just femme & dandy vol. 4: SURVIVE

just femme & dandy

THE SURVIVE ISSUE

MARC SCHORIN | ELIZABETH WENGER | AJA BARBER | ERIK FUHRER | SARAH SHEPPECK | DAN CLAY | RAE THWEATT // BODY POLITIC HAIR STUDIOS | SAGE LALLY | EVELYN RUDE | SARAH NEILSON | SCARLET NOVAK | SAD CLOWN CLUB | SALEM ARIEL REID | JOSEPHINE LAUREN | JAZZ BELL | MYKKI RIOS | JAS SAUNDERS | NNADI SAMUEL | E.M. LARK | FELIX SALMORAN | KAITLIN MARISOL SWEENEY-ROMERO | MIRRORED FATALITY | JENNIFER ELISE WANG | ANDY WINTER | DALI VALENTINO | S.G. HUERTA | ABBIE GOLDBERG | JAMES DANIELS | MIGUEL WILSON | FIAMMETTA GIANNI | THOMAS HOBOHM | GEYL WELLS | SAJAH FRANCESCA | ELIZABETH KUMAKI | TYLYN JOHNSON

founding editor co-editor in chief addie tsai co-editor in chief sarah sheppeck managing editor simone person disability & access organizer sky cubacub editor, the mane attraction simone person editor, the glowup sarah sheppeck editor, sole mates jen st. jude and stoo editor, no scrubs jo davis-mcelligatt editor, sew what sarah sheppeck editor, triple thread(s) kirin khan editor, cancel & gretel sky cubacub editor, fat + furious simone person

vol. 04: winter 2023

editor, features addie tsai

copyright: just femme & dandy cover illustration by crystal vielula justfemmeanddandy.com

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just femme & dandy is a biannual literary & arts magazine on fashion for and by queer, trans, two-spirit, non-binary, and intersex people. We are an anti-racist, pro-Black publication and aim to centralize and celebrate work from Black and Indigenous people of color. We encourage submissions about fashion and “in”/visible disabilities, fatness, chronic illness and pain, poverty, neurodiversity, mental

illness,

and

other

forms

of

intersectional

marginalization.

We believe in equal access to collective joy, so all work in this issue can be found on our website in plain text with image and audio descriptions and captioning. For additional access needs, please contact our disability & access organizer Sky Cubacub.

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letter from the editor // simone person // 06 a note on access // sky cubacub // 07 cancel & gretel survival is cute! // sad clown club // 09 depth charge // sarah sunfire // 14 mobility aids are freedom // scarlet novak // 19 fat + furious the skin grows // salem ariel reid // 23 the glowup [untitled] // jazz bell // 26 from masking & makeup to baggage & barefaced beauty // josephine lauren // 28 lipgloss triptych and other poems // mykki rios // 34 skincare for grown folk // sarah sheppeck // 38 the mane attraction hair-story: a breakdown of breakdowns // e.m. lark // 42 cutting it close // felix salmoran // 44 ellipsis for my feminine body // nnadi samuel // 46 a medusa of my own // jas saunders // 47 no scrubs mirrored fatality survives the apocalypse // mirrored fatality // 51 holding my own gaze // katlin marisol sweeney-romero // 58 get your thread in the game the crystal poem // andy winter // 63 beanie season // jennifer elise wang // 65

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sew what a bit of fluff // a f carbajal // 67 transfinite::a dialogue // cavar // 69 unexpected joy // jessi eoin // 73 not what it seams unraveling latine tender transness // dali valentino with sg huerta // 79 solemates these boots were made for walkin’ // james daniels // 84 recalling mother // sajah francesca // 86 ode to doc martens // fiammetta gianni // 88 sleeping bag socks // abbie goldberg // 91 sry // thomas hobohm // 95 pink skechers // geyl wells // 96 rainbow platform crocs // migel wilson // 99 the stiletto poem // andy winter // 101 triple threads burlesque justice // tylyn johnson // 103 black man: femininity and fluidity // tylyn johnson // 104 chemise // mykki rios // 106 ode to adut akech’s walk for jacquemus // mykki rios // 107 chemise a la cottagecore // mykki rios and elizabeth kumaki // 108 features start with your own style // aja barber with addie tsai // 112 dan clay (aka carrie dragshaw) offers ten bajillion ways to becoming a queen // with addie tsai // 115 the cost of healing // erik fuhrer // 131 you dress how they tell you to dress until you don’t // marc schorin // 136 body politic hair studios founder rae thweatt offers a “safer space” // with sage lally // 140 what to wear when teaching queer // elizabeth wenger // 143 dapperq at nyfw // evelyn rude // 149

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letter from the editor The common theme? Survival.

Survival was never a choice for many of us.

Growing up working poor, we kept going because bills needed to be paid, kids needed to be fed, and if we didn’t, it wouldn’t get done.

There wasn’t a safety net; we only ever had each other.

when survival felt impossible, and helped me find ways back to my writing, to myself.

Working with the just femme & dandy team, reading all of your incredible submissions, and building up our social media channels (2k+ on Instagram and Twitter! Thank you!) has been a dream. I’m so grateful for this community, and I’m thrilled to watch it continue to grow.

Survival is a different word for community— broke people passing around the same $20 until payday comes, opening our homes to each other, turning play cousins into something realer than blood.

Simone Person Managing Editor just femme & dandy January 2023

As I’ve gotten older and grown into my identities of queer, femme, fat, disabled, and trans, survival has grown with me to be an act of love for myself, for others. I survive not because I have no other option, but because I believe in the future—a future where all of us marginalized see every dawn, where we come back home at night, where we are warm and safe and thriving.

This issue, our first accepting non-themed submissions, explores the vastness of survival, each glorious refraction a path into the future.

This is also my last issue as managing editor and editor for the mane attraction, afrodisiac, and fat + furious. Addie and Sarah reached out to me to join just femme & dandy at a time

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a note on access

I am Sky Cubacub, the creator of Rebirth Garments, a clothing line for queer and trans disabled folx of all sizes and ages, the writer of “Radical Visibility: A QueerCrip Dress Reform Movement Manifesto” and just femme & dandy's “cancel & gretel” editor! I will share my identities with you all so that you understand where I’m coming from and who is in charge of accessibility for this awesome magazine!

I am queer, nonbinary xenogender, and I use they/them/their and xe/xem/xyr pronouns. I’m half Filipinx-American and half white, and I am almost 30 years old. I have non-apparent disabilities including lifelong anxiety, panic disorder, depression with a still undiagnosed developed stomach disorder I acquired later in life, CPTSD (I am a survivor of DV), and newly diagnosed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that developed after having Mono.

For this issue we had all of the contributors make their own image descriptions! Image descriptions and audio descriptions are always incomplete because you can endlessly describe anything. If you are interested in learning how to make internet content accessible, follow my friend Alex Chen on Instagram. You can also check out the Alt Text as Poetry project, a collaboration between artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project.

Access can always be improved, so please contact us to request specific accessibility accommodations you need, and I will do my best to make it happen!

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g & r l e e c t e n l a c

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survival is cute! sad clown club

When Sad Clown Club became what it is today, we were just two disabled folks who couldn’t work regular jobs safely and were very passionate about fashion and how it related to our mobility aids. We sold a few things at a virtual craft fair for disabled artists, and quickly realized how many folks like us were out there! People who wanted their mobility aids to be more than a stick they feel embarrassed to use in a society that’s shunned them. Queer and trans people who wanted to express every piece of themselves in their entirety. People who never even thought it an option to decorate their mobility aids, and were so excited to find us! So, a shop was born. We survive by expressing ourselves in a world that would rather we quiet down, and we survive by helping other people do the same.

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Sad Clown Club has a variety of accessories to decorate your mobility aids, your body, your home, or whatever you want! We have a creepy cute vibe, mixing all sorts of clownish and fun aesthetics. Basically whatever has grabbed hold of our ever-evolving neurodivergent brains! From matching acrylic chain link wrist straps and belt chain sets to coordinate your mobility aid with your outfit, to hand painted framed art, to cute jewelry, and keychains.

We have art and photography prints celebrating disability and queerness, shiny suncatchers and dangles that enrich our lives with color and sparkle, and cute fidget toys that all light up the stimmy parts of our brains.

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Our shop is a love letter to disabled, neurodivergent, queer, and trans people.

To people like us! Every sale directly supports our survival as disabled artists, and we hope every item we ship out enriches the lives of people like us as much as they do ours. If there is anything we’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that survival means so much more than barely making it by. Survival to us is never losing who we are, even with the world against us. Sad Clown Club was born of this idea that our lives are rich and full, that we are whole people, that if we are to survive that means expressing ourselves in whatever ways we can. Now it feels like our purpose is to spread the joy and beauty of how mobility aids relate to all of our individual identities.

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We seek to destroy the narrative that a mobility aid is a sign of giving up. It’s quite the opposite!

Mobility aids are a celebration of freedom, of our bodies, and ourselves. We honor our needs while never leaving behind who we truly are.

We honor our queerness and our neurodivergency and how it all intersects with each item we make, and we love to help others celebrate those parts of themselves. Sad Clown Club says survival is cute! Survival is colorful and loud, its sparkling crystals and cute beads.

Survival is spreading the joy we’ve managed to find in this life to anyone who can relate to us.

We hope our little slice of survival helps you survive, too.

You can support Sad Clown Club at www.sadclownclub.com, and follow their work @sadclownclub.shop on Instagram and @thesadclownclub on Twitter.

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depth charge sarah sunfire

I still believe vampires are real, but when I was a teenager I dressed like I knew it. As a New Orleans native, it was easy to understand that the otherworldly people who roamed the French Quarter late at night weren’t people at all; talk to anyone who lived there before Katrina and they will confirm this. I couldn’t call to Lestat from school, because on weekdays, I had to contend with the ugliest school uniform ever devised in the name of abstinence. Monday through Friday from some ungodly morning hour until far too late, I wore a gray pleated skirt meant to eliminate the very idea of legs or shapely calves, and a boxy starched white shirt that effectively obliterated curves. Add a pair of crutches that I need because I was born with cerebral palsy and red hair that frizzes out to the far reaches of space in New Orleans humidity, and you’ve got a combination so hideous that it would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been so humiliating. My aunt Beth, now in her seventies, was reminiscing to me recently about the ugliness of this uniform and gleefully proclaimed, “That maroon cardigan sweater sure

looked good with your red hair!” Then the weekend swept us up and I was free.

One of my favorite outfits was a black velvet corset with straps adorned with butterflies—the straps and the butterflies were black velvet too. I wore it with a black velvet miniskirt slitted up the thigh—or a long form-fitting black velvet skirt with a higher slit in the thigh—and black velvet boots that had black ribbons for laces. When I walked around like that, my crutches didn’t feel like they mattered so much, and even more urgently, Lestat and his legions of local emissaries knew I was ripe and waiting, all that warm blood, etc.

Given my father’s tendency to overprotect me— me, his daughter; me, his visibly disabled daughter; me, his only child—it’s surprising that he footed the bill for a leather dress from Second Skin, the BDSM-oriented sex shop that provided New Orleans denizens and tourists with anything made of leather, latex, or silver chains that we could

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possibly need. This dress was made of real leather (black, of course), but it was less expensive than anything else in the shop because of two wide strips down each side made of sheer black nylon. It was absurdly short, and had only one zipper, which ran from the top of the low neck to the bottom of the dress. “Easy access,” my high school friend Ruth whispered to me lasciviously, which, when I got my first boyfriend, would prove true, but I was thinking less about action when I bought it than I was about fantasies. Fantasies involving leather. Perhaps those started earlier than they should have, certainly earlier than my dad would have preferred, but fantasy held more power in those days than anything I could touch, and what I could feel with my inescapable earthly fingers was meant to make those fantasies real.

Fantasy was the only realm I could rely on to feel pretty. There was no being beautiful in that school uniform, not for me, with these crutches, this gait.

The epic poet Homer said that you could tell a goddess “by her gait,” and I was convinced that this was how you could tell a monster, too.

tank top with a black see-through blouse over it.

But the pièce de résistance was a pair of black vinyl thigh highs. Worn with black chunkyheeled Mary Janes, they looked like legitimate thigh-high boots.

“Are you supposed to be, like, Madonna?” one of my classmates asked me, thereby making my day and my year. Then a second classmate, whose name I can’t remember, made the rest of my life by asking me, “Are you supposed to be, like, Janet Jackson?” I could write a book about my lifelong adoration for Janet Jackson. She was my go-to reference for sensual existence starting with the release of the immortal album Janet. She still is. I shouted, “YES!” in a moment of true ecstasy I never thought I could feel at school.

I can’t write a whole essay about fashion and disability and bodyness without mentioning that there was never a moment that I had breasts that they weren’t noticeably massive. I’m probably not supposed to say I wanted them recognized, but I did, and you could tell that by my other favorite piece of spaghetti-strapped clothing, a wine-red velvet tank top. “That is a nice shirt,” a taxi driver once said to me. A pervy remark in retrospect, but the fact is, I liked being noticed. If my tits are the focus, the crutches disappear, and getting them to disappear mattered.

Amidst all this despair and body-loathing, there was one amusing upshot of our tragic school uniforms: they turned Spirit Week into a schoolwide event, during which we appeared to overflow over with De La Salle Cavalier pride.

Every themed day meant liberation from our uniforms, and there wasn’t a single student who didn’t take advantage of this. On Camouflage Day, campus looked like a military base. But the most exciting of these any-excuse-to-ditch-themaroon-and-grey days was 60s, 70s, and 80s Day. That’s not three days, to be clear. It’s one: a decade for everybody.

The Goods were remarked upon much more satisfyingly on the night of our eighth-grade induction into the National Honors’ Society. I was sitting with two equally nerdy friends, honeyspirited girls whom I had never heard mention sex or sexuality at all. In order to pick up the certificate documenting my genius, I had to traverse the whole of the school cafeteria. When I returned to my seat with my paper in hand, one of my sweet

I wore a plaid miniskirt (a subtle fuck you to my school uniform) and a black spaghetti-strapped

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friends nonchalantly observed, “You have nice boobs, Sarah, I wish mine were that big.”

had no idea that they were hawked by groups of market-researchers in cahoots with cosmetics companies, striving to make a buck. I thought they spoke truth, and the truth was, a body like yours does not belong. It is not even acknowledged. We would, on the whole, rather it didn’t exist.

I have a loud laugh by nature, but my reaction to his unexpected bit of crass flattery came dangerously close to disrupting the event. Just as I caught my breath long enough to ensure that I wouldn’t laugh the proud parents out of harmony, our other friend, the embodiment of heterosexuality, looked at me and said, “Well, now that we’re all thinking about it, I have to agree with her.” Every time I saw that top again after that—navy blue nylon, dotted with black velvet flowers, dramatically form-fitting with a wide scoop neck—I thought of that dual compliment. I kept that top until it was threadbare, wearing it well into college.

It took a long, long time to get over that. It took several bouts of severe depression, deep-dive sessions with a physically disabled therapist, and, at last, go-hard afternoons with my life-altering personal trainer who helped me see my body in terms of my capabilities, rather than my limitations (and everyone, I’ve finally learned, has physical limitations).

My SideStix helped too. Yonder lies a nation called Canada wherein a thoughtful and dedicated company makes custom-fit crutches that enable more fluid movement, less shoulder pressure, and other concrete benefits that aide in athleticism.

(On the company’s website, an athlete with one leg is doing a backflip with his SideStix.) I eyed that company for years before I finally had the money to pay for the fruits of several different exact measurements. They ask for the distance of your middle finger to your wrist for the perfect arm-cuff length and other individualized specifics.

They also ask for the measurements from your old crutches. When I sent those in, I got a dismayed call from British Columbia.

Decades later, I was sitting in the seat of a punk hairdresser and we were talking about beauty standards and body-related norms. I mentioned that under no circumstances could I open a magazine and see a body like mine, growing up or any time.

“Did that set you free?” she asked me. “Since you have a disability were you like, ‘I don’t have to bother with any of this?’” What kind of adolescence might I have had, I wonder, if I had reacted that way? If I had opened those magazines and said, “I exist in a physically different world than the one your normative asses are assuming and I want no part in the constraints you’re implying with these photos. Imagine the power in using my own body to set myself free.

“There’s a notable discrepancy between the measurements you gave us and the measurements of your current crutches,” he said, referring to my height as relative to the crutch.

I told my hairdresser, Kaley, that it wasn’t like that at all. Because I had a disability I was hyperdisconnected from what those magazines called Beauty, and I believed those magazines. I

I sighed and explained that in America, we really don’t do custom crutches. The philosophy is not, “Go beyond your perceived limits, potential

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athlete!” so much as, “Sucks to be you, a cripple, here’s some equipment you apparently need to go do whatever people like you do.” No matter how diligently I stick to my ever-intensifying workout routine, I still get old people stopping me in the street to compare themselves to me, saying they thought they had it bad because they’ve aged, but I have it worse, look at me.

None of the pretty girls had crutches, as I saw it.

And pretty mattered. Pretty mattered so so so much, much more than the brains I knew I had.

I’ve since learned that this is lightyears from the truth; there are scores of kickass women with physical disabilities the world over. But you wouldn’t know that to watch TV, would you?

I’ve seen casual ableism on shows that are otherwise progressive. People still fear these bodies. They still don’t want to think about what might happen if they one day woke up in one, as anyone could.

It hurts to know that even as I feel more comfortable in my body than I’ve ever thought possible, there will always be people determined to see me as injury incarnate, downtrodden. I know that’s a fly on the wall of their vision and nothing to do with me, but that, too, took me a long time to understand. Some people see truth, some people see lies. The notion that I have nothing to be physically grateful for, that I am not free, that I should want to be other people, is a lie. It’s a lie I told myself for a very long time, aided by those damn magazines.

I’ve come to embrace physical disability as an ode to interdependence and a stance against oppressive notions of individualism and profit-motivated “productivity.” I feel fortunate that my body makes a political statement without my having to do a whole lot. I need help carrying a hot drink to my table at the café (because of the crutch handles) and bam, gone are all illusions that we’re not in this together.

Sidestix cut an elegant figure: they have ergonomic handles made of cork, they’re sleek and black. Mine, because they fit to my actual size, are short. I don’t really see them as a part of how I style myself, but I also don’t see them as a detriment to my stylishness the way I used to. One night after work on the 44 bus, a warm voice remarked, “I like your crutches,” and I made a friend that way—one of my few friends who has a physical disability. I felt vindicated knowing that my Stix elegance is perceptible, because it’s not a kind of elegance we talk about. As a teenager, it wouldn’t have been the kind of elegance I wanted to talk about. Crutches were, for so, so long, akin to a coat that ruined my otherwise regal Cleopatra Halloween costume, drawing attention away from the long gold form-fitting one-shoulder dress and the shimmering golden snake-crown.

I hear a lot of complaints about supposed pressure to “be perfect.” This is a foreign notion to me, and even a satirical one. My whole life, the very atmosphere, has whispered that I am imperfect and I will always be. What I didn’t realize before now is that this is true of everyone. It doesn’t make us any less of the wonders that we are. And so, here I am with four surgical scars, no illusions of a possible perfection that’s only out of reach because I can’t get to it, and, at last, real understanding that any condescension I receive from pitying old people or magazine-approved normies is their problem.

I no longer use fashion to detract from what about my body makes it absolutely mine. My favorite

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clothes these days are my workout getups, which rapturously draw on self-aware garishness to show off the muscles I’m building. My favorite sports bra is splashed with neon turquoise and hot pink palm trees on a black background, typically worn with neon turquoise yoga pants. If it’s hot outside, I’ll pair a black, navy, or dark grey sports bra with shorts that basically scream, “I didn’t work out these glutes so no one would notice,” but for all that they’re unassuming articles, soft movable fabric in subtle colors, held up by a simple drawstring.

In my youth I would’ve assumed that I’d be less appealing to vampires when I was dressed for the gym. But who knows? Getting your heart-rate up does improve blood flow. In my youth I would’ve assumed that I couldn’t have entered a gym at all, and that if I didn’t get laughed out of the place the machines would be too much trouble to be worth it. I never realized I could build muscle, I could push myself and feel good about it, I could go to the sauna afterwards and sweat an ocean, feel my body transforming in the heat. Maybe that was the secret all along: not to wait around for a vampire to fulfill their mythic promise of eternity, but for me to discover that a brand new hypersensory life can begin any time. And the best part is, I didn’t have to wait. I just had to get moving.

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mobility aids are freedom scarlet novak

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My mobility aids are freedom. They are safety and survival. They are my armor and my fashion statement. They make me feel powerful and independent. They give me the freedom to leave my house, to go out with my chosen family, to share my story with others. I’m Scarlet, a 24 year old non-binary person. I am Disabled and use multiple mobility aids to help me get around. I have found that decorating my mobility aids makes me feel more confident when I use them. Here is a photo shoot I did a while back!

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t a f

+ furious

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the skin grows salem ariel reid

Survival was a word stitched into every sweatshirt and pair of sweatpants that I wore from the age of eight.

complimented me, and I bloomed without feeling confused or ashamed.

I was too young to know who I was, but I knew that I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps.

He created breathtaking portraits of horses, and I begged for the same sketchbooks and markers to replicate my brother's happiness and passion.

When that didn’t work, I turned my attention to the 2000s drawing kit, Fashion Plates, where I could design outfits by switching out stencils of skirts, dresses and shirts. I spent countless hours designing outfits; my dream was to dress real people, to be under the spotlight making those clothes.

Gender was etched into my skin, a scar traumaborn. I thought who I was was based on what I wore because of what people saw me as. My body became accustomed to violence, but the hands that hollowed my identity were not only my own.

Queer was a word that defined my older brother in high school. Our mother still loved him, but didn’t shield him from her husband’s hate, a hate that was disguised as love. I toed the line between that love and hate; at ten, anyone would be greedy for the wax on their mother’s poisonous apple.

As I grew older, I discovered that depression is one hell of a joy-killer. I found myself unable to focus on any one thing at once. My interests were short-lived and dispassionate. I thought I was too fat, too sad, too nothing to be what others had the privilege to be. One moment, fashion was all I could think about, and in the next, it was

At eight, I stole my brother’s prom dress, stuffing the black-sequined monstrosity into my school bag. I changed out of my long pants and sweatshirt at school and into the dress. Many of my peers said I looked beautiful. It was the first time someone other than my mother

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unattainable. It was years before I thought about fashion again. I kept millions of hours of Vogue designer runway shows on my laptop. When I came out as a trans man, looking back at those men on the runway opened something in me that I couldn’t bear to shut.

who I want to be. There’s a gorgeous, breathstealing man at home with his arms wide open.

I am more than a fat queer man, more than the labels forced upon me or that I placed on myself. I don’t have to survive anymore. I am living in skirts, suits, and lingerie. I exist in this skin and body that I am learning to forgive, to give tender care to. Desire lives in my own home and within myself. It has a name which changes from time to time, but I own it—it belongs to me and no one else. It can be whatever the hell I want it to be. I’ve decided that I wasn’t surviving all my life. Survival wasn’t the right word for what I’ve been through, what I did day to day to get up—it was fighting.

I didn’t care whether clothes were intended for a man or woman—those long white and frilly couture dresses seemed to only belong to pretty and thin girls, and all of the feminine men wearing low-cut silk shirts were athletic. But I wanted the clothes all the same; I wanted to be like those models. But the clothes were all designed for people who were much, much smaller than me.

My wanting was depriving myself of things I could actually have.

I survived living the way the world expected me to. My goal was to be the person everyone wanted me to be, and to take up the smallest amount of space possible. After all those years, I realized that I didn’t have to limit myself to what others thought I deserved; I could sculpt myself to fit who I really am.

I still struggle with my body today, but I have someone who loves it for me when I can't stand to look at it. My boyfriend inspires me to use my creativity to fulfill my dreams; nothing feels as good as when I’m holding fabric between my fingers or sketching the costume designs of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s contestants. Nothing has felt better than learning to walk on the road of selflove.

Love is when you escape the binary, forcing the whirlpool of the world to reverse. Alone, it seems impossible, but I’ve learned that there are communities out there waiting for who I am and

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o w l g u e p th

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[untitled] jazz bell CONTENT NOTES: mentions of a suicide attempt, psychiatric institutionalization, ableism, transphobia, fatphobia, intersexism, and COVID

Before COVID, I was out as nonbinary but was still acting like a woman to get by. I wore what I call my “white social worker cosplay clothes” to my internship (you know . . . the long skirt, the cardigan, the top that’s way more modest than I would choose for myself). Being as disabled as I am, I didn’t have the energy to even think about the way I would like to present aesthetically if I wasn’t so tired of oppression. I was trying to get to tomorrow.

institutionalization, paired with the medical abuse I experienced there, only made those feelings worse). A few days later, COVID hit.

Needless to say, I was having a pretty shit time. I, along with thousands of other disabled people, were (once again) thrust into isolation. An isolation that many of us are still experiencing. In all this though, I was truly alone for the first time in a while. I started to realize nothing I was doing in my life was sustainable for my fat, disabled, intersexed body. I had more time than I’d ever had to ask, “what do I want when no one is watching?”

Gender expression has always been confusing to me. As an intersex person, I have been punished throughout my life for the parts of me deemed “biologically” un-woman. I spent a very long time trying to appear as high femme as possible to ward off further discrimination, but I also grew to consider these aesthetic expressions as an extension of my visual art and creative expression. It’s complicated.

Turns out, the answer to that was cool makeup, cool earrings, cool hair ornaments, a beard, and a low voice. I started taking testosterone.

Now, I don’t know where disability dysmorphia ends and where gender dysphoria begins, but I don’t really think it works like that. All I knew was that no matter what I tried, no one could ever

So complicated apparently, that I was institutionalized after a suicide attempt (of course,

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really perceive me the way I wanted to be perceived; no amount of makeup, craft, or intention was going to cut through the ableism and transphobia and intersexism that people hold.

Instead of trying to “express my gender” in a way others could understand, I tried to express my longing for nature and the ways I see it reflected in myself. In the beginning of COVID, I longed for nature in the absence of touch, but most nature spots were not accessible for me either. Nature is also a deep part of my spirituality, and I have always felt spiritually disconnected through the enforced separation of disabled people from natural spaces.

I started painting my own face with things that reminded me of what I couldn’t access myself.

Golden eyeliner for sun rays, blues for waves, reds for fires, asymmetric looks because nature is not symmetrical and neither am I. Nature is genderfucked, and so am I. Makeup became a grounding ritual that kept me alive during the first part of COVID. I became less afraid of myself. Of course, it didn’t stop the ableism and transphobia—I never expected it to.

What you see is not my gender, but a selfaffirmation, a spiritual armor, a commitment to imagine myself as part of the worlds I want to live in when I talk about disability justice or the possibilities of gender or fat liberation.

