A lot of things would have been so much simpler if Simone had sperm. We wouldn’t have had to do IVF, of course, but also we wouldn’t have had to choose a sperm donor. Oh my goodness was it hard for us. When people ask, which they often do, who he is and how we chose, it’s hard to know where to begin. How do I distill two years of conversations down into a column or a video, let alone a conversation over brunch?
I’ve been dreaming of bees lately.
One night not long ago, I turned to my girlfriend in bed and said, “When we grow up, we’re gonna live on a farm and raise bees together.” She smiled indulgently, stroked my hair, and told me to go back to sleep. In the morning, she reminded me that a) we’re already grown up, and b) we’re both city girls. But she didn’t give me a hard “no” on the beekeeping, so I’m going to go ahead and interpret that as a “maybe/probably yes!” When Riese starts her radical separatist homestead in the Midwest, we’ll be right there with our beekeeping suits on.
Outside of my dreams, the media has been absolutely abuzz with bee news lately! Bees have been making headlines for their unfortunate love of nicotine. Recently, Wired ran a piece on how we’re all worrying about the wrong bees, and the Spectator ran a thinkpiece on how bees are better at democracy than people. In Seattle, millions of bees (somewhere between 14 and 22 million) recently spilled on the interstate, to great devastation and the dismay of the Oregon wine industry. Elsewhere in the country, hundreds of millions of honeybees are making their way to New Jersey to pollinate the nation’s blueberries and cucumbers. In New York, the police department’s now-retired-one-man bee-containment unit has come forward saying he was falsely accused of stealing and selling bees. And in DC, environmental advocates recently gathered at the White House garden to urge Michelle Obama and her husband to protect the bees.
Although our life together in a separatist commune may not exist yet, I’ve collected eight excellent videos about bees that all of us dreamers can all watch right this very minute. Enjoy.
See, I wanna be a self-sustaining and revolutionary business capable of paying queer media-makers what they deserve and putting resources into projects made by us, for us. But the money flooding awesome new media properties like Refinery29 means that our inability to pay competitively could lead us to suffer the same death of so many independent queer publications that came before us. There’s been a huge push for more LGBTQ content at mainstream publications over the past year, and queer writers will find it easier to pay their bills writing for Cosmo or Nylon than they could writing for indies like us. We’re still here though, because this is our dream and these are our hearts, and we do believe in a financially prosperous future. We just hope that we get enough A+ members by the end of the year to keep the dream alive!
Riese, Business of Art Fix: Keeping The Indie Dream Alive When Talking Pay and Other Stories
Ander slept so peacefully, with his hands under his chin or on his cheeks. But his heart and lungs were struggling from his first breath, 16 weeks before he was supposed to need them. We cupped his head and sang him Christmas carols, hoping to get his oxygen levels to improve. We had a “honeymoon period” the first week, and we held him. But then: he needed heart surgery, as his heart hadn’t finished forming properly. His lungs weren’t getting enough oxygen to his developing organs, and the doctors played a “game” of ventilator roulette trying to find the best combination of pressure, suction, ventilation, and oxygenation.
The threat of pneumothorax loomed. Our doctors discussed with us our options for treatment, and started putting some of the aggressive treatment options in frames of quality of life and expected outcomes. Our son’s chronic lung disease kept getting worse, so they put him on a go-big-or-go-home drug that was, one doctor explained, “like hunting for an antelope with a torpedo.” A few days later, he went into cardiac arrest, but was revived. The next day, it happened again. The third day, we chose to take him off of life support so he could die in our arms. We informed our family: “Anderson is a Scandinavian name that means brave and strong,” we told them. “And our little boy fought like hell to give us 26 days together.”
Most sex education doesn’t go beyond a heteronormative p-in-v narrative. According to Autostraddle’s lesbian sex survey (open to all women who have sex with other women), 81.79% of respondents had elementary or high school sex ed that didn’t talk about queer sex (2.71% had never had any safer sex education, not even from the internet).
Many cis women are also unfamiliar with their basic sexual anatomy and asking people to label or draw diagrams of their reproductive systems yields… interesting results.
Drawing on three years of medical school knowledge and an obstetrics-gynecology rotation where I did more pelvic exams than I can count, I’m going to guide you through the research to find out what’s relevant to your interests about safer sex, and what to do about it.
It’s a tumultuous journey through otherhood, the fleeting things that change us, and the fights we have with ourselves in the mirror and in our heads. Leah’s a powerful guide, armed to the teeth with confessions, a steadfast sense of humanity, and a killer optimism. Bodymap is the winding tale of a 30-something’s journey in this world, one centered around her experiences as a queer, disabled femme of color from working-class roots and with a legacy in diaspora.
Basically, the worst thing about this movie is that the remake was terrible.
“She went to an all girl’s private Catholic school and decided to take me, the most outwardly, proud, flamboyant, dapper lesbian in the city, to her prom. We received nothing but love and acceptance from her friends and teachers and it was a beautiful night.” Ashley & Clea via The Prom Gallery
