FRUITSLICE Issue 7: Home

Fruitslice Summer 2025 Issue

Fruitslice is a celebration of:

• Porch lights

• Open doors

• The Midwestern goodbye

• Sleepovers

• Found families gathering in handmade homes

• The soft power of staying

Fruitslice is a backlash against

• Systems that turn housing into profit

• Minimalism as moralism

• Prioritizing wealth lining the walls of our houses instead of what we love

• “How it's always been done,” prioritizing mindless tradition over flesh and blood humanity

This issue is dedicated to Home.

To the ones we are born into. The ones we're trying to find. The ones we make, and the ones we leave behind. The ones we’ve outgrown. The ones that haunt us. The ones we carry in our bodies.

To those who make homes in language, in lineage, in resistance.

To everyone who maintains the shared spaces we rely on—schools, hospitals, offices, labs, libraries, streets: custodians, sanitation workers, garbage collectors.

To the people building homes in wreckage—of systems, of relationships, of disaster. To those who squat with care and claim the abandoned. Who patch roofs, share stoves, and hold the line against displacement.

To those who understand that revolution starts at home. It starts with sharing and engaging in everyday domestic labor tasks.

To the couches we’ve crashed on. The doors that opened and the ones that slammed shut. To the ones who stayed. To the ones who couldn’t. To the ones who ran. To the ones who returned.

To the ones tending altars, building ramps, passing down recipes, and leaving porch lights on. To the ones who showed us how to change a tire, unclog a sink, or fix a bike chain.

To those who stock the food pantries.

To the children translating for their parents.

To those who plant gardens in concrete.

To the ones who host teach-ins, cuss out city council, link arms to block squad cars, stock medic kits, defend encampments, and show up for jail support.

To those who live: "we keep us safe” and “not in our house.”

To those who hold the line, hold the door, hold the baby, hold the broom.

You are the blueprint. You are the welcome.

This issue is for you.

Thank you.

Letter thefromEditors

Content Warning: This issue, and the contributors within, reconstructs what “home” looks like within a Queer context. To do so, Fruitslice Editors and contributors have had to reconcile fraught histories that are embedded in our homes, cultures, communities, and families. To properly reconstruct a Queer home, we have been faced with the task of tackling difficult subject matters, such as racism, colonialism, imperialism, christofacism, genocide, exploitation, cultural erasure, displacement, imprisonment, slavery, disordered eating/diet culture, fatphobia, childhood neglect/ abuse, death, violence, alcohol and drug use, natural disasters, misgendering, gentrification, classism, religious trauma, adoption trauma, mental illness, internalized Queerphobia, break ups, divorce, sexual violence, TERF ideology/gender essentialism, and family estrangement. These themes are intertwined with the concept of home and building stronger and more sustainable communities in the future. We hope you manage your discomfort as it arises and take care of yourself while reading this issue.

Dearest Readers,

Home is not a neutral word.

It holds weight—emotional, historical, political. It is a site of origin and of rupture. It is where we are first named, shaped, and sometimes, where we are first exiled from. Queerness exists in tension with the state. Queerness is sometimes cast as clashing against tradition. When our bodies are relegated to scrutiny, home can become unsafe, unlivable, or unreachable. At the same time, home can be an inheritance—a space passed down from our loved ones, carried with us in food, music, language, and faith. For many of us, both things are true at once.

We build home in the in-between. In the silence after a slammed door. In shared playlists or guest room shelves. In public transit rides and side-street cigarette breaks.

In the mirror (eventually, maybe).

It’s the chosen family dinner that runs until 3 AM, the group chat that never sleeps, the lover’s apartment where you finally learn to take up space. It’s the particular way your grandmother folded dumplings, carried now in your own clumsy fingers. It’s the pronouns that fit or a name that finally clicks.

Home is a deeply personal idea—the personal is political. And sometimes, the political is terrifyingly personal.

To speak of home is to speak of land, of displacement, of who gets to stay and who is pushed out. It is impossible to reflect on home without acknowledging the people for whom home has been violently taken: the millions of Palestinians facing occupation and forced displacement, the Congolese communities ravaged for resources, the Sudanese civilians made refugees by an ongoing genocide. Their struggles are not peripheral—they are central to the question of home. Any conversation about safety, belonging, and rootedness must include those who are systematically denied it. We are inseparably bound to the broader fight for liberation across all occupied and colonized lands as the project of home is often one of reclamation, reinvention, and resistance.

Amid loss, survival, and the slow work of repair—we still find evidence of home everywhere.

That’s what we’ve tried to gather here: stories of home in wedding altars built in onebedroom apartments, in Trans* joy documented on 35mm film, in friendships forged through shared grief, in the shape of a prayer passed down through generations. We see home in the way people reclaim their bodies through movement, medicine, adornment, or rest. We see it in the quiet endurance of making something—anything—where there was once only absence.

In the making of this issue, we’ve seen how the individual becomes a home they can extend to others in a multitude of ways. Home is a patchwork project—a quilt stitching together place and people. Home is a strange place we have yet to discover. Home is a place we can be welcomed into by others.

It’s not always permanent. It can be chosen. It can be cultivated. It can be found in the leftovers, the offcuts, the in-between spaces where we’re allowed to just be. It is not necessarily where we start—but it may be where we return. It may be where we land. Sometimes, it’s where we are brave enough to stay.

Wherever you are, wherever you’re reading from—this page, this issue, this moment—you’re home. And in this home, you are always welcome.

Copyright © [2025] Fruitslice Inc. All rights reserved.

Everything in this issue belongs to its original creators—the writers, the artists, the dreamers, etc. Fruitslice holds first publication rights, and the right to archive and distribute the work in its originally published form. 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 issue without prior consent (except in the case of brief quotations used in critical reviews and academic work) will be considered utterly disrespectful, generally uncool, and legally questionable—but we aren’t cops.

Art by Daniel Rivera Stahlschmidt

CONTRIBUTORS

Alfie Nawaid

Andy Valk

Ann McCann

Anneliese M. Gelberg

Asher Perez

Ava Pauline Emilione

Bailey Bauer

bellze t

Brie Coleman

Cal O’Reilly

Caryl Townsend

Casper Orr

Kimberly Hall

Knock Off Bowie

Kota Ball

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

Lia Turpin

Lorinda Boyer

Maia Brown-Jackson

Manda

Meg Streich

Micah B

Michael McFadden

Nell Kerr

Celeste deBardelaben

Chloe Oloren

Daisy Slucher

Daniel Rivera Stahlschmidt

Diane Nguyen

Djeneba Deby Bagayoko

Donica Larade

Eden Aphrodite

Emily Rose Miller

Fatima B.

Flossie Hedges

Franky (Frances) Cannon

Izy Carney

Josie Boyer

jp thorn

Kahlea Williams

Kam Bradley

Kate Netwal

Kathleen (Tac) Tacelosky

KD Hack

Kim Arthurs

Octavius Nightingale

Patricia Kusumaningtyas

Philip Kenner

Sabrina Skinner

Safara Louise Parrott

Sam Fitz Sarthak

Scott Pomfret

Sean O’Neill

Shannon Brown

Shelbey Leco

Shelley Lloyd

Taylor Michael Simmons

Theo Elliot

Vas Littlecrow Wojtanowicz

Victoria Ivie

Victoria Jamilé Hernández

V.M. Reilly

v.w.l.

Founding

Editor-in-Chief

Senior Editors

Chloe Oloren

Ann McCann

Casper Orr

Em Buth

Poetry Editors

Non-fiction

Editors

Kayla Thompson

Meg Streich

Starly Lou Riggs

ashley hunt

Azul Castro

Casper Orr

Eden Aphrodite

Kayla Thompson

Navreet Gill

Rowan Crosthwaite

Tess Conner

KD Hack

Azul Castro

Adam Mac

Casper Orr

Chloe Oloren

Danny LaVigne

Em Buth

Kam Bradley

Kahlea Williams

Kayla Thompson

KD Hack

Rhyker Dye

Tess Conner

Fiction Editors

Andi Rand

Azul Castro

Bailey Bauer

Chloe Oloren

Danny LaVigne

Em Buth

Rowan Crosthwaite

Starly Lou Riggs

Tess Conner

Spotlight Editors

Misc. Editors Submission Managers

Art Directors

Cover Photo

Bailey Bauer

Casper Orr

Chloe Oloren

Danny LaVigne

Em Buth

KD Hack

Rowan Crosthwaite

Casper Orr

Chloe Oloren

Em Buth

Bellze Tandoc

David Cruz

Layla Razek

Melanie Zhgenti

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

Manda

TEAM FRUITSLICE

Executive Council

Ann McCann

Cam Reid

Caroline Gharis

Casper Orr

Chloe Oloren

Em Buth

Jason Wayne Wong

Kayla Thompson

Meg Streich

Melanie Zhgenti

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

Rhyker Dye

Starly Lou Riggs

Board of Directors

Founding Editor-in-Chief

Art Directors

Senior Designer

Project Management

Ann McCann

Chloe Oloren

Jason Wayne Wong

Chloe Oloren

Melanie Zhgenti

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

McKenna Gray

Bellze Tandoc

Danny LaVigne

Kim Do

Leilany Sosa

Submission Managment

Grant Coordinators

Bellze Tandoc

David Cruz

Layla Razek

ashley hunt

Elisha Sawyer

Kahlea Williams

Accountant and Financial Strategist

Creative Strategy and Operations

Website Design and Technical Support

Internal Community Director

Publicity Coordinator

Events Team

Luchia Liu

Social Media Marketing Lead

Social Media Team

Caroline Gharis

Casper Orr

Olivia Bannerman

Puzzle Designer

Rhyker Dye

Starly Lou Riggs

Beau Beatrix

Caroline Gharis

Hailey Green

Kim Do

Hannah Potter

Caroline Gharis

Chloe Oloren

Daisy-Drew Smith

Hailey Green

Melanie Zhengti

Nicole Hernandez Reyes

Micah B

The Bigger Picture

We are Always in Jacksonville Words by Shelley Lloyd

Family Home Evening Words by Chloe Oloren

Ode to SGV Words and Photos by Victoria Ivie

Adopting “Home” Words by v.w.l

The Model Apartment Words by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

I have never known home Words and Photos by Sarthak

Sweet Little Lies Words and Art by Sabrina Skinner

A record for living in queer time Words by Shannon Brown

Built, Not Found Words by Lorinda Boyer

Lalish, Duhola Village, Yazidi children and Khanke IDP camp

Words and Photos by Maia Brown Jackson

Carrie Bradshaw With A Baby Harness On: Notes On Nesting Words by Ann McCann

Welcome Home, Fellow Traveler Words by Octavius Nightingale finding some body Words by Diane Nguyen

The Conservation of Monarchs Art by Victoria Jamilé Hernández

New Orleans Photos by Shelbey Leco

Watch out for the bones Words by bellze t.

People of the (African) house Words by Djeneba Bagayoko

Saturn Returns To Find You, As Garden Art by Kim Arthurs

Fervent for the Hunger Words by KD Hack

Swingers, Collateral, and the Sunset Strip Words and Photos by Celeste deBardelaben

Love Thy Neighbor, No. 1,2, & 3 Words and Photos by Sam Fitz

I Can’t Go Home To My Fatherland Words by Littlecrow Wojtanowicz

The Body Politic

Ghost Brook Words by Franky (Frances) Cannon

People Are Dying, I Hope I Can Change Art by Andy Valk

i’m doing this because i love u Art by Nell Kerr

Do You Know Me? Words by Lia Turpin Language

You Are Here, Not There Words by Safara Louise Parrott

As Close to Worship As We’ll Get Words and Art by Daisy Slucher

We are Always inJacksonville

Welcome to East Hampton — No, Really, Welcome

Reality does not run along the neat straight lines of the printed page1—an unwelcoming welcome dinner in East Hampton, New York is where it comes to a head, which is hilarious because I only just got here.

The drama teacher corners me and tells me that my aunt has told the entire staff all about me—For gossip inflamed her with a passion2—all about my family. About my stepdad’s carport setup—three TVs, a fridge, an oyster pit, a bar, a smoker, four grills, two high top tables, and a pair of heaters—and how he and my mom never use the living room.

Anyway, he wanted to let me know that they all voted for Obama with a hard look in his eye.

And I’m wondering—still wondering over a decade later—what the hell it was that my aunt told her coworkers (my coworkers, our coworkers) about her redneck niece.

What a welcome. I have the rest of the school year to spend with these folks, faced with the doxa which has labeled me white trash before I opened my mouth.

Words by Shelley Lloyd

registers, I find myself most drawn to the third affective register that surfaces in this passage: exhaustion.4

But I run off into the city whenever I can and wander around. I have a friend who lives here but I’m scared to call him.

He knows too much.

Too often we forget that we have the right to leave if we want to. We have the right to deny our use,

and, through this, close the wounds created by the world fed on the binary rhetoric.5

Where are we? Is this Jacksonville?6 When isn’t it? We always are.

L’atopie—

But must we choose between delight and dread? Are these our only options?3

And it lingers, through Doctor Who marathons and Talking Heads dance parties in my room like the constant buzzing in my ears now has meaning. Beyond these two

1 Sadie Plant, Zeros + ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture

2 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

3 Cynthia Barounis, “Wretched Refuse: Disability, Disposables, and the Cripistemology of Camp”

4 Ibid.

5 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism

6 Jillian Weise, “Dream About The War on Opioids by Someone Who Uses Opioids, Responsibly, For Chronic Pain.”

Words Are Weapons

(And I’m Not Good at Dodgeball)

Language itself is a violent thing.

Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure.7

It’s 2004, I’m sitting in the sunroom of a stranger in Bracknell, England burning through my calling card and trying not to scream at the person on the other end of the line back in Jacksonville. My best friend broke up with his boyfriend the day before I left. The boyfriend I introduced him to and was friends with. Who he broke the heart of and put me in a horrible spot by doing so. There are a lot of things that I want to say during this call.

Not the least of which is that he is ruining my trip.

I’ll find an internet cafe when I get to London.

Queer silence clings to the potential that absence can do work.8

Our friendship lasted less than a year after I got back from England.

Memories in the Margin: Because Apparently I’m a Hoarder Now

Tickets, receipts, and business cards count as things at the same time that they count as subgenres of the document; they are patterns of expression and reception discernible amid a jumble of discourse, but they are also familiar material objects to be handled—to be shown and saved, saved and shown—in different ways.9

I keep a lot of things that I really ought just to throw out. In a book, I recently found an airline ticket: Indianapolis to Charlotte, American Airlines flight number 5487, Gate B10, Departing at 5:01 PM on March 30, 2018, Seat 15C, Group 8. I forgot about the actual events that would lead to the need for the old-school, printed-at-the-gate boarding pass in this day and age until I found it.

7 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

What does it look like—or feel like—to salvage the unsalvageable?10 To hoard useless trash that should be taken away and thrown in the dumpster?

I remember going to Indianapolis, of course. It was a quick 24-hour trip to present at the Popular Culture Association conference and then back to Clemson.

I spent three of those hours virtually attending one of my graduate seminars. I presented at an impossibly early hour. I ate nothing but aloo gobi in an attempt to forestall any further cravings for curry when I got back to an Indian foodless Clemson.

8 J. Logan Smilges, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence

9 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

10 Cynthia Barounis, “Wretched Refuse: Disability, Disposables, and the Cripistemology of Camp"

WE ARE ALWAYS IN JACksONVILLE

But now I remember that it was the flight back from the conference that was an absolute nightmare. My flight was delayed long enough that I would have missed my connection in Charlotte if I hadn’t sobbed to the gate agent that I absolutely had to get on a flight, any flight, to Charlotte because my cats were home alone and were probably getting hungry (I wasn’t sure when Shauna had come over to feed them in the morning) until the Delta gate agent found an American Airlines flight she could get me on.

Never fly anywhere with me; if the flight out doesn’t get delayed and requires rebooking in order to make connections, the one back definitely will.

When I moved, I unearthed books I hadn’t seen since that unreal year in New York. Books that I had lovingly selected at The Strand. Books that had sat in the trunk of my car for years. Books on Oscar Wilde, books on Flannery O’Connor. Wilde’s love letter to Bosie. O’Connor’s prayer journal.

A ticket stub for a Placebo show.

The blank areas allow onlookers to reconcile their own reality as they grapple with the pagina; these are spaces to remember where one exists as a reader.11

Trash or Treasure? The Art of Dumpster Diving (Emotionally)

And pictures of my father, of Ocala, and Jaguars games when he would take me at the end of a visitation—or, more often than not, meet me at the park and ride in Mandarin. And we would spend five hours side by side but alone, both of us becoming one with the sea of teal. Me with gold glitter running down my face.

Pictures of Joyce and me at Warped Tour.

Memories of someone else, maybe.

Maybe I was trying to throw that me away finally. To throw her in the dumpster with those pictures.

When I left Clemson, I threw hundreds of pictures in the dumpster near my apartment alongside the listing cat tree and the lamp that refused to work except when it wanted to—usually in the middle of the night after I had gone to bed.

Pictures of high school winter guard competitions and trips to Orlando, Miami, Tallahassee, and Tampa, and seemingly everywhere in between.

A photographic map of Florida seen through a teenager’s eyes.

Along with the junk and the failure lives a camp cripistemology, created by returning to camp’s origins as a trash aesthetic and as a set of relations to and among discarded objects.12

But of course, I couldn’t get rid of it all, and no matter how long it has been since I legally became someone else (thirteen years last February),

I am still here, and they are still me.

A cripistemology of camp allows space for tears.

Tampa, Time, and Other Holding Patterns

As a kid, my hockey stick scraped against the rough pavement of our street.

Today the cold wind off the Hillsborough River steals my breath as my hands freeze around my beer and I wait to get inside the arena.

Yes.

I moved to Tampa for the hockey.

But—I’m not sure I ever lived there. I never unpacked my clothes in the three years I lived in my apartment. I never hung up my pictures.

I existed.

Back in Jacksonville: Home Is Where the Hurt Is

I’ve been reading Survival Strategies by Tennison S. Black and I’m being haunted by two stanzas from “I Was Born For Rainy Days But.”

because I left something of me13 I’ll just remix them—

Remixing is an act of self-determination; it is a technology of survival.14

but, anyway—

I waved up an exorcism of my origin—but I’m going back, anyway15

moving back to Jacksonville. Again.

A truck full of boxes and a nearly empty bank account.

Homecoming, Question Marks, and the Inevitable Crying

When I flew back home for the holidays from New York in 2013, I didn’t even make it back to the house before my mom and I made our way through three pitchers of margaritas at the La Nopalera in Mandarin.

It’s just down the road from the apartment my mom and I lived in before she met my stepdad.

It was snowing when I flew out of McArthur. I’m shedding layers the longer I sit across from my mom.

The idea that return is the same as homecoming is a myth.16

I want to cry.

I don’t know if it is because I’m happy I’m home, or if—

Family Home Evening

Words by Chloe Oloren

We never locked our doors in the house that I grew up in. Nothing to steal, nowhere to run. Besides, everyone was watching.

My neighborhood was a deliberately engineered social experiment. Mormonism had arranged our lives into “wards”— geographical divisions that determined (among other things) when you attended church, when you cleaned the building, and who monitored your spiritual progress. Every neighborhood in the world is theoretically divided into these mormon jurisdictions. Someone has certainly drawn a circle around your home on a map. You are someone’s spiritual responsibility, even if—especially if—you’ve never considered mormonism at all.

I remember someone once warned my mom to lock our car doors at night—not because of theft, but because it was a good year for home gardening and the neighborhood had a surplus of zucchini. People were leaving bags of them in unlocked cars. You can only make so much zucchini bread before you start to resent generosity.

In Utah, these wards are compressed—just a few streets long. The bishop, three doors down; the relief society president across the street; the seminary teacher, next door. Every backyard is a shared backyard, every child a little missionary-in-training. There was no real sense in being alone. I’d bike through the neighborhood, stuffing my T-shirt with cherries from trees that didn’t belong to us. Property lines existed only in theory.

Art by Andy Valk

We all knew the name of the police officer in town because he had nothing better to do than chase teenagers for jaywalking or being out past curfew. Officer Thurston, otherwise known as “Thirsty.” As in “Thirsty” to get some high schoolers in trouble.

But the policing that regularly took place was much more insular, a pattern deeply embedded in mormon history. We all knew who was watching. The bishop. The relief society president. The ward gossip. But none of them were as powerful as the voice in your own head.

Utah was constructed to look like zion, feel like order, and erase whatever came before. The straight streets, the templecentered design, the imported flowers, and the artificial rocks—all of it serving the narrative of a divine plan rather than acknowledging the violence of settlement. Paradise requires both construction and erasure.

All of this—the wards, the self-surveillance, the cherries, and the gossip—wasn’t random or organic. It was designed with meticulous precision.

I started to wonder if I’d been planted too— if everything about me was being groomed to look natural, while nothing actually was. I carried a kind of low-grade nausea everywhere I went. I didn’t know why I felt disconnected, only that the world around me was seamless and I felt like a glitch. I kept thinking: it’s not supposed to feel like this. Everyone else seemed so at home. Why didn’t I?

Mormonism is a religion of order and bureaucracy. Mainstream mormonism today has lost most of its mysterious fantasy-sexcult energy from Joseph Smith’s time. Now, it’s mostly a corporation run by repressed conservative old white men, shaped by the red scare, and obsessed with paperwork. That obsession with control isn’t just spiritual, but extends to the land itself.

When Brigham Young stood on the hill with his wives and followers and declared, “This is the place”—a phrase now printed on everything from license plates to baby onesies—he was engaging in that most american tradition of declaring paradise on stolen land. The Ute tribes who already lived there weren’t just inconvenient obstacles to a divine real estate development; they were real people with their own complex civilization, spiritual practices, and relationship to the land. There is a horrifically brutal and often buried history between the mormon settlers and the Indigenous people they displaced. Popular books about pioneers celebrate the handcarts and the seagulls that saved the crops, but remain silent about things like the Circleville Massacre1, the Bear River Massacre2, and the forced relocations3. This selective remembering isn’t accidental—it’s as deliberate as the grid system of Salt Lake City.

The feminist scholars I would later read gave me language for this: epistemic injustice, the damage done when your experience is rendered unintelligible by dominant narratives. When you are told, repeatedly, that what you feel is wrong, impossible, or sinful. When the pain in your body is reframed as spiritual weakness.

Everything around me was organized around worthiness. Worthy to go to the temple. Worthy to be a missionary. Worthy to have the spirit with you. Worthy to have a loving husband. I didn’t know how to measure worth except that mine always felt precarious.

Then I had sex.

When I lost my virginity at 17, my bishop told me that sexual sin was second only to murder and I was no longer worthy to enter the temple.

I want to be precise about what this means. In mormonism, they baptize the dead. The living stand in for those who died without knowledge of the true church. We gather names from census records and baptize them by proxy. I had done hundreds of these by 17.

But when I committed adultery, I stained my worthiness. Every baptism I’d performed was null. Their souls, waiting in the spirit

1Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, “The Circleville Massacre,” accessed May 24, 2025, https://pitu.gov/the-circlevillemassacre/.

2Darren Parry, *The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History* (Salt Lake City: Common Consent Press, 2019).

3Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, “Chapter 4: Paiutes,” in A History of Utah’s American Indians, ed. Forrest S. Cuch (Salt Lake City: Utah State Division of Indian Affairs, 2000), https://historytogo.utah.gov/uhg-history-american-indians-ch-4/.

world, would continue waiting. I had failed them through my unworthiness. I’d ruined their only chance. Their eternal progress stalled because my body had betrayed them. I carried not just personal shame but cosmic responsibility.

I felt dirty. I felt heavy. I felt irredeemable. The mathematics of mormon damnation are precise. This is gaslighting elevated to theological principle: convince teenagers that their normal desires have metaphysical consequences. Create a system where salvation and damnation operate on an existential blockchain, where each transaction is recorded permanently, where forgiveness exists in theory, but the ledger never really clears.

I started to notice how everyone knew which families had a wayward kid, even if no one ever said it outright. Girls who dressed “too loud” got modesty talks in the bishop’s office. How no one ever swore— not just in front of adults, but ever. It was like the language itself had been scrubbed clean. Every interaction came with a kind of glossy politeness, but underneath it was simmering fear. A fear of stepping out of bounds. Of being seen in the wrong light. Of disappointing someone who might be watching.

What’s most difficult to explain to outsiders is how this system manufactures its own justification. When all measurements of worth are internal to the system, you can never appeal to external standards. When your community has created its own epistemology—its own process for determining what counts as knowledge— doubt itself becomes evidence of unworthiness rather than legitimate questioning.

Art by Josie Boyer

It took years to realize that what I’d been raised in wasn’t a home, but a film set— perfect from the front, all scaffolding and emptiness behind. The manicured lawns and ordered streets weren’t signs of paradise, but control. Mormonism is about control— of land, of bodies, of narrative. The most tightly monitored communities are often the ones that boast about having nothing to hide. The most inescapable prisons are the ones we mistake for home.

We’re shaped by the first systems we live in, even as we learn to reimagine them. Freedom isn’t the absence of constraint, but rather the ability to choose which constraints give our lives meaning. What

I was seeking wasn’t boundlessness, but agency; not the absence of structure, but structures I had actually consented to.

The journey out of the system that raised and erased me required a complete ontological restructuring. I had to relearn what constitutes reality, what counts as evidence, what love looks like without conditions attached. I had to rebuild myself without the scaffolding of certainty.

Now I live in a house with doors that I can lock when I want privacy and open when I choose connection. I plant native flowers that grow wild and unplanned. I’ve drawn up new blueprints for a life where worth isn’t measured by compliance, and where boundaries are respected not as barriers but as the frames that make genuine intimacy possible.

Sometimes, I’ll feel that familiar sensation— that someone is watching, measuring, noting my failings in the cosmic ledger. But I’m learning that what they called sin was often just humanity. What they called faith was an oppressive structure created to keep us small. What they called zion was just a facade with darkness underneath it all.

I still believe in transcendence, just not the kind that requires uniformity. I believe in the sacred, just not the kind that needs constant policing. I believe in community, but the kind constructed through mutual recognition rather than mutual monitoring. For the first time, I understand what home actually means; not a perfect place where nothing is out of line, but a messy, honest space where I can finally, completely, be myself.

Ode to SGV Words and Photos by Victoria

Ivie

For 28 years, the San Gabriel Valley has been my home

Born and raised, I have an extreme love of the beautiful, nature-filled, diverse, and often overlooked small cities that make up the SGV.

Seeing the Eaton fire’s devastation to the communities of Altadena and Pasadena (aka Dena) firsthand has brought a new pain and meaning to “home.”

The place where I was born, where I had my heart broken more times than I can count, where I lost my dad and grandpa, where I made connections, broke my leg, was a caregiver, volunteered, learned to drive, and too many other memories to recount.

The SGV home is hurting, ravaged and working to repair.

to belong and be provided for.

Even while physical homes, and decades of memories that made up the buildings that hold so much value were turned to ash, SGV communities came together to provide fire victims a sense of communal home, a place to belong and be provided for. Hope, resiliency, strength, happy memories, and legacies—those are also the things that make Dena Strong.

These photos were taken while I was driving around the ruins of Altadena and parts of Pasadena, interviewing predominantly people of color who had lost so much to the fire. To the families who have shared their pain, loss, and worries for the future, thank you and I wish the best for you. May this area recover, rebuild, and keep the deep cultural history of so many SGV Black, Latine, and Asian families.

Adopting "Home"

Words by v.w.l

Dollhouse

She is pressed against the window and it is cold on her fabric skin. Nothing is outside. She is shivering. She never felt so frozen, so consumed at Home she’s not allowed to say that anymore because she is home. That’s what they tell her. No, she says. No. This can’t be home, not this place—please, not here. Where the glass is freezing and the palm is burning on her cheek. Where she spits out Mother like a curse and her brothers are her cousins and her uncle is her dad who is never home and her Mother is raising her hand again already, no patience, no limitations, and her sister’s—her real sister’s—tears water a feeling deep inside: a sickness they tell me is Home. Welcome Home. Welcome to your new* family*, welcome to your new name. Her hand, sewn up again, embroidered in unrecognizable letters. Frantically, I search the back of mine, praying the stitches are skin deep, that they have not touched me and have just branded this doll they call me, but is not Me. It is not Me. That name is not Mine, but they are in the Dollhouse and I am Outside of it, and they dress her in pink rose dresses and tie up her hair and call her theirs. And she looks at me, afraid. And I see through her eyes briefly, for just a moment, and all the threads I’ve unraveled tighten across my neck in an instant, and we are (un)done again. Mother says I am beautiful. I shower in the dark. I cannot see the doll, or the walls, and I am Outside again.

Negative

I am an hour away from that house and I can breathe. Oxygen burns my lungs; it is so foreign to me now. My voice is low. I try out being myself. I gift someone the truth. They use language for me no one else has used before, call me things I was told I could never be, wasn’t born to be. I can breathe.

I am thirty minutes away, and I can feel the tips of my fingers. They drum on my knee in the car. Basketball shorts hang loosely off me. My hair is short, cut at the root. No one says anything when I hold a boy’s hand. We are allowed to be friends. Allowed to be.

I am across the sea, and I can clearly see my face, my skin, my teeth. Winter cradles my face here in this faraway city. Even the snow is kind. Maybe He remembers. I try not to. Funny how something that once made me feel so dead now makes me certain I am alive.

I am across the country, and the sea knows my name. Savors it. Engraves it on breaking waves against the seawall. Stows it away in the roots of the mangroves. Reminds me of it when I come to the beach late at night to stare into the dark.

I am across the street and I am safe. The neighbors are walking their pigs. I walk behind their house, out of sight from the house’s windows. I am unseen. I am free, for the moment.

I am outside the front door and blood rushes to my face: a reflex. A knowing of what is behind the door. new*: but not really new—new in the way they look at you, new in name, but the same family you were in before the adoption (but also, not) family*: in the sense of blood and bone, of legal branding, of “Hi yes this is my Mom, she told me I had to call her that now.” Conditions may apply (if you ever wanted it to feel like home that is)

Orchard

Chlorine laps at the small of my back as I float face up. The backyard is so quiet this time of day. All the other kids are at school. Daddy is at work. I don’t know where my sister or nanny is. It is just me, the bees, and the pool on a hot day. I feel the depth of the water beneath me. The citrus trees are full of fruit again. Oranges, lemons, and grapefruits checker the mingling green leaves. Lizards scurry up the walls of the house, their tongues flicking the air. Inside, the tile floors are cool to the touch. It is quiet. Like no one is home at all.

