FRUITSLICE Issue 3 - Gay Rights & Gay Wrongs: A Special Pride Edition (Summer 2024)

Fruitslice

Gay Rights & Gay Wrongs

FRUITSLICE IS A CELEBRATION OF THE JOYOUS AND THE FORLORN THE HOPEFUL AND THE DESPERATE THE DISPARATE WAYS WE LIVE AS ONE

FRUITSLICE IS A BACKLASH AGAINST: CORPORATE, ARTLESS, HEARTLESS PRIDE

In Queerness there is a “beyond” of occupation, of settler-colonial rule. Here, we are contracted to hold Queerness as a space for resistance - and insisting on it. As human beings, we all do “rights” and “wrongs.” In these stories, narratives, and poems, one has access to the multiplicitous ways that these structures are Queered and how Queerness becomes us.

This issue is dedicated to all those who fight for Queer rights. To the pioneers who bled and died for liberation. To Marsha P. Johnson and the Stonewall Rioters. To the mothers of the Ball community. To those who Queer their everyday lives: by refusing to put up with bullshit, by loving unconditionally, by going against the grain of normativity. To Audre Lorde. To James Baldwin. To the rights won and the wrongs it took to get here. To Nex Benedict. To those who have risked everything for love. To the ACT UP activists. To Leslie Feinberg. To those who are reimagining what is possible now and those working to free the future for Queer generations to come. To Sylvia Rivera. To indecency. To destroying boxes. To burning down the house. To the legions of unsung Queer heroes. To being an us, for once, instead of a them. To your rights and your wrongs. To your hopes and your dreams.

And to your power.

art by MICHAEL MCFADDEN

Letter from the Editors

Dearest Reader,

The first Pride was not a parade but a police riot led by trans women of color, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. It is this legacy we commemorate and celebrate. The path to progress is not paved with politeness. These women fought for liberation with bricks, not ballots. Never let entrenched power structures tell you that protests and riots don’t work. Sometimes, defiance is the only option. Sometimes, we must get our hands dirty to claw our way out.

Our third issue, Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs: A Special Pride Edition of Fruitslice, celebrates how far we’ve come in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights while also taking an honest look at where we might have missed the mark. We are highlighting all the myriad ways “wrongness” is wielded by and against the Queer community.

This is a chance to talk about everything—from the wins like marriage equality, to the tougher conversations about transphobia, biphobia, racism, and ableism within Queer spaces. It’s a chance to talk about how even though our shared experiences of Queerness strengthen our community, so too do our differences. It’s a chance to talk about how homonormativity and pinkwashing are just as dangerous as outright homophobia. It’s a chance to talk about how Queerness doesn’t fit into a neat little box (and fuck, we don’t want it to), and how there’s no wrong way to be Queer.

Our collective exploration into the multidimensional theme of Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs is also a chance—a necessity—to talk about the genocide in Gaza and our steadfast solidarity with the Palestinian people. As a community of Queer artists, writers, and activists, we recognize the parallels between the fight for Queer rights and Palestinian rights. Our commitment to anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-fascism inherently includes supporting the Palestinian people in their quest for liberation.

In this Pride edition of Fruitslice, we continue our commitment to lifting the voices of marginalized communities and deepening our commitment to liberation in its most expansive forms. As we celebrate the varied spectra of Queer existence and resistance, the fight for Palestinian freedom remains a critical issue that resonates deeply within our community. The struggle for Palestinian liberation, much like the fight for Queer liberation, is fundamentally a struggle for self-determination, and for the recognition of humanity in the face of the state and its monopoly on violence.

Just like there’s no one way to be Queer, there’s no one way to fight for freedom and justice. Being part of the LGBTQ+ community has taught many of us about the power of standing together, even when—especially when—the odds are stacked against us.

Being a part of the Queer community has shown us the importance of lifting each other up, of fighting against injustice wherever we find it, and of embracing all the complex and beautiful intersections of our kaleidoscopic identities. And it’s with this spirit that we stand with the people of Palestine. Their fight for sovereignty and recognition hits close to home for anyone who’s ever had to fight to simply exist.

As we assert our identities and rights within the LGBTQ+ community and stand in solidarity with Palestine, we resoundingly reject the false notion that supporting Palestine is anti-Queer, and that supporting the settler colony of Israel is somehow required for Queers.

Let us remember that “Gay Rights” cannot flourish without addressing the “Gay Wrongs” committed against any oppressed group. As Angela Davis reminds us, justice is indivisible.

So, as we peel back the layers of our own identities and rights within the Queer community, we stand hand in hand with the Palestinian struggle, challenging every narrative that seeks to divide our solidarity. Our commitment extends to all Indigenous Peoples’ right to sovereignty and their resistance to colonial erasure, from Palestine to the Congo, and of course here, on Turtle Island. Let this be a shout against oppression, and our bold affirmation that in our quest for justice, no marginalized voice is silenced, no liberation struggle is overlooked, and no boundary unchallenged. Together, let’s dismantle old narratives and binaries meant to divide and oppress, and fiercely proclaim that our liberation is bound together, inseparable, and unyielding.

We are rooted together, hungry for liberation, and ripe for revolution.

art by SAM PAOLINI

Content Warning: This issue delves into challenging topics, including ableism, biphobia, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, homophobia, mentions of death, queerphobia, racism, religious trauma, state violence, and transphobia. We do not shy away from these hard conversations, as they are crucial to our ongoing fight for true liberation.

Every effort was made to contact and properly credit copyright holders. Please get in touch with us regarding corrections or omissions. Reproducing or reprinting all or any part of this zine without prior consent will be considered utterly disrespectful and generally uncool.

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art by JODIE UNDERWOOD

CONTRIBUTORS

A. D. Warrick

André Le Mont Wilson

Ang Ruiz

Angelina Leaños

Ann McCann

Annika Papke

Ash Sloas

Bob McNeil

Caroline Wolff

Claudio Parentela

Dani Massey

Eddie Creamer

Elena Vallejo

Ellie Allan

Em Buth

h b anowan

Hamsa Fae

Hannah Providence

Indovina

In Her Image Photography

Irina Tall Novikova

Jade Bennett

Jamie Kaminscky

Jennifer Abod

Jill Young

Jodie Underwood

Jules DiGregorio

Juno Stilley

Kade Harvey

Kenna DeValor

L.M. Zoller

Lane Stephens

Leighton Schreyer

Leo Josefina

Lorinda Boyer

Margot Hazel

Maxwell Edmonds

Meg Streich

Melissa Wilkinson

Mena Brazinski

Michael McFadden

Micah B

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

Nikolai Renee

November

Ocean Grove

Paige Johnson

Peja Zepeda

Rae Henaghan

René Zadoorian

Ro Maharjan

Roman Campbell

Rosie D’Ercole

Roisin McCool

Sam Paolini

Sara Rodrick 乐福华

Sequoia Chenoah Roane

Starly Lou Riggs

Stephen Brown

Taylor Michael Simmons

Teddie Bernard

Tess Conner

Venus Aberdeen Jefferies von reyes

William Ward Butler

Zeke Offman

Zenia deHaven

Zoe L

being

Pretending&

being retending

EVERYONE IS NO ONE IS EACH

My dog is dead and Eric thinks the pinball lesbians can fix me. He tosses a pack in the passenger seat, A treat in the cage Lures me downtown takes me over his shoulder and under his wing

I scratch and howl The whole way there

The dykes who drink at the dive bar are nothing short of magnificent but I’m 19

I center my pain– I become it

Squeeze it in my palm like a stone when I shake hands with them

From the dykes no rough touch no reproach

They are giants to me.

We’re on the exhale, babe. No need to raise your voice when you’ve spent your whole life screaming

What’s her problem the bartender asks Eric

She’s newer, greener. Still cares enough to be scandalized Dead dog says Eric orders a beer for me and a Coke for himself

Someone has to drive home I’m in no state.

The dykes and I knock back pints I lose to them in poker

Still sober enough to glean I’m in their debt

Owing them every chance at past and future happiness

Every girl I’ve touched under a table

In her parent’s house In public

Take it all back I want to say It’s wasted on me.

Oh my fucking god one hisses Just eat pussy already

We smoke outside I try to numb it

Press my tongue to something breathing

SO HOT AND FUCKING OTHER

I pick the biggest, wisest bull

So sage so trite

She is old

Speaks in tongues and riddles

Her face crumples like a tablecloth

Her mouth a tiny spoon

She brushes it off

Lights another

Shakes her head

I think about my dog

That was once a happy motion

You silly thing she says

And doesn’t say

This is not always how it will be

The dykes are warm and unsympathetic

They tell me to take in cats instead

They live longer take up less space

I thought

They had been around long enough

To know these are terrible reasons

I show the dykes Cleo’s poem about cannibalism

They nod approvingly

Like it’s a routine

Like they planned it

Like they were expecting this all along

That’s good they say Very good

The dykes make me read Rich then Siken

Show me to map

The outline of my body

Then toss it into the ocean–

Or in laps

Of women who make me hate its edges less

They think I need someone to mellow me out I tell them that’s Eric’s job

You should know about the femmes, too,

Never seen so many colors

So much gentler so much more harsh

The way they anchor the bulls

Dig their press on nails in Sting then soothe

I’ll be good eventually I promise them

No they tell me You must be awful now

I want to be a regular

Want to walk

The same way

They do

On the issue of texting my ex girlfriend

The dykes are split

The butches firmly against

No use fastening yourself to someone’s coattails. Filling up on crumbs is No way to live

The femmes say go for it

An old queen touches up her makeup

Wields the lipstick tube like a dagger

Or a scythe

Always better to regret it than regret it

She licks the excess off her teeth

words by MENA BRAZINSKI

i want my lighthouse boy and our love like the tides i want to chart the stars hidden in the freckles covering his shoulders

i want my sugar-spun man; his thighs like strawberry shortcake i want to dig my teeth in shove my fists in the crumbs and lick the cream from my fingertips

i want that darling little crow and their barely-contained fire i want to bite till i taste smoke in their veins sweet like pomegranate seeds bursting on my tongue

(i want)

the woman with drummer’s hands sharing weed and wine and takeout thai finding safety in her arms

(i want)

the muse and his big blue eyes divinity from his fingertips laugh like sunlight on my skin

(i want)

the writer, covered in scars blindingly intelligent, brilliant cappuccino connoisseur

“you greedy bisexual” “you insatiable thing”

yes.

god, yes.

i am what they say and worse. iwantiwantiwant— i want it all.

words by ROMAN CAMPBELL art by MICHAEL MCFADDEN

gatekeep 1

words & art by JADE BENNETT

“Gatekeep 1” is an image of the packaging from the DIY HRT company Otokonoko Pharmaceuticals overlaid on a film photograph of the University of Florida psychology building.

The packaging itself is a deeply strange and fascinating historical and anthropological artifact, signifying the cultural and governmental forces that have shaped the current paradigm of trans care. Transphobes criticize the anime characters on the box, noting it’s atypical aesthetic of the medication. Packaging is filled with memes like “made with 5G technology”, or the anime character saying “Don’t look at my giant Girldick.” To avoid confiscation in delivery, it cannot show the actual chemical name of the estradiol valerate, so it lists a more vague “EV” and the word “Cyclofemboy.”

Since there is no regular vetting process for DIY medication, there are inevitably doubts about its purity or safety. However, the creators are transparent that they are also transfemmes, and their mission is to support other transfemmes safely. This is reinforced by others who are able to test the drugs and post the results online. While this medication does not go through the bureaucratic systems, it is created by and for our community.

In Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, she discusses the medical history of transgender care from about 1960 to the late 1990s and how regressive psychologists slowly took over the discipline. This resulted in a horrific fascination with transgender bodies and identities, objectifying them to the extent that some psychologists would decide who got care based on their personal attraction to the trans person. These psychologists asserted themselves in the role of gatekeeper, allowing only the “truly transsexual” to transition while denying the rest.

Gatekeeping psychological practices are a large part of the reason that we seek this kind of DIY care. Accessible DIY care is necessary to combat the negative effects of historically pathologized psychiatric care.

Sticky fingers grab at Barbie dolls with matted hair, missing shoes, and bite marks across their toes. Pretty girls play with pretty dolls, and I want to be one of the pretty girls. I ask to join them a little too excitedly; my eager hands plunging forward. They tell me I can play the dad, smirking with an expression I had yet to learn how to decode. I would rather be a big sister like my own, or a mom. I don’t even know what a dad is. They hand me a shirtless Ken with cargo shorts, and I am unimpressed. I shrug acceptingly because I want to play with the pretty girls. In kindergarten, boys like girls and girls like boys, and I am unimpressed.

The next afternoon I ask to be a girl doll: I am good at being a sister. I am told that those are already taken: You have to be the dad. I don’t even have a dad, at least I get to play with the pretty girls. I hold Ken, and this time I put him in a dress, and heels, and wrap a towel around his head. The pretty girls giggle, and I like their smiles. That isn’t what dads wear, go find his shorts. I don’t know how to tell them that my dad went away.

Where is Dad? I ask Mom on the car ride home, just before we reach our alley. She tells me he didn’t want to be a dad anymore. How do you stop being a dad? She says something about cheating and leaving with money, and I am not really sure what that all means, but I’ll try it with the pretty girls tomorrow.

Free Play

That night I am in bed staring at the bumpy ceiling and rubbing my feet against the wall. I turn to switch off my lamp when she catches my eye. Selena. Sitting in a box on the very top of my bookshelf, shining in the moonlight. Why have a doll if you never open the box? I get up and grab the chair from my desk pushing across the floor until it reaches the wooden shelf. I climb onto the chair standing on my tippy toes and reach, reach, reach – got her. I hold the box close to my chest.

Back in bed, I bite through the tape; opening the box as carefully as little hands can. I open the flap and pull her out by her hair. Sorry, I whisper, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I turn her around between my fingers, examining every inch. I take a breath in and breathe out. I don’t remember

anything but feeling like she was breathing along with me. Slowly, I take the clothes off my Selena doll and run my fingers over her plastic skin. I trace bottom to top quickly, then once again, but the next time I linger.

I run my fingers over the curve of her calves, and it feels like I’ve found the missing part of the moon. I feel the bumps on her chest tracing it once so gently that my finger is almost no longer touching. I brush her lips thinking about the songs she sings. The only words I know in Spanish are the ones she sings through the speakers in Grandma’s car and the word “chula” which Grandma says means beautiful.

I have never said anything in Spanish before, but my lips curve and adjust around the words as I say them aloud, my chula. I sit for a minute longer, or maybe ten, then my eyes begin to feel heavy. I kiss my fingers and press them against her lips, the way I’ve seen Grandpa kiss Grandma goodnight. I place my doll under my pillow, close my eyes, and smile. Pretty girls play with pretty dolls.

words by ELENA VALLEJO

art by HANNAH PROVIDENCE

better than the alternative

words & art by JADE BENNETT

Estrogen is a gray market drug. While it is legal to possess, inject, or ingest, it is illegal to buy without a prescription within the United States. This leaves a legal gray area for the import of estrogen and similar drugs, leading to the rise of DIY HRT manufacturers in countries without the legal restriction. These manufacturers flourish by sending their products in covert packaging. The deeply transphobic culture, which has necessitated this kind of treatment, has also excoriated it, resulting in a blackout of these products within popular culture and consciousness. This is somewhat difficult to ethically transgress.

Talking about or displaying DIY HRT comes with ethical considerations: if it reaches a wide enough audience, transphobes may have information that could get important sites shut down. These sites serve as directories of information, comparing not only price, but purity. Indie, queer press carries a lower risk, but publication in mainstream press should be avoided. The day I sun-printed this cyanotype, an image circulated on Twitter, warning that The Guardian was searching for someone to talk about DIY, and not to say a word. The article “raises concerns” over teenagers getting access to hormones or puberty blockers in the UK, giving little platform to trans advocates and keeping the statement that there is very little evidence to support trans care.

While I do not seek to glorify DIY HRT, it is a necessity for many people, especially in places with less accessibility. The alternative—not having life saving medication—is abhorrent, and so is restricting access or giving a platform to those who seek to.

The photogram process I used highlights the absence of the materials—the outline of a syringe and the packaging that would be around a vial. These medications are vital for the bodily autonomy of trans people. Our autonomous rights should guarantee us access to these medications, ensuring our right to determine how we want to transition. It is a difficult time to be a trans person, and the things we turn to may be difficult to face. Until pharmaceutical HRT is made more affordable and accessible, DIY options are important for trans people to find the care they need.

I think about the caterpillar

Tucked into their skin-tight cradle

Who melts, dissolves, un-becomes

Returns to primordial ooze in the service of a transformation impossible, and yet –

They build

Cell by cell

The butterfly

Emerging agonized, and hell-bent on existing –

Spindly legs

Eyes of inconceivable perception

A tongue made only for sipping nectar

And wings – such wings

For siLen (surgerY)

And I think of you, now Ooze, in your own cocoon

Made of propofol or dexmedetomidine

A hard metal surface

Blue cotton, and blue surgical paper

Blue rubber enveloping the hands of the doctor –

Cut, scrape, stitch –

Who knowingly or unknowingly wields the wand of sterile, surgical steel

That invokes you, ooze

And your ragged and vivid breaths become those of the same god that coaxes the liquiform insect back into shape

Cell by cell

To bestow, to call into being, agonized and hell-bent on existing

Your own wings – such wings –

That in its depths, the body always knew would become.

words by SEQUOIA CHENOAH ROANE

art by LANE STEPHENS

art by LANE STEPHENS

restaurant

words by JENNIFER ABOD

I’m sitting across a table from a seasoned poet I am meeting for the first time. In conversation, she chuckles: My husband calls himself an honorary lesbian.

Behind my mask, I wonder: did he ever worry about holding her hand, losing his children his family his job his life?

I wonder, did she truly think I’d chuckle too?

restaurant rage

art by MARS GOODWIN

AMERICAN BOYS

words by RENÉ ZADOORIAN photography by IN HER IMAGE

The first thing Darius told me was a lie.

“Got an A. You?”

“Same,” I replied, keeping my paper face down.

We were each other’s first friend, I’d like to think. Despite being inches shorter than I was, he stood with confidence, as if he hadn’t landed two months prior. Dark tight curls covered his head, eyes brown with a tint of redwood if you looked close enough, and eyebrows thick above them. I envied his long eyelashes, even as a child. It didn’t take long until I found out he envied me, too.

“You fit in,” he told me once afterschool. “Help me dress like you, yeah?”

We spent our time in my closet, Darius trying on various t-shirts and tank tops. I might as well have been a cat chasing lasers the way

my eyes fixated on his body, staring at the light trail beginning to form on his stomach. I watched his back hide behind fabric, only to be revealed moments later when Darius deemed the clothing “American” and “middle school” enough. From that point on, we walked to school side by side, carrying cheap skateboards we were too scared to ride.

Our final summer before high school was spent at the public pool. Both of our voices had dropped recently, no longer sounding like young boys but young men. Darius and I stood at the door, towels in hand as we waited for the pool to open. We walked through the humid locker room, not yet filled with naked men and slippery floors. The smell of cheap powder soap lingered between us as we stuffed our bags into one locker.

We were the first to get into the water before it was polluted by band aids, mucus, and unshowered bodies. We savored the ten minutes of silence, floating on our backs before families crowded in. We play fought in the water while ignoring the lifeguards’ warnings. We ran by the side of the pool, jumped into the shallow end,

even held each other under the water to see which one of us would survive a tsunami. The pool water helped conceal most of our questionable activities, from pulling each other’s swim short strings to underwater wrestling. By the time we stepped out, our eyes burned from the chlorine, our hands shriveled, hair soaked flat against our foreheads.

The walk through the locker room after a swim was never something I looked forward to. The smell of cleaning products, the slippery bodies, the lack of towels wrapped around waists. Unlike earlier, it was impossible to walk through the room without your skin touching someone else, whether intentional or not. We dressed with our eyes down, scared to catch a glimpse of other men, and left with our hair semi wet and clothes stained with patches of water.

At sixteen, Darius’ uncle hired us at his Armenian market to stock shelves and sell cigarettes and lottery tickets we couldn’t yet buy. By this point, Darius was taller and toner than I was. His facial hair was already coming in— not peach fuzz but genuine stubble—something I wouldn’t experience until my early twenties. During our shift, I listened to the words he used in Farsi and Armenian, wrote each syllable on receipt paper that I would then memorize with the hopes of impressing him.

