Everett Maroon's Blog, page 12

Lambda Literary Emerging Writer’s Workshop, Day 5

We’ve read through all of the fiction writers’ pieces and handed back critiques, treating each work and editorial process seriously and concentrating like whoa on giving good specific feedback. After five days I feel raw and exhausted, but good. It’s like whittling deadwood, sloughing off the bits I don’t need (I’m looking at you, insecurity and bad literary habits). Now I can focus my attention on word choice, craft, storytelling, and because Chip has hammered it into me, description. It may very well be that every story I write for the next few years, I will write for his eye and ear and sense of prose.

Samuel Delany refers a lot to Flaubert, and Balzac, and Walter Pater. He considers his words, and speaks in the most delightful cyclical cadence that keeps me fascinated with whatever next word is going to come out of his mouth. I’ve been cobbling a list of his reading recommendations, which may only make sense in context of giving feedback to us, and which is based in part on the kinds of stories we’ve been writing, but which is still a great stand-alone list. Here are some of his reference points:

Marius the Epicurean, and Imaginary Portraits, and The Child in the House, by Walter Pater
The Geography of the Imagination, by Guy Davenport
Enemies of Promise, by Cyril Connolly (a book on what makes writing lasting or not)
Aspects of the Novel, by Ian Foster
Forgetting Elena, by Edmund White
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, ed. by Paul Williams
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst
The Way of the Flesh, by Samuel Butler

It’s a lot to read, but then again, I have some time to read them.

I sat at the square table on Wednesday morning and listened to the critique of my ensemble novel from Chip and the eleven fiction fellows, and was thrilled to get such helpful feedback, especially the difference in perspective. One character that I thought was well written struck them as less interesting; their problems posed with less urgency, and for me, this had been a huge blind spot. How nice to get their sounding board responses! I pored through the dozen copies of line notes, margin notes, and summaries, and opened up my laptop. Reread my prose. Highlighted sections that needed care and feeding. French pressed myself a cup of coffee, and scratched at the copy of my manuscript, the one that already stands a couple of inches high. I scrolled down to the bottom of the manuscript and started typing.

When I looked up I had 5,000 new words. Words I didn’t have last week, or last month. I’ve been quiet about this writer’s block, but it is true that when I got here, I’d only been adding one hundred or so words to the story at at time. Now I feel that the story is more open, ready for whatever I can drop into it, and revisions will happen in time. It’s a good thing, a very good thing. I’m coming away from this workshop experience renewed about this project (as in, this book has to get written, and has to get published), and confirmation to some degree that after all of my years writing, reading, worrying about writing, keeping up with publishing, working on myself as a person, they all are beginning to bear beautiful fruit.  I couldn’t be more pleased.

And now I have to get down to work.

Lambda Literary Emerging Writer’s Workshop, Day 2

We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re critiquing each other’s work. So came the second full day of the retreat, enshrouded in mist once again and with a chilly breeze that made me glad I’d chosen a sweater vest for the morning. Thank goodness I discovered how to command hot water out of my shower, because a second event of freezing liquid was just not going to work for me. I woke up at 6:30 and went through my new French press coffee routine, then groomed myself.

I’d read two more stories last night and done my best to provide guidance without dissection. I tucked a small notebook into my pocket so that I could jot down the authors and titles of recommended reading (I’d missed two or three references on Monday). I chatted with people in the dining hall over steaming bowls of creamed wheat and not-so-fresh squeezed orange juice. One of my colleagues was dog-tired and held her head in her hands. And before I knew it, she was crying.

I’ve been in this place of sudden compassion before, and it has always involved a decision between sitting quietly so as to let them have their emotions, or filling up the space partway to offer a hinge they can swing from if they want to. So I told a very short story to express empathy in an indirect way, and she thanked me and then got up. Sometimes I wonder if spending so many decades divorced from my feelings hasn’t made me more able to connect to people now, because I refuse to pretend humans are strictly rational. I’m making up for lost processing time.

