LGBTQ Online Safety Guide

I'd like share an important LGBTQ online safety guide which came out in early 2019. 

Did you know that 73% of LGBTQs have been harassed online due to sexual orientation or gender identity? This guide aims to empower them and give them the tools to protect themselves online.

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/lgbtq-guide-online-safety/

I like how they give a few tips and practical suggestions for each situation.

Peace & Love, 

Gay Happiness

Thank God, All the Children Are Queer

In his manifesto, The Future of Queer, Fenton Johnson advocates that we should "teach, in the most emphatic way, our young to be queer, which as every parent and teacher knows, is through example."

I often fail to provided this example. I use the excuses of my own Catholic background and the Muslim community where I did my early teaching to keep me silenced and closeted. 

At our holiday party this year, a young person I worked with from 3rd grade to 5th grade came through with her mother, one of our organization's earliest advocates. The kid I used to teach was now fifteen and about my height. The three of us chatted with a new employee. 

"And what about your life outside work?" the mom asked. "Are you married?" 

I took a quick, stabilizing breath. I was already out to my colleague. "I have a partner," I said quickly. "We just bought a house up in Mt. Airy." 

The mom's face betrayed a flash of recognition; the teen just smiled, a little knowingly. 

Can I teach children to be queer without talking about my own love life? More importantly, over a decade into my career, have I done so? 

Once again, Johnson's definition of queer: "And so what defines queer, finally," he writes, "is not what one does in bed but one's stance toward the ancient régime, the status quo, the way things have always been done, the dominant mode, capitalism."

While I haven't shared my sexual identity with youth, I have built my teaching on queer values: recognition of individuals' strengths and skills, respect for self and neighbor and insistence upon equity. 

*****

The highest point of queer success and romance, in Johnson's view of history, has come through creative endeavor. 

To be born bent, however that manifested itself, was once to be forced to look within -- to explore and express, in Gide's words, 'what seems different in yourself.' This embrace of the gift of our essential difference was the wellspring of queer creativity -- for evidence, read or look at Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sherwood Anderson, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marsden Hartley, Audre Lorde, Agnes Martin, Baldwin, Baldwin, Baldwin to name only a few of the eminently civilized writers and artists who understood commitment as well as or better than any people taking marriage vows with the knowledge of no-fault divorce waiting in the wings. Their lifelong, selfless practice rooted itself in their fecund, uneasy difference: their queerness. These queer writers and artists took unbreakable vows to their art, dedicating their lives to showing us, their audience, the human condition. 

Being queer no longer forces one to look within, as LGB people and relationships become more a part of mainstream culture. Queer youth of the new generation aren't plagued with the self-doubt and double consciousness that ruined so many queers of previous generations. The brave like Carson McCullers and Audre Lorde stood out precisely because of what was stacked against them. 

Emma González, survivor of the Parkland shooting and gun control advocate, is the new queer. When she emerged on the national stage, I saw my students in her. In Philadelphia youth programs, I'd been witnessing comparable self-assuredness, clear thinking and queerness for years. 

If it is queer creatives who have shown us our past, complete with its hypocrisy and oppression and brave striving, then it will be the queer children, who have declared themselves in charge, who will light our way into an even braver future. 

Johnson has a vision of this future. "In place of our age of irony," he writes, "I imagine an age of reverence, chosen in full embrace of the knowledge of science, even as it grounds itself in the calm conviction that we live and die in mystery, that all human endeavor must begin and end in respect, for ourselves, for one another, for our fellow creatures, for our wounded, beloved Earth. Let us all become queers."

Dear Fenton Johnson, I've been talking to the children and it's already happening. With their noses buried in their phones, they've been processing the world in which they find themselves more quickly and more adeptly than any generation before them. And they don't like what they've found.

Returning to the writers and artists, Johnson writes, "Through their art they showed us that the solitude we so fear, that we will do anything to escape, even marry -- that solitude is an illusion, a scrim preventing us from seeing how we are all one, we are all in this boat together."

Generation Z, as these children who have grown up immersed in technology are called, knows we're in the boat together, and they see it sinking. 

What if they, this Generation Z, are actually the dream of the Internet, as it was promised when we first logged on: all of the information to the power of all of the people? 

What if they can develop, earlier than any generation that came before them, the ability to differentiate truth and falsehood, block out the noise and find a path to change? 

What if they do grow into an entire generation of Baldwins and Woolfs, learning from the vulnerability and wisdom of the queers who came before but empowered to rise up and create a more just world? 

Thank God, the children are all right. The children are queer. 

Now We Are Become the Suits

I just finished, for about the third time, The Future of Queer: A Manifesto by Fenton Johnson in the January 2018 edition of Harper's Magazine.

It implicates me, as a queer white woman aspiring to relative comfort. A selfish part of me bubbled up, indignant as I read the manifesto: "It took me long enough to find my love, don't I deserve to enjoy it?"

To hear Johnson tell it, I don't.

On the one hand are the far left queers, including all out trans people, who are activists and teachers who fight daily, not for the right to marry or anything so conventional, but for the right to completely deconstruct the way society thinks about family and community. And build something more beautiful in its place.

It was the kind of fantasy I certainly had as a bisexual in my twenties -- a commune-style space where relationships are communal rather than transactional and there are plenty of old folks around to care for the children that come up.

On the other hand we have, though a I am loathe to admit it, me and most of my friends. Increasingly, I know almost no single people. The lesbians and queers among us are building our comfortable lives in the image of our straight-couple friends, buying houses and marrying and having babies.

"Now to be LGB (T remains beyond the pale)," Johnson writes, "is no longer to be forced to look outside the norms, since our largely white, entirely prosperous leadership has so enthusiastically embraced the norms. Now we can forget AIDS. Now we can get married. Now we are become the suits."

It stings, but he's right. There are no lesbian or queer couples I know of who will decline the right to marry. In most cases, we point to children as the reason. If Sonia is the birth mother, I have more rights if we are married before she gets pregnant. The reason that most of us marry is to keep our children inside our chosen clan -- so they don't end up with their evangelical grandparents or a cousin in a distant city, far from the community that raised them.