The streets, too. Empty, and quiet. Across the street and four houses down lives my babysitter. Down the road and to the right, my best friend is home. I see the U-shaped driveway, the Blu Ray set we use when we visit. The backyard full of groundhog holes. His father with the icy blue eyes and cheery smile. His mother's silver car. To the left of my house, my school waits for me each morning, close enough to walk. Perfectly rock-shaped holes dot the sand along the fence where I waste time before school digging up anything I can. Imprints of my own making. Indents made by my hands and feet. These are my streets, my sand, my home, my pool. My body, floating in the water, watching the sky above. No one is here but me.

[blank]

I wake up to the sound of my parents' dogs barking. For a moment, it feels like I’m back in that place, but we moved years ago, and I am no longer a child.

My arm brushes against my partner’s. Our cat is asleep on the end of the bed. When she notices I’m awake, she hurries to be in my face, asking rudely for breakfast. The morning is barely escaping into the gaps in our blackout curtains. Our room is small, smaller than our dorm was. The walls are almost bare, but over the last few months, our things have slowly taken over the space like Spanish moss. New curtains here, coat rack there, bookshelf covered in plushies and crystals in the corner. No one has come to wake me up. No one is yelling. It’s so quiet, it’s almost like no one is home.

But they’re home, here in bed with me. I roll over to wrap my arms around them. Immediately, they push me away and grumble back to sleep. Now, our cat is yelling at the door. There’s a feeling, one I haven’t felt since I was very young. A sense of ease. Of belonging. And I’m not even really “home” yet. I'm only resting here in this unfamiliar house that replaced our Dollhouse.

I lie awake and let the morning wash over me.

The Model Apartment

Words by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

A little musing on dream homes and the Queer imagining of said homes.

It’s the yellow flowers in the bottom left corner of the fourplex that draws the eye. It’s the Edison bulbs on the square chandelier in the dining room. It’s the lack of a television. It’s the Spanish Colonial Revival style of the exterior meeting the craftsman style of the interior. It’s the serape draped over the boxy tangerine couch, the drip painting above the terracotta fireplace, the cherry walls whose corniced corners connect to the cherry beams on the ceiling.

It’s everything: it’s the model apartment, the apartment you imagine moving into when you’re older, the place you live when you no longer have debt and feel more adjusted, when you’ve abandoned your worries and are actually living the life you’ve been dreaming about. This apartment is a fact and a fiction on Sycamore Avenue, a few units north of your own apartment, occupying space in your mind for when you grow up.

You try to pass the apartment whenever you can, going out of your way to indulge the prickles to look in and around from the sidewalk. You most often find yourself luxuriating outside while walking with your dogs, idling there as you encourage their relief on the apartment’s climbing plants and fruiting bushes. You pretend to stare at your phone, looking over your sunglasses, and into the apartment. It’s the northeast corner unit, first floor, the building’s centerpiece that’s just left of center. You are eye level with the paned picture window that is flanked by column windows that offer glances of the front door and fireplace, although these views are obscured by the ruffles of vining plants stationed on the cutest miniature makeshift balconies, kind guards that climb from first to second floor.

You’ve never seen anyone in the apartment. It’s empty but markedly habitated, even if only by your imagination. In fact, you’ve seen yourself in the model apartment as a Gen X version of you with the Gen X version of your boyfriend and the Gen X version of your dogs and friends and family. You are having a wonderful dinner party, where everyone feasts on decadent foods you made using a stand mixer, served out of little white ramekins with indented grooves on the sides. Everyone drinks wine out of matching crystal stemware and eats

Art by Izy Carney

leafy salads from your garden off plates from a place like Heath. No one has a hyperrestrictive diet. With your guests, you are a portrait of the united nations. The party sits around a reclaimed wood table whose centerpiece is a mass of lit pillar candles that you don’t worry are a fire hazard. Words like business account and persimmon and Bryn Mawr and Marrakech are tossed around and no one feels alienated or dumb when they are used. There are no kids. Everyone is from the East Coast. Everyone has time to go to the gym. Everyone reads. Everyone has a clean, specific gender. One of the guests mentions a friend who passed away. Only red wine is drunk. There is no still water. Someone has a movie deal. Another sold a book. A home was just closed on. Everyone, in their own way and while, looks out the paned picture window at a shaggy twentythirtysomething standing with a few dogs at the edge of the lawn. You look out from the dinner table and think about how this young person must have it so much simpler than you do. You smile because, really, your gay reality is much less complicated than theirs. You are casually well-balanced, you think.

On another day in the apartment, you are having a quiet afternoon with a giant man. A husband. You share the boxy couch with him. The fireplace is on. The two of you are looking through big books and reading the new yorker from cover to cover. One of you is an architect. The other is an unspecified designer. It’s after work. You talk about what you heard on npr. A single mandarin is a suitable dessert. There is not a computer in the house. You talk about how lovely the apartment looks as the sun sets, but, in your Palm Springs house, the sunset would look all the lovelier. When is the next time you’ll have a weekend or week or month to get away to the Palm Springs house? This is a constant question you and your husband, the giant man, toss at each other until someone catches the idea to just leave, to get in the range rover and go, taking the always packed thom browne weekenders and the ralph lauren towels, getting out of town without needing to tell anyone or ask for anyone’s permission. You invite friends from New York and Miami and D.C. You’ll make a lamb roast. There will be martinis. A boys’ weekend. You will wear the penny loafers.

Another night, another dream, you are alone, with a cigarette. You smoke them casually, on cold nights like this. You drink a scotch with a single rock. Jazz music plays from a big rectangle that blends into the cherry walls. A giant candle flickers from the coffee table. It smells like roasted figs. You are wearing a robe. Your doorbell–a set of actual bells on a gold chain–rings. You open the heavy door. A man with a salt-andpepper beard gives you a hug. He is wearing a leather jacket. You help take his jacket off, pausing to squeeze his firm shoulders before letting go to put the jacket on a mirrored coat rack. You take his large hand and take him to the couch. You offer him a cigarette. He accepts, plucking one from the complicated European packaging, doing so in a knowing way that assures everyone this is not the first, second, third, or even fourth time he has done this. You both sit on the couch and talk about how lovely things are, how lovely the night is, how lovely each other’s eyes are. You offer him a cocktail, rising to the bar cart to prepare something for him. You take a long blink and look out the window. The night is black as violets, he says. Blacker than violets, you reply. You join him back on the couch, handing him his drink in a crystal tumbler. He takes a sip, licks his lips, and places the drink on a leather coaster. You wipe a drop of drink from his beard. Your robe falls open. He looks down and back up. He winks. The two of you laugh. You kiss a kiss that suggests this is the only thing that will happen during

You shake your head, looking up and down the street, since nothing is actually happening in this apartment. There are no people, just beautiful stuff that isn’t yours. You think this standing outside with your dogs, noticing the dusty doormat and dying potted plant on the apartment’s stoop. The velvet curtains are drawn more than usual. The lights always seem to be on during the day. The candles are never lit. There’s an untended stack of magazines by the window. Does anyone actually live in the apartment? Does anyone live the Queer lives you think they’re living behind those walls? These imagined lives in the model apartment, these fuzzy facsimiles of cinematic people from a late 1990s fantasy, are nonfictional, off living beyond these walls.

You walk back home. You wonder about the people you hope live there, these future selves in their present tenses. You walk up the woody stairs of your Spanish Colonial Revival building. You take your dogs off their leashes. You sit at a window facing the street, looking at the trees. You think. You pour a glass of wine into a milky, stemless cup. You stare at a painting on your wall. The sun sets, casting the room in pinks and oranges. You go back to the window. You catch eyes with someone younger, someone who was standing there, someone indulging a look. They walk away, quickly, eyes off in another direction.

I have never known home

Words and Photos by Sarthak

I have never known home

but I know the walls that surround it, the moon light that never enters, the room that no one visits, and the thing that everyone forgets.

I have never known home or the grocery lists on the refrigeratorbut I know everything that wasn’t listed Jeevika December, 2023

like poems that you thought of reading or your mother’s favourite colour, or the note your father once wrote from the time he used to smile.

I have never known home, only the photographs of faces that don’t exist; Probably lying in the attic in that one closet

Rohann

November, 2023

which no one really remembers the purpose of just that it was given by someone to someone else and has existed through time and space and parallels. Alas, the closet survived longer than the faces it holds.

Ayann

Anonymous August, 2023

where I realised, for the first time that you will never see papa smile again or mama wearing her favourite shade of red or the faces locked inside the ancient closet or the ugly fact that you are twenty-five now or how you understand more than you know you aren’t home, and you don’t miss it either you are inside an apartment on another street where you only know how to breathe

I have never known home, I have only known all that hides underneath it and the street that lies outside the window and for now, that is all that you need to know.

April, 2023

ISweet Little Lies

Words and Art by

Sabrina Skinner

make reliquaries. Memorials, sculptures that exist alone or form altars; my work acts to contain disjointed memories, thoughts, and desires within the vessel of clay. Objects that are sired by personal metaphors, their creation immortalizes transient moments. From large installations to functional pottery, I connect interpersonal symbolism and popular culture through the depiction of surreal arranged imagery. Through the use of narrative devices to convey deeper meanings within the form, I illustrate personal stories within fantastical scenes. Drawing inspiration from historical forms, a sense of nostalgia and (dis)comfort remain in the familiar silhouettes of home and nature. By joining together abstraction and realism, an allegory of truth emerges. Where through odd collages of repeated symbols and mundane objects, the weight of memory takes shape.

By exploring subversive humor and subjective memory, my work is the embodied presence of a process driven urge for satisfaction and control. Self-indulgent attention is paid to texture and pattern, while a restrained color palette allows the form to remain visually powerful. Embodying a manner of holding, the lines between body and form blur. While texture invites touch as a way of preserving and cathartically acknowledging desires, negative space represents the duality of being “whole.” Raw and empty; reliquaries are filled by words unspoken, and truths unknown. This duality is further expressed within forms of growth and decay, opulence and the mundane, and the urban alongside the rural; each theme acknowledging the presence of conflict within the internal world. Clay, in its age and surety, is the material I’ve found that best expresses the innate and fluxing nature of human connection and our presence here on earth. Combining natural subjects and materials, later subverted by man-made objects—the conjunction of these parts express the turmoil of our ongoing and recurrent states of being. Thus, by making what was once fleeting, now solid and whole, I hope to preserve those experiences and feelings in their full authenticity; acknowledging the past, and taking back control of the narrative.

Ultimately, the sculptural forms I create are a collage of fragmented memories. Three dimensional, and heavily detailed—the clay is visually and tactilely familiar. Meant to portray a kind of vulnerable whimsy; my collaged arrangements (both the odd and the mundane) create an illusion which represents larger concepts of home, comfort, and uncertainty. Through their combined installation, these forms elicit a subjective, palatable experience; the captured moment of that final space. Thereby embodying shared sensory memories collectively to express the inherent ephemerality of our lives, the beauty found in decay, and the benefit of liminality.

A record for living in queer time:

Words by Shannon Brown

1. “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is

not enough, that indeed something is missing,”

(Muñoz 1).

It is the way that we lose time down by the river. All of us. I bring my lover first and kiss her when we get up to our ankles. We watch the 10 o’clock beavers slide out, troubling the smooth surface of the brown-blue expanse. 10 o’clock becomes whatever o’clock and our toes have gone numb. The wood is aromatic and freshly cut by the tooth. Kiss me on the bank like the animal I am. We will feel the fur rise between our fingers and cushion out the cold. The June moon is half-bitten and we are something new under it.

2. “...queerness is not quite here,” (Muñoz 22).

Our language pours from the nightstand and buzzes between us. The day begins at midnight and not at all. Obscure me into the morning that we call morning because the welcome light wanted for a name. We name it what do you want to do now? Whatever it is, it is unproductively, ridiculously, painfully, temporally, wastefully gorgeous.

3. “...the mark of the utopian is the quotidian,” (Muñoz 23).

Your body is like mine is like yours. Soft belly and blue eyes that look up at a low prairie cloud when they roil, like mussel purple against the iridescent nacre of a high-drifted one. Our time is on the side of a folk hill. Press the line of your spine into the softness of my belly. I will sigh hard and it will make you want to get up. Feel my air and know that I am the sturdy bank. Packed clay in white and gray layers, sweet humus and grasses. The river driftwood of my ribcage settles back into the dirt when you breathe.

4. “...queerness as horizon,” (Muñoz 19).

We are not quite here yet. Stitch your fragmented vision into mine while we walk. But it doesn’t feel like walking, not all the time. It feels like gliding and flapping and pushing our aching sky-bound muscles toward an elsewhere. We are on every dockside and harbourfront, wondering what that wave broke over way out there. We are storm-watching the flat canola field. We are the pearl, pushing through the fleshy present toward the thin daylight opening of our shell. We are. Hard and shining and here and not at all. Works Cited Muñoz, Jose Esteban, et al. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Tenth Anniversary edition. New York University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.18574/9781479868780.

Built, Not Found

Words by Lorinda Boyer

Sandy and I waited until marriage was legal in our home state of Washington. We weren’t interested in chasing approval across state lines. We wanted to marry where our roots ran deep—where we lived, paid our taxes, and waved to neighbors who never asked questions. Some folks didn’t understand. “Why wait?” they asked. But we weren’t the ones who needed to move. The law needed to catch up to us. For Queer folks, belonging isn’t ambient— it’s constructed. Forged. We gather the rusted scraps of acceptance and weld them into shelter. Over and over. And there’s a kind of quiet defiance in holding out for what feels right. In saying: I belong here. I deserve this. Love, after all, shouldn’t require a passport. But the fight for legal recognition was only half the battle. The deeper reckoning was internal—carved from years of trying to be someone I wasn’t.

Eleven years later, I sit on the porch with Sandy, coffee in hand, toes bare against the wood, and I can still feel the twin weights I carry. Grief and joy. The religion that raised me told me I must pick their side, the right side. Blend in, straighten my spine—and my sexuality—and say all the right things. And I tried. God, I tried. I told myself to keep quiet, to blend in, to be grateful. I wore the smile like armor, married the man like it might save me, and swallowed the truth so hard it cut going down

But truth doesn’t stay buried. Not when it splinters like bone.

Mine started as a whisper—barely there, just a breath under the door. But whispers grow teeth. And one day, it didn’t knock. It blew the whole damn thing wide open.

Coming out wasn’t all confetti and Pride parades. It was messy. It was reckoning. I had to unlearn everything I’d been taught about what it meant to be good, to be loved, to be enough. But authenticity doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t soften its edges for comfort. It demands space, it demands light.

Still, I carry joy around like currency. The quiet kind, hard-earned and deeply felt. The comfort of Sandy’s breath rising and falling beside me in sleep. The way our laughter fills the room without asking permission. I now carry a truth I didn’t always believe: My love is real. And it’s right.

In living as myself—a Queer woman, a wife, a survivor—I lost things. Predictability. Approval. A few people I once would’ve fought to keep. But I found my voice. I found peace in pieces—on porches, in protests, in the low hum of safety I now call marriage. I found color so rich and defiant it made the gray-scale years feel like a ghost I barely remember. That’s home. Not a place you stumble into, but one you build with trembling hands and stubborn joy.

Lalish, Duhola Village,

Yazidi children and Khanke IDP camp

Words and Photos by Maia Brown-Jackson

As a survivor, my skin itself is unsafe. I don’t truly feel at home anywhere. I long for it—I’ve searched the world. One of the places I felt most at home was in Iraqi Kurdistan, welcomed and embraced by the Yazidi survivors of ISIS genocide. These three photographs represent the different forms of home that the Yazidi from Shingal currently have:

Their village, destroyed by ISIS and rebuilt, somewhat, with barely any international aid, a place where many refuse to return.

The most holy place in their culture, where they are always welcome and meant to feel protected.

The IDP camps—overcrowded, unhygienic, fraught with conflict and violence and always in need of supplies.

These are the options they have for home. And still they are enduring. They are fighting. They are asking only that the world remember they exist as they continue, somehow, to have hope for their future.

Carrie Bradshaw With a Baby Harness On: Notes On Nesting

Words by Ann McCann

If you followed my journey of online sperm-searching last year, you will have learned about my wife’s and my foray into the online world of free sperm donations and donors. In the world of capitalism, cash is king, and so it is in the world of sperm purchasing as well. With vials costing several thousands of dollars each at some clinics, and not typically covered by insurance, many turn to facebook and other online groups where donors supply their sperm for free. My wife and I found ourselves among them.

Now that you’re caught up to speed on our search for seed, I ask that you come back home with me. For me, home— which had sometimes been followed by the suffix -less—was usually somewhere I just came back to after work. Not much more, sometimes less. They were short-lived dwellings, of which I jumped to and fro out of necessity, or timing, or convenience. Now, it is where I work, where I spend my days and nights with my best friend, where I play with my pets, where I write, and lately, where I again daydream about being pregnant and caring for an infant alongside my wife.

Shortly after I wrote “Getting Strangers on the Internet Pregnant,”1 my wife and I had actually decided against children. Politics got scarier, we watched babies in Palestine die, our mutual mental health plummeted, and things felt too uncertain to entertain the idea of children. “But nothing has changed!” you might be screaming at the page. But that’s where you’re wrong. Two very important things changed: I am turning thirty, and we just finished rewatching Sex and the City. While I type, I’ve always fancied myself a Carrie,

but as I approach thirty, I find myself crying with Charlotte when she can’t get pregnant and screams about wanting a baby, and yearning when Miranda decides to keep her unexpected pregnancy. I cannot sleep one night, and my wife asks what’s on my mind. “I feel like I’m going crazy but I can’t stop thinking about babies and right now I’m freaking out because I can’t think of any boy names I like!” They get my beta-blockers and cold water, massage my feet, and tell me about their plan to start collecting vintage baby clothes. I calm down and fall asleep.

The next day we, again, make a tentative timeline and action steps towards getting pregnant. We decide which room will be the playroom. I don’t know if I-want-a-baby hormones are real or not, but my body has decided they are and—like a cat circling and scratching a cardboard box before giving birth—they begin making me need to nest in the most frenetic and insane ways. First, it starts with cleaning the “doom room” of half-empty boxes from moving over a year ago that will be a playroom in the future. I unpack, I let go, I check expiration dates on medication, I throw things away, I put all my tools in one spot, I use the top shelf of the closet. Then I sweep. Twice. Then I mop. By hand, with a cleaner and paper towels. The floors have been lived on. My feet are dirty, but the floor is clean. I wash the windows with real glass cleaner. Finally, I hang up my baby quilt that my great-grandma made for me on the wall. The same one I stared up at on my wall as a child myself.

We dream about a big brother followed by two girls. I unpack the last of the boxes from moving. We have two boy

names—just in case—and both girls’ names picked out and have discussed the order in which they will be used. We bring more plants into the home and start our balcony garden. I meticulously research different cribs and decide on one after several nights of google research and reading product reviews. We somehow put more art on the walls and discuss painting them because my wife and I see a shade of yellow on the walls of a friend’s house we both adore. When we tell them about the hard work of turning a Doom Room into a Nursery, they think we mean for plants and I have to find the self-assurance to correct them and tell them we mean for children—I can have a baby, I remind myself, I can raise a child, I can make this choice, I’m going to be a mother. I’m going to be a great mother. Later, my wife and I decide on the nursery room theme.

I’ve played room-tetris every night as I go to sleep, and imagine where bassinets and tummy time stations will go. I realize that our treehouse, surrounded by sun and the tree tops and birds and bees, will be the first home our children remember, and I think about rearranging the art on the walls. Our home is quiet and peaceful as I write this. Incense and candles burn, cats surround my writing perch, my wife quietly journals by my feet. I know it won’t always be this way, especially once children arrive, but it’s more than I’ve ever had before and everything I’ve always wanted.

“Are you writing? You look like Carrie Bradshaw right now, you must be writing.” My wife knows just what to say. Maybe I can be Carrie Bradshaw with a baby. Either way, I’m finally home.

WelcomeHome, Fellow Traveler

Words by Octavius Nightingale

I haven’t gotten braids down quite yet. Smaller ones I can do, despite the painful lack of ribbon and twine and beads to decorate them. Sometimes, I manage a sort of half-up ponytail style, or a braid ‘round my shoulder—my split-end hair scratches and tickles, so it never lasts long. I once managed twin braids, but very quickly despised it.

I wonder if my ancestors had help with their braids. If, before battle or ritual or travel, they all sat together and wove strands of blonde and brown and black, ensuring that no one’s sight was infringed and that they all looked presentable should they die that day.

I grew up with short hair. It was as though my parents weren’t quite ready to leave the comfort of the ‘80s and ‘90s; they downloaded shows from that era for me, as well. My hair was lighter than it is now, chin-length and pin-straight. I cut it shorter in middle school, an attempt at becoming— or at least looking like—a “real boy.” I’m glad I failed. My hair grew back quickly, gentle waves colored like acorns and soil. I didn’t know what to do with it, even how to brush it. I looked to the past for answers.

For a long time, I deemed myself reprehensible—pale and masculine, I was a danger to those around me. The basis of this belief was the truth. If I asked, my parents would tell, and they rarely sugar-coated things. Before reaching double-digits, I was watching true crime and reading historical

fiction concerning Indigenous boarding schools. In my mind, I was an abuser waiting to happen. It was in my blood.

It took me a long time to realize where my blood really came from: a time and place far before the Mayflower and all it brought with it. I realized that I never truly saw myself as an American, or even an Oregonian. The mountains and forests and stars are far stronger and older than any line laid by human minds. It was then that I stopped seeing things so simply, and began to see myself as a forest, a skyscape, a constellation: ancient and holy beyond words.

My cousins tell stories. In these stories, I’m a retired knight living in an isolated sanctuary, having hung up the iron in exchange for incense. Perhaps those stories are true, in a way. Perhaps the blood of some Germanic Christian priest flows alongside that of a Scandinavian vitki, alongside that of Czech archers and Slovakian wanderers.

How much of my existence is an echo of someone else’s? Names and faces long forgotten, yet their blood flows in me, passing quietly through the veins of colonizers and abusers, waiting for someone ready and willing to get back on the path from which we were ripped so long ago. How many of my ancestors bore decorations like me? Silver rings engraved with charms of luck, leather cords bearing pendants of hammered steel in the shape of holy symbols, painted nails and inked skin. How

Photo by Manda

many of them hit bullseyes despite being unable to properly see their target? How many of them worshipped the gods of their ancestors despite or alongside Christianity? How many of them struggled with braiding their own hair, preferring to keep it down anyway? How many of them were me?

In my dreams, I press ink onto papyrus and skin and watch the stars and birds. I travel in search of stories and language, speak many tongues, and soak up every bit of knowledge I can find. I hold a sword forged for me alone, shoot arrows which always hit their target, and divine messages from the gods. I wear robes and tunics, douse my cheeks in starlight and let seedlings sprout from soil-colored waves, and ride a pale gelding. I live in a temple in the mountains, surrounded by starlight and birds.

In the waking world, I haven’t shot an arrow in well over a year. I sit behind a screen and write fantasy. Sometimes poetry.

There are no stars or snow where I live, somewhere between the coast and cliffs of Cascadia. I ride my bike and sing with birds and wait for the Dicentra formosa to bloom. I try hard to learn other languages, scrape up enough money to get another tattoo, and listen to music sung in a language my ancestors once spoke—still alive. I draw stars on my cheeks and sit in the sun. I sew something of a tunic out of old curtains and shuffle tarot cards. I braid my hair as best I can.

The path one is born on doesn’t have to be the one they follow. There is a sort of holiness in forging one’s own path—even more so when they use the remnants of the old. Peeking through the trees and fog to find conveniently forgotten paths and places, plucking histories from bloodlines and bird calls and starlight and sea. The past is never as far behind as believed.

The Conservation of Monarchs

Art by Victoria Jamilé Hernández

finding some body

Whenever I write about my parents, I use the words “mother” and “father.” There is a gravity to them. They’re like the authoritative bell toll of a clock tower. Maybe it’s because it makes me feel like I have my shit together. Maybe I gravitate towards them because they let me be dispassionate; I keep them at this distance so I don’t have to immediately reconcile my diasporic trauma.

My father, steeped in shame as a victim of harsh racism, expedited the assimilation of our family. My parents gave my siblings and I tetherless English names removed from Vietnam or Laos. I can’t speak our mother tongues, and neither can my brothers. I can see my father’s rationale. Erasing any possible traces that marked us as different would spare us from the prejudice and hate he lived through when he sought refuge from what Americans dub the vietnam war.

This detachment has been with me for as long as I can remember. I am, of course, distanced from my Asiatic cultures. Estranged from being able to communicate with my limited-Englishspeaking grandparents. Mostly, I interface with what should be my culture through mispronouncing menu items in Asian restaurants. In effect, the conception of my identity is dissociated from my physical body. I inhabit a Southeast Asian skin, and yet I have no evidence that validates my body’s stake.

This detachment from the body repressed my Queerness for the majority of my life. There is an irony here: I went to an arts high school and attended two arts colleges. I’m sure there have been more closeted individuals in the world, but I like to think it took me three institutions and a children’s cartoon to pull out whatever was repressed inside of me.

I have always felt like I was piloting a fleshy vessel. Like a giant mech in a Japanese anime. If I was the sum of my thoughts and experiences and feelings, then I could detach myself from any physical body I inhabited. This logic certainly paralleled my father’s line of reasoning, that if we lived as Americans, then Americans we were.

In that liminal phase of gradually relaxing COVID-19 restrictions, I streamed She-Ra and the Princesses of Power with my then-partner. We’d always loved kids’ shows; we burned through Hilda and

Words by Diane Nguyen

Gravity Falls and Owl House. I think it was us nursing the hurt kids inside ourselves, letting them live and breathe and laugh and play in ways we never got to.

She-Ra was different for me. It was the first American cartoon with Queer and neurodivergent representation I’d ever seen. My heart melted for Bow’s dads, and I resonated with Entrapta’s one-track mind for tinkering. I cheered for Perfuma and Scorpia.

At the end of it, something clicked for me. I realized that I could tell the little kid inside of me that it was safe to come out now. And I remembered that kid watching Queer anime and wishing with her whole heart how much she wanted to be the women on screen. How much she’d always known and I didn’t. It was like I had finally noticed the ebb-tide, and noticed the people walking along the beach, and realized that I could walk there, too.

I have been transitioning (my mother calls it “transforming”) for three years now. The changes sneak up on me. Like how one day I notice my chest filling out my bra, or the parabolic curve emerging at my waist. I feel so intimately connected to the contours of myself. I don’t just live in the space between them; these outlines are me. I am no longer a ghost haunting these bones. I am corporeal, and I feel like I’ve finally arrived at a place I knew was inevitable.

I am on a video call with my mother and father. I haven’t called them in half a year, which for me isn’t atypical. Their love is encoded: my father asks how the car was running, and if my phone is working well for me. My mother asks about the food she sent. They reiterate a point they’ve made: I need to transfer the car’s title from their name to mine.

“He can do it at his leisure, I didn’t write a date on the form for that reason,” my mother says from off-screen to my father. I say that I know, and we say goodbye.

I walk into the living room and sit on the couch with Liv. She kisses my cheek and asks how it went. “Fine,” I say. “My mother misgendered me off-screen.” I shrug, signaling that I don’t want to talk about it. She fiddles with the wrong remote and I laugh, handing her the correct one. She presses play. “Starfleet is the only family I need,” says Captain Picard

NEW ORLEANS

Watch out for the bones

Words by bellze t.

I was eating bangus today, and my mother told me to watch out for the tinik. This is the closest kind of intimacy I can expect from my mother—a warning about the bones that could bleed my mouth.

Conversations over family dinners are largely occupied with such talk: what each faroff cousin is doing now, when we need to buy groceries this week, the things we cannot consume. All to disguise an unspoken longing to return to somewhere else. I ask my brother to pass the soup.

I feel closest to home when I eat Filipino food. My body has been carved around lechon and sinigang and fish bones. I am a product of my ancestors’ bodies. My bones are their bones, made of what nourished them. But eating our food is as close as I can get to them. I become more aware of the distance between us and the hollow that exists to mourn our degrees of separation. My body has determined what our home is supposed to be like based on the food we eat and is dissatisfied with the loss of it. Eating is intimacy, but such closeness is haunted by people and places I will never truly know. We are only halfway to fullness, my body says.

When I stay at their university apartment, my Queer friends and I usually cook rather than go out to eat. We’re all children of Asian immigrants or immigrants ourselves. Cooking for each other makes me feel as close to them as possible. There is a closeness that I can only find in total consumption, the sacred nature of creating something and nourishing ourselves with it. From bánh xèo to hot pot to ramen, we fill ourselves with meals and memories and rebuild the kind of homes that we have been denied. We revel in sharing utensils. We wash each other’s dishes. We say: “Eat more; we need to finish this lettuce.” “Who left rice on the paddle?!” “Do you want more chili oil, garlic, or fish sauce?”

Then we talk about T, top surgeries, and phalloplasties. Awkward hookups, complaints about apartment hunting, and how worried we are about becoming our parents. We get drunk and laugh at ridiculous grindr messages and hinge profiles. This is it. This is what family conversations are supposed to sound like. The yearning for elsewhere isn’t gone, but we are building a better home that lets us be Asian and Queer.

It’s not a perfect replica of what home should be. All of us hail from distinct diasporas, so we alone cannot fill all of our cultural gaps. We aren’t able to touch the earth of our homelands and feel like it is made for us. The apartment is cramped, full of eight people. There isn’t adequate space on the windowsills for the plants, and the couch hasn’t had pillows all year. Yet as I lather pots, bowls, and the individual tines on forks, my body feels as right as it can be. We are all warm and alive and new.

I am standing at the kitchen sink, surrounded by people who aren’t ashamed to eat.

