just femme & dandy vol. 01

just femme & dandy

THE INAUGURAL ISSUE

NOÉL PUÉLLO | WO CHAN | ELLE HONG | RITA MOOKERJEE | K IVER | BIRCH ROSEN | LEY DAVID ELLIETTE CRAY | GABE MONTESANTI | JAX BULSTRODE | WRYLY MCCUTCHEN | VINCENT CHONG | SIMONE PERSON | ALTA LIAM | ANITA KELLY | KAITLYN CROWE | VAMIKA SINHA | TJ TALLIE | NATE BARRON | MARK KURAI | HARRISON COOK | DOROTHY CHAN CISI EZE | DAWN VOGEL | MARGARET REDMOND WHITEHEAD | CHRIS TALBOT-HEINDL

vol. 01: summer 2021 copyright

just femme & dandy

cover illustration by crystal vielula justfemmeanddandy.com

founding editor co-editor in chief addie tsai

co-editor in chief sarah sheppeck

disability & access organizer sky cubacub

editor, the mane attraction sarah sheppeck

editor, the glowup sj sindu

editor, sole mates jen st. jude

editor, sole mates denne michele norris

editor, no scrubs jo davis-mcelligatt

editor, sew what octavia saenz

editor, triple thread(s) kirin khan

editor, cancel & gretel sky cubacub

editor, features addie tsai

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.

letter from the editor // 06 a note on access // 10

the mane attraction amy schumer follows me around the bar asking how i got my hair so curly like that // simone person // 12 internalized trichonoirphobia, the hate of black hair // cisi eze // 13 my first undercut // jax bulstrode // 18

the glowup putting on a nonbinary face // k iver // 20 tanka trio for applying eyeliner // rita mookerjee // 23 the struggle for autonomy while taking accutane for testosterone acne // birch rosen // 24

no scrubs our culture, our art, ourselves // nate barron // 28 bald and genderless // ley david elliette cray // 33 queerantine // mark kurai & t.j. tallie // 39

sew what thrifting as cruising // wryly mccutchen // 56 what is my style without limitations // chris talbot-heindl // 59 death, in a fashion // dawn vogel // 60 all good ghosts here // margaret redmond whitehead // 61

triple thread(s) the transformation sequence // harrison cook // 68

sole mates don’t tell a sole // alta liam // 72 to the $3 pair of old navy flip flops, with love // anita kelly // 73 biding // kaitlyn crow // 76

cancel & gretel the borders of my style // vamika sinha // 80

features an intimate space: noél puéllo // viola almunir // 86 roller derby fashion starter kit // gabe montesanti // 91 triple sonnet for oversexed and overripe and overeager // dorothy chan // 96 armor // gabe montesanti // 98 bull in a china closet : excerpts // elle hong // 100 portraits and seals // vincent chong // 101 years flow by like water // wo chan // 107

about the artists // 110 our team // 114

letter from the editor

It is a political act to take back a body that has been judged, shamed, objectified, harmed, and projected onto in countless ways and to reclaim it as a site of potentiality, aesthetic power, and joy.

Let me tell you a story, a story of beginnings.

I witnessed and heard stories that I would never experience outside of my own observation. Stories of adults who, as children, began to come into their own style, and their parents, partly out of exhaustion, and partly out of being charmed into it, would acquiesce to Sunday brunch with children in all manners of dress and sartorial combinations: feather boas and rainboots, tutus and baby fedoras, neckties and skirts.

I know not all of us were that lucky. But, some. Some of us grew up, found our people, took them home, and opened up old photo albums, and pointed, and said, see, right there. You can see it. You can see the body that I would grow into.

I was not one of the lucky ones. I grew up under the constant but stern hand of an Asian immigrant father, and as an identical twin. Our outfits were, for the most part, decided for us, day in and day out, long after it was legal to drive, and on some occasions, even after we had left home. There is a photo here, or there, like the one of me sitting at my desk in a vest. Or another of me standing on a cliff somewhere, with a flannel wrapped around my waist. But, those are from later years, as a teenager.

Everything else was prescribed, and appropriate.

There were hints of who I was to become. I got punished for playing with my father’s briefcase as a child. My mother taught me how to tie her silk scarves around my neck as a makeshift necktie, something I would do for hours and hours. But, for most of my young years, I was seen as one thing, and it was not the one thing that I would now use to define myself.

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As I began to grow into my own understanding of my body, of my queerness, of the liminal space I occupy between genders, I began to wonder, to hope: are there others out there like me?

And slowly, ever so slowly, I began to find more of us. It became clear to me, perhaps almost two decades ago, that there needed to be a space for us.

But, I was what they called a late-bloomer, both in terms of my recognizing my nonbinary-ness as well as my queerness. How could I be the one to curate such a space?

And so, I waited. I kept my eyes open, my ears to the ground. I regularly searched for spaces that showcased the writing and artists of people from all parts of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella on fashion. I found exciting spaces that addressed one style or presentation, but none that represented all of us.

I cite as the first step forward in doing this thing I didn’t think I was “expert” enough at when I spoke to my dear friend, Filipinx non-binary trans writer and disability activist, Kay Ulanday Barrett, on the second floor patio of a hotel during the AWP Conference in early 2017 about the beginning of this idea I had to make a magazine that highlighted queer fashion.

We talked through some ideas; I took them out for dim sum. And still, I waited.

Two years later, I was asked by Sarah Clark, a disabled two-spirit writer and the Editor in Chief at Anomaly, where I serve as co-Fiction Editor, but then was Assistant Fiction Editor, whether I had any ideas for curating folios with Anomaly. I decided this

was the perfect forum to test out the waters of this idea. It was called Queering in Plain Sight: a folio of queer fashion. I’d like to share some of what I wrote to introduce and frame the marvelous works of that early experiment, which launched in December of 2019, which I wrote, in the middle of the grief of divorcing my only love and embracing the debut of my first book, sitting in a friend’s apartment in Astoria, a friend who I met while dancing tango and who had seen me go through so many of my own evolutions through gender expressions and expressions of queerness —femme to masc to everything in between. Thinking back on it now, what more perfect moment in time and selfhood to write such a piece, as it is in between the joy and the grief that we queers find—and have always found— ourselves. It is in the dressing that we can bring a lightness to our lives, and to one another: For the queer community, we code ourselves with our bodies when it has been dangerous to identify ourselves with words, and we code ourselves with our bodies in order to join a community that may exist as the only family structure that makes us feel safe.

Until recently, we could find only a handful of models in popular culture to inform our own aesthetic choices, and so the very styles that we don operate as a patchwork quilt, collaged together with vintage and thrift store finds, sometimes high end pieces (perhaps on discount), our sister or mother’s lipstick, and our father’s neckties. All the mismatched bric-a-brac that makes up a person’s aesthetic where it is not easily found.

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Curating and publishing that folio was an incredibly exhilarating and life-affirming moment in this journey towards the pages you have before you. But most importantly, it confirmed two things for me, which led me to create just femme & dandy: first, that there was a need for a space like this one, to form community around LGBTQIA+ fashion. And second, that I had the permission and the ability to spearhead such a moment.

The pandemic, as you’ll see from our tender, thoughtful, extraordinary contributors T.J. Tallie & Mark Kurai in their excerpts from their pandemic fashion photographic project titled Queerantine, opened up opportunities for many of us to look more deeply at how we engage with others, and with ourselves, and perhaps unexpectedly, pushed us to explore the boundaries of what we wear and what we have always longed to wear, but been afraid to embody. I, too, began my own pandemic photographic project this February— perhaps unsurprisingly exactly a year after my pandemic divorce became official—by “remaking” an image of an artist of color every day, and sharing it on Instagram (@addiewearshistory) along with an extended caption of why that artist has impacted my own practice of way of living and thinking in the world as a queer, non-binary person of color.

But, what the pandemic offered me, and offered many of us, was a chance to push ourselves in new ways, and to take on projects or initiatives we were too timid to take on before.

Perhaps because I entered this earth as a pair, I work best in collaboration with others. I work best in the dialogic, the exchange of ideas, and I always seek out those who will challenge me, and who will see things that I don’t have the lived experience to see as readily. That is why I knew, without question, that I wanted Sarah Sheppeck to herald this endeavor with me. We came to know of each other when she reviewed my first book, just a month after Queering in Plain Sight would be introduced to the public. Sarah is a force to be reckoned with, a Black queer femmegoth with the voice of an angel and a sharp wit, especially when it comes to her iconic Dad jokes. You can credit her for most of the pun-worthy titles of our sections. As we became closer friends during the beginning of the pandemic, and I asked, if, just maybe, she might want to run this thing with me, she didn’t hesitate. I can’t imagine partnering this enterprise with anyone else.

I studied fashion magazines and thought deeply about sections for the magazine that would offer aspects of LGBTQIA+ fashion that I saw energy around in the conversations and ensembles I saw in my friends, community, and from passersby on the street. From there, Sarah and I refined them to the following: the glowup for skincare & cosmetics, the mane attraction for hair (with afrodisiac, a dedicated column focusing on Black hair), sole mates for shoes, no scrubs for streetwear, sew what for DIY and thrift, triple thread(s) for bespoke and couture, and cancel & gretel for ethics & inclusion. I can’t say enough about our incredible team of editors, some old friends, some new acquaintances, some long admired, from a range of backgrounds and identities: SJ Sindu, Jen St. Jude, Denne Michele Norris, Jo Davis-McElligatt, Octavia Saenz, Kirin Khan, and Sky Cubacub. I want to especially thank Sky Cubacub for their labor with ensuring that our magazine is as accessible as possible.

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just femme & dandy volume 01 traverses across over 100 pages and twenty-five contributions to provide just an offering of how glorious and powerful we are, and how what we say with how we accessorize and clothe ourselves is a process of reclamation, of celebration, and, most of all, what we need now more than ever, joy. I hope, more than anything else, this work, however it may find you, brings you joy, and makes you feel empowered in your own complex, beautiful, marvelous selves, within and beyond your bodies. That is what it has done for me, and then some.

Addie Tsai

Founding Editor Co-Editor in Chief just femme & dandy

June 2021

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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 FilipinxAmerican 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.

Bull in a China Closet : excerpts, by Elle Hong, has an option to watch with an added audio description track, which is performed by me.

A note about this video: the lighting effects utilized in the first portion (towards the end when there is a subtle strobe effect) might cause migraines for migraine-prone individuals, and also could induce seizures. In the audio descriptive version, I give a verbal warning before the strobing happens and say when that effect is no longer being used by the video!

Image descriptions and audio descriptions are always incomplete because you can endlessly describe anything. As this is a fashion-focused magazine, I chose to center the clothing and accessories! 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.

I wrote all the descriptions for the images and video that we’ve included with volume 01, with assistance from my Rebirth Garments employee Morgan Hill, a nonbinary corsetier and fashion designer you can find at @mayhemmemoirs on Instagram. All work in this issue can be found on our website in plain text with image and audio descriptions and captioning.

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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m a n e e h t

a ttr a ti o n c

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AFRODISIAC amy schumer follows me around the bar asking how i got my hair so curly like that simone person a lifetime of being twisted bent around soldered off each corkscrew an aching tether to the women before me lost across the seas a reminder that our footprints don’t start here my hair took a long time to love as a girl i’d wet it drown it in whitegirl mousse begged my scalp to flatten act right calm down go slow be anything else besides mine for just a minute but on weekends at granny’s house she’d thumb over every curl & hold me as tender as my head

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AFRODISIAC

internalized trichonoirphobia, the hate of black hair cisi eze Trichonoirphobia is the irrational fear or hate of black hair.

Some people questioned Viola Davis’s choice to attend the Oscars with her natural hair in 2012.

At the time, wearing our natural hair without wigs and weaves was seen as an act of bravery, somewhat revolutionary. Those of us who have gone out with our natural texture, have likely heard some variation of, “What are you doing with your hair?” Those of us who have locs (they are not dreadful) feel compelled to make monthly trips to the salon in a bid to re-twist our undergrowth. That is how much we hate to see our curls. It would seem as though seeing a thick mass of curls on a person’s hair evokes certain negative feelings.

In The Boondocks (Season 4, Episode 3), Huey Freeman tells his granddad, Robert Freeman, that he is making a hair cream. Realizing he is out of his own hair cream before a date, Robert decides to make use of Huey’s. The next morning, Robert wakes to find his hair straightened. A broke Robert sees this hair cream as a goldmine, as black people would love to have “straight, beautiful hair.” Huey confesses the hair relaxer is in fact an explosive, but Robert doesn’t care about that. He soon finds a buyer for the product: Boss Willona, owner of Right Like White, a beauty salon that caters to black women. When Huey tells Willona the relaxer is an explosive, she laughs it off, saying black women are willing to put whatever into their hair, even if it is toxic to achieve “long, straight, beautiful hair.” Even when the authorities warn the public about the product, black women are willing to walk with bombs to attain the desired Caucasian hair texture.

Running beneath the currents of our collective subconscious as a people, we have a desire to rid our hair of its blackness, its beautiful curls.

Trichonoirphobia is deeply ingrained in our psyches owing to how all facets of society (family, media, school) teach us overtly or subversively that our hair is ugly - and ugly should be hidden.

We are not comfortable with our hair, and we exude this hateful energy in several ways:

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cisi eze

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We shame people for rocking their afros We think braids or other protective styles are not fancy enough for important events We deem long, straight hair, or loose, wavy hair is better than cornrows or braids We think of afros as unkempt We shame ourselves for not having “neat” hair, also known as “good” hair We think our natural texture is unsuitable for professional spaces We say keeping our natural hair is a tell-tale sign of being irresponsible We ask people what they are going to “do” with their hair We believe we need edge control We “wig-up” to hide our cornrows We believe re-twisting our locs makes them more beautiful We apply toxic products to our hair to make it appear “neat”

good, and ours is bad. Interestingly, we can draw a straight line between this way of thinking and how our people accepted the white god, while demonizing the gods of our ancestors.

Before white people ravaged the African continent, black people living in Africa had their own beauty ideals. Having thick, woolly hair was something to make one proud. Our ancestors could braid and twist their hair exquisitely into several patterns and designs. Hairstyles were a form of non-verbal communication. How one styled their hair was evident of their social status.

Our ancestors believed our hair connected us to divinity, seeing as it grew upwards to the heavens.

They made sustainable hair maintenance products from the environment.

Then slavery came, ushering centuries of intense hate of blackness and everyone who embodied it.

Fast forward to the 19th century. Although black people were free, they were not free enough. Racial prejudice was rife. The premise of these biases?

Our appearance. Our natural hair reminded freed black people of their painful past.

The list goes on.

Trichonoirphobia perpetuates racism.

Then again, we are bound to consider black hair untidy when we hold ourselves to the Eurocentric beauty standard that lays emphasis on slick hair lying flat on the scalp. Thick, bulky, and lustrous was how Nature designed our hair. It has no business looking like Caucasian hair, which so many of us call “good.” In India Arie’s “I Am Not My Hair” she sings, “Good hair means curls and waves (no). Bad hair means you look like a slave (no).”

Little wonder that black people saw it as a major blessing when hot combs came into existence in France, 1872. Garrett Morgan accidentally invented hair relaxers in 1909. This soon became a huge commercial success. The straightening comb, something like an improvement of the 1872 hot comb, was available to black people in America by 1915.