For Johnson, the idea that we marry to manage these kinds of relationships under the keen eye of the state is part of the problem. It's a cop-out, and it's opposed to the early queer communities that may very well have been stronger because they had to navigate the messiness of these relationships on their own. Or maybe they just grew closer together because their children were more often taken away.

Johnson, a professor, activist and survivor of the AIDS era now teaching somewhat reluctantly at the Koch-funded University of Arizona, tells the story like this. "The assimilationists have won, with state-sanctioned marriage as the very mortar cementing the bricks of the wall of convention that separates us from ourselves, from one another, from all that is unfamiliar, strange, challenging and thus from learning and growth."

He goes on, "state-sanctioned marriage is precisely analogous to gentrification -- the creative outliers do the heavy lifting, and when a certain level of safety has been achieved, the assimilationists move in, raise prices, and force out the agents of change."

And on (he's a beautiful writer), "Because our salvation, our literal salvation in the here and now, in this nation, on this planet requires our abandoning those ancient clan divisions in favor of the understanding that we are all one. As the Buddha abandoned his family to undertake the search that led to enlightenment, so Jesus, that communitarian photo-feminist celibate bachelor Jew, rejected the ancient clan divisions in favor of a new order."

Johnson might be a gay man, but he knew how to strike an arrow right to my heart with a sexy and original description of Jesus.

I want a new order, too! I want to wander the countryside in sandals with twelve women! I want to occasionally settle, all together in a house, and plant a garden! I'm grateful to be reminded of all this, but of all of the battles that I choose in this life, I'm not sure this societal restructure will be one of them. I'm 36, I've found someone to love and I'd like to have a baby soon.

"And so what defines queer, finally," Johnson writes, "is not what one does in bed but one's stance toward the ancient régime, the status quo, the way things have always been done, the dominant mode, capitalism."

While I'm sure I'd disappoint Johnson with my comparative lack of revolutionary spirit, I will continue to define my life in small ways against capitalism: taking care of my mind and body, shopping at the co-op and abstaining from the pervasive impulse to buy and consume. Such simple steps can be incredibly difficult for those of us who were raised in a strongly mainstream and consumer culture.

Difficult on any given day, and still not enough. But I am grateful for the worthy struggle, and for Johnson's resounding wakeup call.

How Much Family Is Too Much Family?

To talk to most mothers, mine and Sonia's included, there is no such thing as too much family. In my parents' rural American culture, they look forward to every four-hour meal, every one-year-old birthday party and every high school play.

It's easy to forget from the vantage point of my coastal elitism: most of America is built this way. Or at least, the rural and suburban part of America that is lucky enough to be moderately comfortable and middle class.

This weekend, I skipped out on some family events in favor of getting my head on straight for springtime, exercising and creating some new health and writing goals. I felt more relief than guilt, a true accomplishment for a veteran of 13 years of Catholic school.

My favorite cousin, a sweet 41-year-old man with two kids, was in town from Washington state. His little brother, a self-righteous Christian who is difficult to be around, came along too. Families and girlfriends stayed at home so Thursday night, Sonia and I had dinner with the two cousins on their way to my aunt's house.

They drove their rental car our house and we walked to a nearby gastropub. I apologized for and tried to explain city life. My favorite cousin recounted a story from when we were little.

"You had this little pink mirror with a handle," he said. "I looked into it and said, 'I'm in the mirror!' and handed it to you to prove it. 'No, I'm in the mirror!' you said. You were so confused. We went on that way for a long time."

"Did you try that with your daughter when she was that age?" I asked.

"Absolutely," he said. "It's a classic. You find a classic, you stick with it."

I can't explain my love for this cousin except that we were the two oldest, so right around the time I was starting to be aware of the world, he was there, five years older than me and awesome. He's also got a way of breaking the ice.

In another moment, we were explaining the structure of high schools in Philadelphia and Sonia's school pride came out, a little more aggressively than usual. I was worried that she sounded a little racist, which she is not.

"Honey," I said. "Watch it. You're sounding a little elitist."

The favorite cousin was quick on the draw. "You would be too," he said, "If you went to Central!"

It was great to see him. Even the Christian cousin and I tolerated each other, as he engaged us in stories about his new hobby: deep-water diving.

That was Thursday night. Saturday, we were invited to may aunt's for all-day conversations and meals. Tonight, about a dozen family members are doing the same thing at my parents' house. We declined both invitations.

It's true that Sonia and I are trying to say "yes" more often than we say "no" to family, but I live in the city for a more engaging job (which I love), for a chosen family (which we are building) and for the opportunity to write about where I come from (which requires distance).

Looking back on my past few blog posts, I feel like a pendulum. My boss and Sonia have a related observation about me that drives me nuts. They both claim that I can have very passionate, completely opposing views on a topic two days in a row. They're not wrong.

At work it looks like this:

• Monday: So-and-so isn't working hard at all. We should give them a warning because they're not meeting expectations. 
• Tuesday: The same person is amazing! They really stepped up today and it's so clear that they're putting in more of an effort. 

Both of these things can be true, but few people would make such a quick shift. I think it means I'm always open to being proven wrong. I want to believe in people. 

At home it looks like this: 

• Monday: I haven't heard from the cousins who are coming to visit, so we can skip seeing them this time. 
• Tuesday: I heard from them! We have to change all of our plans so we can see them in the three-hour window they gave me for a dinner together. 

When it comes to writing, this tendency leaves me a little schizophrenic-feeling. I want to write about family and belief and happiness, but my ideas about these topics are constantly shifting and internally contradictory. 

This blog is an opportunity to build a body of memior-style vignettes, to note themes as they evolve over time and to nail down a story about family that feels fresh enough to turn into a book. To do all that, sometimes requires a break from said family. 

A Guide for Small-talking to Parents

I've had what I thought was a healthy disdain for small talk since puberty. I raged against people contentedly chatting about grocery deals or potted plants while there was so much terror and suffering in the world.

Around this time, I also began to have a double consciousness -- making out with girls and telling myself that I was just experimenting for boys, that it didn't mean anything greater about me or my life.