Salam, merci, chetori, barev dzez, yerek dollar.

Rarely did I pronounce them right the first time. Still, Darius showed the patience of a teacher, repeating words as many times as I asked him to.

“What was Iran like?” I asked as we stocked the metal shelves with off-brand Cheeto puffs.

“My family’s there.” He shrugged, opening another box of snacks. “I miss my cousins. And my friend next door. His mom always invited me for a snack after we played football in his yard.”

I asked if he would ever go back.

“My dad really wants to. Regrets coming here. I think he just misses his home. And it’s not like I’ve got a choice in it, you know?”

I did not know. Still, I nodded, disappointment swelling in my chest.

the fridge. Not that any of that mattered to Darius and me—we were busy watching the muscles in his arms move under suntanned skin as he helped truckers unload boxes of produce. We listened to his voice as he spoke above the noise of traffic, greeting regulars and strangers the same. We even smelled the oranges he peeled as he walked past our entrance during his breaks.

We first smoked weed sitting on Luke’s closed trunk in the parking lot beside the market. More enjoyable than the rebellion of it was the simple presence of Luke. His hands worked gently, folding small creases into the filter before rolling. We watched in contained excitement as his lips touched the paper and his fingers ignited the flame. As he inhaled, I listened to the weed burn, blackening before exposing the embers inside. My lips would touch that same joint.

“This doesn’t mean we kissed, right?” I semijoked, taking the joint which, upon closer look, didn’t seem all that elegant. But this was Luke, and whatever he did was good enough.

“Of course not. If sharing a joint was the same as kissing someone, everyone’d be a faggot,” Luke reassured. “Do I look like a faggot to you?”

Yes, I wanted to speak, as if saying it could make it true. Instead, I took my first hit, forcing the back of my throat to burn as I suppressed a cough. I held the joint out to Darius, who took it with confidence. Luke broke the news as Darius took his first hit. His girlfriend was visiting from college. Whether from the news or the weed or both, Darius coughed into his elbow. It broke us silently—two boys wishing it was untrue that the one man we looked up to in ways we couldn’t explain had a girlfriend. I faked a phone call, claimed that my mom needed me at home, and excused myself. The mere twenty-minute walk home caused my legs to ache, as if I were operating something more than my body.

When his girlfriend started showing up to work, waiting for his shift to end, Darius and I stood by the front entrance, sharing a can of monster. Darius said it was what white boys like Luke drank. We watched in envy as our prized possession showed that he was never really ours to begin with.

Most days, Darius and I found any excuse to talk to Luke, a nineteen-year-old who worked at the pizza place next door. Luke worked hard, always kept the front of the shop clean, even caught a guy trying to steal a case of carbonated doogh from

“This is the third day in a row. It’s like he forgot about us or something.” I took a sip of the can and tried to ignore the all-too-sweet aftertaste.

“Whatever, man, I don’t care,” Darius lied as he patted my shoulder to head back inside. “We don’t need him.”

After our shift, we walked around the block to

the park, usually inhabited by child soccer teams and family gatherings. At night, it was occupied by faceless people, staying far enough away to not have to acknowledge each other’s presence. We sat on the empty swings, kicking the wood below our sneakers.

“Do you think they’ll stay together?” Darius lit a joint, bought from the only smoke shop that willingly ignored fakes.

I shook my head and kicked off the ground. The joint passed between us as we launched our bodies into the starless sky. Each swing seemed to take longer to descend as the world slowed down. The chains felt comfortably cold against my palms. The sound of leaves seemed to grow by about a million decibels, drowning Darius’ voice. My body soared into the trees, lifting from my seat.

“What?” I remember turning to Darius, waiting for my eyes to catch up with my face.

“You good?” he repeated, a smile on his face. I nodded, and our laughter echoed through the park.

We lay in the dark grass, side by side while looking for stars, trying to decipher them from the planes. Each moment of near victory was refuted by a green and red flashing. We tried to guess the number of dogs who had probably pissed and shit on that very spot where we lay.

He sat up and rested my head on his legs. “If I do something, will you get mad?”

“I doubt it,” I replied, almost too quiet to hear.

Darius was hesitant. I could tell from looking up at his face, a smile formed in times of anxiety. He lit the rest of our joint, took a hit of confidence and kissed me, smoke and all. I could feel a cross hanging from his neck, the coldness of it laying against my chin. I’d imagined doing this so many times, but I never accounted for the details. Like his height requiring that he crane down over me. Or the taste of his fancy cologne that he sprayed too close to his mouth. Or his stubble against my top lip, I’ll often wonder what he remembers from that day. Does he recall the shirt he wore? One of mine, borrowed and never returned.

I spent my walk home failing to act casual. I was a newly hatched baby turtle, pushing towards the water. I was no different, following the moon home, where I would spend thirty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to convince myself that I was real. We’d spent the following day finding any excuse to touch—him picking an invisible lint from my shirt, me wiping an eyelash from his face. We brushed past each other with boxes of produce, apologizing for intentionally

being too close. Once, briefly, the thought crossed my mind to tell Luke all about the night before, and just like that, I tripped on reality.

We were stocking the fridges when Darius told me he was going back to Iran.

“My grandpa’s sick,” he tried to justify, focused more on the floor than me. I hated him in that moment—Darius and his dad and his grandpa and everyone else on Earth. Darius, for pulling me into a world I had no intentions of accepting and leaving me there alone. His dad, for taking Darius back without thinking of me. His grandfather, for not gathering the strength to stay alive. Hell, even his uncle. For hiring me, for putting me next to a shop with a Luke and a Darius. They were pulling my heart across the world by plane only to land in Tehran.

“You can’t live with your uncle or something? You could even crash here,” I pleaded as the childlike urge to cry climbed my throat.

“I wish. My dad wants us to be with him. You know, in the end.”

If I opened my mouth I didn’t trust myself to stay composed, despite biting the tip of my tongue as a distraction. And so, I nodded.

We stood with luggage at our feet, ready to be loaded into the trunk. Not knowing how long they’d be gone, Darius and his dad took practically everything. I wondered if some of my “American” clothes made it into the cases, tucked away as a reminder of here, and of me. We hugged stiffly, so as to not look too sentimental towards each other. We fit the suitcases into the trunk of a Toyota, taking turns in this heavier version of Tetris. Despite my best judgement I let my thoughts run wild with scenarios between Darius and I, two American boys. I was sure he’d come back soon. How long could it take for an old man to drop? I fantasized about his return, hopefully not long from his departure, where I would greet him at the airport and go straight to the park where we both had our first kiss. Darius broke the silence.

“Don’t mention what happened to anyone,okay?I’vethoughtabout it and I’m not into guys.” His eyes refused to meet mine.

“Yeah, me neither,” I lied back.

in Hollywood”

“Last Night

art by KENNA DEVALOR

On Art, Activism, A nd Queer visibility:

Learning Lessons From My New Gay Aunties

WORDS BY MICAH B.

i

sat down with Tara and Heidi of In Her Image Photography, hoping to learn what made these Queer photographers tick. I got much more than I bargained for. As we chatted, I got to see into the personal and artistic worlds of these two icons. As soon as we met, Heidi turned to me and said, “Hi, we’ll be your gay aunties for the day.” Unsurprisingly, everything went well from there.

The two artists told me about their wildly different upbringings, growing up a world apart. Tara recounted: “I grew up in the East Bay of California. I had a poor, working class, violent, abusive kind of growing up. So I became insular, and I grew up on my own, raising myself. I always knew I was different. I didn’t have the words for lesbian, but I knew I had crushes on girls from a very young age. I dropped out of school, because it was too hard to be a gay kid, and I just kind of got a full time job and found some lesbians and ended up in Santa Cruz, California.”

“My story is the polar opposite,” Heidi recalled. “I was a late bloomer, I think, from an early age, I knew, but I grew up in a very conservative Australian seaside town. I went to an all girls high school, which in theory, would have been just a dream for a lesbian, but you know, was just full of bullies. Later in life, I came out, when I was 29 or 30. I had been in and out of relationships with men, and was always miserable and didn’t quite understand why—even though I sort of knew in the back of my head. I had this

PHOTOGRAPHY

BY

IN HER IMAGE

really dated idea of what a lesbian was, or what they were supposed to look like. Growing up, I didn’t know that lesbians could look like me.”

It took a while to piece together how their relationship came to be. Heidi found her way to the East Coast, while Tara was out west. The two met online, through their photography. Both loved each other’s work, then connected over ButchFemme.com. Tara was working for a skincare company, and Heidi was managing restaurants. The two quit their respective jobs, and said, “Let’s create a business that we love, that we get to do together, and celebrate and tell people’s stories.”

That was 15 years ago. The rest is history.

Tara and Heidi now live in sunny Petaluma, where they take part in a thriving Queer scene. They go to drag brunches, Queer events, and take pride in being part of a wider community of Queer small-business owners in Sonoma County.

One of the most inspiring things about Heidi and Tara’s lives is the union between art and personal life. “We spend so much time focusing on our work-life balance, attempting to separate professional and personal life.” Heidi and Tara have learned to go the other direction, letting their personal lives, values, and love shine through into their work.

“We don’t have a separation on our instagram of our private life and our

business life,” Heidi explained, “If we’re going to a drag brunch, we’re going to post about it on our business page.”

Tara and Heidi’s work reflect the decades-old feminist mantra: “the personal is political.” They bring their private lives into the public sphere with a fiery passion for uplifting Queer folks.

“We want people to know about where we’re going and what we’re doing. And hopefully, it also opens up that visibility door. For a lot of people that may not have been to a drag performance before, they’re like, ‘Oh, my God! That looks like fun,’ instead of, ‘Oh, these people are awful.’ ”

Heidi reminded me that this personal-professional union is not all smiles and rainbows. “We’ve had the hatred and the vitriol over the years, and we’ve had people drop off when we’ve shared parts of our life that we’re proud of. But what we have always said about our life and our work is that we are always going to show up as ‘Heidi and Tara,’ just as we do in real life. There is no separation. We are who we are at work: take it or leave it. This is who we are. We’re a proud queer couple and we celebrate that.”

Tara and Heidi are exactly the lovely Queer photographermentors you’d want to do your photoshoot. They are both insightful and provocative in turn, and always put themselves out there to do the right thing. They met one client of theirs when he dm’ed Heidi on instagram to say, “I can’t afford you, but I’m saving up. I know that you’re the right photographers, and I really want to be a model. You’re on my vision board!” Heidi and Tara decided they were going to photograph him for free.

“When it comes from a Queer young person, I’m gonna show up for them

in whatever way I can, and become their adopted gay aunty,” Heidi told me. Later, she realized that this young man had wrinkled clothing because he was homeless, living out of his car. Here, Heidi’s usual quick, upbeat cadence turned solemn, reminiscing on “the imperfection and beauty that collided at that moment, my canvas being wrinkled and his pants being wrinkled, and him telling us this story about his dreams for him and his husband.”

Heidi and Tara both agreed on a final point, trading off sentences as they spoke. “When you see the work that we shoot, it’s nice to remember that there’s people with stories. It’s not all glamor. It’s not all Queer joy. We left that session kind of bereft, not knowing how to help. We didn’t want to be saviors. We don’t want to be those people. But we did want to tell his story. And this let us tell his story.”

To wrap up, I asked my new gay aunties to tell us about gay rights and wrongs.

“I think for me it still comes back to gay rights being about visibility and voices being heard,” Heidi explained. “Gay wrongs to me are perpetuating images that tell untrue stories about Queer lives. Sometimes I see images put out by other photographers that I would consider gay wrongs because they’re just perpetuating a stereotype of how gay people should be photographed or seen. Someone will be like, ‘Hey, I’m photographing two guys at their wedding this weekend. How should I pose them?’ You wouldn’t ask that of a straight couple right? We’re still in that disconnect of thinking that a gay or Queer couple is somehow removed. Gay wrongs are perpetuating this myth and this ideology. That is harmful for our community.”

However, for Heidi, the gay wrongs aren’t just committed by cishet people: “There’s people in the Queer community that are on the wrong side of history. And I’m like, ‘how do we bridge that gap? How do we find a common connection?’ Because everyone always assumes that

all gay people are friends, and they’re all friendly, and they all feel the same way. But that’s not true, right? There’s a lot of division in our community. So I think finding opportunities to heal the community is also a form of activism. We must learn more about each other. I think there should be more of us out there—people like yourself—writing and putting out this publication. And giving us all voices. That’s what we need to do. What we continually need to do is just give everyone a voice. It doesn’t matter what part of the Queer community you’re from. We all have a place and we all need a voice. We double down. We don’t hide. We don’t. We double down. And I think that’s what we’ve always done. If there’s bad shit going on out in the world, we don’t hide and wonder if we shouldn’t speak up about it. We speak up about it, and then some.”

Make sure you check my new gay aunties out on instgram @inherimagephoto, or online at www.inherimagephoto.com.

JoY sorro &

sorro W

art by ASH SLOAS

Sandy, squeezed my hand tightly in hers. I hopped excitedly, foot to foot. The moment had finally arrived. From a platform high above the swarming crowd, a queen with a megaphone welcomed the masses. In sync with the wink of her exceptionally long-lashed eyelid, a cannon boomed. With the panache of a Disney performance, glitter and rainbow confetti erupted into the sky. Parade participants skated, danced, and gyrated down Manhattan streets. Painted skin, sequined pasties, leather thongs, strangers pressed against one another in unity. The air thick with weed, scorching asphalt, tasted of hard-won freedom. My senses heightened, sought to soak in every bit. Sandy wrapped her arms around my waist, kissed me with parted lips; I reciprocated. We reveled in being openly together, unabashedly in love. Today, in this space, we were the majority. We were normal. Over five million people had gathered and even though I everyone around me was family. They were my people, my community, my tribe. United to bear witness and to commemorate that on

fifty years ago, the first Pride was

This is Where he sits. A representation.

A pile of candy in the Corner. Sweet. Shimmering. Each word here weighs a pound. Each candy here weighs one fraction Of the 175 pounds that were on planet Earth. People watch his xerox sit in the Corner. They think about sweet people, sweet Things. Then they get hungry. They take. One by one. He begins to dwindle. I watch as I lose him to their hunger For negligence. Their sweet teeth, their fangs unwrapping him, Eating him, feeling him melt on their tongues like a group psychedelic, A memory-inducer that only hits the drug dealer and his product. The pile Disintegrates. Pounds of him are lost to their greedy, complicit mouths. I look At all the wrappers on the floor and I remember his clothes, stripped bare to Reveal sores to the doctor. He is given an expiration date. Notice how I left out the candy box itself. Notice how he is stripped Of a name. Notice how I replenish him, Hoping to change the story.

(Portrait of Ross in L.A.)

A Portrait of Ross in L.A. is an art piece created by artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1991. The piece consists of a pile of candy displayed in the corner of a room, which always begins at 175 pounds, the starting weight of Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’ partner who died of AIDS. Viewers are invited to take a piece of candy, which over time depletes the pile, symbolizing the physical and metaphorical loss experienced in the face of the AIDS epidemic.

| 18/01/2021

BLESSING

art by OCEAN GROVE

Before We Swim

words by EDDIE CREAMER

The first time we came to this beach, everything between us was new. We wrestled in the sand like little gods, shouting, laughing. When I kissed you, the hard taste of your mouth had the whole ocean in it.

Later, lying back on a towel, I watched your shoulders where you sat next to me, coarse with sand stuck to your sweat and the sun cream I’d put there, against your protests. You said there was no need for it, nothing could hurt you. Almost, I believed you.

Eventually you stood up, shading your eyes from the sun.

“Swim?” You said, and held out your hand. I took it, and we ran over the compact sand in great strides, heedless of the little shards of shells and the dried-up seaweed at the tideline, sprinting into the water, our speed a trick against the sudden cold shock of it.

The last time we came here, I sprung you out of that place where they’d locked you up and we drove across the country all in one go. Somehow, I got the wheelchair over the dunes, straining while you looked back at me and smiled, rolling your hands feebly over the wheels. At the beach, you bent forwards and I thought for a moment you’d launch yourself up to run like we used to; but it was your shoes you were after, pulling them off with your socks, burying your feet in the sand up to the ankles.

I took off your shirt so that the sun was on you, tried not to stare at how skinny you’d become. I traced the lesions on your back with my finger.

“Don’t,” you said, pushing at me. I ignored you, kissed them, like each one was a pebble we’d collected every time we’d come here; and there were a lot of them.

Eventually, I had you laughing. But we didn’t swim, not that day.

Now, I stand in that same place where we lay the first time, or as near as I can remember. I look for something to mark it, the imprint of your body in the sand, but the tide has longsince washed all of that clean.

A storm is coming in; the waves crash onto the beach like clenched fists. Beneath that sound, through it, I can hear you out there, asking me to swim a final time. Your voice echoes in the wind, in the thunder as it gathers on the horizon.

“Swim,” you’re saying, again and again, and this time it isn’t a question. I won’t deny you — I never could.

I walk down the beach and you get stronger. At the shoreline, the spray is hot across my face. I take a step, another after it. The water foams around my feet, pulling at me. Your arm held out is as strong as it ever was, and I say your name back into the wind, no more than a whisper against the noise.

I lift my foot. The sea, waiting, inhales.

words by ANN MCCAN

reProduCtiVe CoMModiFiCation:

On Queer Couple Conception OR How To Get A Stranger Pregnant

ilook for echoes of my wife’s face in photos of strangers in a Facebook private group for sperm donors. (Soft brown eyes that look like they’ve been crinkled up in a smile their whole life. Good eyebrows, untouched by the mid2000s trends that left mine over-plucked. Curly hair, wild and messy. Square jaw, wide, round nose, good forehead--good Portuguese genes.) These online groups are community homes for tens of thousands of recipients and donors across the country with posts spanning topics— from a discussion on fertility supplements, donors posting their genetic stats, and hopeful couples (and occasional singles) wanting to grow their family. They post about their desired traits in a donor, their location, and their preferred *ahem* method of donation. Folks post about their ovulation cycles, how many times they’ve tried, and, always making tears well up in my eyes, celebrating when they conceive.

Donors are active in the group, replying to calls for a donor in X Y or Z area, congratulating parents-to-be, and proudly (and with consent from the parents) sharing when they successfully help grow a family. Donors only charge a very small nominal fee to legally set the precedent for a goods and services exchange, or ask that recipients simply cover the cost of shipped donations if that is the route taken. The altruism in donating to families in need this way feels like community at its finest and most equitable.

For those unfamiliar, it costs thousands of dollars to purchase sperm from a cryobank in California, even “nonprofit” banks. Largely uncovered by standard insurance, the rates only skyrocket from there if you need fertility treatments or opt for Invitro (IVF) or intrauterine insemination (IUI) over the oft-joked about “Turkey Baster” method of artificial insemination. These procedures rack up clinic costs, medication costs, “membership” fees to even be able to see full donor profiles, and more. Because of this, the hope for pregnancy is wildly inaccessible to same-sex wouldbe parents without thousands (and thousands) of dollars to shell out each time, every time you have to try, or try again. For my wife and I, this is all but out of the question entirely. Which for a while meant growing our family was out of the question. Until we learned about these online donor communities.

For these online donor communities, the idea is simple. Statistically, around half the population produces sperm en masse, and yet cryobanks exist as huge capitalist profit machines that take advantage of both hetero and homosexual couples’ desires for a child when, for various reasons, they cannot produce their own viable sperm. Many folks rightfully take issue with this. After all, the right to

a family should belong to everyone. Luckily, a large number of them have taken to the grassroots method of sperm distribution as can only be done in the current wild west of a technological age—digital community building and resource distribution. In this time of rollbacks on Queer and trans rights, I find this community resource is as radical as it is invaluable.

My wife and I had both respectively been in the “no kids” camp for many years for many very valid reasons before we met each other. When we found ourselves changing course towards the “well, raising kids with you would be nice” camp, it felt out of reach, out of reason, and like a pipe dream that we could talk about endlessly but had no clue how to access in reality.

On our walks through public parks, we found ourselves sighing at the sight of infants in strollers. In stores, I had to be dragged past displays of itty-bitty

polka dot dresses and tiny Carhartt overalls. On social media, I would send my wife videos of dads playing in the mud with toddlers in rainboots or learning to style a daughter’s hair with the teasing caption, “You lol”. After sex, they would joke,

"iF i had a Penis, You’d be so Pregnant right noW.”