Soon enough I wandered away from the cafeteria, sitting outside at a cold plastic table with pen in hand, making more notes on a piece from a fellow fiction writer. I have a bit of quiet time most weekday mornings because my office doesn’t get busy until the mid-afternoon, but it’s not the same kind of work. Of course. One is responding to emails and one is attempting to relax enough to get words streaming through my fingers. I’ve been feeling a little conflicted—I have so few opportunities to talk to other writers in person, but I have precious little writing time. So I’ve been tackling each in blocks. Just reading has been fantastic; I need to forge more reading moments in my regular existence, and I’m thrilled to be collecting a list of recommendations from such well read individuals.

I went to a discussion on writing transgender characters after I’d spent enough time at the table. As happens in such presentations, we quickly descended into the labyrinth of inadequate language to describe gender identity’s categories. Less commonplace, however, was the commitment of the people in the room to move past the snarls, so we fought until we came out the other side, mostly. LGBT is nothing if not a contested coalition space.

Dinner was uneventful—food on this campus is bland and forgettable. I found myself in another conversation about literature, energized again by the glut of thoughts from my co-collaborators. And then it was time to watch United in Anger, a documentary about the early days of ACT UP in New York City. Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman collected thousands of hours of footage from the early protests against the FDA, the NYC mayor’s office, Social Security and St. Patrick’s Cathedral (I’m looking at you, Cardinal O’Connor). It made me remember my time in ACT UP Syracuse, just after coming out at 20, making friends with the upstate Radical Faeries, who took me in like a foster child, and who I mourned as many of them wasted away and then died. I listened to the quiet question and answer after the film finished, appreciating the sad reflection and gripping my fists that we could someday build another successful movement for civil rights.

I dragged myself up to my room, finishing my reading and zoning out until I was asleep. I woke up this morning with the bedsheets in a knot. As a fellow writer here posted online, “Each night, I appreciate fitted sheets more.” Hear, hear.

Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Workshop, Day 1

Okay, here I am. I can stand on the slant of the hill and gaze upon the San Fernando Valley, when the mist and/or the smog isn’t hiding it, that is. It’s pretty, and like a lot of the West Coast, covered in desert plants. None of the palm trees I see are native to Southern California, but I appreciate them anyway. Palm trees, for me, mean that I’m somewhere not considered home. They ring vacation to me, because you can never really lose the New Jersey, I guess.

I have sat in a room with Samuel Delany for hours now, have wandered across a campus with him, hoping our noses will lead us to the dining hall (for better or for worse), acting like such engagements with him are totally no big deal. This man taught Octavia Butler. Octavia Fucking Butler. AKA one of my favorite writers of all time. But hey, let’s chat about how much we hate stairs. (Answer: A lot) I don’t pretend that Mr. Delany will have any idea who I am by the middle of next week, but he’s personable and so brilliantly smart he may be solely responsible for the huge sun spot that flamed out last week. I have great admiration for Malinda Lo, who is teaching the YA/genre section, I have scads of respect for Sarah Schulman, who inspired my many years of involvement with the Lesbian Avengers (which she cofounded), and I always revere poets like David Groff because I’m completely inept at poetry.

But Chip Delany? Yes, I am star struck. In actual awe. And I’m doing my best not to act like a moron in his presence. Which those of you who know me well will admit is probably rather difficult for me.

We got to work last night reading three pieces from the twelve fiction writing fellows and as someone remarked through obvious sarcasm, they were all wildly different from each other. I loved that. I love that 48 LGBT writers can sit together in a room and look deeply at each other’s craft and among us we’re creating very different stories. It is the way literature should work, pushing us toward “original” thought and through that momentum, opening new spaces for the next batch of intrepid authors. Once we start noticing, those openings are all around us. We will never run out of stories.

I’ve been in workshops before in which not everyone pulled their weight. Some students hung back to give their critiques, clearly mimicking things that had already been said, never getting specific with any of their feedback. Nobody in our group pulled a trick like that — comments were specific, critical, helpful, and collectively we pushed the three projects forward in a way that the writers sincerely appreciated. It was also a relief not to have to hear the tired bull hockey from non-LGBT workshops, like “maybe if you just made her straight,” or “I’m not gay so I didn’t get that reference,” or the never-accountable, “I just didn’t relate to this.”