By scoffing at small talk and simultaneously not wanting to talk about anything of substance with family members, I was left with nothing to say to many people I'd known growing up: aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. And of course, parents.

My family silences contrasted with the quickly intimate confidences I created throughout my late teens and twenties. The party always ended at my dorm room or apartment, with a few friends whispering about what kept them up at night and what kept them going. I sought intimacies with anyone on the margins, where I was: restaurant workers, struggling writers, anyone queer or sexually experimental.

I learned a lot, but I am in touch with almost no one from that time of my life. We were bright-burning candles that quickly extinguished, friends of a season.

For the first time in my life, I'm spending time with my elders and thinking about the next decades of our relationships and how I can make them stronger. Against all my natural resistance, it seems to come down to a question of small talk.

It all started when Sonia and I began reviewing "acceptable topics of conversation," when driving to visit to her parents or mine. We had long ago lost the ability to talk naturally with our own parents about our real lives, and this seemed the best way back in. By listing out conversation topics for one another, we gained confidence and security that we could get through the night without too many awkward silences.

Acceptable Topics: The Korean Side

• How to make Korean food (this is actually several, since you could talk about each dish in great depth)
• How to make kimchi (merits its own bullet point)
• Early days in America (their tourist stand, how they chose Philly)
• Korean traditions around marriage, 100 days (for new babies), Lunar New Year
• Business at the store
• The new micro-loan at the store, what they got with it, the sketchy contractor
• Retirement (although I learned that this quickly leads to the "when are you having a baby" conversation)
• The house in the suburbs where Sonia's brother & sister-in-law now live
• Her brother's job & sister-in-law's progress in nursing school
• Us in 2018: getting healthier, plans for the house, trips

Acceptable Topics: The White American Side

• How to make Slovack pastries
• The grandmothers (I'm still lucky enough to have two)
• Other family members (the cousin headed off to college, the cousin's child with health problems, the aunts and uncles moving south)
• House renovations and improvements, recent and planned
• Yard improvements and changes, recent and planned
• Dad's substitute teaching gigs
• Mom's halfway house project for women coming out of prison
• Upcoming trips
• My brother's work on his house & his girlfriends' parents' health
• Us in 2018: getting healthier, plans for the house, trips

Gay children with difficult family relationships have so much stacked against them. For years, we practice the art of hiding ourselves from our parents. By the time we come out, we've lost the ability to talk about even the most everyday aspects of our lives.

When we come out, we want to launch right into the big questions: the meaning of life, our dreams for the future. Yet we struggle to talk about the most everyday happenings: a movie we saw, a night out with friends. 

Even though it's still uncomfortable, Sonia and I are making plans and showing up. We are being patient with ourselves and with our parents. We are starting with the little things, and learning how to talk to them again. 

The Path of Joy Is Connection

We can walk to a gorgeous, redesigned public library from our new house, so Sonia and I recently rediscovered the magic of borrowing books. You can take 10 home, try them all on for size, and read one or none at all! 

We've been interested in mindfulness, so The Book of JOY  became my bedtime reading. It's written by Douglas Abrams and details a week when His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, two dear friends and spiritual leaders of Buddhism and Christianity respectively, spent a week together talking about the meaning of life. 

All three are listed as authors because the spiritual leaders' dialogs are recorded and sometimes quoted for several pages at a time. 

It has gems like this: "Modern society has prioritized independence to such an extent that we are left on our own to try to manage our lives that are increasingly out of control" (p. 95).

My independence is often at issue in our relationship. Sonia doesn't understand why I won't call my dad to help us hang a new light fixture or tear out the old bushes by the front sidewalk. 

I try to explain. I never saw my parents asking their parents for anything. They did everything on their own. Parents give you eighteen good years and then they should be able to reap the benefits of their hard work. It's your turn to shine.

Korean culture is more familial, so that even though it's just the four of them plus the sister-in-law in the U.S. (and, more and more, me!), the bonds seem stronger. Dinner every two weeks is non-negotiable. Parents weigh in on how much you're eating, how healthy you look, how eager they are for grandchildren. 

My parents have never in 36 years asked about grandchildren, and so I have no idea how they picture their role in that time of life. Sonia's parents bring it up every second visit and it's clear that mom wants to be involved, daily if we'll allow it. 

"Once again, the path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation. When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as a part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face -- together" (p. 100). 

I haven't yet put the "Script for Clearing the Air" into practice. When I wrote it, I saw my parents as a threat rather than as a part of me. It's a common feeling for those of us lucky enough to have living parents with whom our connection is still recalibrating. 

Today, after reaching out to talk to my mother this weekend about her own mother's decline (they may have to move her into 24/7 care within the week), it feels more like we're on the same team. I can almost picture my parents attending our wedding one day. 

Today the connection, which is not static but ever-changing, feels like enough. 

A Script for Clearing the Air

Mom and Dad, I'm calling today because Sonia came out to her parents about two and a half months ago. They had a hard time with it at first (her mother threatening suicide, her father insisting she can still get back on "the right path" and not ruin her life).

But just over two months later, I've had two dinners with them and her mother is dropping hints about babies and asking to meet you while we make kim bop.

What a natural parental instinct -- to want to meet the person that your child has chosen, then to want to meet their family.

It made me remember a tipsy phone call we had about a year after Sonia and I started dating. I was the only tipsy one, to my knowledge. I called your house needing a bit of honesty. I remember talking about my admiration for Sonia and her parents from a half a dozen different angles, trying to help you see why this relationship was the best one of my life.

That would have been a good and appropriate time for you to say you wanted to meet them. But you didn't. I did most of the talking.

Instead, Sonia and I are approaching our four-year anniversary and it seriously shocked me when her parents said they wanted to meet you. When I realized that this "meet the parents" moment was probably going to happen, my stomach sank.

Would you be willing to do it? Furthermore, do I even want you to meet them without knowing if you would support our marriage? What about kids?