Mostly it’s hopeful and in good spirit. Sometimes it’s sad. Sometimes I see a woman at the cafe with a baby strapped to her chest while her husband brings her latte to their table and tears flood my eyes, despite trying to hide it from my wife. Most straight couples have it so easy, I think to myself in these moments of grief, stumbling into pregnancy and parenthood with an ease my wife and I will never know. Why can’t I be holding MY partner’s child to my breast? Why couldn’t OUR family be enjoying the first sunny weekend of spring? We finish our walk to the park and wait till the playground is cleared and sit on the

by

art

IRINA TALL

"soMetiMes, beautiFuLLY, WiLdLY, strangeLY, and inCredibLY, it’s about heLPing strangers on the internet get Pregnant"

until we are swinging so high our adult brains yell “danger!!” in a way they never did as a child and laugh about it. “Are you going to jump off?” they yell over to me. “No way!” I reply laughing, remembering the feeling from childhood of flying through the air before hitting the bark. The sadness is still there a bit, but mostly I just wonder if our children would be cautious like I was or wild and adventurous like my wife.

I take prenatals, but we haven’t settled on a donor yet, with several genetically outstanding options from the group. We have names picked out, but have no clue how long it will take to conceive after we do choose a donor.

We loosely plan career moves and academic semesters around raising a child we don’t have yet, but have faith in having soon. As a career nonprofit worker and a Queer person, I am never not astounded by the power of grassroots community organization and mobilization. When things feel dark and overwhelming being a woman, being Queer, being alive, it feels hopeful when I remember that Queer community organization isn’t just for passing protective laws, or striking down hateful ones, or marching in the streets, or having to come up with new ways to protect our LGBTQIA+ siblings in this world. Sometimes, beautifully, wildly, strangely, and incredibly, it’s about helping strangers on the internet get pregnant.

art by IRINA TALL

by

art

IRINA TALL

art by IRINA TALL

LOVE | 18/01/2021

PURE

art by OCEAN GROVE

Possible, Beautiful Us

words by SARA RODRICK 乐福华

Under the neon & haze of a rum-soaked gay bar, your outstretched hand pulls me onto the stage, makes me brave enough to dance in the brightest corners of the room.

After the show, you hand me a plum & we stuff our eager mouths, tired bodies, with light.

We sing our wishes to the moon, make space inside the present tense for a breath or two. We’re here (breathe in).

We made it (breathe out).

In your sleep, I hear you whisper: yes, we’re alive & still on the news, a bomb threat at a local library before Rainbow Story Hour fills my lungs with lead.

They were going to read Call Me Tree by Maya Christina Gonzalez, whose books allow black & brown kids to imagine themselves possible, as trees & rivers & sunsets & connected to all living things.

The brown boys in my neighborhood play soccer in the Food Lion parking lot, using the debris netting as a goal. They know something about hope.

In my car, filled with the sweetness of plums, Frank Ocean sings we gon’ see the future first & I want to believe our people will make it.

Over generations of resistance, we’ve developed cells that tell us where our loved ones are in time & space, even after they are long gone.

In the reverse, my grief receptors reveal your possible absence to me despite you standing in front of me.

How text me when you get home is not just a lover’s gesture but a prayer, a riot, a love

in its most tender form sending daggers into a night filled with possible, beautiful us.

& seen

unseen &

sister privilege words by h b anowan

art by CLAUDIO PARANTELA

we go to the bathroom together and everyone’s thinking it and we know what they’re thinking because we’re thinking it too except

we know it.

we know the third stall of this particular bar bathroom has the toilet paper dispenser on the left side instead of the right and you can turn around to face the toilet and put your foot on it and hike up your skirt so I can get a better angle to pull your underwear to the side

to fuck you.

and I do fuck you. I put my right hand over your mouth and I fuck you with my left and you come and I almost come just making you come and we come back to the table breathless, a bit like how it is whenever I write about you and I forget how to punctuate properly and flushed, our happy hour apps have arrived and they’re steaming and so are we. we do this all the time: bar bathrooms and pool showers and department store changing rooms and festival port-a-potties and a remote corner of the dog park and all the filthy same-gendered private parts of public places —

we claim them.

the same way we claim and own our sexuality except when it’s dangerous or convenient not to. we hold hands and we wear each other’s clothes even if they don’t fit the same because we dress the same and we do each other’s hair and we fix each other’s makeup. we could be twins but the resemblance beyond some vague prescribed femininity is nonexistent though my grandmother once remarked you look like my cousin of the same name before she knew who you were to me, before she knew you use the shortened version of that name, when she thought you were my brother’s girl, before Jesus told her not to come to our wedding, before I disowned her before she could disown me. anyway, she was wrong about all that. you don’t look like her and you don’t look like me. you don’t look like anyone

I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never seen someone so beautiful and so powerful, as hot and as radiant as the sun and somehow still so delicate, somewhat like a sunny side up egg, until I turn you over easy and you’re a little less breakable, still so unlike me in so many ways, and the only thing that’s uncanny here is the idea that we could somehow be related, I mean, we are family now, but we chose that, that’s not what they mean and anyhow it’s easier for the straight and narrow mind to draw lines and make shapes that aren’t there and it’s easier to make believe that there’s some blood bond here, well actually I guess there is, because of course I have my red wings, but they enforce and suppose some genetic kinship, which let’s face it, there’s got to be at this point, because you’re programmed in my code by now, but some other sororal signifier has to exist to appease their better judgment and when push comes to shove it’s easier for them to say excuse me, are you two sisters? than to consider the consequences of what it would mean if we weren’t so we say

“yeah, sure.” and finger bang in the women’s room at the gym.

Sapphira Cristal Lip Syncs for the Win

words & art by ANNIKA

PAPKE

I love ‘Queer mess’ in the form of reality TV, a pastime beloved by many in the community. In the past year especially, I have quadrupled down on my assertion that we are the future of television and bring a truly unmatched level of chaos, creativity, and emotional highs and lows to the medium. I was super inspired by this most recent season of Drag Race for bringing us drama, reads, and shade— and ultimately, a group of queens who were having fun and bringing positive yet accurately messy representation to the Queer community.

words & art by NOVEMBER

I will look at the Roadkill.

I will look, because closing my eyes does not make the bodies disappear.

I will step out of the car and peel their bodies off the pavement with my trembling hands, because God knows no one else will.

Not the killers behind the wheel. Not animal control. Not you.

I will delve into the Earth till my nails are replaced with blood and soil.

When my fingers grow too weary, I will tear at the roots choking our makeshift grave till my gums are bled gray.

I will cry out with a mouth full of ichor, matching the red trickling down my friend’s cheek.

And when no one answers, I will lower them into their new home. A home they deserve so much better than.

The only home they’ve ever known.

I will kiss their nose, and I will not wipe the blood away.

Then I will go back to my car and do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

I will look at the Roadkill. And God damn it, you’re going to look with me.

A Month for Our Sacred Hearts words by TESS CONNER IT'S THE END OF JUNE IN AMERICA AND I UNDERSTAND HOW LANGUAGES BECOME EXTINCT. SILENCE IS UNNATURAL, IT CAN ONLY FOLLOW A MAN-MADE VIOLENCE. THEY WOULD CARVE THE TRUTH OF US INTO STONE, JUST TO BLUDGEON IT TO PIECES AND SELL WHAT THEY COULD OF THE ASHES. THEY WOULD HAVE US BE SO ISOLATED AS TO NEVER HAVE THE DESIRE TO SPEAK. BUT WE— RIOTERS, LOOTERS, LOVERS, ARE NOISY— UNDENIABLE, HINDERSOME, AND DIVINE. SO WRAP YOURSELVES IN EACH OTHER, CORDAGE IN A WEAVER'S HANDS. WE WON'T BE UNMADE.

words

good luck, babe!

Thoughts on the Lesbian Pop Renaissance

by JILL YOUNG art by MICHAEL MCFADDEN

Last weekend, I went to Arizona to visit my fellow lesbian-bestfriend-from-high-school for her 60-year-old boyfriend’s birthday party. (Giving context here would require far more than my allotted word count, so I’ll just leave it at this: life is often difficult to explain anecdotally.) Several noteworthy events happened that weekend (a senile cowboy pointed a loaded gun at me, for one) but the moment I will cherish most was this: my friend and I jumping around her living room, scream-singing as her new puppy nipped at our toes, twirling and smiling with winestained teeth as Chappell Roan crooned—

“You can kiss a hundred boys in bars

Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling

You can say it's just the way you are

Make a new excuse, another stupid reason

Good luck, babe”

Both of us were, of course, aware of the clear and present irony of this particular song scoring her AARP-eligible boyfriend’s party. But we didn’t need to acknowledge it. Sometimes dancing is language enough. And for Queer people, these songs have not always been written for us, by us.

By now, late spring of 2024, everyone and their mother (and their mother’s friend from college that used to make out with her as “practice for boys”) knows who Chappell Roan is. With the release of her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, the glam-pop drag-loving young lesbian superstar rose to major fame in what seemed like mere months (though Roan herself will be the first to emphasize that this fame is the culmination of over a decade of hard work.) Roan’s songs are explicitly Queer, with lyrics like “I like (I like) what you like (what you like)/Long hair (no bra) that's my type (that's right)/You just told me, want me to fuck you/Baby, I will 'cause I really want to.” And she’s not the only young star pioneering this renaissance of lesbian pop—24-year-old lesbian singer and actor Reneé Rapp has garnered major attention around her debut album Snow Angel, and sold out her first ever US tour. Also notable in this new wave of young lesbian artists are Girl in Red, Towa Bird, and (less new to the scene) King Princess, and

Something in particular stands out about Rapp and Roan: their audiences. Like their slightly older pop predecessors Hayley Kiyoko and Teagan & Sara, these lesbian artists have a dedicated fan base of queer women. However, Rapp and Roan have uniquely managed to garner major attention from mainstream, non-Queer crowds very early in their careers. What’s more, they’ve done so while simultaneously being out and vocal about their identities. I felt confused and exhilarated to hear Pink Pony Club blasting through the speakers at my local Ralph’s the other day.

It goes without saying that I am thrilled that lesbians are finally getting their share of the pop spotlight. Queer singers of previous generations, like Lesley Gore or Janis Ian, surely would not have seen the same success if their debut albums included “knee deep in the passenger seat/and you’re eating me out…” Many queer artists still touring today only felt ready to share their sexualities publicly after banking years of commercial success. Surely Roan and Rapp are testaments to the progressive public acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals in recent history. So why do I feel nervous about it?

When I came out as a lesbian after 5+ years of identifying as bisexual, the biggest change I noticed was the way that men in my life treated me. I saw, for the first time, the painful truth of how many men only value women they consider to be sexual prospects. Working at a restaurant, I had several

straight male coworkers I considered to be friends—that is, until they found out I was gay and not kidding about it,—ceased speaking to me entirely. In the past, when I’d mention I was bi to straight male friends, they would respond indifferently or even with increased interest. But since I began calling myself a lesbian, I have found the label to be largely repellent—at least to the men that believe me.

I’m not complaining here. I definitely don’t want to be friends with men who view me solely as a sexual object. But it does make me think a lot about the audiences of these young lesbian pop stars. Both Roan and Rapp are conventionally attractive, young, and femme-leaning. They embrace camp and “girliness” in their music and performances. Many Queer fans in online spaces have pointed out the general public’s hesitancy to acknowledge Rapp and Roan as lesbians, defaulting instead to “Queer” or “bisexual” labels despite the artists’ publically-shared identities. The word “lesbian” has historically carried negative connotations: bitchy, uptight, man-hating. Are people afraid to use it out of internalized fear of those connotations? Or are they, perhaps, holding on to the idea that these women are not completely gay, that they might, in the right situation, with the right man… be straight?

The urge to gatekeep music is nothing new. The 2010’s “hipster” era birthed the endlessly-memed phrase “I liked it before it was cool.” Queer people are historically trendsetters in music, fashion, and media—so it is common for us to roll our eyes when straight culture discovers something we’ve already been into for years, especially when they intentionally repurpose or misunderstand it. And when that something is explicitly Queer, it can often times feel like being robbed of a safe space, or a piece

When I witness straight men at Boygenius concerts try to leverage their Phoebe Bridgers knowledge as a dating tool, when the straight girls who threw around the d-slur in high school are jamming to Casual, when I have to wait in line behind a bachelorette party to go into the Chappell Roan- themed club night, it’s easy for me to feel frustrated. I have this one thing? You don’t even understand what she’s singing about the way I do!

Despite my frustration, I know I’m not in the right to feel this way. For one, I have listened to straight male artists my whole life and not felt at all disconnected from their music despite my opposing gender and sexuality. Music, like any art, is a tool for empathy a means through which to connect to something greater than yourself and understand world through new perspectives. Witnessing non-Queer audiences connect with Queer art, even if they do not completely understand it, is proof that we do not need to censor ourselves in order to be heard and loved. As a writer and performer myself, this is my goal as well: to create work specific to my experiences that connects with people of differing backgrounds and identities. I want lesbian pop stars to succeed. I want them to take over the world. I want frat boys singing about strap-ons and PTA leaders grooving to gay anthems. I want housewives in loveless marriages to have mid-life gay awakenings. Who knows? Maybe the rise of lesbian pop will make for a more accepting world. Or at least a gayer one.

Sapphic Mirror (2022) analog/digital collage

words & art by LM ZOLLER

I created this digital collage using a variety of lesbian pulp fiction covers. Ann Weldy, a.k.a. Ann Bannon, the author of the lesbian pulp fiction Beebo Brinker books, said in an interview with Stephanie Theobald for The Daily Beast, “I guess I can’t look back and regret the choices I made because I don’t think I had within me the wherewithal to live a bolder life. And I’m sorry about that” in reference to her worries of “not being brave enough” to come out or divorce her husband in the 1950s.

In Natasha Frost’s “The Lesbian Pulp Fiction That Saved Lives” for Atlas Obscura, several of the other authors wrote about taking their frustrations with their own lives and selves out on their characters. When I read Beebo Brinker, I was disheartened at the amount of biphobia; reading this interview, I can see how maybe the sapphic characters who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave their husbands for Beebo were not supposed to be a social commentary on mixed-orientation relationships but rather the author’s anger at herself. Weldy thought of the books as a kind of alternate life she constructed for herself, “bits and pieces of which I would have liked to have lived. It became sort of a satisfying outlet, where perhaps, looking back, it should have been a lived experience instead of an imagined experience… It seemed just beyond my reach, something you could see through a window, but you couldn’t pass through. You could visit, but you couldn’t live there.” So I chose the image of a mirror that appears in my other mixed analog/digital collages to be Beebo’s window.

And yes, that butchy femme with the bob in the green blazer standing at the corner of Gay Street is the cover art of Beebo Brinker, the final installment and prequel of a five-book series of lesbian pulp fiction about the titular character—who is canonically a 6-foot tall butch. The black and white images at the bottom are all public domain art from Wikimedia commons from midcentury lesbian pulp fiction covers, including The Price of Salt, The Girls in 3-B, Satan’s Daughter (aka “Satan is a Lesbian”), Spring Fire, This Bed We Made, Odd Girl Out, and The Third Lust. I described this image to my partner as “a stand-in for Ann Bannon looking through a mirror on Gay Street with a cuddle-pile of pulp lesbians.”

UNTITLED

words & art by JADE BENNETT

Untitled is an attempt to catalog and understand some of the ways that trans women are portrayed in film media, focusing specifically on the archetype or stock character of the “transfeminine sex worker” and their real-life counterparts. The films featured in this digital-collageturned-mixed-media-piece depict trans women as being targets of violence. Putting trans characters in these positions reflects how our society sees trans women.

We see this in the character Snowflake from the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Heavy Traffic (1973). She flirts with a man in a bar, despite being warned not to. The slapstick way in which she is condemned, mocked, and later attacked makes the audience side with the attacker. Bakshi, as an animator, comes from a background of slapstick violence like Tom and Jerry and pushes it into hyperviolence as part of his style. While Snowflake is brutalized, she is still the sympathetic character in the interaction. The violence against her is not encouraged, but is set up to be a comedic point when considering Snowflake’s masochism.

Sylvia Rivera, a transgender activist and founding member of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), gave the 1973 speech, “Y’all Better Quiet Down,” which is available to view online. She speaks about being attacked, not only by homophobes and transphobes, but the queer community itself, who boo her when she first goes on stage. She talks about the prisoners and sex workers who don’t call the more assimilationist Queer men or women’s organizations but instead go to STAR, as they are the ones that actually help them. However, transfemme people like her are often stripped of agency and objectified in the media.

Cillian Murphy’s role in the film Breakfast on Pluto (2004) is another instance of a transgender sex worker being routinely attacked and discarded. While the film is more empathetic toward her, she is still eccentric to the point of being seen as “crazy,” with her trans identity being an extension of that. In the frame I used in Untitled, she is the victim of an IRA bombing. She is blamed for the attack, being seen as a “deceiver” because she is a trans woman.

The two women in the lower frame are from the film Tangerine (2015). At the climax of the film, the two characters— both transgender sex workers—come together after Kitana Kiki Rodriguez’s character is the victim of a hate crime. Mya Taylor’s character gives the other woman her wig in a symbolic moment of community and healing, providing a surprisingly humanizing depiction. Starring actors that are actually transgender, this film shows hope in the way that representation has evolved, giving these characters agency and showing them establishing community.

A PLAYFUL ODE TO BAD COCK

words by STEPHEN BROWN

Dicks need to look more like how things are inside; little dicks for little guys who try to keep me small, bigger dicks for bigger men, big enough to move the fuck out of my way, and a satisfying curve—we know the one—for those who, when life gets real, pitch their tent and stay.

I'll open a DM from some dude I've never met, and instead of dick pics I didn't ask for, there shall dangle some grotesque experiment. A curiosity, a corkscrew cock with sleep crust in its eye, so a cursory glance will serve to know this man'd, for sure, fuck up my life—fuck up my family tree— something serpentine, or spurred, so when I see it, I'll know exactly what's in store for me.

Dicks need to look more like how things are inside, so the next man who expects me to make him cum, will come, himself, correct. ‘Cause we'll both know I'll see the future on that dick the moment it's erect.

Out of Ignorance

words by ZENIA DEHAVEN photography by IN HER IMAGE

I didn’t always know I was gay.

I thought that was something that people just knew. I believed that every gay person was visited by an angel who looked like Elton John, and he tapped them on the forehead, said, “You’re gay,” and then disappeared in a shower of sparkles and rainbows. I was convinced that I was an undeniably cisgender, straight girl. I thought it was completely normal for girls to look at boys and envy their broad shoulders, cropped hair, and flat chests. I thought that being attracted to Tigris from Kung Fu Panda was a very heterosexual thing to do.

Yeah, the closet was made of glass.

I came out as bisexual when I was sixteen, and I came out as nonbinary when I was twenty-two, but I might’ve realized who I was earlier if I had read different books.

I grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, and, unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of gay folks in Young Adult fiction. There was an overwhelming dominance of straight, cisgender, able-bodied, white characters. And, because I didn’t read from the point of view of LGBTQ+ characters, I read in ignorance.

It’s shameful, but Old Me looked at the full abbreviation of LGBTQ+, at all the letters that follow the +, and thought, "That’s too many! People don’t need this many terms!" I was about thirteen at the time, right before readily available Internet access, with only my novels and outdated library books about sexuality as resources. In my stupid tween brain, I thought, “Well, I haven’t met any intersex people, and there aren’t any intersex characters in my book, so the people who say they’re intersex must be lying.”

I also have never met a giraffe. That does not mean that giraffes don’t exist.

These thoughts were born out of ignorance. I was uneducated and possessed a god complex at thirteen, when my biggest concern should’ve been passing geometry.

The first time I encountered an LGBTQ+ character in a book, I was reading Heroes of Olympus, the sequel to the Percy Jackson series. Nico D’Angelo confesses to Cupid that he used to have a crush on Percy. This shattered my mind in the best way possible. I knew that gay people existed; I had family members who were Queer. Somehow, it never occurred to me that kids my age could be gay. I thought it was a thing you grew into, like enjoying olives. I never considered that my classmates could be gay, or that I may even have queer feelings. For the first time, I realized that I might be happy in a relationship with either a boy or a girl, or someone who didn’t fully identify as either.