We are all untethered from our homelands because we would never belong. We’re too u.s. american to be Asian, too Asian to be u.s. american, and too Queer to fully be either. But we will not disinherit the hallmarks of our ancestors’ homes, rooted in distant lands.

Home starts with hungry mouths and ends with satisfied appetites. I refuse to suffer the undignified hunger that denies my Queer self and my Filipino self. I want to savor everything, bones and all.

People of the (African) house

Words by Djeneba Bagayoko

Colonization did a number on all of us. From displacing entire populations, bending nature to colonizers’ will and uprooting trees and people, to demonizing ancestral cultures and practices. One of its most nefarious legacies is the redefinition of the concept of family. This redefining includes the imposition of crystallized gender binaries, the staunch LGBTQIA+ phobia in continental and diasporic African communities, and the so-called need to maintain (colonial) “family values.”

However, not all is lost. As a matter of fact, nothing ever was.

Though the forces of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have been devastating, echoes of who we were before their arrival still live on—in our language, our architecture, and our world-sense.

c c c c

In continental Africa, and more precisely in the languages of Bamanankan (Mali), Jula (Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso) and Wolof (Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania), the terms for family are som g w, lum g w, and waa kër respectively. Their literal translation in English is people of the house. If you’re part of Ballroom or have watched Paris Is Burning, Pose, or Legendary, the translation might already be ringing a bell.

Ballroom culture uses the house as an embodiment of family. This value crossed over from the continent and holds true in the diaspora. Before we delve into it, a little history lesson: Black Ballroom culture emerged in the 1960’s in New York. Queer Black people faced discrimination from their white counterparts, so they separated from them and created their own underground Ball culture. Ballroom became a safe space for Black and Latine Queer folks. Ballroom is a world where those who are marginalized, discriminated against, and oppressed due to their gender and sexual identities are free to express themselves. Competitions—or walks—are a core aspect of the culture where different people and houses compete against each other to snatch trophies and have their name engraved in the pantheon of Queer legends. Ballroom culture restructured the concept and organization of the family, or better yet, it remembered the African way.

Houses are a social structure where Queer people who cannot depend on their biological family unit for acceptance find a home. They are led by house parents: mothers, mostly Butch Queens (Gay Men) or Femme Queens (Transgender Women) or fathers, who are mostly Butch Queens or Butches (Transgender Men). The name of the house parent becomes that of the house and the children. Houses often adopt names of famous designers, stylists, supermodels, or magazines. Some iconic houses include House of Prestige, the Kiki Royal House of Noir, House of Mugler, House of Xtravaganza, House of Pendavis, among others.

Mothers

Other synonyms for family in Bamanankan are:

Denbaya = family from den (child), ba (mother).

Badenya = kinship (when siblings have the same mother).

Balimaya = used for relatives related by blood, friends, and people we love, respect, and hold in high esteem. It is also used in distressing situations to empathize with the other person (e.g. do not worry, my child).

They all center ba, mother.

It is mothers who pass down histories, take care of and spend more time with children. In many African American families, both within and without Ballroom, the mother and the grandmother are often the pillars of the house.

In Ballroom, people find solace, protection, support, food, a roof, and love in chosen families after their biological relations shun them. Although house fathers do exist, house mothers are more predominant. This is reminiscent of matrilineal family structures in Africa where the family is an extension of the mother. House mothers thus reinstate the practice of African matriarchy in their families.

Roles

As written by Marlon M. Bailey, “In Ballroom, your sex assignment or gender identity does not necessarily determine the role you play in the family. Ballroom members reconfigure what genders perform certain gender roles in this kin unit. Hence, Butch Queens can be mothers and fathers, some Butches are fathers, and many Femme Queens are house mothers.”

This flexibility in Ballroom kinship structures echoes practices found in many African cultures, where social roles are also fluid and contextual. On the continent, identity is often shaped by shifting markers like age and place. Roles can change based on how old you are (you can be the junior in one setting, but become the elder in another while maintaining your age), and whether you are in your lineage family or the one you married into. In African tongues like those mentioned above—and Yoruba—we don’t have gendered terms like “brother” and “sister.” Instead, we say younger sibling or older sibling. This is noted in more detail by Ifi Amadiume in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, and by Oyèrónke Oyĕwùmí in The Invention of Women, where both scholars highlight gender-inclusivity in African idioms and ways of life.

Across various continental and diasporic African communities, family is much more than the two-parent nuclear household. It includes grandparents, parents’ siblings, in-laws, other families and children in the neighborhood and friends. In countries like Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, compound houses are the architectural manifestation of how large and inclusive African families are.

Black Ballroom culture preserves the African matriarchy and the African family. In Cuba, the 2022 Family Code revision serves as a rare state-backed acknowledgment of nonnuclear, non-biological kinship—a structural nod to the kind of expansive, chosen family that Ballroom embodies.

Ballroom is African family values. ` `

Black Ballroom decolonizes and broadens the concept of family to include people who love and take care of each other regardless of blood ties. The only blood that counts is that of the covenant which is thicker than the water of the womb.

Art by Kim Arthurs

Fervent for the Hunger

Words by KD Hack

My heart beats a bit easier with each mile I put between myself & the overwhelm of the city. I roll my window down after riding over the river I grew up on and in, and am welcomed by familiar country roads. The air is sickly sweet with lilac blooms, late afternoon rain, and miles of manure. I find myself making this drive more often with each visit, forever craving the stillness of late summer evenings, the crunch of carrots pulled straight from the warm earth, and the beloveds beside me as we extract our bounty.

For the past handful of years, I’ve called myself a “farm groupie”. This is a delight and privilege afforded to me through a vast network of small scale farms whose growing practices, commitment to community, and reverence for the land they steward have reshaped how I connect with my human, and more than human, connections. After years of doing my best to brush off the dregs of my conservative small-town upbringing, replanting myself into rural life with a more values-based, holistic and Queer approach to community is a radical act. The people and places I’ve encountered in this period of rebirth have been instrumental in helping me understand not only the community I want to surround myself with, but the community I want to build.

I met Elle at an October bonfire through a mutual friend. We bonded briefly over our shared love of Ross Gay, Mary Oliver, and the outdoors. A few months later, I was enchanted by her home baking adventures on the internet and pursued a friendship. Her fervor for flavor matched my own, just like her curls and much of her wardrobe. After baking a tarte tatin together in my apartment, sticky and salty with the miso caramel leftover from a pop-up earlier that week, I knew that her kitchen-witch heart was one I wanted to know better.

The first time I visited Elle’s flower farm in the St. Croix River Valley, it was still April. The clouds were characteristic of a Midwest springtime hanging in the air for a little while longer. We walked through the still-flowerless fields, whose soggy ridges were in recovery from a raging winter. We baked a cake as gray as the sky above us, dense with poppy seeds and not too sweet. While I read by the fire, she spatchcocked one of the chickens from the fall’s harvest and started a sauce made from last summer’s tomatoes. The tiny house’s kitchen, fragrant with fennel and fire smoke, was much different from the one I grew up in, though it reminded me of the comforts of a childhood revolving around food and family.

There weren’t portraits of naked bodies in bloom in my childhood kitchen, or endless hordes of homemade preserves hiding in every free crevice. There weren’t piles of poetry collections, Queer critical theory, and mutual aid manifestos. Instead, there were framed photos of my beloved grandmother beaming on her wedding day, beside the creek with her sister, laughing and perched atop a picnic table. There was a freezer in the garage, a Midwest mainstay—full of frozen pizza, popsicles, and venison, alongside my brother’s and my art plastered to the indoor fridge, so full of memories you could barely open it.

Not all of my early memories were as sweet as the giant tub of ice cream kept in the freezer, but they’re a part of me. They are as present as the pines and pastures outside my window. I was raised to love the land—to learn from it. As much as I would’ve rather curled up with a book than pick pole beans in my mother’s garden, access to this kind of abundance was both a comfort and a privilege. I’ve reclaimed this love with every afternoon spent in the fields with friends and flowers, and with every meal made with the spoils of the day’s harvest.

It’s easy for me to understand why someone would choose to make a home out in the country, despite the isolation and uncertainty of working with a land that sometimes has a hard time loving us back. There are moments where our fingers flare with fatigue, or our backs burn with the burden of a too heavy load. Sometimes the tomatoes sadly sag in the sun, as defeated as we feel after a long day in the field—but we always return to the place that nourishes us because at the end of the day It’s as much our family as the people it feeds.

The first time I hung out with Erin in person, they came across town in their truck. Up until then, we had only communicated via social media, trying and failing many times to convene over a game of cribbage. They were eager to help me put together my bed frame and pick up a box spring, despite the increasingly insistent snowfall and being freshly post-op from top surgery. We instantly bonded over our shared childhoods in rural spaces, from our families’ love for cards games, townie bars, and fleet farm, to the way we were able to free roam the back roads we grew up on—country kids through and through. After accomplishing the day’s tasks, we bellied up to the bar at the closest thing you could find to a true “dive” in the city we lived in. We cemented our friendship over cajun fries and some mugs of hamm’s, appropriately priced and cold as ice.

My friendship with Erin and the incredible cast of characters they introduced me to through Queer country dancing at Eagles #34 (my favorite establishment in all of the metro area), was instrumental in healing both my relationship to the urban spaces, as well as my relationship to my rural upbringing. Before meeting them, I felt like I had to perform a certain type of “city Queerness” that never quite became effortless, despite the half decade or so I spent in the Twin Cities. I moved to Minneapolis from my small Wisconsin college town as a so-called “baby Queer” whose dating experiences was minimal at best due to many years spent in a place whose itty-bitty Queer dating pool I’d barely dipped a toe into. I was unsure of what parts of myself to cherish and what parts to discard. It took me more than a few months – years, even – to find my footing.

Community-minded to my core, I fervently searched for Queer cuties and comrades in my new neighborhood—a pocket of the city famously full of lefty artist types who spend their mornings at local worker-owned cafes planning puppet performances and punk shows with their polycules. I discovered them in unexpected places: my next door neighbors who held me through trauma and heartbreak in the early era of the Covid-19 pandemic; the short-lived Queer book club I started with a fellow writer from a dating app; the Queer softball cuties who convened every Friday in Powderhorn Park, cackling and kissing and ceaselessly cheering each other on. I cherish these connections that carried me through the most difficult years of my adult life.

Despite my deep love for the community I cultivated, I was weighed down by both affection and exhaustion when thinking about the boxes I tried to squeeze into while living on the Southside. This past fall, as I fell deeper in love with my Queerer rural roots and further out of love with the city, I decided it was finally time to leave. As Pride month begins, I’m one month into working and living on an all Queer/Trans* veggie farm in the Chippewa Valley, the closest place to home I have.

Now, I’m cooking meals for beloveds with produce I pulled mere yards from my garden level apartment. I’m pulling tarot and devouring rhubarb crisp on the new moon with my neighbors. I’m writing more poetry and sleeping more soundly, redefining what ruralness means to me without losing sight of the roots that raised me.

I am making a home in my body, tending to his asks and celebrating their limits and strengths in equal measure. I am slow sunsets and sunrises, leaning into ease instead of eagerness to squeeze out every last drop until I’m bone dry and depleted. I am the constellations etched across my belly in earthy hues fit for a feral farm king, forever well fed and growing softer with each passing day. I am finding dirt in new crevices and freckles clustered close enough to kiss. I am finally coming home.

Swingers, Collateral, and the Sunset Strip

I fell in love with Los Angeles before I even lived here. For years I worshiped Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, watching and re-watching Beginners, reading and re-reading Zeroville. In so many ways, LA is a tabula rasa—constantly being defined and redefined—developed and then abandoned. History written over itself. Every movie I watched seemed to open up a new trap door and each shot seemed to be a footprint of something already disappearing.

Words

by Celeste deBardelaben

Ed Ruscha’s 1966 piece Every Building on the Sunset Strip is a long continuous photograph of Sunset Boulevard, stitched together and stretching for blocks. When I saw it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) it was only vaguely recognizable. In a place like LA, this feels uniquely pertinent: any attempt to capture the city eventually becomes a character of itself—Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Sunset Boulevard.

Watching these movies, the sundrenched streets and avenues of Los Angeles took up residence in my imagination.

and Photos

Like so many others, LA was introduced to me as a projection of ease and fame—an endless summer. Fast Times with its high contrast sunny exteriors and cool neon nights is so different from the dreamy unease of Under the Silverlake. It is easy to find dismay in this daydream; its detachment from reality and its irreverence to the past, as the Chavez Ravine becomes Dodger Stadium.

But there’s also possibility in the blank slate.

What I love most about LA is what I love most about photography: the realization that perspective and depiction is everything. My favorite movies about LA are the ones that open up a microcosm you never knew existed, exploring a hidden private world a la Swingers, Collateral or Play It As It Lays. The best movies about LA embrace its superficiality; What a way to go or Koyaanisqatsi parody my city, but only make me love the highways and lavish parties more.

So many locations are reused—landmarks like The Aero or Echo Park Lake appear in multiple films. While they remain, what changes is the viewpoint. I hope to translate my own version of LA into celluloid, to sculpt with light a vision of this city wholly unique in its take on the familiar. For that moment, it transcends the blank slate.

Los Angeles is always best when it plays itself.

When I shoot, I look to tell stories that carry this sense of reality. Fiction is often a way of filtering the past into narrative, and what grounds these stories in reality is the cinematography. My perspective as an outsider to LA is this: finding beauty is easy when you can reject your preconceptions and appreciate it as it is.

I Can’t Go Home To My Fatherland

Words by Vas Littlecrow Wojtanowicz

Every time I've gone back to Borikén (AKA Puerto Rico), I’ve watched it decline like I’ve watched my elderly father fall into a slow death spiral. My last time there, I noticed how many Boricua goods came from other countries. The beachside food vendors all seemed to be either Dominicans trying to eke out a living, or rich Nuyoricans, trying to reconnect with their Puerto Rican heritage. No actual Boricuas born on the island sold bacalaitos or alcapurríás anymore. The local festivals now accepted sponsorships from the very same multinational conglomerates that mercilessly undermined our culture. My homeland stopped feeling like home decades ago.

The island became demoralized after the united states tried to "help" our economy by installing the PROMESA junta.1 The united states no longer denied our status as a colony with little autonomy, no thanks to president Barack Obama. After Hurricane Maria, I gave even less thanks to Donald Trump for continuing the tradition of united states presidents screwing us over which only paused during the Carter and Biden administrations.

I traveled to the island to see my dad about every other year. This time I didn't even wait a full year. Familial obligations changed my agenda, so my partner and I put up with the security theater at the airport to make the visit. I didn't really want to go. I didn't have a good feeling about what I'd see.

As the plane landed, royal blue roof tarps overshadowed the traditional pastel colors of houses torn up by Hurricane Maria. Jerry-rigged into some semblance of function, the power lines stood like the Leaning Tower of Pisa with bowed cables. FEMA deployed a federal disaster response crew to Borikén—nine months after the hurricane—after putzing around wherever white people lived. When Australia faced devastating wildfires during the 2017-2018 bushfire season, the U.S. government sent personnel and resources without delay. I know this because my partner and I stayed at the same low-cost motel as the construction workers who told us where they’d been sent prior to their delayed arrival.

During that visit, my youngest sister got married. My siblings all reunited for the first time in twenty years. I wish I had more to say about that happy reunion other than it happened. I wore a dress, pretending to be a relic of a past that no longer reflected my Nonbinary masc reality. I didn’t feel safe doing otherwise. Humorless evangelicals, bent on creating a theocracy, replaced cheerfully drunk catholics that enjoyed throwing grand christmas parties. People now openly ridiculed and maligned Queer folks in ways that seemed so unfamiliar to me, as someone who grew up in the land of Antonio Pantojas.

Dad’s cancer had spread to his stomach. Thankfully, a Taíno folk medicine program at a Sábana Grande farm helped him make progress towards defeating it once again. Dad survived black lung and cancer before. We felt confident that he would make it once again. After all, opting-out of the medical system and relying on my maternal grandparent's knowledge of folk Taíno medicine helped me survive certain tragedies. So, why not him? Little did he know that beautiful farm that gave him so much hope would close down because of an impending plague.

1 Congress of the united states. Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). Public Law No: 114-187, 30 June 2016. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5278. Editor’s note: PROMESA, passed in 2016, created a federally appointed fiscal oversight board (often referred to as “la junta”) to manage Puerto Rico’s debt. While presented as an economic recovery measure, it stripped local governments of financial autonomy and was widely criticized as a modern form of colonial control.

Shortly before the COVID-19 epidemic forced the island and the states of the union to shut down, I went to visit my father one last time. His stomach cancer had spread everywhere. His usual rants about pro-Independence politics ceased. Smaller hurricanes— and a major earthquake—turned the island into something worse than what it was before. Everyone had solar panels and large water tanks on their roofs, like some post-apocalyptic nightmare. No one could trust their own government to provide necessities like hydration and electricity. Pastel houses remained in ruins. I noticed that the color palette of the surviving ones became more Americanized and gray.

People seemed afraid to approach each other and kept an invisible bubble of protection. It struck me when my father told me not to make any eye contact with anyone. I noticed more and more suburbs with English street names.

Drag queens used to be revered ambassadors that showcased Boricua beauty. Trans women, dressed to the nines, would pass with the greatest of ease. Unfortunately, with the religiously-motivated shunning of showy makeup and the adoption of generic and shapeless fashion, the ability to pass became exponentially more difficult for drag queens and Trans women. Without the layer of protection that feminine beauty culture once gave, they now faced slaughter on the streets.

No longer did my father shout, "Hola Tito!" to strangers to greet them. No longer did I get hellos in the form of hugs and kisses from folks I didn't know.

Our Spanish—which had always been a blend of Taíno, Yoruba, and English—had become even more English. The salsa of my youth had been supplanted by reggaeton and trap. For some reason, these observations made me certain that I would never see my father again after boarding the plane back to Minnesota.

My dad always loved Borikén. He fought for Boricua autonomy in the seventies as a protester and union member. He fought for the culture and the hope that our island would someday break out of its weird free-associated state commonwealth status and find independence. With a 23% record low voter turnout in the last statehood referendum—and the majority of those voters choosing statehood—that dream ended. No more 81% voter turnouts. Our people just gave up. Just like my father prepared himself to give up.

The government shut down the Taíno healing farm because they considered it “agro-tourism” and not ancient medicine. At the same time, the same government deemed my father’s allopathic cancer care to be “elective” and unavailable until six months later. My motherland seemed to be suffering the same ugly fate that my father did: a slow and nasty COVID-19 fueled cancer leading to suicide. People seemed to be too tired and cut off from their life-giving culture to survive as proud Boricuas.

My father faded away, and so did the place I once called home.

Ghost Brook

Words by Franky (Frances) Cannon

In my secret spot out on the peninsula at Ghost Brook, I glance around the small reservoir. Looking for witnesses, and seeing none other than the great blue heron who keeps one yellow eye on me and one on the marsh, I strip and hang my clothes on the broken branch of a pine, careful to avoid the tree’s sticky sap wounds. I step gingerly over ants and patches of dry lichen, between St. John’s Wort and beach wormwood, to test the temperature of the water with my bare feet. The presence of my toes startles a pumpkinseed, a small fish, who panics and flits in a tight circle above a nest of eggs. I hunt for a spot to jump in that won’t intrude on their territory. I’m not afraid of pumpkinseed bites—what really scares me is the lurking presence of snapping turtles in the opaque gardens of pondweed. I flatten my limbs against my torso to torpedo through the weedier bank and into the deep section of the pond where it’s cleaner. Once I clear the last few tendrils of milfoil, past the barrier of fear, I spread out like a parachute and float up to the top, finding relative stillness in the center of the reservoir.

I only ever feel fully comfortable in my body when I’m in the water, preferably without an audience. Buoyed by my own breath, balancing on the gently undulating surface, surrounded by cerulean shadow, I feel no pain, no struggle. Even when I am seen, my body is obscured in the semi-opaque murk. My form shimmers, elusive. On land, I feel exposed and vulnerable. In the company of other humans, I hide parts of my naked body from view—my disease, my flaws. Here in the water, I am free to be messy. I swim without aim in my own awkward dog-paddling, frog-kicking choreography. Yet here, more than anywhere else, I feel beautiful, because I feel healthy. Here, I don’t think about my chronic illness, my autoimmunity, my mismatched limbs, the twist in my spine, my confused gut, my scars. In the water, all of that drifts from my skin and sinks into the mud.

As I tread water, I spin in a slow circle, taking in a panoramic view of the landscape. Everywhere along the edge of Ghost Brook I see stories and past selves—over here, near this root mass exposed by a storm, on the sunny pine needle beach, is where I have brought countless first dates: Sarah with her soggy notebooks of half-formed poems, Alyssa and our spilled ciders, Jenny with her epic picnic. I hid my body while undressing in front of them; but once in the water, I felt able to flirt and even relished their gaze. We lingered too long in the twilight and had to find our way back to the trailhead in the dark without flashlights or phones, only the stars and a patch of phosphorescent mushrooms to guide us.

Up over that hill is where I attended a mushroom foray with a ragtag group of nerds. I became enamored with the botanist who led the group off-trail. We gathered boletes, chanterelles, and black trumpets in our baskets, but also non-fungal fruits: wild blueberries, blackberries, and my favorite—thimbleberries.

There’s the beaver pond, where many years after the fungal foray, I accompanied the botanist and his daughter on a critter hunt—we found tadpoles, little red efts, beetles, and leeches.

In the season of spring ephemerals, I delight in the rare sight of lady’s slipper orchids bobbing their voluptuous blossoms along the side of the trail. A barred owl once made an unexpected daytime appearance and inadvertently drew our attention to an enormous patch of golden morels.

I have moved too many times to count—away, back, away—yet I always return to Ghost Brook. I’m drawn back in all seasons, alone or with loved ones, to forage, hike, swim, ice-skate, or just to sit on a rock and watch the heron creep among the sagittaria flowers. This, more than any other place, feels like home.

Art by Knock Off Bowie

People Are Dying, I Hope I Can Change

Art by Andy Valk

Art by Nell Kerr

IYouKnowMe?

Words by

Lia Turpin

am a Trans woman. At least I think I am. When I go to the store, I know the people there don’t see a Trans woman. To tell the truth, when I look in the mirror and brush my teeth, I’m not quite sure what I see either. It’s my face, but I’m not always sure what that really means. But I know what I see with my eyes closed.

I see fliers online—I see posts of all the girls at the Sapphic gatherings, the “FemmesOnly” clubs, and no one there looks like me. I see so many forms of gender expression, the kinds that easily make sense to others, but I don’t see myself among them. I see people whose identities and expressions tend to be understood without explanation—whose access to social affirmation, safety, and desirability is rarely questioned. And I notice how those perceptions are often shaped by whiteness, femininity, and the presumed neutrality of cisadjacency, even in Queer spaces. I see the AFAB Femmes, the Butch Lesbians, and the AFAB Nonbinary people. And I see the visibly transitioning Trans women; visible in the sense that they telegraph their womanhood to the world. But, I do not see myself. I know I am seen as a man—a Black man, at that—and I know the presumption of violence tied to both my race and my gender, consciously and subconsciously. I know why I don’t see people like me included in these spaces, and why people like myself might not even feel safe enough to try to enter them in the first place. There is social, legal, and physical danger in showing up in places I know people will be scared of me, and risking my safety isn’t often worth it just to attempt to break down social barriers. see

The people in these spaces make my status as an outsider clear—their body language, their tone, their passive aggression. The Butch AFAB women that know more about cars and sports and home renovation than me are given space there. But they are seen as expansive Femmes—or at least close enough to be welcome. And I’m not. Their claim to belonging seems to rest not in their gender expression, but in the bodies they were born into. I wear the same jeans as them. Neither of us shave our legs. Why are cisgender women that self–identify as masc more welcome in Femme spaces than me? I have been told by women that they need men to display some level of femininity around them in order for them to feel comfortable. Do they require this from cisgendered Masc women? Or is their body enough to signal that they are safe—that they aren’t an aggressor? And if being a cisgender woman grants one innate femininity, what does this mean about how they think of Trans men’s legitimacy as men? About whose masculinity is viewed as real—and threatening—and whose isn’t?

What does the term “Femme-Only space” even mean, and how is it enforced? There is a criteria that no one seems willing to say openly. In the effort to create alternatives to male dominated spaces, I see Femme spaces policed similarly. There are those that belong and those that don’t. There are those that are embraced with open arms and seen as legitimate and those that are deemed threats to the space. When you say Femme, what do you mean? Really ask yourself: who do you make space for?

What does it mean to be a Trans woman who doesn’t want to transition? What does it mean to see myself one way, to know myself with my eyes closed, and to lack the drive or desire to make that visible to the world around me? I have been so unfairly saddled with the task of figuring out if, completely removed from society, I would want to be in any other body than the one I was born in. Or if the only reason I would wish for anything to be different is purely rooted in having been shown, time and time again, that the only thing keeping me from being welcomed into the spaces I want to be in is the one thing I have the least control over. I want to stop thinking about that, and I want to stop wrestling with the feelings of exclusion, and I know that one of the quickest routes to that is just to transition. But every time I think about doing it, I feel like I’m considering cutting off pieces of myself as an offering for others. And that just makes me sadder.

The communities we build and the spaces we join have unspoken rules about what you need to do to belong there: slang you should adopt, clothes you should wear, music you should listen to. But make no mistake, you need to choose some in order to belong.

What does it mean to be a Trans woman that refuses to capitulate to that demand? To refuse to mold myself in a way that makes myself recognizable to others at a glance? I am not one to change myself, to appease others in order to fit in. I am not one to soften myself to make those around me comfortable. I walk into spaces and people see me as a man—I know this. I walk into “feminine spaces”—book clubs, mixers, television viewing parties—and my perceived masculinity is seen as a threat. I am an invading force. And that has nothing to do with who I am—and everything to do with what people expect me to be.

I don’t know where I belong. I have never felt at home in “men’s spaces.” I have never felt like much of a man at all. I am a Trans woman who likes men’s jeans and t–shirts, and doesn’t want to take hormones or surgically transition. The only reason I have ever wanted breasts, long hair, or different facial features is because I recognize the acceptance it would afford me with the women whose spaces I so badly want to be accepted into. To give in, tear myself apart, and build myself back up again in a way that maybe, just maybe, would allow me to blend in with the people who have made me feel so low.

I feel at home with my eyes closed. It is an out of body experience. One of being able to see my spirit, everything that I am, unbound by the chains of socialization or preconceptions tied to my physical being. And if I close them long enough, I think I even start to forget what it even is that other people see when they look at me. But eventually I open my eyes and the weight comes crushing back down.

I am me, and I’m not even sure what that always means. Do you know me?

You Are Here, Not There

Words by Safara Louise Parrott

This story begins sort of in the middletowards the end, but not quite the end.

In the summer of 2024, a friend of mine and I were enjoying one of those hourslong mornings turned into afternoons on my porch. We were enjoying a pack of light blue American Spirits commiserating the woes of her academic life and my recently ended stint at a local non-profit, allowing the sun to illuminate our points on whatever tangent either of us was on about. The conversation turned solemn and important as the topic of the state of the world deepened from the big phrases like “The West” and “Medical Industrial Complex” and were replaced with words and phrases like “home” and “my mother”. We spoke about Tigray, and then we spoke about Palestine, and then Sudan. We spoke about the impossibility of normal life and asked each other what that means and if it was worth trying to maintain something like it.

“I think it is important to remember that at the end of the day, this is not happening to us,” I said.

My response to this posturing troubled me in its distinctive othering, and it is something I think I must work at to undo.

How does one become the other? Let’s go back to the beginning.

Living in Willis, Texas, there was rarely a week that would go by when someone hadn’t said any iteration of: “I saw someone who looks just like you the other day!” At first glance (listen), a warming anecdote, but giving it a once over, what you are witnessing is the mastered artistry of a small town microaggression, the type of act that leaves just as swiftly as it comes. Then commences the clunky waltz of breadcrumbing, wherein you are expected to inquire into what made them think it was you. But when you are the only person in your town that does in fact look like you, or shares the same blood as you, it is obvious that what they are really saying is that they saw another non-dark skinned Black person amongst a sea of white counterparts, so it must be you!

It is a common question received by any adoptee: Did you always know you were adopted? Given the day, my response to this question may vary: Yes, but they let me down easy. Or, Yes, they were sure to let me know. And if I’m really caught in a mood, Yes, it was the first thing I learned about myself! Facetious, yes, but the true answer is somewhere in there. Since the age of three, the adults in my life were explaining to me that I was different, and there was nothing I could do about it. From that age, my adoptee experience would be defined by difference.

This is not the only type of occurrence that I had grown accustomed to in that little town. There have been countless times when someone shouted across the room because they noticed my crown of hair that was its own collage of tried and failed attempts of contorting its coils into the thin flowing strands of my constituents. Or the times I would be stopped in the chickfil-a line by some elderly woman named Darlene, or Louann, or Mary-Beth, asking me if I am Ethiopian and then proceeding to tell me all about her son, or daughter, or fellow church lady’s Ethiopian girls who they own and are quick to describe just how amazed they are by how smart the girls turned out to be.. And don’t get me started on all the schoolyard/classroom pranks that kids would try to pull on me to get me riled up so that they could holler obscenities at me about the whiteness of my teeth, or the level of my voice, or whatever else they decided it was that my body brought so much offense to that week. All of these instances though are not just retellings of small-town battles I fought in my youth– this is indicative of something much larger; the slow and arduous process of creating the other.

The process of othering is easy, but it is only one of the many steps within the greater system of supremacy. A system that can only exist through the oppression of another, underlining the dominator’s “right” to be there, to extract from the land, to exploit, to displace, to exterminate. Othering gives an oppressor a false sense of moral authority, that they know what the outcomes should be in this world they have strong-armed you into. They are afforded

the bargaining tools of “yes” or “no” in how you may behave in their presence or respond to their reprehensible actions, with the hopes that you become exhausted enough from the constant fight that you succumb and surrender to what shall be imposed. So what does it mean to refuse this system? How do we return home to ourselves, and begin the praxis of remapping our inner and outer worlds? For myself, this began when I started to think of and understand my body as a landscape in need of stewardship. Setting off my journey of internal cultural burning and the redefining of body, as a map of home.