I haven't put my life on hold, but I don't look forward to milestones because of the weight of navigating them with shaky parental support.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've built my own life. But the desire for parental acceptance is strong. I've held onto a candle of hope that the two of you would come around, but the flame is fanned by an absence of conversations, an avoidance of the big topics.

I won't let our marriage and any children we're lucky enough to have be tainted by your shaky support or overt judgement.

Sonia and I would like your support during these upcoming milestones, but if there is some point your religion won't let you pass, we need to know now. So we can get on with it, with all of the information.

Denial Is the First Stage of Grief

Sonia had two or three dinners with her parents during which they flatly ignored the fact that she had come out to them.

This didn't surprise me at all because my parents had gone through (and are possibly still in) a similar stage of denial. However, I was more than a little surprised when literally every gay person we talked to about this, responded with a knowing, "that sounds familiar." How common is denial?

Denial is the first stage of grief. As much as it breaks my heart that so many parents of gay children approach being gay as a loss, at least it's predictable.

The five stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It's still uncommon for parents of gay children to celebrate rather than mourn the chance to learn more wholly who their children are. But perhaps our response to this, as gay children, is to judge them by how quickly they move through these five stages, so that we can all at least get on with our lives.

For Sonia's parents, it was about seven weeks. Their quick turnaround, despite a horrible initial reaction, makes me wonder if my parents are even there yet.

Following those few dinners of denial, Sonia's mom came around with a light prod right after the New Year. Sonia asked if her parents would like to meet me, and before we knew it her mom was asking what I liked to eat and I was in the car driving with Sonia to Sunday dinner for the second time in the three and a half years since we've been dating.

(The first time, I'd met them as Sonia's friend after we'd been together only a few months. If they remembered that other meeting, they didn't let on.)

We entered Sonia's parent's home and balanced our flowers, coats and bags as we took our shoes off in the entryway. Her parents came into view in the living room. 

I said, Annyeonghaseyo, twice, smiling and bowing awkwardly, worried she hadn't heard the first one or that I'd said it from too far away. 

Sonia's mother brushed off my carefully practiced Korean "hello," and greeted me with a warmth my own mother had never shown Sonia, hugging me with my coat still on and patting my cheeks with her hand.

"So pretty," she said, as she pulled me into an awkward embrace.

Her father and brother asked me questions about my job as her mother and sister-in-law brought dish after dish to the table. They were somewhat incredulous that someone could make good money at a nonprofit, but Sonia reassured them.

During the meal, we talked mostly about the recent snowstorms and the food. A lot of the conversation was in Korean. The food was all familiar; Sonia's mother sends her home with at least two shopping bags of Korean food every two weeks, so I'd been getting familiar with all of it for years. I knew what I liked, and I even surprised myself by liking the soup with rice cakes, a texture I usually avoid.

After dinner, her mother brought out two bowls for each of us, although some family members declined one or the other. Unlike me, they knew what more was coming. One was a sugary liquid dessert with rice; the other tasted like a cold cinnamon tea with pine nuts. Then there was a fancy cake her brother had brought -- because it was an occasion, right?

As Sonia has taught me, no Korean meal is complete without fruit at the end. The orange slices came last. Count 'em: that's four desserts.

We went home with full bellies and a sense of whiplash. From Sonia's description of her coming out night only seven weeks prior, we didn't believe such a lovely night would be possible, maybe for years.

As we drove home, I explained the honky phrase, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sonia Came Out!

Our "couple logic" went something like this. Holiday season 2016, I let Sonia know that I didn't want to spend another holiday season attending separate holiday gatherings hosted by our separate families. I didn't want to face my own family without her. I thought I might go crazy if they tried to ignore her existence again. It was harder to do that when she was present.

Sonia planned her coming out by counting backward from Thanksgiving, the indisputable beginning of holiday season 2017. She decided to tell her parents two weeks before Thanksgiving. That meant telling her older brother and sister-in-law two weeks before that.

First, some background. Sonia's mother and father immigrated to the States from Korea in the late 70s. They worked a tourist stand, hawking American flag t-shirts and Eagles tossle caps until they could afford a store of their own. They've been working six days a week at their corner store in North Philadelphia for at least 20 years now.

The store is their livelihood: what put food on the table in the early years & eventually what bought them the down payment on a four-bedroom home in a gated community an hour away. Turned out the American Dream house was too much of a commute; Sonia's brother moved in and her parents still live in the row house where they raised their children.

Sonia is the baby of the family, and the darling. So much so that, when she came out to her brother over the phone four weeks before Thanksgiving, her brother insisted that everything would be "fine and dandy," so loved and admired was she by her parents.

Sonia wasn't so sure, but I dared to hope. Within a week, I met Sonia's older brother and sister-in-law, a nurse from Korea whose academic papers (for her B.S. in nursing) I'd been helping to edit for months.

They were kind. Conversation moved naturally from education to jobs to her brother's new car. I floated through the meal, only slightly more demure than I am in my daily life. When I went to the bathroom, Sonia's brother told her she should be nicer to me and make me eat more dessert.

The night Sonia came out to her parents, her brother and sister-in-law were at dinner, but it was harder than they'd expected. Her brother didn't expect the overwrought emotion from her mother, and ended up crying himself. Her sister-in-law struggled to support her and also maintain her role of accommodating daughter-in-law. I sat at home twisted in knots.

I met Sonia at the door when she came home. "It did not go well," she said.

We played Thanksgiving much as we had in previous years -- Sonia drove about an hour with me to my family's dinner, then I sipped wine at home while she visited her own family. Her parents pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

It didn't feel like other years. Something had shifted.

Blake Morgan Is Bi!

Happy Monday! I'm on a roll this morning: lunches made, kitchen swept, laundry folded. I have a little over 30 minutes to drink some tea and write so I can exercise for 30 min. and still get to work at a reasonable time. Can every morning feel this good?

Because of my time crunch, this will be a short blog post in homage to the writers of Madame Secretary, which I've been watching solo on Netflix (Sonia avoids political shows).

After working together for three years, Blake Morgan, assistant to Tea Leoni's Secretary of State, finally came out to her. Any queer person watching knew this character wasn't just a straight guy. There was something truly satisfying about this revelation.