All because the son of Hades told Cupid that he had a crush on a boy.

And no, the book didn’t make me gay. There’s no witchcraft embedded in the ink that, when read, flips a switch in the reader’s brain that makes them taste the rainbow. I would’ve realized my sexuality and gender identity at some point, but Nico’s confession helped me think about myself as a person much sooner.

House of Hades was released in late 2013, over a decade ago. And while many readers embraced the inclusion of a gay character, especially a fan favorite like Nico, the reaction to this revelation wasn’t entirely positive. Some parents were furious that there was a gay boy in a series meant for children, even though there was nothing sexual or inappropriate about him. He was just a boy saying he used to like another boy, and it was enough to give homophobic parents a stroke.

While the push for diversity in children and

Young Adult fiction has its successes, with books like Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys, Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, to name some of my favorites, bigotry still runs rampant in America. Homophobes are very uncomfortable when characters like Nico are in children’s media. Because they can’t stomach the idea that Queer children can love just like straight kids, children and Young Adult books featuring LGBTQ+ characters are disproportionately targeted by book bans. According to PEN America, a nonprofit focused on raising awareness for the protection of free expression, 26% of banned books in the US featured LGBTQ+ characters. This is horrifying. Removing books that feature Queer characters doesn’t keep kids from “becoming” gay. Censoring what young people read restricts the diversity of perspectives they encounter. If kids only read about white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied characters, then yeah, it’s not surprising that they think that this is the “default” or “normal” perspective and that anything else is “woke,” “other,” or even “dangerous.” If they only read from one point of view, one of privilege, children might harbor bigoted ideologies from their ignorance.

Even I, a kid who grew up in a liberal suburb with pretty good schools, found myself with distasteful ideas about people in the LGBTQ+ community, all because I was uninformed.

It’s no coincidence that books are targeted for censorship. Books can fundamentally change the way we think, for better and for worse. This is why conservative groups target books with Queer characters; they don’t want future generations to empathize with the LGBTQ+ community. Last November, the Keller Independent School District banned books from libraries that included any concept of gender fluidity. The Florida Citizens Alliance, a conservative group focused on education, asserted that

book bans are for, “protecting the innocence of our children.” Even books without sexual content are deemed problematic if they include LBGTQ+ characters, with book ban supporters claiming that these books are sexualizing children. They want to demonize us. They want kids to remain ignorant and to grow up thinking that the LBGTQ+ community is lewd, repulsive, and inappropriate for children of a certain age. They want to raise a new generation with the homophobic values they cherish so dearly.

Diversity in books may have improved in the last few years, but the war for representation has only just begun. Children have every right to see characters who look like them, talk like them, and love like them in their books. Books are the path out of ignorance and into compassion and understanding. It’s our job to protect the books and creators that challenge our heteronormative culture.

So, now that we’ve discussed how royally messed up all of this is, how do we fight back? I’ve included some actions we can all take to protect our right to read. It’s not an exhaustive list, of course, but it’s a place to get started.

1.

Stay Informed.

Stay updated about book bans by signing up for newsletters to receive regular updates about book bans throughout America. Many of these are free, including the Intellectual Freedom News as well as the Journal for Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, which are both organized by the American Library Association.

2. Write a Letter to Your Favorite Banned Author. Thank an author for their work. It’s not easy being the subject of scrutiny and it’s our job to remind writers that their voices matter. You can reach out to them via email or social media. Twitter seems to be the central hubbub for writer/reader interactions.

3. Tell State Officials to Protect the Freedom to Read. Call your legislator. This is probably the quickest way to contact your lawmaker. Their phone number for constituent concerns should be available to the public. Give them your name, emphasize that you’re a constituent, and then tell them your concern about book bans.

4. Brush up on Banned History and Book Burnings.

This isn’t the first time that books have come under fire by extremist groups. Learn more about the history of banned literature. It’s our responsibility to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself.

All of this to say: Read Gay Shit.

words by MEG STREICH art by KADE HARVEY

I would call myself a practical person tabs kept open on computers for months after opening just in case entryway only utilized for the preferred coats of the week like with all in this world RuPaul begs to differ on a 2010 macbook in 2014 if you put it in incognito mode it was free realization came slowly like the onset of the plague first of the symptoms next of the implication at conflict with practicality harmonious only in avoidance of birth control within the walls of incognito learning that she will spend her college tuition before she enters the world that you’re supposed to tell people your parents who you fuck now girls come over on tuesday nights and make your lips bleed and the only thought in your head is if this works how much harder life can be

Clomiphene

words & art

BY LM ZOLLER

Last Night i Dreamt (2024),

coLL age

my absolute favorite haunted Sapphic movie of yesteryear is Hitchcock's 1940 Rebecca, based on bisexual icon Daphne du Maurier's gothic novel of the same name. The narrator is an unnamed orphaned young woman (referred to as “I” or “the second Mrs de Winter”) who marries Maxim de Winter, an older wealthy widower, while they are both in Monte Carlo. When they return to Manderley, his estate in England, the narrator discovers the estate is metaphorically haunted by his late first wife, Rebecca. Everything is just as Rebecca left it thanks to Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper and Rebecca’s devoted servant since Rebecca was young. Mrs. Danvers does not want the narrator taking Rebecca’s place and immediately starts girlboss-gaslight-gatekeeping her.

Every single relationship in this novel is problematic, but the Gay Wrongs appeal of the film is definitely Mrs. Danvers. There are two particular scenes that are both homoerotic and threatening. The first is a scene in which Mrs. Danvers takes the narrator into Rebecca’s sealed-off quarters and shows her Rebecca’s fur coats, all soft and brushed, just touch them. Rebecca’s hairbrush and vanity, how Mrs. Danvers used to brush Rebecca’s hair every night. Rebecca’s negligee, so finely made you can see right through it. This scene has such a homoerotic charge to it, and not just in the sense of Mrs. Danvers’s possible attraction to Rebecca. It feels a bit “predatory lesbian” and a bit sexy and dangerous.

The “sexy and dangerous” vibe gets turned to 11 in the second scene. This scene occurs after a disastrous moment that Mrs. Danvers purposefully engineered at a party to humiliate the narrator. Mrs. Danvers goes on to tell the narrator that no one could ever replace Rebecca, and oops, look here, there’s this convenient balcony you could just jump off of and end it all? In the 2006 musical adaptation, this is the opening number of Act 2, where Mrs. Danvers is essentially grasping the narrator’s shoulders and singing how Rebecca will return to claim vengeance on those who betrayed her and summoning Rebecca to return from the “realm of fog.” Again, this should not be hot! This is bad, actually!

I’m not the only queer person who has a devotion, if you will, to Rebecca. I particularly like this exchange between the co-hosts of Gaylords of Darkness, a Queer horror podcast:

Stacie Ponder: If you look at [those scenes] in terms of du Maurier herself and the sort of conflict that she felt over her own sexuality… you know, it was a different thing to be basically openly bisexual and sexual deviant in 1940… What she had to deal with through that and how she internalized that and just that scene of like this evil dyke half talking to this like virginal straight woman and the two sides are battling, and it's really interesting.

Anthony Hudson: Stacie, you are blowing my fucking mind. That's amazing. See, I read it and I knew that there was something [gay] going on because I immediately fell in love with Mrs. Danvers, because she's perfect. I said, “Mrs. Danvers is clearly the hero of Rebecca, right?” (Episode 101 - SCUM Queen, Nov 4, 2020).

I know with Queer representation sometimes we’re grasping at straws. I am well aware that it is not 1940 and that I’m truly blessed to be living at a time where I have many more choices for good Queer media than I did in my teens or 20s. I’m also aware that if I want to read between the lines on Sapphic tension during the Hayes Code, I could just read or watch The Haunting of Hill House (the original film) and enjoy Theo and Eleanor’s relationship, which is very sweet. If Bad Gays Podcast loves an evil twink, I love an evil femme, and Rebecca de Winter and Mrs. Danvers are absolutely peak evil femmes. At the same time, I also identify a lot with the unnamed narrator, the sort of mousy young bride who turns out to be horny for revenge. Every single person in this novel/movie is a goddamn mess and I love them for it.

This collage piece draws inspiration from the narrator's dream of returning to Manderley, now overgrown with flowers and weeds after being laid to waste by fire. I stumbled across the photo of Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs. de Winters in a pile of gay magazines from the 2010s I was gifted for a zine workshop, and chose to play with the oversized full moon and peonies to create a dreamlike sense of foreboding with the fire in the back of the narrator’s mind and memory.

Fleeing both homophobic attacks and the closet in L.A. in 1993, I sought refuge with my queer cousin, Michael Dawson, and his partner near San Francisco. He took me in as a Queerling, kneaded my scalp, and said, “I’ll shape and mold you into my protégé.” Then he gave a mad scientist laugh like Vincent Price in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” song. “Ah-haha-ha-ha-ha!”

Growing up Queer, I often felt like a fake boy. Neighborhood kids thought I was not real. Bullies called me a girl, and little ones planted pink frilly panties in my drawer and claimed they were mine. Like Pinocchio, I wanted to be a real boy. I didn’t know whether my cousin was the good puppeteer Geppetto or the evil puppeteer Stromboli, but he saw an opportunity to shape me as his living puppet.

One day, when I was about twenty-nine and he thirtyfour, he came to the doorway of my room and spoke in the small, nasally voice one would hear on Saturday morning cartoons, “I’m your little friend.”

I stared at him with a Mr. T afro mohawk dyed blond against his chocolate brown scalp. In his hand, he held what appeared to be a brown snot rag sporting two googly

eyes and a red nose. He would have me believe that his rag doll, lacking a mouth, had spoken words of friendship to me.

I looked at this grown-ass Black man as if he were crazy.

Seeing me unamused and uninterested, he left with his rag without saying another word.

When Michael died of AIDS in 2004, I inherited his creation: the square-faced puppet he had made himself. His puppet was eight inches square and made from wooly cloth that resembled the fur of a brown plaid bear. He glued two googly eyes to this and a red cotton ball clown’s nose.

Sewn to the underside of the cloth face was a six-inch penis fashioned from pantyhose stuffed with cotton. He tied and knotted one end with flesh-toned thread to form two balls for the scrotum. A seam in fine stitching ran from the head along the shaft’s entire underside, like a penile raphe. A cutoff tuff of excess pantyhose blossomed at the intersection of cock and balls like a bow on a gift.

Having no use for it, I tried selling it to the consignment shop Worn Out West on Market Street in San Francisco near the Castro District, but the buyer returned it to me without comment or an offer. I didn’t look at Little Friend again until 2022 when I searched for photographic evidence of whether my cousin wore this as an accessory to his drag ensemble.

Michael kept a photo album documenting his drag outfits at every Pride parade, Halloween party, or Castro march. Near the end of this album is a picture of him in drag holding Little Friend in the identical way he had the one time I saw him with it. He was performing before diners in a restaurant. Instead of a wig, he wears a shortcropped, orange-dyed afro. He applied foundation, glossy

lipstick, peacock eyeshadow, and painted eyebrows. Black pants hug his hips, and falsies sag beneath a turquoise zip-up velour vest. He completes his outfit with a diamond bracelet and chandelier earrings. He resembles a Black Bozo the Clown.

In his left hand, he holds Little Friend (who probably had a stage name for their act). He holds the face by gripping the hidden penis like an upside-down joystick (or joydick?). He likely used his index and thumb to manipulate the underside of the face. His own face is animated as he speaks to or for Little Friend. Their posture and relationship remind me of the ventriloquist act Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

However, the most intriguing detail in the picture is the existence of two more puppets. On the table directly beneath Little Friend is an identical brown plaid cloth topped with a red clown’s nose—a second cock puppet. In the foreground on the table, facing away from the viewer, is a polar-bear-furred puppet face about twelve inches square with large googly eyes and a clown’s nose. I am willing to conjecture that it was a butt puppet probably made from the padded fannies some drag queens wear.

He literally could “talk out of his ass.”

Amid the detritus of a meal sits a child’s sippy cup. Because it was printed on Fuji paper, the picture was probably shot by the child’s parent and given to him, whereas the photo of him wearing the identical outfit earlier in the evening was printed on Kodak. The parent probably thought, Oh, isn’t this cute. A drag queen with puppets. But did his drag persona, Bodacia Ray Tata, flip up the puppets’ faces to reveal the body parts beneath?

Puppetry is one of the few professions that celebrate gender fluidity. The puppeteer plays different genders while performing the puppets’ voices. Roleplay, transformation, and make-believe are not only the foundations of puppetry but of Queer identity. If adults were to play with dolls, our society would consider them suspicious. But if adults played with puppets and were good at it, we would pay them. I’m not surprised that Michael saw puppetry for what it was—a form of drag.

Given homophobic accusations that Queers “recruit” and “molest” kids, I doubt my cousin would do a The Crying Game-style puppet penis reveal for the tyke. Michael’s puppets were two-sided. There was the cute

words by ANDRÉ LE MONT WILSON

and cuddly Elmo side and the sexy and sleazy Miss Piggy side. He could adapt which side he revealed according to his audience. After studying this picture, I guess he had stopped at the restaurant on his way from a performance and saw an opportunity to entertain one last audience member for the evening. He gave the tyke a G-rated drag performance that involved neither a lip sync nor a strip tease. This was revolutionary enough. He did this twenty years before activist Michelle Tea introduced the concept of drag queens reading to children in Drag Queen Story Hour.

But if this was the G-rated show, what was the X-rated one?

Since I dismissed his puppet the one time I saw him with it, I am now curious about his performance since I lack transcripts, videos, or witnesses. All the drag queens he hung with had died. When he stood in my bedroom doorway and ventriloquized, “I’m your little friend,” I saw a moment of hesitancy on his face as he gauged the receptivity of his audience. He calculated that flashing a pantyhose penis at his younger cousin would be inappropriate. Would André think I’m coming on to him? Would he get the joke?

Michael decided against performing further.

Now, I can only imagine his standup routine:

BUTT PUPPET. (in the deep baritone voice of the maneating plant Audrey II from The Little Shop of Horrors) FEED ME!!!

DICK PUPPET. (in the whiney voice of Rick Moranis) But. . . but . . .

BUTT PUPPET. That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.

I can go on and on, imagining my cousin’s puppetry. Butt and dick puppets are ripe with possibilities. He subverted the art form, creating in-your-face queerness to show that it was not only for kids and straight people.

I wonder what Michael could have achieved had he lived and developed his puppet act further. Within a decade, not only had he died of AIDS, but so had other Queers who worked in puppetry. Wayland Flowers of

Little

Madame’s Place died in 1988, and Richard Hunt of Sesame Street died in 1992. I used to think my cousin was an isolated drag queen performing puppetry, but when I saw other queers performing puppetry, I knew he was on to something by combining drag, sex, and puppets.

I watched a recent segment from season six of RuPaul’sDragRace.He challenged the contestants to take male puppets and “Drag it up!” Watching the contestants transform boy puppets into drag queens and then perform with their creations, I could not help but feel jealous that my cousin was not alive to compete in this challenge. He was doing drag and puppetry long before the hit show. He would have been great.

“He subverted the art form, creating inyour-face Queerness to show that it was not only for kids and straight people.”

a L one together

one together &

it’s FunnY it’s FunnY

WORDS & ART

BY NICOLE HERNANDEZ REYES

Sometimes you wake up and you just feel wrong

Sometimes you realize you have never felt right

You go through the day with this thought spinning around your head

Until eventually you stop noticing how it feels

Days and years pass and it all feels normal now

You think everyone and no one must feel this way

But you never talk about it for fear you are alone

Maybe you are, maybe we all are.

Except no, that can’t be right, because one day after so long

You find someone who is just like you

And you talk to them for hours

Conversations about the past, present, and future

You tell them about how lonely it has been for you

And as they hear your stories, you discover something about yourself

And when it’s your turn to listen

You realize you’re not as alone as you thought

They lead you by the hand to meet more people like you both

And again you listen and listen to others who were once alone

When you get home that night and look in the mirror

You can see that something has changed

You look different, lighter

And my god, you have never felt so right

FOR THE PURPOSE OF GRAVE ROBBING

Do you remember an asshole neighbour who was possibly buried with a particularly gorgeous necklace?

Did you get cut out the will of your bigoted granny who always wore a pair of lovely emerald earrings?

DISCLAIMERS (PLEASE READ BEFORE CONTACTING):

GOLD ONLY! No human remains will be taken. Yes! This is a crime. Please familiarise yourself with relevant statutes & proceed with caution. We do NOT target graveyards that belong to religious minorities (please contact me at the email below for my full code of ethics).

WHY GRAVE ROBBING?

The price of gold has skyrocketed, I’m unemployed and finding it difficult to comply with the sapphic uniform that requires an adequate ring collection. I do not suit silver and I’m sick of my rings tarnishing. I want real gold, real garnets and real sapphires. Will accept other stones too.

As required by my doctor I am seeking at least 3 hours of pulse racing exer ize per week. The hike to the graveyard and the adrenaline during the expedition will satisfy this.

I am looking to develop a unique sapphic community. There are not enough queer, sober spaces and I do not enjoy puzzle nights so this is what I am resorting to

*I am also open to starting a bookclub Interested?* Please contact me (Crabby, she/her) at: sapphicgrcommunity@gmail.com

art by ELLIE ALLAN

WHEN MY FISTS ARE BLOODIED, AND MY TEETH ARE CRACKED.

WHEN YOUR KNEE MEETS MY STERNUM, AND I COUGH UP EVERY TRUTH YOU’VE HIDDEN, EVERY DISAPPOINTED GLANCE MINGLES WITH MY BLOOD ONTO THE PAVEMENT.

WHEN I’M QUICK TO RECOVER, I DIG MY NAILS INTO YOUR PALMS, AND IT’S YOUR TURN TO BLEED SINCERITY TO GROVEL AT MY FEET TO HOPE FOR FORGIVENESS FROM A FACE UNRECOGNIZABLE.

KNOW

IT

IS NO FAULT OF MINE, THAT YOU REFUSED TO KNOW ME.

I’ve been out since I was fourteen.

That’s not the complete truth, really. I’ve been vacillating between the closet and whatever metaphor lies outside of it for ten years, spending my life in alternating chunks trying to be myself or aggressively pretending, hoping, praying “god please let me be cishet.”

In the back of my mind, I’ve always known. The discomfort in my skin that leeches out of my pores has always buttered me like cheap lotion. Sticky, saccharine, artificial superficial sacrificial. I never felt like a ‘girl’, even when I tried to dress and act like one. Whatever that meant, whatever that means, I still don’t know. I never felt the way about boys that my friends did — I never liked them really, just envied them. Wanted to crawl inside their skin, to see what kind of wonderful world they got to live in, and crawl back out with a justified feeling of resentment.

In the back of my mind, the memory of my mom saying "you’re not trans, are you?” when I was 13 haunts me. When I replied with a confident ‘no’ even though my heart ached as I said it, and my bones screamed retaliation. Even if I didn’t consciously know yet, that binder and masculine clothing felt a little too comfortable when I cosplayed Dave Strider for the first time.

And those words echoed every time I bound my chest for the next half year I identified as genderfluid. And when I realized what consequences might come, what my mom really meant when she said that, I retreated slowly back into the depths of the closet, putting my gender and sexuality on the shelf until I was 19.

TRANS TRANS // RIGHTS FIGHTS

words by LEO JOSEFINA

art by BOB MCNEIL

When I figured it out, when my friends helped me through the crisis of my identity with genuine love and respect, I hoped the world (read: my parents) would be kinder six years later. It’s 2020, everyone is mindful, right?

But after several conversations about my pronouns, after groveling and begging for crumbs of validation, assuring them that I wouldn’t correct when they’d inevitably mess up (that’d be crass), I start to wonder when I get to get mean. When is it my turn to be happy? When is it my turn to stop lying down, to start correcting them, to start calling people out for behavior that I shouldn’t let slide? When do I, finally, after years and years of giving in and letting go of everything that I called my own, when do I get to be selfish?

Is it worth it at all? To sacrifice yourself for other peoples’ comfort, as if you haven’t been doing that your whole life? Is it worth it for the shallow love of someone who set an invisible boundary before you were born about what was acceptable? And you wonder, when all is said and done, when you’ve disappeared from their lives, from their futures, what will they do? Will they find you, and ask for forgiveness from a face unrecognizable? And when they don’t get the child who truckled and fawned and spread themself thin, will they be upset?

