Nov 13, 2018
“The Fifth Element” Was Made For Straight Boys—The Gay Ones Made It For Themselves
My family enjoyed “The Fifth Element” without seeing how queer it was. Did that mean they could not see how queer I was?
My family enjoyed “The Fifth Element” without seeing how queer it was. Did that mean they could not see how queer I was?
How do we pass the time while traveling from Point A to Point B? What stories do we tell one another, and how do those stories connect?
I used to imagine having a Korean mother, someone rich in stories and jokes about Korean food and culture. My Korean mom would, ideally, be Maangchi.
Animation can teach a kid a lot about themselves and the world around them. Disney movies taught me about my queer desires.
It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space, but actively owning it.
Every day, when my kids come home from school, the first thing I ask them—like most parents do—is about school. But unlike most parents, I do not expect my kids to say that school was fine.
Montrose was unofficially codified as the nexus of queer life in Houston. That’s the part we cared about. If you held a map to the wall, I could tell you how we came to be on those streets.
I felt that whipping out the white cane would irrevocably launch me into the kingdom of the blind, and, for many years, I did not want to go there.
The long and fluid history of fairy tales shows us that men who want to control, dehumanize, and violate women have always existed.
It’s easier to cut people out than to learn to differentiate between the chronically demanding and the occasionally needy. It’s war, we tell ourselves.
I have no desire to live forever. But what I would give to return to adolescence and do it over, even once! To kiss who I wanted to kiss, not settling for her brother.
In her illness, Korean food was all my Polish-American mom from Jersey wanted to eat. It was all that she could bear.
If citrine is supposed to bring you abundance, what might it bring if you didn’t need so much wealth in our capitalist hellscape?
There will be as many different iterations of this storm, and the ones to come, as there are Houstonians. And we have to hear them—they’re what will determine our map for the next one.
“Accommodations are things that we need, and deserve, in order to lead our lives. But they’re treated—we are treated—like we’re trying to pull one over on the rest of society.”
For me, distinctions between light and dark have dissolved as my blindness has worsened. I do not experience blindness as darkness or blackness.
Remain forever hungry, or enjoy the tried-and-true? Sometimes, I learned, it’s okay to double down on the life you have.
What, exactly, are the building blocks that make a fairy tale a fairy tale? And who—or what—might be making them in the future?
When we dress up, when we experiment, sometimes it’s because we are trying to discover who we are. But sometimes it’s because we already know and have nothing to hide.
My parental separation was vastly less traumatic than what is happening to children at the border. But this narrative lives inside me.