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from masking & makeup to baggage & barefaced beauty: an incest survivor finds healing in queer identity josephine lauren CW: mentions of incest abuse

I have a lot of baggage. Figuratively. Once literally too, but no longer. Today, I am proud to say that the contents of my life fit into just three packs: one rolls behind me, one hangs from a shoulder, the last straps around my back. I have released everything that I don’t need to prepare for traveling. Well, almost.

boats, and its babes. Wealthy. As I got dressed, I daydreamed of the moment mass would end.

When I would transcend the trees with friends and eat donuts. So I prepped by dressing casually —pants, a t-shirt, comfortable shoes—and left my bedroom. Immediately my mother screamed.

“Anne Marie, you need to dress up! Go change and hurry!”

A tote of makeup sits exiled outside of the pile of my packed up life. Its items once bought to belong to my body, to be absorbed by my body, to hide imperfections of my body, to highlight the beauty of my body. Neglected for the past three years, since the beginning of the pandemic. The powders hardening, the liquids separating, the mascara clumping as it slowly dried from staying inside a bottle, no longer lengthening my lashes. A brush to maintain my long, wavy hair. The tote won’t fit. The question is: do I still need it?

“But Mom!” I talked back.

“Don’t talk back to me!” she yelled as she continued to get ready.

“Anne” means “Favored.” “Marie” means “Rebellion.” This was just the beginning, but then the only option was submission. My three brothers walked out of their bedrooms each in pants, a polo shirt, and some form of comfortable boot. As I bemoaned my mother’s cues, forced my muscular legs into tights too tight, pulled a dress over my broad shoulders, and buckled Mary Jane style shoes with a slight heel on my long, narrow

I remember the stress of Sundays. Forced to go to the Catholic Church just down the street in Newport Beach. A destination location in Southern California known for its beaches, its 28

feet. They never fit right. I sat at the top of the stairs with my head in my hands, sad once again that I had to present myself as someone I didn’t want to be. Every week.

When all the other girls claimed pink was their favorite color, I confidently stood up and said mine was ice cream: a flavor full of purples and blues and yellow hues all at once. Difference.

I walked into the church, drenched myself with holy water, making the sign of the cross on my chest: forehead, between my breasts, right shoulder, then left. Then participated in the ceremony: I sat, I stood, I kneeled, on repeat, mimicking the priest—the male in a dress in front of me—alongside the community. As soon as it ended, I quickly ran to the donut stand, stuffed a cinnamon-sprinkled hole in my mouth, then found the nearest tree to fulfill my dream.

When all the other girls’ bodies became plump and full and round and lovely, mine stayed stick straight, flat, and muscular. Disembodiment.

When all the other girls seemed to follow the roles of silence and submission effortlessly, my big mouth always said whatever came to mind and challenged the same confines. Divergent. I came to look like the tree I so wanted to climb. Strong, stubborn, and stuck in a society, spirituality, and system of family not suited to me.

I hugged the bark with my hands sacredly and gazed up lovingly. Reverent and ready. Then, I lifted one foot onto the broad trunk, opened my legs to reveal my little-mermaid-themed underpants, and pulled myself into the bushes of leaves that hung from the branches of the tree.

Suddenly belonging. Seriously, my mother followed me in horror scolding:

But eventually, I caved. I craved to be like the others. To be popular like the glitter-studdedeyelinered girls. The ones with flipped out chin length hair and Doc Martin platform shoes embedded with stars. I wanted to be loved by the boys like them. Valued for my appearance, my aesthetic, my body. I tried so hard to be femme.

And started conforming to fit in. I stood in front of the mirror and criticized every flaw, picked at my skin. I never saw myself as me. I prayed and played pretend endlessly.

“Get down here this instant! You’re in a dress, you can’t climb trees.”

I descended, quickly ashamed, and watched with envy as my brothers scaled the tree effortlessly in their pants, polos, and sensible boots. They teased me from above, while I dropped to the ground.

Bound. They could remain. Why did I have to change?

I remember the makeup. The long hair. The weekend shopping trips. The glitter. The gold.

The glue. The time. The effort. The cost of consumption. The infinity of wants. The insatiable needs. I remember why I was doing it.

And who I was doing it for. Them. Men. To fit in. It was all a distraction. But again my femininity always fell behind. Because there was still another side of me.

It only got worse. It was as if my whole world received a memo that I hadn’t. On Halloween, when all the other girls wore pretty princess dresses, I chose a scary fish face. Shame. When all the other girls sat around the schoolyard and talked, I played ball with the boys. Disconnection.

The swimming, treading, and water polo ball passing every day toned my already wide shoulders, further flattened my leveled chest, kept

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my hips narrow and fit. The mascara flowed down my face, the glitter and gold wouldn’t stick.

Tights were out of the question at this point and dresses that wouldn’t amplify the masculine shape of my feminine frame were hard to find. My mind and mouth still too proud and outspoken. The most athletic of my friends, they changed my name to, “Anne the Man,” claiming the duplicity that belonged within my body.

I am an incest survivor. Abused since the age of two. Raped. Not once, not twice, but over and over again in my youth. Not by one man, not by two, but by three. And not just by three, but by an entire family that condoned the behavior, that justified the behavior, that swept the behavior under the rug.

Those same brothers that teased me when I was forced to get down from the tree never believed me. That same mother who ensured I fit in and never fulfilled my dreams, supported the men whose bodies I was forced to embody. She demanded forgiveness in the name of god and salvation and the church that passed priests harming children from parish to parish. Jesus carried his cross, so must we at the cost of children’s bodies. Or so I was told.

As I grew older, this binary polarized even more as social conditioning deepened. Now professionally.

The men with three-letter acronym titles beginning with “C” surrounded the conference table and me. I tried to adopt an aesthetic of simplicity instead of adapting to the sexist standards of professionalism. Makeup-free, earthtoned clothes, flat shoes, naturally beautiful. No longer climbing trees. Instead, fulfilling new dreams to scale corporate ladders and break glass ceilings.

But it was all a lie. The patriarchy. Career satisfaction in a system built for men, by men. The Catholic imagination, built for men, by men. The nuclear family system, built for men, by men. The gender binary, built for men, by men. The use of my body, for men, by men. The duplicity of my being divided into the energies of masculine and feminine. The normalization of society that believed all of this was reality, the only option.

“Anne, you need to dress up.”

“Wear more makeup. High heels,” they scolded.

But I could talk back now. “I’ll wear makeup and heels when you do.”

They laughed uncomfortably and then went silent. But it got weirder with the warnings.

I had learned to survive in these lies. My selfworth mirroring what men thought of me. The violence internalized. The makeup masking this ugly reality. My soul standing like a tree in my body, while the weeds of patriarchal ideology wrapped around it with the expectations of femininity. Trapped under the weight of oppression. My tree couldn’t breathe. Suffocating under their bodies. Warned when around their bodies. Now, triggered around all bodies.

“Anne, the client you’re going to see today is known for hitting on women. You’re his type. Be careful.”

They knew. My body was being used to sell products. Exploited for the bottom line of a company. It was my responsibility to ensure I wasn’t harmed, not the company’s or the client’s. I knew these patterns all too well. Because…

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When I disclosed the abuse to my family, they left me. Codependency. They couldn’t challenge those who harmed them. So I became the casualty.

They blamed me. At 24, I carried all the pain from all these years within my body, packed a car full of belongings, and drove away from what I knew home to be and my biological family.

chopped myself down.

Grief was my primary identity coupled with the vacuousness of all that should have been provided by family first or community second. Empty. I forgot myself. Lost my identity as a tree in the first place and struggled to find a new one apart from this process. The tree climber had become a tree cutter and none of it felt natural. Completely isolated. Alone. Nowhere to go. No home to go home to. An abused body lost in a world built to protect those who abuse. Rage followed.

Then, I had a lot of baggage literally and figuratively. From the inside out, my body felt heavy. The weight of intergenerational wounds, my unprocessed pain and that of my ancestors. All of my belongings stuffed into the back of my car.

Uprooted. A traveling tree wrapped in suffocating weeds. No one to accompany me. Deeply lonely.

It was all too much work at the same time. To rewire my mind from the traps of trauma, to reclaim my body that was used, to restore my being that wanted freedom over oppression in a system that still required submission to survive. To recreate a family, to rebuild an economy, to rediscover a way of living that suited me in the body that still bore the consequences of my beginning. To pay for most of the work out of pocket, while going to work to earn the money to pay for the work out of pocket. To show up, to dress up, to put on makeup, for a career path that would pay the bills, but never fulfill me and likely retraumatize me. Risky. To advocate for the safety of the next generation of children.

Now I had nothing but coping mechanisms, Complex-PTSD, debt from student loans, and a flood of unprocessed memories. A few disabilities without diagnoses from too much trauma far too young. An entire life to deconstruct and reconstruct from the inside out and the outside in all at once. With so little, I had to build a new body, identity, home, family, economy. But with the weight of my wounds, I could hardly move. I slept most of the day.

I couldn’t tell the difference between the weeds and the tree within me. Buried alive to survive. It would take time. Bodies weren’t built to be born in violence, then cut down, then rebuilt again backwards. It’s not natural, but in this case necessary. So, I slowly weeded my body from the inside out. Weed by weed, I let the memories fall from me. The ideologies. The identities. The binaries. The spiritualities. The economies. The communities. The memories. The family. The structures that were supposed to support me. The weight of their bodies and their abandonment. I dismantled the branches, severed the only parts of myself I had ever known away from me. Then, I

I was trapped in a cycle of pushing too hard then burning out for years. From the healing and hurting and hiding and holding myself in, holding myself back, holding myself bound. I could hardly function between the work to earn money and the work to heal. The work to reveal my former secrets publicly to guarantee that children were safe from my family. All of this responsibility on me. Justice, compensation, trauma-informed support, community—not possibilities during recovery around an issue like incest abuse. Too taboo.

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So I kept simplifying my life to fit into less and less luggage. The baggage on the outside minimizing while the baggage on the inside took up so much space. I leaned on the stability of others while I treated my own instability. Moved from friend’s guest room, to couch, to blow-up mattress, to cheap apartment, so that I could manage the cost of living in the present while surviving the past simultaneously. Every 3-6 months, packing everything back up to not burden anyone too much. I needed the world to slow down. For life to slow down. For the triggers to slow down. So that I could catch up to my body now.

Instantly, it was just me and my tree. I could wake up every day and listen to my body. Violence turned to resilience. Reverence and readiness. I held the bark of my bones with both hands sacredly and gazed at myself lovingly. Finally ready to be me.

I cut my hair into a pixie. Went makeup free.

Barefaced daily. My skin breathed. Dressed minimally, simply, comfortably. My body became bigger. I learned to rest. Without the pressure of rebuilding, and earning, and healing, and holding so much trauma, yearning for the fulfillment of so many stolen years, managing the weight of trapped fears. My brain began to settle. I could finally begin to practice being.

Then it was Spring of 2020 and Covid-19 spread to the United States just down the street from me.

Suddenly, everything slowed down for all the wrong reasons. Traumatically, a pandemic swept the world. But in response, protections were put in place that I had long been waiting for.

Government paychecks I didn’t have to earn.

Reduced medical premiums. A suddenly introverted social system. Remote work opportunities. A society that cared about mental health. People who understood the cost of isolation. Solidarity. Instantly, everyone asked me for permission before approaching me or touching me. I didn’t feel forced to hug, or to hold, or to help others at my own expense. Consent. Finally safe in a world required to stand six feet away.

Then, I looked into the mirror and saw myself for the first time. I called myself queer. My pronouns became she/they to hold my femme identity partnered with gender fluidity. I changed my name to Josephine. Josephine means the “Expansion of being.” I go by Jo. now.

Today I still carry my entire life on my back. But I move now by choice not necessity. It turns out a lifestyle of simplicity and travel suits me. I only take with me what I need: a few long sleeved tshirts, two pairs of pajamas and jeans, bras, underwear, three types of black leggings, socks, and jackets. One for rain, one for snow, one for in between. A swimsuit. Flip flops, pointed flats, and two pairs of tennis shoes—one for walking, the other for fun. A towel. A bag of toiletries. One necklace. One laptop. One ring. One wallet. I do have one dress and one pair of fancy shoes, but rarely wear them.

I became a full time writer focused on activism. I interacted with people only virtually. I didn’t have to hide from creepy men, or defend my values, or cake my face with glitter and gold makeup, or stuff my feet into heels, or my body into dresses too tight for me. To manage my long locks of hair. I didn’t have to mask, by which I mean act like I didn’t have disabilities. To pretend to be femme. To repress my parts considered masculine.

So, what about that tote? That bag full of makeup and masking tools that have been so necessary to

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my survival. The proof of femininity, the suppression of masculinity, the oppression of disability. Do they still have to be?

Home. And the rest of my belongings are packed into those three bags. The minimalism of this life invites the maximalism of my experience. A reality always calling me to more. More liberation, more justice, more freedom, more play, more purpose, more pleasure. More of all this and less of all that.

Crap.

Suddenly, function wins over form as I walk into the kitchen and confidently throw the bag full of brushes and glitter and gold-packed powders right into the trash. And with it the patriarchy, the false gender binaries, the nuclear family, the Catholic hierarchy, the failure of systems meant to support me, forced identities, heteronormativity. All the effort required to appear to be someone else.

Whether I need them or not, this is not who I choose to be.

What a queer and perfect way to be. A traveling tree expanding her/their being without the constraining weeds. I flow in fluidity and let my being guide me. So, where am I going? We’ll see.

I hope it feels like gold and glitter and the freedom of children climbing trees. Allowed to be. The one thing I know confidently: I’ll look just like me.

Josephine.

I take the baggage of my body with me: my neurodiversities, my disabilities, my histories, my identities. But this burden I now call beloved.

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lipgloss triptych mikki rios One: candy apple shellac open to reveal white fangs a snakebite from the fruit lethal smile never serve a house of men with tiny minds never sleep poised and patient in a glass coffin wander the woods until a mutual wildness sets in a frenzied togetherness

Three: frozen strawberry in a forever field surrounded by stasis hibiscus winter glazed over summer kisses alive only in memories veiled in nostalgia’s luster a shimmer ache like a bruise’s memory pink diamond threatens collapse into gel anytime

Two: stain of fuchsia juice worn warning warpaint in this still body resides a fight quiet mountains scenic canyons can still hold poison take care pressing lips to any thing growing free storms roll stealthy in from nowhere

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lipgloss duet (a continuation) mikki rios Four: whimsical sheen coral yet blue lights strobe on the merry-go-round a delicate dizzy twirl sticky sweet pucker slow dance candied flowers floating in lemonade carnival tents/jello molds transient palaces of moments loves hands quiver holding like letting go kills Five: champagne gold pulse of the disco luxury for everybody soot into filigree night stretches a cat everyone’s limbs reaching out like roads grasping for stars mirror ball glimmers brows sizzling sweat bodies melding indistinguishable enchantment hovers heavy each night a waking dream

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plumping glosses (an expansion) mikki rios Six: as adults we buy cosmetics youth scented birthday cake cartoon cereal as kids we stole from vanities pristine bathroom counters each tool transformative this makes lips bigger this makes eyes wider this makes a nose smaller this makes you lighter this darker this makes you different without telling a soul

Seven: the vial says fire and it burns true true red like chiles cherry cola ignition i used to hate spicy to rebel as mexican the way i still can’t do rainbow as part of my queer but picante is a state of mind embers fleck kindling hair molten tongue throws sparks come sear by my mouth char with my words

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sweet gloss (a missive) mikki rios Eight: been on this roller coaster it never really gets old i tell myself be a statue you are a passing zephyr but you kiss me into picturing sherbet summer dripping into hot cocoa winter i’m so love drunk with possibility you are an open bar watermelon daiquiri in five gulps mezcal and spiced pear i smother us in sap oozing from my core

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skincare for grown folk sarah sheppeck

The skincare industry is more saturated with products than ever. It seems like every few months there’s a new, buzzy product being touted by everyone from beauty influencers to professional makeup artists. And if you were raised in the era of Noxema and Clearasil, the sudden influx of “holy grail” products and buzzy brands might seem overwhelming, leaving your Google history filled with queries like, “Do cucumbers on eyes actually do anything?” “Do I need eye cream?” and “WTF is snail mucin?”

layered by using the lightest products first, and the most dense products last. Putting on a heavy moisturizer, for example, before putting on a spot treatment will prevent the spot treatment from penetrating your skin, leaving it to sit on top of the moisturizer instead.

So, the more-or-less definitive order of skincare application: Exfoliant 1. Cleanser 2. Toner 3. Serum(s) 4. Eye Cream 5. Spot Treatment 6. Moisturizer 7. Sunscreen 8. Face Oil

Fear not, your faery godqueer is here to demystify some of the most common questions about skincare.

WHAT ORDER SHOULD I DO MY SKINCARE ROUTINE IN? The Order: Cleanser, toner, serum, moisturizer.

There are variations (exfoliant-cleanser-spot treatment-eye cream-face oil), but generally this is The Way. Why? Density and occlusivity. Science!

DO I NEED THAT? If you’re thinking, “Wait, I don’t use _____” or “I didn’t know I was supposed to _____,” that’s okay.

Let’s break down the product categories that are absolutely necessary for maintaining the health of your skin.

Cleansing is always the first step in your skincare routine. After that, any products you use should be

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NOTE: I am not being compensated for any of the product recommendations I make here.

Anything I mention by name is something I actually use and love.

product buildup, and bacteria.

How to Apply: Work cleanser into damp skin in a circular motion using your hands or a facial cleansing brush.

Exfoliant This step isn’t numbered above because it’s the only one that shouldn’t be done daily. Overexfoliating can lead to skin irritation and aggravation of existing skin conditions, like oil overproduction. That said, exfoliating 1-3 times per week can help improve the overall texture of your skin. This step also helps to remove layers of dead skin cells, making it easier for your skin to absorb product.

How This Fits in The Routine: This is usually the first step in your skincare routine. If you’re exfoliating first, cleanse immediately after exfoliation.

Sarah’s Recommendations: Best for Sensitive Skin: Keys Soulcare Golden Cleanser, $22 Best for Dry Skin: Buttah Skin Cleanser, $15 Best Under $20: Urban Hydration Nourish & Rehydrate Castor & Shea Face Wash, $10

I especially recommend exfoliating your face and lips during the winter months, since removing chapped skin helps ensure that your moisturizers and balms are actually doing their jobs.

NOTE: Keys Soulcare, Buttah Skin, and Urban Hydration are Black-owned brands.

How to Apply: Using a washcloth or your hands, rub in a circular motion on damp skin and rinse with warm water before cleansing as usual.

Eye Cream You absolutely do need an eye cream. Sorry, babes. The skin around your eyes is up to ten times thinner than the skin on the rest of your face, meaning it’s much more susceptible to damage. You don’t have to go for expensive antiaging or wrinkle reducing creams (we don’t promote ageism in this family), but you do want to get a moisturizer that’s made specifically for the eye area.

How This Fits in The Routine: 1-3 times a week, exfoliate before beginning your usual skincare routine.

Sarah’s Recommendations: Best Black-Owned: Keys Soulcare Be Luminous Exfoliator, $25 Best for Lips: Lush Honey Lip Scrub, $13.50 Best Under $20: Burt’s Bees Conditioning Lip Scrub, $9

How to Apply: Scoop or squeeze out some product–you need less than you think–onto your ring finger and dab, don’t rub, around your eye.

Why your ring finger? Because it’s the weakest, and thus least likely to pull at the delicate skin around your eyes.

Cleanser If absolutely nothing else, wash your face morning and night. Morning to clear sweat and oil that may have built up overnight, and in the evening to clear your face of environmental pollution,

If your eyes get puffy in the morning, keep your eye cream in the fridge–the coolness will help

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bring down the swelling.

Sunscreen, Face Oil, and Primers Yes, sib, you need sunscreen. Yes, even in the winter. Yes, even if you’re melanated. Some moisturizers come with SPF, as do some foundations, so I’m lumping sunscreen in with priming the skin for makeup, although I know not all of us wear makeup daily (or at all!).

How This Fits in The Routine: After cleansing, toning, and serums, before spot treatment and moisturizer.

Sarah’s Recommendations: Best for Dry Skin: Honest Beauty Calm & Renew Melting Eye Balm, $28 Best for Black-owned: Keys Soulcare Radiant Eye Cream, $30 Best Under $20: e.l.f. Cosmetics Holy Hydration!

Eye Cream, $10

Facial oils are less necessary than suncreen, although they’re a great way to get in even more moisture before applying makeup–a good tip for those of us who prefer matte foundation looks.

How to Apply: Use your hands to apply to your skin in upward strokes.

Moisturizer Moisturize your face, baby. Every day. Even if–in fact especially if–you have oily skin. Oil overproduction is actually a response to your skin being dry, so moisturizing regularly will help oil and dry skin alike.

How This Fits in The Routine: This is the last step in the routine, after all other products have been applied.

Sarah’s Recommendations: Best Sunscreen: Black Girl Sunscreen Moisturizing Sunscreen Lotion, $16 Best for Priming Makeup: Danessa Myricks Beauty Oil, $30 Best Under $20: Flower Beauty Supernova Celestial Priming Whip, $17

How to Apply: Use your hands to apply to your face and neck in a circular motion. If your face gets puffy in the morning, try keeping your moisturizer in the fridge and applying it while it’s cold.

How This Fits in The Routine: After cleansing and toning, before eye cream and spot treatment.

NOTE: Black Girl Sunscreen and Danessa Myricks are Black-owned brands.

Sarah’s Recommendations: Best Gel Moisturizer: Urban Hydration Aloe Vera Daily Moisturizer, $8 Best for Dry Skin: Buttah Skin Facial Shea Butter, $19 Best Under $20: fresh Rose Deep Hydration Face Cream, $18

Still have questions? Tag us on social media and ask away! You never know, you might even see your question in print in a future issue.

Now go forth and glow, babes.

NOTE: Buttah Skin and Urban Hydration are Black-owned brands.

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m a n e e h t

a ttr a ti o n c

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hair-story: a breakdown of breakdowns e.m. lark

While on the Brooklyn-bound Q train, you have the realization that you, as you are right now, can do whatever you want with your body. With your life. With your hair, even, which has been a defining factor of your appearance and personage for what feels like forever.

Furiously write in your journal as you pass over the East River, your knees scrunched up, and the soles of your shoes pressed into the perpendicular seat. You can barely read your handwriting,but you know that the words mean everything to you.

Realize that you never really absorbed all the advice you were given because it was in the frame of being a woman, and you unconsciously rejected it. You rejected anything that reminded you of the place that you were put in, such an unholy state for your body to be.

Contemplate your newfound revelation the whole way home while listening to your specific forevery-version-of-me playlist that you made as a therapeutic exercise.

Ignore that someone else seeing this playlist would probably think it’s cringe.

Language is powerful, you remind yourself.

You’ve known this, it’s your livelihood. You hated yourself for all the times you didn’t have the words to describe your truest being, nor the courage to speak it aloud.

Once you’re home, politely step around your roommate’s cat—who likes to weave around your feet—grab your pair of shears, and lock the bathroom door.

At eighteen you knew more than you do at twenty-five; you’re curious enough to try out that proclamation, even in the dark.

Fix your headphones, stare at yourself in the mirror, and contemplate what you might look like with all of it off. If this experiment works all the

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way, then it will be gone. You will have followed in the footsteps of so many before you.

Put off making a hair appointment to fix what went wrong. You’ll survive.

Put it off for the next twenty to thirty minutes, pacing back and forth in your bathroom. Your hand trembles, and so the shears tremble with it.

Your heart races, and your breath grows short.

You’re somewhat convinced you’re going to pass out in the bathroom instead of cutting your hair.

What if they hate me for it? Am I betraying my family? you ask yourself, which hurts. Your brief euphoria from the train has ground to a halt, and it makes your chest ache.

Actually start cutting your hair. Really cut it, moving your shears through the forest of your hair.

Realize that your shears aren’t strong enough to endure the wilds of hair, barely cutting through the top layer.

Laugh. Watch the hair fall into your hand.

Remember that one of your exes said he liked girls with shorter hair, and that made you angry because you were trying to grow out your hair.

You were never good with being told what to do, no matter how much of your life revolved around being a people-pleaser.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. You were never meant to fill those shoes.

Go tell one of your best friends what happened.

She laughs after assuring that you’re okay, and you laugh because it’s still too fucking funny for its own good.

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cutting it close felix salmoran

CW: mentions of addiction, cancer, death/suicide

mom, who nodded and handed me a razor. By high school, I was shaving nearly my entire body.

And at the bottom, it wasn’t a fear at all but a desire.

River Halen, “Dream Rooms”

Out of desperation, I bleached my arm hair, I tried Nair, and I'd taken to flat-ironing my head hair almost every day, continuing through my sophomore year of college, until one day I didn't want to, and haven’t since. I had just come out as gay then, and was down to shaving only my ‘stache, torso, fingers and toes—my debut doublecast in the role of “other.”

My first issue with hair was that I didn’t want it.

I got my curls from my mom, and she made me into Samson. Whenever I wanted a haircut growing up, she would warn, no more than two inches. Although we’ve stopped speaking, I’ve internalized her voice. In the mirror, mostly, antes 1 muerta que sencilla.

When I met my hairdresser, I had just moved to a new city after undergrad, and had gotten a bad haircut at the Hair Cuttery right before graduation. In the next year, I had half a dozen drastically different hairstyles—my hair went from hip length to baby mullet, which I then grew out for almost two years. My mullet born, I started using they/them pronouns, and stopped shaving completely—liberated by my deviance.

I spent my childhood pulling my hair back as flat as I could into a single bun, getting as close to bald as possible. When my body hair entered the scene, I was petrified. The day I found my first leg hair, sitting on the floor of the elementary school orchestra room, I came home and cried to my

1 Sooner dead than simple—this is more than my mother’s catchphrase; it’s a truth by which she lives (one that I hated growing up,

and associated with inauthenticity and maintaining some level of performance to control the illusion of how others perceive you, even those closest to you).

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Once I felt like I’d reached peak mullet—neon orange tips with the sides faded to the scalp—I had my hairdresser chop it off, leaving me with four inches of curl on top, which I immediately dyed platinum.

I stayed bald longer, noticing the recession of my hairline, which caused panic and gender euphoria.

I scheduled my top surgery consultation, and in order to ground myself for the Big Chop, I resolved to have my curls again. I dreaded the growing out process, so I had my hairdresser clean up my sides and shape once a month. I have another haircut scheduled soon, just in time for my wispy sideburns to connect to the the distinct shadow growing along my jawline.

* When I shaved my head for the first time, it was to shed the outermost edges of my existence, turn the soil, see how the land had changed, and what newness could grow. I was just barely pre-T; falling out of touch with my mother; my dad had just been diagnosed with stage IV cancer; Denim, my cat, soulmate, angel, and my inspiration when I first dyed my hair gray, had just died. I was addicted to Xanax, and I quit my tech startup job, although I can’t remember which happened first. I shaved my hair down with no guard twice, and grew it out for half a year afterwards. That was the longest I’ve ever gone without a haircut, and coincidentally my first six months on HRT. When I finally saw my hairdresser again and got a fresh fade, I went home, had my housemate do my eye makeup, and took a dozen pictures of myself.