Will they know that it is no fault of mine that they refused to know me?

Orange Crush

words by PAIGE JOHNSON art by MICHAEL MCFADDEN

A trip to Tybee Island is supposed to be a retreat, an auspicious occasion, according to astrology apps

I only read ironically or for the glittering Saturn aesthetic and wind-chime tinkling as I keep tabs on a Florida crush.

But going with the flow has supplanted me in a serial killer’s square. This Southern three-mile island boards more barricades than a nuclear fission factory—I’d say sans the smoke but there’s just another kind. Weed and seaside smell hurts my head as I scroll Savannah forums until I discover seven bodies slain in four weeks, animal entrails ground up and garlanded across bleached seashell lawns, cat bones springing out of marshland like croquet hoops.

I think of The Trawler, Easton Ellis’ latest American Psycho, how he’d stuff aquarium gravel down slit throats, burrow toy ships into vaginas like cave crashes, how candy-slick the colors must’ve looked fresh.

I miss my rainbow tank swirling with sea monkeys,

her impossibly soft blankets streaked with menstrual blood, our conjoined TBR pile I could stare at until I fall asleep, imaging the wrinkly spines under my fingers, all the fun I wouldn’t have reading them IRL.

Outside my hotel crowned with a captain’s wheel, college kids in kings’ capes shake like hula girls, fall out of ghost tour trolleys and garish tiki bars. They trash the streets like Coachella meets Mardi Gras, fattening the seagulls to takeoutbox proportions and sharding up the boardwalk with brawls.

I start to see the serial killer’s point: a fine one at the end of a pocket-socked fillet knife, though I doubt his motive has to do with any linear thought process.

Maybe it’s something more primal, that makes me recall the Burton-inked blond who said bad smells cause sickness of all kinds, like in The Shining. So maybe the low-tide reek akin to canned asparagus is the real culprit.

I shake my head and imagine your wide eyes, the slap of your sandals over chalk medallions, how you’d comment on the cop-per-block

policy, how stretchy and smooth, hot hot, the uniforms look across fit chests even though it’s not fashionable to say.

Not as comely as your peach bikini and Cantukinked curls. This is twice as evident when I stumble into a country pub of 20-somethings costumed in old lady wigs and spring house slippers. Somehow, they all know to belt words from before they were born, about blue mountains and maraschino moonshine, heartbreak like railroad wreckage, and prison stints over domestics.

Sipping chlorinated soda like cough syrup that can send me to the violet dextroverse, I prefer you pirouetting on an empty shoreline, silhouetted by a black-and-white lighthouse, swirl-swirl-swirling until we spit up strawberry seeds from our cocktails like post-surgery stitches. We could scour the candy-striped changing booths for sharks’ teeth to stick where our wisdoms went. Peek into green-shuttered souvenir shops selling hermit crabs in bug-catcher boxes to rove over Fruity Pebble fish gravel, to roll over d(y)e-hydrated shortly after.

We could fireman-climb the Victorian leaf gates of snowbirds’ second homes, drop into terraced balconies, raid their iceboxes for Bomb Pops as tourists snore like truffle pigs. B&E the adrenochrome country clubs, make their wine cellars our B&B, topple the sculpture stools of saggy bikini butts where they serve Tybee teases and stow the pieces in our pockets like rock candy in case we cross paths with the Spring Break Butcher breaking the oily neck of another fake future psychiatrist, sports therapist, journalist or gloryday-stuck grad, sad she won’t one day get to see her salary garnished by student loans or pass the cap along to the third told-so but starry-eyed generation.

Could, could, could, that’s what we’ll all be thinking.

That’ll be my mantra as I stare out my hotel window all night, counting jellyfish and horseshoe crab corpses on wet sand, hypnotized by the chug & slush of the A/C, the perfumed ghost of you— sunscreened nectarine rind— as crows caw at my glass, wings whipping like helicopter blades, little “helps” and sighs.

“Help,” I mutter and sigh, watching the easternmost coast eat up the bodies and my fingers crave yours.

words by ZOE L

As a young kid I had hands that shook. From trembles to shakes, I was the kind of girl who flinched and stumbled her way through her emotions, never looking at them for too long because if I did, it hurt. I was often anxious and intense and it seemed that, no matter what I felt, it was always too much for me to handle. I was not a person who felt with grace. By the time I was thirteen I had severed myself from the world in any way I could, and had no plans of ever reattaching myself. The world was too much. It was better to just… sink.

ANd THeN I meT LAUreN.

I remember the first time she held my hand. Her palms were dewy and soft— like sourdough left out too long in the path of the sultry Texas sun, like peony petals and mist on sunripe tomatoes. She didn’t even hesitate. She just. Grabbed my hands in hers. She took my hands and I think drinking sour milk would’ve turned my stomach less. She was my best friend. God, I loved her. She softened the edges of the world— offered companionship and understanding to everyone and everything around us. It’s the first time I can remember feeling too much and it not hurting. My hands didn’t shake when she held them. My shaking hands made still, y’all, when I say she took my hands, I mean I don’t think she ever gave them back. She will always have my thirteen year old heart.

And while I wish I could say our story ends happily ever after, it doesn’t. It doesn’t end horribly, or painfully or even accidentally. It just… ends the way most young relationships do. We dated for a while, and god, I didn’t know that beaming could also be an

emotion. I was full of sunlight and helium, the world technicolor. I was tethered. And it didn’t scare me. I went home, beaming. And god, did my Bible-beating mama beat that beaming outta me. I broke it off pretty soon after that, and I know it hurt her. I know it did. I couldn’t even let myself feel regret about that. I couldn’t let myself feel anything. It took time, but we stayed friends. We’re still friends, in some ways.

You know, at thirteen I didn’t know what I know now, but if anyone learns anything from me, learn this if nothing else: Love ain’t a sin. Ever. It is not dirty, or ugly, or wrong- by its very nature it can’t be. It is guiltless and joyous, true and sacred. Holy, even, if you believe in such things. But I was hurt and scared, and so so young, and I didn’t know what I know now. And it hurts now sometimes, when I look back. And I’m angry about the injustice of it all. I look back at that moment more often than I care to admit. And, god, how I used to envy Orpheus. He looked back too, but at least Eurydice knew she was loved before the end. I guess she knows it even after the end, too. She could never have doubted it. So, because I never got to say it, Lauren, honey, you were loved by me. Even if it was a clumsy, limping love. I loved you with all my heart, and it wasn’t the best, but it was mine. It was ours. The fact that I got to love you at all has spoiled me beyond what I deserve. And if I love any better now, it’s because I loved you then. Because you loved me then. So, Lauren, honey, thank you.

THANK YOU fOr TAKINg mY HANd.

words by VON REYES

Which came first, the masculinity or the misery?

Toxic masculinity—as we understand it in a colonized, cisheteropatriarchal, Westernized world—manifests as harmful and rigid rituals by cisgender men that they then enact onto others. These rituals are passed down and solidified through violence, embedded in the fabric of everything we experience. Traditional feminism has historically identified and focused on how toxic masculinity is enacted upon cisgender women by cisgender men.

My niche in feminist scholarship has always been in Queer and trans intra-community participation in patriarchy. So, this piece does not aim to discuss the cisgender feminine experience with toxic masculinity, as many feminist writers have already done it justice. Instead, I want to elevate the nuanced ways that toxic masculinity affects transgender men of color, within and outside of Queer communities.

I am a man at the intersection of being biracial, transgender, and gay. I’m a man that loves other men; the way they look, the way they speak, the way they love. I’m a man that is proud of my masculinity because of all it has taken for me to arrive here. To me, toxic masculinity is the racial emasculation of Asian men like myself, like my partner, and like our ancestors. To me, toxic masculinity is the delegitimizing of my experience as a man because of my uterus. To me, toxic masculinity is the grindr accounts that say “no fats, no fems, no Asians, no trann*es.”

Toxic masculinity is not gender-specific. Each and every one of us is capable of embodying toxic masculinity. The thing about oppressive systems is that they’re selfsustaining. If you get a portion of the oppressed to buy into your narrative of control, they’ll do the work for you in maintaining the status quo. Cis people, Queer or not, love to remind me that “I can’t escape my biological reality.” They say being a man is about having a penis, having XY chromosomes, being “born” a man. Even the self-proclaimed allies say, “I totally respect your pronouns, and whatever gender you choose to identify with!” But was my gender ever a choice?

I used to ask myself this question often, just before the dawn of my self-acceptance. Did I choose to be a man? Was being a woman just too hard? Am I betraying the Great Sisterhood? Am I sick in the head?

For those concerned, the answer to all of these questions is and always was: no.

In contrast, some Queer folks, gender-expansive people, and women who I once shared community with shied away from me when I felt brave enough to live openly as a man of trans experience, leaving behind the false ambiguity I had forced upon myself. And a gay man of trans experience at that. How dare I reject Queer femininity by being and dating a man? If you’ve spent time in queer online spaces, you might have seen some of these sentiments floating around.

The questions started again—am I upholding the patriarchy by being a trans man? Am I letting the QTPOC community down? Am I part of the problem? Should I just go back to being non-binary?

This might not be shocking, but the answer to all of those questions is, once again, no

Now I have new questions—are we not just continuing the cycle of patriarchy by enacting rigid expectations onto our masculine community members? Is the belief that men are not capable of kindness, gentleness, care, and vulnerability not toxic masculinity repackaged?

I want to be clear—the message here isn’t #notallmen . As I’ve said, we are all capable of internalizing and enacting toxic masculinity onto ourselves and others. It rears its ugly head each time I get dysphoria from wearing women’s clothes, each time I cringe at the dissonance of my post-HRT voice, each time I am misgendered and I wonder what it is about me that tipped them off… and then hating that I even care.

The antidote to toxic masculinity is holding two truths: patriarchal conditions force all of us to uphold white male supremacy and at the same time masculinity in and of itself can be deeply healing and beautiful. Through therapy, a reconnection to kapwa¹ in Filipino Psychology, and a community of masculine-of-center folks on a similar journey, I have constructed my own meaning around masculinity.

For me, it’s the way Chino Scott-Chung fought tirelessly for his brother’s truth, even in death. It’s the networks of generational storytelling among transmasculine people

¹Kapwa is the core principle of the Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology) movement originated by Virgilio Enriquez. It links modern Filipinos to their pre-colonial history to reattach our spirits to our values and heal colonial trauma. Kapwa is translated directly as “other people”, but its true meaning is collective. It refers to a prioritization of shared humanity above the self. All of our other values are kapwa in action. – from “Finding Filipino-ness” by Carl Lorenz Cervantes

of color in my community. It’s the way my best friend’s husband effortlessly started using my new name and pronouns without asking any invasive questions. It’s the quiet way my grandfather admires my grandmother as she retells us stories from our childhoods, as if hearing them for the first time. It’s my future father-in-law on facetime with me, teaching me to fix the leak under the bathroom sink. It’s the way my partner kisses me, and I finally know what it means to be a man that is loved.

Masculinity on its own is value-neutral. It is the racialized definitions of what it means to be masculine, and the internalization of such definitions, that are toxic. It’s challenging to reconcile the ways that patriarchy (and frankly, most often men) harms us, but this reconciliation is necessary. Loving, celebrating, and honoring healthy masculinity can be transformative, if we only give it room.

art by DANI MASSEY

Reincarnated Love as a Surrender to Environmental Collapse

words by NIKOLAI RENEE

somewhere, distantly, there is a crunching, a crumbling, of river stones like big teeth.

we wait downstream, knowing it is time, knowing this bank is meant to see. a medley of words torn straight from my most vital arteries.

the poetry kept me alive. pumped itself through slow like cold honey for a runny nose.

between intentional breaths, we smooth out our creases.

somewhere, nearer now, there is a whirring. so low, i almost think it’s just my ears ringing. it’s just the next life

talking about this one. we were grown in a home structured by these nervous hands.

never enough to outrun the devastation that comes from somewhere, up around the water bend. the creaking and the whining of an old prophet’s rambling.

the juxtaposition of heartache and the flourishing life of after. it’s all coming to a halt. my gown is soaked, and your hair is glistening.

the noise chills my bones. there is no warmth in our fingertips. i turn to face the resolve of another soul that saw too much. and we inhale.

the whole forest stops to bask in the last rays of unconditional love; this cycle. my palm meets your heart. it is eternal.

i hear the blade swing back. you bury your nose in my shoulder, my lips meet your neck. the collapse begins. and we exhale.

art by CLAUDIO PARENTELA

THE VIGIL

words by ANDRÉ LE MONT WILSON

I left the emergency room at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. I had admitted my husband, Rob, for a urinary tract infection. After spending two hours waiting for status updates and permission to see him, I needed to get home.

Across the street, I saw a candlelight vigil. The darkening sky after sunset in Berkeley caused the mourners’ candles to brighten. For whatever reason, the vigil attracted me like a moth to a flame.

I crossed the street and stood on the edge of a crowd of about eighty. I looked over their shoulders. Real and battery-operated candles and a vase of flowers comprised a makeshift altar on the sidewalk. Two photos and a painted portrait of a Black man leaned against some hedges. A sign taped to the trash receptacle at the corner read CANDLELIGHT VIGIL FOR ZUMBI.

I had been writing an essay about the racism I experienced during my vacation in Italy, where Italians mistook me for an illegal African migrant. But when I exited the hospital, I still encountered the effect of racism at home. As I stood on the outermost ring of the vigil so as not to be noticed, I experienced flashbacks. Police—all white—had chased, stopped, or held me at gunpoint. I escaped those encounters but imagined how people would have memorialized me had I died. Would the video of my shooting go viral and spark protests? Or would they hold a candlelight vigil like the one for Zumbi?

A mourner, a woman, saw the distressed look on my face and approached. She explained how the man had checked himself into the hospital. He had been experiencing a mental health crisis. He died the next day when hospital security dogpiled on him. I do not know if I was hyperventilating, but the woman sensed I was on the verge of a mental health crisis of my own. She assumed I was a relative or close friend of Zumbi. Speaking in the hushed tones of a mourner at a funeral, she asked, “Did you know him?”

“No,” I said, my voice choking, “I didn’t know him, but he was my brother.”

“DID YOU KNOW HIM?“

“NO, I DIDN’T KNOW HIM, BUT HE WAS MY BROTHER.“

eMPoWer o PP ression &

erMent ression

For Gaza: An Exercise In Futility & Love

after Aracelis Girmay’s You Are Who I Love

words by RAE HENAGHAN

You are who I love though you do not know me. You are living out the last stages of genocide in a tent in Rafah. You were martyred during the first Israeli air strike after October 7th, 2023. You shimmer like the peaks of waves under a Gazan sunrise. We will never meet, you are who I love. You glean like the dew of a poppy flower’s burning red petal. You are who I love and I can never be sorry enough. You rescue the white and orange cat from the rubble with your own hungry and tired hands. You shimmer like the sound of a breeze through the fruit trees. You are who I love and all I can seem to do is to watch a video of you weeping. You refuse to evacuate the hospital because birth does not pause for extermination. You shine like the freshly cleaned canine tooth and you are who I love because I too (in very different ways) have felt the cold ground underneath me with the boot at my neck, strips of my person ripped from me forever. The people with power over me do not listen, the marches do nothing but satiate a feeling of doing something in the face of live-streamed horror, there is only more money for bombs targeting you, even though you are who I love. You shine like a trail of beach sand escaping between fingers. You live stream to update the world each day you survive in my one and only colonizer language, you grasp for words in your mother tongue. You glow like the hot under earth listening to the beat of footsteps and drums. You are scared not of death but of displacement, you have been robbed of more than could ever be returned and you are who I love. Your dances, your slingshots, your keffiyehs, your tunnels alight my sky and you are who I love despite my futility. You glimmer forever in Gaza and in my heart.

Oh my lost and enraged heart, whose calls and rallies do nothing, is there only the gleam of violence left? That I was gargantuan, that I was Godzilla. I would crunch the white house under my talons and devour Biden in halves. That I could roar before they launch a nuke at my belly, I would dangle Netanyahu by his intestines above the shining shell of north Gaza. If I have god, she dies with you and you are who I love and I fear there is nothing left for me to do but to destroy what destroys you.

art by SAM PAOLINI

world wide web (for Nex Benedict)

words by HAMSA FAE

red states love the dolls but in their basements press play on the taboo thirteen tabs open, zipper down

Most Viewed Best Videos

My Favorites Shemale the girls rule his subconscious incognito window is for bigots he likes extra nuts in his cookie mine are macadamia serve it as milk at high schools maybe revealing his fetishes will make bathrooms more safe bullies less bothered by a they or them

art by JUNO STILLEY

SITE TO SITE

WORDS & ART BY JADE BENNETT

Canonical writings on transsexuality also argued that, for transsexuals embarking on their transitions, a “change in geographic location is almost mandatory,” / “young children are better told that their parents are divorcing and that Daddy will be living far away and probably unable to see them.”

Content Warning: this piece contains explicit description of DIY HRT, institutionalized transphobia, and violence against transgender people. Please use caution while reading, and take care of yourself!

Site to Site is an exploration of how gender is considered in our culture—including the comparative normalization of non-binary identities. My understanding of this developed through the lens of Julia Serano’s “Whipping Girl”, a manifesto that explores psychologists’ treatment of transgender people, and how transition has been established as something pathologized and shameful.

Serano explains that Blanchard and Bailey were at the forefront of this initial wave of pathologization. They sought to further push trans people (especially trans women) away from any established site of gender. In a culture that did not yet recognize non-binary identities, gatekeeping womanhood by means of autogynephilia and “homosexual transexuals” was an act of violence.

The text on this piece refers to a procedure, recommended by psychiatric professionals, that required people seeking gender transition would be required to move away from their job, support network, and family, including children. The medical reasoning implied that this procedure avoided employers’ humiliation of being associated with a transgender person and protected children from the perceived corrupting influence of a transgender person. This stripped the trans person of their identity, making them entirely rebuild their lives to hide their trans identities.

This influenced my understanding of transition. I believed that transitioning involved going through a period of medical dehumanization and loss of identity— a loss of self represented through motion blur, further found in the light bleed and smears of the cyanotype solution.

Everyone deserves to be respected and recognized as themselves, regardless of where they fall on the gender spectrum. In a better world, everyone would receive the care they need. No one should have to exist in the violence of cultural rejection.

TransgenderGirlboss

words by MARGOT HAZEL

art by ROISIN MCCOOL

My breakfast today is a monster & some sort of protein drink. My dress looks nice but I am unsure if the flats work & if the stockings disrupt the balance of the outfit.

My boss's boss is here & gives two other women hugs. She looks at me, hesitates, & sticks out her hand. l ignore it & hug her out of spite.

We have a vendor here today! Her laptop will not connect to the projector. The uprising of technology against humans has begun but only in this humid classroom.

Of course on a day when everything needs to go right, it goes sideways.

While I'm fiddling with cables & trying to crack the code, I'm hoping my sweat doesn't smell masculine. Does sweat smell different between genders?

What does non-binary sweat smell like?

Either way, I hope my stench doesn't clock me.

To her credit, the vendor calls me “she”.

To her discredit, the vendor mentions how the river cruise line she works for is looking for ways to eliminate poverty. How does a cruise line eliminate poverty?

How does a shining example of the class divide solve a problem it helped create? She doesn't know. I know but I don't think she would like the answer.

My lunch today is a monster and an Adderall. A girlboss of girlbosses & I will refer to myself as that until others start saying it. (And until I start to believe it)

The chaos of this job, of this day, of this life.

An environment I am expected to thrive in.

All while being consciously aware of how I am being perceived.

How could I not be?

When the eyes follow my every move?

I choose to believe they are admiring more than diagnosing. A cool goth girl compliments my septum ring, which confirms my bias.

And gives me the extra bit of energy I need to keep me on the rails.

The ride is over. The day has been won. My appetite still hasn't returned to me. Thanks to all of the additives in my system. That feeling of stepping off of a rollercoaster. That's what I feel in this moment.

The main difference is the small moments throughout the day that I'm replaying in my head.

And the moments where I wish I had done or said something different. I'm pretty sure that doesn't usually happen after rollercoasters.

My boss's boss bought us all lunch.