The malicious erasure of blackness is obvious in how we use relaxers to tame our hair. Relax and control our hair as the white slave buyers subdued and tamed our ancestors, right? We should question ourselves on why we feel our oppressors’ hair is

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The black community raved about these inventions, owing to the belief they would help black people achieve straight hair, thereby facilitating their assimilation into predominantly white societies. Black artists such as Nat King

Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, and Ella Fitzgerald relaxed their hair, to mention a few.

To a degree, our internalized trichonoirphobia is justified white imperialism has conditioned us to see our natural hair as inferior. Our hair has garnered negative stereotypes through the centuries. Knowing and accepting we have internalized hatred for our hair is the first step in reprogramming our minds to start loving our hair. This we can achieve by intentionally releasing toxic anti-afro messages and stereotypes.

This is not a call for us to get on the natural hair bandwagon.

Women should present and perform beauty in ways we find comfortable. Whatever works for us is perfect, as perfection has no template. Then again, we should recognize the personal is political. What are the ways our personal choices affect the fabrics of society? Would it not be amazing to see younger black women feeling comfortable with their hair and loving how they look naturally?

If our workplaces are anti-afro, we are limited by dress codes (“Give to Caesar…”). Upending centuries of trichonoirphobia will not happen in a day.

As a people, we should lovingly embrace our hair. This means black-owned businesses should be at the forefront of accepting our natural hair, schools should not “felonize” young black children for keeping their natural textures.

Media must be willing to represent beauty in any form. Black media, especially, must be intentional in producing content that validates black hair in all forms.

Our curls are beautiful.

Our edges are perfect.

Our hair is not an apology.

When are we going to start loving our hair?

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cisi eze

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my first undercut jax bulstrode

my love shaves my hair in the shower calls me a prince says they love my body it’s been hot for days and the only relief comes from watching my hair float to the ground from standing in front of the mirror and seeing their hands hold my violin hips later we lay on the grass freshly cut, the same as me burn hand-me-down haircuts in favour of recognisable looks count the small words we use to describe this life this love we teach ourselves how to exist

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o w l g u e p th

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putting on a nonbinary face k iver

My gender surfaced through intuition. As my third decade gained on itself, I grew tired of the work, money, and time expected of me to become “presentable” to anyone outside my home. The weather in Florida where I lived became a daily metaphor for that heaviness, making the choice to shed jewelry, hair, heels, and synthetic fabrics an easy one. If men weren’t expected to wear it, or carry it, I wasn’t going to.

My assigned gender was on strike. This process took a long time in part because I was born in the early 1980s in Mississippi where strict gender and sexuality codes continue making life difficult for queer people, sometimes unbearable. Now, my gender is simply picking up where my 10year-old-self left off when they started dressing like k.d. lang and was quickly punished back into floral patterns. A year later, I started wearing makeup. Everyone thought I was too young, and told me so. I spent hours learning how to apply layers of foundation, mascara, and dark lipstick, as if my once-desire to look less feminine had been overcorrected.

I mistakenly think of makeup as the last marker of gender conformity I’ve yet to let go. Makeup requires work, money, and time, and I resent how little all three are expected of men to “put their face on.” Two things keep me holding on: 1) Pandemic stress has wrecked my skin and made me look every bit as old as I am. Most days, I don’t recognize my eyes. 2) There are gendernonconforming and cis people using makeup to appear androgynous.

I wish I had the features of Asia Kate Dillon, simultaneously soft and sharp. My face is oval, with round cheekbones. I have a fleshy nose with no discernible cartilage to justify its fleshiness.

The 90s stole my eyebrows that once sprawled their real estate on most of my upper lids. While my eyebrows are not quite pencil thin, they now have a permanent round arch. However minimalist my style, I look like a woman in her late 30s. My brain chemistry would never allow hormone therapy for sharpening my features: the probability and risk of mental suffering is too

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high. So, I’m getting help from makeup. When I tell people that I’m learning how to use makeup to appear less feminine, they automatically think, more masculine. They assume I want to theatrically perform male stereotypes: paint on a beard or mustache. A friend asks me what my drag king name would be. At first, the idea registers in my body as dysphoric. I just want a minimal, everyday routine, the I-don’t-care look that arrives with some care. I want to take an author photo the way Asia Kate Dillon takes an actor photo, at complete ease and delight in their face and body. I have a photo deadline coming up, my first since coming out as nonbinary. I need reinforcements, from YouTubers and queer elders. My queer friends send me tutorials that don’t quite hit my target. But their algorithms help me sift through twenty-plus more, stopping at the last two.

by depicting hypermasculine stereotypes and, later, stripping to a bikini bra to remind the audience, “I am both.” Her video doesn’t help me find my regimen: there are no brow or contouring techniques. But I catch some of her magnetic courage to be both genders, either genders, or neither gender when she wants. That is the sustaining force of the distant queer elder.

They bless your identity with the benediction of their own life.

On YouTube, I watch Lisa Eldridge, a British cis woman, give an androgynous makeup tutorial.

Throughout, she’s careful to assert her cisness, as if for permission: This look isn’t going to be for everyone…I’m quite a girly girl, and I like dresses and I like girly makeup, but… The video is surprisingly helpful in teaching me how a very feminine face can appear less so. I learn that 1) brows are key: draw them straight, not arched. Lower the arch.

Lower the arch some more. 2) Contouring is more angular, instead of rounded, at the cheek. 3) Make sure the highlighter is not a shimmer. 4) Use the dark contour palette to define your eye socket and your bottom lid. 5) Don’t use a lot of mascara, if any. 6) No eyeliner. 7) If your lips are naturally pink or peach, no need for color. I’m sure these rules can be broken but, for now, Eldridge’s template is useful in its strictness.

Lately I’ve been reading about the innovative expression of MilDred Gerestant, aka Drag King Dred. Gerestant was a first-generation Haitian American who rose to drag stardom in the 90s and died in 2019 at 48. A short documentary filmed in 2010 features her joyfully walking through her neighborhood in a large suit with a shaved head, hoop earrings, and a fedora. In a hair salon, Gerestant marks a sharp, triangular goatee with eyeliner, applies adhesive, and dusts her chin with tiny, snipped hairs from the salon.

The result is a chiseled face and major masculine sex appeal. This isn’t what I want, I think. Then, she reveals that she shaved her head before beginning a career in drag: I just got tired of doing my hair. There it is: tired. The inevitable aftermath of performing what we don’t want to.

Eleven years before this one, before the words “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” become commonplace, Gerestant describes herself as fluid. She is remembered as beginning her shows

I try doing what she says. At Sephora, I buy the versions of her products that are not Tom Ford or Bobbi Brown—still resenting the cost. As expected, my eyebrows look too thick and dark.

But they’re straight, not arched. My cheeks and temples have sharpened, just a little. I’d gotten a little shy with the contouring. Every time the shadowing seemed too dark, I blended it too much. I had not periodically backed away from the mirror to check the overall effects like Eldridge advised. But, looking in my selfie screen,

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I suddenly feel lighter. This scenario doesn’t fit in my “less work=less heaviness” formula. But I didn’t expect to feel that lightness when I shed my name to one letter and my wardrobe to button ups, loose slacks, and flats. That feeling steadily revealed itself as a primal need that I hadn’t named.

After my first go, I look at some of Gerestant’s performance photos again, and notice that, in some, she made sideburns right below her cheeks. I realize that she was using facial hair to sharpen her cheeks the way I’m using shadow.

Like her other applications of facial hair, the sideburns looks natural. By contrast, my brows look cartoonish. But, along with that feeling of lightness, they also offer an unexpected sense of safety. As if they’re now carrying a claustrophobia I don’t have to. Tomorrow I’ll try them again. I’ll try darker shading.

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tanka trio for applying eyeliner rita mookerjee

Remember: more is more and don’t try to do it in one stroke. I can do it but I’ve had twenty years of practice. Yes, I was sneaking my mom’s kohl from her vanity at ten and tracing to my temples for ballet nights when I felt real, brown, bright.

Muscle memory ties that feeling to my brush so that when I glide from tearduct to mideye, I see spotlights: where I’m meant to be.

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the struggle for autonomy while taking accutane for testosterone acne birch rosen

Every morning and night, I peel back a tab with an image of a pregnant woman and a prohibition sign, push a pill through a thin layer of foil, and take my medication. These are only some of the 28 warnings not to get pregnant printed on the package of a 5-day supply. Once a month, I see my doctor to renew my vow of abstinence and submit to a laboratory urine pregnancy test to confirm that I am not, despite my abstinence, pregnant. If I do get pregnant, my pregnancy will be recorded in a government registry. No, this is not dystopian fiction — this is what I go through to treat my testosterone-induced acne as a “female patient who can get pregnant.”

testosterone that brings my body closer to my nonbinary sense of self also causes me to develop painful, long-lasting acne nodules on my face, chest, and back.

Isotretinoin’s potential side effects include dry eyes and skin, liver disease, and changes in mental health. But by far the most time, attention, and regulation are devoted to its potential effects on pregnancy.

Isotretinoin—as the 19-page guide for female patients who can get pregnant, the 36-page birth control workbook, and the diagrams of disabled babies on every package will tell you—can cause miscarriages, premature births, and congenital physical and intellectual/developmental disabilities.

For these reasons, the Food and Drug Administration requires a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy for isotretinoin, which is called iPledge. Certainly, patients should be informed of the reproductive risks associated with isotretinoin and given the knowledge and resources necessary

The medication I take, best known by the trademark Accutane (generic name isotretinoin), is known for its potentially severe side effects and is considered something of a last-resort acne treatment. I took my first course of it as a teenager, when a dozen other topical, hormonal, and antibiotic medications had failed to reduce my cystic acne. I’m taking it again now because the

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to minimize those risks. But the iPledge program grossly oversteps into dictating patients’ choices about their bodies.

methods, according to the rates cited in iPledge’s “Guide to Isotretinoin for Female Patients Who Can Get Pregnant.” Curiously, iPledge does not include effectiveness figures for condoms in its documents. Rather than providing patients with the information they need in order to make the right decisions for themselves, iPledge seemingly withholds it in a manner calculated to manipulate their perceptions of the effectiveness of contraception and their reproductive choices.

Taking testosterone as a trans person has been a powerful way of claiming ownership and control of my body and sexuality. Our culture and media have taught me that my value lies in my fertility and my attractiveness to men, and I’ve rejected those values in favor of comfort and pleasure in my own body. iPledge, meanwhile, makes it clear that my body belongs to the federal government and the hypothetical baby I would never willingly give birth to.

In the face of these overreaching and somewhat arbitrary regulations, I have maintained autonomy over my body and sex life by lying to my dermatologist.

I knew before I started my current course of isotretinoin that it would be bad. Taking it as a teenager had taught me the ins and outs of the iPledge program: in addition to the monthly pregnancy testing, I would have to use two methods of birth control simultaneously from a month before starting isotretinoin to a month after finishing it. At least one of these methods must come from a list of approved primary methods including hormonal and surgical methods and IUDs but notably excludes condoms.

While condoms are deemed insufficient, “not having sex or sexual contact with any male 24 hours a day, 7 days a week” is embraced as such a reliable solution that iPledge does not require a second form of birth control for abstinent patients, despite noting that “one of the most common reasons that women get pregnant is that they do not avoid sexual activity when they plan to be abstinent.” So as far as iPledge is concerned, I am abstinent.

That would be a problem. In an earlier draft of this essay, I belabored my reasons for rejecting each approved primary method, but they don’t really matter. What matters is: it’s my body and I decide what to do with it. Condoms are highly effective when used correctly, and if it came down to it, I would get an abortion.

There are other glaring omissions in the iPledge resources: most notably, no acknowledgement of the existence of abortion or trans people. For all the talk of miscarriages and disabled babies whose existence must be prevented, it’s strange that the program never mentions that pregnancy is not only preventable, but also terminable. No discussion of birth control is complete without recognizing abortion as a possibility. Furthermore, the pamphlets repeatedly refer to “unborn babies”—a framing often used by anti-abortion activists. If I were to get pregnant, there would not be an unborn baby inside me; there would be a not-yet-aborted fetus.

Notably, iPledge relegates condoms to its list of acceptable secondary methods despite their high effectiveness. According to Planned Parenthood, condoms are 98 percent effective when used correctly. That makes them more effective than half of the approved primary birth control

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The omission of trans people is a problem in itself and also exacerbates my other problems with isotretinoin packaging and the iPledge system. The erasure of my existence as a nonbinary person is a daily fact of life in our cissexist society, but there are situations in which that erasure is especially harmful.

It’s well-known among trans people who take testosterone and the doctors who treat us that testosterone often causes acne. It’s a short mental leap to anticipate that many of us would take isotretinoin to treat that side effect. When discussing topics such as pregnancy, in which gender and reproductive anatomy are often conflated, it is especially important to use specific and sensitive wording. iPledge makes no such effort.

For me, the problem starts with “female patients who can get pregnant.” Per iPledge’s own criteria, this really means “patients who have a uterus and at least one ovary and have not been confirmed by a doctor to have gone through menopause.” That’s a bit of a mouthful, but it’s specific and doesn’t introduce any extraneous factors. More realistically, even “patients who can get pregnant,” without the unnecessary gendering, would be a huge improvement.

Misgendering is more than a nuisance. It’s a reminder that people and institutions I rely on for care misunderstand fundamental aspects of my identity and needs. It’s a microaggression (and usually an accident) each time it happens, but the constant incidents pile up, isolating me from the world and accumulating in my body as toxic stress. I want to avoid the dermatologist’s office, even though I’m required to show up once a month. When I begrudgingly come in, my body is braced for fight or flight the whole visit. I have to insistently advocate for correct gendered recognition while lying about my sex life in order to access treatment.

The iPledge system, while purporting to have my best interests at heart, subjects my sex life to government surveillance, misgenders me and my partner, omits relevant facts about preventing births, and incentivizes lying to my doctor.

It’s difficult to suggest fixes to a system with so many flaws, and such serious ones at that. Some ideas are more obvious and simpler to implement: switching to gender-neutral, anatomy-focused language in materials about isotretinoin and training medical staff about how to use respectful language for transgender patients.

Some people would argue that “female” refers to sex, not gender, and is therefore appropriate to use. But as long as my categorization as “female” leads people to automatically assume I’m a woman, “female” is gendered. (Asher Bauer gives an excellent, more thorough breakdown of the social construction of sex in “Not Your Mom’s Trans 101.”) iPledge also conflates gender with anatomy in more obvious ways, referring to patients as women, with she/her pronouns, and as prospective mothers. The iPledge materials and their sloppy categorization of me no doubt contribute to the constant misgendering I also face from the staff at the dermatology clinic I’m required to visit monthly.

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But neither of these get to the heart of the problem: iPledge is a system for patient surveillance, not empowerment. To truly support patients, the FDA would have to switch to an informed-consent model: giving patients the knowledge and tools necessary to make the choices that are right for their circumstances. In a country that’s constantly trying to decrease abortion access and deny young people information about contraception and queer and trans existence, that seems like a lot to ask.

