Tag: Queer

Yes, we broke up. No I don’t want to talk about it. But I will share this zine I made… Artwork by the author One day when I’m not sad, I won’t look for her car everywhere. I won’t wish she’d drive up my drive, or just randomly decide to come see m...

I spent six days on Kindred on the Rock in Point Hill Jamaica, a part of the first cohort of artist / Jamaican kin / queer / community to experience the experiment that Staceyann Chin cultivated during her return back to Jamaica. As I came back home to Philadelphia, PA and my body started ...

In the past, queer individuals in the creative field faced limited representation due to the criminalization of homosexuality in many countries. However, the current generation is witnessing a powerful shift as brave queer artists fearlessly express their identities and share their stories. It is cr...

When I was growing up Christian, nobody told me the religion took its key images of Jesus from queer painters. How ironic, I’d realize later, for a religion that hated the dreaded “gays” to love Michelangelo, Leonardo, etc. Christians loved the movie The Passion of the Chri...

Yesterday I saw an interesting post on Instagram by the Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft about the German writer Bruno Vogel, born in Leipzig 125 years ago yesterday. He worked at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin together with Magnus Hirschfeld etc in the 1920s. Very interesting for me, was ...

Historian Robert Beachy calls Berlin the birthplace of modern LGBT identity in his 2014 book Gay Berlin. Writing in The New Yorker, Alex Ross agrees with Beachy that the Germans first invented gay rights more than a century ago. By the mid-1920s, public attitudes in ...

(Note: this is the second of a series of three posts. Here’s the first. Here’s the third. There’s an important context for these reminiscences, one I’ve written of elsewhere, but shouldn’t presume any given reader would already know: my parents were bohem...

There’s a map of the Castro pinned to my wall, next to a calendar of the Black Nazarene, which my mother mounted because she thought I did not pray enough at night. But I do pray enough at night. I always remember to say thanks each time I turn the lights off, the Black Nazarene in the corn...

Lesbian dating is like playing chicken, at least for me. Both parties have to run at each other, and it’s less about who flinches last and more about smashing into each other; it takes two-sided proactiveness. The pandemic did a number on everyone’s social scene and social abilitie...

In 1953, Betty Howard, as she was originally called, married a missionary named Jim Elliot. In 1956, he was was slaughtered in the jungle of Ecuador. Evangelicals became very interested in this ‘martyr’, and she published two books, Though Gates of Splendor and Shadow o...

Last week I travelled to San Francisco to attend the fourth annual Lesbians Who Tech (LWT) Summit conference. It was my first time attending the conference, which saw 2,500 lesbians, queer women and allies descending on the Castro district in San Francisco to talk all things tech from mixe...

I’m sure this is a sentiment many in the LGBTQ community relate to. The feeling can stem from a lack of support from family and friends. It may be because of your geographic location. It may be self-inflicted as you stubbornly push people away. I’m not judging; I’ve done it too. ...

I find it hard to say thank you. It’s hard to accept when gifts of fate and love are bestowed on me. It’s not that I am ungrateful: I am allergic to kindness. I shake. I stutter. There is now a chance for me. There is now a way forward, not just for me but for my mother. You gave us s...

This was an event that I had been looking forward to for months, with anxiety only heightening as the days leading up to the event went by. I put a ton of pressure on myself to ensure that I make it to this event in one piece — my anxiety disorder be damned. As a kid, there’s no quest...

Everyone has their own way of expressing themselves. Whether it’s through clothing, hairstyle, tattoos, or makeup, we all show our individuality in various ways. Some expressions are subtle while others garner some reactions. When I dyed my hair purple, my mom said blandly, “What made...

It was fifth grade, a time when minds are awakening to so many hormonal and non-hormonal urges. I remember arguing with a friend, Mark, about whether Russia and the Soviet Union were the same entity. That was pretty heady of us. I remember my friend Randy quarterbacking our class to a win over...

He/they is a native of the American South and practicing neo pagan with a Bachelor’s in psychology and a PhD in English. He has a life partner who is another man. They both have Dissociative Identity Disorder. His full bio is here. Their background is important because the novel takes pla...

Iwrite to share with you my love for four dear women I befriended this year as a woman. I came out as a trans in June 2022. After a combination of factors delayed my social and medical transition (seasonal affective disorder, incompatible career, sperm bank scheduling conflicts), I began h...

My bedroom is cool. It is late. The sun set hours ago probably, but time doesn’t hold much purpose right now. My bed feels like a cocoon gently floating at the speed of light while, in my room, time stands still. The coolness of the summer night means that I can hide under the blanket while...

They hear the voice of my gender As we yell for equal pay But “She must be on her period,” Is all you’ll hear them say. They see me march alongside brothers, Sisters with deep caramel skin, They say we’re “Thugs, criminals, and gangstas,” And a jail cell&...

I’ve always been good at being alone. Or so I tell myself, at least. Being lonely on the other hand, you never get used to it. That feeling of sitting cross-legged in a bottomless pit where people cannot reach you, but only look over the edge and find your shade. And there’s no ladder. I...

Autistic people experience diagnostic overshadowing. We’re not allowed to be anything else or have other conditions. Any illness, ailment, or difference is seen only in the context of being autistic. Unfortunately, this, alongside the high numbers of trans and gender variant people being autis...

It’s a wedding; it’s a valet guy. 15 minutes — y’all, could be worse. It’s the arts district. It’s Your Fiancee’s close friend, former colleague. YF drives; you doll yourself up in the luminescent mirror, perfect, as you like. Bobbi Brown’s multi-st...

Actually, I just made that up based off OG, which I get called a lot because I’m old. (61 in the gay male world can feel more like 161!) OQ is my little joke, but I’m not really kidding. When I joined Queer Nation in 1990, I was among the first people anywhere to start actively reclaimin...

Iwrite to share with you my love for four dear women I befriended this year as a woman. I came out as a trans in June 2022. After a combination of factors delayed my social and medical transition (seasonal affective disorder, incompatible career, sperm bank scheduling conflicts), I began h...

“Gintong Biyaya ni Ikapati” or (The Golden Blessings of Ikapati) was an artwork more dedicated to our Filipino farmers who are experiencing harder life than ever during the pandemic. I used the deity Ikapati, as more with androgynous features, cause aside that she changes gender at times...

In the tapestry of life, each thread is a story, weaving together a portrait of who we are. My story, an intricate blend of Asian heritage and a rainbow identity, is no exception. It’s a narrative peppered with digital escapades, heartfelt searches, and the kind of humor that only life’s...

We are generally not very used to thinking about queerness (identities and sexualities other than cisgender and straight) as something that can be found in the deeper past — meaning the human story spanning back hundreds and thousands of years ago. This is probably because the language and ima...

“And so I go into the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place among the lives — the trees, the annual plants, the animals a...

The first image of Promare is a triangle constrained inside a rectangle, distorted and maimed as the walls close in around it. There’s a place for subtlety in art, but there’s also a place for distilled simplicity. And the more I think about Promare the more I feel...

In the curatorial texts for queer ecology, I have written for the Museum Arnhem as a part of my internship assignment, I have started with “Queer ecology. The two words are well known separately, but what do they mean when brought together?” (Senturk). Indeed, the two separate words migh...