Blake Morgan is awkward. He's been burned. He maintains his right to hold some thing or things sacred, and decide himself when he wants people in his inner circle. He'll tell you what he wants you to know when he's ready, and not before.

Plus, he's a dashing dreamboat. He's a bi guy I would've gone for in a heartbeat.

One of my first books after beginning to date women was Look Both Ways (NYTimes review). It gave me confidence but not necessarily a language, or a way of talking about bisexuality to gay (especially lesbian) people I knew or my Christian parents.

Among lesbians, beginning in college, I was an outsider. If they suspected I had crushes (oh, did I have crushes!), I was dismissed as one of the silly straight experimenters. I even thought of myself that way.

Among my straight Christian family, I was already an outsider with my education and liberal views. Add feminism, then bisexuality and eventually moving in with a woman & the bisexuality tends to get lost. It becomes a fuzzy stepping stone rather than a part of my identity to choose and fully own.

Thank you, writers of Blake Morgan. It was a rare pleasure to see a bisexual character on television whose sexuality is secondary to his work ethic, determination and adorably anxious overachieving.

I liked this character because he bucks the "all-out, all the time" mandate from LGBTQ leaders like Dan Savage. I see where they're coming from, but I also think it's a little bit like asking your black friend to represent all black people whenever you have a question that concerns "the black community." It's not his or her job, just like it's not my job to represent all queer people, all the time.

Like "the black community," maybe the "LGBTQ community" is less a community and more of an umbrella that serves its political purpose. I'm under it. Is that enough?

Your Life Story Isn't Your Life. It's Your Story.

"Your life story isn't your life. It's your story."

I'm feeling that quote acutely as I sort through thirty-five years of pictures, handwritten correspondence (letters! notes from abroad! the best postcards!), awards, published and unpublished writing and other random keepsakes. The small, finished room in our basement is full of this shit.

While I have an occasional flash of joy a la "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," I'm keeping more than I want to keep. I'm keeping it out of a vague sense of obligation to my mother or unborn child (not sure which).

I'm keeping letters from my college friends because the humans themselves bring me joy, and I'm not inspired in this moment to reread every letter I've ever received from them. Does that mean I'll never want to do so?

I'm keeping the box of pictures from my mother because, while I've been completely happy cutting my own photo collection in half, I've run out of steam. I can't hold another 300-500 pictures in my hand, one by one, and decide what to do with them.

This weekend, Sonia and I went to Connecticut to visit one of her friends from law school. On her fridge was a magnet: "Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself."

The friend is gorgeous -- tall and African American with perfect skin and amazing, long dreadlocks. She's from Virginia and told us the story of her husband walking into law offices where she was working and looking her up and down, clearly curious about her but clearly not going to do anything about it. Against policy if not the law, she searched in his file for his email address and sent him a message asking him out. They were married a few years later.

When I praised her bravery, she said, "Girl, I had to find my husband," and shrugged it off.

I don't know too much about this couple, but I liked that quote on their fridge. In the course of a weekend, we went to a winery, a cider mill, a casino and a corn maze. We made small talk easily and avoided politics and anything too personal. There was a sense of confidence in both of them, a sense of plunging headlong into the future together.

There are things I kept because I'm creating myself.

Because I kept the letters from a youth counselor named Mark, I'll remember lying on the floor of an elevator with him in a hotel near the Mall of America. I was sixteen, he was twenty. We didn't kiss. He wasn't my first taste of the illicit.

Because I kept the laugh-out-loud "communication contract" written by my ex boyfriend Dan, I'll remember how funny he was, how I probably would have chosen him if I was able to choose a man.

Because I kept a book constructed by Ari and written in a few months into our relationship, I'll remember the intensity of my first relationship with a woman, how it came upon me like a revelation.

There are things I didn't keep, too. But they're not a part of my story.

Recently, I sat in on a session about trauma's effect on the brain in young children. In all children, the neural pathways that are encouraged (i.e., "If I cry, I am comforted.") are the pathways that become set. Other potential pathways are pruned away. This pruning continues through our lives.

There were maybe a dozen letters from unrecognizable names. These completely forgotten intimacies -- both friends and lovers -- had been completely pruned from memory. Yet I'd been present with them all once, maybe more than once. Regardless, they were in Friday's trash.

It's both empowering and tragic, the relentlessness of time. The reality of so many people -- and each moment -- intersecting with your life so briefly. The constant need to create one's life, and the fact that each moment passes into the abyss if we don't seize upon it.

Our First Month as Homeowners

When last I wrote, Sonia and I were selecting paint samples and gathering boxes, finishing the bottom of peanut butter jars and pitching stale snacks. 

We've been in the new house a little over a month.

The most surprising thing?

I'm doing a lot more "when my parents were my age..." math. It mattered less when I was in an apartment. But check out this smattering of riches:

• When my parents were my age, they'd owned three homes. 
• When my parents were my age, they'd built their dream home, which they live in to this day. 
• When my parents were my age, I was eight. 
• When my parents were my age, my brother was five. 
• When my parents were my age, they had two acres of land that they somehow kept pristine while keeping both my brother and I alive. 

I guess you could say I'm appreciating them a little bit more this morning. 

The most lovely thing?

Sonia and I are communicating well, maybe better than ever before. 

We had our first two major fights since moving in, about money and my taste for alcohol. We do math completely differently and get to the same answer, but it drives us both nuts that the other person cannot understand our methods. I drink more during transition times as I'm working on getting into a new routine. 

Also very cool: 

• Waking up in the bed we own, in the house we own!
• The Icelandic blue Sonia painted our bedroom with the help of some friends. Both the color and the fact that it happened without me. Like magic!
• The gorgeous feng shui of our tiny office after I moved some furniture around. 
• We have a laundry room. 
• I can't wait to come home after work. Making dinner and walking around the neighborhood feel like bigger occasions than they have in the past. 

Home ownership never excited my imagination in the hypothetical. I didn't dream of a house I might love to own. I didn't even have a long-term plan for home ownership "one day." We both had good jobs and a little savings, so we made it work quickly. 