Each of us were allotted two minutes to offer our verbal comments, and then Samuel gave them his feedback. One author smiled, somewhat slack jawed when he was done. “That was worth the price of admission,” she said. She’s right. I found myself wanting to keep going, even though my chair was like a crab shell around me and my brain longed for a latte. Can we have more pieces to read and talk about? Why yes, yes we can. We go all the way until Saturday.

I can only imagine. By Saturday we will have talked so much about narrative and character and exposition and themes and tension, I may explode in happiness.

Throat Afire

It never fails that when I need to be somewhere or do something especially important, I catch a virus. There was that time, after being unemployed for two years, that I was supposed to go to Census-taker training, but got Susanne’s stomach bug instead. I’ve given presentations with 100-degree fevers, and taken the SAT while the chicken pox was still scabbed all over my body. So nobody in my household was surprised when I finally caught Emile’s cold from last week, two days before flying out to LA for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop.

At first it was just a tickle in my throat—maybe Wednesday afternoon or so. By Thursday night, in which I had go to my first board meeting as a new director for a former prisoner rehabilitation nonprofit, I was exhausted. It wasn’t as bad as that 2003 bout with mononucleosis (which kept me from driving to my sister’s house for Christmas that year, because timing is everything), but I felt weak and feverish. My throat emanated pain and itchiness. The back of my sinus cavity cranked up its production of disgustingness. I clammed my way through the meeting and then made conversation with some impromptu house guests who were spending the night with us. Please, I begged the anonymous virus, get out of here in the next 24 hours. I’ve got a big trip, okay?

Viruses, it turns out, don’t have ears. And they’re sod at telepathy, too. So Friday rolled around and my throat continued to roil, although maybe at a less intense dial number. I took an extra vitamin and chugged a cup of orange juice. Maybe the illness had peaked.

Friends inquired and send little internet missives of wellness to me, and I told myself I was overly attentive to a simple head cold. I chased Emile around the back yard, moving him away from a wasp’s nest, and getting him excited to collect all the sticks in the yard. For the record, there were eight sticks in the yard worth carrying around in toddler hands.

By Friday evening I felt roughly 79 percent my old self, but I was still wiped out. Well, I thought, I can sleep on the flight to Seattle and the long flight from SeaTac to LAX. And I will sleep well tonight.

Oh silly me. I tried to fall asleep from 10:15 until 1 in the morning, and after that I woke up every 40 minutes or so, wearily noting the green digits on the alarm clock. In my addled brain, I calculated the minutes until said clock would start beeping. Three hours. One hour and twenty minutes. Sixteen minutes. 4:45AM couldn’t sneak up on me because I never really fell into sleep. Then I was in the shower, fumbling through the motions of my usual morning routine, kissing my sweet son goodbye and hugging Susanne as the sun peeked over the Blue Mountains.

People trickled in through the door marked Departures, and I packed the perfect bag at 50.0 pounds. The Alaska Airlines employee seemed genuinely impressed when he said, “Nicely done!”

On the plane, I found my seat, stowed my briefcase overhead, and sat down. The man in the next seat had moved toward the middle in some weird attempt to block me. Between my ample ass and his space hogginess, it was a bit uncomfortable. We sat there a few minutes, in silence. And then he turned to me and said, “The row behind you is empty. Why don’t you move there?”

Seriously?

I wish I could write that I popped him in the face, or called him an asshole, or told him to move his bullshit ugly ass back there if he was so astounded by my size. Instead I stood up and told him if someone came on the plane to sit there, then I’d be back in this seat with my fat ass. It was something, and of course he didn’t acknowledge it, and I went ahead and thought awful things about him and his stupid South African accent, as if he were single-handedly responsible for apartheid. It was nice to have my own row, but oh, he was an annoyance after a week of annoyances.

That’s when it happened. After days of soreness, my throat gurgled, rumbling like an angry volcano the nearby residents had presumed was safe for the purposes of proximateness. I felt a cough coming.

I did not take the high road. I did not behave like an adult. I coughed in his general direction for the next 35 minutes, and honestly, I don’t really feel guilty about it. Call it cough-kismet.