But wasn’t the whole point of this medication to feel comfortable in my own skin?

r c u s b o s n

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our culture, our art, ourselves nate barron

My style is a combination of me, all of me. I journeyed through life, heartache, and joys to find it, or more accurately, to develop it. I learned that I didn’t need just one style. It takes a plethora of fashions to fit my moods, my surroundings, and my community. During my stay in New Orleans, I have come across so many examples of authenticity. It is on the walls, in bookstores, in the faces I pass. Being queer and Black is being authentic, resilient, and unapologetic. Clothes have no gender. The wearer’s personality is the final accessory to any outfit. Be authentic.

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Comfort starts at home. When I acquire a new garment or want to try a new combination, I like to break it in at home. It’s like new shoes.

The more you wear it, the more it molds to you.

I don’t want my outfits to feel like costumes.

While at the house, I can adjust, look in the mirror, strike a pose, or put on makeup.

Whatever helps me feel comfortable and confident. Whatever helps me feel like one of the versions of myself.

At times, my choice of clothing contrasts with “society's expectations.” Style is artistry. I am an artist. Just one accessory can make a statement; can display personality. It can highlight who you are or who you are growing into. Seasons and surroundings can change. Change is natural.

Who you are today does not have to be who you are tomorrow. Even wearing your favorite socks can change your step.

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One of the biggest concerns I hear when advising folks about androgynous dress is confidence in their body shape. Black queer excellence is giving body and face. When I get dressed in the morning, I pick one thing I want to highlight. It can be a bowtie, a hat, or even my smile. I build my outfit around that one thing because that one article of clothing or physical element is a battery. It charges my feelings for the day, radiates through the rest of my outfit, and develops my confidence in myself. I sometimes pick necktie knots I want to try or earrings that add that sparkle. The rest of my outfit and body are just the supporting cast.

I want to be loud and proud but also strong and silent. Being bold doesn’t mean being gaudy. I want my look to blend into my soul. I am not dressing for attention but for my authentic self. I appreciate when I walk by someone that compliments my look and the person that says nothing. That obviously means they can’t put me into words! I want my internal monologue to be seen. I’m an experience.

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Complexity is in the details. I started elevating my style by adding one or two accessories at a time. Adding suspenders over a T-shirt and jeans can add an additional element. Even changing shoelaces can feel like a development. Don’t try to change your wardrobe all at once. Let it grow with you. Elevate and replace your clothing one at a time.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Being goofy allows room for error and can present new opportunities to further your understanding of your style. Take your look for a stroll. Take a walk and strike a pose!

Start the day feeling accomplished by setting the tone for the day. When I take the time to put a little extra effort into my dress and grooming, I feel it! I go out, I am more productive, I am more complete. Life can take a toll on our productivity and time. Selfcare can be anything that puts a smile on your face. For me, it’s a hat! Take time to smile about your clothes.

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The city of New Orleans allows its people to celebrate diversity. Growth comes from experience and experimenting. Life and love are great motivations to pursue many passions.

Be bold and experimental. A toast to diversity.

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bald and genderless ley david elliette cray

I was born bald and genderless.

And here I am again.

Maybe not genderless—that’s hard to say. I’d need some idea of what gender is to assert that with any confidence, and whatever previous idea I had has slowly eroded alongside years of thinking about and studying the topic. What I can say with confidence is that, on any common understanding, the gender I was assigned at birth sure wasn’t right. And I can say that my intuitive and preferred way of moving through the world is best described in what amounts to a flurry of contradictory ways, with the only common theme among them being something involving the word ‘femme’.

So am I a non-binary transfemme? Sure am. Is that my gender? I don’t know. Maybe? I don’t really care.

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Let’s talk fashion. I’ve had a mullet. A bowl cut.

Ill-advised spikes with entirely too much hair gel. Every color of the rainbow. It was a persistent identity crisis, even before nature started her cruel trick of slowly but surely taking my hair away. Was it a coincidence that the hair was disappearing right alongside my thinning and receding masculine self-conception?

I don’t know, but holding on to both was starting to feel embarrassing, an increasingly public sign of that awkward last-grasp clinging to something that everyone but me could see just wasn’t working anymore. “Just shave it all off,” some friends said. Then they said it again, and again. I resisted until I couldn’t anymore.

So I shaved it all off. The hair and the masculine selfconception. Now, here I am, bald and genderless— or bald and whatever you want to call this way of being and moving through the world. With both reset to a blank slate, free movement forward was possible. I knew in some way then that my expression would eventually settle into the femme side of things, but the hair—or lack thereof—left me with a puzzle: how do I feminize this head?

Wigs? Wigs weren’t right. Some people pull them off fantastically, but I’m not any of those people.

When I try on a long, flowy wig of even the highest quality, I might as well be sporting a toupee —I just see myself as a person looking like they’re trying to look like a person who has hair. And I can’t move confidently if I feel like I look like a person trying to look like someone who isn’t them.

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Drugs? Creams? Meh, I’m unconvinced.

Plugs? I don’t even know what those are, but they sound scary, invasive, and probably expensive. And either way, gender dysphoria sucks and it sucks immediately, so whatever fix I ended up with, I wanted it quickly.

Then, behold, the solution: stay bald.

Embrace it. Bald femmes are gorgeous. And hell yeah, I could become one of those gorgeous bald femmes. I would become one of those gorgeous bald femmes.

The story, of course, continues. Another cruel trick of nature is that self-conception isn’t quite the same as public perception, much less reception. Testosterone-driven puberty left me with a face conventionally coded as man: the brow, the nose, the chin, the jawline. All the respect in the world to any who go the facial feminization surgery route; it scares me near to death.

Here’s an understatement: being misgendered is annoying. Not annoying in the sense that some cis people might think: “oh, they didn’t use the particular word I want, that’s annoying.” Nope. It’s annoying in the sense that every time I get called ‘he’ or ‘sir’ or ‘man’ or whatever, it just reinforces the impression that there is no room for me or my self-conception in the world. That the way I move through the world is wrong.

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Of course, I know that’s nonsense, but like I said earlier: gender dysphoria sucks, and sometimes it makes you believe—deeply believe—things you otherwise know to be total garbage. Given my collection of male-coded facial features along with the annoying cultural norm of masculinizing baldness, then, I was left with a sequel to my previous puzzle: how the hell do I femme up my smooth, shiny dome?

Makeup, right? A dark lash, some contouring, a little lip liner? In the hands of an expert, the problem is solved. In my case, that all helps, but it’s sure not enough. Even with regular practice (which is a very, very exaggerated way of describing my present routine), I’m still coming off a no-idea-how-to-domake-up streak that lasted over three long decades.

You know what I could do, though, with minimal or even no practice? Get myself a few pairs of thick, cateye glasses. A whole array of dangly earrings. And my favorite: the head wraps. Now, I’ve got to be careful there: a lot of headwrap styles aren’t open to me, and I’m not the sort of person to stomp all over group identity and just help myself to a culturally significant adornment tradition just because it makes my head feel pretty.

So I tend to stick with two styles: I let it flow, or I twist it up. Either way give the long, flowy look of hair without getting into tricky toupee territory. The wraps aren’t hair, they don’t look like hair, and—most importantly to me—they don’t look like I think they look like hair. But they’re still something I can style, swing, and swish: a hair alternative, just like my dandelion “herbal beverage” that isn’t coffee, isn’t trying to be coffee, and yet still serves as a nice coffee alternative.

(That is almost certainly the most controversial statement in this whole article, but whatever.

Fight me.)

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I’m lucky enough that I have a bestie who happens to be a tattoo artist (love, hugs, and shoutouts to Kasha—check them out on Instagram at @foragertattoo). We’ve done lots of gender-affirming work together, all over the body. Above the shoulders, we’ve got the little white heart by the left eye, the minimal grey and pink dots by the right, the pink carnation behind the ear and the oh-so-subtle whiteink florals and butterfly across the throat. All of them serve to soften the look. (If you don’t believe me that the neck tattoo is there, just zoom in. Subtle.)

And the nice thing is that it’s hard for someone to fault you for having head, neck, and face tattoos when they’re so dainty, light, and pretty. Of course, some still will find fault, but they’ll sound silly as hell doing it. (Now, I’m not saying you should just go get face tattoos even if doing so is going to cost you your job —but for those of us who want to and can do it without retaliation, maybe, just maybe, we should?

Visibility leads to normalization, after all, and normalization leads to an expansion of the circle of people who can feel free to ink their head, neck, and face without running into punitive nonsense.)

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I don’t like to leave any doubts, so the rest of the outfit matters. Feminizing my otherwise insistently masculine-coded head takes some work below the shoulders, too. Why stop the flow, swing, and swish at just the wrap?

Rock the skirt. Play with the waistline.

Shoes, shoes, shoes. And my favorite: when I skip the headwrap, I throw on the “men’s” blazer and mandarin-collar button-up to go with the skirt and heels. Just enough masculine-coded attire mixed in contrast with the femme foundation to show that the latter is neither accident nor an attempt to present myself as anything other than what I am.

It’s a way of saying: this is femme. This is femme. Maybe not your femme—my femme.

So, forget hair, and forget the culture of masculine-coded baldness. Here I am. Bald, genderless, and unabashedly femme. It doesn’t matter much to me if some folks don’t get it, or if some folks don’t like it. I love every single day of it.

Photos: Diana Urbina (@thenuisance) Make-up: Natalie Cochran (@natgeode)

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QUEERANTINE photographing the everyday anxiety of a queer body in the covid-19 pandemic mark kurai & t.j. tallie

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and as with many in the U.S. we began to distance ourselves for health and safety. After the first two weeks of self-isolation began to stretch endlessly outward, we found ourselves feeling somewhat adrift and listless. At that time, anticipating the potential for a protracted isolation, the two of us decided to undertake a photo series that documented life during the pandemic. In this photo essay, we analyze images captured by the photographer, Mark, and examine how the subject, T.J., posed himself in a variety of clothing styles to explore how we navigated the alienating, unworldly sense of the pandemic. Thinking through this experience together, we discuss what it means for queer bodies of color to move through the world —or not, in the case of a pandemic—and how this project helped us survive the endless anxiety of the year while imagining strange, and potentially wonderful queer futures.

In her book Queer Phenomenology Sara Ahmed explores the relationships between space, home, and belonging. She ties these threads together explicitly around the idea of orientation, asserting that “the concept of ‘orientation’ allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space-that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance. And yet, for me, learning left from right, east from west, and forward from back does not necessarily mean I know where I am going. I can be lost even when I know how to turn, this way or that way” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 6).

This is precisely how we felt in those first weeks of navigating the pandemic, in experiencing the now painfully over-familiar world of walls of our home, the front steps, the outer courtyard.

There was simultaneously a hyper-awareness of where we were and also being wildly out of direction—where were we going, what was any of this? This is part of what our photo project offered us—a chance to feel grounded.

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One of the most disorienting aspects of the past fourteen months during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing has been the passage of time. This creative venture provided us with structure and consistency. Once a week, usually a Sunday, Mark would walk to T.J.’s house, and take a series of photos. Before the fun would begin, T.J. would select one or two outfits, consult with Mark, and discuss an overall plan for the pictures. In the evenings, Mark would edit the images, and our routine would be complete. For sixty-one weeks, this became our ritual. For each photoshoot, the images became a way of marking time and our conversations helped us understand what was going on around us. What began as a weekly collaborative creative project became a series of photographic temporal markers that organized our weekly routines and our memories of the intervening year.

For Mark, the photoshoots were more than a chance to indulge his creativity. While the shift to working remotely was a smooth transition, balancing the constant pressure to perform and the desire to maintain community among friends and family often left him too depleted to focus on his own wellness. After a week spent working indoors and isolated, these regular events were an opportunity to go for a walk outside, to stay connected to a friend, and to continually nurture a passion for photography. With T.J., he had created a project that allowed him to regularly address different facets of his life. . . and he does love efficiency.

For T.J., the photoshoots offered an opportunity to escape his own pandemic-induced anxious thoughts and literally step outside of the same four walls of his apartment. Part of T.J.’s excitement for this project involved working from his own history with fashion, bodies, and performance.

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In his research as a historian, he has examined the ways that Africans used fashion to claim their belonging in a colonial world and to subvert raced and gendered expectations of them and their bodies (Tallie, 206, p. 389-410). He maintains a fashion blog for his non-quarantine outfits and he’s written before about how fashion means something important to him as a queer, fat, Black person (Tallie, 2020). It allows him to move through the world with confidence, to challenge things around him, and to feel powerful. But what would it mean when I was largely alone?

possibility within the constraints of everyday life” for Black people in white supremacist societies.

The daily practice of choosing clothing that will cover the body and create moving images, can create profound frequencies of feeling for observers; these quotidian actions are “mobilized as everyday practices of refusal” (Campt, 2017, p. 5).

For both of us, this project allowed us to stay connected as friends in a world newly shaped by isolation. Regularly taking distanced photos outside allowed us to connect with each other and feel active in a world that seemed painfully static.

Little did we know that we would take hundreds of photos over nearly fourteen months stretching from March 28, 2020 until May 23, 2021.

We hope you enjoy going on a partial journey with us now.

With this in mind, we offer these snapshots from the pandemic and attempt to listen to what these images may tell us about fourteen months of queerness, bodies, and movement.

As we retrace these photos of queerness, fashion, and the pandemic with you, we remain indebted to scholar Tina M. Campt. In Listening to Images, Campt explores the myriad ways in which Black people claim a future for themselves despite constant oppression or erasure. Studying passport photographs or ethnographic imagery, Campt chooses to listen to the images, focusing on the feelings elicited by these everyday objects. For Campt, “‘listening to images’ is at once a description and a method. It designates a method of recalibrating vernacular photographs as quiet, quotidian practices that give us access to the affective registers through which these images enunciate alternate accounts of their subjects. It is a method that opens up the radical interpretive possibilities of images and state archives we are most often inclined to overlook”. Campt finds within these images, “the struggle to create

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march 28, 2020 (day 15) This photo was taken two weeks into social distancing and working remotely. We suspected the pandemic would endure longer than expected but it was difficult to comprehend the scale and seriousness of what was to come. In the first week of photos, we had a vague concept of taking regular photos but no concrete plan. It was really a chance to document how disoriented, how confused we felt.

Initially, we joked that it was an opportunity to see an extrovert just be alone for a few weeks, but the anxiety was already at the forefront of this photo.

Personal fashion has always been a way to signal and reinforce queerness. Being forced into virtual environments for a vast majority of our social interactions changed our relation to personal fashion and how it reinforces (or fails to reinforce) our sense of identity. What does it mean when no one is around to see the clothes you choose? How does one rebel or mark oneself differently when so much of their lives are remote and removed from interactions with the wider world?

about the outfit I specifically chose a fun and edgy t-shirt and some quirky mismatched glasses frames, but here they work to underline the anxiety rather than hide it. There’s something purposefully blunt and sassy about wearing a shirt with Bert and Ernie as a leather fetish gay couple, flanked by all of the uncertainy all around me.

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june 27, 2020 (day 106) This photo was taken roughly three months into the pandemic. Beyond the rising mortality resulting from COVID-19 the U.S. was roiling in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a devastating rise in unemployment, and economic turmoil.

Everything felt as it had shifted—massive street protests, on-going conversations on anti-Black racism, and reckoning with the fundamental divides in the country— and yet it all felt so abstract from quarantine.