Hot dogs & hamburgers. Really stretching the budget, I’m sure. It’s 3pm & I’m eating a lukewarm hot dog, which restores my sanity & reminds me that yes, you do need to eat actual food.

A strange sense of accomplishment washes over me.

It was tough, but I made it through the day & looked good doing it.

Nothing about this environment is meant to allow you to thrive.

Especially not someone like me. And yet, here I am.

Thriving.

VI L L AN E L E L

for my trans sisters

(screw the TERFs)

LEIGHTON SCHREYER art by KENNA DEVALOR

Like a female French villain, I think, pronouns: elle Maleficent, magnificent, some might say bestial or bold

Feared for the truth she embodies, the stories she dares to dispel

Call her wicked, call her witch, call her unwell

Still, she’ll sing louder; voice vibrant, vivacious, worth every ounce of gold

Like a female French villain, I think, pronouns: elle

Turn her body into a battleground, a homeland to target and shell

An empire to be defeated, you say, for the standards she’ll never uphold Feared for the truth she embodies, the stories she dares to dispel

Rob her of her rights, her dignity, make her out to be a rebel

Still, she will root, rise, resist, uncontrolled

Like a female French villain, I think, pronouns: elle

Take a mugshot, do a strip search, try to stick her in a cell

A criminal to be punished, you suggest, for refusing to do as she’s told

Feared for the truth she embodies, the stories she dares to dispel

Banish her, beat her, God damn her to Hell!

Still, she’ll burn brighter, a beauty, a star, something stunning to behold

Like a female French villain, I think, pronouns: elle

Feared for the truth she embodies, the stories she dares to dispel words by

Hi y’all, it’s me again. Much like the inherent exploitation of the capitalist system and my anxiety disorder, I’m not going anywhere unless extreme measures are taken. For those unfamiliar with my work in the previous two issues of Fruitslice, let me break it down real quick. I like movies. I like watching them and thinking about them and talking about them, and I have a letterboxd account that I feel is not getting the engagement it deserves so now you all have to live with the consequences.

I’m going to present you with five films that I think are worthy of your time and attention. You don’t have to watch them. You don’t even have to read the reviews. In fact, why are you reading this? Is it possible that no one reads my writing and I am simply shouting these thoughts into the void? If I say something crazy right now would anyone notice but myself? I think George W Bush’s paintings are kinda bad. There I said it. I bet no one notices. God I hope no one does.

The Rights and Wrongs of the Gay Community as Depicted on Film

The Revolution Was a Lie

Our political system is built on broken promises. Every single election, candidates and parties and even the very machine of our government come to the American people, falsely prostrate themselves before us, and ask for our votes. In return they offer us a promise: “give us your vote and we will make your life better.” And every single time, they fail to live up to their side of the bargain. The promises are never kept. Our lives are never made better. The politicians will be back next year, asking for our vote in exchange for nothing much at all. It has been ten years since the ‘war of liberation.’ America is a self-declared social democracy. The struggle is over, the war has been won, and the people have been liberated. But if a revolution doesn’t change anything, then of what use was the revolution? Born in Flames drops us into the world of a failed American socialist state. The economy is collapsing under the weight of inflation and unemployment. Minority communities are still oppressed. And women continue to be marginalized. The people are growing restless. The promise of their liberation was a lie. They are no better off than they were before. And they are angry about it. An army of women, riding bicycles and blowing whistles, descend upon a pair of ill-intentioned young men. This is the revolution. The women are deemed ‘vigilantes’ and ‘terrorists’ and ‘lesbians’ by the media and the very state that has failed them. And yeah maybe they are lesbians okay so what? Sometimes things go to shit and we need lesbians to ride in on horseback, or peddle in on their gay ass bikes, and save the rest of us. And hey, sometimes in the fight for your gay rights, you have to commit a few gay wrongs. Like blowing up the World Trade Center. (author’s note: they actually do blow up the World Trade Center in this joint, proving two things: (1) this film was ahead of its time and (2) Bin Laden was an unoriginal hack.

Born in Flames is such an interesting and grounded exploration of the rise of a revolutionary movement, albeit a fictional one. And we definitely wouldn’t want a radical feminist lesbian women’s army to be a reality, now, would we Joe?* Okay maybe we do. Personally, I’d love that. That would be sick as hell. Somebody’s gotta start the revolution. And we know it’s not going to be the cishets. Seriously, this joint is just as frustratingly relevant as it was 40 years ago and is definitely worth a watch. Remember, the revolution is an endless struggle. Fuck the system.

* Current u.s. President Joseph R. Biden

BORN IN FLAMES (1983) Lizzie Borden

Twink Death

Anthony Minghella

We all wish we could be somebody else from time to time. Maybe we’ve simply grown tired of our own life. Or our tastes have become a little more expensive than our current financial circumstances can afford. Or we want to fuck our best bud in the bath at his Italian villa after a rousing game of chess. It is perfectly human to fantasize about a different, maybe even better, life. And it’s normal to be willing to do a couple of unsavory things along the way. Nobody’s perfect. We want what we want. That’s okay. And sometimes in the pursuit of our desires, we may accidentally bludgeon a few people to death.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name, has a fairly straightforward setup. An old, rich white guy approaches a young, rich white guy and says “Hey you’re a young man who looks like he has rich parents, and you live in New York City. You must know my white son. Would you mind terribly if I paid you to travel to Italy so you could ask him to come home to dear old mom and dad?” The young and seemingly rich white man, we’ll call him Tom, as that is the character’s name and I don’t want to be rude, is up for the challenge and is suddenly on his way to a lovely little seaside village in Italy. Tom quickly locates the target of his search, sexy ass Jude Law’s character Dickie. And when it comes to Dickie, like Tom, I find myself confused by the fact that I simultaneously want to (a) be him, have all of his clothes and his haircut and his beautiful face and his enormous wealth, and (b) be with him, kissing and stuff. Hijinks ensue. Lies and deception. Unspoken repressed homosexual attraction. Multiple dead bodies. Lots of hot people. You get it.

This story has been remade on three separate occasions and for good reason. In a way, the story of the talented and deeply amoral Tom Ripley is concerningly relatable. We can see ourselves in him. His wants are not unlike our own. To be loved. To live in comfort. To fuck our hot best friend even though he has a girlfriend and has yet to admit to himself that maybe he’s a little interested in boys. It’s not Ripley’s desires but the actions he takes in their pursuit that creates conflict in the viewer. Not many of us would be willing to kill in the pursuit of what we want, but there’s something deeply unsettling about just how enthralled we can become as we watch someone who is.

I am a man who has dated multiple lesbians. Of course, I didn’t know they were lesbians at the time. Presumably they were unaware of that fact as well. But they became aware of it at some point. And so did I. It would appear that my type of woman is one that is on the cusp of lesbianism, inevitably dooming me to a life of dead end relationships with women wherein I am the bridge between compulsory heterosexuality and the blissful Queerness that lies beyond. And the idea of an honest to god relationship with a man terrifies me so it seems that I’m stuck here. I am Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill only to get to the top and realize that the boulder has been a lesbian the entire time. All this to be said, I feel somewhat qualified when it comes to identifying lesbians who find themselves in relationships with boys. I mean it happened to me. I was a lesbian’s boyfriend. Multiple times. And it couldn’t possibly happen again, right? Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I’m not that qualified.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night presents the viewer with a sparsely populated, monochromatic, western ghosttown aptly named ‘Bad City’ and the lonesome night walking, man hunting vampire that resides there. She lives in a windowless basement apartment. She likes vinyl records, having posters up on her walls, skateboarding, and avenging the innocent. One day, after feasting on the lifeblood of the local drug dealer, the vampire meets a boy. This boy isn’t like the other men she’s come across, men she might more readily sink her teeth into. This boy is kind and gentle and soft. He has a cat. He wears mascara. He has a heroin addicted father and a dead mom. He looks like a soft butch. He’s perfect. Listen, y’all, this film presents these two characters as a cute cishet couple that fall in love or whatever, but there’s some gay shit going on. I’m not crazy. And it’s not just her. At the bare minimum both of these cats are bi. Personally, I think eventually she leaves him for a she/they who is her soulmate, and he tries guys for a while. But hey, that’s just me.

My Girlfriend Sucks

If anything, this joint is worth your time just because it’s different. You’ve never seen a film like this one. Sure it borrows plenty of elements from films you’ve seen before. The story of a boy and a girl, who are both a little weird, meeting and riding off into the sunset together definitely isn’t new. It’s the way in which this story is told that makes it worthwhile. Plus, a guy thinks a cat is actually his dead wife haunting him from the grave, and that’s pretty funny.

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014)

Ana Lily Amirpour

Just Kiss Already Fellas

CHALLENGERS (2024)

As a man, allow me to send a message to all my fellas out there: guys, never let a girl come between you and one of your boys. Just kiss each other, it’s much easier. And I know what you’re going to say, ‘isn’t that going to make our friendship really weird?’ Yeah, probably man. But if you don’t kiss your bestie now, then you’re going to lose him forever and end up in a loveless marriage, your call.

“isn’t that going to our friendship really weird?”

Luca Guadagnino

Challengers is Luca Guadagnino’s newest film. And, being a gay man himself, this dude loves making movies about Queer stuff. Of course, Call Me by Your Name is famously gay. I mean what’s gayer than two people of the same gender having sex with one another? That’s a rhetorical question of course, please don’t write in. Guadagnino’s previous films, like Suspiria or Bones and All, are subtler in their Queerness, but it’s there if you look. Challengers is about a throuple. Kind of. Outside of one drunken night in their youth, our three main characters, two boys and one Zendaya, aren’t really all together at the same time. Zendaya dates both of the boys, and the boys get up to whatever weird homoerotic shit they get up to but never at the same time. That being said, they still have a kind of three-way relationship. They are in a love triangle, and all of the sides touch. I don’t know, it’s all very complicated. Much like any polyamorous relationship. Listen, y’all, I’ll say it: I don’t get polyamory. I’ve had a hard enough time maintaining healthy romantic relationships with people, and I’ve only been trying one at a time. Now you want me to date two people at once? What if I call one of them by the wrong name? Or they hang out without me? Or we can’t all decide on where to go for dinner? I have anxiety. Do you have any idea the mental and physical toll dating two people at the same time would take on a person like me? I simply wouldn’t survive it. I don’t know how y’all do it.

This joint fucking rocks. If you like hot movie stars, pulsing house music, the thrill of athletic competition, and the idea of two dudes sharing a churro and openly flirting with one another as they discuss a major point of tension in their friendship, then you’ll love this movie. Come to think of it, in tennis, ‘love’ means zero. And, well, I think you’re a zero if you don’t love this film.

Everybody has something that they’re good at. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told by others attempting to make me feel better after I’ve failed at something. And ‘good’ can really be quite a spectrum, can’t it? Somebody who is good at something could simply be competent at that something. Capable of the bare minimum needed for success. On the other hand, they could be a genius. One of the top minds in their field. Someone who has mastered their craft. Not only capable of doing that which is necessary for success, but of doing things that nobody could have previously imagined.

Todd Fields’s Tár is about somebody that is really good at something. A genius even. Lydia Tár is considered to be one of if not the greatest living conductor of her time. And that very well may be the case. But what Tár is truly good at, a master of even, is the construction, curation, and maintenance of her persona. By using this particular skill, she has created the perception of herself as a great conductor despite the fact that she might not actually be one. Now we all create personas. The way in which we are perceived by colleagues and friends and lovers is often not the way in which we truly are. In fact, it rarely is. There may be bits and pieces of ourselves stored within, but we cannot deny the fact that we create facades as a way of self preservation and advancement. That is what Tár does so well. She cannot compose her own music, and she engages in deeply unethical professional behavior. But she knows how to navigate the deeply patriarchal system within which she finds herself and understands how to use it to her advantage. It is her ability and willingness to exploit this deeply troubling system that allows her to reach such great heights. But the mighty fall, especially when their rise was built on a lie.

This film is so incredibly rich and complex and layered. I couldn’t possibly cover all of the ideas that have been masterfully layered into this story. The ephemeral nature of cancel culture, the myth of auteur theory, and the exploitation and appropriation of the trauma of others within art are ideas all found within Tár. I cannot recommend this film strongly enough to you. Please watch it. And bring someone else along for the ride. Then talk about what you just saw.

The Patriarchy but for Women

TÁR (2022)

Todd Fields

tradition rebe &

tradition rebeLLion

art by JAMIE KAMINSCKY

The Gingko Tree in November 2023

words by RAE HENAGHAN

unfurls into strings of small fans—golden like my hair, thick & woven into my lover’s clothing.

We walk the dogs, take pictures of blooming white flowers, all giant & fluffy like iced cupcakes. As if attempting a tree full of white roses. The maples laugh glowing crimson & orange in the afternoon. I think of finally arriving at peace.

Uphill, my right hip aches where the bone was shaved this summer. I am still not healed from my chosen family choosing eugenics over the safety of my compromised body three years ago. I am a lonely creature, even in peace.

On my phone: everyday I watch a Sudanese girl chant a revolutionary song, girls surrounding her echoing ثورة ( thawra—revolution) after each of her lines.

I rage & fatigue in the heart of empire.

On my phone: someone (me) calls for TRANS DAY OF VENGEANCE // ALL OUT 4 PALESTINE.

The morning glories trumpet I’m beautiful but someone else still fires a missile.

This, I may never comprehend. This world, I will never forgive.

to FeeL the rage

is to roLL it around

betWeen thuMb and ForeFinger artiCuLate its edges re Centered its ruthLess rash there’s no reCourse on this Path it resides deeP

riPPing at insides First Wringing drY organs LiKe sheets tiLL theY tear tatters LeFt on the FLoor and i aM on a raMPage running to trY and saVe You

words by ROSIE D’ERCOLE

YO SOY JUANA INÉS

words by ANGELINA LEAÑOS art by CLAUDIO PARENTELA

YO SOY JUANA INÉS PERDIDA EN UN MUNDO DE REGLAS I AM JUANA INÉS, LOST IN A WORLD OF RULES, CAUGHT UP IN THE WHIRL OF A HETEROSEXUAL SOCIETY RAISED TO CONFORM, MADE TO PERFORM, STRIPPED OF SEXUAL FREEDOM, AND SAID TO SERVE THE SAINTS I INHERITED. MY SISTERS LOST LOVE LIKE WAR AND WON CROWNS OF CHASTITY BUT NOW! I MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN THE PARADOX OF IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL, DESPITE MY HEART’S HUNGER, OR TO EXIST IN THE GRASP OF THE SPANISH PATRIARCHY, SILENT CRIES FOR A WOMAN’S TOUCH AND PRAISE FROM THE MOUTHS OF MEN. I HAVE COME A LONG WAY TO BE HEARD FOR MY INTELLIGENCE, BUT I HAVE A LONG WAY TO CONTINUE TO BE SEEN FOR MY IDENTITY, FOR MY HEART’S EVER-CHANGING DIMENSIONS AND REFUSAL TO BE CHAINED BY MAN.

I AM BOTH SAINT AND SINNER THOUGH DEVOTEES WILL DEBATE THE FORMER AND HISTORY WILL ERASE THE LATTER BECAUSE A WOMAN LIKE ME IS ONLY ALLOWED TO LOVE ANOTHER WOMAN PLATONICALLY BECAUSE A WOMAN LIKE ME IS ONLY ALLOWED TO BE WISE WITH HER MIND IF IT PLEASES HIS MAJESTY BUT DO NOT BE DECEIVED I WILL USE MINE TO PROVE EDUCATION IS NOT JUST FOR MEN I AM JUANA INÉS. THE PATRIARCHY IS STRONG BUT MY HEART IS STRONGER, MY MIND UNBREAKABLE.

I AM THE VIRGIN MARY AND THE GODDESS COATLICUE, THE TAMED MOTHER AND THE FIERCE WOMAN KING. HISTORY CAN SAY ALL IT WANTS ABOUT ME, BUT MY WORDS AND MY LOVE CAN NEVER BE ERASED. I WILL LIVE FOREVER IN MY POETRY AND SO WILL SHE.

What seCrets do You hide in the Cu FF o F Y our J eans ? is that Where You KeeP Your gender ? or, Li Ke the roMans Who harbored daggers in the ManY FoLds oF their togas d o You ConCeaL there soMe unKnoWn WeaPon –a KitChen Kni Fe, For CarVing through binaries a briCK , to bring doWn Legions oF CoPs a MatCh, to burn eVerY PsYCh ManuaL that teLLs us We are siCK ? are theY one and the saMe ?

I try to conserve my peace

Conservatives try to push their agendas on me

I’ll burn the white house down

Do it liberally in my evening gown

Flash my pearly whites as I kiss her lips

They stared with their naked eye at the solar eclipse

Beastial proposed legislative ash unfetters bigotry

The world is finally met with symmetry

My community from a different age

I can’t imagine it all

Rubble can’t raise another Stonewall

Born on the land of red, white, and bloodbaths

I’m not capital,

I have no monetary value

Be human to me.

I’m not a slur in your speech

I’m not a fetish deep in your mind

I have a name

Be human to me.

They said our riots were distasteful

We aren’t given what is rightfully ours

We can make you taste the rainbow over and over again

If you don’t be human to us.

sCorn FroM a Lesbian

words by PEJA ZEPEDA

art by EM BUTH

heaVen

&

art by MICHAEL MCFADDEN

words by WILLIAM WARD BUTLER

Postdiluvian

After the flood, he pulls out like a retreating army; a horse rode hard and put away wet. Adelphopoiesis means brother-making, means there was something analogous to marriage even for faggots of the faith,

even though Sodom and Gomorrah was a sting operation; even so, sin isn’t a stain on the soul— it’s more like the stain on glass that filters light through the windows. Haven’t I wanted to be holy, to behold, to be held—to decimate the zealots yelling about my immortal soul in hell. Belief is a siege; I’ll never leave here alive.

I

C A R US

ROISIN MCCOOL

This comic is about a first relationship that felt so right that it seemed like an act of hubris. It focuses on the glory of reveling in the relationship, rather than running away from it. words & art by

CoMMunion

words by A. D. Warrick

Take, Eat, this is My body which is given for you Queers & fags & dykes & bitches and Brendi at Zaza’s Pizza who charges me half because she knows I’ll leave a fat ass tip.

Do this in remembrance of who We were that day when my bumper was getting fixed and the Rent-A-Center let me borrow a convertible mustang so we blasted Against Me & screamed – God Bless Your Trans sexual Heart! – into the wind until our voices gave out.

Drink this, all of you late summer Sunday punk rock babies two stepping barefoot through water balloons crowding the wood-palette stage slinging your arms through the hose water as hymns of chaos play.

This is my blood of the new covenant dripping from my giggle split-lip as you dab it with mcdonalds napkins you found in the glove box & crack us both open a pbr to sit on the hood and drink together.

Great is the Mystery of Faith.

We have died. We have Risen. We will cum again.

Carmilla

words & art by JULES DIGRIGORIO

words & art by JULES DIGRIGORIO

Carmilla

chisel themselves into brittle backbones, ......emblazon themselves across wrists like puncture wounds from ......rusty nails on a wooden cross.

There are details missing from the ......sermons.

They neglect to tell us that the ......Frankincense gifted to Jesus by the three wisemen had ......notes of drugstore perfume and vodka lemonade ......and woodsmoke from the burning building my best friend narrowly escaped with his ......boyfriend.

And yes, it’s true, none of this is easy, ......but hiding isn’t either. None of this is easy, but loving never is.

A sermon lay swathed in every ......sentence my lover speaks, hidden behind a hesitancy ......planted there by far too many of God’s children.

Sweat pools on my palm ......like holy water at the tinny tremor of her laugh ......over a telephone wire— so how can you call that lust? ......I can hear a hymn in her heartbeat, the scratching of skateboard wheels on ......concrete— so how can you call that blasphemy?

She is “amen” incarnated. With her, heaven is not just a kingdom in ......the clouds, but the freefall of a rollercoaster with ......her arm around my shoulder, skipping stones on forest streams, bandaging skinned knees, ......praying on our altars of arcade machines, and ......rejoicing in every day we don’t succumb to an afterlife they ......insist will not welcome us.

But I’m not scared. I know what it’s like to ......hold hands with an angel who wears her halo around her neck, my ......initial in gold dangling over her heart.

And I believe it’s the Bible that says ......“Thou Shalt Not Lie,” so I won’t.

