Lio Min has listened to, played and performed, and written about music for most of their life. Their novel Beating Heart Baby is about boys, bands, and Los Angeles.
What a joy it is—a singular joy, an occasion for jubilee—to allow your art’s translation through another point of view.
This is the deal I’d make with God: my devotion in exchange for acceptance of the past, peace with the present, and assurances about the future.
I love my parents because they are in me, but I wonder if, when they look at me, they see those parts or instead a shapeshifter who’s slowly taken over the person they thought they’d raised.
Transition begins by insisting that you can want more. It’s a dream in the sense that it reveals the version of you that wants, above all, to be here.
She’s loved and lost and lost and lost and yet still loves, and I root for this assertion to take root. Every sweetheart deserves their summers.
I could live inauthentically if it meant I could live with him. But my body kept betraying me with panic, and of course he noticed.
It was the first time I’d ever pointed at myself and claimed “boy,” even jokingly.
Since voicing my intention to transition, I’ve been revisiting my favorite love-as-a-woman songs and reorienting myself within them.
The more I wrote about women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.
The Eastern Zodiac is one area of mysticism my family can all agree on.