Earlier this year, I posted a series of pictures to my Instagram stories, rating my hairstyles from high school up to now. Laying my selves out like a puzzle, it’s clear to me that each piece makes up my own reflection, willing to stare back.

Recently, my housemate said to me, your hair has lived so many lives. And in each one, I survive a world that tells me I can never look in alignment with how I feel; I ferment my own becoming. My hair—shaving lines into the sides, growing it out, coloring the tips, styling a wet look—is not my crown, but my shield. It’s how I honor and heal a multiplicity of selves and actualizations, how I establish and express my expansion.

The second time I shaved my head was this past summer; I was no longer speaking to my mother; it had been over half a year since my dear friend— B, who had the most beautiful bleach blonde curls —died by suicide; I was a few months sober; and I had gotten misgendered at my new job three times in 48 hours, not long after I’d reached my maximum dose of testosterone. My stomach was the first place to get hairy on HRT, so I found myself with more hair there than on my head, and I excitedly brought out my old crop tops, feeling newly comfortable with the implicit femininity.

Faithfully, my hair is the first to catch up to my heart, in this relay race against only time, with infinite beginnings. And what becomes time in the face of immortality? 2

2 There is a myth that your hair and nails keep growing after you die. It turns out this is an illusion caused by the shrinkage of the

skin around the follicles drying out, shriveling up. I decide this illusion is enough, for me.

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ellipsis for my feminine body nnadi samuel Praise for your loin that sparks a controversy. relic of skin, ligament & bone-soft flesh: all the terror to mourn you. yet, your pubescence: the way each strand devours space, spreading voracious across a lap. here, the loin demands safety. demands way beyond being well trimmed & prim-proper, demand ways to defy this biological make-up—afflicting the gap in between my hip. how the bush beneath, misgender my youthfulness.

I hold a church’s pamphlet, & the sermon translates pubescence as disaster overrunning a girl's body.

I confess to the damage, to shortchanging myself in measuring up to this worth, by planting a scissor to each armpit. & in the next week, I am skin-thorny as a porcupine. all starched hair & razored meat—swording out of my loin. a sacrilege, wielded in defence of whoever raised me.

I am volatile: head to toe.

I recall the teenager at New Jersey who, in a bid to outdress his age—skin his bones alive. flesh, hanging from kneecap. & in the same breath, I surround a bathtub with a paring knife, beheading each bushy part. the pamphlet says: ‘razoring the body is a penance for harlot.’ but, isn’t our loin a temple of God & other smaller things? beloved, I wish you a stress-free shave.

I implore, you experiment more on washcloth doused in coconut oil—as often as you bleed.

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a medusa of my own jas saunders

If I remember right, I first wanted to cut my hair when I was twelve—nearly thirteen.

boy and wishing I could have that ability. Until I noticed her, I didn’t realize it was an option for girls to have a boys’ haircut. It was something almost always reserved for straight, middle-aged and/or elderly women. Or lesbians, who were only spoken of negatively with disgust or offensive jest.

It would have been a good way to start the school year at the new school if I had cut my hair then.

Start afresh; reinvent myself to look more like myself; untangle my old knots. I had always been a tomboy in primary school, so I wasn’t cutting down any trees to get myself to where I had wanted to be—I was encouraging the roots to grow in the right direction.

When I got to middle school, I knew three girls with short hair.

However, as a twin, I was conscious of disrupting the balance. Two girls with their go-to thick braids. Two girls with pigtails in kindergarten school photos. We’re non-identical; fraternal, which only reinforced the ideas in my head that I was expected to be a part of a matching set. After all, people expect twins to look alike.

Two of them were in my grade but not in my classes. I saw them in the hallways or on school camp. One of them had a pixie cut with a heavy side fringe, as if she was in her emo phase. She wasn’t at our middle school for long, and the fringe looked too girly for me—like passiveaggressively giving eyelashes to an M&M to say, Hey! She’s a girl!

I only knew one girl with short hair in my public primary school. She was two grades below me but in the same choir group. I didn’t know her well, though I remember her getting mistaken for a

The other girl had shaggier, slightly longer hair, like a mullet—but without the shaved sides, since it wasn’t the trend then, especially not in Anglican school. She left our school in ninth grade, and

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when I saw her a few years later, she had grown her hair out, like she could get away with it when she was young, but once she’d gotten older, she didn’t want to be assumed to be one of those evil lesbians. There’s nothing straight girls hate more than being assumed to be one of those.

out of my own brain. Whenever I told my mum I wanted to cut my hair, she said I’d regret it, or that it would take forever to grow back, as if I’d inevitably want long hair as soon as I hacked it off.

Maybe that was the real clown behavior all along.

After I got outed to my mum at the end of high school, I told her to not panic, that I wouldn’t want to look like one of those lesbians.

But I was still jealous that their parents let them have short hair without attaching the stereotype that it made them gay, that they didn't care that people could think of them as other because of their hair. They could just have what they wanted.

* My dad worked with an older, hard-butch lesbian dubbed the Australian Ellen DeGeneres by the department full of men. They teased her about being a manly dyke. She was true-blue though, knew how to take it on the chin—a real Aussie battler that could give banter back like a superpower. I met her once or twice; five years ago, when Australia legalized same-sex marriage, I had a blast dancing to “Nutbush City Limits” at her small backyard wedding where she wore a suit. I wish I hadn’t been so anxious to confide in her about my own lesbianism and ask her advice as a baby butch. But I was stuck in a dress. My hair was long. She was essentially a stranger.

The third girl, however? Three grades above me in senior school, we only shared recess time. She was different. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was definitely my own Alison Bechdel’s Ring-of-Keys moment. She wore the girls’ school dress uniform, but her masculinity radiated straight through it.

She was butch. Unlike the other girls, she was one of the evil lesbians. The side of her hair was buzzed down as much as the dress-code allowed.

She didn’t walk; she swaggered around the campus with confidence, as if the conservative school was a Pride parade. With her, I felt admiration and longing, a bitter disappointment that our paths only crossed for twenty minutes of the school day.

*

When I was fourteen, I started feeling dysphoric. I hated my long hair. I hated my chest. I hated my voice. I hated myself. In hindsight, some of it was probably hating my sexuality. I had my first celebrity crush on Zooey Deschanel when I was five. Entering middle school was the first time I properly realized I wasn’t like the other girls. I still didn’t like dresses. I knew I didn’t like makeup; it was something I had only borrowed from my mum once—when I was five also—asking her to put red lipstick on my nose so I could pretend to be a clown. As a teen, I felt like I couldn't escape

Mum knowing my sexuality deepened my internalized homophobia. I could get away with wearing my masculine clothing, but only because I had the long hair to compensate. But I had to have no body hair. I had to wear makeup. I could be a half, but not a whole of who I was.

I finally managed to cut my hair this year. It started with an undercut until I knew I had to get rid of the rest. I know butches can rock long hair, but the knots and the emotional tangles weren’t worth it. I was sick of being pretty, like an

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object, sick of my hair dragging me and my confidence down. I wanted to feel handsome for once; I wanted to feel like me.

They’re cold, and their scales scratch me. I have nightmares that they talk to me, trying to tell me that I’m not good enough, strong enough, butch enough. But I don’t believe them, and I wake up. I always do.

My mum wasn’t keen on the idea, despite having short hair herself back in the ‘80s. But I booked myself an appointment, told her about it the day before, and did my best to ignore the look on her face. When I came home from the studio the next day, I felt as light as a feather. And she came around; I knew she would.

And that’s a part of my reward. I get to push onwards and persist, because I am who I have always been. I look how I have always wanted to.

And I let little girls know they can look like me; I let little Jas know she does look like me. In a world that hates masculine women, I wake up and hold my head high, cropped hair and all.

Being in a dress with long hair feels like I’m in drag. Femininity is attractive; it just doesn't feel like me.

I haven’t worn a dress since graduating last December, but I still feel like people want me to splash on makeup or wear something feminine, even when they say that I suit my hair more now, or that they can't imagine me with long hair or in a dress. There’s this expectation that I need to make up for the absence of long, lingering locks.

But cutting my hair was a vow to myself. And I’ve stuck to it.

When my hair gets too long, that’s when it feels like there are snakes in my hair, sliding down my head and to my shoulders, as if I’m a Medusa of my own kind—except I turn to stone when someone looks at me.

After finally having what I’ve wanted for so many years, my subconscious takes it away from me. I’m transformed back into who I once was—an uncomfortable adult who hates to look in the mirror, who showers with her eyes closed.

I lie in bed, and the snakes slither like restless children across the pillows, down my neck.

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r c u s b o s n

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mirrored fatality survives the apocalypse mirrored fatality interviewed by jo davis-mcelligatt

Who - and/or what - is mirrored fatality?

Introduce yourselves! mirrored fatality is an underground interdependent Kapampangan and South Asian xenotrans experimental and healing noise punk farmer duo sharing their rituals + altars. mirrored fatality creates their “cocoon webs” combining performance art, music, spoken word, film, photography, painting, drawing, upcycled garments, anti-imperialist education, and healing justice practice spaces to mobilize a warrior community responding to transnational calls-toaction for mutual aid, land sovereignty, and prison abolition.

They have toured across Turtle Island (United States of America), United Kingdom, Mexico, Thailand, and Spain (Editor’s Note: check out mirrored fatality’s timeline at tinyurl.com/mftimeline). As farmer artists, mirrored fatality has completed several residencies. mirrored fatality internationally performs their

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sonic metamorphosis container, COCOON WEBS: a ferocious affirmation of chaos to harness ancestral power, primal spirit, collective fury, and interconnectedness to our multiverse in a world numbing us with toxic forces. VALE, BIOME(TRICS), BLOOM, UTOPIA, INVALIDATION, REINCARNAGE, PRIMALDIAL MAGMA, and EARTHBODY(S) are restorative anthems to sustain us through the revolution to ground ancestrally, move through feelings of invalidation, cathartically release remnants imprinted by systemic and intergenerational trauma, and imagine visions towards collective liberation and land justice.

How would you define your style aesthetic? mf: During our performance at 143rd Dimension, a Queer and Trans Punk Festival in Oakland + San Francisco, our friend Gaia WXYZ called us “apocalyptic spasms from anticolonial mutants.”

Although our current spirits are adorned in

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human flesh + bones, we activate our true forms through armor + warrior ware reflecting the hybridity of utilitarian_cyborg, primordial_endangered species, and decaying earth_landscapes. Our aesthetic combines technological trash, cyberpunk, upcycled wares, the international underground trans +queer punk/rave scene, and naturally sourced materials.

We try to embody the hybridity of animals+cyborgs+transhumans: the laman haiwaan and labuad meklooq (kampangan_urdu for: flesh beast and earth creature); the multispecies inhabitants of 2022 & 3033 living on ECOCIDE 3URTH; the corpses of natural ecosystems of planet earth murdered by apathetic humans and artificial intelligence seeking vengeance. Our aesthetic combines dystopian futurism with ancient matter rooted from our South Asian + Kapampangan ancestors + future descendants and allows us to morph into the creatures we hope to exist in when capitalism and climate catastrophe are obliterated and all living beings live free.

What inspires your fashion? Where do you look when you need aesthetic ideas? mf: Our fashion draws its inspiration from the blessing that is performing as mirrored fatality. As mirrored fatality we are able to travel to different parts of the world and experience varying punk shows, raves, theater performances, dance festivals, film screenings, and break bread with other QTBIPOC artists + freedom fighters. The underground queer and trans of color scenes we are in allow us to continue to imagine new heights of inspiration and genre boundlessness.

Through our travels we are inspired by the people we love along with the costumes + films we absorb. Lately, we’ve really been inspired by our friends who create clothes (who we commission for costumes to wear on tour!) and tv shows/films

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geared towards a reality of cyberfuturism_transhumanism. Our tours especially in the United Kingdom impacted our fashion inspiration—our friends Cat Lauigan from the Bay Area in California, Klank, Lynn, and Wes who share a studio space in Hackney Wick, Fran of You Are The Next Generation, Fantastic Toilies, Puer Deorum, Yiling Zhao, Queer Rave Soundsystem, Conqueer Event’s Fashion Show we modeled in, and Riposte London.

creatures who are channeling the ceremony we are creatiOur props symbolize our armor, our guitar cables we have used across the world to disseminate Indigenous genocide (We invite you to support Stand with Kashmir and Liyang Network) and human rights violations community knowledge, chains we liberated to free tree trunks from deforestation, and masks we must now use in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, chem trails, and tear gas and bombs at protests.

How do you see music and fashion working together? Do you think of them together or separately?

We mimic the movements of machines that are malfunctioning through rapid glitching choreography to envision that all technological weapons of surveillance can and will be demolished. Whenever our equipment or car breaks down, we repurpose them into fashion.

We’ve taken old quarter inches, car headlights, radios, and TVS, and have incorporated them into our costumes and performance.

mf: Music and fashion for mirrored fatality are important cogs of our machinic dimension. Our physical presentation is an important part of our performance because we are embodying laman haywan / labuad meklooq’s (flesh beasts / earth creatures): posthuman freak, cyborg, animal creatures who are channeling the ceremony we are creating.

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How do you see fashion as political? Do we have a responsibility to buy better - or maybe not at all? How do you think can we be and do better? mf: We recently watched Shu Lea Cheang’s ECO CYBER NOIA film, Fresh Kill. Cheang says ECO SCYBER NOIA is “massive intrusions of networking technology into people's lives,” and what she foresaw as “a future where multinational media empires clash with hackers.” The film did a beautiful job of showing unnecessary waste impacting all of us globally. The ways in which we can consume fashion through the shopping tab on instagram, Amazon, Aliexpress, and etc has hijacked our consumption rates. Fast fashion, clothing created from different parts of the world, and the waste we do not witness in this process is literally killing the Earth and its living beings. rainforests, major river systems, and other lifegiving ecosystems in Mindanao, Philippines, and landless elder migrant Filipino farmers in Orosi, California.

As musicians and performers, we refrain from buying into the idea that we need new wardrobes/costumes constantly—we usually wear the same costumes we’ve accumulated the past 4 years and find ways to rewear them or repair them when they fall apart so we don’t consume unnecessary material.

Where are your favorite places to look for clothing? How did you learn to make and design your own clothes? Any tips for folks who want to do the same?

We also aim to make fashion auctions where we donate pieces of clothing to mutual aid and transnational calls to action. For example, we did a COCOON WEBS exhibition at Cone Shape Top where we sold dresses and airbrushed shirts with proceeds supporting LGBTQIA+ communities in Kashmir under military occupation by India, environmental frontline defenders in Mindanao who are standing between extractive industries and vital old-growth

mf: We find a lot of clothes from loved ones passing them onto us (one time our queer elder Queen gave us their old leather bondage pants), thrift and vintage stores, flea markets, fabric stores, and buy pieces from designers who we are our friends or in collaboration with. We learned to design and make our own clothes using mood boards of artists, designers, and pictures from our favorite films, performances, and lookbooks and that inspired us and applying that to whatever fabric we had around us.

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Neither of us have any training in fashion but we just began upcycling old clothes or finding clothes with textures or colors that interested us and then editing them. For the airbrushed shirts, our friend Parker did a skillshare of their airbrush machine and let us use their materials to make two shirts we then auctioned for Stand with Kashmir and Liyang Network. We both handsew everything so we started by just cutting up clothes, painting or spray painting on them and then sewing pieces together.

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When we filmed the BLOOM Music video, we found white dresses that we cut, spray painted, and painted on to make the outfits we wore in the video. Also, for the Exo_system_Eco_skeleton Garments, we wanted to make new costumes and repurposed neon green bicycle long sleeves that we then dyed with found objects around the desert/residency space: vinegar, bleach, tea, rusted nails, herbs, and spraypainted abandoned homes on the mountain tops’ remnants: chains, a baby crib, wires, locks, old metal grids, and etc. We wanted the colors to mirror the landscape. A big tip is definitely get a sewing kit and work with whatever you have. If you are able to go to a thrift store or fabric store and pick up clothes, scraps of fabric, and other materials that you are interested in, do it! Our favorite fashion are clothes that are unique, one of a kind, and have lots of heart and intention put into it.

Want to listen? mirrored fatality has recently released a remastered version of their COCOON WEBS EP with Aklasan Records, two films— VALE (Get Better Records) and EARTHBODY(S)_BIOME(TRICS) (Tour de Moon)—and the singles “REINCARNAGE” and “VALE” (Get Better Records), and “BIOME(TRICS)” and “PRIMALDIAL MAGMA” (Cherub Dream Records). Their second EP: ECOCIDE 3URTH (Cherub Dream Records) can be purchased on digital streaming, and on cassette tape with a zine that comes with each purchase at mirroredfatality.bandcamp.com.

Find them on Insta @mirroredfatality.

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holding my own gaze katlin marisol sweeney-romero

When I was a little kid, all I wanted was to be like Sailor Moon.

I could always relate to Usagi’s big emotions, frantic energy, and looming fear that she was going to fail. Those qualities are still pretty accurate to where I am at in my life now. But in the 25 years that have passed since my first Sailor Moon VHS tape was popped into the TV, I always wanted the power to initiate my own “Moon Prism Power!” transformation sequence.

My Sailor Moon transformation fixation perhaps makes more sense in the context of my wistful childhood. On the surface, things were fine— perfectly fine, more than fine, nothing-out-ofplace-so-don’t-tell-people-if-they-ask-becausewe-keep-things-private fine. Under the weight of a fine-tuned suburban veneer, things were finely filtered through a constant state of bated breath.

My conservative upbringing in a Catholic household with strict rules and limited exposure to the secular world was further intensified by

panicked realizations that I was queer, which I suppressed to make space for the stakes of being a terminally ill parent’s emotional repository for lifelong insecurities and regret. Aside from a few

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nail polish is applied to each finger, followed by her donning of the Sailor Scout uniform: a gorgeous bodice and mini skirt, knee-high red boots, elbow-length gloves that paradoxically cover the nails, a golden tiara, and small earrings.

All of these elements converge into place as she strikes a pose before the moon. As I watched (and continue to rewatch) this sequence, I enter an enduring state of aspiration and comfort, from which I dream of my own self-initiated transformation. As she becomes Sailor Moon, Usagi shows no signs of fear or self-doubt. Like her stance, she appears confident and ready to take on whatever comes her way.

Whenever I needed to escape, I would emulate this sequence in my bedroom. I would wait until everyone was asleep or busy to close the door and my eyes. I dreamed I was surrounded by a glittery sky as I ran a finger over each nail, pretending it had been coated in fresh nail polish, and quietly leaped into the air, arms outstretched, imagining myself enveloped in my very own Sailor Scout uniform. I would extend my legs as invisible boots

youthful indiscretions and emotional outbursts from the unrelenting stress of the everyday, most of life before 20 was about being someone else’s do-over—someone who reminded me on a near daily basis that it was my responsibility to rectify his failures, that it was my responsibility to repay his presence in my life by generously offering up my own as his second draft. The moments in between these mounting pressures, when I could just sit in front of the TV and watch a fellow anxious girl transform herself from ordinary to extraordinary, meant everything to me.

Sailor Moon’s power, of course, literally materializes as the magic she wields to fight her enemies and save the day, but I was transfixed by the figurative magic of her self-adornment that initiated each fight scene. Never in my childhood did I have access to a fully autonomous, physical transformation; every haircut, article of clothing, weight gain, makeup application, and intimate doctor’s visit was forcibly filtered through my parents’ regulation. By contrast, Usagi’s transformation sequence is all about her, and only her. The sequence begins as a fresh coat of glittery

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appeared below my knees and used both hands to trace the outline of a tiara on my forehead. This practice became sacred to me, became soothing to the parts of my soul that were screaming to come out but knew the unspoken consequences of being myself without permission. I rewound the VHS over and over and over again as I performed this ritual over and over and over again. Each time, I believed that if I believed hard enough, I could summon that power, too.

After years of prolonged proximity to my childhood hometown, I finally moved out of state and started my own life at 24. The distance granted me the space I needed to process a lot about my childhood, especially the parts that were firmly tethered to a different version of events told to me about how my experiences happened. More importantly, it gave me a chance to become a person entirely of my own making. It is a hard experience to put into words—that life before my mid-20s was an exercise in reworking personal boundaries into negotiations for the comfort of people close to you—in being a person who never says no and who never lets other people down.

It is hard to accept that these moments, too, remain a part of me, even as I fight to get older, to stay alive, to remember that when it all seems impossible, it is because I am coming into my own for the first time. It is a hard experience to put into words that I am in permanent grief over the childhood that was fine, over the childhood that maybe was not actually fine.

But I made it through, I make it through, I will make it through, in the solace of my selfadornment—a shield that makes my body my own for the first time with each new layer of clothing and makeup I try on as I meet myself.

With each spare moment I reallocate towards discovering and redefining my self-adornment practices, my lingering resentments, embarrassments, needs for clarification, blend into the background.

I spend hours staring into the mirror as I practice applying iridescent glitter, colorful eye shadow, and bold lipsticks, assessing with each pat and swipe which cosmetic will become part of my cosmetic arsenal. I wake up before 6 a.m. most days to have enough time to test different

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techniques when drawing on eye liner wings, with my ever-evolving wing shape becoming my signature facial feature. I study online makeup tutorials, test the consistency of different products in a range of temperatures, and experiment with unexpected color combinations. I spend hours searching for inexpensive statement pieces I can wear to accentuate my makeup. I scour small makers’ shops on Etsy for unique earrings that could extend the storytelling I tell with my cosmetics. I alternate between growing my hair out past my waist to cutting it short into a bob that I dye blue, then purple, then back to blue, back to purple, then back to black with highlights.

I go back to the child self I lost touch with each time I remember to spin, to smile, to laugh, to extend my arms and kick my feet out as I transform in the mirror and through the camera.

With each new look, I pause to take photos—at different angles, in different lighting, with different poses, in different places. I take the photos when I embrace the euphoria of my makeup, accessories, and clothing blending together to form a perfect moment. I take the photos when I feel the sinking sadness of my makeup, accessories, and clothing being out of sync, only to find months or years later that I was not ready to see the beauty in them yet. These photos often enable a periodic review in which I make mental note of what elements I wish to standardize in my routine, what to adjust, and what to do away with. In quieter moments, these photos form the through line of my memories that prove I was here, that I created something beautiful—something special in its ethereality, in its inability to be replicated perfectly. Each photo traces the contours of my spirit, of my hand as it moves across my face and body to summon the energy necessary to persevere. They preserve a life lived in the vivid color of self-adorned expression.

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get

me

d a e i n r h t t h r e u g o a y

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the crystal poem: a zuihitsu andy winter

the Crystal Ball Nicki Minaj pulls up bringing the boom bap kicks off with karate chop sticks snare & slap ~ a language of broken wrists & magazine covers / speaks through me as i / strut & cut beats / into powder & blush / what is tabula rasa but the way we burn the runway / with thigh-high boots & stilettos scribing / a calligraphy of loops blurring into infinity / into smoke & spotlight / as in we buck & bend reality / as in we ooze sex / like a siren / on an ambulance / until no gender / no bloodstain / glistening on grand prize trophies / fishtail gowns / & champagne bodies ~ Paris is burning. New York is burning. Saigon is burning.

Kyiv is burning. Cape Town is burning. Singapore is burning.

We’ll burn the whole world if we have to.

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~ Gucci.

Comme des Garçons.

Saint Laurent.

Revlon.

Balenciaga.

Lanvin.

Miyake-Mugler.

We, ateliers of a lost generation. We, painted bodies in galleries of disco, busts dripping in diamanté. We, duct tape designers / glue gun engineers / aerosol architects. We, artifice & artifact. We, the bizarre & the bazaar. We, the 0th season. We are everywhere, anywhere & therefore nowhere. We welcome you. ~ Danielle Revlon. Kerri Mizrahi. Mercedes Prodigy. Gisele Xtravaganza. Meeka Prodigy. Stasha Garçon.

Sinia Ebony. Lola Ebony. Barbie Mizrahi. Kassandra Ebony. Daesja Laperla. Alyssa Ebony. Jazell Barbie Royale. Ayanna Khan. Alloura Jourdan-Zion. Yolanda Jourdan. Asia West. Kimiyah Ebony. Tyra Allure Ross. Leiomy Maldonado. Tutu West. Tamiyah Gorgeous Gucci. From the star of my crown to the tip of my ponytail, I dip to all the queens before me. ~ one two three now hold that pose for me

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beanie season jennifer elise wang

The morning air bites at my knees, as I skate around the park. The wheels flatten the fallen leaves even more, and I dodge a stray twig. After an hour of pushing, ollie-ing, and grinding, my arms feel smothered in the hoodie, but I don’t want them exposed, just like how I used to dread the wind hitting my neck and ears. Then the dysphoria made me confront the cold head-on, but thankfully I have a secret weapon. When it’s time to go home and the helmet comes off, I put on a beanie over my buzzed head and dream of mountains instead of the beach.

Sleeves lengthen; Shorts are traded for pants; But my hair stays short.

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w h a w e t s

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a bit of fluff a f carbajal

Spooled , spun , as if a hundred miles of yarn have been woven around and around , pushed into uncomfortable shapes , my clothes disintegrate : shoved a little bit , shrunk a little bit , squashed a little bit , fucked a little bit .

They leave me a flimsy purple little flannel that comes undone in my hands , fragile — candy floss , but with no calories .

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If I get made redundant I shall make me a purple coat out of tumble-dryer fluff , wrap it round my naked body and run down the street , and watch the curtains twitch as the fine film peels off me like a chrysalis .

The heart of the neighbour down the lane will skip a beat or two , and I will cackle a witch’s laugh and shan’t give a monkey’s .

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transfinite::a dialogue cavar Text on black screen: “transfinite / a dialogue” Enter: My overstrewn closet. I am fucking with this closet door, every which way.

I leave my closet door open all the time. Mostly because it refuses to budge, no matter how hard I push.

A trait I can’t help but find endearing.

The rare times it doesn’t jump the track, it’s just even harder to open up again, and I’m squeezing myself into all these shapes just trying to see inside.

Blink. Black screen opens to a blank, lined page. My hands. I am writing: “figured it was the universe / making me / some ch– ”

So eventually, I gave up on trying. Figured it was the universe making me some cheesy metaphor about being queer. Like I made that line break in the script for this video, like some kind of poet. ...Like a poet who says like too much and talks types in sentence fragments so you’re, well, like, what the fuck kind of poet is that?

Blink. Black screen ––

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Anyway.

Opens to my closet. I jiggle the door fruitlessly with one hand.

I’m trying to frame my closet door as a metaphor here, which isn’t anything new. Like other sorts of containers –– marinara-marred tupperwares, plastic bottles hour glasses in the hand.