In her paper Remapping Paradise, author Sophia Dege centers her work on Early Ethiopian mapmaking with a broadened definition of the word map, originally written by Thomas Suarez in his 1994 book, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia1 .

“A map is a spatial representation of a place, thing, or concept, actual or imagined. Note that the subject of the map is not restricted. A map can chart the path to a neighbouring village, to a successful endeavour or a fortuitous event, or even to the next life; it can illuminate relationships between various levels of existence or consciousness, or between a previous or future age of the earth.”

When they say, “The Body Keeps the Score”, I ask, what game are we playing? Surely not a game of scorekeeping, because I have zero desire to compare myself to you, and I have no intention of keeping any type of score on the board, but, what I can offer here in this partnership is a body that recognizes the fragility of what is offered to us Earthside. The scars on my chest, the gaps in my smile, the curve of my brow, the gold-red in my skin; every inch of my body is a memory of place and of purpose. My body tells a story of preservation, of rage, of great connection, and of victorious reckoning. It is not unlike your own body, or those who have laid down their bodies, or the stolen bodies, or the caged bodies, or the burned bodies, or the shrouded bodies.

In the grocery store, when picking out my weekly yogurt, a woman tugs my shoulder and calls me “home”; in the airport in Seattle, a brother waves to me and offers peace; in Nashville, a sister offers her spices and says, “Send me a pic of the final dish”, and in Detroit, when they say “My aunt/ sister/grandmother would love you!” I used to think the only way to survive was to deny myself in the world I lived in. To accept my lack of power and allow the systems greater than me to exist in impunity. Shreds of this belief still exist within me today, but I am unashamed of it now.

While in these respective works the authors are offering arguments and journalistic research on indigenous and ancient practices of cosmology and cartography, I am proposing this idea of mapping can be used with the self as a tool of re-humanization and internal liberation. Finding the points of tension (or release) and becoming the non-judgmental observer, allowing what needs to be communicated (mapped out) to do so freely. Although it is early days for me in this practice, it is one that has brought me to a much more loving relationship with myself and the time and place in which I was brought to this world. This practice has begun to break down the remnants of these tools of othering I’ve learned, that creeping voice that still thinks something like, it’s not happening to us, is the appropriate response to suffering being inflicted upon my own people. Deeper so, this practice has called me to a richer understanding of what it means to wield my rage as a fuel for my loving.

There is no connection in shame that can sustain this fight in liberation. And a life lived in submission to forced othering has proven to be no life at all. Conversely, a life committed to the undoing has brought me back to myself. It has brought me back home. When I trace my chorded muscles to their knotted conjecture, patient and non-judgemental, the hidden stories I’ve internalized are released and laid to rest in the wind, there in the absence rests an opportunity for a new story, a true story, to take its place and serve as a new roadmap in this forgotten territory. This cycle of grief and creation is one that has taught me the tremendous beauty of being a citizen of the world and a devotee to my healing. It has also brought to surface much of what I had been avoiding for years, but I hold tightly to the truth that I cannot deny myself in the world around me, which is to say that I am nothing without rage and love.

1Suarez, T. (2012). Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Tuttle Publishing.

As Close To Worship As

We’ll Get

Words and Art by Daisy Slucher

“As Close To Worship As We’ll Ever Get” is about the chosen family I found after leaving the church. At 20 years old, I realized I was Queer—and that I no longer fit into, or even wanted to be part of, the church community I’d grown up in. I had moved from my hometown, one of the only blue cities in the state, to a small town in Kentucky for college. Ironically, I felt the most comfortable exploring my Queerness here despite the conservative politics outside of the art department. I’ve created this piece to honor the first home and community I created that emboldened me to come out. The subjects appear to be singing together with arms raised. A type of worship of their own.

We Share the Wrong Things

It’s Not a Lie, It’s a Myth Words by Kota Ball

Breakup Geography Words by Eden Aphrodite

Beyond Belonging Words and Photos by Kam Bradley

It’s Not a Lie, it’s a Myth

Words by Kota Ball

Myth: I cut this cheese for you so that you would have a snack when you got home from work, since I knew dinner wouldn’t be ready until late.

Fact: I cut this cheese at least three hours ago for myself when I got super high. Then I fell asleep on the couch. I told you it was for you, and I could get away with it because— even though it was room temperature by now—it’s not the kind of cheese that sweats. Honestly, I forgot all about it until you came in the door. The lingering smell of your floral and white tea shampoo hit my nostrils just as the door handle smacked into the wall. The drywall is exposed from your best and worst days. I pretend to have been awake the entire time. I’m not sure how you don’t realize I wasn’t, because Kelsey Grammer’s revisionist retelling of the Battle at Bunker Hill is playing at full volume.

Myth: I am posing with the plastic pirate outside the surf shop on vacation in North Carolina because I think it’s corny and want to make you laugh.

Fact: I really like pirates. As a kid, I used to draw them and watch the documentary extras from the Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs on my portable player when I had to sit at work with my mom. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are my perpetual favorites. Maybe it’s because they were known for

their drag. The Pirate Soul Museum down in Key West opened when I was still young enough not to mask my enthusiasm. I’ve wanted to go ever since, even after they moved it to St. Augustine and renamed it. They took the word “soul” and replaced it with “treasure”. You know how much I hate Florida and capitalism, so that should tell you how much I love pirates. We take a picture. You laugh so hard it comes out blurry. I laugh, too, still and hollow.

Myth: I am super excited to watch the newest episode of our favorite show with you to finally see what happens to our favorite character.

Fact: I watched this episode when it came out on Tuesday. It’s Friday. I knew you were going to keep pushing TV date night and I couldn’t help myself. Your coat hangs on a hook by the door. It’s 8 p.m., and it’s still dripping melting snow onto the hardwood. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten fed up with being pushed aside and went ahead without you. You won’t figure it out, though, because I watch it on our friend’s account— the one I still remember the password for. NICEtry455H4T! isn’t exactly easy to forget. (She really should update it.) Don’t get me wrong, I am excited to watch it with you. You’re so cute when you find out one of your red-string theories was right. I mean—wait! No spoilers. At least I owe you that much.

Myth: I am having so much fun at the party on your brother’s charter yacht.

Fact: I’m seasick. We’re stopped at a sandbar (which is just asking for shark bites), and I feel like I am going to vomit. I’m squiffy off the rum and unable to get my sea legs. Still, I can’t stop thinking about stealing this boat. Have you ever heard that song “A Pirate Looks at Forty” by Jimmy Buffett? I’m not forty, but I love that song. Something about being lost and finding purpose on the ocean but never really getting there. I remember listening to it in the back of my dad’s honda. The sound of your coffin nails tapping on a beer bottle steals my attention. As you sip, I wonder what I would write in a letter to put inside the spent glass. I start humming to myself as my eyes land on the keys hanging negligently in the ignition.

Myth: I can’t wait to try your grandmother’s lasagna.

Fact: I fucking hate lasagna. Actually, I hate any pasta dish with red sauce. Except chicken parm. Chicken parm subs are the only reason I survived my first rugby season. You’re Italian, so I’m going to have to suck it up. Food is culture, and I know you’re not the biggest pierogi fan, so I can take this hit for you. But I also know that if I say I like it, your grandmother is going to send us home

with some for the freezer, and you’ll expect me to take it to work. Even if I do tell her what I really think, she will just pretend she doesn’t understand English. I know she was born in White Plains. I repeat, I fucking hate lasagna.

Myth: I have never been on a better ride than the Tower of Terror.

Fact: I have been on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Florida no fewer than 40 times. I swear I was on the ride one of the times Johnny Depp replaced his animatronic. Once, I was stuck in the park with no money and no way to get back to the hotel while my parents sat through a timeshare presentation. I started to get heat exhaustion. I could have taken one of the ferries, but I have a phobia of smallish boats with way too many people on them. To try and make myself feel better, I rode the boat-on-a-track around and around, floating through the cool tunnels surrounded by waist-deep water and electronic scallywags. I’m not sure how there was no line, but there really wasn’t. I fell asleep in the back of the boat and the cast members never bothered me. I want you to come with me. I stand in line holding your hand as we shuffle towards the simulation of a broken elevator.

Breakup Geography

Words by Eden Aphrodite

IArt by Donica Larade

have always been the one to move out. Every romantic relationship I’ve been in, save for one, has been ended by me. I’m not scared to do the work—everybody knows love takes work—I have worked until my fingers bled for love. I have made myself small for love, cooked and cleaned and laundered for love, slept on the wrong side of the bed for love, grown into new and strange shapes for love, and moved across the country for love. I would have done anything for love. But when the work doesn’t work, I leave.

My ex-girlfriend, N, and I have spent most of our lives less than an hour apart. We had a mutual childhood friend and swam at the same swimming pools. When I try to describe the relationship to other people, I say that we raised one another. But that’s an understatement. Eden did not exist before N. They were the first person to call me my chosen name. Prior to that, I had been dormant, a garden in winter, waiting for the right light under which to bloom. I used to say that I knew I’d picked the right name when I heard it on their lips.

Our weekends were spent on buses and trains, holed up in one another’s dorm rooms. Less than a year later, we cocooned ourselves in a one-bedroom apartment across from a funeral home while the pandemic raged outside. The first piece of decor we hung was an elephant shrew, fondly named “Uncle,” who occupied pride of place in the kitchen. When I took him to get framed years later for our fifth anniversary, they had to cover the blue painter’s tape we’d originally used to affix him with the picture mat. Things were simple enough. We both took online classes so we didn’t have much occasion to leave the house, but we got out when we could. Ours was a comfortable, domestic kind of love. We were cozy.

But over time, coziness became cramped, then became suffocating. We did everything together, and if it couldn’t be done together, it probably wouldn’t happen. Time apart was agony that could only be soothed by reunion. There was a sort of smushing that happened in such close proximity, our identities melting at the edges and fusing together. There was no me, or them, just us.

I wasn’t unhappy. But at the edges of my mind, a feeling of dissatisfaction grew. Who was I? What did I want? Was I happy? Of course I was! I was living with somebody I loved, and who loved me. Why shouldn’t that make me happy?

Two summers in, I broke up with N. My dissatisfaction had grown so large and thorny, so wrapped around my psyche, that it became impossible to ignore. The love I thought I needed, that I had worked and begged for, was not meeting my needs. When I tried to tell N why this breakup was necessary, I was so stifled that I found I couldn’t actually express what those needs were. They were going away to grad school at the end of the summer, and I would be transferring to finish my undergraduate degree. Between the crush of emotional claustrophobia and the looming threat of long distance, I left.

Well, for three days. To my parents’ house. 20 minutes away. And visited every day to talk about how we might make things work, even though we’d been trying, it seemed, for almost as long as we’d been together.

On my lunch break during one of those three days, I wrote on a scrap of receipt paper that the process felt like trying to ungraft two trees. As we spent more and more time together, we had grown closer and closer, our trunks began to twist around one another, until eventually it was impossible to discern who was who. There was no easy way to pull us apart. It would have to be a lumberjack process of chainsaws and axes.

Eventually, I asked if I could come home. They said yes, and we spent the rest of the summer in an uneasy approximation of the previous two years, fumbling over what had previously been second nature.

In my experience, distance does not make the heart grow fonder, it merely creates space for you to imagine things better. The friction that occurs when you live in close proximity is absent, and so you are free to focus on the good parts. Affection accumulates,

yearning sets in, and you make milestones to make the miles softer: next week is two weeks from the halfway mark until you can visit!

I went to school in Boston, where I called N every night. Hearing their voice at the end of a long day was a comforting ritual, and one that consistently had me drifting off to the sound of their voice, or more often than not their soft breathing, at a reasonable hour. I wanted this. I also wanted to stay out with my friends until the bars closed—to not have to worry about being home in time to say goodnight.

My winters and summers were spent with N in their studio apartment on the south side of Chicago. Visits were spent counting the days until I had to leave. I learned to love Chicago-style hotdogs and the city’s sensibly gridded streets. N used our old unfinished dining room table as a desk, so we took our meals on the couch, watching pirated shows on my laptop. The windows were always open, even in the dead of Midwestern January. I slept on a folding bed; they slept next to me in a twin bed their late uncle had once inhabited. I was in love.

A friend of mine once asked me what the reunions were like. I wanted to tell them that our reunions were ravenous, that I was pinned up against the front door the second I walked through it, that we made up for lost time. Instead, I told them how we would grin like idiots from the second our eyes remet, how there was always food waiting to be eaten while sitting next to one another on the floor, how I would strip my clothes off and head right for the shower to wash the distance away, how I slipped into comfy clothes, right back into our routines, to how things were when we lived together. What I didn’t tell them was how when we’d fall asleep together that first night back, the part of me that couldn’t just settle in, that needed more than cozy, that needed ravenous, needed to be pinned against the door, would lay awake in the folding bed, shivering against the wind blowing off of Lake Michigan. This is what I wanted.

BREAKUP GEOGRAPHY

Los Angeles was supposed to be different.

When we packed the Chicago shoebox into a uhaul, I was cautiously optimistic. Growing up on the East Coast, Los Angeles was a mythological place. N had found our new place, a classic SoCal dingbat, with a pool and everything. From the exterior, it looked like a 50s motel, and had a name like one too. Upon initial inspection, it was lovely. We hadn’t been able to tour it before signing the lease, but it looked like all the pictures. The problem was the jalousie windows—glass blinds that never fully shut, and don’t lock. They afford no privacy, and just as much security. They made N anxious. I tried to put on a brave face.

Our apartment was sparse; we had the couch and table-cum-desk from our first apartment, my old desk chair, a few bookshelves, a coat rack, mismatched bedside tables, and their desk. The walls were steel gray, and largely bare, except for a calendar, and some knick knacks I hung above the linen closet. It was always too cold, or too hot, and there were never enough places to sit, but it was home. Mostly.

One night, after a coworker’s birthday, I crawled drunkenly into bed beside them and declared “I’m not happy.” With those three words, I blew the fucking roof off. The admission was a waving of the white flag. This was the end. The next day, I finally and officially broke up with them. I packed my things and went to stay with a friend. I left a note, spritzed with my perfume. By the end of the week, I had signed onto a lease on the other side of the city.

Los Angeles was supposed to be ours.

How do you split a city? Like a cake, once you make a slice, there’s only so much frosting can cover.

This town is big enough for two of us.

And yet, when I visit my doctor back on the west side, I can’t help but feel like I’m trespassing. That’s their part of town, where the streets counted down to the sea, and the marine layer chaperoned our early morning walks.

All the events we wanted to go to are on the east side, my turf. I find myself in bars, restaurants, and venues we made plans to visit while laying in bed together.

When I moved into my current apartment, I had two items of furniture: my old desk chair and the bedside table N’s mother bought for me at ikea. Here was an opportunity I’d never had before, the chance to create my own space entirely from scratch.

The new place is mine, all mine. It is at the top of a hill, with exactly 55 steps. When you get to the 41st, there is a gate, and behind that gate is a beautiful garden. When I bring people over, I always take a moment to say “Welcome to the garden of Eden,” and sometimes cheekily add, “and Dan and Toby,” (my roommates who actually tend to it). The landlord used to live here, so it’s landscaped with more care than you’d expect of a rental. There are terraces, and flower beds, and sculptures. I eat at the picnic table when I want the sun on my shoulders and can stand the mosquitos. There’s one area I’ve dubbed the conversation pit, where I watched the lunar eclipse, and where I first spotted the resident possum wandering under the orange trees.

The first thing I bought for the apartment was a canopy bed. I still don’t have a canopy, but sometimes I hang my wet laundry from it, and imagine gauzy curtains in place of my bras. The mattress I bought had to air out for three days, so I slept on an air mattress my first few nights in the new apartment, but it was my air mattress, in my room. I got all the rest of my furniture for under $200, and half of that was the price of a uhaul. My desk and topless wardrobe came from an old woman’s house; I was told she was the matriarch of the neighborhood, a street of prim townhomes south of Beverly Hills. My bookshelf is secondhand container store, it’s the same one my ex and I had, in a lighter color and for half the price. The vanity, my pride and joy, had to be taken home via public transportation—sitting on a mottled Metrobus seat, staring into it, I must’ve looked like I was doing performance art. The walls are covered in ephemera: a shopping bag from the Chinese grocery store I shopped at in Boston, a framed playboy print, a drink menu from Lesbian Goth Night.

In the mornings, I look out the front window and I stare at the Hollywood sign. This apartment wouldn’t exist if not for my breakup, not the version of it I live in. The nice thing about cutting something in half, is that it makes it easier to share.

Beyond Belonging

Words and Photos by Kam Bradley

October 8th, 2021:

The windows were hot to the touch from the still-blazing evening sunlight. It made my blazer-and-silk-shirt-combination hard to bear when standing by one of them. It would get better; the temperature was supposed to drop to a “cool” 79 degrees Fahrenheit once the sun went down.

My friend snapped a picture of me with my soon-to-be-wife’s pentax K1000. The camera used to belong to her, and in a move of generosity, she had given it to my partner. All of our wedding photos would live in 35mm. One roll of film and three disposable cameras.

We made the day ours—and small on purpose. Eleven people had arrived, my bride the last one through the door of our one-bedroom apartment in Texas. We promised each other “‘til death” in front of the few closest to our hearts and our altar dedicated to Freya, which was draped in gold, surrounded by offerings.

I got drunk off of tequila shots, fireball, and probably a whole bottle of wine after the short ceremony. Everybody ate nachos and then went home.

To remember this night, I got two stripes tattooed on my left ring finger: one pink and one orange, to symbolize the Lesbian pride flag. Of what came after, the tattoo hurt the least.

January 2024:

The alley between the public library and the opera house created this terrible wind tunnel on blustery winter nights in Michigan. The ground was barren thanks to the rock salt that crunched under my docs as I headed to the opera house bar to visit my two best friends, their dinner freezing itself to my hand. In my other hand was my minolta SR-T 101, my first and only film camera, loaded with a roll my in-laws gifted me for christmas.

I had had the foresight to understand that my life was changing quickly, and that I would need some outlet to freeze time. Film photography would let me measure it out and keep it in milliseconds of light. Unpracticed and unfamiliar with the medium, I set out to learn this art for myself. Between the heft of the camera and the limited amount of exposures, every push of the shutter and pull of the film-advance lever marked a decision made. I wouldn’t get to know until months later if the decision was the right one. It fostered an appreciation of myself, my artistic intuition, my mistakes, and the moment captured. That night, of all nights, was the time to start practicing how to decide what to remember. When I passed through the doors and laid eyes on my friends, what I held in the back of my mind spilled out of my mouth. “We’re getting divorced. I think. We’re at least going to try ‘being divorced’ for a week.”

Shock. A beat of silence. I ordered a malbec.

I nursed that single glass of wine until the bar closed at eleven that night. With one hour to spare, my best friends and one other bartender went down the street to the cigar lounge, where I puffed on my go-to groovy blue and continued putting together what had happened and what was next. A mental checklist started: I’d already moved most of my clothing across the hall of my ex-wife's house. That was most of what I would take with me. Obviously, if we really did end up divorced, I would move-in with my best friends. They had an extra bedroom just for me.

Our week of trial divorce had come and gone. On January 14th, it was decided the marriage was over. Reason cited: we simply weren’t compatible.

BEYOND BELONGING

February 2024:

I started off staying the weekends with my friends. Little by little, I brought my life over to their home. It was mostly clothing. None of the artworks I had purchased on our vacations were coming with me. I had left the pieces behind somewhat out of sadness, but mostly because I had bought them for her, so it was up to her to decide what happened to them.

While I was sorting through boxes of our things mixed together, I found Freya’s altar painting. The one we had gotten married in front of. A swell of “Thank goodness I found you,” and “I’m so sorry this is happening,” broke within me. Tenderly, I hung the painting next to my borrowed bed in the spare bedroom of the house I was vacating. Freya also belonged to her.

Until I had to spend the time dividing the house into categories of “Mine” and “Not Mine,” I didn’t ever give thought to all of the stuff we had. It didn’t matter who bought it, whose family gifted it, or where it would be stored if it couldn’t be used. There was no ledger of who gets what because “‘til death” means you can’t take it with you when you separate. But I watched her fall out of love with me. It was like watching a candle go out from the wax smothering the wick. I didn’t want to admit it back then, but I had also fallen out of love. By trying to kill my Transness out of the assumption that my wife wouldn't love a man even if it were me, I killed the well from which all love flowed. Forcing myself to deny my own heart in regards to transition meant wrongfully trying to control how someone else loved me and that meant—

Togetherness ended, but my life did not. It was hard to fathom beyond what I thought would last until my final breath. Now the task was to sort through stuff and hopefully find myself and peace in the process. My method of sorting myself out of “us” was this:

What is mine is mine.

As long as it wasn’t ours, and obviously not yours.

Lastly, only if it fits in my room.

March 2024:

I lit a hemp cigarette with fumbling hands. There were still things left in the house, but I finally had the rest of what I needed to live. My family had packed their vehicles with the bigger items like the lawn mower (petty, I know) and dispersed them between attics and the old farm. Everything else could be dealt with later. I couldn’t help but flip off the house as I drove away, burning my lungs to distract from the tension I held everywhere else in my body. I wanted to scream, but I exhaled instead.

It was time for the real work to begin. I had to reckon with leaving pets behind. Talia, the youngest of our three cats and litter box delinquent, was the only animal that came to live with me. It made the most sense—Talia gravitated to me despite my attempts to convince my ex to rehome her on account of nervous poops on the floor. Now, I don’t know what I would do without her guarding the bathroom door or watching me creepily from the corner of every room. The other two cats were a bonded pair, and dear Tiger was my ex’s baby. I couldn’t afford nor meaningfully care for the dog. I took him for one last pup cup before I left, in an attempt to apologize for being an inept dog parent. Suddenly removed from all of the Grown Up “should-haves” (the wife, the house, the jobs, the pets…), I had to learn what home really felt like.

April 2024:

Refinancing a house is a bitch. Reassuring yourself and everyone around you that you won’t get screwed over by the person who called off the relationship and kept the house: Bitch Supreme. But on April 25th (I think), I walked into a starbucks and sat next to my ex-wife. I didn’t order a drink. Across from us was an awkward older man in a slightly too-big suit trying to entertain the both of us while we signed here and initialed there. Our agreement to refinance the house into just my ex’s name came from a place of mercy on each other. I couldn’t afford the mortgage on my own. She mostly could. I asked if she would repay the money I pulled from my roth ira for the down payment, and she said yes. So I really didn’t care that eventually she would get to sell the house and take whatever profit came from it. The whole meeting, I couldn’t bring myself to fully look at her. My palms sweat with pen in hand. Did she know I went on a date the day before?

I’d built up the moment in my head for months. Finally, I was free from the burden of homeownership, but anything left behind really didn’t belong to me anymore. The other side of that coin was that everything I had at that moment belonged to me. I may have left behind the beds, the pillows, the curtains my dad bought, the entertainment stand, the TV wall mounts, the power drill, the dog crate from my sister, plates, bowls, cups, silverware, but I had everything that made me feel like I was home. And it’s not a list of things. It’s love and patience.

April 2025:

My leg bounces on the stool while I stare out the windows at work. They are warm to the touch on the first real spring day in Michigan. The minutes are agonizing as I wait for my ex to show up with my portion of divorce papers to sign. After all this time.

When I see her car, I look to my manager, say I have to go now, and race to the back door. She texts that she has parked near me. I take a mental note of the new stickers on her car, and most of them throw me off. It’s clear to me that there is a distinct difference between the person I married and the person I divorced. Sure, when she popped out of her SUV—the one she had pulled up in for our first date—her mannerisms were still the same. But she was wearing anime merch and told me she pays for the crunchyroll account she and her friends share. My wife hated anime; my ex-wife pays for it. A very small example of how neither of us are the same.

I don’t know the woman that served me papers. When I look at our names side by side, a “v.” in between them, it feels like an invitation for a funeral. We are showing up over zoom to bury the people that bound themselves together with twine made out of “should.”

There’s no drama as we sign. A little awkwardness, some joking, but mostly friendly business. Then she drives away.

Present day:

I think of the tattooist named Warlock, mixing his own shades of pink and orange that have now mostly faded from my finger. He tells me that he “really doesn’t get the gay thing but more power to you.” Was that an omen? Was it an omen that we tried to have our friends take photos on one pentax K1000 and three disposable film cameras, and we have almost no photos from the wedding? The rest of the photos live in the phones of our guests. Only a few were ever retrieved. Funny how that works. The digital and physical evidence of the event have been all but destroyed on my end. Lost to history. Now I am the only archive of the way it all felt. I let go of the objects, and I know the details of what happened will fade, but I have pictures of the things I thought were beautiful in the toughest moments. These images will remind me that home was never lost.

1. The Last Malbec (35mm). Taken in January. The lens flare to the right of the image comes from the shutter door on the camera sticking at slower shutter speeds. This glitch in the mechanical parts adds its own framing. The flyers on the table dox me a little bit, but I don’t live near where that photo was taken anymore.

2. Nightstand (35mm). Taken in January. This was a symbol of independence and a place to put my personal items. My first step in making space for myself.

3. Fake neon comfort (35mm). Taken in January. $12 impulse buy. I was very excited to have such a small thing to change the energy in my room.

4. First self portrait (35mm). Taken in January. Won’t even lie, horribly underexposed but that is why I love it. I was learning how to shoot on film. I’d never taken indoor photos and passed my reflection after getting ready to take photos of the snowy outdoors. It is my first self portrait (even though it’s in a mirror) after breaking up and coming out as Trans.

5. A tree (35mm). Taken in January. Taken minutes after my first self portrait. This tree was in the yard of the house I used to own.

6. Goose (35mm). Taken in February. Blurry image of Goose the dog. My focal point distance was off which is why the leather seat in the background is clearer than the dog eating whipped cream. Also Goose was moving.

7. List of my stuff screenshot (mac screenshot). Dated January. What prompted me to make this at 8:35am…I’ll never know. I wish I would have kept the one that my ex was making on our joint note for groceries…

Screen and Sound

Revisiting the Classics

But We’re a Family: Revisiting Domestic Spaces in But I’m A Cheerleader

Words by Bailey Bauer

The Boys Art by Kate Netwal

The Black Interior: Exploring Race, Representation and Domestic Space on Screen

Words and Photos by Kahlea Williams

Frame by Frame Words by Taylor Michael Simmons

JBut We’re A Family: Revisiting Domestic Spaces in But I’m

a Cheerleader

Words by Bailey Bauer

amie Babbit’s 1999 directorial debut, But I’m a Cheerleader, has (rightfully) become a cult classic in Queer spaces. This dark comedy centers around Megan (played by a babyfaced Natasha Lyonne), a high school cheerleader sent to a conversion therapy facility called True Directions. Megan laments throughout the film that she can’t be Gay, she’s a cheerleader, for goodness sake! This is the essential question the film poses: does our alignment with, or diversion from, cis-heteropatriarchal gender roles equate to Queerness? How closely intertwined are gender and sexuality? And what does that mean for the Nuclear Family model which has become standard in most homes throughout the global north?

It feels essential to note that in 1999, when the film was released, being Queer was still an illegal act in some areas of the united states1. In fact, “homosexual acts” were not decriminalized federally until 2003. Additionally, in 1999 there were little to no legal protections for Queer folks in the workplace, certainly no legal right to marriage, and the culture still generally skewed toward discomfort, or even violence, toward Queer individuals. Now, that isn’t to say society hadn’t made strides toward equality by 1999. The fact that films like But I’m a Cheerleader were made at all speaks to a certain level of progress. But the prevailing thought was not one of Queer acceptance.

To fully understand the cultural context around But I’m a Cheerleader, it’s important to look at how mainstream media—particularly television—helped construct and enforce rigid ideals of gender and sexuality throughout the 20th century. In the 1950s, a decidedly homophobic time, television replaced radio as the popular medium for media distribution. With television came the explosion of the advertising industry, and a new vision of American families was up for sale. Of course, print ads and radio ads had existed for quite some time, selling their own version of the American ideal. But now families across the country (and various other countries, who culturally adapted alongside the hegemonic U.S.), could see this ideal at work. Popular programs like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver offered a cookie-cutter version of the Nuclear Family. These shows reinforced a strict gender binary, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and conservative ideals—norms that were marketed as natural, desirable, and patriotic. The Nuclear Family had existed before the advent of television, but now there was a visual model ingrained in—and sold to—every American who could afford a TV. Father (who obviously “knew best”) would go to work, teach his Sons how to do manly tasks, and keep prying eyes away from his beautiful virginal Daughters. Mother would engage in domestic tasks, provide Father with emotional support, and maintain a sharp, youthful appearance. Sons would play sports, chase girls, fix cars, and Daughters would write in their diaries, shop (with Father’s money!), and pine over football players. Even with the counterculture explosion in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it seemed Americans could not escape the dreamy Hollywood version of the Nuclear Family, and in the 1980s, under the conservative Reagan administration (himself a Hollywood actor), American society largely returned to the idea of the Nuclear Family model as “correct.”

1HUSL Library: A brief history of civil rights in the United States: The 1990s, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Doma. HUSL Library at Howard University School of Law. (2023, January 6). https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/lgbtq/90s

Queer culture was always lurking beneath this hegemonic “ideal”, quietly challenging its assumptions. By 1999, Queer folks were fighting for their own version of the “ideal family” in popular media. In September of 1998, the popular television show Will & Grace aired its first episode, offering mainstream audiences a softened, palatable version of the Queer Found Family as the titular Will, a Gay man, and Grace, his straight female best friend, decide to live together after Grace is left at the altar. Throughout the show, several characters remark that Will and Grace are like a married couple, and at one point they even contemplate having a child together. Their situation made clear that the Found Family unit is one based on love, not merely obligation, such as is found in the Nuclear Family model. Still, Will & Grace maintained a sense of comfort for straight, white audiences by leaning on familiar gender roles and sitcom tropes. The show’s version of Queer family life was digestible, funny, and largely de-sexualized—easing mainstream viewers into a new family structure without threatening the old one. A few months later, however, 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader would Queer the gendered expectations of domestic spaces and the Nuclear Family unit in a much more culturally subversive way.

