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 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.

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.

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.

We Can All Write Our Reps -- Here's How

I haven't been blogging, but I have been writing. Mostly letters to my representatives, in the following categories:

• U.S. Senate (mine are Toomey & Casey)
• U.S. Congress (mine is Evans)
• PA Senate (mine is Williams)
• PA Congress (mine is Roebuck)
• PA Governor & Attorney General (Tom Wolf, Josh Shapiro)
• Philly Mayor, five city council at-large reps & one district rep

With the exception of a few city councilwomen, these are all straight men. Most of them are white. The exercise in learning who they were and that they represented me -- while I hadn't really bothered to learn much about them -- was eye-opening in itself. 

They are all Democrats with the exception of Pat Toomey, so he gets more letters from me. Interesting fact: U.S. Senators have multiple offices in various districts of the state (PA has seven; I imagine smaller states may have fewer). That means for each Toomey letter I write, there are eight copies: one to each district office, and one to the office in Washington, D.C. Even if he doesn't read one of them, his staffers will. 

As I share about my letter-writing on social media, several people have asked me for a copy of the letters. I debated sharing these letters on this blog. Was the content "queer" enough? Did it have anything to do with happiness? 

Jenny adeptly pointed out on a very cold walk the other evening that if it's coming from me, it's queer enough. And while happiness may not be in our politics right now, this is how I'm keeping my sanity. So here goes. 

For a how-to guide for your own activism, read the Indivisible Guide. Then feel free to steal any of my language or letters to send to your own representatives. 

The Not-gay Novel

Let Me Explain You by Annie Liontas is not a novel about being gay, and it's not a novel about how a Greek immigrant family comes to terms with their oldest daughter being gay. But it sort of is.

The main character is an egotist named Stavros Stavros, the father of three daughters, the owner of two restaurants, and the ex-husband of one woman, who announces in an email to his family in the opening chapter that he will die in ten days.

There's a lot going on in this novel. The novel takes a close third-person perspective that sometimes sits with Stavros; sometimes his oldest daughter and namesake, Stavroula; sometimes his ex-wife Dina; sometimes one of the other two daughters, each with their short list of working class struggles.

Because there is so much going on, and because I read this hoping for a little more lesbian action, I was particularly honed into the treatment of the lesbian character and oldest daughter.

In one of the first chapters, she rewrites the menu of her restaurant to honor July, the name of the coworker she has been pining after for years. It's awkward, and another 200+ pages go by before they find themselves in a late-night kitchen, with food as the metaphor for love and desire.

The possibility of an affair, one of the primary drivers of the book, ends without a kiss, unless you count Stavroula's "We just frenched," joke, uttered as they worked together to tie a rack of lamb. Let's just say the comic release of the book wasn't the kind of release I was hoping for.

I've been reading more first novels, imagining what mine will be, gathering courage from the idea that these writers toiled away for so long before finding a pathway and putting this first work into the world. I liked this one, and there's probably more for me to excavate in that father-daughter relationship than I'm ready to do right now.

But my novel will definitely be gayer.

Why We Write Novels, Inspired by Trump Supporters

I grew up in rural America among those who elected Trump. In mocking interviews, his supporters say, "I don't care about the facts. I know it’s true."

Or, “you have your facts and I have mine.”

Working in education, I see an opportunity for curricula about facts vs. opinions. But these statements go deeper than poor critical thinking, to the root of subjectivity. 

Imagine person A and person B.

Person A decides by age 25 that evangelical Christianity is the answer to life's pain and a path toward meaning. She goes deep into religion, and everything she encounters in life seems to affirm her religion. If you think that religion is not circumspect enough to inhabit the modern world, look again. 

Person B has been exposed to religion for her whole life, and never once inspired. By age 25, she is reading every book she can get her hands on and believes literature is the path to truth. The study of philosophy, history and psychology make sense of the world, and everything she encounters in life seems to affirm the primacy of empirical understanding.

My mother is person A. I am person B. This is why one writes novels.

Questions about Writing for the New Year

What I Can Do by Mary Oliver

The television has two instruments that control it. 

I get confused. 

The washer asks me, do you want regular or delicate? 

Honestly, I just want clean. 