 

You Don’t Even Know What Trans People Can Do

If I see one more dead trans woman on a cop show, I am going to pull out my already thinning hair. Pop culture loves the narcissistic trans guy (or even better, “boi”), the drug-addled butch lesbian, the screeching drag queen, and the sensationalized dead trans woman. With media images like this it’s no wonder mainstream America thinks we’re so desperately unhappy and to be avoided at all costs. Well, I know some great folks who are ordinary and amazing all at once. Here are a few of them:

My friend Jamie just biked across the continental divide twice today. She freaking bikes all over the place, sometimes for charity. I did an interview with her a while back.
My friend Jay is a sociology professor. He teaches about medical sociology. Don’t know what that is? Look it up!
Tom Léger started a transgender-focused press and two of his books have already won awards. See his interview with Morty Diamond.
Imani Henry is a longtime activist in NYC and just got his masters in social work. Take that, social safety net! Imani is on it!
My friend Aleisha owns and runs a kick ass hostel in Ontario with a full-sized Dalek in the lobby. I may be making up the Dalek but I don’t think so.
Imogen Binnie and Ryka Aoki wrote two of the best books out there in the last year. Seriously. Buy them. Read them. Tell your friends to buy them and read them.
My friend Riley is programming a physician management system, one of the biggest ones in the country. Your blood pressure and medication list? She helped build the system that captures all of those data.
Lori Sceales owns an amazing hot tub and hot stone massage clinic on the Big Island of Hawaii. Did you know there wasn’t popularized hot stone massage until Lori made a video about it? Thank a trans woman the next time you relax with a hot stone massage!
A tiny town of 50 in Wyoming has a trans woman postmistress. I was thrilled to get postcard stamps from her, and I’m not sure if she knew why.

I know five trans social workers, two trans nurses, three trans doctors, five trans professors, one trans firefighter, a whole mess of trans writers, three trans folk who run successful nonprofits, and more than a dozen who mentor young people. Many people I’ve met volunteer a good portion of their time, contribute to their communities, and have befriended their neighbors. We are geeky, serious, shy, brazen, endearing, hardworking, curious, affectionate, love animals and movies and pets and long walks on the beach—sometimes.

We are ordinary, except for this radical thing we had to go and do to get where we are today. And for some of us, even that thing feels pretty average. We identify in all kinds of ways around our gender, and often we don’t feel like talking about it. Especially if you come up to me to ask about the dead trans lady on TV last night. For real. Go buy a book by Carter Sickles and then come at me for conversation.

What the Hell Is Wrong with This Country (Part II)

Primary school government classes in the United States explain the ideals of representative government—that our democracy supports the election of (often ordinary) people who then keep access open to their constituents so that the needs in their local districts and states will have a voice in the voting body. Unfortunately, in many districts, this is not really how elections and governing operate anymore. Consider:

From The Campaign Finance Institute

Congressional elections averaged $1.4M for House elections in 2010 and and more than $1.5M in 2012. Senate races averaged nearly $9M in 2010 and more than $10.3M in 2012. The total cost for all congressional races for the 2014 midterm elections is estimated to run $3.5B. That’s billion. These extreme costs narrow the possibilities of who can run for seats, limiting elections to well networked or party-sponsored individuals, the independently wealthy, or people running on a cause that garners a lot of grassroots support. (See Table at the right.)
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United has put a lot more money from organizations and corporations into elections, even local-level campaigns. Between 527 groups, PACs and SuperPACs, even small congressional districts see a lot of monetary input, often from groups outside of the state or district in contest. If candidate fundraising doesn’t come from kissing babies and shaking constituents’ hands anymore, then…
Issues taken up by office holders may reflect the priorities of big donors and organizations rather than the general public. At the least there is evidence that so much corporate money spent in SuperPACs has been used to wage negative campaigns against the presumed opponent (SuperPACs are not allowed to raise money for a particular candidate). Thus candidates now must raise money to get their messages out and to defend against the negative campaigns from 527s and SuperPACs (hence the rapid rise in average campaign costs).

If we’re getting a narrow band of very privileged people running for the highest offices in the land who often owe their victories to organizations rather than (or solely due to) through their own campaign managers, we may be looking at the new territory of governing wherein those same funders to 527 groups and SuperPACs look to craft template legislation that can be taken up at the state or congressional level. Take, for example, ALEC—The American Legislative Exchange Council, begun by one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation. Americans don’t argue about reproductive rights, voting rights, or gun control in a vacuum; these become national problem spaces because of how ALEC has pushed their agenda in a systematic way.