In the midst of the economic crisis fueled by the pandemic, many gay establishments and queer institutions have closed never to be reopened. Regardless of our feelings about these establishments—many gay bars are openly hostile to non-white, non-masculine, fat bodies—they provided spaces to be seen.

In the absence of those spaces, distanced from queer community, we began to re-examine and reinvent how we saw ourselves and the clothes we wear. We bought skirts and wore more caftans. We painted our nails, donned eyeliner, and made sure the other participants on our Zoom meetings noticed. We created a tiny public queer space on these Sundays, occasionally enjoying cocktails while distanced and feeling less alone.

about the outfit I paired a bright patterned caftan with chunky navy eyeglasses and a restored vintage bone necklace. I received the necklace (rusted, and in fragments) as a donation from an old vintage store and a friend revitalized it by rewiring it and adding extra beading. It was a repurposing of an old accessory, one that made me feel like something was truly mine. I decided to wear it not only because it gave off a particularly cool summer vibe with the outfit, but because it was an act of claiming space in this pandemic.

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july 19, 2020 (day 128) This photo was taken at a time when unemployment had worsened and the economic situation for many Americans was critical. Renters, low-income, and younger households were increasingly more likely to miss housing payments. LGBTQ+ homeless youth were particularly vulnerable during this time; schools had been closed for months, the hours and services at LGBT community centers were reduced. The pandemic had exacerbated security around housing, food, health and mental care.

The power of ‘queerness’ comes from challenging the idea of normal or appropriate structures.

There can be power in remixing a concept or idea outside of its original context, especially when making claims to space or freedom. As we listen to this image, T.J. inverts the standard early twentieth-century idea of the strongman or traditional masculine swimsuit wearer. He wears it as a different type of leisure, stuck in his apartment complex rather than the beach, and refuses the camera’s gaze. This outfit is nearly a century out of date, and no longer elicits popular masculine energy. Instead, it can be a chance to tease that idea, and to exist outside what is seen as normal or appropriate.

about the outfit Yes, I own an old-timey one-piece swimsuit. And I fucking love it. As someone who has long been nervous about the size and scope of my body, this outfit both shows it off while also containing it in inventive ways.

On this Sunday, I got to repurpose an old-fashioned masculine outfit, pair it with a straw boater, and get a little day tipsy on your front steps. Mark also took some photos of me lifting weights like I’m a 1920s strongman.

It was a fun day because I felt strong. I felt powerful. I felt ridiculous. I honestly loved every minute of this day.

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july 26, 2020 (day 135)

about the outfit

This photo was taken as some Americans continued to refuse—sometimes violently— taking the most basic precautions for theirs and others’ safety, like wearing masks. Rallies of anti-mask, anti-lockdown protestors were highly visible in San Diego where we live and across the rest of the country.

The pandemic changed social connections, imaginations of what’s possible or acceptable or permissible. For me, this involved transforming ideas of what clothing was personally meaningful. Like many people, I’d begun thinking critically about what my gender identity meant in isolation from everyone. I feel comfortable with both he/him and they/them pronouns, but I wasn’t sure about wholly embracing traditionally feminine-perceived fashions. But finding this vintage housedress at a nearby store (that I ordered and received remotely!) changed this. It’s a sunny, bright floral print—and it has pockets! I felt like a cool auntie around the house in the flowy, practical garment, and when Mark first took photos of me across the street from my apartment, I felt nervous and also liberated all at the same time.

The resistance to following medical guidance on safety inherently touched upon ableism, racism. For people living with disability or conditions that predisposed them to COVID-19, for communities living with histories of traumatizing medical experiences or being denied adequate medical assistance, there was an immeasurable fear of this pandemic. These realities were felt disproportionately by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

Queer fashion can and does respond to these environments. It can offer the potential to resist scripts of conformity, of belonging offered in events like the anti-mask protests.

Instead, it can imagine new worlds, reinvent new types of dressing or behaving or being.

It can stand out and challenge our daily comforts.

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august 30, 2020 (day 170) This photo was taken at a time when COVID exhaustion was starting to impact the emotional well-being of many people more and more. For many who continued to social distance and follow Centers for Disease Control guidance, a constant stream of social media stimulus depicting people exercising at gyms, eating at restaurants, travelling, smiling mask-less among friends and family had evoked a range of emotions related to frustration, anger, and a lack of sympathy.

about the outfit I remember feeling very vulnerable in this photograph because it was one of the first times that my stomach was so exposed. As a queer, Black, and fat person, there’s a sense of vulnerability, of fear and nervousness about my body. This vintage cape felt like a decorative armor. I loved how it helped me move through the space and feel powerful and provocative. I thought to pair it with some strong eyeliner and an old military cap a friend gifted me years ago. I love that this feels celebratory, joyful, but also somewhat militant. It’s the idea of not being gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you—fuck these systems, fuck these oppressions, fuck these hierarchies. Let’s be glorious in our claiming space.

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Months after lockdown, we were battling to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle. The pandemic had highlighted the fragility and security of our health, sensitizing us to our bodies. Watching the changes in our physique, the decline in our muscle tone, our weight gain was difficult. Insecurities with our bodies were reawakened—insecurities that had developed (pre-pandemic) in relation to white, masculine bodies. It was not a coincidence that those were the same bodies that we saw over social media continuing to travel and lively freely during the pandemic while we stayed inside and dealt with a growing dissatisfaction directed at ourselves.

october 11, 2020 (day 212) This photo was taken some time after the U.S. surpassed 200 thousand coronavirusrelated deaths.

Since the outset of the pandemic lockdown, the word “normal” had been used in common discourse. People nonchalantly remarked about the “new normal” in workplaces and dreaming of getting back to their “normal” life that existed before the pandemic. There was a stubborn attempt to return to normality—or perhaps more accurately, back to the ordinary and comfortable.

The relation between normality and queerness is fraught. Normality has historically been weaponized against the LGBTQ+ community—“why can’t you live a normal lifestyle?”—reifying the boundaries of sexuality to provide feelings of comfort and certainty to straight people, borders that queers were not allowed to cross (e.g., marriage, adoption).

We felt this tension consistently as we continued to engage with non-queer people through work or as we watched from our isolation. Our work attire often reflected that pull towards normality—wearing professional attire like a button-down shirt for virtual meetings.

about the outfit This is absolutely an outfit I would wear in my regular day job as a university professor, and it felt very, very surreal to wear it after seven months of working remotely. My work clothes felt...well, they felt like a costume. Granted, they’d always been a performance, a way of projecting being a history professor and ostentatiously performing belonging even when I didn’t feel it, but this felt more like I was on stage than before. I love this checked shirt paired with a tie I found in a thrift shop years ago and an old derby gifted by a retiring colleague. I changed it up a bit with a pop-in septum ring. The pants are reproduction turn of the century style, and I feel snug and secure when in those suspenders. It’s strange that we took this photo on National Coming Out Day, and yet I wore a regular day outfit, perhaps as a way to think of the ways that queerness takes multiple forms, even in the everyday.

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january 10, 2021 (day 303) This photo was taken after months of apprehension and anxiety over the 2020 Presidential election, an intense and on-going denial of the new administration, and days after the Capitol Riots. It had been 300 days of isolation, but some hope was on the horizon as the Food and Drug Administration had authorized emergency use of a vaccine created by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer back in January.

Queer self-fashioning can respond to these endless, despairing pressures by creating new worlds. As blogger Maurice Tracy argued: I live in a world where either body privilege or race privilege is always against me. So I point my camera at my face, most often when I am alone, and possibly bored, and I click; I upload it to instagram, and I hold my breath because the world is cruel and I am what some would call ugly, but I don’t see it. ...I want them, you, to see that I am human, and there is a reason why I got to this size, but I owe you no explanation or justification for any part of my existence I owe you no explanation or justification for my smile or my swag or my selfie. Hell I didn’t even owe you this. (Tracy, 2013)

As Tracy asserts, there can be a defiance in continuing to take pictures, to allow your body to be visible.

In this image, we can hear the exhaustion, but we can also hear continued resilience, defiance, and a general reference to clothing and styles outside of Western norms. It’s amorphous and challenging, outside of the clear hierarchical lines of order the Capitol rioters called for on January 6.

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about the outfit I am exhausted beyond measure. I broke out some hexagonal clear frames to wear over a long sleeve shirt, but thought I’d dress it up with a West African Sankofa beaded necklace made by a dear friend. She’d intended it to be a “power necklace,” something to hold to whenever I felt scared or intimidated, and that fit the bill. I draped myself in an old oil cloth I’d had around the house with some great batik designs and wanted to reflect both my exhaustion but also my refusal to simply fade into the background in the darkest days of the journey so far.

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february 26, 2021 (day 350) This photo was taken at a time when multiple vaccines were being rolled out across the U.S. focusing on vaccinating the elderly and those most at risk. At the same time, a U.K. variant of the coronavirus had been spreading rapidly within the U.S. We were learning that new variants were potentially more easily transmitted, more lethal, more resistant to current vaccines.

Listening to this image, the top hat and formal dress recall elements of dandyism, a historic style utilized by Black Americans to claim space and disrupt the everyday norms of white supremacy and heteronormativity.

As historian Monica Miller has asserted, “the dandy’s affectations (fancy dress, arch attitude, fey and fierce gesture) signify well beyond obsessive self-fashioning—rather, the figure embodies the importance of the struggle to control representation and selfand cultural-expression” (Miller, 2009). As the fears of a potential new-vaccine world lay on the horizon, and a year of isolation loomed, the self-conscious carefree regality of a dandy stares back at us in this image. T.J. looks at us confident, directly, but still with a slightly off-kilter, or queer stance, reminding us that not all is as normal as we’d think.

about the outfit This look was so much fun to do! I thought some old sweater pins, found online, would pop against this vividly patterned dress shirt, and with these dark blue geometric frames. Mark last minute suggested the top hat, which truly brought the look all together for me, incorporating an element as formal as it was playful. It felt like an opportunity to experiment with bold colors and hope that things could be changing. This was the last photo we took before I got my first vaccine shot, and I was nervous and excited!

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march 7, 2021 (day 359) This photo was taken after over a year of sustained awareness of violence directed at non-white communities. After another year of violence directed at Black communities was being erroneously compared to pandemic-related hate directed at Asian communities. By this time over 3,700 incidents of hate targeting Asian Americans had been documented. In the coming weeks, new incidents would become part of public consciousness in the news and social media from Seattle to Queens, Portland, and San Antonio.

As hope continued to give way to further disillusionment and violence, queer fashion can subvert as well as inspire or threaten. This image threatens. It proclaims a selfregard and also screams “back off.”

We may still have been isolated, but we were also not willing to give a single inch.

about the outfit Some days you must go hard femme, dripping with queenly disdain. This tiara, some black matte lipstick, and a fun white caftan made me feel regal, made feel powerful. I loved this day.

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may 23, 2021 (day 436) This photo was taken 2 days after Mark could consider himself fully vaccinated. Sixty weeks after social distancing became a lifestyle, we ended the weekly photo documentation project. Today, we have entered a period of time when the demand for isolation is less immediately real, and we are cautiously exploring our place in the midst of socialization.

Following a time of great and enduring change we are remarkably different people in this photograph compared to when we started. However, our photographic journey has made us feel closer to each other, the regular rhythms of our friendship having continued throughout the isolation of the pandemic. In that regard, and beyond any other consequences, the strengthening of our friendship was the greatest success of this project.

about the outfits T.J. I also feel the clothes here are so marvelously queer. We look respectable, fancy, and yet also not normative. Mark’s got an amazing shade of red lipstick, such a beautiful suit jacket, and this wonderful skirt. I’m going more for early twentieth century floral dandy. We could be opening a queer bed and breakfast or hawking artisanal soaps. But there’s also something more here. . . a sense in that we’ve marked time, and navigated a sense of loneliness, isolation, and being profoundly disoriented. I feel community here, that we’ve made space in the midst of this. Also, we look fucking hot.

Mark Photographing and scrutinizing the images of T.J. reminded me to appreciate the bravery and beauty in queer bodies. Sixty weeks of photos. Hundreds of photos edited. Attending to the color of T.J.’s skin, the way light and shadow play along his contours, I became more intimate with T.J.’s face and body than I was with my own. Throughout the pandemic I was so hypersensitive to how my body felt that I intentionally distanced myself from how my body looked beyond an abstract sense of dissatisfaction. This photoshoot and my outfit were an opportunity to reflect on how I use clothing to augment or hide my body. In picking an outfit I intentionally included pieces that are pre-pandemic (the button-down shirt) and those acquired during the past year (the bandana necktie), pieces that are more masculine (the blazer) and those that are more feminine (the skirt), those that hung tighter to my body and those that flowed around it.

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In reflecting on these photos, we turn back to Sara Ahmed.

So many of these photos were about confronting the uncertainty, the anxiety, and trying to make it known. An artistic endeavor that documented the unstable experience of a global pandemic created a feeling of control. More than that, it was the consistency of queer fellowship that grounded us. As Ahmed says, “What I remember, what takes my breath away, are not so much the giddy experiences of moving and the disorientation of being out of place, but the ways we have of settling; that is, of inhabiting spaces that, in the first instance, are unfamiliar but that we can imagine—sometimes with fear, other times with desire— might come to feel like home. Such becoming is not inevitable” (Ahmed, p. 10). Such transformations are not inevitable; we take for granted now that the severity of the pandemic has decreased, that vaccines have changed things somewhat, and our relationship to space is recalibrating. But these photos are reminders of hope and wonder and confusion—the idea that amid all of this, we could make some sort of peace, and find a resting place in this roiling sea.

1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), 6.

2. T. J. Tallie, “Sartorial Settlement: The Mission Field and Transformation in Colonial Natal, 1850–1897,” Journal of World History 27, no. 3 (September 27, 2016): 389–410, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2016.0114.

3. T.J. Tallie, “Weaponizing Wardrobes: Reckoning with History, Blackness, and Embodiment,” Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics 3, no. 2 (2020).

4. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2017), 5.

5. Ibid.

6. Maurice Tracy, “The Fat Boi Diaries: Why Selfies?,” BlaQueer (blog), March 16, 2013, https://blaqueer.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/the-fat-boi-diaries-why-selfies/.

7. Monica L. Miller, on her book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity: Cutting-Edge Intellectual Interviews, Rorotoko, October 15, 2009, http://rorotoko.com/interview/20091016_miller_monica_on_slaves_fashion_black_dandyism_st yling_black_ident /?page=2.

8. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 10.

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w h a w e t s

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thrifting as cruising wryly t. mccutchen

i thrift most of my clothes. i love the thrill of the hunt. the chance nature of it. it’s a bit like cruising, no? you sense an intense energy. & when you look, you’re dazzled from across the room/aisle. from this distance, you can’t make out the finer details of your mysterious provocateur. you approach, maybe run a finger over seams. search the collar for indicators of what this being/object might be comprised of. you try on/out a few things. & if all the stars & signs align, you make it home together. & just maybe that someone/something even wears you (out) just as much as you wear them (out). i’m a poet & performing artist. i consider my expression through clothes akin to my poetry practice. or at least it’s a related art form i’d say. i often bring in small elements that remind me to be open to the stranger sparks & wobbles of this universe. add something to the middle. & then remove it bc it’s far too darling. cherish the awareness of its absence. this approach, when applied to clothes, also enables me to find other creative weirdos. a kind of artfag flagging, if you will. we see each other by design.