Everything is like that. 

I won't even mention cell phones. 

I can turn on the light of the lamp beside my chair

where a book is waiting, but that's about it. 

Oh yes, and I can strike a match and make a fire. 

Mary Oliver's poem reminds us that poetry still exists in our digital world. We can still make fire. There is something fleshy and physical about the reminder. 

Mary Oliver is a gay writer. Mary Oliver is not a gay writer. I feel the same way about Michael Cunningham. They are lofty and ambitious and smart as hell; they transcend.

Some mornings, I am pressed to come up with a queer topic. Are they all queer topics if they're coming from me? Or are they all queer if (as Sonia likes to say) I'm "just making things up with my fingertips"?

Is queer writing necessary, or a distraction? 

Better yet, is all poetry queer? 

Juliet Takes a Breath

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera had at least three entry points into my life.

First, following the election I sought book lists. In particular (1) provocative books to read after the election and (2) new queer and feminist books. Rivera's title was on the second of these lists, and I ordered it immediately.

Second, in reading her bio, I learned that we're in very similar lines of work -- seriously, we have almost the same job title -- and yet she's had time in the past few years to write a book. I took it as a point of motivation for 2017.

Then -- if you can believe it -- I was paging through an issue of my college alumni magazine as I was putting together this year's intention collage, and I learned that Gabby Rivera graduated from Goucher College, just like me. One year after me, in fact.

I'm reading her book now. I'm also writing mine.

And just in case you'd like a glimpse of that intention collage...

Hey Hetero!

This photo exhibit by Tina Fiveash is today's (first) gem. It's been circulating somewhere on earth since 2001, and was translated into Greek last year for an exhibit in Athens.

I can't imagine kissing my love openly on the streets of New York, let alone the streets of Athens.

My two trips to Greece were in 2001 and 2002. Culturally, they still had that Mediterranean machismo going on. I was repelled by the men and their comments, liberties and assumptions more times than I can count.

Much has changed in Greece since my last visit: the debt crisis, instability within the EU and the Syrian refugee crisis.

It's interesting that Hey Hetero! came to Greece at the height of political upheaval. In Greece, rooted in Socratic Method and so proud of its philosophical tradition, is it possible that it took instability of this pitch to begin breaking down decades-old misogyny and heteronormative thinking?

Or is that silver lining a little too easy?

Confession: I've Been a TERF

I just finished this page-turner. Reading it, I felt like I was in college again, but college was cooler (and easier).

The most disconcerting revelation: I've been a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or at least, I held one belief in common with them.

"Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys have argued that trans surgeries are a form of mutilation, carried out for political reasons because of the way gender is constructed in male-dominated society."

I wouldn't have used mutilation. But I had to admit: I'd had similar thoughts, and thought myself completely original for having them. Did gender reassignment surgery serve the patriarchy by confirming a false dichotomy?

My question also came from a new-age belief that we're born into this world with circumstances and challenges to learn lessons. I thought it followed that the gender we're born with had something to do with our destiny on earth.

Of course, it does. But that doesn't negate trans experiences, or anyone's choice to have gender confirmation surgery.

I dropped my skepticism about the necessity of surgery after I met trans people who seemed truly happy and -- dare I say it? -- "well-adjusted" after surgery.

One Small Beauty or Happiness

I'm back. And still finding my voice, the voice of this blog.

The next experiment: less than 200 words, one small beauty or happiness each day.

Christmas 2015: Sonia and I did not send Christmas cards; we weren't living together. We went to my parents' house for Christmas Day brunch. It was just the four of us. There were many silences, my parents' and Sonia's. I carried the conversation, resentful that no one else seemed to be making much of an effort. We exchanged gifts awkwardly and ducked out quickly, avoiding the extended family gathering later that day. Sonia went to her own parents' dinner alone in the evening.

Christmas 2016: Sonia and I sent Christmas cards to my entire extended family, signed with both our names. Christmas morning, we popped into her friend's engagement party then drove 90 minutes to my aunt's house, where everyone was polite. Even the Evangelical relatives were kind and welcoming. My mother was still wound as tight as a spring, but I was at ease with Sonia by my side.