A key scene Babbit uses to signify the ridiculousness of gender roles in the home comes as the Queer teens discuss their “roots”—what True Directions owner Mary sees as the jumping-off point for what turned these teens Gay. Megan struggles to understand hers, but after hearing examples from the others such as rebellious Graham (her mother got married in pants), goth Sinead (born in France), or soft-spoken Clayton (mother let him play in

Art by Asher Perez

BAILEY BAUER

pumps)—Megan decides her root is this: her more passive father lost his job and tended to the home while her more dominant mother worked. This is and always has been a common arrangement in many American households. However, within the Nuclear Family ideal, the idea of a mother earning money while a father stays home and engages in domestic tasks deviates from the model’s strict, binary gender roles and is framed as “unnatural.” Megan even notes, “I think I got the wrong idea.”

Mary’s entire definition of Queerness stems from this diversion from the Nuclear Family, and the strict gender roles that come with it. Conversion therapy, in this instance, is seen as a return to typical gender dynamics, and is hardly related at all to sexuality or sexual desire. The girls, clad in pink skirts, are made to engage in domestic tasks (washing dishes, changing diapers, trying on dresses), while the boys, dressed in blue shorts, play sports and work on cars. For Mary, it seems that being “straight” is more about being a “proper” man/woman, and less about who she actually desires. Sexuality becomes an afterthought— subsumed under gender performance.

Near the end of the film, as the final act in their “therapy,” the teens must engage in “simulation,” where they perform simulated sex with a teenager of the opposite gender. This, too, defines even the sexual experience by its gender roles: the man will thrust into the woman, the woman will open like a flower. Desire, and certainly love, do not enter into the equation. At one point in her “conversion”, Megan tells Graham, “Women have roles. After you learn that, you’ll stop objectifying them,” further conflating pre-prescribed gender roles and perceived sexuality in Megan’s mind, while eliminating her sexual desire altogether.

But I’m a Cheerleader ultimately offers a clear alternative to Mary’s vision (and thus the American patriarchal ideal), by introducing us to Larry and Lloyd, a Gay couple who run a sort of “halfway house” for Queer teens. Megan ends up here after being kicked out of True Directions for inappropriate (Gay) behavior. Here she reunites with Dolph (played by Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Dante Basco), another teen who was kicked out for similar reasons. Dolph and Megan were both once Mary’s most promising pupils. Dolph is the all-American boy. He plays sports, he speaks with a deep voice, and he is generally more masculine in his presentation. Megan is a christian cheerleader with long hair, soft skin, and a stereotypically feminine style. However, their adherence to patriarchal gender norms is not enough to save them from being turned away, and their innate desire (and love), for their same-sex peers forces them into the Queer life they were so terrified to live.

Lloyd and Larry have their own version of a family unit. Megan is free to live her Lesbian truth at Lloyd and Larry’s house. And yet, even in this safer space, Megan is not truly at Home. She has escaped the strict gender roles of True Directions, but she had to leave behind Graham—her true love, and the one person she ultimately desires—thus leaving her Found Family incomplete. Only when they are reunited does the audience feel that Megan and Graham have found a true Home, a place where they can belong fully as themselves, and where love abounds. A place where they are Family, in the truest sense of the word. Like Will and Grace before them, it is love that holds this Found Family together, and the characters no longer need to cling tightly to established gender roles to feel seen and held.

Jamie Babbit and screenwriter Brian Peterson offer a clear message: it is not strict gender roles that hold the home together, it is LOVE.

In the U.S. today, uncertain times have made fear the prevailing decision-maker for many Americans, causing them to cling tightly to well-worn, easily definable lifestyles centered around strict gender roles, the Hollywood patriarchal ideal of Nuclear Family, and a vision of a straight, white America where cheerleaders kiss football players and girls grow up to be moms. But missing in this vision, and in many Americans’ daily practices, is genuine Love. It is not rigid gender roles and strict rules of identity that will save us in times of uncertainty, but Love, and the empathy, acceptance, and true kindness that come with it. But I’m a Cheerleader offers us a vision of what the Home—and maybe even the world— could be, if only we allow ourselves to follow our true directions.

My Loved Ones For those who make you feel at home

The Black Interior: Exploring Race, Representation and Domestic Space on Screen

Words by Kahlea Williams

Examining the domestic on screen can give us insight into Black interiority, or the inner lives of Black folks that are so rarely represented in media. Historically, Black representation on screen is objective, dehumanizing, and severely limited. Characters tend to be devoid of depth, intimacy, development, and anything that suggests they are human. Historically, Black characters were flattened out to be palatable to the audience. This tendency to reduce Black characters is shaken up by the emergence of Black domesticity on screen. I specify Black-centered, because one could argue Black domesticity has been represented on screen since the birth of film, but this domesticity came in the form of subservient mammies and maids, characters that existed to serve their white masters on-screen and off.

Television shows like The Jeffersons, for example, are profound because they offer audiences a glimpse of Black interiority via the domestic that had not yet been widely available on film and television. The show features an affluent Black couple, George and Louise Jefferson, who live in a swanky high-rise in New York City. Their apartment is a fixture of the show. Not only as the main primary setting, but also as a comedic tool throughout its run. George is a successful businessman who loves flaunting his wealth, and their apartment is one example of this. The apartment, to him, is a symbol of his hard-earned wealth and success. As a Black man inclined towards traditional masculinity, he doesn’t have much inherent

interest in the interior design or upkeep of the home itself. But the apartment serves as an affirmation of his ability to overcome barriers to economic success. The importance of the apartment building as a symbol of status is underscored in the opening credits, which feature George and Louise walking together into the building, the iconic theme song “Movin’ On Up” playing. (The song was written specially for the show by Ja'Net DuBois, who played Willona Woods on Good Times). They ascend the floors in the apartment building as they ascend through the ranks of capitalism. The song in the opening credits exclaims, “We finally got a piece of the pie.”

The attainment of material wealth is intertwined with home ownership in the united states,1 something Black folks were prevented from doing full-stop for hundreds of years, and then discriminated against piecemeal even when it was made illegal to do so. The discrimination was so severe, and the resulting estimated economic losses to Black families so profound, that a class action lawsuit has been filed against the VA, seeking damages “to address persistent bias against Black veterans since 1945.”2

The decades in losses in Black material wealth due to systemic barriers to making it nearly impossible to attain it underscore the significance of Black families on screen portrayed in their own homes. There is a heightened sense of autonomy, for the home becomes an assertion of one’s dignity, an affirmation that they deserve safety,

1Urban Institute, Closing the Gaps: Building Black Wealth Through Homeownership, November 2021, https://www. urban.org/research/publication/closing-gaps-building-black-wealth-through-homeownership; and National Community Reinvestment Coalition, The Racial Wealth Divide and Black Homeownership: New Data Show Small Gains, Deep Fragility, August 3, 2023, https://ncrc.org/the-racial-wealth-divide-and-black-homeownership-new-data-show-small-gains-deepfragility/.

2Yale Law School. (2024, March 7). First-of-its-kind challenge to racial discrimination in veterans’ benefits brought by clinic. https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/first-its-kind-challenge-racial-discrimination-veterans-benefits-broughtclinic

security, and comfort. For the audience, to see a Black couple living comfortably (some might even say lavishly) in a home they own, a space they command, not serve, was revolutionary.

Material wealth is a crucial aspect in achieving a sense of security, and in the Jeffersons’ case, achieving a sense of success. George knows he has made it because he has a beautiful apartment in a coveted building in New York City. His home affirms his sense of self, and his sense of dignity. George is able to gain a sense of validation of his masculinity through his ability to provide, through his home.

The live-in maid, Florence, is another example of a domestic status symbol.

Though they often clash, George agrees to hiring Florence full-time as a live-in maid only after she saves him from a bad business deal. Prior to this he had refused to hire her full-time and even demanded Louise fire her. Florence and George’s clashes are hilarious and provide much of the comedic relief in the show, often delivered via use of the interior design of the home. For example, the shutter windows between the kitchen and dining area are a commonly reused comedic tool in the show, manifested as Florence interrupting a serious conversation (or argument). Funnily enough, in many ways Florence resists George’s attempts to render her a status symbol as much of the comedic effect of her character is that she does not act like a “typical” maid. She is not overly submissive, freely shares her opinions with her employers, and asserts boundaries. This is usually the source of the friction between George and Florence: his attempts to exercise his dominance and her rebuffs. As George resists attempts to undermine his dignity and humanity in the

outside world, Florence similarly resists attempts to undermine her humanity inside of the home. The domestic becomes a scene of political resistance in the Jefferson home as we see the contrast between the ways a Black man and a Black woman resist oppressive social structures both in and outside the home.

On her first day as their full-time live-in maid, Florence brings the couple breakfast in bed, then proceeds to climb in bed with them and eat the portion that Louise declined: “No sense letting that go waste.” The depiction of the maid in bed with the heads of the household, eating the same food as them, subverts the power hierarchy between domestic workers and their employers, perhaps revealing the inherent intimacy of this type of work. Rarely do we see intimacy like this on screen between a domestic worker and their employer.

The audience might wonder why George would tolerate such affronts to his manhood, to his (perceived) dominance. At the heart of their relationship is an understanding of each other as scrappy survivalists, not just trying to get by but doing so while preserving a sense of dignity, a rare currency rarely afforded Black folks. Underneath all the showboating and chest-beating is an acute awareness of his place as a Black man in the larger social hierarchy. He understands the importance of allies in surviving white capitalism, and Florence has proven herself as such. He can trust her, and because of their relationship, his home becomes a refuge with a built-in community. Community is how marginalized folks survive oppression, and without it, the Jeffersons would struggle to maintain their status, and by extension, their home, their sense of safety and security.

The Jeffersons and other Black-led TV shows of the era offer audiences a rare glimpse into the domestic world of Black folks. Through their relationship to the home, we can learn more about their relationship with capitalism, racial oppression, gender dynamics, and other broad cultural themes. In The Jeffersons we witness lovable, relatable Black characters resisting oppressive structures through the roles they play within and outside of the home, pushing the boundaries of what it means to be Black and successful.

Frame Frame by

Words by Taylor Michael Simmons

I visit my family every few months. For a holiday or birthday or just because. Well mostly it’s because my mom has continuously pestered me to do so—or at least until my codependent tendencies take control and I can’t help but agree to come home simply out of guilt. But it’s not really my home. Sure, it’s the house I grew up in. It’s the people that raised me. But it’s not where I belong. Now, is visiting my family so terrible? No, of course not. Do I feel like an asshole for complaining about having to visit them? Absolutely. But the truth is, I just don’t belong there. When I’m there, I’m not myself. I am a projection of what they believe me to be. What should feel like a vacation instead becomes a chore. The only true comfort I find during these trips is in the last hours of the night, when my family has gone to sleep, and I get to lay in bed with a movie.

When movies explore the literal and metaphorical themes of home, they often bring their audience a sense of comfort and calm. For this issue’s review, I’ve chosen to go in a slightly different direction—other than Lilo & Stitch, cause that joint’s heartwarming as hell. But the other three films I have selected focus on people who either don’t quite feel like they belong, or find themselves at home in a place that is actively detrimental to their wellbeing. Either way, don’t expect to feel all warm and fuzzy inside after watching these films (again, except for Lilo & Stitch, that one’s a good time).

Shout OutDads

The Shining (1980)

by Stanley Kubrick

I’m sure that being a husband and a father is very hard. If not, then why are all of our dads like that? I mean, does anybody reading this have a fulfilling and emotionally healthy relationship with their father? If so, reach out to me and let me know if you’d be willing to rent your dad out for the day. I could use a game of catch in the park. Maybe a nice firm handshake that naturally turns into a warm and loving embrace. One “I’m proud of you” might cause me to collapse. I know I seem critical of parents as a concept, and my parents in particular, (I literally reference them in each of my reviews for this issue) but I do have some sympathy for them. What a tremendous responsibility it must be to have a child. And of course, I know a little bit about that responsibility because my son Frank is an eight month old black cat who won’t stop pissing everywhere even though I’ve explicitly asked him not to. I can feel the pressure rising. I’m on the verge of snapping. Wait. Oh my god. Is Frank going to complain about me in therapy when he’s older?

Jack Torrence is a husband and a father. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a lessthan-successful writer who has most likely cheated on his wife and physically abused his son. But he’s trying to be better. He hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in five months, or hit his son recently, and he just got a brand new job. Jack has been offered the newly vacant “caretaker” position at the Overlook Hotel, located in the scenic Rocky Mountains. All he has to do is pack up the essentials, including his wife and kid, and spend a few months living in and tending to the hotel. Working to fend off the ever encroaching threat of winter, and keep the Overlook from succumbing to the elements. But this job ain’t so easy. In fact, the last guy submitted his resignation letter in the form of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after triple-homiciding his family. But certainly that won’t happen to good ole’ Jack. He has his writing to keep him busy. All he has to do is type on his little typewriter and resist the incessant urge to murder his loved ones. What could go wrong? Well, a lot as it turns out. And as his family feels the increasing need to get as far away from the Overlook as possible, Jack finds himself right at home.

Like most scary things, if you examine The Shining closely in the cold light of day, it might not seem so frightening—in fact it might even feel a little silly. And it’s true, this movie can be laugh-out-loud funny (especially when seen with a crowd). But if you give yourself over to the film, let it dig its hook into you and worm its way inside your brain, then you will be rewarded with one of the most awesome film viewing experiences of your life. The Shining has terrified audiences for decades, and for good reason. Kubrick’s floating, almost ethereal camera makes every frame feel haunted. The lengthy runtime is stuffed full of iconic horror imagery, from Nicholson terrorizing his family with an ax to a man in a bear costume giving another man in a tux an offscreen blowie. And Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall are absolutely bringing the heat with truly unforgettable performances that are simultaneously downright ridiculous and undeniably effective. In the end, this film confronts the viewer with a terrible truth: the things that haunt us—our demons and vices— will sooner or later begin to haunt those we love. Sure, we can do the hard work to heal our wounds and exercise our demons, but maybe terrorizing our loved ones is just where we belong. After all, it does seem to run in the family.

Can We Keep Him?

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

When I was growing up I wanted a dog but, like many small children, I did not get to make my own choices. Especially choices regarding my personal finances or the life of another sentient being. So my parents made a choice for me. No dog. Instead, my siblings and I endured a series of increasingly tragic non-dog animal deaths. My sister got birds and they killed themselves. Not sure how, but I want to say it was a hunger strike, maybe. Then we got rabbits, but it turns out I’m allergic and my dad had to “set them free.” I fear he may have just killed them and if he didn’t do it then the coyotes certainly did. Finally, I won stick bugs at an auction at the christian school I attended until the third grade. It was a great day! I took home two adult stick bugs in a glass terrarium, along with an unrelated harmonica. The bugs mysteriously died shortly after. The harmonica lived, although I don’t know where it ended up. The bugs probably died because I was a child and had no fucking clue how to care for a camouflaged insect. After an appropriate grieving period we went to lay them to rest, only to find a terrarium full of the post-mortem offspring of my stick bugs. We released them into the wild never to be seen again (and potentially changing the local ecosystem forever). In hindsight, I think I would have really benefited from a traditional pet experience. But I never got a dog. Turns out I’m more of a cat guy anyway.

Lilo is a small Hawaiian girl who loves the music of Elvis Presley and is filled with resentment. She often lashes out in anger. Not because she is a mean person, but because she is in pain. She finds herself disconnected from her family and peers, and this is frustrating. She longs for a friend—somebody who will make her feel at home and provide her with a sense of belonging. Enter Stitch: a creature hellbent on destruction. Birthed from the experiments of a mad scientist who is tried for his defiance of nature in an intergalactic court. They are a match made in heaven. While visiting the local animal shelter in hopes of finding a new dog, Lilo finds and adopts Stitch instead. Which is crazy, because Stitch is so clearly an alien from outer space and not a dog and how did any of the adults involved in this transaction allow it to happen? Unjustifiable pet purchase aside, it all works out in the end. Lilo finds the family she was looking for, composed of a blue talking dog, older sister and her surfer boyfriend (both hot), surrogate parents in the form of a bickering gay alien couple, and one butch social security caseworker. One big happy family.

Lilo & Stitch is a disney classic. So much so that it is being thrust onto the disgraceful heap of live-action disney remakes that take the stories you loved as a child and bludgeons them to death before your very eyes. Because god forbid this new generation have its own canon of stories, they must instead consume the reheated leftovers of our childhood. But I digress. I’ll leave you with this: even this film was not immune to the consequences of September 11th, 2001. In the original cut of the film, Stitch was supposed to hijack an airplane and fly it through the city of Honolulu.1 After 9/11 this was deemed inappropriate. And I’ll never forgive Bin Laden for that.

1Business Insider. “How the ‘Lilo and Stitch’ Airplane Crash Scene Was Changed After 9/11.” Business Insider, 15 Sept. 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/lilo-and-stitch-airplane-scene-before-and-after-9-11-disney-2017-9.

(Editor’s note: Surprisingly, this is true. The original ending featured Stitch hijacking a commercial airliner and flying it through a cityscape before it was reanimated in response to 9/11.)

Love Sick Phantom Thread (2017)

by Paul Thomas Anderson

If you’ve read my previous reviews, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that I have a bit of a codependency issue. I think that it stems from my relationship with my mother, in combination with a whole bunch of other stuff that we don’t have the time to get into right now. To put it briefly, I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem as a child (still don’t, working on it) so I was desperate for external validation. I found that I could get that validation by ignoring my own wants and needs in order to prioritize the wants and needs of others, particularly my mother. And this became a pattern I noticed in other relationships, particularly my romantic ones. As a Bisexual man, I find myself routinely in relationships with women, but I think it’s mostly because of my unresolved mommy issues. If I had daddy issues instead I think I’d date a lot more men. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have some notes for my father as well, but the trauma just wasn’t as formative (I think Freud had something to say about that).2 I tend to become overly reliant on my partners for the validation I deprive myself of. As you can imagine, this becomes quite annoying for them and, of course, deeply unhealthy for me. Sorry to ramble on like this, my therapist got promoted and had to reduce her client list and since I’m not an active suicide risk she couldn’t see me anymore.3 So I’m between therapists right now and could really use someone to talk to. All that to say, I have found myself in a series of codependent relationships in my life, so I know one when I see it.

A boy meets a girl at a seaside bed and breakfast. Reynolds Woodcock (boy), a renowned fashion designer and confirmed bachelor, has just gotten into town after driving all night from the city. He is ravenous. And Alma (girl) is happy to serve him anything he desires. Even herself. Not to eat of course, that would be gross. The pair quickly become enraptured with one another and Alma soon moves into Reynolds’ London townhouse to serve as his live-in muse and lover. But she is not the first. Reynolds has used and discarded countless women in this way. In fact, Reynolds is entirely reliant on the women in his life. He learned his trade from his mother, whose presence, even in death, looms large over him. His sister runs his business on his behalf and enables his boorish behavior. His dresses are hand stitched by craftswomen who will never attain the level of recognition he possesses, and his designs are worn by only the wealthiest women of the highest status, whose patronage pays for his lavish lifestyle. And all, in a way, seem disposable to him. Eventually, his time with Alma has arrived at its natural conclusion, the point where he seemingly ends all of his romantic entanglements. But Alma refuses to be disposed of so easily. She will do whatever it takes to maintain her place in Reynolds’ life. After Reynolds falls ill from the exhaustion of his creative and professional pursuits, Alma takes care of him and nurtures him back to health, taking on an almost maternal role. Maybe this is something Reynolds has longed for since the death of his mother? But once back to full strength, he returns to his usual ways, and Alma is forced to take matters into her own hands. What follows proves that they are made for each other, destined for a lifelong struggle, taking and giving control of themselves and their relationship in an eternal dance. But as natural as this feels, their relationship is poison.

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson was inspired to make this film after falling ill with the flu.4 He thought, as his partner Maya Rudolph (yes THAT Maya Rudolph) was caring for him, that maybe she wanted him in this state. Weak and vulnerable and fully reliant on her for his well being.5 Allowing himself to consider that maybe she had even poisoned him. But she would never do that. I saw her on TV so I trust her.6

2Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2010. (Editor’s note: Freud never explicitly addressed bisexual dating patterns in this way, but he outlines parental dynamics that shape adult desire—in Chapter V, Section C.)

5Fact-check: True. Also creepy and weird.

3Editor fact-check: This is true. Upon investigation, we confirmed that the author’s therapist did, in fact, get promoted and subsequently reduced her client list.

4Zacharek, Stephanie. “Paul Thomas Anderson on the Phantom Power of Phantom Thread.” Time, 19 Jan. 2018, https:// time.com/5109281/phantom-thread-paul-thomas-anderson-interview/.

6Fact-check: This is true. Maya Rudolph does, in fact, routinely appear on television.

If This Is The Happiest Place on Earth Then Why So Miserable? Am I

Some Kind of Heaven (2020) by Lance Oppenheim

Disneyland holds a special place in the collective consciousness. American children yearn for it. Perhaps children across the globe wish to visit its hallowed halls. But I cannot speak to the desires of the global youth. What I can say is that I was not immune to its allure. Not that I ever really had a desire to go. Just that, for whatever reason, I have found myself within its borders a number of times. My first memory of disneyland is when my parents took my older siblings there without me, leaving me behind to hang out with my grandma. It wasn’t so bad though. She’s a nice lady that gave me apple slices and fishy crackers. The second memory was far more formative. It was my first time as a guest at a disneyland theme park. Honestly, I was looking forward to it because I was a child and of course I was. But I was also experiencing overwhelming fear. My so-called “friends” had somehow convinced me that real life snakes got shot out of the walls on the Indiana Jones ride. And, being a boy with a yet undiagnosed anxiety disorder, this caused me to freak the fuck out. I remember screaming my little head off at the entrance to the ride. Pleading with my parents not to make me go on it. But I was a child and devoid of any meaningful free will. My parents forced me on the ride. Turns out, they don’t shoot live snakes at guests on the Indiana Jones ride. There was one very big, very fake looking animatronic snake that I remember immediately making me feel better because of how silly it looked. And when we got to the part where the boulder rolls at you, the ride broke. They turned all the lights on and we had to physically walk through the rest of the ride. That really shattered the immersive experience. I learned two important lessons that day: (1) anxiety can lead to far more suffering than the actual thing you’re anxious about and (2) sometimes even in places meant for our enjoyment we can still have a straight up bad time.

The Villages is a retirement community in Florida. A place where the elderly go, not to die, but to live. It was built as a “disney world for retirees.” And it lives up to that. Designed for affluent senior citizens to live in lavish comfort, the Villages has everything an old white person could desire as they await their inevitable death. Golf carts. Endless rows of pickleball courts. Industrial sized margarita machines. It is heaven on earth. Or at least something close enough to heaven to do the trick until grandpa finally has that heart attack we’ve all been waiting for. Some Kind of Heaven tells the story not of retirees enjoying their twilight years, but of those unlucky few who, despite living in a community specifically designed to maximize the happiness of its residents, still don’t quite feel like they belong. Dennis Dean is an 81-year-old man who lives in his van and is going to off himself unless he can find a beautiful and wealthy widow to provide for him. Barbara Lochiatto is a woman who has run out of her savings and is forced to work full-time in the community she planned to retire in. And finally, we have Anne and Reggie Kincer, a married couple dealing with the usual ebbs and flows of a forty-plus years long marriage. Reggie has gotten really into spiritual practices like meditation, smoking a little pot by the pool, and telling his wife and an entire camera crew that he’s going to go into his room to jack off on the day of his anniversary. Suffice it to say, our subjects are not your typical overly tanned, bleached toothed, privileged retirees.

Some Kind of Heaven is incredible and Lance Oppenheim is a director to watch. He has released three feature length projects and they are all bangers. Ren Faire is about a mad King Lear figure who rules his fake renaissance-era kingdom with an iron fist. And Spermworld is about chronic black market sperm donors and the psychology behind their abnormal behavior. His next project is a narrative feature film with Robert Pattinson and Phoebe Bridgers. Lance is 29 years old. I am deeply jealous of him. His style of filmmaking is unlike anything I have seen before. It blends reality with fiction until the audience can’t tell what is real life and what is manufactured for the cameras.

Spotlights

Dog Eared

Review of Greedy Guts: A frank, funny and feminist ode to fatness, appetite and pleasure Words by Brie Coleman

That Which Holds Our Humanity: A Review of Sing the Truth Words by Kahlea Williams

Profiles in Creativity

Sinister Wisdom and the Persistence of the Lesbians (as a Lesbian) Words by Meg Streich

Opening Doors in Publication: An Interview with Moss Puppy Magazine Words by Casper Orr

What Madness Drove Them?: Exploring the Folly of Folly Words by Micah B The Big Gay Writing Family Words by Casper Orr

Review of Greedy Guts: A frank, funny and femininst ode to fatness, appetite and pleasure

Words by Brie Coleman

HPhotos by Michael McFadden

ome is elusive, but attainable for those of us that navigate life in marginalized bodies. Queer, Trans, Disabled, Neurodivergent, disordered, and of course, big fat fatty bodies. Gina Tonic’s memoir Greedy Guts: Notes From An Insatiable Woman frankly details her journey as a woman who desires in a society where want, especially female want, is frowned upon and shamed. And yet, it is a society where an elimination of self is not necessary to create a space that feels like home.

Opening Tonic’s novel is reminiscent of lounging in bed with your best friend trading bites of candy bars you picked up at the local tesco after peeling off your under-dress-shorts to let your bits breathe. She brilliantly weaves her personal history with research to allow us to contemplate what it means to be in a body that is excluded, othered, and often reviled while creating gorgeous spaces for ourselves to expand and belong.

With a bit of humor and a truck load of vulnerability, Tonic connects all of us that grew up fat in the 2000s with her stories of disordered eating. Her book brought me back to my own teens, hopping on the treadmill and trying to consume only chocolate slimfast shakes pilfered from my mother’s stash.

Tonic is clear that fat shaming is a way for societal structures to protect the status quo, stating: “The crushing need to compensate for our bodies doesn’t just come from within. It has been developed by a patriarchy and society that demands respectability from those in marginalized bodies.” She reports that the only acceptable option for the “good fatty” is to be consistently feeding into the mouth of capitalism; to be “chasing the elusive white whale of thinness” at all times. While it is often implied that people in fat bodies are gluttonous, capitalism simultaneously and voraciously sucks away both our joy and financial resources by convincing us that our bodies do not match the only acceptable options. Straight, white,

cis, thin, no mental illness in sight. These are the things you must be perceived as and if not, you better work like hell to change that. Diet culture is a trap, this idea that we will be able to re-enter respectable society through thinness. It’s as simple as “go[ing] to some zumba classes and eat[ing] some cucumbers to assimilate.” Easy. No problem. Except having to give up fulfillment, pleasure, and the will to live.

Tonic reveals how capitalism plays both sides in the name of inclusivity. “Numerous times… those in bodies marginalized from the mainstream—fat people, people of colour, Disabled people, Queer people, Trans people—have been placed in the public eye with the aim to sell products.” More often than not, this so-called inclusivity is performative and when push comes to shove, the same companies that profit off of our fat, Queer bodies are also overturning their DEIA policies.

The society we live in values weight loss above all else. Save a puppy, job well done. Lose 10 pounds and your co-workers will gush over what a terrific human being you are. The only acceptable response to an offer of cheesecake is to take one bite and declare loudly that you are just too full. Or even better, let everyone know you just aren’t a dessert person. Tonic proposes an alternative, a life where there is no cap on pleasure. Eat the cheesecake, have a “fab one-night stand,” celebrate “being fucking filthy.” Refuse to be ashamed to want more rather than less. More treats, more sex, more life.

Sometimes home must be built. Tonic, along with her co-founder Chloe Sheppard, started The Fat Zine “to provide a space for plus-size creatives to explore their craft.” A home for fat liberation and solidarity. She flips the script that we are constantly fed, stating: “feeling beautiful has a power that is especially important for those of us in marginalized bodies to feel—even if it requires creating our own, community specific codes of beauty.” We are allowed to feel beautiful. I repeat, we are allowed to feel beautiful, even if we do not match the bullshit and frankly snooze-worthy standards set by hyper-normative culture.

Although she does not claim to have all the answers, Tonic shares how she has come to be at home in her body by “rebelling together” with “subversion and a refusal to assimilate.” Tonic highlights the power of intersectionality: “I feel fatness and Queerness have a particular bond due to the revolutionary ways that fat, Queer people in history have paved the way for positive and diverse representation for those that exist in bigger bodies.”

Together we have and will create our own spaces to call home, remembering that “being a big bitch hasn’t ever gotten in the way of the endless, sumptuous activities that life is all about.”

Words by Kahlea Williams

That Which Holds Our Humanity: A Review of Sing the Truth

In a world where truth is muddied by colonial falsehoods, the stories in Sing the Truth pierce the fog like a beam of light, illuminating our shared collective humanity in every story. Indeed, Sing the Truth is aptly named.

This collection of short stories was edited by Laura Pegram, founding editor and publisher of the Kweli Journal, a vanguard literary journal that publishes emerging voices of color. Kweli means truth in Swahili, and truth is present in each and every story in Sing the Truth. That is, the stories ring of an innately known but rarely acknowledged fact: we are all human under our socially constructed labels. We are connected through this fact, and Pegram excels at offering readers an accessible path to these truths via stories.

The stories in this collection, though diverse in settings, characters, and perspective, all have one thing in common: they reveal realities and lived experiences oft ignored in mainstream literature. These stories bring readers closer to truth by revealing layers that are often concealed by colonial narratives. The experience of loss of agency, of being exploited, being stolen from, of having one’s humanity erased. These are the experiences that unite the marginalized around the world and across time. The pain, such as that experienced by characters in these stories, serves as evidence that the oppression is real. The pain must be documented because, as Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it."

Sing the Truth preserves and illuminates our humanity. In sharing our truth through stories, we reinforce our experience as

valid—no colonizer narrative to gaslight us in second guessing our experience. The colonizer narrative seeks to sugar-coat these truths, denying them altogether or feigning innocence at their role in the destruction. By singing our truth, we crystallize our narrative. Across waning time and shifting borders, the printed words remain intact. We are here, we exist.