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in the early days of my outward gender variance, thrift stores were one of the few sites i was truly able to stretch my gender explorations safely. i was comfortable there because that's where my mom took a much younger me to get "new clothes" second hand. i even enjoy the way i can sometimes smell but never know the history. can only ever imagine what the first hands must have done to them. i tend to take a very "shop local" approach to buying accessories or nonthrifted items. i buy jewelry from other trans & queer artists most of them from the PNW (where i live). i only really wanna pay full price to my LGBTQAI+ fam & to BIPoC creators. same goes for body mods (tats & piercings). one of my favorite poems of all time is "Delight in Disorder" by Robert Herrick, which might just be the first poem ever written about Sprezzatura/studied nonchalance: More bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part this poem carries a sense of casual & even transcendent disruption. a loving acknowledgement of convention in cahoots with a subversion of it. & while i do love rules, what i most love, what i think to be most queer, is to strategically stray from accepted/enforced forms. when i do it i feel I’m breaking from respectability in nourishing ways. in ways that feed my well-ancestors & rebuff the troubling ghosts.

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some of my more recent breaks from form: 1. in my latest foray into lipograms i decided to include one use each of the three letters (ROY) i was otherwise excluding from the rest of the text.

2. in dress, it can look like an ostensibly allblack outfit punctuated by oxblood shoes & a pair of socks that say “DADDY” in all caps, bright white lettering. maybe none of this makes sense. but to me it does. when you’re queer & trans in this world, it is a form of resistance to be at ease & in disdain (of the status quo). i aim for an aggressively flamboyant ease. i Delight in Disorder. in dress & in poetry, i simultaneously soothe myself & defy those who(’d) diminish the vibrancy of the ancient trans family i am so lucky to be within.

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chris talbot-heindl

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death, in a fashion dawn vogel

there's arsenic in the dye, but am I not luminous in this green gown? (and if I were to survive this, live to see a different century, might I not be given a tiny paintbrush, dipped in radium-226, sharpened with my tongue, to paint the hands of a watch another luminous green?) my golden bangles glitter in the light, wealth on display, the most valuable thing. (cyanide and mercury pulled them from the ore, broken bodies, broken lives, broken promises, ecological devastation in their wake, not the tiny tinkling sounds they make on wrists complicit, drenched in someone else's blood.) jeans of the bluest blue synthetic indigo overdyed distressed. (maybe the rivers don't catch fire anymore. that doesn't mean they're clean. we dream of blue waters, but synthetic indigo blue is not the color in dreams. hydrocide is a nasty word.

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all good ghosts here margaret redmond whitehead

All houses have ghosts.

The one we buy is a two-story building the shape of an upright Lego, teal and coral pink, with white gingerbread eaves. It has a tall privet hedge that feels like it can shield me. To the left of the front door is a wooden plaque naming its year of birth: 1889. It is a house that feels rich in history, so stable that when I stand on its wooden floors, my heels root deep into the earth.

When my wife, Sara, and I first visit the house, and step through the threshold, I know its smell. As we move further inside, I recognize more of it: There is my stovetop espresso maker; there is a wall print of the activist whose autobiography is in my bag; there are books I want to read and books I’ve read; there on the kitchen counter are the cookbooks we used to teach ourselves to cook. When I open the door to the back vestibule and see dozens

of dried garlic bulbs hanging from the walls, the recognition changes. From then on, as we tour the house, instead of seeing myself as I am, I start seeing myself in the future. The historic house holds the magic of time travel.

There are also the things I don’t see. There’s no nursery or children’s rooms. No dresser surface, bathroom shelf, or closet rack holds things I wouldn’t use. It takes me until that evening to guess that no men live there. “Well,” I joke, as the notion solidifies that we are buying a house from a queer couple, “At least we know it doesn’t have any homophobic ghosts.”

I’ve never felt interested before in the people who came before me in places I’ve lived, but it means something this time, that we’re inheriting a queer space. There is no ground to break. Instead of trying to make a place our own, we would be building upon something that was already there.

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When we pull up in mid-November, the first moment the house is ours, I spot a woman tossing logs of firewood into the back of a pickup truck.

“Is that them?” I ask, leaning forward. “Are we going to meet them?” I wonder if I’m going to need a pair of rubber-coated work gloves like the ones on her hands.

While we chat with her on the sidewalk, she tells us about how she built the tiny house—an artist studio with a loft for naps—in the backyard, and how the neighbor helped install the wood stove in the living room. We already know from internet snooping that her expertise is in sustainable agriculture, and that the garden we’re about to inherit is a tightly calibrated ecosystem.

They poured so much work and beauty into this building that I feel an incongruous guilt for buying it, as though I’m taking it from them. I ask, “Are you going to miss it?”

The previous owner looks past the hedge to the house, and shrugs. She says they’ve had a good run there, seven years, and that it’s the end of their time. When they leave, trundling away with a truck bed full of firewood, one of them says, “Just wait until spring. The garden will be full of surprises.”

She adds, “The asparagus comes up first.”

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I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be part of the queer history of a building; to move into a queer space. There are the small things it means: The straight neighbors preaccustomed to your existence, when your last neighbors called you sisters. The feeling of a building already amenable and welcoming to you, ready for you. The absence of phantom presences otherwise encountered in the dayto-day textures of the floors and walls, which by their existence alone might threaten to remind you that heteronormativity cloyingly defines ideas of home and family. There’s no space for that bullshit. All good ghosts here.

houses and the people who fill them. In my favorite set of house-related lyrics, the narrator returns to a derelict family home covered in trash and graffiti, wind-beaten and sun-faded, and sets about trying to make right, only to find in the seven long mysterious years he’s been gone, the lilac bush in the patio has flourished, alone. He doesn’t mind the litter or the vandalism—I use those words too—but the thought of the lilac bush meeting its doom is too much:

In that release and freeing, though, there is something else. There is stepping into a space you already fit into and finding that you do not need to fit it to yourself, but that, in fact, you can build upon something already begun.

Saving the house, in a way, revolves around the lilac bush, this single living thing that has altered the house beyond what its owners ever meant it to, growing beyond its sanction, so big and so fruitful and strong, changing the composition of the house more profoundly than garbage or spray paint ever could. In returning to the house, the singer isn’t just trying to restore it—he wants to protect some of the new aesthetic it’s taken on. It is better in some way, more suited to him, because of this unlikely squatter. He will scrub the graffiti off the doors, restore the panes and fortify the walls—This poor old house is in decline / I hope we got to it in time—but the wildness of the lilac bush indicates a trajectory other than intact-in disrepair-restored; it suggests something less circular and more linear, a growth of the house from its previous self to something not just restored but improved, built upon, the sweet pungency of the feral porch flora transcending the house to something more than a house, something like a holy artistic sanctuary. Let the lilac bush live on!

Queer spaces have frequently been public spaces—clubs, back rooms, bathrooms, parks, and cruising spots—but they are defined by their transience as often as they are by the legacies they leave. And yet private spaces, as well, have long provided safe or relatively safe queer space. The hedge is a shield and the walls are armor. What I had never before fathomed is a space that is both: A space that could come with queer legacy, and which could shelter me as a home.

I’m not someone who always dreamed of a space of my own. My dream was always a shared space, a house full of people who move easily around one another: Community that behaves like family. As soon as I could name this desire, I started collecting within the trope. I read books about perilously tightknit housemates, and listened to songs about

I could not stand to see it die; Let the lilac bush live on!

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A house, and its bidden and unbidden parts, the intentional shingles and unexpected lilac bush, can collaborate with its inhabitants.

The structure in which I live provides unmoving beams to hammer into, and walls to paint and floors to scratch or buff. The ground it stands on collaborated with the owners before us—we call them “Elinjay,” a meshing of their initials—as they weeded the garden beds and wove a grape vine into an arbor and laid beneath it stone slabs that came from the floor of the sea. It held their paint.

Its walls absorbed layers of their cooking grease. Shelves bear the rings of their essential oil bottles.

Sara theorizes that at some point, an owner of our house before Elinjay took steps towards modernizing it, and that in the seven years Elinjay lived here, they steadily worked to reclaim its true form—return it to its lilacwild oldness. There’s the strange, textured beige wallpaper in the bedroom, the imperfect fits on the trim, and the not-quiteexact measurements that we’ve codified as signature Elinjay. Perfect-fit carpentry with the wrong kind of paint. My office walls are lavender. The kitchen, white and coral. The living room wallpaper is bronzy damask, and it is a little bit shiny. Where we lean understated, Elinjay went big.

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In seven long mysterious years, things can alter a house that deserve more than a blink of notice.

Some living things transform a space in ways that change its composition and meaning, and render their legacies deserving of preservation. Let the lilac bush live on! There are acknowledgements we must make to the unwieldy, unconforming entities that shape the spaces we inhabit.

At first, Sara and I don’t trust ourselves not to fuck anything up, but as we gain confidence we make small changes: We hang my grandfather’s woodworking tools on the living room walls against the shiny damask; we repaint the porch; Sara takes down the ripped plastic blinds and I sew new curtains out of white hemp fabric with a lineny weave. To Elinjay’s outbursts of color and pattern I add simplicity in the soft and the hard: draped fabric and rusting metal. In thinking forward, I try to envision the house without them, but it’s hard to separate the two. It seems more apt to imagine a trajectory of layering artistic sensibilities, the space they forged and the parts of ourselves we brought in through its doors.

In the heat of summer, I pay a man from the internet to dump a cord and a half of firewood through the back gate. I spend the day out back, hands sweating in my rubber-coated gloves, stacking the wood log by log across four pallets in the pole barn. I blare Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. At lunch I take a work call about an editing job but the whole time I’m on the phone my arms are itching for the weight of a few logs.

The four pallets fill slowly, layers crossing across each other as the pile empties. When I tell my cousin I’m having a blast stacking wood, he cracks a laugh: finicky work with a bunch of tree pieces—of course. The punch of his revelation, joy in surprise, matches mine.

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In the end, the forsythias show up first, flowering bright tiny specks of yellow along the fence.

Then comes the asparagus, and the grasses and the trees and the hedge-walls fill out with green.

When the pond thaws, we discover three goldfish paddling around in the murk. The strawberries fatten until we pluck and eat them. The azalea blooms and then the rhododendrons. The sweet fern and hostas uncoil. The champagne currants and gooseberries turn up, then the raspberries between thorns and white mulberries hanging from branches. The sea kale, sorrel, and comfrey spread themselves out across garden beds. The walking onions grow until they are too heavy to hold up their own heads. The arbor vines sink under the weight of the grapes. We make cake from the currants and we sauté the asparagus; we make jelly out of the grapes they planted.

At the peach tree, a hip-high, scrawny little branch of a plant, Elinjay pauses and gives a little sigh. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “That tree has never been happy there.” It might be all the shade it gets from the neighbor’s cherry tree, or any other of dozens of factors. It has a couple dozen dark green leaves and a bent to it like something’s drawing it nearer to hear a secret, or maybe drawing it down to the ground.

With the yard’s steady unfurling, I keep thinking that I never would have known how to design a garden to suit my sense of beauty exactly, but that this is it. I find it remarkable that I didn’t have to make a place from scratch where I feel at home.

Some aesthetic part of me was already here.

In the warmth of the second November we gear up, armed with web research and shovels and a tarp. We are prepared to unearth a substantial root ball, but the peach tree comes out of the ground as easily, as untethered to its prior soil as though it had been growing from a slope of ever-shifting scree. As the light of late fall dims across the yard, we transplant the peach tree to a spot in the sun.

“We were thinking about moving it to the other side of the tiny house,” I say, a little anxious about mentioning changing a garden with the person who made it, “So it could get more sun.”

Elinjay clearly doesn’t share our vision of torchpassing. “You can do whatever you want with it,” she says later, of the garden. “It’s yours.”

It is an incredible thing to get to know the ghosts of a place and find that, in many ways, they are you. Parts of you that you haven’t yet found and named.

A year in, Sara arranges for a call with the previous owner to learn about the garden. She walks around the yard with her phone, holding it up so Elinjay can explain to us what we’re seeing.

I take notes on a paper garden map I’ve made.

“Forgiving,” I write next to the blueberries, hoping I’ll be able to decipher the notes later.

“Lingonberries: living mulch.” “Concord grape arbor: planted 2012.” “No man’s land.” “Weed tree.” “Seaberry tree. RIP.”

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

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the transformation sequence harrison cook

Glitterous Rex hatched from a pean-historic drag egg. That’s the smarmy genesis of the drag queen concept living inside my head since late 2019. I’d just started watching Rupaul’s Drag Race every week with the religiosity of a devoted sports fan with my gay friends in Chicago. We all had a drag queen name. The fictional character of ourselves who has the courage to wear anything under the lens of critique, roast any hater on the spot, and who, of course, levitates down that runway like some goddess from myth. With tones of canary yellow laced in every outfit, Karl transformed into Baby Gouda. Sleek and angular, Simon transfigured into Sylvia Satrease. But I never saw my drag queen, Glitterous Rex, in the same cute cellophane light. To me, she hatched from her egg to terrify the world of men. Not to friend them. She parts the eggshell, spindles of goo stretching, sliding down the porous exterior. She emerges, wearing an acid green dress, flecks of color on the fabric Trompe-l’oeil reptilian or avian features, perhaps as a creature caught in the stages of evolution itself. Pink glitter T-Rexes glint as the heels of her shoes. And as she takes one step forward, the illusion of my drag queen evaporates in a prism mist. The name, “Glitterous Rex,” implies a certain level of expertise. I can talk the talk. I can't walk. Literally: I’ve never crammed my size fourteen foot into a set of high-heeled shoes, but when I picture myself stepping into Glitterous Rex there is a certain stillness and wholeness required of myself—the artist—that now, I find myself lacking.

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I remember Lady Gaga’s 2013 Vanity Fair cover spread, misplaced between Popular Mechanics and a Farmer’s Almanac in the grocery store. Topless, hair grayed, sylvan almost, Gaga was coming off her Monster album and writing the bangers from Born This Way. I saw the other copies safely tucked in the lifestyle section. Perhaps it was the forced juxtaposition bringing me to pick up Vanity Fair like a magnet picks up a loose nail. I flipped through the gloss pages, past perfume, and cologne samples, glued, folded, and sealed, past clothes my family couldn’t afford even in their dreams, and found the feature on Mother Monster herself near the middle. She wore a dress crafted

by Alexander McQueen, featuring Renaissance figures as a gold trim around crimson and olive green. Her spread in that little number looks like Lady Gaga in a crimson veil. She wore the same dress at the VMA’s in 2010, though then she sported a vertical feather, instead of the magazine’s crystal crown. I remember sneaking the magazine into my mother’s grocery cart. She was on the phone, distracted, and loaded the cart onto the cashier’s belt two items at a time. Though I’d start a collection of Lady Gaga fashion shoot magazines, the 2013 Vanity Fair Style issue painted a scaffolding, provided the bones for Glitterous Rex, stomping down the runaway, a moment frozen in time, when she flips her dress, and looks at the audience through a thin veil and they are petrified.

due to special abuse, and the transformation it instilled within his work moving forward.