Blink. A blank white wall. A flash of Cavar, dressed in a pink collared shirt and dark blue pan–– Blink! A return to the blank, lined page. I have completed writing: “figured it was the universe / making me / some cheesy metaphor / about being queer.”

I strike out both stanzas.

Closets are made with closure in mind.

I close the cuffs on my pink shirt.

Everyday, a person reaches into their closet, selects their vestments, and seals it once more, all with the assumption that whatever they’re wearing is sufficient to wherever they’re, uh, whereing.

Blink. My crowd-lined page reads “where-ing.”

Blink.

1

Interviewee : So, the problem here is, obviously, I’m queer.

2

Interviewer : You mean you’re ashamed of being gay?

Interviewee: No, there are just too many of me to wear all at once.

1 The view from their lower right-hand side. They wear glasses, blue plugs, and a burnt-orange long-sleeved shirt. Their hair is in a

man-bun.

2 The view from their lower left-hand side. They wear no glasses, blue plugs, and a floral blouse, with the burnt-orange shirt

underneath. Their hair hangs loose, except for a small ponytail at the crown of their head.

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A blank white wall.

I enter, wearing my late uncle’s old tiger t-shirt and a pair of olive green shorts. My tattoos and bare-hairy legs are in full view. I pose. I leave.

I used to be a girl. I sucked at it, but it was fine, until I started becoming a woman, during which time I decided I no longer wanted to be part of that whole scene. I didn’t do the thing you expect of “transmasc narrators,” mostly because I’m not “transmasc.”

I enter, wearing my striped shirt that reads “fluid” with long yellow corduroys. I pose, hands in my pockets.

I didn’t go the whole tomboy to lesbian to trans route, as if any of those categories were mutually exclusive in the first place.

I am back in my pink shirt and blue pants. A lingering glance reveals my pink shirt to be dinosaur-patterned.

I was a little girl who loved American Girl dolls and Lego kits, but mostly ended up gravitating toward books.

A blank white wall. I wear the olive shorts with a teal t-shirt. As I narrate, I put on an oversized blue flannel.

I found nonbinariness online as a preteen and claimed it, along with queerness, for myself several years later.

After all of that, I realized that I –– a trans person, seeking “biomedical transition” could also be a lesbian.

I was allowed to be –– to have been –– all of these things.

Interviewee: We’re all taught to see identities like these as contradictory, as if there’s one big Truth we’re all going to settle on eventually. This makes it easier for cis people to rationalize the existence of trans people, acting like we basically have the same genders as them, but are a little slow on the uptake.

Closet shot.

Interviewer: Okay, Sarah, but what about your closet?

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Interviewee: I’m Cavar. There are some Sarahs –– she’s and they’s both –– in my closet.

Blink.

I button my blue flannel, beginning at the cuffs.

I have to keep my closet door open because I’m so many.

Blink. I am shirtless but for an unzipped grey vest. I wear the yellow corduroys and a post-op chest.

When I use the pronouns “they/them,” I’m talking not only about the me I happen to be –– though I am talking about that singular person, too, even as they’re ever-shifting –– but I’m also talking about a litany of selves, a plural they. I was yesterday’s me.

I fasten each button on the blue flannel.

Assuming I live to see tomorrow (and if you’re listening to this, I have, or, at least, someone has) I’ll be tomorrow’s, too.

I open my grey vest to see the scars. I walk offset.

“Cavar::Sarah” appears.

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unexpected joy jessi eoin

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unraveling latine tender transness: behind dali valentino’s viral vaquero costume dali valentino interviewed by sg huerta

How did you get started with creating art? I know you work in a bunch of different mediums.

I’ve been into art since I was a little kid and I never stopped. Growing up poor, my Abuelita used supplies from the dollar tree; we made things out of paper from baskets to frames. She sewed blouses, skirts to aprons with lace and embroidery.

She taught me that I could make anything out of everyday materials. That stuck with me—I like making things.

Creating original designs is very new to me; in the world of cosplay, everything is fanart. I’ve been focusing on the Trans Mexican art I want to see in the world. The light bulb went off: “Holy shit! I can make that myself!” I did not expect the first thing I made to actually skyrocket. Apparently I’m not the only one who wanted more of this.

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Wait, that was the first original design you made?

Yes! Surprisingly enough, I’ve sewn over 120 cosplays, but when it came to doing an original design, nothing. This is the first one that I was like, I'm gonna do the same things I do with costumes, but actually bring my OWN concept to life. It was a whole new level of self fulfillment I’ve never reached before.

I definitely do want to talk about the Tender Trans Cowboy costume because I actually saw the tweet circulating and thought, “This is the coolest thing ever” before we even connected!

Do you want to talk about the creative process for that?

There was not a lot of representation growing up, especially for Trans Latine cultures. It broke my heart. In my childhood, because of assimilation, I drew a lot of white characters, and realized, “Why am I doing this? Why am I not representing my own people?” I'm just gonna have to do it myself like I do with everything else.

Western aesthetics, brands, and lifestyles have been whitewashed for so long. How much a part of [Western culture] is from people of color that was just taken. Like “chaps” are from “chaparreras,” and “lassos” from “lazo,” a lot of stuff was just mispronunciations of how to pronounce it in Spanish. My grandparents were rancheros from Mexico so it’s like this culture that I could have been a part of and I could have learned is separated to me because of the aspect of being queer and assimilation in the US.

The irony is, I never really cared for the Western genre until I started seeing queer musicians and then I wondered, “Why aren’t there more?”

When I started researching it, there’s a handful of published books out there talking about how vaqueros are the original cowboys. How so many Indigenous, Mexicans, and POC in general were such a big part of the Western culture in the US. They were demonized quickly and characterized as the “bad guy” from racist stereotypes because of a famous cowboy Western show that went on tour across the country.

I did an art show in Seattle last year at Friday Afternoon Tea for Hispanic Heritage Month. My theme focused on Latine Trans Joy and Queer Euphoria. The first piece I did was a trans masc farmer posing next to some sunflowers and it clicked immediately. That started this big snowball effect and became my muse. I needed to be the Tender Trans Cowboy.

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Is there anything specifically about vaquero culture you try to highlight in your work?

Social media will focus solely on the skinny conventionally attractive white people in the LGBT world. For BIPOC it’s painfully clear how much we aren’t appreciated. We want to be seen, adored, feel hot in our body. While the general public wants to erase our very existence or fetishize us. Somehow through it all we are starting to find each other. We deserve to take up the spotlight. We will survive and we will thrive.

During the pandemic and presenting male in the workplace, my Mexican male coworkers embraced me with open arms while women were suddenly hostile. It was a shock from what I grew up with. My uncles rarely showed affection, never cried, were never tender, would never express their feelings. Toxic Maschismo has prevented men from having communities for so long. My theme is to embrace that tenderness that is desperately needed here. It’s what irritated me when some people tried to pick apart the wording for the back of my costume. No, I chose tender first. I want it to be known that masculine presenting people can be tender.

That’s the amazing thing of [the costume] going viral. I found a lot of people and artists who I looked up to following me now. It made my day to be seen back by the people I adored. To be seen in my fullest self and recognized, acknowledged for it as amazing.

I think that’s probably why you went viral, because I remember seeing that before we connected and thinking, oh my gosh, this is the thing I’ve been wanting to see but didn’t know it. I think it’s a beautiful thing.

When you search up “vaquero men’s clothing,” “cowboy clothing,” “Mexican men's clothing,” it’s always muted. Why aren’t we more colorful? Men and masculine folks deserve to be more expressive, so a lot of [making the costume] was to combat toxic masculinity. To be flamboyant and proud.

I intend to work with a lot of POC friends and not involve any white people with it. I want to show that there’s so much more of us out there that are queer and trans and trying to embrace our culture. I have so many trans masc folks who are rejected by the cis men in their family, and we have to define manliness. That’s what being trans is, finding the aspects of your gender that you didn’t grow up with. Transforming masculinity and making it your own. This outfit is the start of a series, a project highlighting the power of self representation while taking back Western culture.

Do you have any other thoughts on the lack of Latine and trans masc rep?

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I’m often asked why I write, and I feel like I don’t have a good answer other than the fact that I can’t not do it, so I’m just curious how survival plays into your process for art and for costumes.

I’ve been in survival mode for so long. In college I had to drop out because of homophobia from my family. I had no systems of support anymore. I was completely alone. I’m a very social person and made a lot of friends at events. I’m an open book and people would ask me about my family, and I would mention I was cut out for being queer. So many quickly said they’re my family now. People outside the LGBT community don’t realize how common queer kids not being accepted by their family is until they meet one. I would just be open about that, I had no shame in it, because, well, I’m happy. I was so depressed when I wasn’t open and now I’m really fucking happy. I just needed help.

We need community more now than ever.

Having support systems in person is so fucking vital to our survival.

Costumes are another extension of my art. I want to focus on the love and effort that goes into a lot of the vaquero world. I want to be able to integrate my Mexican pride into everything I do.

Thanks to my friends commissioning me for art I was able to get by. Creating is just a part of my mental health. I can’t imagine my life without it. I have an amazing support system of friends who enjoy my art and helped me survive.

I’ve had a few people ask, “Oh, can I draw this outfit with this character?” I reply with I need you to understand that this is a very personal costume.

This is a part of me, a celebration of who I am.

What fuels your work now?

I started thinking about where I want my art to go, what I will be proud of in 10 or 20 years from now. I want to create visual novel games. I want to make art for book covers and work with trans authors. I want to do illustrations for YA books, I want to make a graphic novel. I have a lot bubbling in my mind and if you follow my socials, you’ll get to see what I’m up to.

Our queer culture is there, it’s just been swept under the rug and not talked about because of homophobia and transphobia. We’ve always existed, and I hope with my work I can bring to light more history of us proudly being ourselves. I hope I can inspire other BIPOC and trans Latine folks to feel seen and loved.

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m a e t l e s o s

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these boots were made for walkin’ james daniels

It began, as far too few love affairs do, in the dusty upstairs of a local vintage shop with a friend. We caught sight of each other at the same moment, and I brushed past a rack of denim jackets and another of jeans to lay my hands on what were destined to become my first pair of cowboy boots.

The leather was cracked and dry with age, the heels worn smooth by use. I had no money with me and hardly wanted to even try them on. I tried to zero in on their flaws, to see where the leather was peeling, where the shoe was coming away from the sole slightly. My friend/fairy godmother insisted I give them a shot. What were all my cowboy-themed poems and tattoos for if I wouldn’t even try on this pair of boots clearly positioned here by fate?

I had never before felt so powerful. I knew I couldn’t leave the shop without those boots, fixeruppers as they were. My fairy godmother swooped in with her purse and the words that cement so many friendships: ‘you can get me back.’

Yet for a long time after that, I only wore those boots in my room. I came down from my euphoric high and realised none of my clothes really went with cowboy boots. I realised my family were bound to laugh. I realised the leather was drier than my skin gets in the winter and flaking almost as badly. I realised I was afraid of standing out in a bad way. I wasn’t confident enough to debut those boots to the rest of the world without making sure their staging, the lighting, their make-up was perfect. So I wore them only in my room and them gave copious massages with fancy leather conditioners. In an embarrassing and obvious metaphor for myself, I hid them away because I was afraid they would be

As soon as I took a step in them, I was in love. I wasn’t saving myself, I’d enjoyed footwear before –but never like this. I could have spent all day pacing back and forth across those floorboards, weaving between racks of velvet, lace, and denim.

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seen and deemed imperfect.

slightest, my date said: ‘you know, you sound like you’re wearing high heels.’

I did some growing up here and some glowing up there. I accepted that perfection is a moving finish line and that some source of my discomfort with my appearance has always really been about my discomfort with my assigned gender. I cut my hair and varied my wardrobe and purchased my first binder. I went to my first Pride event and met a man there who accepted my identity and was still attracted to me.

But then he told me that thousands of years ago, the butchers of Ancient Egypt wore high heels so they could step over all the blood and animal carcasses. And I remembered that high heels used to be an indicator of class, not gender. And I remembered that my uncle still had a pair of platform shoes in his attic from being a teenager in the 70s. Not so very long ago at all. And I thought of all the brave men who wear heels now, and all the men who don’t want wearing heels now to make them brave, and how a cowboy could live his whole life with earth or barn-dance floorboards underfoot and never know that in the city he would sound the same as a woman in a pencil-skirt business suit and stilettos striding to a board meeting. And I was so glad of the evening and the man beside me and those boots, because they reminded me once again how important it is to dress for yourself and not for other people. I walked the streets of London noisily, and I felt seen, and imperfect, and powerful. Just a cowboy in the city – but I am excited now to wear them other places.

A few months later, we went to London to attend a country music concert together. I felt it would be wrong not to wear my cowboy boots. Finally, the perfect occasion for their long-delayed debut. I gave them the works the morning of the concert: conditioner massage, left to stand, careful polish and finish up with a good brush. They looked better than when I first laid eyes on them. I was so caught up in the boots that I ran out of time to consider the rest of my outfit and ended up throwing on a pair of jeans, my binder, and a checked shirt. So at least I’m living up to some stereotypes.

I felt powerful walking through the house, and I felt purposeful striding to the train station. I felt smart and sexy sitting on the train with my date.

And then we got off the train. And then the clopping noise made by my heeled boots became extremely conspicuous compared to his silent steps. And I was suddenly aware of how much shorter I was, even in heels, and how much more feminine my bare face was next to him and his beard, and how my first binder wasn’t the most suppressive binder out there. I didn’t feel powerful, I felt stupid. In my head, I became a freak tottering about on stilettos that weren’t enough to hide how bad I was at being my assigned gender. I was quiet. As if he couldn’t read my mind in the

After all, these boots were made for walkin’ – and not in circles in your bedroom.

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recalling mother sajah francesca

My love for ballroom women surpasses the love a child has for their own mother, for without these women, I could have never been conceived.

My Mother found me years after I was born, stuck in a liminal tavern of mental static and physical torment. She showed me how beautiful life could be if I shoved it in a stiletto and strutted down busy streets.

The feeling of a blistered ankle still burns, rubbed raw from all the grating, but nothing beats the feeling of seeing your own poised legs in the mirror of a public bathroom, decorated by a pair of pumps.

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My Mother sat me before her and beat into me the knowledge that my existence happens under a blazing bright spotlight.

She pounded her palms into my clavicle and screamed that I have to fight to be the man that others are scared to be, because of other men. She stabbed, slashed me then told me to stand up and walk: The world is waiting for the imprint of your sole; you must step forward unafraid, Heel. Toe. Heel. Toe.

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ode to doc martens fiammetta gianni

I’ve always had issues with shoes.

the shoe shops on the high street with my usual glare. How dare all these shoes that don’t fit me exist, I thought, drowning in dramatic teen angst.

Due to the clubfoot shape of my feet they were always too small on my ankles or too wide around my toes. They were too stiff for me to try on, and when I finally squeezed them onto my poor, tired feet they would be too arched, too flat, just . . . too much.

I don’t remember what caught my eye at first, maybe it was the bright Doc Martens sign.

And then I saw them.

And it was not just one sort of shoe either; boots, trainers, flats, and heels all fell short in some way, making stumbling all the easier than it normally would be. All very disheartening really. My mobility issues were one thing. Hitting my teenage years and leaving behind a cemetery of unused shoes instead of the seemingly never ending footwear carousel my peers rotated through was isolating in a hidden way.

Calling out to me in the way only a real soulmate can.

Grey and black from a distance, at a closer look I saw a pattern of roses and thorns. Looking up at the marketing above it I read, clear as day: “made of canvas.”

That was all I needed to rush inside as fast as my chronically tired feet would carry me, and my mom swiftly followed with relief that I was finally interested in some new shoes. The trying on process went by in a flash, but I remember the feeling of them fitting, confidently able to tell the employee who helped me that I wanted to wear

No one thought of shoes that deeply. They didn’t have to.

This changed in the early spring of 2015.

I walked the streets of my hometown side-eying 88

them immediately. A rare moment.

"of my immortal shoes began to shatter, the moment I remembered my mum's question desperately wishing I had said yes.

Soon I was back on the main road with the new boots on. I walked a few paces in them and looked in the shop windows. It was then that I heard my mum’s voice.

“Are those SKULLS??”

Indeed they were, and they now looked so much cooler! Maybe in another life I would have been a fully fledged goth.

The other extremely vivid memory from that day was my mum asking me if I wanted two pairs, as they were half off. I said no, I was sure they would last me 10 billion years. And in a way they have, they have been there for what feels like a lifetime: changing schools, family structures falling apart, meeting my best friend, that same best friend becoming my partner a few years later.

They’ve been at the beach with me, protecting me from the fiery sands in August. They have walked on different roads all over Europe.

of my immortal shoes began to shatter, the moment I remembered my mum's question desperately wishing I had said yes.

A silent but reliable friend. My sensible, goth shoes. I was always so proud of them.

I am still very proud of them.

Over the following weeks and months, long after I’d replaced the laces, I began researching past Doc Marten collections and eBay, desperately wishing they would turn up. I was ready to spend more money on them than I would ever on any other pair.

Seven years on, as the shoes began to show their age, the looks from people began to change.

“Are you still wearing those?” “Do you have no other shoes?”

No one thinks about shoes that deeply, I told myself. But I did.

The answer to the latter is no, not in any way that matters anyway.

My prospects were growing weak, and pressure from family to wear “comfy-looking” shoes when what they really meant was “respectable” was

I first noticed the change around three years ago: the laces began to fray. And that is how the myth

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growing more intense by the day. And it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the gestures of my family trying to convince me to choose new Docs for various birthdays and Christmases. So why was I appearing so indifferent to new shoes?

I tried it last year and found a gorgeous pair in soft leather with iridescent lace loops. And unused they have remained for an entire year.

I did use them for the first time this week, as my old ones are gradually giving up on big trips. And I suppose that is fair. They have been with me through so many stages of my life. It would also be fair for them to take one last trip with me before they go under my bed forever: I am getting my first walking stick this month, and I want them with me when I do.

Same reason as always, really. I was scared. I associated trying new shoes with physical pain and sensory nightmares and embarrassment. They often don’t fit on the first try, and sometimes you get little socks to try shoes on with and when that doesn’t work and return the shoes you tried on you’ve just wasted the employee’s time.

No one thinks about shoes this deeply, true. But it is hard to forget your first solemate.

The obvious solution is to buy online then, right?

There is still the possibility they might not fit, but overall not as overwhelming as a shop.

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sleeping bag socks abbie goldberg All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people in this essay.

Despite being from Maine I have always hated the cold, so it was somewhat of an odd choice when nearly ten years ago I decided to spend six months living on the unceded territory of the Unist’ot’en people (located in what is also known as northern so-called British Columbia) in the middle of the winter. They had put out a call for allies to help protect their ancestral homeland from several proposed pipelines – projects that would devastate the natural environment and impede upon the Unist’ot’en people’s access to the land. Feeling depressed about the climate crisis and disillusioned by the local campaigns I was working on, I decided to go.

When you’re living in the snow, the most important rule is to never work in your sleeping bag socks. Your sleeping bag socks are the softest pair you have, fuzzy, ideally covered in a fun pattern, maybe even an animal on the toe. You can wear them if you’re lounging about on an off day, or when you’re going to sleep, but you can’t work in these socks because they are sacred.

When the days are long and your arms are sore from chopping wood or shoveling snow, you will need something to hold onto, something to work towards. Some days that will be revolution, but some days that will be your sleeping bag socks.

To get to Unist’ot’en Camp you must drive over an hour from Houston, BC through the winding, bumpy logging roads until you reach the Wedzin Kwah, a fierce glacial river. There you will find a bridge which you can only cross with consent from a member of the Wet’suwet’en community (Unist’ot’en is a clan of the Wet’suwet’en). Shortly after I arrived there was a colossal snowstorm leaving the logging roads completely covered. For the next three months the only way in or out of the camp was by snowmobile.

Beyond that, you can’t work in your sleeping bag socks because it’s not practical. They don’t have the moisture wicking properties of your base layer (likely long underwear made from a layered polyester mix). They are not made of scratchy wool so they can’t keep you warm if they get wet.

The mornings are so cold and your sleeping bag socks are so soft you won’t want to take them off, but you have to. If you try to work in your sleeping bag socks your feet will get wet and once you get wet, that’s when things get dangerous.

There was a small group of us there for those winter months, including other settler allies like

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myself, Indigenous allies, and Wet’suwet’en elders.

At 19 I was the youngest of the bunch, most of the other allies were in their mid to late twenties. We worried about undercover cops, and secret recording devices so we didn’t share personal information. Instead we got to know each other through astrology, work styles, and favorite oatmeal toppings. Living in such intense conditions brought us together quickly with no need for backstories.

Walking the trapline takes hours of strenuous hiking over hills and down steep embankments, collecting martens, and resetting traps as you go.

That winter it snowed so much that every week we struggled to break a new path, sinking down into the fresh fluff even in our snowshoes. We ate big breakfasts on trapline days, putting moose meat in our oatmeal so we wouldn’t have to stop and eat on the trail where our human scent could linger and frighten the animals away. We didn’t carry more than we needed and we left early in the morning to assure we’d make it back before 1 dark.

There was Lauren who had been coming to support the Unist’ot’en people for years by then, Camille who was quiet, but, if you asked, could tell you about dozens of different potato species, Ethan who kept a hand carved spoon and a titanium mug clipped to his belt. There was Josh who brewed matcha each morning, and Kai who always beat me at cards, and Marie, a proud gemini. There was River who I kissed one night in a snowbank beneath the full moon. We were a small group, but solid.

One day, all the Wet’suwet’en elders went out on the land to work on various projects, leaving the allies behind to manage the base camp. I stayed back with most of the group to do the daily chores while the others set out for the trapline. They got a bit of a late start, but it was a sunny day so we didn’t worry much. We chopped wood, hauled water, kept the fire going, kept community, kept alive.

Most days were simple: each task contributed directly to our survival. We chopped wood, hauled water, kept the fire going, cooked food, washed dishes, shoveled snow off the roofs to keep them from falling in. In the evenings we played dominos and Fleetwood Mac on guitar around the fire. We kept community and we kept alive.

At some point the clouds began to flatten and fill up with darkness, but around them the sky was still bright. We worried, but only a little. We cooked food, washed dishes, shoveled snow off the roofs to keep them from falling in. Surely the rest of the group would appear over the hill on their snowmobile any minute and we would all sit together for steaming bear meat chili and bannock. We went back to our tasks. We kept community, kept alive.

Twice a week some of us would ride the snowmobiles miles out into the forest to walk the trapline. Trapping animals is an important cultural practice for the Wet'suwet'en, a way they connect to the land and monitor its health. Additionally, selling skins is part of the legal strategy to assert and prove “aboriginal title” by demonstrating that they depend on this territory for ancestral practices carried out since time immemorial.

As night fell and the darkness seeped from the flattened clouds through the rest of the sky we got worried for real.

When the clouds started leaking the fast and heavy

1 In 2019, several years after the events of this essay, Coastal GasLink bulldozed through the heart of an important trapline.

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snowflakes that had been flattening them, then we got scared.

some water on the fire for tea and hot chocolate, make sure the walkie stays on and charged, I’m going to go get some dry clothes for when they get back. We’ll hang them by the fire so they’re extra warm.”

A call came over the walkie talkie, “The snowmobile just broke down and Camille is getting cold. Like… really cold.” The night wasn’t one of the coldest, but that made it worse. The snowflakes were wet and melted as they landed on just warm enough bodies. It isn’t the cold that gets you, it’s being wet and not being able to dry off. If you can’t dry off, you can’t warm up.

About 30 minutes later Ethan’s voice came through the walkie, still panicked, but this time embarrassed. “They’re out by the 11 km mark but…. we just made it to the 7 km mark. We ran out of fuel… I forgot to check the snowmobile for fuel.”

You have to take precautions on the trapline. You wear your wicking base layer, you take off your heaviest jacket before you walk, no matter how much you want to keep it on, but it’s a grueling day and inevitably you work up a sweat. Between the sweat, and the dark, and the snow, the situation for Camille was becoming extremely dangerous.

Lauren filled a thermos with the water we’d been boiling, Marie packed some food, and I bundled up the extra layers we’d been gathering before Ethan split. Then we checked the last remaining snowmobile for fuel and set off.

In the days to follow we would have lots of conversations processing the near disaster. We would talk about our various responses to crisis, where they came from, and how they worked.

We would talk about gender dynamics, ingrained white supremacy culture, and how Ethan’s sense of urgency ended up preventing us from reaching Camille and the rest of the group sooner. We would talk about power, and trust, and snowmobile fuel. But not that night. That night we ate steaming bear meat chili and bannock. We sat around the fire playing dominos and Fleetwood Mac on guitar. We all changed into dry clothes, and curled up in our sleeping bags and each other’s arms, grateful we had kept community. We had kept alive.

Ethan leapt up racing wildly around the bunkhouse, dropping one glove as he looked for the other. “We need to go right away! Josh, get the snowmobile ready! We’re going! We’ve got this!”

“Hold on,” Lauren interrupted his panicked flurry.

“Let’s just take a second and make sure we have a real plan.” Lauren had already been around that winter for several months. It was Ethan’s first visit, but he had a burly beard, a hat that made him look like a park ranger, and a hand carved spoon clipped to his belt.

“Every second counts! This is life or death! We need to MOVE!” Ethan lunged for a half empty water bottle and sped off before anyone could object.

Later I asked Camille how she had felt that night, shaking in the cold, wet from the falling snow. “I was scared.” She said. “But I really couldn’t think about that. I couldn’t think about how long it would take for someone to come get us, or what

Lauren shook her head and stayed calm. “Put

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would have happened if the snowmobile had broken down before the walkie talkie was in range or if we would need to spend the night out there. All I could think was eventually I’m going to get to put dry socks on and that’s going to be the best feeling in the world.”

the world I have been dreaming about is possible.

Not only that, but there are moments of refuge, cracks in the world order, where it is already here.

If I can recognize, celebrate, share, and create these moments then I am less likely to lose myself to despair and more prepared to keep fighting. I am less likely to be held hostage in inaction by my own failure to imagine just how wonderful this world could really be. After all, if these moments are already possible, what else is already possible?

In many ways my frenzied move across the continent to join a struggle I’d only read about on the internet was a lot more like Ethan’s frantic rescue mission than Lauren’s prudent strategizing.

When I decided to go in the first place it was because I felt like everything that was happening around me was too small. I wanted to feel like I was doing something that mattered, I wanted to save the world. I relate to Ethan’s instinct to drop everything and drive into a snowstorm on a snowmobile with no gas.

Sometimes these flashes of realized liberation are big and dramatic, like successfully keeping the police off the land after a tense showdown, or getting everyone safely home in a snowmobile rescue mission. More often I feel possibility in softer moments – Wet’suwet’en elders sharing ancient traditions like walking the trapline, and new ones like using moose meat to make savory oatmeal; guitar jams after a day of incredible stress, and guitar jams after a day when nothing much has happened at all; thanking the martens as we remove them from the traps for skinning, making mistakes and helping each other process them with compassion, getting into snowball fights while shoveling cabin rooftops.