The effect of that -- the simple presence of her, the confidence and calm it carries -- is entirely new. I'm so grateful.

Parker (Part 2): On Being Organic

Parker is taking a "legitimate" (his word) acting class so that he can make better porn.

When we talked a few weeks ago, he was engrossed in a scene from the play Edmund by David Mamet, which he'd been working on for class.

He described Edmund as "born on third base," which he had to explain to me because I immediately went to the baseball-sex metaphor, which doesn't even make sense here. He likened "born on third base" to "born with a silver spoon in your mouth." Ok, got it.

In the course of the play, this family man (you get it: picket fence, office job) "in a flourish of self-centered, willful badness, casts off all of these trappings." Those are Parker's words, too. He's doing some casting off of his own these days.

The first fifteen minutes of our conversation was dominated by Mamet's play: the storyline, the description of the scene Parker is working on, and a little background on the class. Most of the other students are recent university graduates looking for connections, help with their showreel or insight into their portfolio. They're not sure if Parker is kidding when he says he acts in porn.

He's taking the course for two reasons: to get more skills as an actor and to make better porn. He wants to push himself to create something that's a little more beautiful.

"I would say that 99% of the time, the sex is just improvised," Parker said. "Just let it roll. Do what feels good, do what feels natural. If there's narrative involved, you'll get a script. If there's not, you just arrive and fuck."

Here was my chance. "There should always be a script!" I interjected. "I think most women would agree with me." Finally, I had the ear of someone in the industry. Why don't they all know this?

They do. "I think most people would agree with you," Parker said. "But here's the thing, they're not going to pay for a script when they can just say, 'ok, here's the set. You're fucking him. These are the positions. And um, yeah. Go for it.'" 

Sonia, who was making breakfast in the kitchen as Parker and I spoke on Skype, disagreed with me about the script. She told me later that she found it incredibly sexy, the idea that porn could be that natural. But of course, so much of what we've seen looks neither natural nor particularly enjoyable. As a result, it hasn't been a big part of our sex life.

Can porn be life-affirming? Yes, and! If it's going to be, we need smart, articulate people in the industry with a nuanced understanding of gender, sexuality and the cornucopia of possible acts of sex (Happy Thanksgiving!).

He talked about the challenge presented each day by his work:

Because the scripts are so loose, as loose as they are, the challenge is the big thing for me. I really enjoy being in that place and not being comfortable, and then being like 'I have to figure this out. This is difficult. How can I make this as good as it can be? How can I bring this to life?' I enjoy the creative elements of it: going through the script, seeing what I can put onto this. That's fascinating. Then, I really enjoy the physical performance side of fucking on-screen. That is terrifically enjoyable to me. 

He also talked about the path that led him to porn. The serendipity reminded me of the early days of my nonprofit organization: one person led to another led to another, and eventually you sat down across from the person who would help you realize your dream. But that explanation is too neat for Parker.

He described his continual progression -- from BDSM and a realization of gender politics, to the end of a relationship, to a party where he met a director, to other directors and eventually someone who would show him how to become an escort in a safe way -- as "little grains of sand that build the steps that I'm climbing up."

He wants me to resist neat stories, and warned about the easy meta-narrative that would do his story a disservice. "I wouldn't be in the position I'm in now without all those little details, and swimming my way, stumbling my way through gathering them up."

Parker is a philosopher who is still unsure whether words can serve his journey. He lives with depression and anxiety, half-imagined careers, memories of relationships that went from dynamic and challenging to stuck. Everything pulls him away from the trappings of Edmund at the beginning of the play.

"I've come to the realization that that's not how life works, you can't just will yourself" to have a certain career or life, he reflected. "You can't take the resources you have and decide to go from here to there. 'I'm going to go there, be that.' One of the reasons porn worked for me is because it's been organic."

I'm pretty sure Parker meant by organic, natural development or growth. But organic also connotes, "relating to living matter." The body. That rang truer. 

This man is a thinker. I remembered why I liked him so much, why we never ran out of things to talk about when we were nineteen and our world was just beginning. 

Although he's thinking about porn, and thinking about it in nuanced and artistic ways, the act of it may provide a little relief, an opportunity to be pure flesh. I wonder how often most of us live in our physical bodies this wholly. 

