When Geneva and I were driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a rented convertible, I saw an entire cloud floating next to the highway in the sky over the desert. I could see it spanning what looked like the whole of the sky to the right of us, almost touching my shoulder. I watched it graze the universe on top and I saw rain pouring out of it in the distance and somewhere in the middle, there was a lightning bolt like a heartbeat.
I could have fit my entire life in that cloud. My entire fucked-up, tiny, timid life.
It only took us five minutes to drive past it.
Every time she shares one of her stories I feel so damn lucky that I get to hear them for the rest of my life.
Katie, Crystal’s fiance, on her fave piece by her very special person via A+ Valentine’s Day Roundtable: From The Mouths Of Our Babes
Don’t ask me, I wanted to say. You’re a tall, burly man with a deep voice and degrees more prestigious than mine. You’re like Dorothy in teaching Oz — you can go home anytime you want, all you need to do is click those particular ruby slippers three times.
When I got my job I looked around at all I’d hoarded and stolen and bought at thrift stores and I waved goodbye to hunger pangs and wanton desire for five-dollar appetizers and constant, seizing panic, and checking my bank account every morning, but I never landed anywhere else. I no longer belong to the circumstances that raised me, but I’m also an alien to the universe I occupy as an adult.
It’s somehow more comfortable for society to label fat people disgusting than to acknowledge our desirability. The propaganda is so pervasive that fat people must fight not to believe it of ourselves. We look at our bodies in bits and pieces because we are taught that the whole is too much. We feel a lover’s hands on our fat thighs and we have to trust that the hand wouldn’t be there if its owner didn’t want us.
We eat the messages that call us repulsive and we let stomach acid destroy the words and we march forward. We flirt with another fat girl at the coffee shop. We welcome a skinny boy to lose himself between our legs. We learn to stand naked in front of full length mirrors and see our many inches as a whole.
We learn to fall in love with ourselves.
It was 1995, you see, and my image of the modern lesbian was pretty stereotypical — dumpy, unstylish, short-haired. It’s a “type” I embrace these days (literally and metaphorically). But back then, as an awkward gawky teenager struggling to fit in, that image was downright petrifying and bore no resemblance to my own aspirational existence. The only famous lesbians I knew of were The Indigo Girls. So I was pretty vulnerable, you could say, to suggestion.
If we don’t abundantly love each other, we can’t have an abundant relationship with God. I must embrace an interpretation of my faith that requires unconditional love for queer people because any less would be to deny my own humanity and that of my community.
Unfortunately, when you’re eleven and sick of being bullied and having only internet friends, you don’t really see the “caution, permanently internalizing white heteronormative ideals” signs posted ten years ahead in the future.
And what came later in my life—all the trouble and isolation, the drugs and running away, the aching loneliness—that wouldn’t have happened, because I would have known love. I would have had this memory of being safely in your arms, since this one click in time, instead of stumbling into each other’s lives at thirty-six and forty-two. If we could have found each other then I might have loved someone, truly and sweetly, with all the musk and magic and invention of the young.
Paper Birds, by Liz Greenhill for The Rumpus, from this week’s Things I Read That I Loved.
I’m proud of who I am and what I’ve accomplished. Being transsexual does not diminish my value as a person. Fuck you, and the things you say, for making me feel like it does.
Nicole via The Things You Say
My name is KaeLyn Rich, my legal name, the name my parents gave me when they adopted me, the only name I know and answer to, the name I can pronounce. My first name was Lee Eun Jeong, assigned by the orphanage, strange on my tongue.
I read each update about Ayotzinapa and think about riding a public bus in Juárez, years and years ago. The school bus, gutted inside and painted a dull brown outside, cost me almost nothing to take me from one part of inner Ciudad Juárez back to the international bridge linked to El Paso. While it bounced and took sharp turns, I stared out the window at the city’s landscape, knowing that the bus I sat in resembles the same type of bus that transports maquiladoras to and from the factories. It is the same type of bus involved in their disappearances. For all we know, it is the same type of bus that dumps their bodies in the Juárez Valley. I think about the missing women.
Mónica Teresa Ortiz via Burials in the Mist of Dawn on Autostraddle
And here’s where family drama, cultural context, the larger institutions of racism, and immigration policies get all muddled. Now, where is that immigrant who moved from Caracas to get a degree in the states to help me when I need him? (I mean, I have all these questions, Dad, about who I am and where I come from, what languages I should speak and what my place is as an American.)
I rock my natural hair long and wild. I spend exorbitant amounts of money on paraben and silicone free hair products so that I can grow it longer and wider. I hang onto my curls like they are the very things that define me. I think it’s difficult to find a sense of balance when you are constantly being told you’re “not really black” or “not really gay.” Even as I consciously tackle these issues I feel like my hair is my security blanket, my constant. And it is precious. And you may not touch it because it is a mystery to you and that is okay with me. I’d prefer to remain mysterious while I figure my own shit out.
We were just talking about Radio Shack yesterday, I was saying how it seems so unnecessary these days and why would anybody go there, when Best Buy is so much bigger and has more things and there’s something consistently sketchy about Radio Shack. I think I’ve been a few times in the past few years, and every time have sort of been confused why it still exists but okay, it’s in the strip mall down the street so let’s do this thing. Anyhow I don’t know why I’m still talking about myself when the point is that this essay is both hilarious and intriguing.
Read Radio Shack’s Eulogy, the Playboy interview with Dan Savage (it’s worth it), the story of a prude’s awakening, a thing about your favorite podcast Serial and more in this week’s TIRTIL!