But if I’ve taken anything from those months on Unist’ot’en land it’s that the stakes are much too high to burn ourselves out in spectacular acts of ego-driven martyrdom. We have to build up structures of community and care to keep fighting for the long haul. We have to strategize with intention and focus on taking care of each other if we want to survive.

And of course, I feel possibility in sleeping bag socks, laid lovingly next to the fire by a friend so they’ll be perfectly warm when you need them.

After a day of fear, and cold, and uncertainty, putting on dry socks really is the best feeling in the world.

After the snow melted, we began construction on a Healing Center which since 2015 has helped Wet’suwet’en community members address the traumas of colonization through culturally-safe care and access to ancestral traditions and language. The Unist’ot’en people are not just fighting against the capitalist, colonial fossil fuel industry, they are building the world they need directly in its path.

To learn more about or donate to Unist’ot’en Camp please visit https://unistoten.camp

These days, as I try to build community and fight for justice where I am, that is what I hold onto: the feeling I had on Unist’ot’en land of knowing that

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sry thomas hobohm I came to this world quite confused because the two flags looked the same. Quite confused because I wanted to top in a dress and high heels. Quite confused because they wanted a bottom cop sailor super soldier. Still I played my part, stepped inside the Eagle where my family beat in and out of me, daddies demanded I chomp cigarettes, eat, boy, but actually daddy, not a boy, and actually daddy it didn’t work, I got high off the nicotine and now it’s a pack a day all over the bay. My body is a map they stick pushpins in, so that now it all just leaks out—do you want to see? I have a video. I have so many holes and still I need more. I picture myself with just one extra hole and I get so wet. That’s my ugly secret. A guy on Grindr figured me out, said, “im just not into fem guy sry” “who said I was fem??” “u have long hair” I hope his dick falls off tonight.

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pink skechers geyl wells

The August I was eighteen and freshly in university, my mother took me to a small shoe outlet. There, I found the pair of shoes that both healed a small part of my inner child and gave me my first taste of gender euphoria before I even knew I wasn’t cis.

I pointed to me being on the spectrum, but because I was socialized as a girl—and “only boys were autistic”—those signs were almost entirely ignored. For example, my sensory issues with garments impeded my everyday life tremendously.

Let me explain.

In fourth grade, I wore a blue polo shirt and khaki shorts every day. Every. Single. Day. When my mother asked me to wear tights or leggings, I would collapse on the floor in tears and violently itch at my skin. No long sleeves, even in winter. I lied about wearing underwear because the seams cut into my bottom. I suffered panic-attack-like meltdowns if the fabric of my socks was not pulled tightly enough around my toes. If they didn’t feel right, I screamed and kicked the back of my mother’s seat on the car ride to school.

Growing up in the early aughts in Dallas, Texas, being diagnosed with autism was the last thing any parent wanted for their child. This was the era of only talking about Asperger’s–– we couldn’t even say autism, but instead used a socially acceptable ASD-adjacent diagnosis coined by a Nazi doctor to justify neurodivergent behavioral patterns. As if that was so much easier to stomach.

Because my parents didn’t know common misconceptions about autism were even misconceptions, I was treated like an allistic child: bright, creative, talented. Underneath the mask, a second hidden self was trying to fight her way out. Specifically in primary school, many signs

I grew up knowing that feminine clothing involved fabrics and textures that hurt my skin: tulle, sequins, lace, elastic. Clothes marketed for girls felt tight, vibrant, and colorful, drawing too

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much attention to my tall, baby-fat-covered body.

Because of this, I opted for more androgynous looks. My hair, too, was often chopped into a short bob, ending above the nape of my neck.

During children’s early development, every act of self-expression, every performance of gender— both chosen and forced upon children—plays a part in who they become later. In my case, fashion never felt like an affordance I was given as a child, but rather, a privilege to be earned. How well I could fake being comfortable in my own body.

How well I could hide my hatred for neon colors and open-toed shoes. Not only did my sensory issues play a major part in what I could handle wearing, but my plus-size body and detached relationship to femininity were major factors that I considered each day when I stood before the mirror and wished to be someone different but wasn’t exactly sure why I hated myself so much.

wear whatever I wanted, which made my morning routine tenfold more difficult. I had meltdowns when I felt dysphoric, left weeping when outfits I set out the night before looked nothing like I pictured in my head; however, over time, my mother gave me more freedom to choose my own clothes. With this freedom, I learned what fabrics made me feel safe and cozy. I wore comfortable shoes and, oftentimes, baggy clothes to hide my body and the bad posture I acquired from being a tall girl insecure about her height. Rather than the world creating avenues for me to feel beautiful as well as safe, I chose to feel drab in the safety of my cotton and fleece cocoon.

Up until this year, I did not even consider the possibility that I was autistic. I thought everyone waged war on their wardrobes, department stores tags, the entire fashion world for that matter, in the same ways I did.

—

—

In class, church, and on play dates, I grew up feeling alien from other children, watching myself from outside my own body struggling to interact with them. While I was loud and boisterous at home, I sat silent in classrooms, afraid I’d be “found out” long before I even knew what I was hiding. I’d hyper fixate on tasks like reading a book under the desk or grammar lessons to ignore my fellow classmates. Now, I realize that my neurodivergence played a part in my gender dysphoria and that alien feeling in my gut. The strict rules and constructs of gender pushed on us as children in Texas made no sense to me. I wanted to wear comfy “boy” clothes intended for roughhousing. I wanted to play the dad in our make-believe games of House. I wanted to kiss girls on the cheek and protect them.

— Once I moved to Arizona in fifth grade, I got to

Flash forward to 2019, when I walk into the Tennessee shoe store. In college I perpetually felt like a girl cross-dressing as a girl; I wore bright red eyeshadow up to my brows and socks with frills around the ankles (although I eventually got over my sock issue, I still refuse to wear underwear and tight shirt sleeves) forcing myself outside of my comfort zone in order to reinvent myself and, hopefully—finally—fit in.

At the store, I was combing the aisles for something prairie-chic or cottagecore, a pair of Oxfords, something—anything—to go with my long, floor-sweeping skirts. I came across a pair of pink Skechers with embroidered flowers. Their glittery, silver seams and chunky laces made me shriek in excitement. I tried them on at once, and although my toes were hitting the tip of the toe box, I loved them more than any shoe I’d ever

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set foot in. In fact, their snugness was a perk, as they made my size nine feet feel suddenly shrunken.

girls. I miss the girlhood I never had access to. Yet, this yearning makes me feel like an imposter in a narrative that should have been mine in the first place. I blame my own brain for gatekeeping girlhood from a body that craved to connect with something larger than itself.

Imagining what outfits I could pair them with, I walked up and down the aisles searching for my mom, who had walked off. She laughed when she saw me. She refused to buy them for me on account they were childish and “not me;” however, being the stubborn youngest child I am, I bought them for myself and wore them constantly.

What I know now is that neurodivergent people should not be made to feel like less of ourselves because of our gender presentation, a presentation largely decided by allistic fashion designers who don't take sensory issues into consideration when producing clothes. This failure to recognize our needs often pushes us to wear clothes we may not totally feel ourselves in. This conformity is not our true selves, but rather, a means of survival.

A boy in my religious studies class thought I had them custom-made, which to me, was the highest compliment. My boyfriend’s grandmother has the same pair, and when she visits from New Jersey, I wear them to flatter her. Other than that, they’ve never garnered much attention, which, for so long, was what I thought I wanted. I wanted to be seen as feminine, girl-like. Petite, and young, and fragile. But over the last four years, I’ve come to think of them as a secret I hold with myself. An offering, a promise, a prayer.

Ultimately, gender is a performance, and as a neurodivergent person, I’ve been masking my whole life. At the very least, I owe it to myself to play the role I’ve always wanted to. So, I wear fistfuls of rings and short skirts and knee socks. I grew my hair out, bleached it, chopped it off, and grew it out again. I hold this secret desire for girlhood between the spaces of my rib cage, close to my heart. I bought the pink fucking Skechers. I buy pink everything.

— Now that I’m an adult with 21 years of gender conditioning under my belt, I yearn to be soft and protected in the ways I often tried to treat other

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rainbow platform crocs migel wilson

There are very few things that better encapsulate my queer identity than my platform, rainbow (knockoff) crocs. Like my gender identity, I have arguably found even more joy from these shoes because they were not something I could have ever fathomed into existence. They are a gift that I have had to grow into and my winding journey to them matters to me just as much as their simple existence.

people began to ask “what” I was; I now so desperately wish to pose the same question to them. However, in the moment, stunned and emotionally raw, I played by their rules and foolishly found myself justifying the very reason for my existence.

Perhaps, it was forgetting to not walk a certain way or talk a certain way, but my inability to fit within whatever box everyone seemed to perfectly fit in left me with one unspoken truth: I must not matter. If I can’t fit in, it must mean I have done something terribly wrong. It never was those words exactly—I was never that blunt with myself. I think it might be worse though, to tiptoe around such a subject, and to tear yourself down in little ways. I grew older and pushed away from the thought of expressing myself. My body was no longer a vessel for the creative, beautiful spirit within me. I wore baggy clothes and sneakers till holes bore through their tops and sides.

We talk of “bliss,” how our worries fade away and life at once seems worth living. In my dictionary, right next to those five letters, I see my feet sliding into my crocs for the first time. I can count the years of my crocs journey, but I think counting the places and faces between would do a better job of showing just how far I have come. My youth was something I took far too seriously. The worry of surveillance and peering eyes kept me from ever really feeling comfortable in my skin.

Looking back, I can see how physically I shrunk myself, so as to not draw too much attention. Yet, my true self would scratch its way to the surface once in a while. My cover was blown when

Judith Halberstam’s queer temporality, or the idea that queer individuals do not exist along the same

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life paths of our cis-heteronormative peers, is very real. It is more than rejecting timelines that state we should settle down and procreate. I see it as the nurturing of what never was, and learning to love that “now” is even better. I often hear of people wishing they had started exploring their gender sooner. Such thinking does not serve us, but if the shoes fits for you, so be it. I know for certain that my gender journey is more than simply switching on a lightbulb and finally deciding to walk in the light. In today’s cruel world, we need however long it takes to stumble in the dark; whatever it means to feel safe.

myself to resent them or to permanently cast them away. My guess is that it is because, again, I have drawn a connection to my gender. Being queer has exposed me to plenty of struggles. It can be hard being the first embodiment of “different” for people. For myself, I strain to find elders, and in my experience, respect, love, and sexuality often are not found in the same room. Being tokenized is often the price I have to pay to be seen and touched. My body simply does not exist within many people’s understandings. Yet, like my crocs, I exist. I endure. Most importantly, I have fun and it shows.

I had to go to countless thrift stores before I found my crocs. It took other less exciting shoes to open my heart and mind to even thinking that I could put on such beasts. I wear them now and I see all the days of telling myself to be smaller and I have no choice now but to be taller. I love that they are mine, down to the jibbitz (yes, one of them is Peppa Pig); little treasures that were given to me by my dear cousin. I am not sure she fully grasps what they mean to me. They are her support forever encapsulated and now I carry them with me around the world.

Slowly but surely, I am learning I don’t have to play by the gender binary’s exclusionary rules. I can fall more madly in love with myself and enjoy my time with friends and family and learn what it means to be safe—truly safe. I could make a joke about pulling my crocs’ straps down, but they broke off a while ago. Perhaps, it’s the universe telling me that I do not have to be scared anymore. I can run and jump, so long as I know I’m also staying true to myself and the little me that could have never thought to be so tall and so loud. I hope everyone gets to feel that someday. I hope everyone finds their rainbow, platform crocs.

My crocs were my shoe of choice as I trekked through Albania. I cannot think of a louder shoe to wear as a Black person in a country where Blackness is something far from normal. I wore my crocs with my dresses, while my crotch bulged and I smiled because I knew I looked really cool. It does not matter where I go, I know I am the future beyond even my own wildest dreams and I love being the person that brings people pause. I need not open my mouth to make others think and that is some powerful, queer juju.

Even as my (fake) platform crocs send me flat on my face every once in a while, I cannot bring

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the stiletto poem: a ‘sharpened’ duplex andy winter

In the hands of a queen, a poem is a stiletto.

My poems are stiletto nails growing like crystal claws in the dark. I crystallised my glowing heart into a sharp object.

I love playing with sharp objects, feeling the edges where a word or line break cuts deep. Wordlessly edging, I bring all the bad boys to heel.

What makes a good heel?

Nothing less than eight inches Nothing more powerful in chess than a queen & her middle finger to fate.

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r h e t a e d l ( p s i ) r t

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burlesque justice tylyn johnson

Zest pervades the onlookers of the queen, lounging on his throne of gold.

Yes, he slays. Draped in black silk, leaving one leg exposed, except something hides between those regal legs, untucked only for his man.

With blood-bottomed heels, he stands up to applause, patting his ebony locs. The vogue of his performance finally arrived, after years of fear under the weight of a world that casted him as a creature of the unholy.

The practices this queen had done in the closet had prepared him to share with the world this love that he knew might never be realized.

Raring to become what he knew he was, the moonlight in the dark. A queen of the night. Of the downpour that would finally, finally, pave the way for his people to stand under that rainbow one day.

Owning that stage, he rolled his body under that dress, narrating a song with his body as his lips mirrored the lyrics with nary a sound.

Meeting the crowd halfway, this queen finally felt something glow in that chest of his.

Liberated, queerness without all the fear. Happy, a soul that had grown light. Blowing kisses to his starstruck people, he curtsies for them, their screams, their dollar bills.

Just as the end of his show nears, he speaks to his temporary subjects “I won’t tell you to not hate, honies,” he says, “Cause I know that I hate plenty of things too; bigotry, ignorance, disrespect, stupidity.

Girls, the list goes on. But do me a favor, and spread a little love.” This queen, long known as fruity, a fag, a flower, a fairy, a pansy, struts past those that once dismissed him.

Easily working heels that would steal the life of another away, he damns his opposition. The hell they tried to drag him to would have to wait, ‘cause he still had to rule his people, to decree that love would continue to be spread.

Because that is what this very moment was for. And in the end, another rebellion was brought to its end, the queen and his people safe still.

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black man: femininity and fluidity tylyn johnson

For a single moment, I inhabit the altar of Black femininity, with my silhouette dressed in the spotlight, and a dress embracing my frame with all the love I spent a lifetime rejecting.

My heels bring me a little closer to a heaven I’m not sure I believe in yet, though my feet burn like hell.

My face has become a canvas of a woman’s making, a painting come to life, and upon my lips rests a song I had long known, but had finally started mastering.

This burden of magic felt heavy at first, but I soon stopped feeling its weight.

My soul had long left my body during the performance, so I retreat backstage as my friends in the crowd scream for an encore, now I can hear my heartbeat, and as it dies down my mind goes elsewhere.

I am reminded of when I first started to seriously toy with my own femininity as a man, with strutting in heels and draping finery over this body I tend to call pitiful, of how the first people to make me feel beautiful and worthy were the Black girls I went to high school with.

They showed me I could be beautiful, that I could inherit divinity for just a moment in time.

Sometimes, I think my mother doesn’t believe that a man can be beautiful or holy, that I will never be able to inhabit neither beauty nor holiness as I am.

And history and her experiences validate that.

Even if she never disapproves of how softness flows from these Black lips, I still remember the conversations we would have after I first came out to her as gay, how she’d say that gay men act effeminate, like women, for attention.

And you know, maybe that’s true, but is there something wrong with wanting to be in the spotlight after being relegated to the shadows, the background, the closet, for so long?

Should I cease this part of my journey of existence to be a “real man?”

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I sometimes want to ask her if she thinks my queerness deserves to manifest itself in femininity, but why would I ask the divine if I may reach inside myself for paradise, when she has already preached to me that it is up to me to craft my own holy throne?

After all, she birthed me full of love to survive even the hatred of a cruel reality, so I gather all that love in my hands as I define my own worthiness, and although this world may not approve, I sit before this metaphysical altar, allowing a lush heritage of femme Black royalty to reign over me as man.

And so in those moments where I become queenly, where I smile in the mirror and profess my scars to be jewels upon my skin, I recognize; as man, queen, or anybody in-between or outside that binary, I will face a constant criticism even as tens of hundreds of people would uplift me, for my daring to reach an existence culminating at the intersection of allure and heaven threatens those who know only of a status quo.

Who would rather pluck the soft flower of Blackness from this world as if it were a weed, or better yet, to trample such a graceful living thing.

Who would demean sweetness in masculinity to be a poisonous fruit, hoping to drag a fag through brimstone and fire misread from ancient scriptures, as if a nigga ain’t a person at they core.

All I can do is let them claim that I am the most unnatural thing since God made women, because if we are so unnatural in queerness, then the feminine sex are simply otherworldly beings, and this is true, for only a goddess may sanctify this land with rainbows after the April showers have frozen over the winter, breathing color into a world long seen in grays and faded greens.

And is it such a sin for a man to wish to aspire to be like a goddess?

Is it so wrong to wash myself in my melanin, and in my soul’s rainbows, in order to ascend into a gorgeous kind of paradise?

What is so wrong with wanting to deliver myself away from toxic masculinity, out of monotony, so that I can be reborn into a colorfully free existence?

All so that I can live with the fluidity of water clear enough for us to see every color, a life forged from artistry and expression and performance, divinely beautiful.

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chemise mikki rios

my costumer cinches my corset/leaves me a gasping hourglass / then fastens me into my new old dress / a historically accurate garment / somehow / also my future / dyed a stone fruit at its perfect summer ripeness / adorned with eggplants and peaches along the ruffled hem / suddenly i transform / i’m a cupcake on a tiered tower at high tea / a powder puff on an immaculate vanity / the hairpin resembling flowers in a woman’s chignon / i feel like a poof/a floating/something airy and trembling with power / like this i could whisk across a dance floor / have an ornate necklace clasped at my nape / glittering across my décolletage / i feel in motion / the pleats are fins or wings or dandelion spores on a zephyr / i could step over anyone with my legs this long / and they’d thank me/my presence is so soft / i could go anywhere / talk to anyone/looking them in the eye / divine feminine confection / this bitch looks good / i am aloft

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ode to adult akech’s walk for jacquemus mikki rios

her stride is sinewy and seamless yet each step snapshots a deliberate animation sequence of perfect illustrations emerging with each gesture a bird of paradise scarlet and magenta with clementine pop the beat paces itself to her motions when i say she ticked joints and rippled like a macaw hovered off the ground a hummingbird poured through space as a snake does i mean the primordial divine where birds and serpents are deities living atop entire sacred towers or sleeping sprawled across immense lake-beds i mean she evoked something lush and jade without wearing any green a falling leaf mille feuille set in tree resin that walk kept going long after you couldn’t see it with your eyes

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chemise a la cottagecore mikki rios & elizabeth kumaki

The cut of the gown in this series became famous in the western world in a 1783 portrait of Marie Antoinette by Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun. While it was already well known in certain oppressed cultures, the portrait of Antoinette saddled this garment with the moniker “chemise a la reine” or “chemise of the queen” which would serve to connect the dress, Antionette, and a comparison to the chemise (an undergarment) for more than two hundred years.

which had to be imported to France and was likely coming from the work of enslaved people in what is now the US or subjugated people in India.

Antoinette popularized this cut of dress in European culture when she started wearing them to vacation at her country houses (which were entirely ornamental and designed to look like rural villages). She liked to pretend she was a simple country shepherdess, but the inspiration likely came from fashionable and practical hot weather churchgoing and socializing dresses worn by free and enslaved creole women living in Haiti, better known as the “robe a la creole” (but this is also a French term and thus also outsider nomenclature).

It is notable that the dress was made from cotton

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The “cottagecore” aesthetic has much in common with the history of the robe a la creole in that it is an expensive and shipping-heavy colonial appropriation of an idealized working-class “pastoral” lifestyle. Cottagecore fashion and photography is meant to transport the viewer to an apocryphal cottage where a fresh baked pie cools on the windowsill as stew bubbles on the hearth, fresh cut flowers arranged jauntily in a mason jar rest on a wooden table, and beautiful women in spotless aprons delicately hold teacups with soft, manicured fingers without a speck of dirt beneath their nails. The only ants at their daily picnics in the sun live within the whimsical embroidery on their linen napkins. The horses shovel out their own stalls lest they get a speck of dirt on the cottage owner’s neatly pressed overalls.

It doesn’t matter that the clothes were all made from polyester in a sweatshop for a drop shipping company and sent thousands if not hundreds of thousands of miles to be worn once in a photo by their final recipient and then discarded to live on for centuries in a landfill and millennia as microplastics. Cottagecore, like the chemise a la reine, is about fantasy first and foremost.

The use of harsh urban backgrounds with small pockets of vegetation in the photos of this “chemise a la cottagecore” was intended to intensify the theme of disconnect with nature as an active experience in favor of connection to it as an aesthetic. The plants serve as props and set and the structured but unmanicured look of the municipal vegetation reflects the artificial intentions of cottagecore’s faux pastorality. This uncanny connection to a perfected and digitized version of nature is reinforced with the intentional clash of seasons. The dress itself is a spring gown but is presented in a summer resort color palette and decorated with images of summer produce.

The set is decorated with pumpkins and fall foliage. The images are disconnected from any real experience of pastoral life while also displaying many of the main themes of cottagecore.

This garment was both stitched by hand and on a vintage Singer. Over twelve meters of cotton voile were dip dyed by hand using RIT dyes, stamped with peaches and eggplants using Speedball fabric ink, and gathered down into a wearable gown meant to evoke the fresh and fruity “farmer’s market” aesthetics of cottagecore while still largely staying true to the original pattern for the robe a la creole. Each line of gathers is fully adjustable using drawstrings allowing for a comfortable fit over many different types of undergarments ranging from drag padding to a basic slip or bare skin. This particular shoot features minimal padding but a strong, corseted understructure.

We approached the design and drag styling of the garment to be less in line with “female impersonation” but instead in connection with the larger, more fluid drag tradition of simultaneously honoring and parodying ideas from art, history, fashion and current trends. The hat is massive because it’s both more elevated and comedic that

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way. The shoes are tottering, towering lucite heels precisely because they’re impractical and unrealistic for any outdoor activity, a touch of contemporary drag aesthetics sneaking in. The wig is a dusty rose hair color that’s decidedly 2020s for the same reason. Peaches and eggplants were our chosen stamps because they reference sexually —and specifically queer—coded emoji. Everything is intended to be both backward and forward looking, always winking and nodding at every point that can be linked to other ideas. Something so self-aware, so detail oriented, that it’s new and entirely unencumbered fun.

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u t r e a s e f

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start with your own style: aja barber on sustainable fashion interviewed by addie tsai

I first came to know you on Twitter, and in the short time I’ve been aware of your work, I’ve already learned so much about not only fast fashion, but also the tensions and pushback you’ve gotten from others. Could you start by introducing yourself, and telling us a bit about how you got into this work?

donation systems to the point where we are now dumping unwanted clothes on people in the global South who don’t need them or want them.

The entire system is a mess.

For those who don’t have expendable income, what are some simple steps you suggest in quitting fast fashion and embracing ethical clothing habits?

AB: I’m a writer who deals in sustainability and all it’s intersections. I also constantly invite people to re evaluate the ways in which they consume.

Step 1: Always figure out your personal style. Fast fashion capitalizes on telling you what you should be wearing instead of you deciding for yourself.

Figuring out what it is that you like means you make fewer mistakes when it comes to purchasing fewer clothes. But I tell people one way to lessen the impact of the system is to buy a couple of items second hand every year. I do this on sites like Vestiaire Collective and eBay. You don’t have to change your style just because you’re changing your ways. I look for brands I already know I love, which makes it so much easier plus you save money. I love nabbing a bargain on something I couldn’t afford a few years ago.

What is fast fashion and why is it so harmful?

Fast fashion is clothing churned out rapidly (often in large quantities) with no consideration of the environment or the humans who make the clothes. It’s harmful because it takes a large environmental toll on the health of our planet while mistreating millions of people mostly in the global South. Because the churn of fast fashion is SO fast and constant, it means we the consumer are discarding and donating our clothes at a far higher rate than before. We've overloaded 112

On the other hand, I’m assuming that just because a clothing item is expensive doesn’t make it sustainable. How does one ensure that who they’re buying from isn’t contributing to the problem?

Who are your favorite sustainable indie designers right now that you think people need to know more about? We’d love especially to hear about designers who offer clothes for bodies not typically designed for, such as fat and disabled folks.

I would say the question that cuts through all the BS is to ask the clothing brand if everyone who makes the clothes is paid fair wages. The high street dances around this question because there’s no way they can ensure this. But smaller brands can usually tell you exactly who made your clothes and in what conditions. Plus you get to buy some really unique items. Smaller brands are the way forward for buying new clothes.

I do a line with my Lora Gene which brings me a lot of joy.

Let’s talk SHEIN. Tell our readers what makes buying from them so harmful, and any other popular fast fashion brands our readers should consider divesting from.

A lot of fast fashion brands you see on the high street have the same bad practices you see with Shein. Low paid workers in abusive situations. It’s why so many brands can price clothing so incredibly low. The price of clothing is artificially suppressed because there’s a lot of exploitation that’s been happening for a long time. What makes Shein scarier is the churn. The clothing they produce is five times that of your H&M and your Zara’s which means their footprint is huge and their waste ... will be everyone’s problem.

Additionally the company is very murky and evades accountability and when that happens that’s how you end up with lead clothes. It’s just a general mess. Avoid! Avoid kids!

Tell us more about how race and racism is a part of the problems you see in the fashion industry.

From start to finish the fashion industry is built off the labor of brown and Black people. From chattel slavery, which made it easier to produce clothing because of the quick production of cotton to British colonialism and the East India Company, which was all about disrupting the cotton trade which made India a super power. Additionally today raw materials are produced in non white countries in the global South. The labor to produce the clothing comes from non white countries in the global South. And when we are done with our clothing it gets dumped right back on non white countries in the global South.

In a perfect world, what’s the fashion world you envision? How would it need to change?

The fashion world I envision is one where small, ethical brands are praised above all and given equal footing on the mainstage. This way the bigger brands would feel challenged to rise to the occasion.

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This is a queer magazine, so, if you’re willing to share, we’d love to know the BIG THREE on your chart: sun, moon, and rising.

Ohmigod, am I a bad queer if I don’t know?

(Laughs nervously)

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dan clay (aka carrie dragshaw) offers ten bajillion ways to becoming a queen interviewed by addie tsai

Can you tell me about your relationship to Sex and the City, how you got interested in it? I just want to hear everything related to that world.

You want to hear how a Halloween costume literally changed my life? So I came to Sex and the City quite late. I almost was dragged there. I first watched it as a sophomore in college at Northwestern. I had HBO in the fraternity room I was living in. A bunch of girls wanted to watch the season finale of Sex and the City. Because I was embodying a particular type of man, I pretended to hate it. They were watching it, and I was rolling my eyes. Oh, this woefully feminine show.