These stories are woven together by a common thread: the perspective of the oppressed. In “Farradiya” we are taken along the migratory journey of a Palestinian family that was forced from their home, the paradise of Farradiya, after the death of the narrator’s father. We are led to believe the grief of being forced from his Indigenous home is what killed him rather than some communicable disease, and I am inclined to agree. The negative health impacts1 of oppression have been studied widely, impacting outcomes such as life expectancy, birth outcomes, maternal mortality, and more. As the narrator’s exhaustion and disorientation grows, what little hope he had of returning to their homeland wanes. This is what oppression and colonization does: it weathers away at one’s hope and wellbeing.

It is important to understand that a story about a displaced Palestinian family, such as in the case of "Farradiya,” has a lot in common with a story about a Black cotton farmer in the southern U.S. suffering at the hands of white racists who control the nearby town, as is the case in “A Hard Bed." A stubborn hard-nosed cotton farmer works tirelessly, meticulously on his land. His crop is his pride, but his pride is deftly challenged by the local racist cotton gin operator. Molly, whose pride is similarly contested, dreams of completing school to become

a nurse. Namon and Joh, duly dedicated to gender hierarchies, prevent her from studying, insisting that her new role as a mother prevents her from taking on any other role. The hypocrisy is heartbreaking as we witness Namon struggle against barriers while he simultaneously constructs barriers between Molly and her dreams. Namon and Joh work together to reduce Molly's agency, as if the essence of motherhood is powerlessness. As a reader, I felt rage, grief, and exhaustion as I witnessed both of these characters’ loss of agency and their shared inability to fully express their justified rage at their oppressors. For Namon and Joh, their oppressors are outside the home, but for Molly, her oppressors are her husband and his brother, both of whom she is economically dependent on. The story reveals an uncomfortable truth, which is that sometimes those who are oppressed participate in the oppression of others.

In "Without a Big One,” we witness the impacts of systemic poverty on a family in New York City. The narrator, Ray Ray, slowly learns the power of narrative when he learns that the "college” he had been told his stepfather had been away at was actually prison. After learning this news, he decides to continue to believe the narrative about college, perhaps because he realizes his stepfather needs to believe the narrative just as much as he does. Stories become real when we continue to tell them. What does it matter to the son that his stepfather is actually in prison? By choosing to believe in the narrative his stepfather created, he honors his dignity and helps him survive prison by preserving his honor, allowing him to maintain the same role he played before prison as protector and provider.

Though they seem worlds apart, the characters in "Farradiya” and “A Hard Bed” suffer under the same global system of exploitation, one that seeks to bend the narrative in its favor. In doing so, the uninitiated may be inclined to believe that these characters have nothing to gain by uniting with each other, but this is a myth manufactured by colonial narratives. In both instances, the characters lost either complete control over their livelihoods, or their ability to economically benefit from the land was so stymied by the local forces that the loss of agency is arguably just as profound. One could also see this theme in "Work." The main character, Mika, declares, "so many folks only just take take take take from you.” Such is the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. “Work” is a story about a young girl who is continually stolen from by those who are supposed to fill her up. Major, who is the so-called father figure in her life, resents her for having a cushy office job, unlike him. He convinces Mika to give him her hard-earned savings, built up from her many hours spent babysitting and making and selling bracelets. The story ends bittersweet with an outpouring of grief to the one person who doesn't seem to only want to take take take take from her, a janitor at her summer jobsite. She is surprised to encounter a person who is only interested in giving to her, a new experience for a teen who has been working since childhood.

This, to me, is what Kweli is; what truth is. Courageously crafting a narrative, taking part in crafting others’ narrative in a way that honors and dignifies our collective humanity. That which holds our humanity is truth.

1Forde, A. T., Crookes, D. M., Suglia, S. F., & Demmer, R. T. (2019). The weathering hypothesis as an explanation for racial disparities in health: a systematic review. Annals of Epidemiology, 33, 1-18.e3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. annepidem.2019.02.011

Sinister Wisdom and the Persistence of the Lesbians (asaLesbian) Words by Meg Streich

Sinister Wisdom, in their own words, is a “multicultural Lesbian literary & art journal… work[ing] to create a multicultural, multi-class Lesbian space. [They] seek to open, consider, and advance the exploration of Lesbian community issues.” Sinister Wisdom has been active since 1976, beginning at a time when it had been made clear based on years of systemic governmental oppression that Queer folks had to start fighting for themselves. Since 1976, Sinister Wisdom has been painting a picture of Lesbian culture as it evolved (and continues to evolve) through the eras. At Sinister Wisdom’s formation in 1976, samesex activities had only just begun to be decriminalized.1 The term Lavender Menace, a term coined by National Organization for Women’s Betty Friedan, was being used to illustrate the perceived threat by Lesbians towards the feminist movement of the time—coincidentally, paralleling the inter-group exclusionary practices of the modern-day LGBTQ+ community.2 Lesbians of the time were viewed as asking too much of the feminist movement, being too radical, going too far and hurting the cause, which of course, we know not to be true.3 In 1972, we saw the first out (out being a key term in this case) Lesbian delegate elected to the Democratic National Convention, Madeline Davis, who also taught the first ever “course on Lesbianism”—“Women + Women” at the University of Buffalo.4 Sinister Wisdom has been around since the breakthrough of Lesbians into the mainstream, claiming their rightful spaces in public office, community organizing, publishing, literature, and music.

The 1981 issue of Sinister Wisdom is a compilation of pieces ranging from as early as the late 1970s to its publication in 1981. Ordered chronologically, each piece gives a candid insight into what it meant, in that moment, to be a Lesbian. In a tone reminiscent of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, we see a version of Queer joy isolated to small spaces, sequestered to corners, and just starting to see itself. The standout piece of this issue is “Sex is Always the Headliner,” written by community activist Karlene Faith (organizer of the Santa Cruz Women’s Prison Project) with an introduction by Robin Ruth Linden. Linden set out to discuss the anti-racist movement emerging in women’s prisons across the country at a time when there was “little support or opportunity for women who had been incarcerated to speak publicly about their prison experience.” Initially, Faith attempted to steer away from discussions of sexuality to avoid further perpetuating the fetishization of Homosexuality in prisons that had been creepily sustained by male social scientists. However, in interviewing these women, Faith expressed not only how prominent discussions of sexuality were, but how open these women were in regards to their intimate selves. This piece was written at a time when prison policy regarding Homosexuality was “Don’t Get Caught.” Delving into the intimate relationships carried out with the hope of not getting caught, Faith writes the story of Juanita, a woman in love with Lorene, the waitress at the staff snack bar. On the day before Lorene is scheduled to leave, she asks Juanita to meet with her. Confessing to Juanita that she was in love with a woman, Juanita is surprised, countering that she had just assumed Lorene was a Lesbian. Lorene replied with a quote that characterizes the time and a layer of the coming-out onion:

“No! I’m not a Lesbian. I’m not a Homosexual. I’m just in love with this woman, don’t you see?”

1Eskridge, W. N. Jr. (2008). Dishonorable passions: Sodomy laws in America, 1861–2003. Viking.

2Napikoski, L. (2025, May 12). Lavender Menace: The phrase, the group, the controversy. ThoughtCo. https://www. thoughtco.com/lavender-menace-feminism-definition-3528970

3Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America. Columbia University Press.

4Davis, M., & Kennedy, E. L. (1993). Boots of leather, slippers of gold: The history of a lesbian community. Routledge.

This story alone packs in themes of self-acceptance that were only found isolated from the male gaze, a growing understanding of the self found through removal of an existing support system, the change from public life to the women’s prison system, and the importance of giving all people humanity. This understanding that existing as a Lesbian is not an invitation to be fetishized by male producers in unwashed undershirts with no top layer, but an invitation to be understood and uplifted by your community regardless of status, wealth, or platform. In the words of Faith, “Prisons frustrate every natural human need. The need for good food must be suppressed. The need for restful sleep must be allayed. The need for joyous work must be buried. The need for sexual comfort must be denied. But it doesn’t work. To be deprived of life’s sensory experiences is not to lose interest in them. To the contrary.”

The 2024 issue speaks to a much different time. Poems about getting the perfect shag haircut and applying “shamrock salicylic acne patches” in the back of Warehouse on Watts (a Philadelphia venue I look out at as I write this) are peppered in with essays from the early ‘80s. This is what makes Sinister Wisdom unique. Oftentimes, within any community we look to the younger, more liberated versions of our group and see them as asking for too much, pushing things too far, asking for too much acceptance, or too much work from heterosexuals. Sinister Wisdom, in its decision to braid these texts in a single issue, shows the reader that, with hope:

This is always how it’s been.

From wheatpasting to tiktoking, every generation sees liberation taking a new form. Lesbian and Queer liberation will continue long after I, you, and those we rally with are gone. There is a certain spirituality to it, a reincarnation of the revolution with each generation of Gays. New people will take your place, advocating for different causes—but at their core, those causes will reflect the same fundamental needs, just in a different form. Whether it is the bold switch from a dress to pants, or browsing etsy and thrift stores for hours trying to find your truest gender expression, there has always been liberation. For generations, as Sinister Wisdom shows, there is a need to push through, to not only tuck Lesbians in a corner but to put them front and center. Hear Queer women in prisons, in rural communities, internationally, and next door to you.

Opening Doors in Publication: An Interview with Moss Puppy Magazine

IWords by Casper Orr

n a publishing world notorious for its gatekeeping and impossible-to-climb barriers, Melissa Martini’s Moss Puppy Magazine offers something radically different; inclusivity, accessibility, and a home for the unloved. As a Queer creative born and raised in New Jersey, I was struck with a pleasant nostalgia when I learned that a literary magazine I’d admired since the first year of college was not only founded in the state, but also operated by Queer creatives.

The art and literary scene in New Jersey, believe it or not, is excellent. There are nearly 3,500 arts, culture, and humanities organizations in New Jersey. Queer artists have long shaped New Jersey’s creative scene, but only recently has Queer culture found more visibility within the state’s public social life. The shift towards visibility is something that Moss Puppy Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Melissa Martini has experienced firsthand:

“I was born and raised in Union, New Jersey. Growing up, there wasn't a huge Queer scene, but by the time I reached high school, we had a Gaystraight alliance, and I felt like the community was beginning to cultivate a Queer presence.

While things quieted down during COVID, I've seen a steady return of Pride events in recent years—even outside of June. There’s definitely more happening now than when I was a kid.”

Moss Puppy Magazine was founded in the summer of 2021. After working on literary magazines throughout high school, college, and her graduate program, Martini returned to the literary world after spending time a part of the workforce.

“I created Moss Puppy Magazine kind of on a whim after quitting my fulltime job. I had grown so used to working on literary magazines… and once I graduated and started working full time, I realized how much I missed the creative, curatorial aspect of that world.

When I shifted to freelance and contract work again, it felt like the perfect time to launch a magazine-and I did it practically overnight.”

Although Moss Puppy Magazine has created a unique personality for itself over the four years it’s been in operation, Melissa hadn’t initially created Moss Puppy Magazine to fill any one specific niche, leaving it with endless possibilities. The only thing that mattered to Martini was accessibility; at the end of the day, Martini didn’t—and still doesn’t—care about your resume. What she and the Moss Puppy team cares about is your art.

“I wanted [Moss Puppy Magazine] to be a space where it didn’t matter if you’d been published before or not; we still wanted you to submit. I don’t think writing should be gatekept.”

Representation has been, and still is, significantly lacking from the traditional publishing industry. This act of gatekeeping within publication is something that Martini feels incredibly passionate about, as it’s what creates barriers within creative communities.

“As for what we’ve seen too much of: censorship of already-marginalized voices. The industry tends to silence or filter the exact people who most need to be heard. We need more space for truth-telling and genuine representation.”

Unlike many of its traditional contemporaries, Moss Puppy Magazine has been a creative outlet for writers and artists that are often overlooked since its inception in the summer of 2021. Melissa has approached her work with Moss Puppy with a focus on fun and creativity, rather than the serious and introspective—although there is room for gloomy and experimental too.

“Moss Puppy Magazine was created to be a welcoming space, especially for creatives who might not feel at home in more traditional or competitive publishing environments.

Our themed issues are curated with heart, care, and collaboration. We focus less on prestige and more on community and fun, curating work that resonates emotionally, spiritually, or creatively, rather than by resume.

Moss Puppy isn’t about proving yourself; it’s about sharing your voice and knowing you’ll be received with love. We’ve built a space where writers and readers feel like they belong. That sense of home is really at the core of everything we do.”

As Martini continues to grow the Moss Puppy community, she plans to expand the world of Moss Puppy Magazine, not only to grow the community and family that has been built around this niche and eccentric magazine, but also as a backlash against traditional publication. Her ventures will put a more approachable face on the world of publication; one that anyone can interact with.

“I’d love to expand into chapbook publishing while continuing our biannual themed issues. Right now, I’m also working on a Moss Puppy Field Guide with my incredible illustrator, Kathryn. The guide will go deeper into the lore of Moss Puppy as a character and the world she lives in, since each issue theme ties back to that larger universe.

Beyond that, I’ve been dreaming of expanding into graphic novels one day, or even developing some kind of game or Neopets-style community site; something cozy, whimsical, and interactive that lets people step into the Moss Puppy world.”

Moss Puppy Magazine has grown a tight-knit, committed, and creative community, proving that weirdness and care still have a home in the publishing world. Maybe with more editors like Melissa leading their own Moss Puppy Magazines, that home will continue to grow.

Find Moss Puppy Magazine online at mosspuppymag.com!

What Madness Drove Them?: Exploring the Folly of Folly

Words by Micah B

You might not know Folly, but you should. They’re a New Zealand–based magazine combining the literary magazine culture of the united states with the wealth of fantastic Kiwi writers. They embrace the quirky, the sexy, the artsy, and the wacky. Their signature style interweaves topics—one moment you’ll be laughing at hand-drawn comics, and the next you’ll be reading an interview with a woman who trepanned her own skull while high on LSD. Needless to say, Folly is a eyebrow-raising, whip-smart, rollercoaster of read.

I sat down with Emily Broadmore, Editor-in-Chief and Founder of Folly to ask her about what goes on inside of a journal that’s breaking all the rules. I learned how it all got started, how Folly has created a home for Kiwi fiction, and the way that Emily herself has made a home for creatives in her hometown.

How did you get started with Folly?

I started thinking about Folly when I was living in america. I was picking up a bunch of literary journals in New York— We don’t have anything like that in New Zealand. At the same time, a lot of the fiction I was writing was getting published in America, while there was no home for it in New Zealand. I was aware that there must be more people like me here in New Zealand that need a home for their writing. That’s where Folly came from. It has created a home for fiction that otherwise wouldn’t have been published in New Zealand.

Building on the idea of creating a home for literary fiction, I wanted to further understand how Folly explores genres beyond fiction.

I was struck by Folly’s melange of styles, topics, and authorial voices. Folly is not organized by genre or theme. How do you choose to intermix genres and how do you let each style shine?

What I'm trying to do there is take the reader on a journey and inject a little bit of commentary, which some people might find a bit punchy. Then, right at the point where someone might be going, “oh, I don't really agree with this perspective; this makes me feel a bit uncomfortable,” you throw in a sexy story or a fun poem. People say they pick it up and then they just don’t put it down. You’re going to feel a bit provoked or maybe uneasy about some of the pieces, but ultimately we’re trying to create something which is entertainment. It’s a strange curation.

After learning about the diverse group of voices present in Folly, I wanted to know how Folly creates community between these writers.

Has Folly led you to any spaces that feel like home—whether that’s a literal place or something more communal?

Yes. That home would be where I am right now—my office in a historic building in Wellington. Upstairs, I’ve got a writer’s studio that I set up two years ago. The writer’s studio is essentially the publisher for the magazine. The Wellington Writer’s studio is home to Folly.

We have got this amazing stable of writers who just do all sorts of wacky genres: stage plays, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, journalism, all sorts of people out there. This building has become a home for a lot of people who needed community.

I set out the studio as a shared workspace and discovered quite quickly that actually, it was not being treated as a shared workspace. It was being treated as a community space for people that felt isolated or like they didn't have somewhere to go.

So in terms of your question about what is home, this building feels like home for a lot of people in our writing community. And for me.

How did you decide to start the Wellington Writer’s Studio?

New York is such a crazy city for someone who’s from this tiny little city at the bottom of the world. I needed somewhere to go to write and I found writing studios. I was fascinated. I ended up down

a wormhole. I had conversations with a lot of founders and visited as many places as I could while I was in New York. And, when I came home, there were a bunch of writers upstairs. They were just paying per desk and they were really struggling to manage what to do when one of them leaves. It was all just becoming a bit too much and I thought: “well, if I don’t create a home for these people, then they’re all going to leave. How about I just take it all over and I’ll just run it for you.” It was clearly needed and it was a way to keep the community operating. And it’s working. It covers itself in terms of how much it brings in, which is all it needs to do. And when we have extra, we put on a drink event or something nice for everyone.

Can you tell me a little bit about some of the people who work in the writing studio and what it’s been like to meet and be with them?

It’s been incredible. I’ve met people that I would never have come across before. We had a run of retired chief executives who turned up to write their fantasy novels. There’s people from all over the world. We’ve got a few people whose husbands or wives have come over from America to work in film, and these people don’t have a community. So they set themselves up at the studio. Sometimes there is this one guy who’ll just be staring out the window in a bit of a trance. And I say “hey, how are you doing?” And he’s like, “ah, I just think I’m going to try writing an essay today.” We also have one guy who writes for the new yorker and goes on these crazy investigative missions around the world. It’s a really fun group of people at all different stages.

Talking with Emily helped me see the ways in which a spark from a single motivated individual with a getstuff-done attitude can create a text that brings together voices from around the globe. Additionally, learning about the writer’s studio showed that bringing creatives together allows an emergence of community and art. Finally, I can’t wait for the next issue of this wild and wonderful journal. Make sure you catch issue 003 when it comes out this November. Follow their instagram, @folly.journal for updates.

The Big Gay Writing Family

Words by Casper Orr

When I saw the post advertising the first meeting of the Big Gay Writing Project (BGWP), I was two years into a writer’s block and I saw a chance to find myself again. I began my journey with the Philadelphia-based writing group in the summer of 2024. BGWP founder, Meg Streich, offers free access to university-level literary education and it’s become invaluable to me (and the rest of the members). Free writing workshops are few and far between, especially those that cater specifically to the Queer community.

Workshops and writing prompts had never really been my speed. Writing prompts have always felt too constraining, like there’s nowhere good to start. But as a teacher, Streich knows how to make your brain tick in ways it never has before. Instead of seeing nonsensical jumbles of words when reading prompts, I’ve seen pages open up in front of me. In the year I’ve been a member of BGWP, I’ve been pushed to my creative limits and found a new artist hiding within me every time. I went from a self proclaimed poet to an essayist, a critic, and a playwright that occasionally dabbles in poetry. You don’t leave this workshop unchanged. You don’t leave it without the people who changed you along the way.

she was able to get one of my favorite contemporary essayists, Noam Keim, to facilitate.

While fun events and guest speakers add sparkle, the heart of BGWP is its people. At the end of the day, without the writers that pour their lives onto pages, we wouldn’t have this workshop. More importantly, we wouldn’t have this creative and talented group of friends. The Big Gay Writing Project is not simply a workshop: it’s a family. And I wouldn’t be able to tell this story without them.

I built relationships with Queer creatives that I admired—people I could depend on. Gaining access to their insight has been a privilege in itself, but Streich has spared nothing to create the most enriching experience she can provide for us. She’s officially thrown the first in-person BGWP event at Tattooed Moms—a Queer bar based in Philadelphia.

Streich has also pulled out all the stops when it comes to the workshop itself. Aside from a rich curation of prompts that were able to even inspire me, she also vigorously seeks out guest speakers for her students. This spring, we had our first guest facilitator and speaker, Nancy Pearson. This summer,

“I did not imagine when I joined The Big Gay Writing Project over a year ago that so much would have changed for me. I am not the same writer or editor I was when I started. I never prioritized or nourished my creativity, nor did I honor my Queerness in my creative expression. The Big Writing Project has been a place to try new mediums and to be proud of the amazing Queer pieces I write. More than that, it has become my family. This group has opened up a whole new way of living and creating for me. The encouragement and love that I receive from this group of humans makes me truly feel at home for the first time. As leader of The Big Gay Writing Project, Meg has given us all a safe home in which to thrive and honor our Queer artistry.”

“The Big Gay Writing Project has immeasurably improved my writing practice, my mood, and my life. I stumbled in last summer for the free feedback, and I return every week for the beautiful, wonderful friendship. Having a space like BGWP, where I know I am always safe to be and write as myself, allows me to experiment with form and content in ways I never would otherwise. The prompts are consistently challenging, while still being playful and entertaining. Meg is encouraging to writers of all levels, and sharing never feels intimidating. Getting the opportunity to read other Queer writers’ work, be

involved with their processes, and watch them grow is a tremendous privilege and a ton of fun. The 1-3 hours we spend together every week consistently makes my highlight reel and I can’t imagine life without it.”

“This year, I set out to reconnect with my creative self expression on my own terms— so much of my work has been created under the rigorous constraints of academia. When I first found BGWP, I had spent several years away from regular creative self expression. Too much life and not enough time to process it. The first piece I submitted for group feedback was during children’s book week. I felt so out of my depth. But Meg’s calming reassurance during the feedback session immediately let me feel it was safe to return the following week and keep sharing. I’ve since created some pieces I am so incredibly proud of, pieces that are distinctively Queer and that feel like myself. I’ve returned to a world of writing and I’m getting closer to the embodiment of the creative person I want to be. I credit that to BGWP and I hold this group so close to my heart because of it.”

“I had not written anything for a year before I found The Big Gay Writing Project. A week before joining, I had told a friend I didn’t like doing it anymore. Now I’ve been here for three months and have never been more motivated to write, nor more excited to read other writers’ work. Meg has gathered an unbelievably skilled, clever, and supportive group of people. And she actively fights against the reflexively self-critical parts of each of us. For the first time, I don’t feel like I have to prove anything. I can just show up as myself. I’ve never felt seen as who I am in a writing setting before. This weird little Queer gang I joined on a whim has become irreplaceable to me.”

“Joining BGWP has sincerely been one of the best things I’ve done in the last year. When I first joined, I figured it would be a way to make myself write more consistently. While it has done that, the group Meg has created and fostered is so full of love and joy. BGWP is an incredible little community, and it’s because of Meg that it is what it is.”

“The Big Gay Writing Project has given me a reason to write again, and a connection to the Queer community that I thought I had lost. After seeing the first promo post, I was unsure about logging on. But once I did, I knew that I was going to keep

coming back for more. I have learned so much about myself and my journey as a writer, and Meg makes it feel safe to push our limits. She encourages us to be our truest, weirdest, least filtered selves and supports our wildest ideas. She has given us a place to escape and to be in community. Honestly, it is nothing short of a family. Laughs, meandering conversations, and constructive commentary are always a guarantee. I know I always have somewhere to come home to with the Big Gay Writing Project.”

“I first became acquainted with BGWP a bit by proxy. My husband was the one who initially found and joined the group in the summer of 2024. But it only took a few months of learning about it secondhand, and getting to know the members better on my own, to make me want to join myself. I’ve never been a part of a creative group that actually lets its members, myself included, let loose and grow as artists quite like this one. Meg is a fantastic leader, facilitator, and writer in her own right. Everyone is encouraged to write, share, and critique in ways unique to their personal flair. I’m delighted to be a part of such an incredible group and dare I say, family.”

“BGWP made me hilarious. In our writer’s group, I’ve realized that I have a unique perspective that’s worth refining and expressing. I’ve gone deeper in my own writing practice and in ways I never expected. We learned the most from the exercises that we dreaded the most. Most of all, I’ve learned to balance depth while weaving in humor and levity. BGWP has been a light in my life when I’ve needed community. I’ve met some of the coolest, most talented people who I’m lucky enough to call friends and creative confidantes. Every week I’m inspired by the writers in our group. I feel lucky to read their work.”

The Big Gay Writing Project proves what happens when Queer creativity is met with attention, guidance, and community. In a world that too often tries to silence Queer voices, this close-knit weekly workshop is a place where those voices not only survive— they flourish.

You can find the Big Gay Writing Project on instagram @biggaywritingproject to learn more about upcoming events and workshops!

Poetry

New Year Words by Cal O’Reilly

Footnote Words by Theo Elliot

jakarta date night 2013 Words by Patricia Kusumaningtyas

Still Life with Hurricanes Forming in the Distance Words by Kimberly Hall

Kenshō Words by Flossie Hedges

brunch with my othering Words by jp thorn “that’s the way, maahi ve!” Words by Alfie Nawaid

Under God, Guheim Words by Ava Pauline

abecedarian gets a bowl Words by Fatima B. Bayou Birds Words by V.M. Reilly

Pitch Meeting Words by Philip Kenner

Rooms: Kitchen Words by Emily Rose Miller

My Sister Writes W-A-R-S-H on a Dirty Car Window Words by Caryl Townsend

New Year

Words by Cal O’Reilly

“Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again” Mary Oliver

taking the long way back through the park after the gym—lashing rain—everything pulled into its own gravity while dark— shadows of new shrubs—a stream of full moon through branches on a small patch of crocuses under the oaks–the ground meets each footstep—its solidity catches me off guard–like I’ve finally found the self I’ve sifted rivers for—first Christmas back home my name is a given–not a pause between here and there between was and is— the hurt teenager in me relaxes his jaw–lets the soft animal escape—nostalgic— I’m sorry it took so long–later I’ll feel homesick

Footnote

Words by Theo Elliot

spores of light are catching in my vision in my head i am a dream, a footnote to my life have you ever drawn both your fists down onto piano keys, white knuckles, like a child with no words and everything to say, all i can hear is the notes bleeding into one my baby sister calls our mother mama, calls the pūkeko that swarm on the hill opposite their house friends their feathered blue and red turns maroon the school choir sent me away from auditions, said kid you’re off key i can see blood just from a flock of birds my memories are oceans and i am chewing the salt the pūkeko summon a memory the keys are the colour of fists and in the space between text and spine i scrawl out a question mark it looks like a hook, something tugs i don’t take the bait i wonder if i am a bad seed my sister so sweet even the birds are welcome for dinner mother / mama has laid the table i am 444 kilometres away every note in the world is offering itself up at once i say nothing i wonder if i feel so distant because i spent too long so close to the wound hook hook and the fish are biting and the unhappy child disrupts the whole world a womb has nothing on nurture even the soft freckles of sun look like defence i am a footnote in my own story i am listening to the piano and all the birds in tāmaki makaurau are pigeons but i try not to hate them for her let them sit with me when it is gums for dinner welcome friends home is over the hill tucked in a memory but i’ve learnt to lay tables in all sorts of places

jakarta date night 2013

Words by Patricia Kusumaningtyas

i.

aduh! the ketchup machine squirts reds on yuni’s thesis. priska laughs, stomach-full, like her dad and warkop on sunday afternoons. my fingers trace fry-grease on brown bags.

wednesday night is ladies night at amelia’s, but amelia got her tongue stuck in priska’s ex-girlfriend susi, so we’re fucking around the sarinah mcdonald’s again. i slide fry-grease to the nape of my neck, god, wish a

pretty girl was here to feed fries in my mouth. kamu nggak ke ladies night? you arise, wiping ketchup off yuni’s

wrists like a thief in the night. i paint a portrait of you in rumors. dara the pillow princess. dara in a two-year lavender marriage with sofyan. dara who slept with all ten of amelia’s exes. dara now feeds me fries,

looks into my eyes, coding sweet nothings discreetly like spies. wednesday night is ladies night after all.

ii.

6:30 p.m., eyelids drooping, packed like sardines from gambir to kalibata. i hang on to your frame at the behest of yuppies in hairspray staring, waiting to take off their stockings. the city looks different from up here, miniscule as chicken bouillon powder, floating on lukewarm water. beneath the upstream crowd

flowing from manggarai station i flex my tippy toes, planting a kiss on your neck. i’m your man and you’re my man like i’m your lady and you’re my lady. we are here alien and anonymous in this sweet brewing stream. just enough loving in a place like this. in rawamangun priska brews tea for dad, in depok

yuni spars with her professor. but here in manggarai you hold me tighter as the pressure rises, an opposite release on the cawang station downstream. awkward brushes, waiting, until we let loose our stockings.

iii.

your mother whispers something in your ear. words thinning like nails on a chalkboard. priska cut her hair short last week, short enough to bury her dad in neighbors’ whispers, dirt above dirt among dirt. yuni started a controversy in school (mostly on a rumor mill) when they saw her kissing amelia’s ex’s girlfriend near the prayer room, so close you hear the echoes of mothers saying alhamdulillah

my daughter is not a lesbi. in your humble room you hold my hand with my head on your shoulder.

i love you in private until the roof bursts to the heavens but in public i whisper your name into my fist, clenching it until my nails bury deep into my flesh excruciating until you let me relax it, in your room, bandages ready. in the living room your mother tends the yarn in the cookie jar.

iv.

you pick me up on your underbone and we are going to the sarinah mcdonald’s again. bruised blue we order fries and sambal and hold hands under the table. fry-grease doesn’t feel like frygrease when we haven’t heard from priska or yuni. fuck it, i’m on the backseat of your underbone, you drive me down sudirman street. president’s palace, istiqlal mosque, jakarta cathedral, the circuit court.

you pick the quietest screening at the metropole. a campaign ad plays between the previews, echoing the mouths of mothers and neighbors and yuppies in hairspray on the commuter line. we sigh and sit still. i gaze in your eyes again at the ladies’ parking, quiet, still luminous, still there.

i hold you, but never too long. always hasty and ill in a place like this.