McQueen said in the documentary,“I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance. I’ve seen a woman get nearly beaten to death by her husband. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”

One retelling of the Medusa myth interprets the defilement of Athena’s tomb as an act of rape and repaints the virgin goddess in a merciful light. She transformed Medusa into the snakehaired, talon bearer, with eyes that turn anyone who looks upon them into granite, we know and see today, so she wouldn’t be abused again.

Though, in college, I found this interpretation fails when Athena later equips Perseus with mythical weapons to slay “the monster,” of Medusa. We remember Medusa as the monster, forget she was once a woman, devout to her goddess, known for her beauty and intelligence.

Medusa, or in these cases, the costume of her, is missing from her myth as notable drag queens invoke her image. Season one of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Shannel lip-synced for her life as Medusa, and when she dropped, her headpiece ripped from her cowl up to her scalp. Season thirteen contestant, Denali, wore an albino python rendition of Medusa, an arrangement of snakes, flaring out into a cobra-like crown. Season thirteen winner (sorry for the spoilers) Symone wore a Grecian white dress with golden armor covering her left side. A wig of grey dreadlocks, arranged like darting snakes with golden heads, fan around her head like rays from the sun.

Symone invokes Perseus and Medusa, the story of the myth, misinformed hero, and misunderstood monster. She slayed.

McQueen, the documentary released in 2018, follows the brilliant, but brief, career of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen. There is an architecture of cruelty McQueen’s fashion combats against. He aimed to elevate the female form to that of a mythic status. His women wore armor, metal scales, brass breastplates, protecting from the brutalism waiting outside the studio. In the film, he talks about a friend who almost died,

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The transformation from gay man into emasculate woman is my favorite part of Drag Race. Artists armed with makeup, bedazzle tackle boxes of the stuff, shape and paint the male face, dissolving our jawlines, cheeks, stubble and eyebrows into sleeker, rounder geometries. A drag queen’s face is painted for the light.

As a child, I whirled around my living room, spinning, and twirling the remote or mop handle, waving my magic wand like Sailor Moon herself who played on the screen. Stars spiraled to her nails, painting them red, while diamonds and prisms of light made her uniform, ribbons changed into ruby knee-high boots, with a halo materializing into a crested headband.

Galaxies and stars streamed in the background giving the illusion of acceleration through the blue cosmos.

Every time “Fighting evil by moonlight/Winning love by daylight” boomed from the speakers, I’d sprint to turn up the volume. When Sailor Moon armored herself to fight for truth and love, I mimicked her, closed my eyes, weaving a painting with my body, and for a brief, brilliant movement, I was left transformed.

For Glitterous Rex’s debut, I’d need one roll of duct tape and one 6’1” fabricated egg to conceal my dress. I don’t know what the duct tape is for, but most drag queens, especially on Drag Race carry one. When I close my eyes, I see Glitterous Rex, walking on stage, the egg covering her. A knife cuts the egg from the inside and when the egg splits open, she walks forward, wearing a dress the color of a split mirror. As she’d sissy that walk, the audience would be forced to look at themselves through the lens of Glitterous Rex. Yet when I look in the mirror, I wait, standing there in the bathroom, with the emerald lipstick always about to touch my lips. I wait for the cool color to smear across my mouth, but it doesn’t. The monstrous part of me is always waiting for the transformation sequence, for her to roar, “Glittoral powers activate!”

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m a e t l e s o s

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don’t tell a soul alta liam

that i'm wearing these shitty sneakers on purpose! how shallow, just because they're white and “match with everything” and because “worms + clothes” is only cute when it's a doodle it's called the BIG apple anyway wasn't that enough? with just two and a half days to explore the whole thing should have been reason more flat plats, pinched toes i almost never wear anything that isn't a 7W these sneakers were just 7 (in what, size or price?)

- a short poem by alta, who learned not to wear cheap ross (sorry, that's redundant) sneakers in nyc?! especially as a gay who can't drive and would rather not have another breakdown in shake shack on broadway ave if they can help it

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to the $3 pair of old navy flip flops, with love anita kelly

Each year, as spring inches closer toward the pulse of summer, I await the two sensations that bring me closest to the taste of freedom: the feel of sunshine hitting my bare shoulders, and the first time I can slide my feet into a pair of $3 Old Navy flip flops.

Preferably, they’ll be a pair I’ll dig out from underneath my bed, already worn in from the summer before, the dip beneath the heel thinned and flexible, the edges worn from ninety-degree angles to smudged curves. It’ll feel a little awkward, the first couple of times I slide the strap between my toes, my feet unused to the fit. I work in schools, and by the time the flip flops come out in June, I’ll have spent the last nine months concealing myself as much as possible: my skin, my thoughts.

Trying my hardest to be a good example, to follow the rules. Like my students, I often strive to fit in, to not cause a ruckus. To be respected and competent, while also not bringing too much attention to the queer staff member who’s often seething with anger inside. It’s simply easier to fit in at school. To wear the right clothes. To do the right things.

But after a few trial runs of wearing flip flops again, fresh air meeting my toes, my feet will remember.

Remind me that I can let go now. I can let sunshine seep into my skin, let it help me sink back into myself. I don’t have to be on. I don’t have to be a good example or follow the rules. I only have to be a body in the world.

I do feel a little guilty about the Old Navy flip flop.

I’ve tried others, but Old Navy’s simply conform to my feet so well, so immediately. Even though I know nothing that costs $3 can be completely good, that these slabs of foam were made from unjust labor, of unsustainable material. This has long been the plight of dykes and femmes alike: rarely do we have the actual means to live up to our earnestly high standards of social justice. (We keep trying anyway, though, forever trying to be better at being queer, at making the world a slightly softer place.)

I will love these $3 flip flops, though, until they fall apart. I have not purchased responsibly, but I will not waste. I will wear them until a hole appears in the heel, big enough for my wife to pick them up from the floor one day and stare at me incredulously through, saying, once again, “Seriously?”

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(I like to think my penchant for using things until they literally disintegrate is one of those charmingly frustrating quirks of mine, but I’m pretty sure my wife would only call it frustrating.)

In the end, though, I want my bare feet to hit the asphalt, the grass, the dirt. I want, at all times, for my body to be as close to the earth as physically possible. It’s only then I feel truly rooted to the world, and to a version of myself that feels right.

During the school year, my body inevitably feels clunky, constricted, Not Right in whatever I wear, especially when it comes to shoes. I’ve never been able to conquer heels; flats pinch my toes. Cute sneakers never look cute on me. Even when I concoct an outfit I feel moderately okay in, I stumble when I realize I have to finish off the ensemble with shoes. Nothing ever quite matches, or is comfortable enough. Eventually, I bumble outside with the fervent hope no one will ever look below my knees.

But in summer. In flip flops. There’s no stress about throwing off my outfit, about awkwardness. Because they’re barely there.

One step closer to nakedness, my only true comfort level. One more inch my body can unclench.

Flip flops travel with me wherever I go in the summer. Once, I hiked two hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. The first thing you learn on a trail is that long distance hiking is the act of obsessing over your feet. You stare at your feet far more than you do at the scenery.

They carry the weight of you, your pack; they ensure you don’t stumble or topple down a

ridge. It’s recommended you buy hiking shoes a size up before a long trek; your feet will swell. They will pound like a heartbeat, punish you for your sins with blisters and strained muscles.

And at the end of each day on trail, I would finally treat them right. I’d pull my battered feet from their prisons, my ankles caked with dirt, sand stuck between my toes, and slip them into a $3 pair of flip flops. Flat and light, flip flops are easy to fit into a heavy pack, where space is short and every item has to count. For a few hours each day at camp, flip flops let my tired feet breathe, literally and figuratively. I could cry, just thinking about that feeling: unadulterated release. They counted the most.

Back in the city, my feet live a different story after a summer of wearing flip flops, but one just as wild.

My heels grow rough and calloused. They have seen the prickly surface of old sidewalks, the dust of gravel drives and alleys, the grime of buses and subways. When I step in the shower, my feet leave grey footprints on the tile.

My dirty summer feet are another signature of mine that my wife will inevitably shake her head at each year. And I will look down at them and smile in gratitude. When my skin is tough and blackened with the grime of the neighborhood, it’s evidence that I went outside today. That I didn’t spend too many hours on Twitter today. That I didn’t spend too long squinting at Google Docs, making my face appear agreeably neutral on Zoom calls.

That I didn’t conceal myself today, even once.

The accumulation of dirt between my toes is evidence that I walked by flowers today. That I felt the breeze on my face, that I absorbed Vitamin D into my skin, that I listened to the songs of birds and

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the sounds of the city. That I paid attention to my community, to the world, always so much bigger and closer than I last remembered.

My cheap flip flops and my dirty feet are queer as hell. They are tough, and they are soft. They prove that I loved myself, if even just for a little while, just a little bit more.

Eventually, each year, the air will cool; the days will shorten. I will once again need to cover up, ineptly, uncomfortably. I’ll put my worn flip flops back underneath my bed. Their existence there will hold the promise throughout the winter, that I’ll feel freedom again, one day soon: sun on my shoulders.

Fresh air on my feet. Sensations truer to my body, each step a tiny bit closer to the earth.

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biding

kaitlyn crow

justice black sequin high top sneakers 2011: the first time I think about gender. The year I get my cell phone. The year I realize you can pick your friends.

Ms. Hertzberg looks me up and down during sixth grade orientation and says, Well, I can tell you march by the beat of your own drum. It’s my neon phase, my sequin phase. I want her to like me. She says it with a smile. I vibrate.

Still, I beg my mom for a razor when Conner Hutson points out that I have more leg hair than him. I can’t get away from the unsettled feeling that eyes linger on my calves. Part of me wants them to look. The part of me that wins never wants anyone to look, to see, again. Shaved smooth, clean, I am invisible. I am just like the other growing-up girls.

nike kids electric green mercurial cleats Coach Rick calls me “Bulldog,” because I’m not afraid to push girls into the dirt. He puts me on the field and tells me to mark the best player on the opposing team. Make sure she never gets the ball. I spend a lot of time smelling grass, dirt, perfume off the other girls’ jerseys. Thinking about how the fabric hugs their bodies differently when their jerseys are tucked in or flowing free. Wondering if anyone else on the field is thinking the same.

My electric feet can never take me as fast or as far as the girls on my team. I try to learn, but I can never control my breathing.

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adidas men's samba classic indoor soccer shoe I bleed into my clothes for the first time. I bunch up toilet paper in my underwear and change into my spare Rachel Carson Middle School gym shorts. Girls leer at me, ask me why I’m wearing my gym clothes all day.

They know the answer.

Three years later - high school, pimples, bras with underwires - my girlfriend asks me if I’ve ever thought about being a man. I flush red and can’t filter the thoughts to words: no, and am I allowed to think about that?

I’ve had hundreds of menstrual cycles since then, not one of them welcome.

birkenstock arizona berko-flor nubuck I go to college to get a degree and accidentally discover myself. I grapple with vocabulary, new language to express the knowledge that has always been there: I am not a girl, not a woman. But not a man, either.

The idea of not having a box to crawl inside terrifies me, makes me feel vulnerable. I join a sorority to build the walls stronger, to hide. But I balk at professional dress days, white dresses at initiation, love her for her womanhood.

My feet are permanently sun-striped two shades of tan from spending more time alone, outside, instead. I take classes at such an aggressive pace, an advisor asks me why I’m in such a hurry to leave, but I can’t answer because I don’t know what exactly I’m trying to leave in the first place.

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ella embossed-leather d'orsay pumps

From one box to another, I decide to buy shoes that make me feel like I can hold down a job. I type into the Google search bar: “black” and “heels” and “office.” Each pair looks more uncomfortable than the next, but I pick something spiky from a brand I think I recognize. I swallow down the squish-toed, heel-bruised, sitting-up-straight-inan-office-chair feelings that creep their way up my esophagus.

sam edelman faux snakeskin ankle boots I find I’ve put myself in a box so tight, so confined, that I start to squeeze “nonbinary” from my pores. I do my job well, but discover every success kneecapped by She did a great job, and We couldn’t pull this off without her.

Someone says Have a good weekend, ladies on a Friday afternoon, and I think about what it would mean to be myself in this space, break down the walls. I imagine looking them in the eyes and saying I’m not a lady. I imagine spending several hours a week making those corrections. I keep playing pretend.

My yellow cowboy boots peek out from beneath my dress pants. An office-wear rebellion in an ocean of black and navy blue. I bide my time. I wait for the right moment to open the box and let myself out.

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

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the borders of my style

vamika sinha

I have no affinity for any border or nation. This is my identity, that there is none.

I don’t know my measurements—height, width, curve, fold. Why commit them to memory, when they are never defined, never fixed, never remain? I was born in one country and given a passport, immediately moved to another and watched my body grow from girl to woman, felt it gain a firmness and flaccidity at the same time, as I flew away again to sink new ideas into the grooves of my brain.

At no point did I remain one way, just like a culture or country.

We all know what Audre Lorde said: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. I began seeing my body as a house, that some unknown master, presumed a man, had built on his land, and felt he could enter and leave and change and define and label when he wanted, with all the power and control of a supposed deity. It’s easy to unpack this metaphor, as multi-storeyed as it is. I write about becoming aware of my existence as a woman without allegiance, in multiple systems—patriarchy, patriotism, gender, ethnicity—that don’t pledge allegiance to anything but themselves, let alone me.

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I only know one thing: that I have always wanted to be free.

My college thesis was a project in searching for agency, and I argued that for a marginalized woman of color like me, the only sliver of that fulsome, privileged, intoxicating power in making your own decisions and choices lay in creating things, in creativity. I made music and wrote things and sang and produced a book and, in those moments and processes, not even the clear demarcations of time and its boundaries had a hold on me. Even if I wasn’t, I felt, temporarily, free.

So many male-aligned and dominated structures had come to create and label and confine my bones, my brain, my flesh, my “identity” so far. If the antidote was creation, then why not create myself the way I wanted? Why not, Audre, rebuild the house itself?

Any individual is as rich and complex and beautiful as a symphony; I would write my own now. I would rewrite me.

In my free time, I watch a lot of YouTube videos about clothes— summer lookbooks and hauls and makeup tutorials from girls all over the world. Most of these YouTubers are in their teens or twenties, the same age group as me. I can imagine many consider this part of the Internet a site of mere frivolity, of play. We often dismiss women talking about fashion and beauty; discourse about fashion itself is stuck in an unfortunate binary between serious, sidelined academia and quick-to-digest blog content in the vein of “10 cool hats for the summer.”

But what we put on our bodies is an attempted act of agency and freedom, and an assertion and real-time interrogation of one’s self, live in 3-D. If the body is an empty stage, then clothes are our props and staging, and fashion is a theatrical production, in which we are the directors, the stars, the show itself.

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I noticed this idea as I grew older and started living in different countries. I was born in India, and inherited a set of cultural, traditional codes for dress from this specific ethnicity I was born into. But then I almost immediately moved to Botswana, a small country above South Africa, where I spent my childhood until the age of 18. There, I rejected the idea of ever wearing Indian dress because it othered me, and spent most of my time in a school uniform, and then whatever my peers wore in order to fit in.