Inside, I was, like, Oh my god! This woman is fabulous! That was my first exposure. It was years before I found it again, when I moved to New York. As luck would have it, I moved into an apartment on Perry Street, which is the street her apartment is on in the show. I had a friend come visit, and she was like, Oh, I can’t believe you live on Carrie Bradshaw’s street! I said,

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Oh, I’ve never seen the show. We stopped everything and started watching the show. Honestly, those first few episodes, which I watched when I was single and first dating in New York, felt like a documentary. This is my life. These are my relationships I have with guys. These are the friendships I have. It felt so real. I have a much smaller apartment, and a smaller shoe budget. But, aside from that. [laughs] Once I actually watched it, it was love at first viewing. I was such a Carrie intimately. Her faults are very similar to my own faults. Her strengths are similar to my strengths.

Her passions are similar to my passions. Just had so much superficially in common. I’ve always dreamed of dressing up like her for Halloween.

But it took quite a while to muster up the courage to wear a tutu. Because even when I was younger, I thought coming out was a moment. And then you’re out. And then it’s all over. But it’s been so gradual for me in terms of coming out and coming into embracing all the different sides of myself. It was a long time before I was confident enough to wear a tutu for Halloween. But then the Halloween of 2016 I dressed like Carrie. It was this very special moment for me. I think so much in my head of seeing [the show] in my frat room when I was so not even close to out of the closet to just finally feeling confident enough to do something I had always wanted to do. It was such a fun day. I took a ton of pictures with my friends.

I posted one on Instagram. Not even once did the thought cross my mind that it would be anything other than something my friends would see, how we post for Halloween. I went out that night. I didn’t even bring my phone because I didn’t have a purse. I didn’t want to ruin my perfect outfit. It really was so perfect. I went to Patricia Field for the tutu. I tried on 18 different tank tops to make sure I got the perfect one. I can’t walk around with a tote bag! I just went footloose and fancy free.

Then I got home the next morning and my phone exploded.

Oh my God. In a way I still don’t understand how it happened.

It was just crazy. Opening it and seeing comments in foreign languages and comments from HBO and Sarah Jessica Parker. It made me so happy.

The next day I posted another Halloween picture.

No one started following. Tongue in cheek kind of thing, remember how I went viral yesterday?

That one went crazy also. It was right toward the end of the Hilary Clinton / Donald Trump presidential race. The internet was this dark intense place. I thought maybe it’s an opportunity to 1) have fun and not overanalyze every single decision I make and 2) spread a little bit of love and sunshine into the world. That’s how Carrie Dragshaw was born. I want to keep

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doing this. It’s making people happy. I seem to have been given a gift from the algorithm gods and it’s reaching a bunch of people. I kept doing it, always thinking I’d do three or four more outfits. That was seven years ago.

or watching an episode, Oh, I’ve never done that.

When it was growing, just asking people. What can I wear next?

So, I know a little bit about what it takes to do this thing. I’m wondering if these [posts] were moments where you said, I remember that outfit that Carrie was wearing in x episode, or do you go online and search and become inspired? How does it work going from that to the DIY part? How much of [what you wear] is stuff you already have, and how much do you have to go out and find online, etc?

It’s such a passionate little community. Everybody had their own favorites. When I was doing it a ton, I would mix outfits that would take a ton of work with outfits that were a little bit easier, to manage my sanity. I had precisely zero drag and/or sartorial skills when I began.

Oh that’s so cute!

So this is the beginning of your drag?

Very very beginning. So I had no idea what I was doing. But it was kind of part of the fun for me, just learning as I go. Oh, fuck, she has a smoky eye in this one? How am I gonna do a smoky eye?

And just trying. Meeting proper drag queens throughout who gave me indispensable drag mother type guidance, Oh, that’s how you’re … ?

No, you gotta do this. All of these things you

By now, it’s all of the above. When I first started, it was my top favorite looks, the outfits I so remembered and instantly connected to. I think any Sex and the City fan has a running list of their favorite looks. But then as I kept going, it was more searching,

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It’s so fun. I still feel so grateful for the happenstance that created it all because it has led to so much connection. There’s so many pluses and minuses to social media. I feel so grateful I have this oasis of positivity and connection with people over this really fun show.

Who’s taking the photos? You also do this really amazing mirroring of the actual shot. I know how hard that is to accomplish.

In the beginning, it was just any friend I could convince to come over. In the very beginning, I was a little bit—we all have our own things. One of my things is asking for help. There was a period in between when it was a Halloween costume and it was a thing where I was just—even my friends are gonna think I’m absolutely out of my mind—so for the first few pictures, I hired a TaskRabbit.

just don’t acquire in your daily life.

Which is kind of like that scene in your forthcoming novel, Becoming a Queen, where they go to the party, and the drag queens help Mark out. [Laughing]

[laughing] I love that so much.

Yes, exactly. That was definitely inspired by my connection to a few queens. I think my favorite part is the captions. My favorite part about the DIY of it is that feeling of—there’s no way I’m gonna be able to imitate this $90,000 Versace gown. There’s just no way. Then you take it bit by bit. How can I get something that looks like the thing she’s wearing on top? What might embody the layers that she has? Bit by bit. It’s become so rewarding. At the time that it started, and still, I had a very professional career. So it’s such a different part of my brain to be using which is so exciting. There’s such an escape when you’re trying to learn something brand new to you. The world is falling apart, but I gotta learn to put fake eyelashes on. That is my task right now.

What did you tell them they were doing?

DC: Once they get to my apartment they won’t be able to say no or else they’ll be homophobic.

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I need a photographer for a few hours. It was so weird. I wouldn’t even acknowledge it. I pretended it was the most normal thing in the world. I didn’t acknowledge I was in bad drag.

Total commitment.

One was the bandeau top and the cowboy hat. It’s such an out there outfit. It had to be outside. Okay, follow me. [AT laughs] We went to this park. The very beginning was touch and go. Once it got energy people wanted to take them. It’s so fun. I have a bunch of friends who just

enjoyed the creativity of taking the pictures.

writing. I write for my professional career and I wanted to explore more of it. One of the rules I made for myself was no drag without writing. I can’t just do tutu Tuesday and post a cute picture of drag. It all has to have some sort of message, which was related to the time it was coming out. I don’t want this to just be silly. I want everyone to get a giggle, a thought, and a boost.

Now I’m curious, what is your sun sign?

Cancer.

Oh, Cancer. Interesting. I’m a Virgo and I definitely relate to trying to ask people for help is the worst.

That’s so sweet.

It’s hard. Part of this has helped me with that. You ask for help and you realize the limits of your capabilities. Asking for help is what then allows it to expand and other people get to have fun with it, too. Goes from being this isolated project to being something that connects me with my friends, too, and meeting new people. There are so many outfits. Now I think, that’s the one where my friend taught me how to sew inside the Dolce & Gabbana robe, and that’s the one where my friend came over and taught me how to make a flower out of coat hangers. Each one has a little personal story for me, which is so fun to go back on.

The outfit is so cute, fine. I also want a little bit of a thought, and have everything to end with positivity because it was such an intense time.

Carrie Dragshaw is not gonna have any thoughts on the G20 summits. [Both laugh.] All of that is obviously important. I wanted to be very clear about my role in the online landscape. So I made this list of rules for myself. Then I watched 15 episodes of Sex and the City back to back to back.

Documented how Carrie writes. What are the clues that would make it sound like Carrie. I made

Tell me about the evolution of the captions, and about how the captions are and are not what we see on Sex and the City.

After the second picture, which was still from the first night, I decided that if I’m going to continue doing this, I was going to make a list of rules for myself. One was that I had to do whatever it took for people to not think it was a parody because it was so important for me to have it feel like a project of love and admiration and adoration and respect because I love the character. There are so many amazing sides of drag. Some of it is exaggerating and some of it is reading. This has to feel like a project of love. The other side for me was at the time I was starting to think about

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this spreadsheet of rules. Multiple questions in a row. Obviously I couldn’t help but wonder.

Transitioning from her individual experience into Maybe all women are. Never making declarative statements. I think there’s something so brilliant about the show in that it invites you in. One of the reasons it’s so rewatchable is her monologues are just so many structural things that just—maybe all of us are—has you lean in, nod your head, have your own thought. I wanted to rewrite Carrie a little bit because though I do have a lot in common with Carrie, I also thankfully have a little bit of a firmer grip on things. [Both laugh.] What if I accentuated the Carrie characteristics that I love—that fierce independence, not so needy on guys, not depending on the ebbs and flows of men’s attention for her self esteem? So I remade Carrie Dragshaw to accentuate the Carrie I wanted to push into the world. I’ve stayed very true to that original intention of a giggle, a thought, and a boost.

I love that, that’s so good.

I’ve never ended without a boost. Even when I wanted to, when I’ve been going through my own things. They’re all so autobiographical.

When I reread them, I think, Oh yeah, that’s when I was ghosted by that guy, that’s when I almost got a book deal but didn’t. They’re just all thinly veiled memoir. It’s been an amazing exercise for me because I have a lot of the self-reflection that Carrie has that can be a virtue and a vice. The fact that I have to force myself out of it, and in the moment reflect on it, What is the lesson? How would I advise someone to move on from ghosting?, has been really helpful for me. Creating this character that has the confidence I wish I had has given me that confidence. It’s been a very drawn out therapy for me that hopefully has added a little light to other people’s lives.

Was this the first time you dressed in drag your whole life?

More or less. I lived in DC and this was before RuPaul’s Drag Race—there was something called the Drag Race. I forget what street it was down but it was a race of drag queens. That was the first time I’d ever actually done drag. I did it with my friends and it was so much fun. It really lit me up.

But I wasn’t ready to ever do it again. One year for Christmas I was Eight Maids a Milking. I was a really snatched maid. I loved it but never wanted to be the one to do it. Carrie was the first time I was the instigator. Even that year for Halloween, my friends had a group costume idea. Oh, join our group costume. And I said, I’m gonna do my own thing.

Tell me how meeting Sarah Jessica Parker happened.

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One, it was totally wild. From the very beginning, she was so kind. One of the reasons I continued doing it. I can’t remember when, but maybe three or four pictures in, she started following me. I can’t go back—

I was wondering about this.

One of the only things I regret is how impossible it was to enjoy the lead-up to that because I was so terrified. It was everything. When a car slams on the brakes and the luggage comes forward. You’re going to be on TV, in drag. Not just drag, but silly. Every insecurity. I’m gonna be on TV in the most public way possible embodying everything that’s ever made me insecure in my life. And then just the fear of not being a good drag queen. My wigs aren’t that good. My makeup isn’t that good.

On Instagram it’s fun and DIY but they told me who the other drag queens were, and they’re amazing drag queens. Drag queens I go see in the city, so I was terrified of that. And then, there was a ton of fear around, how they say, don’t meet your icons. She’s not gonna make the connection that this Carrie Dragshaw is the same person she follows on Instagram. Or she’s gonna see me and be this diva and it’s gonna be really crushing.

—You can’t stop now. [laughing] —to posting pictures of my nephew or posting thirst traps. I’m in the presence of an icon here. It was pretty unbelievable for this regular person.

From the beginning, there was this burst of publicity. A lot of it is just timing. A lot of articles about the one bright spot of 2016. It was just a very love-and-sunshine kind of thing. All of them were SJP approved, the headline of everything. Her support in the beginning is 100% the reason it took on the life it did. Throughout her career she has provided so much joy for me. Then she would write these messages that this was providing joy for her. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it.

For me celebrities lived in a different sphere of existence so the idea that she was connected to them was … and then she mentioned the account in an interview somewhere. Oh my god, she really knows what’s going on. Then I get this very casual Facebook message from someone who worked on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live: Hey, we’re having Sarah Jessica Parker on the show, would you be interested in coming on?

[Both laugh] Would I be interested? I would give my left arm.

So I called. Yeah, we’re gonna do this pageant of drag queens impersonating her. I thought maybe you could do the Sex and the City one. Maybe?! It was so crazy. Then the joy. And then instantly, debilitating fear.

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So so so afraid. Then the show started. I walked out and her eye contact. I’ve never had eye contact like this before.

She was selling her shoes in Houston. I couldn’t afford the shoes but I went there to see her. She spent intensely intimate time with every single person. You did not feel like she was rushing them.

That was one of the lessons I took away from the experience. When you’re really famous, there’s this swirl of people everywhere you go. It was interesting observing it because it’s so not my world. There’s somebody who opens the door for you, somebody who drives you. Every single person she interacted with, she gave them this moment. She even talked to the friend that came with me. She was just so kind. In an instant, it was this acknowledgment of everything. It meant so so so so much to me.

I noticed she interrupted the moment to talk about the Instagram account— The no drag without writing! She mentioned the writing which was so meaningful to me. I even had this whole existential crisis about changing the name of the account. When it started growing, people were like, you have to change the name to Carrie Dragshaw. I went to do it and I couldn’t do it because yes, obviously this is a character, but it was also far and away the most authentic thing I had ever done in my entire life. If anything I should change my name to Carrie Dragshaw.

but everything that’s being said is something I wished I had the courage to say as myself. Even having her—not at all in an ego way —say my name. She was extremely kind. I’m relatively put together. But after the show, I was such a rollercoaster of nerves and emotions. As the show was ending, she said, Wait for me. So I stayed. I thought she meant, Just wait, don’t go anywhere. So I’m standing behind the bar on the show. This person is like, It’s over. You have to go. [laughing] All of this is what I would be doing.

Sarah Jessica Parker said to wait!

It’s not a persona.

So I’m not doing anything else.

It is more me than anything I’ve ever been. The captions have the guise of talking like Carrie

So I can’t go anywhere? [Both laugh.] Then I went backstage and she was so unbelievably kind.

I was word vomiting about the manicure I

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got and how I had to draw marker on my wig to make highlights. I was just talking talking talking talking and not saying a thing, and she was so so so so extravagantly kind. It really was the best day of my life for so many reasons. It was such an embodiment of all my insecurities and a validation of them. I had my best friend there. I knew I wouldn’t be able to articulate myself so I wrote a note beforehand, this is what I actually want to say to you. It just meant the world to me. You should meet your heroes, if your hero is Sarah Jessica Parker.

What do you do as your day hustle? How did you get from that life to Carrie Dragshaw to your debut novel, Becoming a Queen? What was the evolution? that way, that’s when I started exploring writing stuff longer than a caption, in a trajillion different directions. Oh, maybe memoir or maybe a Carrie-length thing. Just experimented. It was so fun. I’m sure you feel this in your creative pursuits.

My career is so structured and so much of life is structured that it was amazing just trying things and seeing what was working and what wasn’t. It started to feel like it might be a thing I really wanted to do seriously. I started taking online classes, how do you structure a book? I’d recently graduated from business school. I’m not going back to school. Still paying off the loans from the previous one. Done with undergrad, done with business school. So I can’t actually go to school.

Same way you can learn online how to do a smoky eye, you can learn online how to structure a chapter, how to transition. The fiction side was really lighting me up that some of the experimentation wasn’t. Then I went to a course called Highlights. An in-person school where there were teachers and published authors.

I think one of the late-in-life lessons I’ve learned is that while growing, you’re asked, what do you want to be growing up? As if there’s one thing.

Right now I’m five things. You can actually be them all. My career for 13 years, and still, is I work at a brand agency called Lippincott. I also consult for this climate change nonprofit that started inside Lippincott. It was basically operating from the realization that climate change has a brand problem. Even people who care about it don’t prioritize it in their voting. So it’s an ad agency for climate change. I work for that a little bit, and obviously Carrie. It was very very clear from the first message I ever got very early on in Carrie where the writing, and connecting to people through the writing, as people began to tell me how it inspired them, was such a uniquely rewarding feeling. It was so saucepan-to-the-sideof-the face obvious that this is what you want to do. This is what makes your heart sing. So for a while it was just, channel that into Carrie. Then the more I got excited about Carrie and about the captions and about connecting with people in

It’s such an amazing program. The same way that

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Carrie Dragshaw did, it changed my life completely. It introduced me to people that didn’t know anything about the Instagram world and didn’t know me. My mom was saying I was a good writer, but I’m not sure she’s an objective audience. I took this novel workshop and the other participants would say it was clear the novel as a whole wasn’t good. But it was also clear parts were. Okay, well if I can write that part, then I just have to do that 900 more times. Having strangers validate it, saying, okay, you can do this. You just have to keep learning, keep trying. I met a publisher who gave me a list of agents who she thought would be relevant for the type of thing I was trying to write. I got a suggestion from someone in the literary world about Young Adult and I was really inspired by that because a big part of Carrie was thinking it would be so cool to help people skip past the completely unnecessary years of shame. Can they, really? I don’t know. I just wasted so much energy hating parts of me. It was a total waste. I did not need to do that. I don’t think everyone does it. With Carrie and with this young adult book, I could get there earlier. Adults are pretty set. I loved the idea of getting to people a little bit earlier because, Lord knows, I hope school is a little different now than when I was there. But not that different.

[laughing] He’s just totally in his own way so much so that it’s not believable. There are tons of ways he’s different from me, also, but a lot of his insecurities are insecurities I’ve had. A lot of his drag journey and experience and being so tentative are so oneto-one with my experience and even his [spoiler alert] name, the fact that I didn’t want to change my Instagram.

—I love that part! And the friends are trying very hard to give him something more fabulous than a regular dude name.

They’d all grown up with Drag Race so they expected a certain amount of pizzazz. Hopefully I’m not as debilitatingly interior as he is but I probably am.

What about relationship patterns in terms of how he—

I usually hate the how autobiographical is your novel question, but given your particular journey … I mean, Mark does end up creating this social media project that comes from his personal experience [with loss]. How much of Mark, the protagonist of Becoming a Queen, is you?

So much of him is me to the point where there were rounds of editing where people would make comments about Mark and it’s like, Oh my god, that is a lesson I need to learn for myself.

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Definitely the guy he starts with. That was cathartic to write.

[Both laugh] It’s definitely the guy. I remember one time me and my friend—we didn’t get dumped, because it wasn’t enough to have it be dumped, but we were spurned by the same guy. We were like, are ten guys doing this to everyone? It’s like there’s just a few guys we’re all going after. One of the things I was trying to capture in the beginning of that book is that when you’re young is that if you’re in a place that doesn’t have many queer people, you connect with the other one. [laughing] A scarcity issue.

It’s the only other one that you see. Or it’s what your fantasies are leading you towards. In really beautiful ways the guy he ultimately connects with I’ve been so fortunate in my own life to have boyfriends who are similar, just the prototype of loving, selfless, kind, truly showing you what it is to be loved. That character was also in a beautiful way a collection of really wonderful amazing relationships I’ve had throughout my life. That’s one area I’ve strayed from Carrie Bradshaw’s past.

[Both laugh.] I’m confident in my own worth so I think that does lead me to men who are a bit more Ezra than John. Carrie really didn’t have anyone.

You don’t even know what it was like!

Girls were losing their minds because she looks at the phone and it’s from John.

We’ve waited how many years for this name?

Not even Big was either. I still cannot handle that his name was John the entire time.

There but for the grace of John go I. [AT laughs.] I hope to imbue my Carrie with the confidence of Season 2 Carrie, the smoking, I-don’t-need-noman Carrie.

That was the first episode I saw.

The outfits are much wilder.

Totally. She has a DIY aesthetic almost in the early days and then they get that Dior budget.

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the solution to the problem, not the problem.

That’s where the drag comes in for me. There are countless books about coming to love yourself but I wanted his to be the B plotline to the A plotline of the family because even the drag of it all for me has been a source of healing for so many things that had nothing to do with drag. There’s just something magical that seems to happen when you start loving your full self. It starts healing things you didn’t even think had anything to do with your identity. It becomes this allencompassing helper.

It’s interesting because when I first wanted to interview you—I’ve been obsessed with you for a while—but then I saw you had a novel coming out, I thought, THIS IS MY IN!—I hadn’t read the novel yet. I didn’t realize at the time how perfectly the novel would fit with the theme of this issue, which is SURVIVE. Not just what drag does for Mark, but that what he’s actually using it to heal and recover from is literal survival for his mental health, for trying to move forward.

I don’t want to give away the spoiler, but I’m wondering if this cataclysmic event that happens for Mark’s family [which involves alcohol abuse] that changes not just his entire life but his understanding of the kind of family he was sitting in, was always a part of Becoming a Queen?

Yes. His family and his friendships. One of the arcs I wanted to draw was that I think when you start to love yourself you become more generous with yourself also. When you’re in a really tough spot, you think, am I lovable? It makes it hard to reach out to others because you’re so in yourself and one of the things I wanted to do is show him become a more magnanimous person as he becomes more in touch with his fullness. There’s this line of reasoning from people who are antitrans, anti-LGBTQ, that a lot of our choices in life come from a place of selfishness. They hear it as, I want you to use my pronouns because I’m exerting my power over you. They’re obviously only applying their own mental condition to our existence. I think when you start loving yourself

It was the origin for me, more than the drag. It was for very specific personal reasons that this story shows how a family recovers from this because so many families are affected, whether it’s alcohol or opioids. Any addiction. But how? That was the driving question for me. How do we?

Countless people do. How could you possibly?

Whether it’s an ongoing thing or an ending thing. There are so many beautiful books about recovering from your identity. Coming to terms with yourself, loving your special self. I want to write something where his LGBTQ identity was

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and embracing yourself, it’s the opposite. You open yourself up for more connection and I hope that comes across with his family relationships, his boyfriends. There are moments where I do think, Oh my god, Mark, there are other people in the world!

right thing when they’re doing it. One of the beautiful things about trying to write anything is to get in that mindset where you recall when you reflect on someone’s decision, oh this is the wrong way to handle this, but in the moment of writing the character, you say, I get it. I get why you would want to shield your kid from this atrocity but that causes an even bigger trauma for the kid.

Get it together! [Both laugh.] One of the things I love about Becoming a Queen, especially for YA, is how you push against ideas of the normal and abnormal family. Mark believes he has this typically healthy family until this loss disrupts that. Then you have his boyfriend Ezra, who is seen as having this pretty dysfunctional, fractured family and it’s almost because of that he’s more able to cope with conflict than Mark is initially. I really love that for teenagers because one reason I like to write YA is—I grew up with Judy Blume, who I love—but I feel there’s this whole world of YA always depicting the family as a kid with parents who are married, nobody ever fights. I do think in those normative families it’s when unexpected conflicts arise that it blows up the idea of how healthy or unhealthy we are. We’re all some version of the same thing.

The brother bond in Becoming a Queen is so beautiful. I love that he’s very affirming in his new understanding of Mark’s sexuality and in trying to help Mark figure out how to correct his dating faux-pas and woo a suitor.

There’s this funny meme online: Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre straight white man.

Can I try to give him that confidence to the point of trying to skip past some of these years of shamethis? What do I wish I would have been telling myself at that age? This doesn’t have to be that hard. You’re awesome. It’s definitely my favorite relationship in the book.

The moment that caused the most anxiety was when they have the makeup dance outside and Mark said, I can’t do this. I was so glad that scene is short. I can’t take this! They really just break up and this is it for too many pages?

One of the things you learn as you get older is that every family has stuff. Exactly to your point I think some of the families that have the hardest time dealing with things are the ones holding on to a certain identity—we’re this kind of family—and it prevents you from actually addressing issues head-on.

By now, as a writer, you know, I’ve read it 18,000 times and I say, I’m going to be able to get through this chapter without crying. But it didn’t happen.

One of the joys of writing is, in order to write halfway believable characters, you have to embody their mindset. It was so expanding for me to try to think about why a parent would hide something like this. It’s obviously out of love or protection. Everyone thinks they’re doing the

I cried so much reading this book.

I really wanted to capture the kindness—when he goes to—can’t be CVS because they don’t sell cigarettes.

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—Walgreens.

Do you have a favorite designer?

Yes. [Laughs] The geography is the same as the town I grew up in. I can’t make up a town. I’m learning too much. When I was a kid, CVS sold cigarettes! But I wanted to show how beautiful someone’s spirit can be and how generous just getting a light, those human connections.

Oh great question. Do I? Probably Comme des Garcon.

They do such wild stuff.

Wild stuff. My personal style looks expected and then you get up close and it’s a twist? And Comme does a ton of stuff like that. Oh it’s a blazer—wait, it’s a skirt? They play with form and I have so much fun in my own life with clothes and just experimenting and expressing.

That tension with the stories of the brother he wants to hold that still involve alcohol.

Anyone who’s gone through any difficult thing, you always want to be fixed before you’re fixed.

You always think you should be fixed before you’re fixed. You feel ridiculous that years and years after you’re still holding on to things. Of course you are! The main thing I wanted to do with the book was be in it. What kind of book do you want to write? There are so many where something awful happens. Now we’re in part 2 three years later and we’re still dealing with it. I wanted to go into the awfulness of it. How do we get out of this? We do it with dresses.[Laughs] I knew I’d found the right agent when there were certain parts, even the most soul-crushing parts, the most this is too much parts—he was like, this should be longer. I’ve got the right person.

Throughout your writing journey you’ll meet people who want to amp up the romance side, move this forward, etc. But it was really important for me that the cataclysmic event is almost pathologically important but also that it be exactly in the middle. I’m a pretty directed person and then something just happens, and it just blows up.

Favorite—this is more a Carrie Dragshaw question—cosmetic product?

My overall takeaway is it is insanely expensive to be a person who regularly wears makeup. I got by at the start with the generosity of friends. The first night I did my makeup one of my girlfriends did it and she said, oh take this, take this, take this, and sent me home with a ton of products. When those ran out, I went to Sephora and got foundation or something. I looked at the price and was like, Pardon me? I’m glad I am impersonating a woman of the fresh face. [Sarah Jessica Parker] obviously wears makeup but it’s relatively simple because I don’t think I would ever have the skills to contour.

My thoughts on makeup are less about favorite brands and more just respect for how people do it.

The tips I got from drag queens I’ve met along the way have been really helpful. But mine is pretty lazy.

What is the most life-saving tip a drag queen has given you?

I have a few more fun questions.

Oh I love it! This is so rewarding for me.

I was at a party with Milk and I was really selfconscious about something. I wasn’t even in drag.

I was just articulating insecurities for reasons

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nobody really knows. I said that I wasn’t very good at makeup and I wasn’t wearing nails and you’re not really a drag queen unless you wear nails. She said to me it’s what you want it to be.

Your drag is your drag. If nails aren’t part of it, then they aren’t. The moment that I light up is so simple: any time I put on blush, I think, now I’m a pretty girl! I love it so much.

York or anywhere you have people expressing themselves. There are ten bajillion ways to be a queen. There’s the conventional beautiful drag queens. There’s the Bushwick bearded queens.