Still Life with Hurricanes Forming in the Distance

Words by Kimberly Hall

summer down south / staggers through our doors one weekend / with an unrepentant / high-walkin’ swagger / all bayou heat / pitch & wave / soon enough congregations will swamp along the surface fronts / share a little-death roll / & we’ve already started counting the days / checking the weather / the facts / every year more storms / & every year / fewer rainbows follow them / my momma wants to move north to drier land / higher ground / somewhere the hiss of June doesn’t raise hackles / I want to live long enough to see my sister married / here / we consider these things between sips of our morning coffee / momma’s today with oat milk over ice / mine black as always / & scalding / calculating / before we flip the calendar / the real cost of survival / public scrutiny / insurance / proof of identification / momma plots evacuation routes & I wonder about the scutes I would have to shed / in order to fit / littered behind / swept up / at the state’s earliest convenience / relocation is tricky / remember those gators when Beryl moved in? / hundreds of miles from home / displaced by depressions / house bills / HOAs / still some internal compass keeps pointing / back / toward what they want most / problem now is / we’ve seen the signs / the green skies / we know what comes next / low pressure system & a crackdown / pretending to be thunder / our label: nuisance / label: obscene / label: unsafe for children / like we haven’t been keystone in keeping theirs alive / holding this house together / like we haven’t been planting seeds & growing / growing / a kind of freedom our neighbors simply take / as their birthright / I have tried blizzards / twisters / hail to keep my head low / but truth is shame never changed any climate / & I am tired of being told to run away / when these days tides are rising / everywhere / what is the opposite of displacement? / an open mouth / a show of teeth / a thousand drops of water / dancing / across the floodplain / crying out we’re here / we are here / get fucking used to it /

Words by Flossie Hedges Kenshō

In the moment, it feels like a curse:

To always open my eyes to the barbed sounds of you putting sud-slick dishes away in our crooked cabinets.

That clatter breaks through dream depths, their textures. It is a hard clap, a branch snapping, a corner turned after a long run.

And I am a soft body, pulled from a sopping opal realm to meet your solidity, your shirt wet from the sink’s bottom lip.

Words by jp thorn

“that’s the way, maahi

After

ve!”

Maahi Ve from Kal Ho Naa Ho

Words by Alfie

Nawaid

maybe there is a reason some words ring similar in my mother tongue. I’m an outsider peering into the sounds as if they’re windows. the jaan of love is relaxing back into the sofa cushions, its long and sighing intonation steepled against the precise flick of knowing, jaanna.

knowing retires to bed early, every minute weighs it down. its breaths hitch upwards in the middle as if shrugging or leaping. love meanwhile smooths its palms across the crease in which knowing sat curved like a perpetual parenthesis.

jaan’s long sound is full-bellied, baying all through the night stealing the air in the room and pausing only once in its song a subtle possessive current woven into the arch of its cadence, saying my love, yes?—meri jaan, na? in response to knowing’s sleep-obscured interjection:

aaja-na. the body murmured into invitation, translation left somewhere between lips and misted glass.

I wonder if the priests knew what you’d become. I wonder if they smelled the goodness on you, the honeysuckle sweetness of self-sacrifi ce or the pots and pans of arroz con pollo you’d go on to cook just in case anyone was hungry. I’ve never seen you with a rosary in your hands but you are the only saint I know, the only soul deserving of a martyr’s name but too free-spirited to ever come when called by it.

I learned your real name a week before you died. Your mother loved the name Gu-heim with its strong, cheerful lilt that always reminded me of bright green walls and ceramic bowls of white rice warm to the touch. At the foot of the church in Puerto Rico, your mother begged to bestow the two syllables upon her precious baby girl but the priests insisted; Guheim was no saint’s name. Instead they settled on Ma-ri-a — a name you held secret and close like a golden heirloom pressed in the underwire of your bra, passed on to me before you did.

God, Guheim

In the week before you died I didn’t fi nd a moment to tell you that I am Queer. During the empty days you left behind I’ve mulled all of your names over wishing I learned Spanish sooner so I could do them justice and tell you Ma-ri-a, soy Lesbiana, feel your rings on my back as you hugged me afterwards holding me close without condition. My heart would be light as a feather in the light of a saint’s acceptance. Now, years later, after all my aunts and cousins wept for you next to the basin of holy water in Brooklyn, at the foot of another church in Puerto Rico a baby is being baptized— as I was, and my parents were, and you before them with toes tiny as black beans, awash with the scent of goodness and meals with unwritten recipes blessed with a future of Queer lovers and friends who harbor secret names of their own. The mother begs for a secular name, clutching her breast and giving it her best shot. The priests will shake their stubborn heads and insist the baby be called, under God — Guheim. the goodness on you, just in case anyone was hungry.

Ma-ri-a, soy Lesbiana, My heart would be light as a feather blessed with a future of Queer lovers and friends The priests will shake their stubborn heads

abecedarian gets a bowl

Words by Fatima B.

a bowl is, in my family, a culture that is passed down for generations. it elicits tales, rich with flavor. to give a bowl in my family is to honor inheritance, like Jalloh. our family name. Krio. our tongue, but our language still mimics our masters, still carries their nomenclature, their english. honors theirs over ours.

pass this bowl down again. don’t question its reach, but its recency. try cleaning off the oil stains, still savoring someone else’s flavors, before tasting what is essentially us.

vanquish the memories of the war that has left x’s carved into us. season your bowl. our vessel. your skin. our name. with your zest, for it is all we have left.

Bayou Birds

Words by V.M. Reilly

My mother says I laugh like a grackle, Squawking and brash, like the oil-slick plague Of mimics and gossips on their powerline Perches, endless and shameless against The flaming sky. She says I have the manner Of a long-legged waterbird: Stork or Heron, wading through ditches and bayou With equal dignity, folding spindly Legs to perch on mailboxes and peaked roofs. If I am a bird, I am glad to be Something common and canny-eyed, to be An eerie voice in the twilight chorus— Even after this place is washed from you, Your throat will always taste of oil and brine.

Pitch Meeting Words by Philip Kenner

Picture this: the beavers return every morning. Below our window, they build another Tower of Babel to unbabble the brook. We make up new names for our mountain town and disagree about the curtains. I read you a poem in the kitchen, you pet our dog(s) on the floor . Our silicone whisk is filthy in the sink, covered in cream sauce. You turn me into a top. I do a forgiveness meditation for the guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, the one who pressed himself against me, throbbing soft and wet with horrid want. In dreams, you carry me from out of the blue, fuzzy around the edges, while he dissolves, his limping tongue chained behind a fence made of years. In the morning, I carve our initials on the sill, and your pillow fills with memory. Here, at the pitch meeting of our life, I stand with begging eyes. Answer me: How can you want anything but what I want? Doesn’t it sound so nice?

Words by Emily Rose Miller

Rooms: Kitchen

When does nature trump nurture? in the heart of my old home their friends son, adopted as a child and raised as his But of course, I know as well as anyone The police report said he was high their insides came out the front yard with our kitchen knife. still had some life to breathe. She said to give. She said her husband He snapped. When is love not enough? Do fate and free will intersect? full of love—even after I heard a family with two small children feet on the carpet indentations In the kitchen where we nurtured

After they were critically injured and killed told me the murderer was the husband’s blood. Happy childhood, family unit. you never know what’s in a child’s head. on too much of everything, and after he stripped naked and ran around His wife lived, barely. My house he wanted money, and they didn’t have any told him to get lost, to get sober. How has someone else’s tragedy become mine? I know my house’s fate is to be horrific death, such ache, new life moved in. now live between the walls, pressing bare where I was a child. Where I became me. each other, new mouths eat and grow. Eat and grow eat and grow eat and grow.

My Sister W-A-R-S-HWrites on a Dirty Car Window

after Lucille Clifton’s ‘defending my tongue’

Words by Caryl Townsend

the kids at school tell me I speak through a tin-can telephone muffled and bathed in brackish my lips and jaw know how water sounds spoken wooder until the old building on Goldsboro is painted black and gold growing up to realize it’s the water that swallows the crab line and it’s the blue shell crab biting the chicken neck not realizing it’s about to be scooped

Fiction

What You Need Words by Scott Pomfret

In Search of Home Words by Theo Elliot

An Unexpected Encounter Words by Kathleen (Tac) Tacelosky Fox Finds the Fairies Words by Anneliese Gelberg tu me manques/kisâkihitin/be well Words by Shannon Brown

What You Need

Words by Scott Pomfret

At twenty-four, what you need is a good spanking. A trusty canine companion. A trust fund. A loving God. A sugar daddy to supplement your loving God. Blue jeans that flatter. A boyfriend who flatters. A beach house. A mountain house. A stiff drink. A stiff cock. A thorough douche (ideally pre-cock). A business plan. A shredded physique. An effective skin care routine. An occasional reminder that you’re lovable.

Over the next six years, what you don’t need but get anyhow: a gig job. A muffin top. A dreary apartment with two roommates and dumpster views. Ungodly student debt. Multiple pop songs called “What You Need.” An unstable impoverished boyfriend whose manhunt handle is Freak. Gonorrhea (thank you, Freak).

After thirty, bridging the gap between what you need and what you’ve got is patently pitiful. You post beach and mountain houses clipped from zillow. You ignore the fact that Freak has decided that he’s not a top after all, and there’ll henceforth be no particular cause for a douche, thorough or otherwise. You pretend that petting your neighbor’s dachshund is sufficient companionship.

By thirty-five, Freak and your roommates are finally history. You recalibrate (in more ways than one). You find unexpected joy in a long walk, a hot bath, a WiFi-free weekend, the dumpster’s convenient proximity, and a full-time gig with actual benefits. You find consolation in a guinea pig—almost as good as a trusty canine companion and better than a boyfriend like Freak. You pay a sex worker to administer a spanking when you can’t do without.

At forty, you begin to fear that if you passed tomorrow, not a single man on the planet would regret having given his whole self to you in a hopeless, whirlwind romance during which you danced the tango in daylight while micro-dosing among the sea grass on the dunes of Punta del Este. Nevertheless, dad jeans and less-than-shredded physique aside, you can point to some real accomplishments. An effective bifocal prescription that allows you to see your skin’s not half bad (though no skin care routine on earth’s going to save you from gravity). Savings sufficient to secure a week in Provincetown at shoulder season (but not on the beach). A reliable pet-sitter for guinea pig 3.0. A good cry when another unreliable boyfriend like Freak (you definitely have a type) abandons you for a Buddhist monastery. Some prospect of successfully making your final student loan payment before a eulogy is necessary.

You encounter some spectacular stiff cocks from whom you part friends. You tally up small satisfactions that add up to something greater than the parts: a God-and-Sugar-Daddy-free spiritual practice, a recipe for a very stiff Sazerac, an unexpected conversation with a handsome stranger who’s nothing like Freak, and enduring a feature film without having to relieve your bladder. You’ve proven to be lovable, though not necessarily in every situation, or for very long, or by everybody, and that’s okay.

And the next time you get dumped by another Freak, who’s found a younger grindr-based you, you don’t instinctively resort to a proper emotional spanking, but instead encounter an unexpected reasonably handsome (in more ways than one) stranger in the mirror, whose personal pep talk and a hot bath is all you need to make it through this hard day.

Search Home In of

She was himself or dead. I said death lurks close to people like us, following us our whole life. He shrugged and said he hadn’t thought about dying in years.

Words by Theo Elliot

ummer was sharp as a butcher’s knife. Every year I shaved the stubble that took months to grow. I watched it fall into the metal sink in the laundry room like snow covering a headstone. I combed my hair to the side and wore the only skirt I had ever kept. A gift from my late grandmother. I made myself into a person, almost entirely trapped in history. I let them bring her back. I flirted with death, just for the holidays, just to keep them happy and quiet. Twentythree years of it. It did not strike them as odd that I had a thick cold every christmas like clockwork, or that my once ribbon soft jawline had squared into something sharper, harsher. I suppose coincidence is easier, sometimes, than the truth.

To say I hadn’t wanted it different before would be a lie. But I was a somewhat willing participant in the succumbing of it; I had my nails dug in, I did not know if I could survive the flow of blood that I’d release when I let go.

Meeting him was as if meeting a more assured, more certain version of myself. Where I dug my nails in, he offered a hand; were it left untaken, he would simply tuck it in the pocket of his jeans and carry on. His stubble was thicker than mine, a line above his top lip that grew when he smiled, and more below his chin.

On the third or fourth date, brave by the strong drinks we had, I asked him about it. He told me there came a point where

Then he took the rest of his wine in one gulp, and then my hand under the table.

Spring stretched out in the haze of us. Limbs sweaty and tangled. Steamed coffee which he’d top with cinnamon. Paperbacks half pored and left splayed open to kiss, or drive to the river, an isolated spot where we’d swim with our chests taped, our shorts strung just below our bellies. It was when we swam together that I first really knew for sure.

He took my hand and left his jeans and button up shirt in a pile up on the rocks. Kissed me softly and told me he loved me.

I told him I loved him too. We let the water drift our Trans bodies to the crowd of people swimming upstream. We dove into the water together, and we did not care what anyone thought. A baptism. I did not think once of god.

Our love stripped me of secrets. I was completely myself before him, vulnerable in a way I’d never been. I used to have the seven deadly sins memorized. Now, only the steep of his jaw, the way to our spot at the river, how many crooked cut strips of tape he needed to bind his chest.

Summer snuck up on us. More days at the river. The phone rang one early December evening. I was reading and he was roasting vegetables and frying steak in the kitchen.

“I didn’t even realise you had a landline,” he said, leaning into the frame of the bedroom that by now felt much more ours than just mine. His hand was folded over the phone’s speaker. An old black thing, with a stalk on the left side. He rested it on his pursed lips, waiting. I sighed and tipped the book onto the bed, holding out my hand in a kind of resignation. He placed the phone in my open palm, and waited there, tucking his hands in his back pocket.

“Mum, yeah, hi.” I tried to keep my responses brief. I prayed the sound of her voice did not carry across my/our room. These days I only talked to god when I needed something. I felt a little guilty for it.

Art by Sean O’Neill

After, he said he’d wondered about my family, but he’d been reluctant to ask. Already I felt like there were three of us in the room again. The thought of death came with a chill that swept right through me. I looked at our windowsill, lined with empty vials that had once housed the oil coloured hormone that gave us life. The medication labels were fading.

I told him that night. I cried like a child, into his chest until I fell asleep. His hand was still in my hair when I woke. He made me coffee with cinnamon and kissed me on the forehead. Took a new vial from the brown paper bag in the bedside drawer. Shot day. I could’ve laughed at the irony of it. The medicine hit the morning sun, casting a thin beam of light across the room.

“Don’t go. I’d never tell you what to do except when I was worried you wouldn’t be safe—just don’t go.” he said.

He took the cup of coffee which I had left untouched. Held my hands in both of his. I couldn’t look him in the eye, instead fixating on the shorts drying on the back of the door. I told him I loved him but I had to go. He said that kind of religion can kill people like us. I said, “Don’t you think I don’t know?”

I looked at the line of light cast by the thing that turned my body into a boy. It carried

an echo of a memory from long ago. Stained glass windows, pinched at the top, casting a line of light across the pews. I inhaled. I exhaled.

“I do it every year. And I’m not dead yet.”

It was a stupid argument, but it wasn’t a lie.

“I am not sure you’re fooling them. You’re all boy, darling. Look at you.”

“Fooling and complying might almost be the same thing to them,” I said quietly.

“Then don’t comply. If it is just christmas that is left, what’s there to lose by telling them? You can have christmas with me,” he said, almost a plea.

I was stubborn. More than that, I didn’t know if I could survive the bleeding out of letting them go.

He took a flight home two days before christmas. There I was standing in the laundry room making a eulogy from myself again. Just hours after he boarded. The folded skirt. A cross necklace. Waiting for me tucked into the back of the linen cupboard. Spring felt forever ago. I looked at the tiny vials, but they only cast shadows.

He’d asked me one afternoon by the river, as the sunset set hot into the hills, if I thought

love could save a person. I’d shrugged, thinking of where I’d come from. Wafers and shot glasses and banged up knees. I knew every verse and every book, but it did not save me when I realised who I was.

“I think it can,” he said, quietly. I wondered if I was supposed to say something to that, though I didn’t know what. The birds talked back instead. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and when I peeled off my clothes to swim I sometimes wondered if he said things in a search for mine. I wanted to turn my wrist to him, but there was only the worn tissue of scars to show.

I had an answer now, wrapped in a towel, staring at my strange and beautiful body. I thought of how he held me, even in sleep. I missed the smell of cinnamon. Missed the river. My shorts looked lonely, there alone on the door. I felt death too close; twentythree years of pretend, a sharp thing at my chest. I picked up the landline by the stalk, and I realised I did not know the number I wanted to call.

So, I stepped into his jeans, and buttoned a shirt down over my chest. My chin was bleeding where I dragged the razor too fast.

I took the next flight with nothing but an empty vial in my pocket. I turned it over in my hand. I knew where to go, an address he’d scrawled on an open envelope a few weeks ago.

You could come and have christmas with us.

In the end, there was no funeral for the last remnants of my old self, just relief. My mother acted as I expected, and there was a grief to it but I carried on. His mother put cinnamon in our coffees, too. When we got home I told him about my grandmother’s skirt and he asked if he could take it for a while.

Summer fell away with all the ache, and none of the sting. By autumn it was almost too cold for the river. My landline rang once a week. His mother. She told me she loved me. I finally understood why he was as he was.

He surprised me with a package as the weather started to chill and our breaths turned tangible in the morning light. The skirt sewn into plaid shorts. In my underwear, my chest now with fresh protruding scars, he said, “Will you try them on?”

I did, of course. He folded into me from behind, kissed me in the reflection of the long mirror. His lips warm on my cheek. Maybe we save ourselves and then love comes later. Maybe love saves us when we find ourselves. Maybe it is sooner. For me, I think it was sooner.

For now, the line of gold was back, and it cast across his cheeks. There was nothing more behind us. There was everything ahead.

Art by Andy Valk

An Unexpected Encounter

Words by Kathleen (Tac) Tacelosky

If I could see you again, you would be handsome and whole. Six feet tall, 51 years old. Trim, but not the skeletal fragment in the photos from that time.

There’d be an awkward moment, what with the unexpectancy of the encounter.

“Um. How ya been? What’s it been? 35 years?” I would attempt an opener.

“Time stands still,” you would say at the same time as I would say, “Time flies.”

You’d stare at me. I look more like you now than I did when I was 25. White hair. Green eyes. More wrinkles on my face than you ever had the chance to have.

“You look like Mary,” you’d say, trying to square that I am indeed your daughter and not your sister.

We’d sit at a coffee shop. I’d try to explain how coffee has evolved into this industry in the last few decades.

“It’s out of control,” I’d say, “Expensive, but more delicious than the folgers you used to percolate on the stove while you made your bacon and eggs each morning.”

Your gentle eyes would express interest, but you would say, “I didn’t come here to talk about coffee.”

I would sigh. And shrug. “I don’t know what to say, Dad. Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?”

“I want to know what you’ve become.”

That’s harder.

“Well, I’m a linguist, dontcha know? A bona fide Ph.D. in Linguistics. And it’s because of you…”

You’d beam a broad smile.

“…how you always wanted to play around with words. Dad-jokey puns. Etymologies. Twists of phrase. They got in me and became a part of me. That poem you wrote me in green pen from your de...well, in your last days, in green ink. Through Kathy’s Eyes you had titled it.”

“That was a good one,” you’d allow.

“Lately, I’ve taken to writing creative pieces, too. It’s hard, but I love it.”

“A linguist and a writer,” you’d lift your eyebrows and nod like it was only fitting.

“I’m proud of you,” you’d say and congratulate me.

“And do you have a family?”

I would remember the time you and I were painting the laundry room when I was collegeaged. You had shared that getting married was the best thing you ever did, and having kids, too. Implying or probably saying outright that I should do that, too. I had cringed a little, knowing that was not to be my path.

I wouldn’t want to disappoint you, but I would try for the truth.

“I did get married. I gave it a decent shake with a really nice guy, but …” Here, I’d falter. I’d worry. Shouldn’t I just enjoy this magic moment with you? I’d be scared, nervous about your reaction. Would there be judgement from you and your religion?

“I’ve been with a woman for 15 years, Dad.” And before you’d have a chance to even flinch a facial muscle of disapproval, I’d rush to say, “She’s so lovely, Dad. You’d love her. She’s bilingual like me. She comes from a big, fat Mexican family. We laugh a lot.”

And you would smile slightly and say, “If you are happy, I’m happy for you.” No, you’d take it up a notch. “I’m happy with you. I share your obvious joy.”

“What about the rest of the family?” You’d want to know.

I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to tell you that I have little contact with Ross. That Mark’s first marriage didn’t work out, but the second time around is going better. That Eliza had colon cancer when she was the same age as you were. That two of your four grandkids are trans. That mom got together with your sister’s husband after you. I wouldn’t be able to fill you in on a lifetime. Besides, it’d be our moment, so I’d just say, “You’d better have a visit with the others if you want to know about them.”

I’d want to cherish this moment. To sit with you and stare at your face.

I’d suddenly remember that we hadn’t ordered. I’d stand up. “I’m gonna get a grande cappuccino with nonfat milk, easy on the foam. What about you?”

You would stand, too. “I’ll have a grande hug from you.” Your arms around me would make me feel safe and secure and loved.

“You order for me,” you’d say.

I’d return with your coffee with just enough cream to turn it the color of a paper bag, just like always.

Finds Fox the Fairies

Words by Anneliese Gelberg

That summer was as hot as any Fox had ever known. The air pooled into slick, undulating miasmas above the black asphalt road that separated her parents’ house from the shopping center across the street. She found herself fixing her gaze upon it as she walked to publix in the fading light of a July evening, willing it to burst open into something solid and still.

She wanted something to happen soon. It had been a summer of waiting, and the heat made the waiting harder. Things moved almost imperceptibly—the palm fronds still in the absence of a breeze, the murky retention ponds outside the shopping center turning fetid and green.

Fox was waiting to find out if she would be allowed to return to college in the fall. She had failed several of her required first year courses, which was grounds for expulsion, but her Literature and the Humanities professor had extended a lifeline to her in the form of a 10-page essay on Christina Rosetti—to be completed during the first month of summer break. For now her transcript read “INCOMPLETE,” pending her professor’s decision that she’d done suitable enough work to salvage her grade and finish the semester with a C.

The shopping center was huge, and the publix was on its far end, where it backed against a dry lawn and one of those algaethick retention ponds. When Fox walked past, she sometimes spotted the large, lumpen outline of an alligator resting among the reeds. She saw the alligator this evening, its chin settled on the green lip of the lawn, the rest of its body submerged in the water. Fox gazed at it for a moment—it didn’t look at her, exactly, and yet it seemed aware of her, or perhaps that was just how it felt to be in proximity to a predator—and then she moved across the lawn and into publix.

The grocery store was cold and bright, and Fox let herself linger in the aisles. She wondered if her mom needed butter and veered towards the dairy aisle, thinking that she could be useful in this small way. The extent to which she’d fallen from her parents’ good graces was difficult to process. This time last year, she had been their pride and joy, ranked 8th in her graduating high school class and bound for a fancy women’s college in New England, the first in her family to leave Florida in five generations. Now, she was scholarshipless and on the verge of expulsion. At night, she dreamt that she would be stuck in Florida forever, withering away on her parents’ porch under an endless sun, or that she was trapped in a grocery store like this, where the aisles extended infinitely in each direction.

At the register, someone said, “Oh, hey, Fox.”

Mara Beninger looked different than Fox remembered in her bright green publix polo. Fox wondered if she’d been living at home since last summer; she couldn’t remember where or if Mara had gone to college. “Hey,” she said.

“Home for the summer?” Mara asked, deftly sliding Fox’s purchases over the scanner.

“Yeah,” Fox said. And then, because she was caught off guard and felt that she should say something else, she added, “Actually, maybe for longer than the summer.”

Mara raised her eyebrows. “Transferring? To… where? To UCF?”

“Um, nowhere. Yet. I’m on academic probation,” Fox said.

“That’s a bummer.”

Fox shrugged. She tapped the card reader.

“What are you doing to keep your mind off it?”

“Nothing, really.”

“You should come out tonight,” Mara said. “With me. I’m on a quest.”

ANNELIESE GELBERG

Fox grabbed her receipt and folded it over. “Oh, yeah? A quest, huh?”

“Mhmm,” Mara said. “To find the fairies. You want in?”

Fox slid the folded receipt into one of the plastic bags on her wrist. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”

That fairies existed was essentially a given to Fox, although perhaps she wouldn’t have used that term to describe them. She understood bad luck—blue bruises and twisted silverware and failed exams. She recognized a kind of fey cunning in her misfortune. She understood, too, that there were things in the wild spaces of the earth that were beyond her comprehension.

Mara had texted her after work and had told her to meet that night at 11 on the lawn outside of the Publix. Fox stood now beside the chain link fence that surrounded the retention pond and let her eyes rest on the alligator, which had dragged itself out of the water and lay in a stark smudge of black on the grass.

A few yards away, she heard the rumble of tires on asphalt as Mara rolled to a stop.

Mara got out of the car and shut the door with a quiet thud. The wind was picking up and rustling the palm fronds, and Fox could see clouds moving overhead, encroaching on the silvery moonlight.

Mara flicked on her phone’s flashlight. She had gone home to change and now wore a sleeveless tunic and loose jeans threaded with a thick leather belt. She looked good, Fox thought.

“Ready?” Mara asked Fox.

Fox nodded. Mara led her across the lawn to the far side of the publix. Beyond the road was a small lake with a dock and a vast swath of saw palm thickets and longleaf pines. The green world, Fox thought, recalling something she had read in Lit Hum.

They crossed the road together. It was not difficult, here in the milky moonlight, to imagine the pines and the palms as

the boundary between town and woods, between civilization and a wild place. They walked in silence past the dock. The wind blew fiercely, wicking the sweat off of Fox’s neck and arms. The sky was half stormcloud and half starry night. She wondered if they should turn back, if it was the wrong night for a fairy hunt.

But just as that thought crossed her mind, a glimmer of light appeared in the distance, suspended in the air—a pale flame amongst the trees.

Mara looked at Fox. Something sharp and determined glowed behind her eyes. They hurried towards the light, and Fox could swear that she heard a strange kind of music. The light seemed to grow brighter as they approached, rippling and flickering like a candle, and suddenly she could smell something as sweet and rich as honey on a stovetop.

But just as they came upon the light, it blinked out. Mara looked at Fox for a moment and then shrugged and continued trodding forward.

“I used to come out here all the time,” Mara said eventually, “whenever I woke up with skinned knees. My mom—you know, she had these traditions and rituals, and I always thought they kept us safe. She would leave sugar and milk out on the kitchen table and keep us out of fairy rings and everything. But sometimes it wasn’t enough.”

Fox nodded. Her parents had their own superstitions—they folded the laundry just so, threw salt over their shoulders, kept unlit candles on the windowsill. Bad luck found them anyway. Fox had always brushed it off, but she could imagine why a person might feel that a contract had been violated.

“I think I wanted answers. I wanted to put a shape to the things that went wrong in my life.”

“So why go tonight?” Fox ventured. “What went wrong this time?”

Mara’s boots crashed through the husk of a dead saw palm, and she stopped and smiled bitterly at Fox. “Our house is rotting.

FOX FINDS THE FAIRIES

Black mold and wood rot and more kinds of fungi than I can name. It’s unlivable. It’s like the place has been cursed. Or abandoned.” Mara turned and crushed one of the dead saw palm’s leaves beneath her heel. “My mother’s rules weren’t enough, I guess.”

“So you’re looking for—answers? Or justice?”

“I’m looking for luck,” Mara said. “We’re moving. Like I said, it’s like the house has been abandoned. So we’re going to abandon it, too. We’re moving to California. So— luck. We’ll need it.”

A howling wind shook the limbs of the trees and flattened the carpet of ferns and lupine through which Fox and Mara tread. The storm clouds had fully eclipsed the moon, and Fox could barely see the tree trunks a few feet ahead of her. She thought about the bitterness with which Mara was leaving home. About Fox’s own impatient desire to leave it.

The light appeared again, visible in a distant clearing. It illuminated the trees and the underbrush and all the thick, coiled vines that hung like severed ropes from the canopy, and in the light Fox thought she could see something moving—maybe dancing. And, again, she could smell honey and something like bitter wine.

Mara tore off towards the light and Fox followed. She could hardly see where she was going, just trying to follow the pale flash of Mara’s skin, and she felt her body bruise and bleed as she stumbled through the thickets. The light never seemed much closer, and when Mara reached the clearing and halted suddenly, Fox realized that it had vanished.

Overhead, a bolt of lighting seared across the stormy sky. It had begun raining—the kind of spitting drizzle that Fox, a born-andbred Floridian, barely noticed—but now the heavens opened up and soaked them, in an instant, to the bone. A gale of wind swept through the clearing and the trees bent and groaned, like living things awakening from their long slumber.

she did, the light appeared once again in the distance, and she knew this was it. Her long summer of waiting was over.

Mara hesitated only a second before dashing towards the light, and for the third time that night, Fox followed, thinking only of the rain’s staccato rhythm against her skin, of the leaves and fronds that smacked against her legs as she ran, of the iron red blood she could taste on her tongue.

Home, she thought. Take us home.

This time, she knew, the light would let them catch it. This was the way of things— trial and reward. And though the rain blurred her vision, she could see something solidifying in the distant light—a still and sunny day, a crabgrass meadow, and a deep pool suffused with acid green algae, reeds and grasses springing from the water, and the buzz of many bugs and the croak of bullfrogs and the trills of warblers and grackles like music on the air. She smelled honey and meat and rot and rain. She saw an alligator resting in the shallows, still and hungry. Its skin shimmered like an oil slick. It knew the secret to good luck and to rotting homes and to failing exams and to waiting. And there, on the other side of that shimmering miasma, was the beginning of something more perilous and profound than Fox had ever known.

“We need to go home,” Fox said, but as

tu me manques/ kisâkihitin/ be well Words by

Shannon Brown

The French hiker sits against the window, warmed by the hushed conversation, she whispers into her phone receiver.

Tu me manques, tu me manques, tu me manques.

It is cold outside the hostel walls but the loft inside is tepid, hot, rising. The peaked windows that let in the alpine light collect the warmth from the hostel strangers below.

Tu me manques vraiment, j’ai essayé d’appeler hier soir…

The other stranger in the loft tonight works at the mountain resort up the road, and he’s never learned a lick of French. He would be in his accommodations right now, but his roommate is a dealer, and he’s escaped their aging bunk beds connected by shaking limbs and stale linens at the hostel for the night. He thinks about home.

His most recent boyfriend’s house was the closest thing to it. It sat where the Rockies spit you out into Stoney fields and the teal bridge takes you over the river’s still glacier water. Just past the memorial church, before the Ghost Lake developments. Technically it was his boyfriend’s uncle’s place, but the bed was warm, and there were more than four short walls. It was their place.