Now that there's an actual house, I see projects everywhere. Bring down the wall in the front foyer; expand the small first-floor bathroom; rip out the scraggly hedges lining the sidewalk. Sonia sort of understands that this is my creativity at work, but made me promise not to tear any walls down in the middle of the night. 

Not only do I see projects, but I'm excited to tackle them. Bring on the surprises, the magic, the future!

How White People Write Race

The Doctorow book has me thinking about how I write race.

As a writer, it’s easier to see my black neighbor or the Coalhouse character as sympathetic humans than it is to see my own parents, with all of their ingrained prejudice and homophobia, as sympathetic humans. 

But that’s the easy way out, a temptation we have to resist as white writers, says W. Kamau Bell.

In an interview on With Friends Like These, he told white people to handle ourselves, calling out racism when we hear it and advocating for a new narrative of whiteness.

To participate in writing that future, I might have to understand where my parents are coming from.

The white supremacist is a familiar character, and it is not them. They deserve better. There isn’t a strong narrative of the “good white person,” racially speaking, but perhaps we can only get there by exploring all of the good intentions that lined our path to today.

The task becomes not writing black characters but trying to find empathy or insight in my parents' view of the world.

There is so much I want to say about our time that I felt ill-equipped to say, but surely the only white voices cannot be the bigoted ones. That's serving exactly no one.

Talking about whiteness, talking about blackness, talking about race in America is like talking to my parents about sex. There’s simply no good agreed-upon language for it. There are landmines everywhere.

I've ridden the wave into adulthood on the premise that the old white, Christian tale of America was simplistic and ignorant, the result of brainwashing or fear. Yet my parents are complex people.

Good intentions got us here. We’re going to need more bravery than good intentions to get us out.

Coalhouse Walker: Real Character?

Into this waiting-to-move period, I've injected an old favorite: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow. Before I opened the book this time, I remembered loving the book but I did not remember the story. I got to fall in love all over again.

The book is a collage of the early-1900s. Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford and Emma Goldman make appearances. Two families, one upper-middle class and the other new immigrants, meet these giants of their time in likely, sometimes inconsequential scenarios.

Because there are so many "real" characters in the book, you imagine Doctorow researching and discovering all of the characters: Father, the executive at the fireworks factory, self-empowering Mother and the revolutionary Younger Brother. Tetah the artist who makes it big and his little girl. Their lives elevate to be as important to the course of history as all the names a reader in 2017 still recognizes.

When I last read the book, Emma Goldman was not familiar to me. Now that I know her as a historical figure, the book reads differently: as though any character, if you explore enough old newspaper articles, could come to life and be proclaimed as "real."

This brings me to the central character: Coalhouse Walker. In this reading, I was sure he was a historical figure. Following humiliation at the hands of the local all-white fire department, Coalhouse and his men (a ragtag team of 3-4 black youth and one middle-aged white man) barricade themselves with explosives inside the library and museum of J. P. Morgan. The metaphor is simply too perfect. I wanted to believe it.

From a NYTimes article written shortly after the book was published: "Asked if this angry black man were a real person Mr. Doctorow said, 'There are several hundreds of thousands of Coalhouse Walkers in this country.'" (Article here.)

But Coalhouse Walker entered the novel as a polite and proud black man determined to marry a young maid who was already the mother of his child. It was only through humiliation and his insistence on his own humanity and worthiness that he became indignant, and ultimately dead at the hands of his oppressors.

I believe in the reality of Coalhouse Walker, as unique or as aggregate, as both human and metaphor. I wonder if many black readers also believe in him.

We're Buying a House!

"We're buying a house!"

I understand that sentence now more than ever: two months of limbo, negotiations and anxiety. Also, the exclamation point. There is an end in sight, after which we'll be homeowners.

This wasn't a part of the plan for 2017. In late April, we got a letter from our new corporate landlords saying that rent would be raised over 10% this year.

Plus Sonia would have to start paying for her garage space. Plus all of the good people -- the ones who have lived here for decades and make this place feel like a community -- are being priced out.

It was time to go. We wouldn't waste another year of rent.

We looked at less than a dozen houses. In three weeks, we found an adorable stone row house in Mount Airy.

It has sun tunnels that tunnel natural light into the top floor. It has a small, carefully manicured front yard. It has a large picture window in the living room.

Before we said "yes," I emailed Sonia my list of improvements I'd like to make in 1-2 years, and improvements I'd like to make in 2-5 years. It was a cultural wake-up call.

Sonia's Korean immigrant parents moved into their house 30+ years ago, and haven't changed a thing. They didn't alter anything unless it broke.

My white parents (2-5 generations removed from their immigrant roots) built their house from the ground up 30+ years ago, and a year hasn't gone by without a major renovation or improvement.

We'd both fallen in love with our new house, but Sonia loved it as it was. I saw only potential: new flooring in the foyer and basement, new drywall in the laundry room & select replacement tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. Once we could articulate that, and I could reassure Sonia that I would not be randomly ripping through drywall in the middle of the night, we could move forward.

On Sunday, I told my parents the news. After trying to call the house, I played the coward and texted them both a long message. Turns out, they were just getting in from the beach. They did not respond with any exclamation points initially. After they caught their breath and looked the house up online, they called.

"Looks like a nice place," my dad said. "There's a baseball field nearby, I think. Did I see that on the map?"

"Do you mind if I ask how much you paid and how much your mortgage payment will be?" my mom asked, relieved when I told her we hadn't paid full asking price.

When they were 24, my parents were married. By 26, I was born and they were in their first row house. By 29, they were parents of two sacrificing daily for their dream, raising a couple of kids in the country on a homestead where, if needed, they could grow their own groceries. They don't understand city living. There are many ways in which I'm foreign to them.

Two years ago, my dad asked me why people of my generation didn't seem to care about buying houses. I realized later this was as close as he'd get to suggesting I buy a house. Such is our communication.