There’s the fashion queens. There’s just people living their life not performing queens. That gave me more confidence to just be. You try different things. Now it’s this steady source of joy. You get people reaching out, help me with this. There were things where I was in what was literally an unbelievable oh my god I can’t believe I’m in this beautiful piece of clothing and it didn’t feel right. Oh no. Me in actual dress isn’t my drag. It just wasn’t it for me. Redid it in my own DIY way with a ten-dollar fabric from Walmart and a flower I found from a garbage can. I’m a flower-in-agarbage-can drag queen. You find out what you actually are.

I love that. I personally think that one of the most powerful things about Carrie Dragshaw is that it doesn’t feel like this over-perfected, produced drag. I imagine part of what’s made it so acceleratingly popular is that it feels like anyone could do it. When you see drag queens, first of all, I couldn’t do it, and secondly, the idea of the hours I would have to spend to do it just stresses me out.

Totally. I am obsessed with drag queens and I love them and worship them and the minimal drag that I do, I’ve learned that whatever you’re tipping drag queens it’s not enough. You’re dancing while you’re tucking. It’s totally insane. There’s this thing they do on Drag Race sometimes where they do quick drag. They only have twenty minutes. I’m like constant quick drag. Then I’ll spend ten hours on my Couldn’t help but wonder thing. So I think we all have things we don’t have patience for and things we do have patience for.

Your drag is your drag. I like that I’m still visible.

It means something to me that I’m still there. I’ve always wanted it to look like a guy who’s just scrounging things in his apartment and trying to embody his favorite character.

As Dan, what’s your favorite fit to wear?

Out and about? I would say probably this Nike Ricard Tisci collaboration piece I own. It’s a black mesh pleated long skirt and then I wear that with exercise tights and some sort of blazer on top. One of my favorite things with clothes is that – I don’t even like masc/femme – it’s all everything – the conventional pairing. A muscle tee with a skirt. I like that butch queen tension so that’s my thing.

Something skirt-esque on the bottom and something manly on the top is what I feel most inspired.

I was sending a picture of you to my co-editor and I said to her in a text, this look is so hot to me.

Where you wear a tutu and your muscly arms are showing.

It doesn’t have to be a stage performance or lip sync. You don’t have to know how to sass in a queer bar.

Even in my day-to-day life it’s my drag. Gay guys are just addicted to masculinity in so many ways.

We all have the things that pull us towards

That’s something you learn living in New

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them that we know shouldn’t. Oh would that guy walk home with me if I would have been in jeans instead of a skirt? So I try to dress in a way that forces me to be authentic to myself.

Enveloped by the dress. So she fluffed it and gave it this iconic moment with all those layers.

It reminds me of the movie where she’s trying on all the wedding gowns. I love the move they went to in the end, but those dresses are so amazing!

That’s a great aspect of the novel, too.

Especially because drag is considered accepted within gay community, but this hold on masculinity for cis gay men in particular, you see that push.

I wanted her to have five weddings. What I imagine Paris Hilton would have.

We have some things to sort through. We have some work to do.

One for the aisle, sudden quickchange at the altar.

I love that part in the novel where the brother says, the right person is gonna want more of the thing that you’re afraid of.

YES. That dress forever my heart.

Becoming a Queen is a vibrant and emotional young adult novel from debut author Dan Clay about a boy who turns towards love, selfexpression, and drag when the unthinkable happens.

Talk about a wish fulfillment sentence. That was so my experience. It’s amazing how often you have to learn the same lesson in life. When I was 22 I had this amazingly supportive and loving boyfriend. Then things end, you go back in the world, and you do it again and again. Life has two lessons you learn over and over.

If you had all the money in the world what would be the fantasy look?

I can’t get any more fantasy than the Versace dress Carrie wears in Paris. It’s just so good. I did this picture with Patricia Field and she was so unbelievable. The outfits are such a huge part of it so to be talking to her about it was incredible. She described this moment during one of the very last episodes they were filming here in New York.

She was starting on this other show. But it was one of the last shoots for Sex and the City so she wanted to see it. She got there and apparently Carrie was sitting on the dress. Patricia Field was like, STOP! She needs to be drowning in the dress.

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the cost of healing erik fuhrer

so as to look more “normal,” I felt as if his pointer finger had sunken into me. Made a mark on my body.

It was late spring, 2021, and I was walking back to my car on The University of Notre Dame’s campus after teaching my Gender Justice and the Environment course. I was newly shaved with a colorful triad of scarves around my neck and my black and white blazer that I bought for its Blanche Devereaux chicness. I heard a loud giggle as a bike road past me. I followed its trill with my eyes and watched the bike stop. The rider straddled the bike, pointed directly at me, and continued laughing, loudly and affectedly. It was clear he wanted me to notice. I still remember the way he looked– white, reddish hair and beard, no helmet, a loose red t-shirt. The duration of his laughter felt long, as if stretching from The Bible into my ear. It was the type of incident that would receive a dismissive tweet in response to its telling: “pictures or it never happened.” Yet, at that moment, documentation was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to get the hell off campus.

Despite the man’s distance, which increased as I walked away from him, my hands tightly pulling my scarves down, so they didn’t blow in the wind,

When I was young, teachers would constantly play this completely bonkers and psychedelic Looney Tunes anti-drug PSA. “This is your brain on drugs” was the main refrain. In Surviving Sex Trafficking, Angela Williams has brain scans done to show what her brain looks like on trauma.

Trauma is a bruise is a brain cell is the way I will always jump whenever anyone walks in the room, the way I always fear I am being followed. The way I often feel like my body is not my own during both the moonlight and the eye of day. It prints itself on our bodies but is not always traceable except through our witness. Our voice.

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. The refrain of Tori Amos’ “Gold Dust” —“I was here, I was here” beats before reminding “we held gold dust in our hands.” It’s a haunting. Sarah Mclaughlin’s voice pianoing in my head, “I will remember you.” I wanted most people in my life to forget me, to

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release me. I sometimes could hardly remember myself.

I confided to a family member once that I was raped when younger, and she asked for proof.

Even though it had been 24. 25. 26. 27 years ago.

All those years darkly butterfly with truth. My body is the proof. I carry the same skin around with me. And that too is a haunting. But I am in control of my ghosts now. I am here. I am here.

At the University of Notre Dame, I often felt like I had to hide the wilds of myself. Talk of social norms that were “necessary for the functioning of society” came up often at The University, mostly with conservative white men who couldn't seem to understand that their “natural laws” didn't allow for my existence, or that of many others. I was told once by a fellow Ph.D. student on campus that he wished he and I could be having a beautiful conversation but that he couldn't do so with me, or with most people aligned with contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matters, because we were all unintelligible. I bet he had epic dialogues with his reflection in the mirror. He could only really have conversations with his own seemingly gorgeous tongue. I’ll take a rain check on that, please. I’ll get my tongue elsewhere, thank you.

much more comfortable wearing what makes me feel beautiful. I bought my first purses here. Have worn mostly pink.

On May 1st, 2022, I sat outdoors at the Brentwood Blue Bottle in Los Angeles wearing oversized, bedazzled, red sunglasses, a colorful unicorn shirt, a colorful necktie scarf, and some rings. I was aimlessly tapping my multi-jeweled costume ring against the table as I typed out a poem when I heard a woman ask, “Do you know it’s Wes Anderson’s birthday today?” I looked up, smiled, and shook my head, “no. But that’s cool. I love him.” Whenever people mention Wes Anderson, I am always painfully aware of the fact that I’ve never seen Rushmore, and the shame was inevitably setting in when it was interrupted by an unbridled joy that followed the woman’s next sentence: “It’s fitting because you look like you have stepped out of one of his films.” It was quite possibly the most accurate thing something has

It took until I taught that gender studies class at The University for me to finally feel comfortable coming out as non-binary. I didn’t use my pronouns yet with students, but I started to use them privately, with family and friends. This incident with the bicyclist was further proof to me that I was not in the right place. That I would forever feel marked there. So in August 2021, I proposed a move to Los Angeles to my partner, Kim. She agreed, and by October, 2021, our house was sold, and we were in LA. In LA, I feel

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“My daughter would love the way you're dressed.

Can I introduce you?” the woman offered. I was stunned. Someone would like to meet me? I have fans! Ok, so she was 4 —but that still counts!

The woman brought her daughter over. She pointed out the unicorns on my shirt, the pinks in my outfit, my rings. Her daughter didn’t love my unicorn shirt as much as my ring, which I gave her permission to touch. I felt seen in a way I hadn’t before that day.

Hypothetical: “What line are you wearing?”

ever said to me. I imagined myself as an amalgamation of Gwenyth Paltrow’s Margot Tennenbaum and Jeff Goldblum’s Alisdair Hennessy– fur coat, pink scarf, everything a size too big. A cartoon in human skin, the reverse of those Disney Instagram filters. Isn’t every Jason Schwartzman character in a Wes Anderson film just a beautiful Pinocchio all grown up? A real boy?

“The possible future wardrobe of a Wes Anderson film that will never be made.”

Which is to say, Wes Anderson, call me. Call me on my unicorn phone; it gets the best reception.

I’ll be wearing a wool knit cap in the dead of the Los Angeles summer.

Which is to say, I am here, and this body is starting to belong to me.

Weeks later, my partner and I were on Rodeo Drive. I was dressed in an Italian rainbow cookie color scheme, with mostly pink toward the bottom. My shirt was a button-down with widget shapes, but more retro, pre-computer age in composition. I like to pretend I am part of Generation X often, though I missed it by five years, and I dress accordingly. “In my day…” I’ll say to a 25-year-old. It’s pretentious, yes, but my outfit wasn’t. If a cupcake went to a Nintendo Party, it might have taken my lead.

We entered Alexander McQueen and were greeted by a woman who told me she would be helping me during my visit.

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A man then walked directly to me from the back of the store, expressed how much he loved my outfit, “so fun,” and clarified that they both would be helping me. I felt doted upon. Dispersed between their introductions to their designs, we chatted about the show Eerie Indiana, and what originally brought Kim and me from New York to Indiana. “Indiana? You? You made the right choice coming to LA for sure.” I nodded. I certainly felt less safe dressing this way in Indiana, especially on The University of Notre Dame’s campus. On the seventh day, God created man and woman, but not me.

that coat on my shoulders. But I didn’t feel like a flame. I felt like a goddess. See, sometimes I feel like a woman. And sometimes, I feel like the universe is galaxying through me. Sometimes I want to fill out a job application and check all the boxes. Sometimes I just want to leave everything blank but that ambiguous “other” box. Sometimes I want to write in, “cigarette, drag me, baby,” because I want to go dancing into the fucking dark with cinders at my heels. And that coat.

When a friend of mine asked if I would have bought that coat if I had the money, I didn’t hesitate: “yes.” He gave me a shocked look: “Erik, it was $4,000!” What is the price tag on joy?

Surely, joy can be experienced for much less money, even free. I have known that type of joy, but this was also a joy. And I wanted it to last.

I finally gravitated toward a long trench coat with a graffiti motif and heard one of the attendants moan, “yesssss.” They insisted I try it on. I knew that I was being reeled into a sale but felt beautiful as they held the coat open for me to slip my arms in and draped it onto my shoulders. “Yeah, you look amazing! Here don’t tie the belt, do this instead,” the attendant gently instructed as he looped the belt behind me, leaving the coat to expand around me. “This coat was made for you,” the other attendant exclaimed as she clasped her hands together in loving approval. I normally would have rolled my eyes, thinking she was only saying this to close a sale, but, instead, I smiled at her and nodded, “it is. It’s beautiful.” She wanted the sale, I’m sure, but I believe she also was truthful. Drape an oversized pink scarf on me and sign me up for the Rushmore sequel. Get Jeff Goldblum on line one.

On the day of the 2022 Met Gala, social media was abuzz with criticism of those celebrating fashion that evening in light of the shocking news that Roe vs. Wade was on the precipice of being overturned. I recognize the deep sadness and fear that people were feeling that day and every day since and understand that my body will not be directly affected by this particular political decision. I do not have a body capable of pregnancy, but I do have a body capable of grief.

And I don't mean that flippantly. I do not mean to devalue or dampen this suffering. In a world that also seeks to snuff my identity and the bodies and identities of those who don’t conform to binaries and norms, I empathize with everyone whose rights to their bodies are taken from them. We must fight, and we must fight fiercely.

Walking into Alexander McQueen made me feel, well, like a queen. I pause writing that term because I know there are gender-neutral alternatives. My particular favorite is “the spark of life.” You can’t start a fire without me; just ask The Boss. After all, I did feel like a thousand lighters had just clicked and flicked when I slipped

I don’t remember what I did that day of the Met Gala. Of the news of the supreme court’s pending decision. Of the news of the actual decision. But I hope I was experiencing some type of joy. Grief

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can disappear us. I know that first-hand. It’s important to make space for grieving. Long-term grieving.

To bake it into ourselves. Like a cake. I learned that from Joan Didion. But if we forget the candles, we burn out. What is the world without fire? Without glitter? Without the stars of us?

We are here. We are here. And we will never stop fucking shining.

My body has been another’s bread without my permission. Has been broken. Sometimes I walk around in a second skin. Borrowed skin. But that gets better as I go on. And putting that coat on made me feel amazing.

Tell me, what is the price tag on healing?

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you dress how they tell you to dress until you don’t: queer taste and cishet fashion marc schorin

I first truly explored Paris about a year before I moved here from America for a Master’s. I was twenty-one and a French major hoping to learn more about Paris as a city. I was staying at a family friend’s apartment on Île St-Louis, one of the two tiny islands in the on the Seine. There were not many young adults in that milieu; most people were gray-haired and put-together.

I first began to seriously consider fashion and identity, but particularly fashion as a constitutive element of non-cisheterosexuality.

I had never really thought about what I wore. I was never interested in clothing; or, rather, the clothing I wore, and the codes that came along with it, were never interesting to me. They were not playful, fun, expressive of myself or of what I wanted. In all fairness, “fashion” as such cannot express any individual’s desires. Fashion is already a societal relationship.

There was, however, a high school around the corner. Every day around noon, teenagers would stream out of the imposing stone edifice, clustered in cliques of three or so, looking for food or cigarettes. I was embarrassed by how much they intimidated me. I would be standing in a bookstore or a café and suddenly a child would be at my elbow, almost to a person incredibly thin and wearing designer t-shirts, colorful wool sweaters, shoes that ran the gamut from loafers to high-heels. The students themselves were almost always white, visibly bourgeois and cisheterosexual in a way that only the cisheterosexual bourgeoisie can be. It was here that

Fashion is not just “the fashion world.” It is not just X number of companies, magazines, etc. It is a network of signs that derive meaning from their context, which in turn represents the everchanging relationships between classes, races, sexes.… It creates its own formal grammar. And as with speech, slippages in how we articulate sexuality in fashion reveal the bones of the broader framework: capitalism and the oppressions that nourish it.

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Fashion choices of the oppressors do more than show off a certain status. It helps create that stratification in the first place. Indeed, the French word for fashion, la mode, literally means “the way,” as in, the way in which things should be, must be, or are done. French writer Monique Wittig made a similar point about the English word “straight”: it implies that heterosexuality is the mode from which one might deviate. Fashion, then, as a whole refers to a ruling class’s taste.

behind what would otherwise be a matter of necessity. Fashion is the codification of that relationship between necessity and choice: it insists upon taste as the mode.

Fashion companies are not unaware of the class tensions underlying its meaning-making—a mainstay of advertising strategies is to emphasize that X Y Z product will allow someone to express themselves, become more themselves, to defy homogenization and group-think. The irony is that this capitalistic self-help jargon only serves to monetize people’s thirst for something to hold onto, an identity or a source of meaning, a search generated by capitalism itself.

Granted, taste is developed in line with whatever materials are available — at one point, sugar and cacao were “fashionable,” in the sense that they were only available to the colonizing aristocracies; then they were “fashionable” in the sense that they were desirable commodities that had been made more widely available.

In my own life, it was only when I stopped thinking of fashion as a neutral, a covering of one’s self in gray slab, that clothes became literally

Conversely, one could understand oppressed people’s tastes as making the best of a bad situation. Take modern-day thrifting, for example.

The few studies available indicate that LGBT people in France are significantly less likely to find and hold jobs than their cishet counterparts.

Assumedly, this would lead to the same kind of disproportionate levels of poverty in Paris that oppress American queer people. In other words, although thrifting may have become a fad, it is also the cheapest way for queer people, especially youth, to dress themselves. Which means being very unlikely to find an outfit that is not cobbled together from many different items, times, and places. That said, to simply equate fashion with economics would be to elide the choices that people make, the deviance they might choose to insist upon.

In other words, what is interesting about taste is not merely that it relies upon access to materials, but that that there should be an intentionality

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meaningful. Of course, I did not “find myself.” I would rather die. But I was able to rethink my body and what it wore as tools within my control, things that belonged to me and were available to me as my own. It was not ownership per se that excited me, but specifically ownership of my own body, of something not cisheterosexual. Dressing, piercing, bejeweling, tattooing, painting, molding were all operations I now wanted to think about as I reworked myself. It did not matter if what I chose had any obvious connection to queer symbolisms. What mattered was that I chose them: a bat tattoo on my upper left arm, a black blouse gifted to me by a friend, chains and a skull ring I found in a thrift store, and so on.

increasingly important to distinguish between oppression, the oppressed, and any given individual. Because not all queer people are discriminated against equally, not all queer people have faced any instances of oppression, and not all queer people are your friend. Pete Buttigieg would be case in point.

However, as a group, people who do not conform to cisheterosexuality are indisputably discriminated against. Phrased in non-individualistic—in systemic—terms, cisheterosexuality oppresses those it does not understand, those it cannot account for.

This forces us into another otherwise looselydefined, heavily-intersected group of non-cishets.

We do not—cannot—respond with our own fashion, because we do not hold power; contrary to the most fashionable conspiracy theories, there is no queer power-structure secretly pulling the strings. That said, we can, consciously or not, offer a counter-system of taste.

According to the definitions I’ve employed, it would be impossible for the oppressed to have their own fashion. Furthermore, it becomes

For instance: are piercings fashionable? That depends. Because where earrings for most women are a non-issue, nose-rings on anybody can signify anything from punk nostalgia to queerness to, simply, youth. And yet, if I were in a bar, or if I felt threatened on the subway, I would want to stand near the young people with nose-rings rather than the white ladies with pearled earlobes.

Implied above is that taste that gets broadly assimilated by queer communities is a survival mechanism, a way to identify one another and provide safety in numbers—or else make it clear who to flirt with without fear of a violent response. Again, this is true, and still needs to be considered in relation to the specific choices that are made: why nose rings, for example? Why mullets, or shaved heads, or bobs—all meaning different things alongside different bodies and

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presentations? Why might some fashion choices be considered straight in one context and queer in another?

The photos below were taken a few months ago by a friend, Vic Krass. The idea was to stock up on “author photos” as my poetry has begun to be published and I hate most pictures of myself.

However, they also demonstrate the kinds of things I like to wear. Obviously, they retain a relationship with prevailing fashion dictates, as well as with the more clichéd responses on our part. All the same, even with the superficiality and the commodification of myself, they do demonstrate how I choose to dress.

Here I can only briefly propose this particular jumping-off point—the formal structuration of “fashion” vs. “taste”—for any actual research into those choices. My hope is that it will help us be more honest with ourselves and each other—admit that we are less of a “community” than many would like to think, that we do not hold power and yet should not seek to ingratiate ourselves with cisheterosexuality, and that there will be no security for our lives so long as cisheterosexuality and its codependent oppressions exist.

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body politic hair studios founder rae thweatt offers a “safer space” interviewed by sage lally

Sage Lally (SL): Body Politic is a Queerowned hair haven that combines elements of a barbershop and a hair salon, creating a less gendered hair care experience for all. Why is holding a safe space important for you as a hairstylist?

gender. How do you practice this belief in your work with clients?

Yes! This is a phrase I first saw used by “The Dress Code Project” years ago and it so simply states the truth. Gendered hair services are a thing of the past. There is no such thing as a men’s or women’s haircut because any and everybody can wear their hair however they want.

Rae Thweatt (RT): I’d like to start by saying that I think of Body Politic Hair Studios not as a “safe space” but as a “safer space.”

This is implemented in my service by pricing according to the length of the hair and the amount of time needed. I approach each head of hair as it lives and simply address the needs that the hair and scalp may present.

It is impossible for someone to claim a space to be 100% safe since no one can control the outside world or those who live in it. Now, what we have cultivated is an open-minded culture of kindness, creativity, and pride in who we are as unique individuals. We celebrate our guests and are here to help guide them on their hair journey, with no judgment or stigma, only love and support. This also applies to our workplace environment and engagement with one another every day.

How have you handled the challenges in the service industry over the past few years? Have you experienced any pushback from the greater community about your business?

Thankfully I have had the support of an amazing clientele.

You often tell me you believe hair has no

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Without their encouragement and unwavering trust this couldn’t have been made possible. If there has been push back from the greater community about my business, I wouldn’t know.

I fully believe in what I’ve created and the need for it in our city, if someone had something to say I’d be open to the conversation but wouldn’t waiver in where I stand or what I believe.

What is your favorite hairstyle to do right now? How has it changed throughout the years?

I opened Body Politic Hair Studios, in June of 2020.

Give me hair that leans into its natural state of being, short or long!

In the height of the pandemic as well as the BLM social and political uproar heard around the world.

My studio location was just two blocks away from the Marcus David Peters Circle (Lee Monument) in Richmond, VA.

This has changed from the beginning of my hair career in 2009, when heat styling was really in (I grew up in the era of the flat iron…we couldn’t help ourselves…)

I’d say my favorite style to do right now would be anything that feels effortless and lived-in. Hair that is hand styled and air dried and celebrating our unique natural texture rather than using hot tools.

Razor cutting has remained a constant tool of choice.

It felt critical to give to the community in any way I could, more than it ever had before.

While the pandemic restrictions prevented my hair business from opening, support and love looked like putting cases of bottled water out front of the studio doors and offering bathrooms and AC to anyone who needed it.

What got you interested in being a hairstylist?

How long have you been cutting hair?

I have always had a love for hair, ever since I can remember. As a little kid I would ask my mom to put every barrett I owned into my hair or put soft curlers in my babysitter’s hair. All of my friends in the 9th grade got new bangs in the locker room via a pair of office scissors taken from the gym coach’s desk. Sometimes I joke that I had to go to hair school to redeem myself from those embarrassing days (sorry friends!) I attended Rudy and Kelly Hair Academy in VA beach directly after graduating high school in 2009 and have been in the industry since.

I knew I was creating a space for people to feel safer and cared for in a vulnerable state, I never would have imagined it to begin in this way but damn how spot on it was with the mission I had been manifesting for months and months prior.

The challenges will always come and go. I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned in being a business owner is to relinquish the illusion that I have control over any of it and surrender to the moment. No one can predict what happens next, so I just strive to create beauty in every moment I’m given.

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If you could tell us one piece of advice on how to take better care of our hair, what would it be?

along Richmond’s Art District Art Walk. I have since added a few more chairs for new stylists and barbers to join the team and to be able to care for more of the Richmond LGBTQIA+ community.

I’m hoping to be able to participate in First Fridays this spring and summer and have some exciting social events in the works (think queer dance parties, fundraisers and pop up markets yeah!)

Mostly just really looking forward to having the space to connect with more people and host some feel-good gatherings outside of our usual hair days.

Find a barber or stylist you connect with and make a plan together for the best care routine for YOU. We are all unique and it’s impossible to say if one thing works for me then it must work for everyone.

What’s in store for the future of Body Politic?

Body Politic has just expanded and evolved into a new larger location! We are now in the historic Jackson Ward neighborhood and are

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what to wear when teaching queer elizabeth wenger illustrations by bethany labit

Ames, IA is a decidedly un-queer town surrounded on all sides by fields mostly planted with its signature crop: corn. When I first moved here to start a graduate program and teach, I was hit by a sudden wave of creative oppression. It was as if the monoculture, which has turned so much of the state into nearly identical acres of corn stalks, had homogenized the culture as well as the land. Classically a swing state, Iowa has moved further right in the past years following the wave of conservatism that has similarly swept the country. With conservatism and ruralism comes a certain commitment to standardization of identity, dress, and behavior in the public sphere. The goal of dressing here is not to ‘pull a look,’ but rather to conform as much as possible to an unspoken, preset, uniform.

anxiety about the first day manifested itself in a recurring nightmarish fantasy in which, upon my entrance into the classroom, a student muttered the word ‘dyke’ under his—for it always was a ‘he’—breath.

No such thing happened on the first day of class when I stepped into the room wearing a floral polo and stained Carhartt jeans, though I could see my hands shaking as the printed syllabus vibrated in my nervous grasp. Who knew 18-year-olds could be so terrifying? Alas, the students said nothing of my home-bleached hair or my dirtybrown steel-toed boots. In fact, it was a miracle that I could get them to so much as tell me where they were from.

It is a tired truism that as a teacher, I learn from my kids as much as they learn from me. There is another, more complex side to this old teaching aphorism: I begin to see myself through my students’ eyes. And this seeing of myself through others is inflected by my own views of myself.

On my first day of class, I knew that when I entered a room full of freshmen from largely midwestern suburban or rural towns, my flagrant queerness and masculine appearance would in itself be something of a teaching moment. My

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feedback.

“Before you leave today, write one thing that is going well in the class, one thing you don’t understand, or one question you have,” I said to the students who were already packing their backpacks in a rush to get out of the classroom.

“You don’t have to write your name on them.”

After they all left, I looked through the stack of unsigned cards and read through them. They were mostly after-thoughts about class going well, or questions about assignment due dates. But on one card, written in the faintest pencil, was an observation that I realized I had quietly feared and expected all along: You always wear interesting nonteacheresque outfits. Not a bad thing at all, but I’ve never had a teacher like it.

What does it mean to see oneself through another’s eyes, when all we possess is our own stilted sight and our own insecurities?

I left class wondering whose handwriting it was, wishing I was a graphologist and could ascertain the identity of my critic merely by the slant of the letters. Was it one of the two sorority sisters who enter and leave class together as if joined at the hip? Or one of the boys who always wore huge crosses dangling from their necks? Was it the agricultural engineering student with long legs he hasn’t yet grown into like the paws of a Great Dane puppy?

Teaching, when done right, is not hierarchical, but rather a reciprocal-relational act. It is an exchange of projections. I understand that my fears of my students have less to do with them as people and more to do with my egocentric anxieties of being butch in a gender-normative state.

In my ideation of their vision of me, I am the butch caricature my internalized homophobia has always made me fear I’d become—slouching, selfdoubting, absent of charm and appeal, existing on the margins of society or in the dark, smokey corners of dive bars.

But this was anonymous, just as I wished it to be. I would never know who wrote that observation on the notecard. But I wanted to know who. I thought that if I knew who it was, I might better discern their meaning—might be able to read between the lines of the note to either my secret fear (angry, homophobic students, taking note of my every mistake) or my secret hope (that I might be inspiring a student to dress and exist as they

Though no student has directly questioned my gender or sexuality, my imposter syndrome as a young teacher was tested one day when I gave my students flashcards on which to write anonymous

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truly wished).

