBC Radio Uploads Suffolk on 7/8/2020. […]
This piece describes the author’s first queer romantic experience, which took place after she began working at a commercial BDSM dungeon. As the title suggests, the piece examines the gulf between fantasy and reality, courage and fear, desire and reluctance, as the author navigates a new world. […]
“Haunted By a 4-Letter Word” describes changing personal, political, and societal perspectives on the meaning of the role of wife across fifty years, from the first issue of Ms., to more current discussions of hetero-normativity and marriage equality. The essay tells that broader cultural story through my personal narrative as a straight Catholic school girl of 16, to my current experience as a 68-year-old lesbian-identified bi- woman partnered, then married, to a woman for thirty-eight years. The essay concludes by describing newer meanings of ‘wife’, while acknowledging some of the current complexities of the label for queers. […]
I do not know how to say what I am. Label me if you must. / All I know is this: / Nobody loves women as much as I love women. […]
“I’m gay,” I proclaimed to a sea of strange, blank faces. The word hung proud and uncertain, in the air just as out of place as I was, in this place and with these people, my new form and friends. Their chattering stopped dead, and a cold silence flooded the room. Hope hovered precariously on my tongue. Frozen, I stared at my dormmates, their shining, distant eyes fixed on mine. I swallowed. […]
My cousin told me not to discuss my engagement with her daughter, because I am marrying another woman. Through this experience, I reaffirmed how to best live my truth and take care of myself. […]
“Gay” takes on multiple meanings and connotation as the author dissects depression and the facade of happiness, as well as sexuality and its variable expressions. […]
The true story of what can happen to a relationship when you see what you shouldn’t and refuse to see what you should. […]
This story about LGBTQIA+ yearning and the hardships of navigating one’s boundaries — while also trying to be open to the experience of falling in love — explores how much we give of ourselves in order to get the most minuscule response, and then call that response affection because as LGBTQ+ people, we rarely know what healthy reciprocity is, especially when we’re young and still learning. […]
“Lesbian Y.A. Novel” is a fragmented coming-to-terms with lesbian identity across hometown, high school, and college. Interspersed with anecdotes about lesbian bars from Artforum’s “Confessions On The Dance Floor: Reveries From The Gay Bar,” this essay contemplates what it means to be a lesbian in any space — warm or cold, closed off or open. […]
A poem about the author’s journey as a bisexual woman struggling with anxiety, told through very minimal Google searches that she (and many other queer people) have made in her life, along with some she hopes to make in the future. […]
In search of healing, both for her damaged knee and “broken” sexuality, Erica tests her faith in her own resilience. As she slowly recovers from surgery and the fallout of coming out as a lesbian, she starts to see the dark side of her desperate need to believe in her ability to bounce back. […]
J. Daniel Cruz recounts his story as a gay Mexican immigrant in the United States in his journey through acceptance, love, loss, and family ties. Cruz explores the religious, social, and familial struggles that arise when a family member identifies as LGBTQ. […]
Using the format of a pop culture quiz, Yolande House interrogates her sexuality and how it has—or hasn’t—changed as she’s grown older. Is sexuality based on experience or identity? Does her lack of recent experience negate a strong identity that formed when she was younger? House’s essay gives a clear voice to the frustrations of how the world looks at bisexuals compared to how bi+ people feel about themselves. […]
“All My Safe Spaces Are Dead” is a look at the upheaval and restructuring of my sense of self. My sense of safety is a horizon I never seem to reach; a mirage that morphs into something new once I tear my gaze away from its lies. Yet I wake up every morning looking for it, craving it, being unable to live without it. This is my hunt for a place to call home. […]
“Howling to No One in Particular” is about a break up. Mostly it’s about losing perceived individuality in couples, hook-up culture, loving someone until you stop seeing them, and an MTV reality show. […]
After a potential lover rejects him for being trans, Kieran DeMelfi is faced with the powerful contradiction between begrudging the man’s callousness, and the attraction he still feels for him. […]
Referencing some chimeric composition of fish, eczema, and weight, “Scales” is a personal essay exploring the swimming pool as a liminal space where the water’s distortions allow its pubescent narrator to linger outside heteronormative perceptions she doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to understand. […]
Tyler Dalzell writes a letter to his younger self, the one who’s about to undergo hormone therapy treatments. In it, he tells himself to be gentle, as he will, during his transition, find a shifting sense of Self, uncertainties about his changing body and, in the most unexpected times, slices of joy and unconditional love. […]
In “A Study In Plants”, “The Image Surprises”, and “When I Was A Boy”, yearning takes center-stage as Sarah Sala comes to terms with loving and/or losing the women in her life: this includes deceased great-grandmothers, estranged sisters, the woman she loves and marries, and herself. […]
“Unlade,” a braided essay, unpacks the legal ruling allowing same-sex marriages to be recognized throughout the United States in the midst of Cie moving into a new apartment. There, unknown and without a center, Cie uses music and Pixy Liao’s Experimental Relationship photography collection to reflect on and explore sexuality. […]
The narrator struggles with coming to terms with his identity as he grows up in a sheltered village in rural France. The story takes the format of a mock-scientific theory presenting evidences before reaching a conclusion, through the metaphor of the universe and space. […]
“Love Letters” is a story about Atash Yaghmaian’s life as a queer teenager in post-Revolution Iran and a funny but painful love triangle. […]
“The Audacity to Live” is a personal essay that centers around Alondra Adame’s experience as a daughter of immigrants and as a queer woman of color wrestling with her parents’ expectations while learning to become independent and navigating higher education. […]
A story of a young dyke in the early 1970s, in Tampa, FL, whose mother’s religious beliefs have led to her being disowned. Making a life and new family for herself, the protagonist desperately tries to live with the monumental loss and the events endured over her sexuality. Her efforts to find peace are overshadowed with her own debilitating issues with alcoholism, drugs and mental health. Issues, resulting from a childhood lost to her mother’s madness and religiosity. The story focuses on a particular night at the local gay bar when said mother arrives unannounced and demands an audience with her child, in a last-ditch effort to save her soul. A furious, yet heartbreaking. exchange, grown from all that’s been done, occurs in the bar’s parking lot. […]
Jenny Ferguson discusses what it means to crush as a demi-sexual adult, and takes readers with her to a black-tie wedding in Malibu, CA, days before wildfires burned 96,949 acres. […]
Aristotle’s views on pleasure and pain correlate distinctly with his concept of health—a necessary component for individual cultivation of goodness. A trans body complicates, but ultimately and surprisingly triumphs alongside, this Aristotelian framework like the careful crafting of an infinite number of ever-changing objects. […]
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