When you grow up in the 1950s, there are only two possible genders and your mother is one and your father is the other. You slide between them. You’re the kid who balks at dressing up for church, who hates ribbons, frills, white ankle socks, the seams inside dresses, and lace most of all; you are the kid who refuses shirts in the summer because boys do. You’re the kid who announces at two that you’re a boy, to horrified response. You keep trying this announcement every couple of years, while your mother explains how wrong you are. Boys — your brother — have a thingy dangling between their legs and you have nothing. You look in the mirror, standing on the toilet seat, to see your nothing, and you pull up the skin where you cleave, and you see nothing there, and if you had the language you would insist this isn’t, anyway, about body parts, this is deeper than dangles.
Hamilton via The Nothing Between Your Legs
I’m guessing that in addition to feeling anxious, sad and scared, you feel very tired all the time from the energy of making so much space for your partner’s emotional reactions, and then their emotions about those emotions and their emotions about your emotions and you know, there’s a theme here. You shouldn’t have to feel this way, and you don’t have to feel this way forever.
Rachel via You Can Leave Your Partner Who Scares You
Boarding school teaches this kind of self-possession repeatedly and thoroughly, because it teaches you how to be in control when you’ve made every effort to be out of it. It’s a scheduled, watched existence and if you want to do the things you otherwise might have done outside school, you learn how to look like everyone else when a perfect chemical storm is forming inside, how to sit through evening register when so high it feels like everything you’re saying is occurring in the future and everything you’re doing is occurring in the past. Trying to unify these two time zones enough to nod your head and say ‘here’ was like trying to nail down running water, but it had to be done and to be done it had to be practiced. It’s not an education to be proud of seeking out. At that age I didn’t appreciate the fact that I had the privilege of other options if I’d had to leave, that I was lucky both to have this education at all and in my relationship with the things that could have derailed it.
The true magic began when people started creating their own #SoftEggContent and tagging me in it. At first it was just my friends. Then it spread to friend’s of friends. Now it includes total strangers who share no mutuals with me and I’m legitimately like, how the heck did you find out about this weird hashtag and decide to participate?! Instagram allows you to add a post to your own story if someone tags you in it, and so I started sharing all kinds of #SoftEggContent, not just original eggs filmed in my own home. The feature to add a post to your story is glitchy though, so sometimes I wouldn’t be able to share a particularly good video. This made me sad, so I solved the problem myself – in these instances I started DMing people and asking them to download the videos and text them to me. Sometimes I was friends with these people and we already had each others’ numbers, sometimes they were total fucking strangers who lived across the country. But everyone felt good about texting me #SoftEggContent!
photos by Molly Adams via PHOTOESSAY: dapperQ’s “Dress Code” Made Your Queer Dreams Come True at New York Fashion Week
Oh and be careful with your eyes. Some people have extremely sexish sex eyes by nature, and it can seem like they’re flirting when they’re not, they just have sexish eyes.
I do not care about most things in real life the way I care about Willow and Tara. Neither I nor my therapist can quite figure out why. They are in me, somehow, like stomach lining, or the quick under my fingernails.
Andrea Long Chu, Buffy’s Silent Episode Was an Elegy for Its Gays