Fashion was an instrument for belonging, and whether it felt right or not, all I wanted was to conform so I would not feel alone in my skin. For university, I moved to the Middle East, a campus of New York University on one of the islands of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I started studying postcolonial literature and inevitably, concepts of decolonization, and apart from my yearly visits to family in India and childhood diet of Bollywood shows and movies, spent the longest amount of time in my life within a South Asian community, both on campus and out in the city (the UAE has a very large population of South Asian immigrants).

I also studied abroad for periods of time in Paris and New York, two cities with ugly histories of hegemony and white supremacy, during which my already complicated identity, so far raised in just the ‘Global South,’ was thrown against new canvases like splattered, mixed-up paint on white buildings.

The life I’ve had naturally inclines me to recoil from traditional concepts of nations, borders, homes and identities, while being hyper-aware of them at the same time. Over the years, as Instagram slowly took over our conceptions of self in both the digital and physical realms, I found other people like me online, and apart from looking at their work or their art, I studied what they wore, how they performed the mixed-upness they came from. I remember discovering the London singer Joy Crookes during a difficult period in Paris, who is Irish-Bengali by birth, and was stunned by how she mixed Nike tracksuits and Clarks shoes with traditional jhumka earrings, for instance. It was stunning, striking, and she looked, ultimately, so comfortable within herself.

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I started to experiment. How could I perform a new me, and rebuild it with my own hands, through fashion? I tied the process to what I was learning in university where just as a rich literary text is complex with influences, references and implicit quoting of other ideas and writers, my style became a kind of visual text that incorporated various political, cultural, artistic and personal ideas. I spent time picking up trinkets, accessories, jewelry and clothes during my travels to map a new cartography of my identity. I worked to decolonize the gazes that had implicitly led me to wear certain things and reject others, even if they were important to me or reflected my history or actually empowered me. Along the way, I also learned to trust and accept parts of myself that I had been taught to repress, ignore or be ashamed of.

I monitored how I felt wearing different things throughout the day.

Sometimes I would feel unprecedentedly confident and powerful, even if what I was wearing wasn’t necessarily trendy or aligned with current beauty standards, all of which often come from Eurocentric perspectives anyway. I could easily figure out when something didn’t work, even if unexpectedly, because I would feel conscious, strange and off. I would keep nervously checking my reflection and anxiously wonder if people were staring at me on the subway or just start tugging at an earring or jacket that didn’t feel right.

I was trying to figure out the way I wanted to express my identity, my personality and my body authentically, all in real-time. And it’s an ongoing journey, as it is for anyone, because we’re always changing, always discarding old beliefs, picking up new ideas and knowledge, making memories in new places, forming fresh cultural ties, traveling and moving and uprooting and re-rooting (or rerouting) ourselves. The borders are always in flux. And of course, we are also constantly under the massive influences of social media and other power structures that place hegemonic standards on us, and we must resist them in our work to reclaim agency over ourselves.

I now enjoy exploring new ways to present the “map” of histories and memories that have led me to my current position. At present, I own a large collection of traditional Indian earrings and a few necklaces, because jewelry connects me to the ritualistic aspect of my Indian culture and reminds me of the collective celebrations as well as the mythologies I grew up with.

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Music is a big factor; I listen to a lot of hip-hop and jazz, and the style from those scenes bleeds into mine through baggy hoodies and tees, and a growing affinity for sneakers. My love of rock music shows through several industrial-type boots in my closet along with band tees, casual jeans, and messy eyeliner.

My time in Paris infused small, dainty scarves into the mix, and I often add blazers to unexpected ensembles, playing with their “masculine” sharp angles. Cowrie-shell jewelry, although now trendy, comes from my childhood in Botswana, and witnessing the soft flows of abayas in the UAE has led me to gravitate toward similar silhouettes through kimono-style wraparounds and skirts with similar ways of draping. I can wear an Indian kurta with combat boots or sneakers, maybe put a blazer on it, some African jewelry or accessories. There are countless permutations depending on my mood, state or situation. I mix up all the performances of borders, cultures, “genders” and “aesthetics” in a single outfit because I myself don’t fit in any. Experimenting through fashion is a way of figuring out and simultaneously performing the multiplicity of who I am and the many, many places, interests and aspects that make up me.

The way our feelings manifest into the narrative we create with our clothing remains a key factor in how we relate to each other, how we forge snap judgements and choose to develop these further into some kind of relationship, too. Instagram is evidence of that; we’re often drawn to how people express and perform themselves, and this is made more so evident on the social media platform that, despite its many flaws, does indeed connect people. I found the models, such as Joy Crookes, for expressing personal cartography through fashion, via the Internet in the first place. And I love seeing that more and more different kinds of people are playing with their own borders through fashion and sharing them online.

Through fashion, I can engage with art and the act of creation to explore and retell the narrative of my identity, one that I refuse to be defined by limiting borders or by any ‘master.’ Fashion can be a thrilling and decolonizing site for disrupting pre-defined and oppressive influences on our self-expression. In the end, it is play, but with immensely deeper meaning and power than we might originally have thought.

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u t r e a s e f

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an intimate space: noél puéllo

viola almunir

Noél and I are sitting together in my room with music softly playing in the background. Candles are lit and we’re cozy. I’m lucky to have her as a close friend and to have been beside her during her many tireless past projects.

Her work embodies so many stories and experiences and is unfolded in the most intricate ways. We have eight years of great conversations between ourselves and our friend group that I wish could have been included here.

But, I hope this little snippet has something you can take away from and lead you to have a conversation with Noél herself.

What are you most excited about right now?

I have an overwhelming amount of work that I’m actually excited about and I’m excited to have the presence of the people I care about again. When I was in grad school, and for the past couple of years, it felt very much disconnected just because I moved from a different state. That wasn’t easy compared to undergrad where you can visit one another pretty quickly. And I feel right now I’m gaining access to my friends and family again. But also, this has been the first time that I feel excited for the future and the present. Before I used to feel like I was fantasizing about the future, and now I feel like I’m building for my future.

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Being multifaceted, how do you want others to view or experience the work that you do?

My work before college was cultivated in a really loving and intimate space with the after school program that I was a part of in high school. Ever since then, my work has been constantly trying to cultivate the same thing, whether it’s writing a love letter to the people around me or to the experiences that I’m dealing with.

My practice currently is so much more directed into fashion and building a narrative with clothing.

People look at my practice and see me as a designer, but that word has never been comfortable to me.

But, I also understand the necessity for that word. I see myself as a maker and that’s enough for me.

For other people, if ‘designer’ feels like a good space, if ‘artist’ feels like a good space - whatever space others find home within my work in their hearts, that’s important to me too.

Do you feel like you’ve reached a place where your work truly represents who you are or what you’ve been wanting to convey?

I think I’ve reached it. I’ve dipped my toes in multiple places and have five pools that I sort of go back to every once in a while. I’ve refined the language for each of those five pools and now I have to build it into one stream. I was doing mostly sculptures and installations at one point and mostly 2D work at another point, and now it’s more body-oriented work. Soon, I’m going to be doing a film which encompasses everything. I’m hoping it will spark a conversation outside of ‘designer’ for some people.

So essentially this film will be like the last hurrah for this chapter of your current work?

Yes, and it will be the catalyst to the rest of my work until I decide to change it. I want to be a filmmaker but I want it to be in a way that feels valuable to me. I want to work on the costuming, the space, the installation - I want to be a part of every single aspect of it.

What are your plans for casting and representation in this film? How significant is this for you?

It matters so much. With the work, I want to be part of the conversation moving forward. I don’t want to be in the conversation that is stagnant. Right now, the people and the representation that we have in film and media, specifically in black and brown spaces, showcases a lighter skinned person with a certain body type. Gender wise, it’s always men and women or someone who is still very passing in one space. I think for this film and any sort of film, it will always be important for me to look for representation outside of the normative. I want my work to be a love letter to my people and all people of color. We deserve to have an intimate moment. An intimate space.

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I’m very interested in hearing more about your ideas of intimacy and the role it plays in your art.

My work is about race and all these other things, but I’m also invested in playing with fantasy and love and things that are not obvious to the conversations at hand. The films are not going to be like movies in the way where they are scripted conversations. I’m hoping they are a lot more nonsensical. I want it super nonsensical. Like, what did you actually get out of it? What is it trying to represent?

I’m interested in the whole movie arc - meeting the highs, the lows, the complexities, then figuring things out and solidifying something at the end. My brain gets overly obsessive with moments.

Whenever you watch a film, you’re seeing how happy they are in this moment. But then, they throw a wrench in you. Such as when the main character gets hit by a bus or her ex-husband comes in again. It’s always setting you up for the moment of tension. I’m thinking about my film and I’m like what if we’re not presenting a moment of tension. What does it look like to exist in bliss? That would be so beautiful because we get so wrapped up in conflict all the time. There’s enough representations of conflict already.

In a way, working on the film and making clothes are very intimate mediums because you’re having this direct connection to people by collaborating and allowing your pieces to be worn on bodies.

This was recent, but something that made me happy during a time when I was upset with making clothes and didn’t want to make clothes anymore, was someone that bought my work. There’s this shorter plus size woman, and she never thought she would have clothing by designers that would fit her body. That was so important for me to hear because she was happy. This thing I’m doing feels frivolous to me in some ways, because fashion can seem like it’s all about aesthetics, but now this woman can get access to it too. And I think it meant so much to her, that it made sense why I’m doing this.

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gabe montesanti

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gabe montesanti

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gabe montesanti

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gabe montesanti

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gabe montesanti

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triple sonnet for oversexed and overripe and overeager dorothy chan He asks me if I own any thigh high boots for the home movie of our dreams, so we can have our Pam and Tommy moment, unleaked and let’s go old school on a tripod camera then get drunk on a boat, me in a red one-piece, nipples popping out—let me put a Cherry Coke over them—and I tell him I have absolutely no grace as a woman. I can’t walk in heels.

I hate florals—how innovative for spring.

I’ll do my makeup in five minutes or under, because what more do you need than a good lip for pleasure and a rosy cheek for treasure?

I’d rather be kicking it in Air Force 1s with plaid skirts and sweat dresses or go ultra-sexy with lingerie as outerwear in public, looking like I have some place better to be than here, and isn’t the key to life to walk into the room like you’re the most important person. I lace up my kicks, put on a red plaid dress, from the noughties era of Betsey Johnson reliving her Club Kid days, hot pink bra underneath, thinking about how tomboys in anime never wear their uniforms properly—there’s always an unladylike bit: an untucked shirt, an unbuttoned blazer, a loose tie, sneakers instead of Oxfords, and of course, she’s the one in the group voted most fun to be around. Don’t we all want to be the best time.

I think about what it even means to be ladylike

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as a woman. Once upon a time, my father told me to be a little lady, in the middle of a department store shoe section. I still hate him for that. Lady is code for woman to be controlled. I cannot be controlled. I will not be managed—I’ll roll around in shorts and crop tops for the rest of my life—the whole womanchild aesthetic of dressing down for success or I don’t care what you think about me, because I’m a wonder, and I don’t care about you.

I own the room. I overline my lips, throw on a pair of boy shorts and a mesh bralette, ready for the home video of fantasies— it’s my moment of splashing out of the water.

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armor gabe montesanti

The first time I brought my girlfriend Kelly to my hometown, we wore what we thought could protect us: frilly pink dresses, ballet flats, and cheap, chunky jewelry. We released our long hair from our usual high ponytails so it hung like streamers down our backs. She arrived mid-day while my parents were at work, and we fucked in my childhood bed— snowman sheets, my stuffed bear smiling vaguely from the side table. It wasn’t safe to stay there for long, so we gathered our things and set off.

In the sunlight, the dresses were our armor and our costumes. It seems ludicrous now—the notion that wearing a dress could somehow deflect the suspicion of gayness. But I was eighteen and terrified, relying on the stereotypes my mom had spouted all my life.

“Lesbians dress like men,” she once told me.

“That’s why they’re so easy to identify.”

That wasn’t the only thing my mother told me about lesbians. “They’re disgusting,” she often said. “They’re damaged. They need people like you and me to protect them.” About Kelly, she said, “Don’t you dare bring her here. Don’t you dare introduce me to her. I never want to meet the woman who ruined your life.”

We planned Kelly’s visit as though it were a bank heist—carefully arranging timelines, locations, and contingency plans. One hour, tops, at my childhood home. A brief walk to my old elementary school, backstreets only. Then, lunch under a bridge behind an abandoned train station. It was too close for comfort to the place where my mother worked, and we worried someone might recognize me. That is why we needed the dresses.

The depot had been nonfunctional for as long as I had lived there, though the city council apparently had high hopes for revitalizing it. Flyers were hung in the post office and the library asking for support from constituents. The vision was strong—the tracks were already laid, and they spanned the state of Michigan and westward past Chicago. Bringing back a functional train station would kickstart the economy. People would flock to my town. That was the idea, at least.

I chose the depot as a lunch venue for both the solitude and the rustic beauty. Kelly wouldn’t get to see much of my hometown, so it was important that the little she did was going to be memorable. To get to the bridge, we passed through a field of bishop’s lace in which sat an abandoned red caboose. Under the bridge were metal beams covered in graffiti, which I found equally striking. The paint chipped

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easily, and a collection of bright colors fell off the walls and landed on the ground. I had a habit of picking up the little chips of paint and crunching them between my fingers, leaving the pile more pixelated than I found it.

Under the bridge, I asked her what her name would be if it wasn’t Kelly.

“I like my name,” Kelly said. Our relationship wasn’t new enough anymore for strange questions to be inherently charming.

It was difficult climbing up the side of the railroad tracks to the spot I had planned for us to sit. The ground was uneven, and the incline was steep.

Our dresses kept snagging on branches. Mud seeped into our ballet flats. I thought lovingly back to the combat boots tucked in my closet back home: the seed of a tougher, more authentic style I would develop in the years to come.

“But I’m saying if you couldn’t have your own name, what would it be?” I pressed.

“Probably Piper,” she said. “Or Paige. Or maybe Sasha.”

“I kind of like Sasha,” I said. Then, hesitantly, “Can I change your name to Sasha in my phone?”

We sat on the ledge under the bridge to eat lunch, legs dangling. I wasn’t used to seeing Kelly with her hair down. Each time she bit into a cracker, big strands fell into her eyes and she had to push them back.

“You mean, like, in case your mom happens to see a text or something?” she asked.

I nodded. We both remembered what had happened the day my mother had gone through our messages on Facebook. The conversation she had read between us involved speculation about whether the Supreme Court would one day allow gay people to marry.

When she caught me looking at her, she cracked a smile. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I just feel bad,” I said, gesturing to the hair, the dress, the ballet flats.

Kelly’s face hardened at the memory. “You can call me whatever you want as long as you don’t give up on me,” she said.

“You already promised it won’t be forever,” she told me. That was our deal: she would do anything I asked in exchange for forward motion.