Major corporate funders to ALEC

Looking at voting rights, for example, we saw after the 2010 midterm elections a push in 37 states, comprising more than 60 bills to restrict voters’ rights in some way, often using the rhetoric of fraud, and often involving an attempt to require photo identification to get to the voting booth. Other bills took away voting rights forever after a felony conviction (such rights are usually restored after release and/or a probationary period), or mandated that voters without a photo ID only be able to cast provisional ballots that may never be counted in an election. Still more voting right bills tried to chip away at or deter people from the convenience of using the “Motor Voter” law that lets individuals register to vote at their local DMV.

Progressives decried these laws in some of the debates as working to minimize the more Democratic Party-aligned voters, who are often poorer, or who may have trouble getting a valid photo ID. One Pennsylvania woman was granted an exception to vote even though she was old enough that she’d never been given a birth certificate, but only a flurry of media attention got the state to grant her that exception. But while we paid attention to Ms. Applewhite’s plight, Kansas passed some of the most restrictive requirements in the nation, decrying that officials needed to safeguard the process against undocumented people voting illegally, despite scant evidence it had ever happened in their state.

Turns out, nearly all of the bills came from a “model” voter ID bill proposed by ALEC in 2009. Think it’s a coincidence that so many of the most recent laws to suppress abortion rights are about implanting [sic] unnecessary requirements on abortion-providing facilities and personnel? It’s another ALEC project. Do bills that have been proposed across the country designed to send public education funding to private and religious schools sound similar? They should. They are based on another ALEC model bill.

In other words, much of the debate around funding and appropriations, as well as hot-button social issues and the supreme act of democracy are now being prioritized by ALEC. This turns government away from using national needs, trends, or global diplomacy for its legislative agenda. While other countries have found ways to offer health insurance for all of their citizens and residents, we are still arguing it’s an impossibility without descending into socialism. While other countries come up with innovative solutions to pay for education for its next generation of workers and thinkers, we debate whether we need public education at all. Pulling back from the government’s commitments to the general public in the guise that it has grown “too big,” has created large pockets of inequality and unrest, and loads of fear. So it is in that context that I argue that the entire idea of “Stand Your Ground” is suspect.

More on that in the next post.

What the Hell Is Wrong with This Country (Part 1)

It’s been a month of terrible news and political developments, not the least of which were the SCOTUS decision to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the passage of extreme abortion restrictions in Texas, and the awful acquittals of George Zimmerman in Florida (who pursued a Black teenager and shot him, killing him) and Ezekiel Gilbert in Texas (who shot and killed a sex worker after she refused to have sex with him). All of this comes on the heels of the Steubenville trial, in which members of an Ohio football team gang-raped a young woman at a party and were convicted as juveniles, meaning they’ll be free after only a few years of light detention. It comes after three years of struggle against conservative forces pushing back gains made by workers unions in the Midwest, after a series of voting restriction laws in more than 20 states, and after a half-dozen high-profile mass shootings around the country—including one that targeted 6-year-olds—that have garnered no new restrictions on gun ownership or registration. To say that America is reeling on its collective heels is something of an understatement.

If we only pay attention to major media outlets, the narrative tells us that there is a huge polarization in the United States today, with warring factions at the extremes waging their battles through reductive and incendiary rhetoric about dead babies, massive government databases, corrupt politicians, gluttonous oligarchs, lazy poor people, insane terrorists, and tone-deaf state employees. It’s almost as if a badly written Hollywood screen play had taken over the nation. In truth, most Americans—according to places like Pew—are centrists, not pushing strenuously one way or the other for a progressive or conservative agenda. But this has occurred at the same time that people aligned with a political party have become more loyal to those parties and their stated values.

Let’s take a step back, and reassess America the Melting Pot. How has a nation of immigrants, one so presumed to be representative of a great diversity of people, values, and opinions, become so dichotomized politically? If that’s what’s actually happened, that is.