......I’ll skip brunch and spend my Sundays at her apartment instead.

I’ll lie down and look up at her like an ......apostle gazing at her god.

......The glasses will come off, abandoned on the carpet ......like every inhibition I’ve ever been foolish enough to worship ......more than this.

She’ll braid my hair, threading sabbaths and sanctity through the strands.

These days, it’s difficult to tell the ......difference between prayer beads and promise rings.

Reflected in my shades, she’s prettier than every stained glass window I’ve ever ......seen, grander than the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Her fingernails skim my jawbone under a streetlamp and when I grasp her ......hip and bite her lip, a church choir crescendos— Our own little hymn for the hellbound.

When she walks me to my car, ......every star that surrounds us is a charcoal pencil shaving plucked from ......the pages of her sketchbook, raining down like confetti, ......or perhaps bullets. but these parking lot promenades ......will not be lost to time; they will not be buried young ......with so many of our people.

A man chased us down the block last ............week, draped in a confederate flag like a ......vestment.

When we rounded the corner, I pulled her ......close and whispered against her lips,

“He’s just mad that we’re ......the ones Jesus died for.”

beYond oPPosition

ondbinarY osition

Words bY JenniFer abod

i aM standing under a sYCaMore tree.

i CLose MY eYes to Listen to drY LeaVes rustLe LiKe rain. Last night, a Young Man bLasted his gun into thirtY gaY reVeLers at a gaY bar. i oPen MY eYes. aboVe, a giant rainboW is shining in a graY sKY. i teLL MYseLF to reMeMber the gLorious Chorus oF rustLing LeaVes, not the rat-a-tat-tat oF shattering Fire

art by ASH SLOAS

supernormal clutches

words & photography by STARLY LOU RIGGS

My now-spouse and I met in Argentina when I was visiting a friend for her birthday. They asked to kiss me on the couch of an underground Queer basement bar, decked out with wall dildos and porn projected behind the DJs. I had to say no, because I was monogamously partnered to someone else at the time, but thus began a beautiful and agonizing saga of

long distance torment, dreamy romance, and video chatting for 7 hours a day. Our real first kiss happened 6 months later in the airport, as I was bringing bags to move in with them. Since then, we have been country hopping, waiting in infinite temporality for a visa to get grounded. That space in between, a place we know all too well as an agender couple (we both use neutral pronouns, they/elle/elu in our spoken languages English/Spanish/ Portuguese), straddling the in-between in every facet of our reality. Seeking a place in this world and trying to identify a dream, supernormal clutches came to be.

supernormal clutches is an art piece about the closeness and sweetness of a Queer love. Assembled as a visual art installation with R.A.R.O. (Residencias Artísticas Raramente Organizadas) in Buenos Aires, supernormal clutches explores temporality. It examines space and variable ways to inhabit it. It speaks to the unspeakable, addressing genders that exist only in the antithesis of another—non-binary, agender— identities based solely around an absence of something rather than the presence of another definition of self.

Here, in this 3-dimensional render of a non-existent room, we are our own. In blending together methods of creation, melding analogue and digital video, 3D room modeling, film photography and darkroom printing, this piece exists in and out of a specific time. It honors Queer pasts, presents, and futures. It is both time-based and forever documented, the relic of improvisational performance and organic intimate moments existing in a dreamscape. By utilizing video, photo, sound, and image, the performance presents many realities and potentials for reality. If reality says we are wrong, we create a space where we can be right, craving to live the gray spaces uniting us and allowing for deconstruction and complexity.

The term supernormal clutches defines a phenomenon in nature when same-sex birds (in particular, seagulls) pair up and share nests, thus resulting in an above average egg count, nurturing their young together. While humans defined the term, nature tends to simply exist. Samesex pairings happen in nature frequently. Gender is not really a construct outside of humanity and intimacy exists as a facet of survival in many species outside of perceived gender roles. Penguins pair for life and are known to choose same-sex partners often. Rats share the responsibilities of raising their young and engage in communal nesting. Looking outside of humanity offers other options. It challenges how we view ourselves as humans, our intimacies with others, the rules we have created, and the ways in which we experience our perceived realities.

Melissa Wilkinson’s HYPERREALISTIC PAINTINGS TEASE UNEASE BY

GENDER-BENDING

POP ICONOGRAPHY

words by STARLY LOU RIGGS

art by MELISSA WILKINSON

From the beginning of time, Queerness has existed as joy and play. Occasionally haunted in the cultural landscape, Queerness is a natural hybrid of ideas, subverting and diverting cultural norms to create a fuller sense of self, often in the face of mass ideology. Contemporarily, Queerness battles beauty standards and celebrity culture. It stands up in the face of normalized categories of what it means to be “man,” “woman,” or anything beyond and in between. Yes, Queerness can be the monster under your bed, but there’s a kickass party under there. Queerness flaunts the notion of disrupting the status quo, while being forced to somehow participate in it. And here, in the complex throes of it all, is New Yorkbased artist Melissa Wilkinson as she destroys, reassembles, and ultimately constructs new and twisted versions of humanity in the most delightfully monstrous way.

“I’m an appropriation artist. I have been an appropriation artist for about 20 years,” Wilkinson tells me as we hop on a zoom chat. In this case, appropriation means utilizing images from various sources and remixing them in some unique way. The figures Wilkinson carefully

crafts in hyperrealist watercolor are genderfluid collages, a contorted take on identity and popular culture. Three Dollar Icons is a selection of faces in greyscale, classic Hollywood-style stars carefully pasted, crumpled, and composed to create new gender-ambiguous glamor shots. Along similar lines, her Chimera series further chops up bodies, making something gratifyingly gruesome. “I was very careful about using that word ‘monstrous’ because I am interested in investigating Queer joy,” Wilkinson explains. “By disrupting these things that are really, really familiar—if I’m taking Rock Hudson and slicing his face—that minor intervention can create something that is both weirdly funny but also repulsive.”

Wilkinson’s work has always embodied some sense of self and identity, first using early images of family and later self-portraits. “The very first piece I did that kind of cemented my identity in terms of my values came when I completely replicated my childhood family photo album in water color. All the same size, put it all in one folio just like a family photo album, and that was the piece.” Stemming from a classic academic art background, Wilkinson found herself intrinsically

“Kick” Queens Series

going against the grain. “I figured out in graduate school [that I had] to undo my training, which was really, really traditional and very academic,” she says. “I cultivated my creative identity in a weird way, in opposition to what I was taught, because I didn’t really buy most of it.” Working with identity is a vulnerable practice, but Wilkinson kept worked hard to weave her traditional technical practice into something entirely unique and new.

Some of Wilkinson’s latest works reveal a somewhat campy take on body objectification. Her Queens series is emblematic of a sort of glitchy mandala, morbidly featuring loose parts of colorful arms and legs. “I think it’s a combination of things. They are Queer spaces,

expressions of joy, togetherness, isolation, and privacy. They’re nightclubs, but they’re also pretty girls in roller skates, which is something I’m really excited to paint. You can’t strip away desire, right?” Wilkinson laughs, recounting a familial reaction to her vulnerable creation: “My mom was like, ‘What is this thing with the socks and the roller skates?’ And I was like, ‘Mom, it’s attractive to me! I like the high shorts from the ‘70s, okay?’”

In taking pieces of Queer pasts—golden era icons of the ‘40s, disco skate scenes of the ‘70s, etc.—Wilkinson is reworking history, shining a light on cultural faults and confusion. “It’s weird because it’s such a curated history, right? I’m 43, so I grew up in front of the television set, just like

“True” Queens Series

most ‘80s kids. I remember The Facts of Life and the tomboy they had on that, Natalie somethingor-other.” Wilkinson’s influences of media are poignant, touching on a specific moment in time, yet an age-old feeling through the endless cycle of who gets seen in the media. “Punkie Brewster, and these characters that were in popular media who were kind of archetypes of who I was, right? I was the sporty one. I wasn’t interested in wearing “girly” clothes. My Queerness was an expression of pushing away the expectations of gender. I was a ‘tomboy,’ we had words for that. And now the conversation has become much more complex and loaded, but the reality was, there was no butch representation on TV at all, and if there was, it was repulsive.”

It’s in this land of the “repulsive” that we, as Queer folks, tend to find ourselves. Placed here unwillingly, yes, but making the best of it, using whatever tools at our disposal to poke and prod, throwing that discomfort back out into the world of the cishets. While Wilkinson has been successful moving her pieces through galleries, selling to Queer and straight people alike, the trends of the art world are everchanging. “Even though I am not trans, the conversation really is just about the ‘ridiculousness’ of gender performance,” she tells me, adding that she saw a shift in the art markets aligning with the recent

waves of anti-trans legislation. “I got a couple of rejections after I’d gotten acceptances to university galleries with that work. Stuff’s changed, and people don’t want to touch it. They want to be advocates and they want to be allies, but they don’t really know how to be allies because their jobs are hinged on it.”

The harsh reality is that all of us, as humans, are along for the ride. But what does hold strong and true are the Queer communities and spaces that will continue to uplift each other. Wilkinson sells most of her art now online. “I think the brick and mortar gallery scene is dying. I sell 50-60% of what I make annually on instagram on my own, to mostly gay folks.”

“It’s movement,” she says about her process. “It’s a glitch, it’s disruptive, it’s an octopus, it’s a chimera, but it’s also like a mandala. It’s a meditation. I don’t have to paint these things. I could leave them at digital mock-ups. But painting them allows me that real meditation on the space, on the joy, on the disfigurement but also like, the holiness of a space like that.” As Wilkinson and I wrap up our conversation, I’m in awe of these spaces she has created. They hit close to home. Wilkinson opens up a world that draws on nostalgia, pulling potential histories into the forefront, on paper, on gallery walls, bringing us all a little slice of Queer joy.

“Lynda”

I have a banana in my pants. It’s hanging out of the front of my boxers—an ugly, invasive yellow stalagmite reaching out like an outstretched finger. It beckons her in an unflattering attempt at seduction. Perhaps, I think, looking down—perhaps it’s not beckoning her at all; instead, it’s pointing up at me, gaudy with mockery in a way only a banana could be.

the peel puckers around the accidental penetration, like two frowning lips, and when I try to pinch it together with my jelly fingers, I only make it worse. “Sorry,” I chuckle, trying to talk myself out of the mess that is beginning to unravel. “Sorry, that’s not . . . that’s not—”

She reaches out for the fruit. It all seems a bit silly when her manicured fingers, beautiful and unblemished, stroke over the soft brown spots peppered up and down the peel. I look away, then our eyes meet, and I slice my attention like this again and again, never quite satisfied by either choice. I’m so focused on the rising burn on my throat that, for a minute, I can’t be bothered to perform.

Her nails are sweet and powder pink, rounded at the tips in gentle curves. She drags them against the skin of the banana as if she were a sculptor, molding and shaping with every stroke, each movement purposeful and exact. She moves in waves, lapping with tantalizing precision.

Suddenly, with just a bit of accidental force, her finger dips into a browning seam. The overripe sludge seeps out. I pull back; she lets go. And even though I know I pulled back first, I inwardly cringe—for maybe the fifth time since we began this strange dance—knowing she'd withdraw her touch from me to put space between us. That she'd roll back onto her heels as if I could explode at any moment.

I manage a laugh, something exaggerated that comes out unsteady. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” I say. I attempt to hide my real feelings behind a lyrical tone—a little ha-ha, a mid-intimacy joke. But then

“It’s okay,” she says, wiping her now dirty finger on the side of her nightshirt, which I have the misfortune of seeing out of the corner of my eye, before reaching back

onto the side table to turn down the music.

I feel my cheeks redden. I’m fumbling with the banana, which won’t sit right anymore and is leaking ooze all over my hands. “I just don’t know what’s happening,” I say. “I don’t know. This isn’t right. This isn’t what was supposed to fucking happen.”

“It’s just a banana, babe,” she says softly. “Doesn’t have to mean anything.”

But it means everything. It’s a defining aspect of the Queer relationship; a defining aspect of people like me—you know, the ones that put a banana in their boxers. In every story, in every space, the banana is a staple of the conversation. An inevitable crossroad. A milestone. A pivotal threshold to cross. A hundred metaphors couldn’t encapsulate the importance of the banana.

I try to respond calmly, but the involuntary rhythmic tensing of my chest muscles tells me even before I speak that my voice will defy me. “But it has to mean something. It didn’t help. It didn’t help at all, actually.” I want to laugh—I really do. One of those sick, sardonic cackles that comes out not when you’re cracking, but you’ve fully snapped.

But my jaw is too rigid. “It didn’t make me feel better. I don’t feel any different.”

“Well, let’s talk about it. What did you expect?” Her hand rubs my shoulder, and her voice has become firmer, as it does whenever I get intense and upset, like clockwork—like how you speak to a child who can’t grasp their feelings right. Leave it to me to turn anything into a therapy session.

I shake my head, but I know the answer: I wanted a magical fix-all, but trying to achieve that made it all worse. Like buying metabolism pills thinking you’ll drop weight. Like shopping for back-to-school clothes, hoping to finally fit in with the peers you envied, not yet realizing that there’s something fundamental about you that defies the ocean: marbles sinking in water, kerosene riding the waves. “Maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe I’m trying too hard." The words feel like a bit of a surrender. “I thought it would help things make sense.”

“Make sense to who? To you, or someone else?”

“I don’t know. Both?” I look down at the banana in my hand. An appendage. A costume. I'm a mime, obsessively repeating a form that will never fully materialize. Some may call that insanity, but it lives within me as desperation. “But there’s always going to be something different.”

“The good thing about this life,” she says, “is that it’s malleable. Trial, error, and adjustment.”

“But this is what makes it real, right?” I can’t stop thinking about the eyes that watch

us. The eyes tucked in the glass of every mirror and the corner of every room. The eyes tacked on the dashboard of our dingy car. The eyes in my head that I can’t see, but I can feel them stare down through my own: a judgemental gaze, a commentary being telepathically drilled into my own thoughts. “This is the best I can do, but it’s not good enough right now. I don’t feel in control.” The banana is speckled even more from the small punctures I’ve been mindlessly abusing it with. The acidic puree under my fingernails starts to burn.

“It’s real regardless. You can’t sacrifice comfort for that kind of control.” She reaches over and wipes some of the purée off the side of the banana and licks her finger. Afterwards, she does so again and extends her finger towards my lips. “And besides,” she adds, “you need to make sure you’re satisfied before anyone else.”

For how discolored and bruised the banana is, it’s sweet on my tongue. I take a deep breath. “I miss the simplicity,” I say. “Before I realized there was a performance that came with this.” Blank slate children and simple words. Happy. Hearts. Friendship. Crushes. Love.

“A big part of this experience is trying to separate the performance from what you want.”

“I wanted to want this.” I close my eyes, thinking. “Maybe I do want this. But it’s complicated. It’s all of the eyes, or something like that. You know what I mean?”

She looks around the room, at the corners and the mirrors, and an idea brightens her face. Then she grabs the blanket, pulls it over us like an impenetrable dome, and we ride the waves.

words by ZEKE OFFMAN

LIBERATION

ART BY RO MAHARJAN

1 2 3 4 5

1 A seasonal well-wishing exclamation (with 3 Down)

6 Some cardiac chambers

7 Like some cities or siblings

8 What might follow a lemon or a gator

9 Appropriate start to Rainbow Month

As Russia and Ukraine

See 1 Across

Yearned

A supportive term for your fellow queen

CONTRIBUTORS

A. D. Warrick (they/them), or just Annika to their friends, is a current graduate student teaching assistant and MFA candidate at the University of Central Arkansas. They are currently Lead Poetry Editor for Arkana. They have previously been published in Screendoor Review, Q&A Queer Zine, and Levitate Magazine, to name a few. When not writing, they generally like to spend their time obsessing over their tv shows, pondering Mary Oliver while wandering the many state parks Arkansas offers, or singing karaoke badly at the local punk watering hole. If you would like to know more about them, or their writing you can follow them on instagram @adwarrick, or present them with a pretty rock, for which they will offer in trade their undying love and devotion.

André Le Mont Wilson (he/him) is a Black Queer California poet and writer. His chapbook, Hauntings, won the 2022 Newfound Prose Prize. In the first half of 2024, he published, or had work accepted in, Fruit: Queer Literary Journal, Fourteen Poems: Queer PoetryAnthology,BeneaththeSoil:QueerSurvivor’se-Zine, and “The Gayer the Better” issue of Brown Bag Online. ig: @awilsonstoryteller

Ang Ruiz (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Piedras Negras, COAH, and is based in San Antonio and Austin, TX. They received their BFA in Studio Art and certificate in Digital Art and Media from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. Ruiz works primarily in printmaking, zines, and digital media. Her work explores the horrors of girlhood, as well as the threshold that exists between beauty and the grotesque, evoking desire within disgust. Ruiz has exhibited work at ICOSA Collective, and The Museum of Human Achievement. Keep up with their work @notdeadart on any socials, and notdeadart.com!

Angelina Leaños (she/her) is a Ventura County Youth Poet Laureate Emeritus and a first-year MFA student at Fresno State. Angelina regularly serves as a Poetry Out Loud coach and a Poet-Teacher, mentoring youth in poetry recitation and creative writing. Additionally, Angelina is a member of California Poets in the Schools’ Board of Directors and was a reader for the 2023 Philip Levine Prize. Her work has been published by Urban Word, FlowerSong Press, the Chicanx Writers & Artists Association, and Arkana. You can find her on instagram @angelinaleanos.

In the middle of a ven diagram between Fran Fine, Joan Didion, and “insufferable lesbian”, Ann McCann (she/her) finds herself waxing poetic about a California that maybe doesn’t exist, women who have taught her how to love while kvetching about why the Moschino heart bag is still so expensive, and the importance of a 90’s animal print mini dress. She can be found photo journaling her life with her wife in Northern California on instagram at @beegirlfriends.

Annika Papke (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Washington, DC. She loves hanging out with her friends and is endlessly fascinated by pop culture. She works to try and capture this moment in time in her paintings with those themes as inspiration. You can find more of her work on instagram at @annikapapke.

ash sloas (he/him) is an Appalachian bred, Brooklyn-based photographer, printmaker, painter, & sculptor. Through his artistic works, ash explores the dichotomy of becoming both the sculptor & the clay via transitioning. He strives to showcase anything he sees as beautiful—plants, people, clouds, an empty subway platform—every little beauty deserves to be accounted for. ig: @ghxstrider_

Caroline Wolff (she/they) is a Queer and disabled poet and prose writer from San Antonio, TX. At birth, she was given one year to live, and has since made it her mission to never shut up. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Anodyne, The Trinity Review, SICK, and elsewhere. She is an Arts & Culture Reporter at San Antonio Current, and works on the poetry acquisitions team at West Trade Review. When she isn’t writing, you can find her devouring a novel, doing pilates, or snuggling with her tuxedo cat. To follow Caroline on her writing journey, visit her on instagram @carolinemariewrites.

Dani Massey (he/him) is an artivist based in Chicago, IL, who creates zines, collage, prints, and advertisement-style images for underground movements. He combines the technology of old-school print media and cutting-edge digital art to make information and politic accessible, and reproducible by the public. Massey explores Queer, Crip, and Poor identities and their relationship to an ever-oppressive christianity through text-based, text-assubject-matter, homoerotic, and revamped political and religious imagery. Massey’s work can be found distributed (in print!) by punks, goths, and freaks in independently published magazines, compilations, on shitty t-shirts, and good ol’ xeroxed copies. Follow him on instagram @neuroscipunk.

Dr. Jennifer Abod (she/her) is an award-winning feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, former radio broadcaster, and Assistant Professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. When her wife Dr. Angela Bowen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she turned to poetry Publications: One Art and Artemis Journals, Persimmon Tree, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, Wild Crone Wisdom, Fruitslice, Discretionary Love, Spillway Magazine. Abod was the singer in the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, 1970-1976. She sings jazz in Long Beach, California. www.jenniferabod.com

Eddie Creamer (he/him) is a writer based in London. A graduate of the Goldsmiths, University of London with a Masters in Creative and Life Writing, his work has appeared in various online magazines, including Queerlings and Elevator Stories from Thirty West Publishing. He is currently editing his first novel, Now You’re Flying, an intergenerational Queer campus novel about a mother and son. He is on instagram @ewpcreamer.