As we spoke about the new house, I kept saying Sonia's name: Sonia's commute would be longer, Sonia is wary of big renovations, Sonia was reading The Automatic Millionaire when we decided to buy a house. My parents didn't respond to any of those points. The conversation skated onward.

As we hung up, my dad said, "Tell Sonia we said hi."

Baby steps.

Old Skins to Shed

The narrator of Rachel Cusk's Outline might or might not be a singular person. By the time I began to suspect that the characters were folding into one another, I was nearly finished. It will be a good one to reread, but I'm uninspired to do so right now.

I didn't have enough empathy for the characters, or interest in their movements. This may have been because the whole book was a brain tease and I didn't catch on until too late.

However, this reflection by Angeliki, a mother of one son, knocked me over.

'...for me, of course, it would be disastrous to have more children: I would be completely submerged, as so many women are. I ask myself why it is my mother wishes me submerged in my turn, when I have important work to do, when it would not be in my best interests and would be, as I say, tantamount to disaster, and the answer is that her desire is not about me but about herself.

'The parts of life that are suffocating,' Angeliki said, 'are so often the parts that are the projection of our own parents' desires. One's existence as a wife and mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman's creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of other things...has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion.'

I don't want to be submerged.

In high school, the Immaculate Conception scared the shit out of me. There wasn't an Internet and sex education was virtually nonexistent. My overactive brain couldn't handle that combo. I convinced myself that when I got pregnant due to some freak accident, I would be strong enough to kill myself. I carried this conviction into my twenties and I'm not even sure when precisely I let it go. Once you've gone down that road, I'm not sure there's any coming back.

So many of my friends are having their second babies. My best friend is pregnant with her first. Two others are attending a book/therapy group called Maybe Baby for queer couples thinking about kids.

On Saturday, Sonia and I went over to a couple's house and met their daughters, who are two years old and five months old. The woman and I used to be roommates in Philadelphia; we'd run into each other at Molly's funeral and didn't want to leave it there. I'd always liked her.

Sonia spent most of her time with the baby, but that two-year-old was my favorite. I am 35; Sonia is 32. No decisions have been made. I don't doubt for a second that I'd love raising a kid, but the pathway there is still unclear.

Plus, I have some old skins to shed: that scared teenager I used to be and others' desires I've been carrying around. Spring's a good time for that.

How Death Animates Us

Perhaps this blog will become: life as animated by literature.

I couldn't fall asleep last night, as happens when I'm newly off alcohol and back to the gym, so I read this graphic novel that's been sitting on my coffee table for about a year: Unknown by author Mark Waid and illustrator Minck Oosterveer.

It's about death. Since Molly's it's become clear that every piece of art and literature is about death. I knew this at fifteen and twenty-one. Just forgot.

The main character, Cat Allingham, is a detective with a brain tumor whose last mysteries involve learning if there is or is not an afterlife. It was only the first in a series, so the jury's still out.

On Sunday, Sonia and I had lunch with my parents and they acted like themselves for the first time in her presence, teasing one another relentlessly, engaging with us and actually showing some joy. It felt good.

We met at the Cheesecake Factory in the suburbs. My parents bravely tried the thai lettuce wraps and loved them. We shared two pieces of cheesecake (all chocolate) at the end and moaned about the indulgence. We walked around the mall together afterward and went shoe shopping, where Sonia impressively saved me $30 on a pair of $105 shoes at DSW.

Who knows why people do what they do? Given time or traumatic events, my parents seem to have turned a corner. They seem more open, more accepting, lighter. I have two theories and they both have to do with death.

A few weeks ago on the phone, my dad told me about a 26-year-old boy who had gone missing from the bar a few miles from their home. It was the same bar my brother and I frequented in our twenties, the closest one to our childhood home. The boy had suffered from mental health problems and substance abuse. He'd joined my mom's church to get help with the drinking and the drugs.

Then one evening, he left the bar, threw his phone and his keys in his car and walked into the woods. It took them a few weeks to find his body, but everyone knew what had happened. My dad told me that path led to an overlook where it would be easy to jump into the river. He didn't tell me that the boy was gay.

The boy who killed himself was or was not gay. In any case, he was in working class Pennsylvania where some combination of lack of opportunity, lack of options and lack of mental health services led to him finding this way out. His options were religion or alcohol. If he was gay, a religion that despised him wouldn't cut it.

Another thing happened this winter. Driving home from the high school where he's been substitute teaching since he got laid off 12+ years ago, my dad did a 360 on an icy two-lane road and narrowly missed an 18-wheeler. Says his life flashed before his eyes. He is increasingly the kind of man who will say things like that, although it's a new look for him.

My mom texted me about the incident the night it happened. She expressed thankfulness for Sonia and my brother's girlfriend. In their shock after that near-miss, they knew what mattered. They knew that Sonia and my brother's girlfriend were the people that their children would come home to if something similar happened.

In The Unknown, death is a chalky-faced stranger with the build of Herman Munster. In my life these days, it seems to be animating a little empathy among my family from a still-safe distance. The empathy is motivating -- it feels like all I've ever wanted -- and makes me want to spend as much time with them as possible. Help them keep their monsters at bay.

An Ocean of Knowledge

The pond in the back of the Hempstock's house in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which is also the ocean that carries Lettie's body away, merits more unpacking.

The metaphor of the ocean in this book is so rich it feels Biblical. It is both a placid pond and a ferocious ocean. It's also a bucket of water that transports the seven-year-old narrator to another dimension.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.  

Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to everything, and I knew it all. 

The ocean is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis. Makes perfect sense that the writers of the Bible would want us to avoid it, too. Seems to me that the keepers of the keys of knowledge too seldom wish to share, as though disseminating knowledge decreases its value.

Or, what if the tree/ocean of knowledge was cast as "original sin" because spending too much time thinking about it -- how souls are made, where we go when we die -- prevents us from being present here on earth, which is the whole point?

After his ocean experience, the narrator has a conversation with Lettie that illustrates this beautifully.

"Do you still know everything, all the time?"  

She shook her head. She didn't smile. She said, "Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here." 

"So you used to know everything?" 

She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play."  

"To play what?" 

"This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.

