Jul 15, 2019
How a Picasso Painting Helped Me Move Past Numbness After Trauma
I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life.
I had not been erased by the violence I’d suffered, but was changed by it. A new, difficult layer had been added to my life.
Wrestling never stops, so I couldn’t stop, and thus I am still here.
As euphoric as my queer epiphany felt, I’d had it as my mother lay sick. It felt like I was reentering the world as my mother was leaving it.
I go to Japan, pulled like a magnet, to see what is mine, undiscovered or forgotten; to see what will never be mine; and to find some way to reconcile the two.
My idea of home had changed, so I took the symbolic step of finding a new tailor—marking Philadelphia as a place that now fit me right, too.
The truth was, for me and as for Fleabag, I wasn’t just looking for a good story to tell my friends. I was looking for something so much harder to grasp: a narrative.
For queer writers, the discovery of this literary lineage is essential to our very existence, to our very expression of self. We can’t find the words without them.
Well, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The answer so often is, simply: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that it actually matters, anyway.
What was I getting out shame, anyway? So I walked away from it all: going to church, reading scripture, prayer, even the Christian music I loved so much.
There was nowhere to go back to. Oklahoma was out of the question, always out of the question. But then, where was home?
The release of "Infinity on High" marked the final moments of the mid-2000s, a time when collapse nested on the tongues of everyone in my universe but never made it out of their mouths.
There’s nothing more queer than cobbling together something fabulous out of very little.
My trans friends rarely come home, and when they do, it is for brief bursts of time. They question why I’ve chosen to keep living here.
I want to believe that I inherited too ways of feeling joy, ways of finding pleasure, ways of being with other queers in raucous and wild ways.
Suddenly, miraculously, it was no longer dismay that I felt. It was freedom. It was Death doffing its blackness and revealing itself to me as life.
I was leaving femininity behind, grateful to have an example like my grandpa to grow toward.
The self-regard that came with watching Bergman films helped me feel rich in something, for the first time since arriving in America.
He begged his mother to let him buy the guitar. When she refused, reminding him that it was half of the month’s rent, he wept.
The Roadshow is so kind, so simple, and so pure that you begin to wonder, “Could this even be faked?” When I visited the set in San Diego, I discovered—no, it can’t be faked.
Who are we if not kin through our deviations? Street hustler and femme queen, macho and maricóncito, variations on a chulo aesthetic.