Sex or not, the experience of being wholly physical must produce an afterglow.

"When you come away from a day of filming and you feel like it's gone well, you're so buoyed up, it's so great. Teamwork is oftentimes really enjoyable...when the teamwork is working, it's kind of buzzing. You're in it together and the engine is rolling. That is exhilarating."

Children Are So Cruel

One of the reasons that I started this blog was to have documentation of my relationship, as a queer adult, with my parents. I hoped that documenting the episodes of our relationship as it changed would give me perspective, and perhaps give others comfort.

There were some pitfalls and minor breakthroughs in encounters and conversations with my parents last year, and yet each of them felt like an echo of something that had happened before. I worried we were going in circles rather than breaking new ground.

I have little interest in circles.

About a week and a half ago on a Sunday, my parents joined Sonia and I for When the Rain Stops Falling (NYT review here).

The visit came about following a series of increasingly bitter emails between my mother and I last winter; after the dust settled, my father asked if they could come for a visit and see a play. It was a tradition I'd instituted in my early days in the city, a way of spending time with them and giving them a little exposure to worlds and ideas beyond what they're used to.

There are no plays in the summertime, so we were able to put it off.

I woke before eight the Sunday they came. Sonia had sprained her ankle, so my original plan was thwarted: a quick tour of the apartment followed by brunch and walking around the city. We adjusted, and I started cooking shortly after nine.

We'd have time between brunch and leaving for the play. I texted my dad to bring his drill. Our apartment walls seemed to be made of granite and I was having trouble getting our curtain rods up. That would give us something to do, and I know my dad enjoys few things more than a practical task involving tools. He was eager to help.

It was a brisk fall day, and I met them in front of our apartment complex, and led them inside. My mother wore purple and a determined smile. Dad was a little uncomfortable in a light suit, which he managed to sweat through before the play. They claimed to be impressed by our apartment building.

I've loved every place I've lived in the city, and my mother has done her best not to criticize them when visiting. The last place, she was most concerned by the stairwell, which she claimed was a fire hazard. It probably was. My parents built their home dream home by the time they were thirty-two; they don't understand choosing to live in an old building.

Most of the places I've lived were built in the early 1900s, which I thought gave them charm. I could also afford them.

My parents took their shoes off dutifully, and offered compliments about the apartment to Sonia and I. My mother even brought a gift wrapped in light green paper: a beautiful, heavy silver tray with a tree pattern. Sonia loves trays -- something about the implied luxury, I think -- but we both liked this one. Dad checked out the whole place; mom avoided the bedroom.

When they come for a play, I'm always torn between choosing something like The Importance of Being Ernest, The Lion King or The Nutcracker, and choosing a play I'd like to see. Every time, I choose what I'd like to see, trying within that to find a play as simply beautiful and non-controversial as possible.

Of course, I love theater most when it pushes my own boundaries. I'm inevitably mortified, sitting next to my father during an explicit sex scene or my mother as someone ticks off the reasons God cannot exist. The only difference this time was that Sonia sat next to me instead. My parents were good sports, despite the cursing and dark themes. I was shaken.

"Parents are so cruel," says one character about his mother's silence. This is a play about the secrets parents keep from their children, the secrets that may be horrible but are never as horrible as the silences that are built up around them.

I knew instinctively that the other line was coming, twenty or thirty minutes later, and it did: "Children are so cruel." It's also a play about children and the expectations we set forth for those who brought us into this world, the godlike expectations that are not fair and cannot be fulfilled.

Ok, I cried. A few times.

I was glad to have Sonia in the seat next to me in the final scene, as a father in the year 2039 handed down mysterious artifacts of his family history to his estranged son in a rare meeting. The artifacts passed through the hands of the ancestors and piled on the lap of a young man looking for answers.

We don't get those answers. They are impossible to know, within all those silences. Who were my parents before I got here? What were their desires and demons? Did they learn anything about life or happiness that could ease my journey?

If asked, my father is quick to point to the importance of family as the central value in his life. My mother would say it's accepting Jesus Christ. I don't mean those lessons, the ones they intentionally pass on. Those lessons are nothing more than their own incomplete stories.

