The language and sentiments surrounding this pandemic, from calls to action to “flatten the curve,” to the anxiety around human contact and intimacy, are reminiscent of another ongoing issue impacting our community—the HIV epidemic. …
They By Sojourner They lives in the nucleus of my cells, it rarely boils to the surface of my flesh. Most days it’s not ready to face the eyes of others. They is not interested in what my appearance is read as by external forces, it carries no regard for social morays or stratification. They remembers and honors the child that often said “I want to be a boy,” while equally loving femme aesthetics because they knew no box could quantify…
By Jaxson Benjamin Author’s Note: This article space centers disabled sexuality because, for the most part, we are left out of the conversation. The narratives around disability and sexuality frequently regard us as partial, lacking in sexuality, or not whole people. Rewriting sexual scripts around disability means centering the lived experiences of people with disabilities. Does that mean that you if you don’t identify as disabled that you aren’t welcome here? You are very welcome, whether you live with a…
For myself and many trans people, figuring out how we wish to present can be very vexing. Luckily, there is a one-size-fits-all approach to gender expression: steel. Where the broad spectrums of gender and sexuality come into play, however, is in what type of armor one wishes to wear. The foul TERFs may say that there are only two genders: chain mail, and plate armor. This is, of course, rank madness! What about the wonderful world of combination chain-and-plate? Not…
I was a weird kid. I was, in fact, a weird, queer kid. I was, further, a weird, queer kid who did musical theatre, had agoraphobia, and, as I reached my teens, listened exclusively to New Wave music, wore eyeliner, dressed strictly in monochrome, and dyed my hair blue—all in Houston during the 1980s. And just to frame the timeline exactly, when I say I was a kid in the ‘80s, I literally mean I was aged nine through eighteen…
Dallas-based artist S Rodriguez sees “gender as a technology, both in a precolonial, colonial and postcolonial state. Gender plays a role in the way you operate in society. It is very much a tool, just like any technology, that you can choose or is chosen for you. And you can choose to continue working with that tool or change that tool.” While for some, the “goal” of gender as a tool might be “passing,” for Rodriguez and many others who…
I tend to play video games that are escapist—ones that let me play at being stronger, faster, or smarter. They let me be the hero but rarely do they hold up a mirror to my own life. The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories is a platform puzzle game about a 19-year-old trans girl’s pain—something that I myself remember all too well. The game takes a magic realist approach to how JJ (our protagonist) deals with this pain:…
I was in the sixth grade at Buckeye Elementary School in Salem, Ohio, a small town of 12,000. There really were buckeye trees lining the street outside of the school. This was a conservative time in a conservative state. The year was 1959. Eisenhower was in his second term. The Edsel was still the attention-getting new car. On State Street (our Main Street), the two focal points were the Woolsworth Five and Dime and the State Theatre, only three doors…
As a Black, queer, single mother of two young Black boys, I am struggling to have faith in society, our justice system, and humanity. When I was a young girl, I had a knack for sniffing out injustice. I had an innate fire in my belly that drove me to stand against anything I considered to be inequitable or wrong. I would relentlessly debate my mother and grandfather on issues of racial injustice, always seeking to understand why things were the…
I’ve had the great fortune of spending most of my life doing work in community. But my passion didn’t originally stem from wanting to change the world; it came from the desire to save myself. At age 20, I was introduced to the idea of sex work, a line of work I would ultimately participate in for years to come. When I entered the industry, and therefore began having numerous sexual partners, my mentors and friends stressed to me the…
