Sep 12, 2019
What an Over-the-Top, Teen Cable Drama Taught Me About My Sexuality
I didn’t know—or think I knew—any visibly queer women, and watching these fictional women half-existing seemed both comforting and lonely.
I didn’t know—or think I knew—any visibly queer women, and watching these fictional women half-existing seemed both comforting and lonely.
We fall prey to letting writing become a passion, cooking a hobby, teaching a service. We must rethink how we value labor.
And then there were the wigs: exercises in risk-taking, rejections of my boring and shame-consumed past self.
Kurt Cobain would not approve, but privately I wondered if there wasn’t space for a beloved burnished thing in my new and improved pop pantheon.
I think now, what is life if not a rather ridiculous, fumbling, histrionic, financially ruinous, unwieldy thing?
Vin closes his eyes and bares his soul, meaning each word of the song, and isn’t that the point? Vin never claimed to be a good singer.
This film is an opportunity to help rescue Fanny Mendelssohn from near-obscurity; and to do the same for me.
I imagine she wrote it for women like me. Women who wear their hearts on their sleeves but hold their hands over their mouths.
Guy Fieri allowed me to ask: who do I fear noise and brightness for? Who do I fear food for? And he gave me the answer: I fear it for myself.
At the time, I didn’t know I could be anything but a girl, a quiet Chinese American girl, cute and easy to ignore, but Kurama hinted at other possibilities.
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?