When he forgot his shoes on the porch, he’d walk out onto the dead spring grass in his bare feet and let it push to break the skin. Always the smell of living things in the air.

Eh bien, tout va bien ici, mais je m’interroge sur...

His first home was a prairie city. He thought the mountains held a terrible beauty, but he had been afraid in the city far more often. Road expansions and developments. Frozen bodies in March when the Boyle Street shelters closed down. Monster trucks overtaking you like a wind of violence. Low-flying planes when they idle. Most often, to step outside meant choosing hate crime, speeding ticket, or hate crime. His first boyfriend outed him to his tenth-grade class and his second ran his car into a brick wall out by the football field. The clubs he grew up in closed because of sexual assault and “mismanagement.”

He went on a total of five online dates in that city: two who threatened, one who bruised, and the last the kind he would follow anywhere. The last and third boyfriend loved to listen to Fiona Apple and sing the base line between their mouths. He left the prairie city for the Rockies when “Werewolf” went from their favourite song to a prophecy. He can’t listen to Fiona Apple anymore.

Quand je reviens, pouvons-nous…

But in the Rockies, the terrible beauty is not pressed up against you on transit or drunk at 3 a.m. in your yard. Here, the terrible beauty looms. Once you slide into the valleys and sign up for the seasons, a part of you must accept smallness. Jaded peaks, crushingly unreal. The most unsettling feeling comes when the smooth blankets of snow quilt over the denouement of a summit, obscuring the edges. From his window, figures roll under those sheets. Head, shoulders, hips, feet. Curled under a seamless, tree-speckled wash of white. When he lays in his dorm, his body is the ridgeline.

Nous repartons demain mais... je ne suis pas sûr…

He pulls his feet onto the cracked leather sofa and watches the French hiker closely. She picks at the callous on her big toe and frowns. He writes her a story.

She’s been disconnected from the real world for three days in the Maymelted backcountry and has been reeled back by her email inbox. Where was her home? Montreal. Somewhere between Napoleon Street and Chinatown. Maybe she worked at La Grande Bibliothèque. She is lonely, calling her ex-boyfriend. Mom. Sister. An ex-partner from two relationships and a hookup ago. The last relationship sent her West and then South like him, into the mountains to find some perspective and to stop feeling so small. But she still feels small. She is small. But her breath is big enough to steam the whole loft window. Her words printed on the voice-misted glass. She’s almost convinced her ex to try again with her, to meet her halfway in Manitoba and kiss her at a layby.

…je ne suis pas sûr... j’aimerais revenir maintenant.

His Stoney home was good to him, in between his twenties and thirties, on the cusp of what he knew and wanted to be. He loved him. Out back on the hill, by the fire pit. Gold and dewy, hands digging into spots just where the body rolls over onto itself. Can I touch you? Yes. Mouths pressed hard to one another, borders breached, floating down the water to the loons crying back.

One of the things he loved most, besides those nights sitting beside the fire, were the horses. He didn’t know wild horses existed where he lived. Maybe in some far away Scandinavian country where they shed woolly coats onto the untouched snow, but not here. He always thought they looked skinnier than they should be, and he almost hit them with his car more than once crossing the bridge and turning off the main road. But now he missed the sight of them, white eyelashes batting the flies and leaning into each other in the grasses. Mottled gray, brown, roan backs blending in the high prairie fields.

The French hiker stretches her leg down off the windowsill and he worries she will crush the bag of Hickory Sticks at her foot. His shifting body catches her attention and for the first time in four hours, she meets his eyes.

His lover’s name was William, which was his father’s name before him. William’s hair was chin-length and soft through his fingers when it was loose in the yellow dawn light. Two rounds of love before even touching the cold hardwood in the morning. Flat feet in the kitchen, thumping like a deep comfort. William’s mother called him William, but he always introduced himself as Bill. He loved the way his name felt in his mouth, even as a memory. William. The moment when his tongue kisses his teeth and his lips press together, so natural, like swallowing.

It wasn’t loud and violent, leaving their home. He just left, quiet and calm into a split sky of orange and blue. No peeling out the driveway, scattering rocks into William’s yard. Just a few kind words. William could always offer a few kind words. These are the words that coloured the walls of their bedroom.

You need help, kisâkihitin, be well.

He didn’t even cry until his back tires thudded off the end of the teal bridge and he saw those horses. They watched him go, leaning on each other, blinking slow, like all that mattered was the feeling of their bodies pressed together.

Je ne sais pas, tu me manques vraiment

Eh bien, je suis désolé de vous avoir manqué.

J’essaierai d’appeler à nouveau demain... portez-vous bien.

The high hostel windows lose their glory in the darkness of the evening. The dimming orange has long fallen behind the far-off summit and now only a weight remains. He curls his fingers into the cracked leather, but he holds nothing. He’ll go, he decides, he’ll go.

But beside him, a crackling impact. The Hickory Sticks have found their way to his side—the French hiker stands above him. The bag is half-open, and she chews with the side of her mouth. She sits. For a long moment, they watch the Rundle Stone fireplace. The straight edge of the hearth is blackened from years of burning, and something deep moves in him, pushing up from the bottom of his stomach and into his chest.

The only thing he didn’t miss about his home with William was the radio. It was an old, gray box with dust crusted permanently between the buttons. It could only reach the one station that everyone listened to in the valley. One time, while William worked, he drove two hours to the mall and got him a real nice one. Bluetooth and everything. He put the old radio out back on top of the trash bin before his lover came home. But William never touched the new thing. He didn’t even take it out of the box. William said he didn’t understand anything sacred. Said they had kissed for the first time listening to that old radio on the porch. He had no right to trash an artifact of them. William closed the door on the new radio in its unopened box.

He sat on the box a while, staring at the scuffed door. Then he stood. Took scissors to cardboard and left styrofoam snowing. Played the first thing he could think of. He always loved strange, young, and dead Jeff Buckley. He worshipped “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and had sung it into William’s hair just last night.

It was hot that night, tepid enough to make it hard to know where skin ends and the air begins. Like when it feels like you’re everything or nothing at all. He’d rather boil. But he was warm and needy, staring at that door. He started quiet. Swayed. Leaned. Out there in the hallway. He moved, danced. Sang. He played a whole drum solo on that closed, scuffed door. Whining out, It’s never over.

It’s never over. The plains at the base of the mountains stretch longer than time. Stoney stretches forever. It stretches from then to now to the next minute. From the hostel couch, all the way to his old back door, where William watches the purple sunrise and feeds the cats. Where the radio sits on their bedside table.

The French hiker clears her throat, a low alto sound. He feels her shoulder first. It greets him as a warm ally, moving slowly through quiet ways. Her hips, thighs, hands, West-moving—she leans into him. The pressure is foreign but familiar. He breathes in hard, testing the resistance of their close, sturdy connection.

They stay like this, a tented and woven peak. They stay and lean, like those prairie wilds, hooved and herd-hungry. They stay like this, still and solid and cemented to some shifting universe. Outreaching, bounding, leaving, arriving.

Extra Extra

The Official Fruitslice

Crossword Puzzle Words by Micah B

The Official Fruitslice Crossword Puzzle

by Micah B

DHL

SPEAR

PLATE 7. CURED

8. ASTRO DOWN 1. DPLUS 2. HEART 3. LATER

4. SPCA

5. REDO

Contributors

Alfie Nawaid (they/he) is a queer Indian poet. Their work is mainly about forging a bond between their queerness and their cultural identity, which people always placed in opposition growing up. In between that, they like to write about cowboys and love. When Alfie isn't writing, he's doing his best to dress like a shady car-salesman from the 80s or watching true crime youtube videos. You can find more of his work in The Gentian and Ink, Sweat & Tears. ig: @xiflynn.exe

Andy Valk (any pronouns) is a queer self portrait artist based in New York. Their work explores themes of self exploration and exploitation through paintings inspired by crudely made sets, props and dolls. The work is a tribute to the act of creation, and the incredibly human urge to record and relay our experiences.

Ann McCann (she/her) is a California essayist in the tradition of Didion. Exploring concepts of grief, motherhood, aging, and more, she finds that writing is cheaper than her therapist. She continues her explorations alongside her wife in Northern California. She can be found on instagram at @beegirlfriends.

Anneliese M. Gelberg (they/she) is a queer writer, teacher, and Florida transplant from Los Angeles, CA. They are one half of the educational podcast Star Wars English Class, and their writing on fandom and pop culture can be found in Reactor Magazine. Today, Anneliese haunts various bookstores, breweries, and theme parks across Central Florida with their fiancée and friends. x/bluesky: @alwaysfern

Asher Perez (they/them) is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. Their bold and exuberant work discuss the concerns of marginalized communities in an effort to unify the masses under our shared struggles. Drawing from their experiences as a queer Filipino-American, they aim to bring attention to the intersectionality of identity in the context of oppressive systems such as imperialism. Asher has a BA in Studio Art from Cal-State Long Beach and is currently a full-time artist and community organizer. website: www.asherperez.studio ig: @akakario

Ava Pauline Emilione (they/them) is a writer and editor. They write about culture, identity, nature, and feeling. Their writing has been published in Expat Press, The North Star with Shaun King, Grain of Salt Mag, Gut Instinct Media, and others. They are the founder and Editor-inChief of Ebony Tomatoes Collective, an intersectional literary and arts magazine centering Black and queer writers. website: www.avapauline.com ig: @ordinaryavaa

Bailey Bauer (she/her) is an editor at Fruitslice. website: www.baileybauer.com

bellze t (they/them; xey/xem) is an occasional writer from Southern California. They like writing about being gay and Asian. They can also be found as a previous writer for the newsmagazine, OutWrite. ig: @bzashent

Brie Coleman (she/they) is a writer, photographer and educator from Virginia. She has a BA in English, an MEd in Education and is pursuing an MA in Literature from George Mason University. Their work was published in Volition Art & Literary Magazine and Braindump Mag. They write poetry and prose with a special interest in journalistic writing. Brie’s passion lies in telling the stories of queer people and highlighting the loveliness of everyday gay life through the use of multiple genres of artistic expression. ig: @briecolemanwriting

Cal O'Reilly (he/they) is a trans writer from Wexford currently studying in Queen's University Belfast. His recent poems can be found in Banshee, fourteen poems, and catflap, and his work is forthcoming in "Beginnings Over and Over," an anthology by Dedalus Press.

Caryl Townsend (he/they) is a poet living in Lancaster, PA. Their work often meditates on ideas of transness, rurality and change. His work has appeared in Washington College's Collegian and a poem of theirs won the 2024 Jude & Miriam Pfister Poetry Prize. Caryl has a BA in Sociology from Washington College and is currently dillydallying around and petting their cat, Woody.

Casper Orr (he/him) is a Trans Disabled writer and artist specializing in memoir, culture writing, and lyric essays. He’s a Senior Editor and Nonfiction Section Editor for Fruitslice and Managing Editor and contributor of Noise Made By living on the east coast. He has work published or forthcoming in Archer Magazine, Electric Literature, t’ART Press, Querencia Press, and more. He can be found on instagram: @casper.orr and substack: @casperorr

Celeste deBardelaben (she/her) is a Cartoonist and Cinematographer based in Los Angeles. She has shot feature films as well as narrative shorts, documentaries, and music videos. She currently works in the shipping and receiving department at BECiNE. You can find links to her work as well as samples of her photography at www.celestedebardelaben.com.

Chloe Oloren (she/her) is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Fruitslice: A Queer Quarterly.

Daisy Slucher (she/her) is a painter from Louisville, Kentucky. Often including her own nude figure in her work, she invites viewers into intimate reflections of gender and the act of looking. Daisy earned her BFA in Painting from Murray State University in 2022 and has been featured in group exhibitions across Kentucky. website: www.daisyslucher.com ig: @daisyslucher

Daniel Rivera Stahlschmidt (he/they) is a multimedia illustrator who loves nature, video games, art history, and fantasy. He loves illustrating decorative artwork with bright colors and patterns. In his artwork, he explores themes of human connection, and connection with nature. website: dansrsart.com ig: gre3nie bluesky: gre3nie.bsky.social

Diane Nguyen is a transfemme Vietnamese-Laotian American. A diverse educator, she works primarily as a piano and coding instructor. Her commitment to youth education is reinforced by her belief that showing up as a Queer educator is an essential act of perseverance in our current zeitgeist. Outside of her work, Diane is a hobby photographer, mostly of her cat Iroh, and an avid coffee enthusiast.

Djeneba Deby Bagayoko (she/her) is an essayist, linguist and independent Black language researcher. In her work, she bridges the gap between the diaspora and the continent of Africa by showing how characteristics present in Bamanankan, Wolof and Esan have been retained in their diasporan counterpart: Ebonics. Her essay, ""Mother, teach me,"" was published in A Bilingual Revolution for Africa. She also appeared in Mubi Notebook, where she discussed the portrayal of African accents by Western/ Hollywood movies titled The African Accent and the Colonial Ear. ig: @farafinmuso bluesky: @farafinmuso.bsky.social

Donica Larade is a multimedia artist and scientist from Nova Scotia, CA that is often inspired by the natural world, social justice, or personal experiences. Working both in the art world and conservation biology, they use cartoons, posters or scientific illustrations to communicate themes about biology, art or political ideas. They are often found in the outdoors creating watercolour painting, pencil sketches, cyanotypes, quilts or mixed media illustrations of local species. website: donicalarade.org ig: @_sea_shanties

Eden Aphrodite (she/her) is an east coast poet in a west coast world. Her work explores themes of memory, intimacy, and transition of all kinds and has appeared in Atlas Magazine and SILLY GAL. A graduate of Emerson College, she holds a BFA in Creative Writing and Publishing. Last but certainly not least, she is an editor at the lovely queer quarterly, Fruitslice! ig: @edenaphrodite

Emily Rose Miller (they/she) holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Central Florida. Their work has been published in Passengers Press Journal, Saw Palm, and Wild Roof Journal, among other places. She currently serves as a reader for ONLY POEMS and has had the honor of attending the summer 2024 Kenyon Writer’s Workshop. Find them in Orlando, Florida cuddling with their cats. website: www.emilyrosemiller.com ig: @emily.rose.miller

Fatima B. (they/them) is a poet and journalist from Jacksonville, Florida, currently based in Chicago, Illinois. With an education in Journalism, Black Studies, and Poetry from Northwestern, they currently work as a freelance journalist and editorial intern for In These Times. A few years ago, Fatima cofounded Eye to Eye, a poetry collective based on the teachings of Audre Lorde. They are currently co-writing their collection Blade Prick with poet/ flutist Max Mika, releasing soon, alongside their own chapbook. You can find their work on their website and follow them on Instagram for updates!

flutist their

Flossie Hedges (she/her) is a writer, artist, and teacher living in southeastern Kentucky. She holds MAs in English and Critical and Cultural Studies, and she flirted with doctoral work in rhetoric before returning home to the mountains. She helps student writers build their confidence at a small college serving the Appalachian region. Her work is forthcoming in EcoTheo Review.

Frances Cannon (she/they) is a queer writer, editor, educator, and artist. She is the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in literature from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow and the Storm, (Green Writers Press, 2025), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026). website: www.frankyfrancescannon.com ig: @frankyfrancescannon bluesky: @francesartist

Izy Carney is a textile artist and community historian living in Washington, D.C. She explores memory and the tension between personal/ political through creative manipulation and deterioration of fabric. She is currently in the D.C. Art Center's Sparkplug Residency program. website: www.patchworkarchive.com ig: @izy_carney

jp thorn (he/they/any) is a queer, neurodivergent artist raised in & returned to the bible belt. an advocate for destigmatization & radically open communication, their work is inspired by humanness, reframing traditionalism, therapeutic processes, unlearning patriarchy, identity, & global patterns.

website: www.thorn.jp ig: @jpeeperz

Josie Boyer is a junior studying arts management and business.

Kahlea Williams (she/her) is a black woman writer born and raised in the midwest with the work ethic to prove it. she is interested in intersectional feminism, black contemporary literature, sustainable fashion and urban design, coffee and cafe culture, zines and independent publishing, and perhaps above all else, overthrowing the empire. She has been published in Afropean.com and Fruitslice. Kahlea is based in Detroit.

Kam Bradley (he/him) is a Trans, Michigan based writer and film photographer. His work frames Queerness as ordinary, juxtaposing his experiences with high-control religious organizations and his born family. His literary debut was in Issue 6 of Fruitslice.

Kate Netwal is an illustrator based in Wisconsin. She creates art that explores themes of identity and relationships. ig: katenetwalart

Kathleen (Tac) Tacelosky (she/ella) is a linguist, actor, writer and fledgling stand-up comic.

KD Hack (they/he) is a Queer & Trans writer, editor, baker, Death Doula & land steward. Their artistic practices were born & nourished across the Northwoods of Wisconsin, & currently reside in the spaces between fingers in the soil & pencils on the page. His work can be found at his Substack, @joyfulcrumbs, and is featured in Peach Fuzz, Querencia Press, Transfix Magazine, Tence, Volume One, & Better Homes & Dykes, among others. ter)

Kim Arthurs (they/them) is an artist, writer, and Pisces from Providence, RI. Their artwork has been installed in various locations across New England. They like to evoke emotional fluidity through mystical realism and memoir, both in their writing and visual art, and harvest inspiration from botanical influence. You can find them making art and writing in the garden with their cat.

website: www.moonersmakes.com ig: @moonersmakes

Kimberly Hall (she/her) is a queer and neurodivergent writer currently based in Southeast Texas. She holds a BS in Psychology and a Master’s in Behavioral Science. Her first poetry collection, Honey Locust, was published in December 2024 by hotpoet inc.

website: www.kimberly-hall.com

Knock Off Bowie (he/him) was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in 2003 and continues his practice in Toronto. Through his work he explores recurring dreams, memories, nostalgia, longing, loss, collage, feminine and masculine dynamics, combining digital photography with traditional oil painting, and his own transgender and queer experiences. These themes create a space to both mourn the loss and cherish childhood memories. The way these motifs are combined are dream-like in nature as the past present and future blend together to create pieces outside of space and time. He continues to posts his digital pieces through his Instagram @knockoffbowie

Kota Ball (they/he) is a trans* writer and activist from New Jersey. Often a horror enthusiast, dark and obscure themes make their way into their autobiographically inspired pieces. Kota obtained their JD from Ohio State and their MA in Community Psychology from Penn State. They see writing as one of the many ways to resist and redefine the systems around us.

ig: @cosmicfishbear

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick is a biracial writer based in Los Angeles and Barcelona. His fiction has been published by Apogee, Quarterly West, PRISM International, Midnight Breakfast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. He is at work on his first novel and is a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow. He writes the weekly culture newsletter The Trend Report™ and loves dogs, pét-nat, and short shorts.

PRISM and Fellow. loves

Lia Turpin (they/them) is a poet, essayist, and occasional cartoonist from Tucson, Arizona. They enjoy spending time in their cactus garden, fighting off pack rats, reading underground comics, and cuddling with their chihuahua, Carlos.

Lorinda Boyer (she/her) writes books, poetry, and the occasional grocery list she immediately forgets at home. A proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community and a Pacific Northwest lifer, she thrives on misty mornings, good books, and an unreasonable amount of coffee. When she’s not crafting stories about life’s chaos and beauty, she’s running for fun (yes, really), over-analyzing conversations from three days ago, or wondering if chasing plot bunnies counts as cardio. website: www.lorindaboyer.com ig: @lorindalboyer

Maia Brown-Jackson (she/her) is a symphony of papercuts, bangedup knees, and stubborn determination. She believes in the altruism of strangers, the power of direct action, and the Oxford comma. Her work has taken her everywhere from art galleries and museums to a nonproliferation nonprofit to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. In her spare time, she volunteers with the Yazidi NGO, the Yuva Organization for Children’s Rights. Also, she makes art. website: www.maiabrown-jacksonwriting.com ig: @tilting.at.windmills bluesky: @andyetpoetry

Manda is a queer adventurer who's addicted to beauty and genuine human connection. She is driven by the need to document/archive/ record her personal slice of chaos in this realm before she expires. She is a multimedia artist. You can find her prancing around ATL, talking to strangers and asking to take their photo.

Meg Streich (she/her) is an essayist, educator, cartoonist, and nonprofit director based in Philadelphia (gobirds). She is the director of The Big Gay Writing Project and you can find her on Instagram @meg.bert or @ biggaywritingproject

Micah (any pronouns) is a San Francisco–based student who is continually curious about their fellow humans. You can catch them feeling simultaneous wanderlust and homesickness, leaning on a friend’s shoulder, and navigating cities by nearest boba shop. They love tea, finding actual uses for the oxford comma, and doing and creating crosswords. They are currently vibing with their family, lying on a bed, and writing their Fruitslice bio.

Michael McFadden (he/they) worked within the social services and community health centers for over 15 years, focusing primarily on LGBTQ health and the provision of HIV/AIDS services. He brings this awareness and process into his photographic work. Drawn to raw documentary, environmental portraiture and highly aestheticized stills, Michael utilizes varied photographic approaches, oscillating his focus between the internal and the external, the individual and the communal. Michael received his B.A. and M.S.W. from Loyola University Chicago and recently graduated from the ICP-Bard M.F.A. Program in Advanced Photographic Studies. He currently resides in Los Angeles. ig: @mcfaddenphoto, website: www.michaelmcfaddenphotography.com

Nell Kerr (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Seattle. His works range from acrylic and watercolor painting, to mixed media collage and print zines, to tattooing. He draws inspiration from the beauty in the mundane, from worship of the body, and from a desire to visually capture complex emotions which defy words. This year his work has been in gallery shows at Slip Gallery, Basecamp Studios, Side Rail Collective, Art Journeys Gallery, and Steve Gilbert Studio. His online portfolio can be found at: www.saatchiart.com/doefacednell

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Octavius Nightingale (they/ it/he) began writing creatively at eight years old, when their elementary school decided that 3rd-grade students were to learn typing rather than cursive. Their urban science fantasy and occasional poetry follows themes of spirituality and religion, the conveniently forgotten, burned libraries, unusual homes, and multifaceted masculinity.

Patricia Kusumaningtyas is an Indonesian poet, tech worker, and film/music critic based in Brooklyn. Their poetry and prose have been published in Roi Fainéant Press, Major 7th Magazine, Dead End Zine, Poetry is a Team Sport, HaluHalo Journal, and Culinary Origami Journal. Her music, film, and art criticism have been featured in Our Home in the Dark, ACV CineVue, and Speed of Sound Magazine, and she organizes events with the Indonesian Film Forum New York.

Philip Kenner (he/they) is an NYC-based poet and playwright from New Rochelle, NY. His chapbook, BOYSTUFF, is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in 2025. His poems and plays are published in Milk Press, poetry.onl, Cordite Poetry Review, Colectivo Tabú, and Kitchen Table Quarterly, among others. He is a founding member of COPY magazine, and he has an MFA from Northwestern University. website: www.philkenner.com ig: @philip.kenner

Sabrina Skinner is a graduate of the University of West Georgia, where he earned a BFA in Ceramics and a BA in Art History. He is currently engaged as a Ceramics Post Baccalaureate student at the Hartford Art School. Creating highly textural ceramic sculptures, his work expresses surreal sensory memory, home, and the human experience. Skinner's work has been shown in the 2023 Strictly Functional Pottery National Show at the Lancaster Museum of Art, the 7th Louisiana Biennial at Louisiana Tech, Meet Me At The Intersection at the 2024 NCECA Conference, the 2024 Small Favors show at The Clay Studio, and the 2025 Off Center International Ceramics Competition. ig: @marketofthefae

Safara Louise Parrott is a queer, trans-racial/trans-continental adoptee from Ethiopia, raised in rural Texas, who's approach to writing is an act of declaring a home. As an adoptee, it is common for your story to be presented to you as a kind of miracle; a narrative that you are not allowed to stray from. Safara's work seeks to blend the personal and the political by using their unique lenses of adoption, queerness, animism and anticolonialism to redefine what we understand of home. It is their hope that their writing is not to be thought of as just their's alone, but as belonging to the greater diasporic consciousness.

@safara___

An MA candidate in USC's Curatorial Practices & the Public Sphere program, Sam Fitz is a scholar & multidisciplinary artist exploring how archival research can be used to explore threads connecting queer communities across decades. During her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Sam delved into these histories through a myriad of mediums, looking at how sapphic communities were able to radicalize, reimagine, and reconstruct domestic and familial spaces. Their current research seeks to explore how artists connect and explore ideas of collective queer memory in relation to the disappearance and instability of queer community spaces. ig: @bblegumfemme

Sarthak is a filmmaker, photographer and writer based out of Delhi but originally from Shimla. His interdisciplinary approach to art encompasses ideas of memory, identity and alienation. His debut short film 'Chitthi' has been a part of multiple film festivals and won the Special Mention Award for Riyad Wadia Emerging Filmmaker at 2024 Kashish Pride Film Festival. ig: @sarthakmakesfilms

Scott Pomfret is the author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir, Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and over sixty short stories published in magazines including Ecotone, Smokelong Quarterly, The Short Story (UK), Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. An MFA candidate in creative writing at Emerson College and a resident of Provincetown MA, Scott’s at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans. website: www.scottpomfret.com ig/bluesky/fb: @bostonseanachie

Sean O’Neill (they/them) is a painter born and working on Long Island, New York. O’Neill’s work revolves around interpersonal relationships through an introspective lens. They are a recent graduate from the BFA Painting & Drawing program at SUNY New Paltz. They exhibited their senior thesis, “I Love You, So I Become You” at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. During their time in New Paltz, O’Neill worked with their housemates to host and curate pop up galleries for their friends and peers. Post-graduating, they have exhibited work at Bushwick Gallery. ig: seans.inferno

Shannon Brown (she/they) is a prairie-born writer and current graduate student at Dalhousie University. From the canola fields outside amiskwaciywâskahikan to the great harbour of Kjipuktuk, Shannon studies Queerness in Canadian Literature from coast to coast. Shannon has published various critical works and flash fiction pieces with the UofA’s Crossings Journal, Circe Magazine, and The CrW’s Anthology, and Sighting Stories.

Shelbey Leco is a mixed media artist. Her style was heavily influenced by her grandmother growing up. As a child, when spending time with her grandmother, Leco enjoyed coloring in giant coloring books. Her grandmother soon realized that Shelbey went through art supplies rather quickly. So, her grandmother taught her the art of zentangle, by creating various patterns and shapes within negative spaces. Through time, Leco’s work developed more into mixed media, however repetition and pattern work is present in her work today.

Shelley Lloyd is a queer, disabled writer from Florida, blending personal musings with theoretical ramblings on disability, time, and life’s oddities. Their work has appeared in These Fragile Lilacs, Wordgathering, APROSEXIA, and BorgDiem, and they authored the chapbook A Reading (Bottlecap Press). When they’re not overthinking, they’re avoiding responsibilities, contemplating the absurd, or spending time with their cat, who’s much better at managing her time. ig: @vileteapot.

Taylor Michael Simmons (he/him) is not great at self promotion but hopes everyone is having a nice day.

Theo Elliot (he/him) is a trans masc poet based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand). Theo has written for various online literary journals and is currently working on his debut poetry collection. He thinks a lot about queer rights, gender theory, Vincent van Gogh, and the sea.

Vas Littlecrow Wojtanowicz is a Boricua cat grandparent, creative director at Velvet Rasputin LLC, Lyricality facilitating artist, and multidisciplinary lyrical trash artist residing in Rice, MN. A former model and current lover of bad cinema with over a dozen comic titles under his belt, Vas uses identity, nature, garbage, philosophical discourse and technology to engage in thought experiments and creative explorations. Vas's literary work has appeared in Red Weather, Sueños y Pensamientos, It Takes All Kinds, and The St. Cloud Times. He also placed second in the 2024 Lake Country Journal poetry competition. (he/him; they/them; lo/ello; iel/ellui) website: www.vaslittlecrow.com bluesky: @vaslittlecrow.bsky.social

Victoria Ivie (they/them) is a photographer, writer and social media book reviewer who has been covering race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability and more for years. They work full time as a journalist, covering LA County, Orange County and the Inland Empire. They have a vested interested in covering local stories, investigative pieces that unearth hidden truths and struggles, and the ways in which everyday people make a difference in their communities or the world. They have a Bachelor's degree in journalism and Associate degrees in Communication, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Gender and Multicultural Studies. email: vwritesap@gmail.com social media: @vwritesap

Victoria Jamilé Hernández (they/them) is a writer, teacher, and lesbian goth born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Utilizing horror and fantasy Hernández writes about the experience of being a disabled femme-queer under a colonial power. Hernandez is completing a master’s in English Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. They were recently published in Latino Book Review (2024), Rhizomag (2025) and in The Caribbean Writer (2025). ig: @cuir_bookseeker

V.M. Reilly (they/them) is a London-based poet and prose writer originally from Houston, Texas. They have a BA in English with Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, now work as a medical receptionist and library supervisor. Reilly’s work can be found in publications such as Andromeda Literary Magazine and Carnations, Violets & Lavender zine, issue 3. ig: @v.m.reilly

v.w.l (they+) is a writer-artist based in the Midwest. Their writing is rooted in their intersecting identities as a Queer, neurodivergent, disabled, Mad adoptee. Underpinning their work is their BA in Sociology and minor in Women and Gender Studies. More of their work can be found on their substack. substack: www.moodra.substack.com

THANK YOU

Art by Kate Netwal

Acknowledgements

This publication has become its own kind of home: built from scratch, held together with care, sustained by community. This issue would not exist without the dozens of hands, hearts, and hard drives that brought it into being.

To our contributors: Thank you for opening the door. For sharing the corners of your world that feel most tender, strange, sacred, and alive. We are honored to house your work here.

To our staff: You’ve made this house a home.

To our readers: You have made us feel at home with your love, and your passion for what we do.

Thank you to messy bedrooms, kitchen tables, park benches, and coffee shop booths. The places in which we wrote, edited, and cried. The real and imagined rooms that gave us the quiet and the connection to make something worth sharing.

And finally, to the ones who have ever felt out of place, unrooted, or unwelcomed:

We hope these pages remind you that you belong somewhere.

Maybe even here.