Elena Vallejo (she/her) was born in raised in the Quad Cities and is studying early childhood education, theatre, and writing at St. Ambrose University. Elena writes to bring to life the stories living inside her. In her free time, Elena likes reading everything, buying tote bags, and eating bagel sandwiches.

Ellie Allan (she/her) is a 24-year-old Lesbian based in York (UK), currently completing her Master’s Degree in Art Law at the University of York, having completed her undergraduate degree in Art History at NYU Abu Dhabi. She tends to write poetry and short stories that revolve around the themes of absurdity, sexuality, and ‘the monotony of life’, often with a semi-autobiographical element. She does this in between researching graverobbers and intellectual property law, and collecting pink vintage ceramics.

Em Buth (they/them) is a non-binary cowboy, space prince, asterisk, and storyteller. They are reading, writing, and doodling whenever they can. They love DJ-ing to empty rooms, running around in the woods, being haunted by all that has happened and all that will be, and making coffee. They desire the liberation of every/ body from every/binary. They love you. You can find them @em.buth on instagram.

h b anowan (she/her) is a lesbian poet. she lives & loves with her wife and their two dogs in a mid-sized Canadian city bordering Detroit. she holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology & works on an assembly line at an automotive manufacturing plant, which she finds endlessly funny. you may find some of her work in Pagination, a literary arts zine made in collaboration between Windsor & Detroit public libraries as well as online at www.poetryis.gay.

Hamsa Fae (she/they) is a Vietnamese-French poet, performance artist, and model who is native to Los Angeles. Her poetry book, Blood Frequency, was shortlisted by C&R Press and The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network in 2022. She has publications in New Words, SAGE (Yale School of Environment), and BLUEBIRD. Her solo exhibition, Trans Aphrodisia, was featured in February 2024 at The Brown Building.

Hannah Providence (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator from Tucson, AZ. Her work deals with themes of nostalgia and identity.

Indovina is a moniker for Michael Indovina (he/him), a 21-yearold bisexual poet, artist, ekphrasist, and editor from New Jersey. He is a senior undergraduate student at Drew University, double majoring in English (with a concentration in Creative Writing) and Studio Art, while also minoring in Theatre Arts. He was the Assistant Editor for Beatdom Books, where he edited the forthcoming book, The Burroughs-Warhol Connection, by Victor Bockris, and issue #24 of Beatdom literary journal. Indovina’s writing can be found in Milk Press (PSNY), Chill Mag, and Insanity’s Horse (Drew’s Art & Literature Magazine). His instagram handles are @indovina_poetry and @indovinamichael.

In Her Image Photography was founded by Oakland born Tara Baxter (she/her) and Australian born, Heidi Margocsy (she/ her). Based in Sonoma County, CA, their portrait business have taken them all over the world to photograph their clients. Partners in both work and life, their images have been published and exhibited extensively throughout the U.S, Australia, Asia and the U.K. Their work has won numerous international portrait awards and prizes, and one of Heidi’s images “Brave New World” is currently on tour with the National Photographic Portrait Prize with the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. This year, their images will be on exhibit in Scotland, Australia, and Barcelona.

Irina Tall (Novikova) (she/they) is an artist, graphic artist, and illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Design. Her first personal exhibition ”My soul is like a wild hawk” (2002) was held in The Museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology. In 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, and draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds. Her instagram is @irina.tall.

Jade Bennett (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Florida developing a practice understanding identity, transphobia, and how our history continues into the current day. Born in Tampa, Florida, her work reflects on both the personal experience of growing up under an increasingly transphobic state, and the historical and political factors that inform the modern wave of transphobia in the United States. On instagram, her handle is @jadebennettart.

Jamie Kaminscky (he/him) is a transgender multimedia artist living and making art in San Diego. Inspired by natural phenomena and a love for art history, Queer rights, and a drive to help others artistic expression, Jamie enjoys using vibrant colors, abstract forms, and experimentation with a variety of materials to tell stories and visualize concepts he wishes to communicate and present to those who enjoy it. For more of his work, check out @brrdboy on instagram.

Jill Young (she/they) has a BFA in Acting and a certificate in Creative Writing from UT Austin. Jill co-wrote and starred in the feature Dear Leo (2020) which premiered at the Inside Out: Toronto LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Jill’s comedic solo show, THE KIDS MIGHT DIE (a tale told by an idiot) premiered in a sold-out run at the 2023 Hollywood Fringe Festival. She has since toured this show to San Francisco, San Diego, and Denver, and will be taking it to Scotland and New Zealand. Awards include Best of Fest- LA Solofest, Best of the Broadwater- Hollywood Fringe, and Outstanding Actor- San Diego Fringe.

Jodie Underwood (they/he/she) is a British artist who explores the intersection of eroticism, gender and Queerness via digital illustration and oil painting. As a third-year painting student at the University of Brighton, their fusion of traditional oil techniques with contemporary Queer themes creates surreal, maximalist pieces resonating with the Queer community. Jodie’s art, informed with humour and depth, encapsulates the transgender experience. Exhibiting at venues like the Royal Academy and, more recently, a kink club during Manchester Pride. Through historical imagery intertwined with Queer bodies, Jodie prompts viewers to scrutinise their internal biases, inviting introspection and dialogue. ig: @jodieroseart

Juno Stilley (she/her) is an artist, landscape designer, and gardener. Queerness in all its forms guides her. “Honor those who came before you, nourishing those around you now, and work for those who will come after you.” You can find her at junostilley.com.

Jules DiGregorio (she/they) is a multimedia artist from Manhattan Beach. Jules recently graduated from Boston College with degrees in Art History and English, and her Creative Writing thesis Being the Deer explored family history and girlhood through poetry, prose, watercolor, and oil paint. The Origin of the Sapphic Vampire was based on a paper for Irish Hybrids and the Eco-Imagination, taught by the wonderful Colleen Taylor. ig: julesdigs

Kade Harvey (he/him) is a Queer artist based in the Midwest. His work focuses heavily on the natural world and the beauty around him. He wants people to know that even in little places like Springfield, Missouri there are thriving and beautiful Queer communities. You have a place out there you just have to look for it. @Kadeharveyart on instagram.

Kenna DeValor (they/them) is a Queer/sapphic + nonbinary published artist and writer from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. They are a current senior at Bloomsburg University studying English literature and creative writing. They have been published 30+ times around the US, UK, and Australia! When not writing or making art, they are a professional tattoo artist in Bethlehem, PA and the Creator/ Editor-in-Chief of their own magazine, FlowerMouthPress. You can find them on ig: @teadragonz/@flowermouthpress/ @pixiehearttattoo.

L.M.Zoller (they/them) is a zinester, writer, and artist who focuses on Queer food, Queer history, and Midwestern ephemera. They are co-author of The Queer Language of Flowers and The Corners of Their Mouth: A Queer Food Zine and the author and artist of the Midwestern Transplant zine series and Non-Binary Femme Dandy zine series. Their artwork has appeared in Queering Dietetics and Kitchen Table Magazine. You can find them online at illmakeitmyself.net, thecornersoftheirmouthpress.com, and on instagram at @illmakeitmyself.

Lane Stephens (he/they) is a transmasc Queer artist who makes pieces surrounding his relationship with identity and the natural world around him. His works range in medium from drawing, painting, and sculpture to jewelry, block printing, and whatever else peaks his interest. Regardless of medium, he focuses on reducing waste and reusing discarded materials within his work. Follow his art journey on his instagram @lanetothemoon.art to see what he’s working on next!

Leighton Schreyer (they/them) is a writer, poet, and critically Mad Queer activist in Toronto whose work explores themes of identity, belonging, embodiment, and being. Through their poetry and prose, Leighton strives to unsettle norms and inspire different ways of seeing. Their work has been published in some of the world’s leading medical and literary journals, including The Sun, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Hippocampus Magazine, and Redivider. Their piece, Thrift Store Stories, was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. More information about their work can be found at www.leightonschreyer.com.

Leo Josefina (they/them), is a New Mexican writer. They mostly write about death, mental health struggles, and being incredibly Queer. They have written for their entire life, trying to make space for their struggles in a way that is cathartic, informative, and hopefully relatable to whoever may need it. They can be found on instagram @leo_josefina82.

Lorinda Boyer (she/her) is a life-long Pacific Northwest resident. She spends her days writing, reading, running, drinking way too much coffee, and hanging out with her wife, Sandy, and her pup, Mollie. As part of the LGBTQIA+ community, Lorinda strives to support, uplift and advocate for all people. ig:@lorindalboyer

Margot Hazel (she/her, bae/bim/baers) is an transgender woman from Oklahoma. She is an aspiring writer & poet who has performed at several local open mics. Margot also has a history in the local theater scene & stays active in the trans/Queer community in Oklahoma. Margot resides in Tulsa with her partner. Her instagram is @margot_bargot.

Maxwell Edmonds (he/him) is an art student at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His work often centers around narratives surrounding mental health and Queerness. He works with anything he can get his hands on. More of his work can be found @schwankystudios on instagram.

Meg Streich (she/her) is a writer and poet based out of Philadelphia, PA. She is the founder of The Big Gay Writing Project, working to create sober Queer spaces across the northeast. When she isn’t working/writing, she can be found meandering aimlessly through a trader joes or working on one of her many unfinished projects. She can take a baked potato out of the oven with her bare hands. instagram: @meg.bert.

Melissa Wilkinson (she/her) is a lesbian artist and activist. She received her BFA in Painting from Western Illinois University in 2002 then went on to receive her MFA in Painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006. Her work has been featured in wide reaching publications throughout the country including three editions of New American Paintings, The Curator’s Salon, and The Manifest Drawing Annual four times. She has shown in various galleries nationally and internationally. She hikes regularly, enjoys making homemade pasta, and consistently attempts to make the best cup of coffee possible. She serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of Art at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. She splits her time with studios in both Massachusetts and the Hudson Valley in New York where she lives with her wife, dog, and cat.

Mena Brazinski (she/her) is a writer from Upstate New York who adores unreliable narrators, non-linear plot lines, and messy protagonists. She is currently in her last year of undergrad and has plans to become a college professor. Her next project will be co-launching a literature magazine in Albany, NY. ig: mebrazinski

Micah B (any pronouns) is a San-Francisco-based student who is continually curious about their fellow humans. You can catch them compulsively looking at nerdy webcomics, deep down a wikipedia rabbit hole, or navigating a city by boba shops and parks. They love doing crosswords, playing word games, and making puns. They are currently drinking tea, playing piano a bit too loud, laughing with their friends, or playing cards with their family.

Michael McFadden (he/they) creates artwork to both explore and celebrate sexual freedom as a form of resistance to multilayered stigma and trauma, both historical and ongoing. Focusing on the overlap between internalized shame and identity affirmation, he draws from family albums and vintage gay pornography. These vernaculars, inherited from biological and chosen families, are the foundation to his visual iconography. Michael received his M.F.A. from the ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies and currently resides in Los Angeles. ig: @mcfaddenphoto

Nicole Hernandez Reyes (they/them) is a Queer Mexican American multimedia artist and designer from Atlanta, GA. They are passionate about using art to tell and explore diverse stories. They hope to make a positive difference in the world for future generations. They love watching film and reading, and can be found watching a multitude of reality competition tv shows most nights. You can find them @nhr19_ on most socials, but primarily instagram.

Nikolai Renee (he/they) is a Trans artist, poet, and Queer who writes for the ghosts who raised them. They process the devastation of humanity, both personal and global, through poems soaked in grief. He currently resides in Washington, in an un-haunted house with his partner and two cats. Renee can be spotted online in a cycle of rot and rebirth @nikolai.sun.renee. Fruitslice is his first publication.

November (they/them) is a self-proclaimed “twink with tits”, and uses multiple mediums to express their thoughts and feelings about identity, intimacy as a trans person, broken families, loss, heartbreak, and, most prominently, being a silly little clown. These mediums include drag, songwriting, digital art, embroidery, acting, and poetry! They hope to strike a balance between hardhitting, but necessary conversations, and pieces that can just make people smile. While their submission covered a grim side of the queer experience, they want readers to remember that there will always be people willing to fight with us for our right to live.

Ocean Grove (he/they) is an Queer and trans illustrator, content creator, and owner of Conscious Euphoria in Brighton. Art has been integral to their life since before transitioning in 2012, and is providing therapeutic solace and a sense of community as a trans person. Ocean’s mission is to create inclusive content that accurately represents the diverse trans community and fosters feelings of joy. instagram @conscious_euphoria

Paige Johnson (she/her) is co-owner of Outcast Press, which specializes in publishing fiction for the alienated. She is also author of Percocet Summer: Poetry for Distancing Dates & Doses. It is part of an illustrated, seasonal series, with its sequel, Citrus Springs, about being a bi sugar baby, hitting the scene soon. Her short stories are often fictionalized versions of such. twitter, insta, facebook @OutcastPress1 and facebook.com/OutcastPress1.

Peja Zepeda (she/her) is a lesbian twenty-year-old full time university student who has an undying love for the art of writing, particularly poetry. She got into the realm of composing poems as a means to let her emotions run free, and quickly adored how beautiful playing with words can be. In her leisure time, besides constantly studying criminology, she leans towards a pen to scribble her heart’s messages, since she aims to become an impactful poet to the utmost degree, whether that be advocating for social justice, or to the sappy romantic bits and pieces of life.

Rae Henaghan (he/him) is a disabled trans and Queer Anarchist poet who lives with his partner and dogs. He finds magic and poetry in nature, dogs, and positioning oneself against the state. You can find his poems on the Suffering the Silence website. instagram: @sick.boyfriend

René Zadoorian (he/him) is a Queer Armenian writer with a Creative Writing degree from California State University, Northridge. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and now resides in Los Angeles. His short stories have been published in various magazines including Wireworm, Periwinkle Pelican, Qafiyah Review, Penmen Review, Northridge Review, and elsewhere. You may find him on instagram @lammpshade, and on his website rene-writes.com.

Ro Maharjan (they/them) is a nonbinary freelance illustrator and animator based in Brooklyn, who draws inspiration from their Nepali heritage. Their colorful and expressive illustrations celebrate gender fluidity, cultural pride, and explore the complexity of the human experience through a Queer lens.

Roisin McCool (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller, currently working in stained glass. McCool has sold zines throughout the Southwestern United States, as well as Canada. Her work can be found online under The House of Hauntology. She likes tuxedo cats and spicy food.

Roman Campbell (he/him) is a trans author, friend-lover, cosplayer, coffee shop enthusiast, and cat dad whose work has been featured in Neon Arts and Literary Magazine, The Healing Muse, and Fruitslice.In his free time, he enjoys drinking an iced oat milk latte while writing fanfiction (thinking about men), reading fanfiction (thinking about men), or staring at a blank google doc and hoping words magically appear. You can find him @romancampbell_ on instagram!

Rosie D’Ercole’s (she/they) writing acts as a formative basis for her many creative projects, and has become a dedicated practice over time. Her work is primarily free verse, and she enjoys the nonconformity and self expression it affords her. She is currently editing her first anthology. Find her creative work on instagram at @rosie_isabella_jean.

Sam Paolini (they/them) is an illustrator, muralist, printmaker, organizer, zinester & upcycled clothing maker from New Hampshire, USA. Their work revolves around connection, collaboration, and collective liberation with themes of grief, fantasy, Queerness & inner demons. They are the founder & director of NH based arts collective Wrong Brain, which provides arts opportunities to underrepresented, emerging & unconventional makers of all mediums. Sam is the 2024 artist in residence for the Reproductive Freedom Fund of NH, & is working on a colorful, stigmacrushing collection of stickers, zines, & prints to raise funds for abortion care.

Sara Rodrick 乐福华 (she/he/they/any) is a Queer transracial adoptee, born in China and raised in the Deep South. Their poetry explores diasporic longing, racial identity, southern foodways, immigration, nature, memory, and all things pleasureful, political, spiritual, and mundane. She’s currently based in Durham, NC, where she’s learning what it means to build community, nurture relationships, and love well. You can find him on instagram @chilicrispqueer.

Sequoia Chenoah Roane (they/them) is a non-binary witch, artist, and writer living in the Pacific Northwest of Turtle Island. Their work commonly features meditations on death, sex, Queerness, gender identity, body, and magic—everything they create is a spell. Their favorite color is green, their favorite animals are bats, and their favorite pen is currently a blue-ink clicky ballpoint from the Royal Moore Auto Center. Sequoia is a solar Gemini, and moves gracefully between states of reverence and mirth. This is reflected in their writing, artwork, and general behavior. You can follow them on ig @dripping.witch.child.

Starly Lou Riggs (xe/they/elu) is a Queer agender visual artist, musician, and filmmaker residing in São Paulo, Brazil. A selfrenowned freak, their work focuses on identity and world building, experimentally challenging the conventional. Riggs was the Managing Editor for Eleven PDX and has had art featured in Fotofilmic, Coy Culture, and Polaroid. They released their first book, el amor es enfermo y el diablo es un sueño, in 2023 with Borderline Press. Riggs creates surrealist characters based on personal experience, blurring the bounds of reality as a way of rewriting histories while normalizing Queer faces, spaces, and feelings. ig: @get.filthy

Stephen Brown (he/him) is a writer-activist with a Philly attitude and a background in LGBT+ Studies. Managing Editor of Rathalla Review, and graduate student completing his MFA at Rosemont College, his fiction and poetry have appeared in Tofu Ink Press, SCAB Mag, Beneath the Soil, Querencia Press, Wicked Gay Ways, and others. Stephen’s debut chapbook, His Boyfriend Materials, is available now from Bottlecap Press. ig: @scarletwitchy

Taylor Michael Simmons (he/him) is a late-twenty-something filmmaker and barista who likes laying down in the shower and taking long walks on the beach.

Teddie Bernard (they/he) is a Queer cartoonist, writer, and the most normal person in America. In February of 2024, they selfpublished their first graphic novel, Ballyhoo. They spend their time refurbishing obsolete printers and researching obscure lesbians. He currently draws his comics in Chicago, where he wishes for colder weather. You can find them online at: www.teddiebernard.net & ig: @tea.ddie.

Tess Conner (they/she) is a genderqueer writer and poet from Georgia. They graduated with a BS in Literature, Media, and Communications from Georgia Tech and have been desperately trying to use their degree ever since. Their work centers on religion, sexuality, family dynamics, and community. When not writing, they can be found reading, embroidering, or protesting the injustices committed by the u.s. government.

von reyes (he/him) is an emergent author from rural, eastern North Carolina who received his MA in Sociology from UNCW. He explores the intersections of transmasculinity and Asian diasporic identity through poetry, confessional non-fiction, and speculative fiction. He hopes to tell stories that don’t shy away from the horrors, but allows us to find the light within them. His work can be found in The Good Men Project, A Coup of Owls Press, and at vonreyes.carrd.co.

William Ward Butler (he/him) is the Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. He is the author of the chapbook Life History from Ghost City Press. His recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Switchyard, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Frozen Sea. You can find him on instagram: @williamwardbutler.

Zeke Offman (any pronouns) is a Queer writer, enthusiastic reader, and aspiring author based in a small Pennsylvanian college town. Recently completing university studies, Offman nurtured these passions with the unwavering support of a close sister and a lovely girlfriend, both of whom have been an anchor throughout every creative and academic pursuit. Offman’s love for writing stems from the opportunity to embody different identities and experience surreal adventures. Enjoying a variety of genres, Offman gravitates towards stories that explore the strange, distressing, or uncomfortable—but in a good way! And now, the next chapter awaits.

Zenia deHaven (they/them) is a young adult and fantasy writer. They are a master’s student in Emerson College’s Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing program. They graduated from Virginia Tech with a double major in Creative Writing and Professional and Technical Writing. Their work is published or forthcoming in Fruitslice, Page Turner Magazine, and SIEVA Magazine. When they’re not writing, they enjoy group exercise classes and playing video games. They live in Virginia with their family and two dogs. They can be found on instagram at @zeniadehaven_.

Zoe L (she/they) is a 25 year old aspiring author and poet who currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas. She spends most of her free time writing and taking pictures with her film camera. They are always looking for new friends, and while fairly new to instagram, you can find them at @zoe_louvre_

art by MAX EDMONDS

Thank you to every Queer person who has made Fruitslice possible, past, present and future. We owe this issue to all your gay rights, wrongs, and everything in between.