I wanted to kiss her under that bridge, but it was too public—too open. The chance of someone seeing was too great. Still, I wanted to cradle her head and pull her mouth to mine. Her clothes weren’t the same, her hair wasn’t the same, and she didn’t look like the woman I’d fallen for, but that was all my fault. I wanted to kiss her to prove I loved her—Kelly, not Sasha—and that I was sorry. But I’m not sure a kiss would’ve been able to communicate that much, even if I’d been brave enough to try.

Sometimes, I felt resentful of Kelly. Her family had its share of problems, but her queerness wasn’t one of them. She had been the third in her family to come out, and her two older brothers had shepherded her through the process. When she eventually told her parents, they welcomed me into their home without any reservations. When we visited, we wore whatever we wanted: t-shirts with heavy metal logos, sleeveless hoodies, combat boots.

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bull in a china closet : excerpts Elle Hong

Bull in a China Closet is a dance film that highlights the artist’s attempts at portraying a deeply layered, queer identity. Combining dance/performance, text, and cinéma vérité, Elle demonstrates the tension and confusion of a trans person working to exteriorize their interiority, or, working to create an outward-facing image that more closely resembles the image they envision for/of themself. In Bull in a China Closet, Elle attempts to give the full fantasy of their idealized gender archetypes, while leaving space to contemplate the process of creating new genders, and ultimately, new worlds.

In these two excerpts from Bull in a China Closet, Elle wears largely thrifted/gifted clothing items with the exception of white gogo boots from Unique Vintage, and a green sock-bustier dress crafted by queer designer YARD666SALE. These garments contribute towards a somatic costuming, or, a technique that relies on how embodiment changes dependent on the costume worn by the dancer.

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portraits and seals vincent chong

Aki (Portrait of Aki with Tobie), 2020 Acrylic on linen 83in x 49in

明

Aki is a photographer, and when we were sketching for this portrait Aki expressed that he would like for his scars from his top surgery to be visible.

This is the first of 5 large scale paintings for my first solo show at Skånes Konstförening gallery in Malmö, Sweden May 2022.

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Yen Portrait of Yên Nguyen, 2020 Acrylic on linen 68in x 32in Yên is a model, actor, and full time Goddex. When we met to do sketches for this portrait, Yên wanted the portrait to be nude, and we also decided a standing pose would be most powerful.

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Ping White Rabbit (Portrait of Ping), 2019 Acrylic on linen 34in x 28in Ping is an artist, designer, and recent graduate who often uses their design skills to help organize QTBIPOC events in New York City.

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ET Quadruple Gemini (Portrait of ET Chong), 2020 Acrylic on Linen 28in x 34in Model ET is a Korean-American artist, activist, and community builder. He is a quadruple Gemini so I painted the constellation of Gemini in the background of his portrait.

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Seal for ET 1-3 ET with 4 Spirits, 2021 Hand Engraving in Chinese soapstone 3.0cm x 3.0cm A seal for ET Chong, a friend and KoreanAmerican artist, activist, and community builder.

The seal reads ‘ET’ carved in the winding style of 9-fold script ( ) and worm script ( ).

九疊篆

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蟲篆

Seal for Pint 1-2 , 2021 Hand Engraving in Chinese soapstone 2.1cm x 2.1cm

平平平平

Ping requested the the characters in their name, , carved four times, so I chose four different historical variants to carve together.

平

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years flow by like water wo chan

“Years Flow By Like Water” by Anita Mui is a digital drag act I created in 2020. I filmed this at the end of summer as the city started bracing itself for a second shutdown. Because of COVID, I filmed it alone. It was the first week where I noticed myself wearing the same light jackets & sweaters I wore the March where the city first shut down. Sad and amazed by the passage of a full year in bubbles, where life changed irrevocably for millions, I spent that fall evening hauling aux cords, mini speakers, LEDs, & feathers up and down the ladder to my rooftop. I moved barefoot in my qipao trying to rig the right light, taping a sawed-off protein powder container to create that circular stage halo.

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The song is about time’s passage—it’s an incredibly poetic song. You can look up the lyrics. Like a lot of Cantopop, the ballad is melancholic, sung bittersweetly and with a low, poignant strain. I was born in Macau, so Cantonese is my first language, a language I began losing when I came to the States. Whenever I hear it spoken though, something aches inside me.

It’s fundamental, large, & open, like a well that still holds water.

I always try to be sincere in my art, even when I’m being absurd. I pair the song w/ excerpts of my own incantatory poem, which I pose as lower thirds.

Cinematic language tells us that an Asian face onscreen paired with English words is subtitling, but these aren’t really that. I don’t literally understand the Cantonese lyrics when it’s sung, but my impulse isn’t to try to translate them. They’re not trying to be explained. Who is the audience who gets to understand everything anyways? Maybe words can do drag too.

But this is a nakedness I can’t intellectualize, at least not meaningfully. I’m painfully aware that I’m an Asian drag queen in the US performing as a femme dressed in the vintage clothing of most likely dead white grandmothers. I’ve never seen myself on screen lip synching Cantonese. I can’t even speak it anymore. And it’s the first thing I knew. It’s a lot of feeling, thinking about another life I never had.

To take something like drag, a medium poised for cleverness, poised for campy recontextualizations, & to turn it towards something mournful—it scares me. Whatever impressionistic idea I have of my first culture, this fabled key that unlocks where I truly belong—it's gone, and in its place is the negative space of diaspora. What do you do with that? Is it pure absence? I think you play in the mystery of it. You can't let it overwhelm you. You have to enjoy it as the most precious and meaningful thing that you have yet to learn about yourself. And you never have to translate it if you don't want to. That's poetry isn't it?

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photo by mettie ostrowski @mettieostrowski

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about the artists

Simone Person (they/she) is a Black queer femme and two-time Pink Door Writing Retreat fellow.

They are the author of Dislocate, the prose winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Press Chapbook Contest, and Smoke Girl, the poetry winner of the 2018 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. Simone grew up in small Michigan towns and Toledo, Ohio. She can be found at simoneperson.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @princxporkchop.

Cisi Eze works as a freelance journalist, writer, and comic artist. She uses art to express her opinions on social issues such as feminism, gender issues, LGBT+ rights, and mental health. Cisi’s art aims to challenge existing societal norms.

Jax Bulstrode writes poems. They are usually writing about rivers or fruit or being queer. They have been published in Anti-Heroin Chic Journal, F*EMS and Southchild Lit. You can find them at @jaxbulstrode on twitter.

K. Iver is a nonbinary poet born in Mississippi. They have received a Ph.D. in Poetry at Florida State University. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, BOAAT, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. They are the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow for the University of Wisconsin Creative Writing Institute.

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Hobart Pulp, New Orleans Review, The Offing, and the Baltimore Review.

Birch Rosen (they/them) is an agender writer, poet, zinester, and performer who uses personal writing to create space for more nuanced trans and nonbinary narratives. Their zines include T&A (Transitioning & Attractiveness) and Trans Restroom Rants, and their writing has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Nate Barron (she/he) is a Black enthusiast of dapper dress and lifestyle. She interprets “dapper” through the lens of Black queerness and excellence. Her everyday look consists of traditional pieces displayed in a non traditional way to showcase her authentic self.

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Ley David Elliette Cray, Ph.D. (they/she) is a non-binary transfemme in Fort Worth, Texas. They’re a philosophy professor and consultant who writes about philosophical aesthetics; teaches yoga and meditation for trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming persons; and works with adolescents and young adults through a virtual intensive outpatient program. Ley watches horror movies, reads comics, and plays videogames with their dogs and cats. Sometimes they play in a one-person punk band. Check out their other work at wesleycray.com and keep up with them on Instagram: @leydavidelliette.

Mark Kurai (he/him) is a gay American-born Japanese behavioral scientist who is passionate about social justice, delicious food, and being an opinionated introvert. He enjoys nourishing his soul and relationships by sharing culinary endeavors and beauty documented in photographs. He received his PhD from UC Davis in Social and Personality Psychology and is now a data nerd telling stories with empirical research and panache.

T.J. Tallie (he/they) is a queer black writer, thinker, and troublemaker. T.J. is also an Associate Professor of African History at the University of San Diego. They specialize in comparative settler colonial and imperial history, focusing on gender and racial identity, indigeneity, and sexuality. He is the recent author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa. T.J. also bakes a mean clafoutis and a delicious focaccia. Find him on twitter at: @Halfrican_One. Wryly T. McCutchen is a hybrid writer, interdisciplinary performer, teaching artist, & 2018 LAMBDA Fellow. Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Papeachu Review, & Nat. Brut. Wryly holds a dual genre MFA in creative nonfiction & poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles & teaches writing at Hugo House. Their debut collection, My Ugly and Other Love Snarls, was published in 2017 by University of Hell press. Wryly resides on unceded lands, stewarded by the Cowlitz & Clackamas peoples, where they cast spells in text & flesh & sweat.

Chris Talbot-Heindl (they/them) is a queer, trans nonbinary, triracial creator working through the complexity of identity through art. They are the co-creator and editor of The Bitchin’ Kitsch and creator of Chrissplains Nonbinary Advocacy to Cisgender People educomic. Twitter and Instagram: @talbot_heindl, Website: talbot-heindl.com.

Dawn Vogel's academic background is in history, so it's not surprising that much of her fiction is set in earlier times. By day, she edits reports for historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business, co-runs a small press, and tries to find time for writing. Her steampunk adventure series, Brass and Glass, is available from DefCon One Publishing. She is a member of Broad Universe, SFWA, and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her husband, author Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. Visit her at historythatneverwas.com.

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Margaret Redmond Whitehead's work has appeared in publications including the Atavist Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Millions, and Transition. She was a 2017 Literary Journalism Fellow at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Fellow in Nonfiction.

Read more at MargRedWhite.com or find her on Twitter @margredwhite.

Harrison Cook is the deputy managing editor for Guesthouse and a contributing writer for Hi-Fructose.

His work has been published in Gay Mag, Foglifter, Slate, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a queer memoir about football. Harrison can be found on Twitter: @CookHarrisom.

Alta Liam is a word aficionado first, a student second, and Filipino-American last. They can be found making commentary about all three and more on Twitter @kpmpngn.

A teen librarian by day, Anita Kelly writes romance novels that celebrate queer love in all its infinite possibilities. Their full-length debut, LOVE & OTHER DISASTERS, will be released on January 18, 2022, and their karaoke fueled novella, SING ANYWAY, is out now. Originally from a small town in the Pocono Mountains, Kelly now lives in the Pacific Northwest, the perfect setting for wandering the woods, drinking too much tea, and dreaming of stories.

Kaitlyn Crow is a queer writer based in Richmond, Virginia. Their works have appeared or are forthcoming in bluestockings magazine, Wrongdoing Magazine, and COUNTERCLOCK, among others.

They serve as an editor at K'in Literary Journal and Chaotic Merge Magazine.

Vamika Sinha is a writer, poet and photographer from India and Botswana. She currently works for Canvas Magazine from her base in Dubai and is also the co-founder of Postscript Magazine, an online literary-arts journal. Vamika holds a BA in Literature & Creative Writing from NYU Abu Dhabi and her research and creative focuses include cosmopolitanism, feminism, identity, diaspora, postcolonialism and jazz. She also photographs in and around the UAE under the moniker foodqueenhoney. Read more on her official website: vamikasinha.com.

Gabe Montesanti is a queer, Midwestern roller derby player. She earned her BA from Kalamazoo College and her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her piece, "The Worldwide Roller Derby Convention" was recognized as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2020. Her roller derby memoir, BRACE FOR IMPACT, is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2022.

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of TOGETHERNESS (forthcoming 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts and IG live. Wo is Editor of the Lambda Literary Review.

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Noél Puéllo is a Providence native, Philadelphia-based artist who is interested in shifting perceptions of intimacy and revitalizing a sense of fantasy through the dissection of queer and Afro-Latinx idenity through clothing construction, mixed media installations, fiber practices, and video. Her work centers the power of physical touch and moves us through a romanticized reality of the discarded. She poeticizes the relationships of her Dominican elders and her own personal stories of existing as a queer, fat, femme, racially ambiguous, trans person.

Viola Almunir is the curator of Ayo Makan Online. She is based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dorothy Chan is the author of most recently, BABE, a collection forthcoming with Diode Editions this winter 2021, in addition to Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the FiftyFoot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She was a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Poetry Editor of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary, a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.

Elle h m (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator from the occupied lands of Kanaka `Ōiwi (Honolulu, HI). Currently based in Cheyenne/Ute/Arapaho Territories (Boulder, CO), they received their MFA in Choreography from the University of Colorado Boulder with a graduate certificate in Emergent Technologies & Media Arts Practice. Their work spans through dance, media arts, writing, music, and pedagogy - often bricolaging them into performance. Elle is invested in the potentials for decolonization, queering, and world reimagining made possible through the container of performing/visual arts. Elle has worked with and studied beneath noted dance makers/scholars including Michelle Ellsworth, Rennie Harris, Darrell Jones, Katja Kolcio, Bebe Miller, Eiko Otake, Nicole Stanton, and Helanius Wilkins. Through written and embodied forms of creative research, Elle calls for a dismantling of the systems that enforce control over our abilities to liberate our social bodies.

Vincent Chong (he/she/they) is a Queer gnc mixed-race Chinese-American multidisciplinary propqueen (artist) living and working on occupied Lenape land commonly referred to as New York City.

His practice is grounded in a foundation of Chinese calligraphy and seal carving. He is a student of Taiwanese calligrapher Master Wu Wensheng who was a student of the late Master Wang Beiyue. He has a solo show coming up at Skånes Konstförening gallery in Malmö, Sweden May 2022.

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our team

Addie Tsai (founding editor and co-editor in chief) (she/they) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color, and teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities at Houston Community College. She also teaches in Goddard College's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University's Mile High MFA in Creative Writing. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin. They are the Fiction Co-Editor at Anomaly, Staff Writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy.

Sarah Sheppeck (co-editor in chief) (she/they) is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester and her 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, she is now back in her home state with her pit mix, Chloe. Find her on Twitter: @EpicSheppeck.

SJ Sindu (the glowup) (she/they) is a queer, genderqueer, femme Tamil diaspora author of two novels, Marriage of a Thousand Lies and Blue-Skinned Gods, as well as the hybrid fiction and nonfiction chapbook I Once Met You But You Were Dead. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, Sindu holds a PhD in English from Florida State University, and teaches at the University of Toronto. Find her on Twitter: @SJSindu.

Jen St. Jude (sole mates) (she/her) is the fiction editor for Arcturus Magazine, a Daily Editor at the Chicago Review of Books, and has work in Gigantic Sequins, The Rumpus, and F(r)iction. Her YA novel is about two girls in love at the end of the world. Find her on Twitter: @jenstjude.

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Denne Michele Norris (sole mates) (she/they) is a Black, Femme, non-binary writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, VCCA, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, Zora, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. Denne is the author of the chapbook Awst Collection—Dennis Norris II, and is both the Sr. Fiction Editor at The Rumpus and co-host of the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot. Tweet her at: @TheDenneMichele.

Octavia Saenz (sew what) (she/they) is an editor and cartoonist based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates illustrated horror and fabulist stories about gender, sapphic love, and Puerto Rican diaspora. Octavia grew up in Puerto Rico and has a BFA in Creative Writing and Illustration from Ringling College, as well as a Lambda Fellowship. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @shrimpwonder.

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.

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.

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