I mean the deeper lessons that they haven't yet been framed or even acknowledged, the stories that arise out of their traumas and silences and wonderings.

Sonia would probably say that parents deserve respect, and it is not our right to ask these kinds of questions or try to see our parents this emotionally naked. She told me recently that I'm not fair to them. When she meets them now, absent years of baggage, they seem like genuinely kind people who are making an effort to understand their daughter.

It doesn't feel good to admit it, but she may be right.

Jenny (Part 3): On Becoming Honest

Jenny and I had beers on her front porch Sunday afternoon, and I realized how much time you have to spend with a person to get a decent interview, to make sure you've covered all your bases and captured at least a little bit of the nuance of their experience. 

She was on fire for Rebecca Traister's new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (review here). 

Traister argues that even for most straight women, relationships with women are more fulfilling in every way. "So I just felt so lucky," Jenny said, "that I'm also sexually attracted to women, too, because I can get so much more from those relationships -- physically, mentally and emotionally -- than I could with a man."

"I'm generally happier when I'm in a relationship," she'd said the week before. "When I'm happy, it's because my life feels full. It feels like the things I'm doing are honest projections of me, and what I want, and what I want to give to the world."

As a teen, Jenny remembers meeting gay women and feeling an inexplicable admiration for them, an awe for their bravery. She remembers being impressed when any woman -- gay or straight -- was able to present themselves as strong and down-to-earth, in opposition to a culture that wanted them to preen and pluck and perform. 

After she came out, she realized that this admiration came because she knew deep down that she wasn't being brave in the same way.

Now, she knows who she is but still finds LGBTQ labels -- lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer -- spectacularly insufficient.

"Meeting someone new, I say 'gay' because I'm dating a woman, so I feel pretty gay," Jenny said. "I do identify as queer, but I don't say that when I am first meeting people, because they're like, 'well, what is that? What does that mean?' If they don't say that, they're thinking it, and that's almost worse."

Queer, for Jenny, carries with it an acknowledgement of the men and the F-to-M trans people she's crushed on and dated. As she puts it, "It's a little more than just lesbian." Queer also gives her the freedom to embody her own version of the strong and down-to-earth women she's admired. 

Jenny is petite, with a tough and determined walk. I most often see her in straight-legged pants, button-down shirts and dangling earrings. She explained her thinking behind her look. 

"I don't like to portray a whole lot of feminine qualities. I've been cutting my hair shorter and shorter. I have a very strong aversion to portraying myself as super-feminine. I don't want to be masculine, just somewhere in between. The last time I dressed really feminine was Halloween. That felt really right to, only on Halloween, put on a dress."

Five or six years after Jenny first started to settle into her own identity and feel comfortable in her own skin, she met her current partner. They've been together for a little over a year now, and the five year plan involves a child. Jenny hopes it involves her current partner. But marriage? Not necessary.

"I'm not sure that marriage is super-important to me. It's a huge waste of money. I'll have to spend money on having a baby. But yeah, I think in five years I want a kid. Just one. Then I'll get another one in seven years," we laughed.

There was something in our laughter that hoped it would be that easy for her to become a mother.

At least some of the confidence and excitement around this vision -- of a child and family, in a few short years -- comes from her current girlfriend.

My relationship has made me feel more fulfilled. Sometimes, I'm overwhelmed by that feeling of being fulfilled, but I feel that I could be with her for a long time and never get bored. She makes me feel confident in myself. I can bounce ideas. She's a question-asker who challenges me without making me feel stupid. 

I feel better matched in my relationship than I ever have, in terms of us being able to talk about anything. She's the first person I've dated who I can see a really long-term future with. In the past, I have been terrified of settling for something that's not right for me, or getting stuck in something, but that has nothing to do with being gay.

Maybe there's a key in there to gay happiness, or to what Jenny called "grown-up happy": learning to separate the trials and dramas of life, the hang-ups and heartbreaks, from our sexuality. Or at very least, to not blame our sexuality -- or bigots' response to it -- for the challenges we face.

Few people lead truly charmed lives. Gay or straight, everyone has their inner and outer demons to face. We're all just working towards being, in Jenny's words, honest projections of ourselves and what we want to give to the world.