It's nice to believe that when she died, Molly entered this ocean, that she's been granted understanding and wisdom and comfort of a kind I hope not to see for several decades. It's an image of afterlife I can get behind, and provides me comfort comparable to what my mother probably feels when she visualizes heaven.

Long ago, literature became my Bible. I return to the books that have shaped me -- Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Stephen Dunn's poetry, and many more -- in the way Christians return to the Bible.

Literature does the Bible one better, I think. It's not a closed system; writers are constantly adding new ideas and metaphors to the conversation, interpreting the world as we find it for a new generation. Thus a book written in 2013, when I was cooking dinners and partying with Molly, offers me comfort when she's gone, just a few years later.

Shine on, bright star. Swim in knowledge.

The Ocean Has Taken Her

What a book to read in the weeks I've been staring down death for the first time. Molly's casket was open, my first experience of one. It was bizarre.

I kept looking around, afraid of offending someone, and wanting to whisper, "It doesn't look anything like her." I didn't dare. Did I think the mortician was hanging around, might be insulted?

The body didn't look anything like the human I remembered seeing just over a year ago. Yes, the disease had ravaged her: made her thin, allowed sores to pop up around her mouth. But I'd known Molly on acne-plagued, hungover days without makeup. I'd known her to fluctuate between skinny and a little bit chunky. The changes were more than cosmetic. Molly simply wasn't there.

Which begs the question: where did Molly go?

I struggled with questions like this as a young person -- middle school, high school. I had the Catholics' answers to wrestle with then. By the end of college, I'd adopted a wholistic spirituality inspired by books like The Celestine Prophecy and The Secret, with a little Kerouac thrown in. I trusted my own subjectivity and the power of my mind and my life force to drive compassion, integrity and decision-making. They haven't let me down.

My questioning today feels less like a struggle and more like a point of curiosity, something I wouldn't hesitate to bring up at a dinner party. You know, the nature of mortality. Let's talk about it.

Enter The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In this lovely, scary tale reminiscent of A Wrinkle in Time, a seven-year-old boy discovers truths that remain hidden to the adults around him. He also befriends a girl named Lettie Hempstock.

Lettie looks like she's eleven, but she and her mother and grandmother are older than the world. They get our main character twisted up in other dimensions. A window to another world becomes embedded in his heart, quite literally and quite dangerously.

Lettie ultimately has to sacrifice herself to save the little boy, but the exact nature of that sacrifice remains blurry. Lettie's mother wades with her limp body into the backyard pond. The body floats. We hear about what happens next from the seven-year-old boy.

The great wave came, and the world rumbled, and I looked up as it reached us: it was taller than trees, than houses, than mind or eyes could hold, or heart could follow.  

Only when it reached Lettie Hempstock's floating body did the enormous wave crash down. I expected to be soaked, or worse, to be swept away by the angry ocean water, and I raised my arm to cover my face.  

There was no splash of breakers, no deafening crash, and when I lowered my arm I could see nothing but the still black water of a pond in the night, and there was nothing on the surface of the pond but a smattering of lily pads and the thoughtful, incomplete reflection of the moon.

If only all sendoffs from this world came complete with erratic, otherworldly weather. In fact, as Molly's brother spoke at her "celebration of life" last Saturday, it started to downpour. As he was wrapping up, a clap of thunder shook the Irish center.

"That's Molly telling me, 'that's enough sad talk,'" her brother said.

She's in the weather. She's in the ether. But where is Molly really?

Lettie's mother has an explantation for what happens in the end, to a girl whose spirit is as old as time itself.

"Lettie's hurt. Very badly hurt. The ocean has taken her. Honestly, I don't know if it will ever give her back. But we can hope, can't we?"

It's So Good to Be Alive

These are the flowers Sonia and I got one another for Valentine's Day. Most of them are still going strong.

Last Friday, I lost a friend. Molly was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis as a child, and lived her life on borrowed time. She was diagnosed in the 80's, when it was rare for people to live past their teen years. She made it to 35.

Cystic fibrosis affects the lungs and digestive system. It's a hereditary condition in which the body produces heavy mucus and eventually shuts down multiple organs.

We lived together for three years, in a three-bedroom house in Center City with two different roommates. The first roommate was standoffish; the second became a friend.

Molly loved the Steelers, and she loved to drink. She was gorgeous and vibrant and blonde. She mastered the art of the flowy shirt to hide her CF-bloated belly. She was welcoming of my partners and curious about my queer identity. It seemed to me as though she simply hadn't known many gay people, especially women. Molly also loved men.

It was the early days of my nonprofit job. I went about three years without a day off, besides the common holidays. I remember one of the first weeks I took off, for a trip to Florida with my partner to see friends. It wasn't even a whole week.

Molly said, "You work so much. You deserve some time off."

At the time, I remember thinking I had her fooled. I didn't really deserve it.

I didn't have a clear picture then of how lazy many people are in their jobs. Instead of competing against humans, I was competing against my own best ideal of what I could do. I fell short every time.

Her words stayed with me. They brought tears to my eyes, even as I denied them. Over the years, they have rung in my ears whenever I'm being too hard on a friend, partner or coworker. I give myself permission to be generous in the way that Molly was to me. Even though I didn't think I deserved it, it felt nice to have someone else believe in both my hard work and inherent worth.

Just as we'd settled on what felt like a comfortable, drama-free household, our ancient landlady showed up one morning. She hadn't seen the neighborhood in 10 years, but that didn't stop her from using her own key to enter our home as Molly and I ate breakfast. She couldn't believe how the neighborhood had changed.

Within a month, we received notice that she would be selling the house. We needed to find a new home. Our roommate moved in with her boyfriend. Molly stayed with family for a brief time, then with the boyfriend who became her fiancé. I moved to West Philadelphia and made new friends.

Since Molly died, I've found myself reaching for Sonia more often, more desperately. The way I feel reminds me of the Stephen Dunn poem, I Came Home Wanting to Touch Everyone. Even in her death, Molly brings me an appreciation of each breath.

It's so good to be alive, to be able to work and love. No qualifications.