*

authoritarian temperament. My short, but shaggy, bleach-blonde hair; my baggy, stained, carpenter’s pants; my flannels and graphic-t-shirts; and my dinged-up work boots—all of this undermines the normative image I have of what a teacher should be: a plain-looking woman in a modest dress and flats, or a middle-aged man with a button up tucked into slacks.

This card was in actuality but a blip in one long semester that consisted less of existential crises and more of the humdrum habits of a classroom. Each class period, three times a week, my students enter the room and sit for 50 minutes half-listening with their laptops open as I lecture them on how to communicate. We read the script of the classroom: them, playing the hesitant-but-willing learners and me, the part of enthusiastic instructor.

Being different is in some ways, exactly as I like it.

I am rebellious by nature, a kid who broke rules just because I disagreed with the principle of them.

At the same time, I am terribly aware of social norms and the potential dangers of breaking them.

These two versions of myself—the revolutionary, idealistic queer and the paranoid closet-case—clash when it comes to occupying the space of the classroom.

And it is a stage play. Stepping into the role of teaching also means stepping into the role of performer, of object, of spectacle. Standing under the fluorescent institutional lights, it is difficult for me to move past the feeling of being ‘on-stage’ as a transmasc lecturer. Being butch in the world is hard enough without 46 young eyes trained on you. To add to all this, professionalism has never been my strong suit. Before returning to academia, I worked for a time at a food pantry, then doing conservation work, and finally construction—a series of jobs that tailored my dress to increasingly less formal wear. I moved from white t-shirts and jeans, to a dirt-coveredCarhartt-sponsored-assemblage, to sweat-stained hole-ridden shirts and pants patterned with industrial glue and drywall mud.

Before the gaze of so many still-developing minds, I am aware of myself as a queer teacher to a group of mostly straight, cis students. A juxtaposition arises between my butch accoutrements and their gender-normative

I put the unsigned note in a drawer in my office.

It brought up in me too many questions that I could not answer. It’s hard to let go of unanswered questions.

Unlike many of my well-groomed, cleancardiganned colleagues, I enter the classroom looking like a punk-rock, sheet-rocker; this is the aesthetic that best agrees with my anti-

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college wear each day when they shuffle in dressed in oversized t-shirts, sorority sweaters, and athletic shorts.

transmitter of culture, power, and subversion. In the history of queer fashion, clothing has often been used to send subtle or overt messages. It is a way to mark oneself as belonging to the queer community; to communicate desire (like in the case of the handkerchief code); or to express gender.

Through all this, I’ve begun to view the presentation of my body and the clothes I dress it in as a literary text or artifact that can be analyzed much in the way my students analyze advertisements, short stories, and poems. I say this in the rhetorical sense of the words: nouns. ˈär-ti-ˌfakt + ‘tekst

When I teach rhetorical analysis, I ask my students to identify the audience, author, purpose, and context of a rhetorical artifact. In this manner, I begin to think of myself as an author as I swipe through clothing in my closet. Getting dressed is much like writing. It is a process of selection, editing, and consideration of flow between components—all in order to communicate a message. As in writing, you must be aware of context and tone: Does the tone of this Unabomber t-shirt match the context of the campus? And of purpose: Do these Birkenstocks with my blue, mushroom-printed socks convey ‘teacherliness’? And audience: What will the

1. a group of symbols that is meaningful to a culture 2. a thing created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users It is not uncommon to view fashion, and especially fashion and the body, as rhetorical artifacts. The overlap of the body and text is clear even in the language we use to talk about writing.

Consider: the essay is constructed by ‘body’ paragraphs, ‘footnotes,’ and ‘headers.’ And writing, when done well, has much in common with good fashion: it has texture, color, movement, and meaning. Together the body and clothing form a web of symbols and signals.

I think often, too, of the connection between the words gender and genre, and how the two terms can feel confining and restrictive. Gender says, “This is what it means to be a woman.” Genre says, “This is what it means to write an essay.” And yet both gender and genre can be bent, expanded, and tailored to the individual.

French theorist and essayist Roland Barthes argues in his books The Fashion System and The Language of Fashion that fashion is in many ways a written thing, a fountain of symbols, a

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students think of my thrifted jean cap that reads “WAILIN’”?

my apartment, walk the streets, and be perceived. *

The answers to these questions are ones I’m still searching for. In reality, the answers may be a more embodied thing. My audience is the world I move through—a world of academic advisers, coworkers, friends, family, students, lovers, and strangers on the sidewalks. That which I wish to convey or achieve varies daily. Sometimes I desire attractiveness, respect, a certain suaveness I’ve always admired in older butches, a vague vibe of intelligence, or a punk-rock, fuck-it-all ethos.

The class period after I received the notecard, I played dress-up as a teacher listening to the quiet people-pleasing impulse that had been nagging at my mind since I read the note.

I wore a collared shirt peeking out of a crew neck sweater and my least-stained pair of khakis. It was, what I believed to be, a teacher-esque outfit. I felt slightly stiff in the preppy clothing. It was the sort of clean-cut outfit Ellen popularized for lesbians when she made gayness a palatable thing in the early 2000s. It recalled my own days as a freshman, back when I was still in the early stages of finding clothing that didn’t confine me or make my body feel like it wasn’t mine.

Ultimately the question of fashion a queer author must ask is the question of subversion and safety. It is a line constantly walked between self-hood and conformity. Some days I wish I could dress without an audience and without purpose—wish that my fashion was hermetically and hermeneutically sealed. But I have to go to work. I have to go to class. I have to leave the comfort of

I told friend after friend about the unsigned note, hoping to be witnessed in some way. Here were my fears, confirmed. But the more I talked about it, the more I realized that though it said outright that my fashion was ‘not a bad thing,’ I had read past the words and into my own psyche. Really, my friends assured me, my open queerness might even be good for students who might be hiding their own otherness behind baggie ISU hoodies and backward hats. My queerness might embolden them to step into themselves.

I soon returned to my normal cycle of outfits, relaxing into the comfort of men’s jeans. The comfort of my un-teacheresqueness. Being queer often means existing outside of normal boundaries and space. Whenever I resist my own otherness, I end up feeling like a fraud. I feel my body like a Polly Pocket in the hands of the little girl I never was, dressing me to her taste in plasticized, pink dresses. In academic institutions, I’ve decided it

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might be best to dress just as I please, allowing my simple, queer existence to stand as a challenge to the institutional structure.

the prompts they are given, to write themselves into existence, make up their own definitions, and be their own authors. I want to teach them how to do this in spite of what their audiences may want.

In Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilites for Writing and Knowing, Stacey Waite writes, “Queer bodies have certainly the potential for pushing up against what is possible, and this potential can cause us to be deemed impossible. That is not necessarily a problem; in fact, it is sometimes desirable to be impossible, illegible—to become a difficult text.”

In writing, as in life, I find the most liberating practice to be shirking prescriptions and ‘pushing up against what is possible.’ As a teacher, I want to encourage my students to do the same. I want to teach them how to break the script, to veer from

I want to show them how to be a difficult text, even if I’m not sure what that looks like in my day-to-day life. I’m choosing to aspire to illegibility and, like all aspirations, it is a process, not a product. It will take practice to continuously own my body, my clothing, and my space. It will take holding myself back from editing the parts of me that might bring unease to my readers. It will take persistence in dressing and moving through the world just as I write: honestly, vulnerably, and without fear.

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dapperq’s 7th annual queer new york fashion week show in brooklyn museum evelyn rude all photographs by evelyn rude

With the world slowly normalizing back to social settings from Covid-19, Dapper Q finally emerged from hiatus after two years of no fashion shows.

Returning to the Brooklyn Museum for their seventh annual show, the energy was exciting and lively on Thursday night. The runway was placed in the middle of the vast room with the skylight glistening on it. Guests were slowly coming in dressed to the nines. The anticipation of the return of Dapper Q was immense. The wait was over after two years.

As the lights dimmed, the crowd of over 1,000 guests hushed. Opening the show, Gay hip hop artist Cakes De Killa left the crowd in awe as he strutted the runway with his two backup dancers.

For the return of Dapper Q, there were 8 designers including project runway’s very own Hester Sunshine with her label debut Hesta.

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The show was packed full of performative art, a cheering crowd, and support from all sides of the room. With 70 models representing the 8 designers, the show was a lengthy one. None the less, the models were diverse from non binary models to only transgender models walking for Transguy Supply. The youngest model bring 10 years old was Noella McMaher.

Featured designers: LANDEROS NEW YORK Devonation THÚY Custom Clothier Stuzo Freemen by Mickey LLESSUR Transguy Supply Hesta by Hester Sunshine

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about the artists Marc Schorin is a Best of the Net-nominated philosophy student at the University of Paris St. Denis-Vincennes. In May 2022, they were granted the Edmund Keeley Literary Translation Award from Princeton University. Their work is available or forthcoming at The Adirondack Review, New Note Poetry, and Wrongdoing Magazine, among others. They can be found on Twitter as @inopportunejew.

Elizabeth J. Wenger is a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Wenger is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University. Wenger's work has been published or is forthcoming in Orange Peel Literary Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Utah Lake Anthology, and essaydaily.org.

Aja Barber is a writer, stylist and consultant focusing on the intersections of sustainability, fashion, and the textile industry. Her work explores the traditions of privilege, wealth inequality, racism, feminism, colonialism, and how these systems of power affect our buying habits.

Erik Fuhrer is the author of 6 books of poetry, most recently Eye Apocalypse (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021). Their recent work is inspired by the work of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Their poetry collection, Gellar Studies, is forthcoming in 2023, and their memoir, My Buffed Up Life, which features Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a fictional interlocutor, is forthcoming in 2024, both with Spuyten Duyvil Press. In January 2023, their first play will be released with Free Lines Press. Find them at www.erik-fuhrer.com.

Dan Clay is a writer and drag queen thrilled to be making his debut as a novelist with Becoming a Queen. Until now, he focused on spreading love and positivity online through his drag persona, “Carrie Dragshaw.” His writing as Carrie has been featured in hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and television shows–from Cosmo to People to Watch What Happens Live–and his TED Talk on being your “whole self” details his first-hand experience with the healing power of drag.

Sage Lally (she/her) is a queer, Richmond-based entrepreneur (and Rae’s client and friend) with a penchant for photography, social media, content creation, and visual storytelling. Her experience has given her the opportunity to design, launch and manage creative marketing campaigns throughout the US, as well as develop meaningful and effective content for audiences of over 3M. She holds her BFA in Photography with a minor in Child and Adolescent Psychology and a concentration in Chinese language from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she graduated with honors. Sage now runs be., an online community for women and nonbinary people that helps you shop your values, and Pally, a creative agency she co-founded with her friend Katie.

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Rae Thweatt (they/she) is the founder of Body Politic Hair Studios, an indie hair studio located in Richmond, VA. As a haircutting specialist with over 13 years of experience, Rae believes that hair has no gender. They aim to create a safer space for the LGBTQIA+ community that allows everybody to express themselves and their individual needs.

Evelyn Rude is a queer AAPI Gen-Z creative based in Austin, Texas. Her focuses are photography, creative directing, and content creation for social media platforms. Her heritage as a Vietnamese American with Japanese culture from her adopted parents can be seen in her photos series and creative work such as K of Koi and Outside the Gold fishbowl. She uses her creativity as a voice for the AAPI and queer community telling her story through her work. Currently she is pursuing her journalism degree and is heavily involved in creative direction and story telling.

She finds it important that her work has diversity and is able to express a story or a message for her clients, herself and the communities she is involved in.

Sarah Sunfire is a New Orleans native, currently living in San Francisco. They hold an MA in Children’s Literature from Hollins University and have had work published in Burning House Press, Midway Journal, The Stranger, and Ms. magazine. They also keep an oft-updated newsletter on ablism in the world and in pop culture — as well as body-related essays generally — called Hot and Disabled. Feel free to subscribe at https://sarahsunfire.substack.com.

Scarlet Novak is a 24 year old non-binaryAmerican. They are a Disabled disability advocate and mobility aid user. passionate Disability Justice. Scarlet is the pet parent to 2 cats named Abra and Pumpkin. They enjoy spending time with friends and watching TV in their free time. You can follow them on instagram @how.scarlet.rolls and Facebook at Disabled Dissociated Bi Gf. Julian Miller and Keiko Maasai are a pair of 24 year old queer, nonbinary, disabled artists living in St. Louis, MO. They met around 2018, have been making art together since 2020, and founded Sad Clown Club in 2021. They are both lifelong artists who have dabbled in multiple disciplines including visual arts and crafts, jewelry making, photography and modeling, music, and performance. You can follow Julian @ultravioletjester on Instagram, @uv_jester on Twitter, and support their digital art at www.ko-fi.com/ultravioletjester. You can follow Keiko @donutclown on Instagram, @clowndonut on Twitter, and support their drag at www.kofi.com/dragprince. You can support Sad Clown Club at www.sadclownclub.com, and follow their work @sadclownclub.shop on Instagram and @thesadclownclub on Twitter.

Salem Ariel Reid is an aspiring author, photographer and digital artist in New Hampshire. They go by He/They and read lots of horror novels and romances in the LGBT+/OwnVoices genre.

He's currently producing three-hundred new WIP ideas instead of finishing one, and saving up to be with the love of his life in the UK.

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Josephine A. Lauren is a queer, neurodivergent author and activist, as well as the Community Organizer of Incest AWARE. She shares her story of surviving childhood incest and illness to raise awareness and support solutions for prevention, intervention, recovery, and justice.

Additionally, she provides writing workshops, consulting, and trainings for survivors, the media, and support organizations. Her story has been published in outlets like Ms. Magazine, Yes!, America, Spirituality & Health, and Elite Daily. You can review her full portfolio at www.josephineanne.com and find her at @josephinealauren on all social media platforms.

JAZZ BELL (they/ them) is a trans nonbinary, intersex, fat, neurodivergent, multiply disabled, biracial (Han Chinese by way of Taiwan / white) visual artist, poet, care worker, consultant, and disability justice dreamer. Their poetry has appeared in Muzzle, Nat. Brut, Button Poetry, Write About Now, and elsewhere. They are a 2018 Pink Door Fellow and a 2020 Interfaces Fresh AIR resident. Their Visual Art has appeared in Crab Fat Magazine, Persephone's Daughter's, on the cover of George Abraham's poetry collection "The Specimen's Apology", on the cover of Ebony Stewart's chapbook "Ricochet'', and in Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Mykki Rios is a queer genderfluid Mexican-American poet, performer and multimedia artist.

Raised in Chicago, and having lived many places across the globe, Mykki has had works featured in issues of Welter, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, Random Sample Review, Smoke and Mold Journal, Lupercalia Press' Vulcanalia anthology, and more. They were also a finalist in Lupercalia Press' 2022 Chapbook Series Contest.

Sarah Sheppeck is a Black biracial writer, editor, and rootworker. The co-Editor-in-Chief of just femme & dandy and section editor for the glow up, she enjoys sharing skincare and skinfriendly makeup tips alike. Born and raised in upstate New York with stints in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the woods of northern Maine, she is now back in her home state with her pit mix, Chloe, and her polydactyl cat, Rita Moreno. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok: @EpicSheppeck.

Jas Saunders is a recent Honours (Creative Writing) graduate from the University of Western Australia, published in UWA’s Pelican and Peafowl magazines, Queensland’s Blue Bottle Journal, and Perth’s youth magazine Pulch, with an undergrad in English Lit and Public Health. Like most writers, she began as a child – her first story being Pokémon fanfiction. Her thesis recorded how the ghost can serve as a form of hope for the future and a mentor figure within bildungsromans/coming-of-age narratives, subverting genre expectations. Her writing interests often focus on - but are not limited to - liminal spaces, nostalgia, and memory, with representation her younger self would have desired to see.

E.M. Lark (they/them) is a lion-maned writer, prose reader & book reviewer, originally from Southern California. Recent works can be found in Moot Point Magazine, Corporeal Lit, Penumbra Online, The Lumiere Review, JAKE, among others past and future.

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Nnadi Samuel holds a B.A in English & literature from the University of Benin. Author of 'Nature knows a little about Slave Trade' (Sundress Publication, 2023). His works have been previously published/forthcoming in Foglifter, Carte Blanche, Beestung Magazine, ALOCASIA, Fifth Wheel Press, Common Wealth Writers & elsewhere. Winner of the Penrose Poetry Prize 2021(LGBTQA+). He tweets @Samuelsamba10.

Felix Salmoran (they/he) is an indigenous Mexican writer, musician, aspiring tattoo artist, sustainable fashion enthusiast, and lover of all things striped. They studied English Language & Literature at the College of William & Mary. His poetry won the 2019 Academy of American Poets Collegiate Prize, appeared in Underground Magazine, and is forthcoming in Makeout Creek Magazine. He lives on occupied Powhatan land with chosen family and 2 cats.

Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at The Ohio State University who specializes in Latinx Studies and popular culture. She is at work on her dissertation, which explores how Latina content creators use social media profiles to produce self-images and an online self. She has published chapters in TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022), Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century (U of Arizona P, 2022), Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (SDSU Press, 2021), and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies (Routledge, 2020). She also co-edited a special issue of Prose Studies (vol. 41, no. 2) on Latinx nonfiction with Frederick Luis Aldama. She serves on the Advisory Board for The Latinx Comic Arts Festival (LCAF) at Modesto Junior College and as the Social Media Specialist for the Graduate Student Caucus of the Comics Studies Society. mirrored fatality (mf): mirrored fatality remembers wholeness from dismembered flesh and mutates as cross pollinating perennial terratoids. mirrored fatality intertwines glitch rage webs with corroded resonance and regenerates forsaken spores across their current biome: ECOCIDE 3URTH. Jennifer Elise Wang (she/they) is a non-binary femme in STEM from Dallas, Texas. When she's not doing neuroscience research, she enjoys writing, dancing, and learning how to skateboard and snowboard. She has been published in New Verse News, FERAL, Southern Arizona Press’ Dragonflies and Fairies anthology, Exist Otherwise, and ev0ke. She can be found at www.facebook.com/jeniversewritings and @JeniverseAbr on Twitter.

Cavar (they/them) is a PhD student and writer of transMad things. They are editor-in-chief of Stone of Madness and swallow::tale presses, and their writing can be found in CRAFT Literary, Split Lip Magazine, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. Cavar's debut novel, Failure to Comply, is forthcoming with featherproof books (2024). More at www.cavar.club, @cavarsarah on twitter, and at librarycard.substack.com.

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Andy Winter (she/her/they/them) is a poet, performer, witch & entity. She is an ice queen of non-binary & trans experience from sunny Singapore, now based in London. Her works have appeared in Stellium, Strange Horizons, EnbyLife and beestung amongst others. She was a '22 Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow. Find her chilling at https://whispersinwinter.wordpress.com/ a f carbajal (they/he) is a Spanish queer and non-binary writer and academic living in the North of England. They are Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton (London), where they teach English Literature and Creative Writing. Their poetry has appeared in Defunkt magazine and been selected for the Grist anthology "We're in It Together": Poems for a DisUnited Kingdom. Their poem "sing(e) me" will be published in the seminal issue of the new transdisciplinary journal Queer Aesthetics. They live in the historical border between Yorkshire and Lancashire with their civil partner, their son, three cats, a whippet, and a varying number of goldfish.

Jessi Eoin (they/them) is a comic artist and illustrator from the occupied lands of the Lenape people (Brooklyn, New York). They make art to uplift and positively represent fat, disabled, and trans experiences, and you can find more of their work at jbeoin.com, @jbeoin on instagram, and @JessiEoinArt on twitter.

Dali Valentino is a Nonbinary Trans Masc, Mexican Puerto Rican Illustrator and costumer.

Seeking work to team up with BIPOC creators and authors to make work of Trans Joy. Their art can be found on Instagram or Twitter under: @Azul_Vaquero_Art. SG Huerta is a queer Chicane writer from Dallas. They are the author of the poetry chapbooks The Things We Bring with Us (Headmistress Press 2021) and Last Stop (Defunkt Magazine 2023).

Their work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. They live in Texas with their partner and two cats. Find them at sghuertawriting.com or on Twitter @sg_poetry Abbie Goldberg (they/them) is a queer, disabled multidisciplinary artist, writer, puppeteer, drag creature, and theater maker from the mountains of rural Maine. They have been published by Autostraddle, Sinister Wisdom, Waif Magazine, Ak Press, HowlRound, The Niche and more.

They love using creative spectacle to imagine other possibilities for this world-- a world that is hard to live in, but that they can't help but keep falling in love with anyway. They are currently based in New York.

James Daniels (he/him & they/them) is a lover of languages and proficient at Russian, Spanish, French and English, though he currently writes primarily in English. He is published in both poetry and prose and plans to pursue a master's in interdisciplinary humanities studies in the USA in 2023.

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Miguel Wilson finds joy in traveling, producing their own music, and talking about gender. As a second-year doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte studying Organizational Science, they love bringing historically excluded voices to the forefront and envisioning more just and equitable organizations. Follow them @lilmigsbigworld on Instagram!

Fiammetta Gianni (she/they) is a 23 year old writer and aspiring author, constantly dreaming up new plots and writing them down in a rush. Their writing is heavily influenced by her experience as a disabled femme lesbian. She loves anything period dramas and crafting. Follow them on Twitter @fiascribblesfor writing progress updates and occasional rants about disabled characters in TV shows and films!

Thomas Hobohm (they/them) is a writer from SF by way of Texas. They're interested in interrogating queer desire and the will to intersubjective knowledge. When they're not reading or writing, they like to play volleyball or explore independent cinemas around San Francisco.

They can be found on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thomashobohm.

Geyl Wells (she/her? I guess?), is a graduate student of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She was born in the heart of Mississippi, raised (mostly) in the shadows of Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, & lives in the suburbs of Nashville. Connect with her on instagram @ebigeylwells.

Sajah Francesca is a twenty-one years old transmasc, nonbinary person with hyperfemme tendencies living in Long Beach, California. Sajah identifies as a pansexual and lives their life boldly, learning how to flaunt their queerness through fashion and art. He specializes in poetry, but indulges in short stories and plays from time to time. When they aren’t writing, they spend their days indulging in cult cinema or drinking obscene amounts of coffee. They have an Associates Degree in English Literature and are in their senior year at Cal State University Long Beach pursuing their Bachelor’s.

Elizabeth Kumaki is a queer non-binary Japanese American fashion and textile artist, actor, and musician living in Seattle, Washington. Their work has been featured on stage, television and by independent artists for performances and photos. You can find them on instagram @seaweedxseed.

Tylyn K. Johnson (he/they) is a part-time writer from Indianapolis, IN. He writes to reflect the traditions of storytelling and empowerment he comes from through the framed lenses of Black and Queer artistry. Their language has appeared in the lickety~split, Brainchild Magazine, Queen Spirit Magazine, and Rigorous, among other spaces. A recipient of the 2021 Myong Cha Son Haiku Award, they have performed various readings and obtained multiple writing awards at the University of Indianapolis. Tylyn is also the creator of "Communal Creativity: A Game of Poetry" on itch.io. His projects and social media can be found at https://linktr.ee/tykywrites. (@TyKyWrites on Instagram and Twitter) 156

about our team Addie Tsai (founder & co-editor in chief)

(any/all) is a queer, non-binary artist and writer of color, who teaches Creative Writing at the College of William & Mary. They also teach in Goddard College's MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University's Mile High MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Addie collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of Dear Twin and Unwieldy Creatures. She is the Fiction co-Editor and Editor of Features & Reviews at Anomaly, contributing writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor and Editor in Chief at just femme &dandy.

Sarah Sheppeck (co-editor in chief, the glowup)

(they/she) is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. They earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester and their Master’s in Secondary Education and Curriculum from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York with stints in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the woods of northern Maine, they are now back in their home state with her pit mix, Chloe, and their cat, Rita Moreno. Find her on Twitter: @EpicSheppeck.

Simone Person (managing editor, the mane attraction, fat + furious)

(they/them) is a Black queer femme, two-time Pink Door Writing Retreat fellow, and casual goth who grew up in Toledo, Ohio and small Michigan towns. They are the author of Dislocate (Honeysuckle Press, 2018) and Smoke Girl (Diode Editions, 2019). Their work explores the aftermath of trauma through poetry and prose. They live with their perfectly terrible cat and wonderful triple Pisces partner. You can find them at simoneperson.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @princxporkchop.

Jen St. Jude (sole mates)

(she/they/mx) is the managing director at Chicago Review of Books, and has work in Gigantic Sequins, The Rumpus, and Catapult. Her debut YA novel, If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come, will be published by Bloomsbury Children’s in 2023. Find them on Twitter: @jenstjude.

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Jo Davis-McElligatt (no scrubs)

(she/her) is queer Black woman and mama to the best kid ever. She is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies and affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Texas, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Black studies, comics studies, and southern studies. She is the co-editor of three collections: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy; Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat; and BOOM! @*#&! Splat: Comics and Violence. She is currently writing her first monograph, Black and Immigrant: The New African Diaspora in American Literature after 1965. Find her on Twitter: @jcdmce.

Kirin Khan (triple thread(s))

(she/her) is a writer living in Oakland, CA who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan her homeland. She is grateful for fellowships from PEN America Emerging Voices, SF Writers Grotto, AWP's Writer to Writer program, and SJSU's Steinbeck Fellowship, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Tin House. Her essay Tight was nominated by Nat. Brut for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in Corporeal Khora, The Margins, Your Impossible Voice, 7x7.LA and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter: @kirinjaan, and her work at kirinkhan.com.

Sky Cubacub (cancel & gretel)

(they/them) is a non-binary disabled Filipinx queer from Chicago, IL. Rebirth Garments is their clothing line for the full spectrum of gender, size and ability. They maintain the notion of Radical Visibility, a celebratory movement based on unapologetically flaunting our bodies through the use of bright colors, exuberant fabrics, and innovative designs. Sky was named 2018 Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune and is a 2019/2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist and a Disability Futures Fellow. Rebirth Garments has been featured in Teen Vogue, Nylon, Playboy, the New York Times and many more! Find them on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter @rebirthgarments.

stoo (solemates)

(they/she) is a non-binary/transfeminine singer-songwriter and actor who lives in Houston. Since graduating with a BFA in Musical Theatre from Sam Houston State University, stoo released two musical projects, “COSTUME by Bling St.” and “SUPERSUIT” (with the latter receiving the top honor in Houston Chronicle’s “Best Houston Albums in 2017”) and performed in multiple professional theatre productions and performance art events . Most recently, stoo has been named Outsmart Magazine’s “Favorite NonBinary Actor” in 2021 and was Non-Binary / Gender Nonconforming candidate for Pride Houston’s Grand Marshal. Find them on Instagram and Twitter: @stooizm. stoo likes: bright colored hair on darker skin, combat boots, abstract pattern button-up shirts, sheer/transluscent clothing and accessories

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@justfemmeanddandymag justfemmeanddandy.com

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