Well for one, our political representatives look nothing like a cross-section of the USA:

From Good.com

The narrative about polarization is compelling, it’s filled with drama, and perhaps that’s why it has so stubbornly affixed itself to our consciousness. But it’s also false. It tramples over the actual story of our times—that our long-term indifference to voting has opened a door wide enough for a highway of ideologues to pass through, with a significant number of state and federal political office holders elected who are there only to carry out their principles, not because they have a loving interest in governing. Certainly there are competent and great people in state legislatures and in Congress. And yet there are the retirements that point to ideologic obstinacy as a force of political gridlock. When Barney Frank (D-MA, 4th District) announced his retirement, his statement included:

Our politics has evolved in a way that makes it harder to get anything done at the federal level. I believe that I have been effective as a Member of Congress working inside the process to influence public policy in the ways that I think are important. But I now believe that there is more to be done trying to change things from outside than by working within. I am announcing today my retirement from elected office after 40 years but not my retirement from public policy advocacy and given the nature of our current situation, in some ways I believe I may have more impact speaking, writing and in other ways advocating for the changes that I think are necessary than trying to bring them about inside our constricting political process.

As Mr. Frank and Ms. Snowe point out, actual votes have changed, whether they are for cyclical bills like reauthorizing appropriations, or even simple resolutions that carry no budget component whatsoever. Last summer we were mired in the debt ceiling crisis—entirely manufactured by Congress itself because the Senators refused to vote to increase the ceiling.

From the LA Times

Once the White House administration changed parties, the debt ceiling votes lost all Republican support. The debt ceiling issues gets the votes from the party in charge, possibly because they’re the ones spearheading the appropriations process. But holding up the country’s credit to the detriment of the general public only hurt our economic recovery, not the least by which our credit rating is downgraded. And if we look at the debt ceiling crisis—and its drunk uncle, sequestration—in greater context, we see something rather more troubling:

It doesn’t matter how broken the system gets because it doesn’t seem to affect voting. 

With voting at record levels for Presidential elections and robust voting for midterm elections, neither party seems to want to move from its stated core values. Even if Newt Gingrich and Marco Rubio were wondering out loud after the 2012 election if the GOP needed to court Hispanic voters better, the House is still putting the stops on the Senate’s version of a comprehensive immigration law. And with 92 percent of Americans saying they’re in favor of background checks on all gun sales, neither political party has made such legislation happen in either chamber, the latest attempt foundering last April. At what point do we question whether “representative” government still exists in the US?

I point out the failure to get any gun control measures passed because it is an extreme example of how the general public’s opinions are currently ignored in lawmaking. But take another hot-button issue: abortion. People who identify as “pro-choice” are at an all-time low of 41 percent, with 45 percent calling themselves “pro-life.” Doesn’t that disprove my hypothesis about representing the public’s wishes? Actually, no. Take a closer look at the opinions in last year’s survey. Only 20 percent of Americans believe abortion should be illegal in all cases. Seventy-seven percent of those “pro-life” folks believe in keeping abortion legal, either in all cases or under some circumstances. But the push against abortion that has occurred in state legislatures across the country are working to make abortion as restricted as possible. Why? If these politicians were working to support actual American beliefs, they would be geared much more around ensuring safe access and to minimize the chances of pregnancy. So there must be another explanation for these events.

Looking at recent legislation around the country on abortion rights, voting rights, collective bargaining, gun rights, and self-defense law, there are a few points of similarity. For one, ALEC—the American Legislative Exchange Council.

More on that in the next post.

Excerpt: Synergy

Here is another excerpt from my novel-in-progress about four gender nonconforming people who try to start an LGBT charter school in DC.

Present Day, Washington, DC

Kalinda fumbles through her still-growing ring of keys, looking for the one that unlocks the personnel file. Final hiring decisions are set for later that day, and Terry had asked her to create summary sheets for the review committee. This has been one of Terry’s “cold” weeks in which he is short with everyone around him. There’s no rhyme or reason to his mood swings, but Kalinda is prescient at seeing them before they hit. She fantasizes about having a signal she can give the rest of the administration so they can brace themselves for a tirade or lecture from him.

Finally, the key slides in past the tumblers in a series of small bounces of metal against metal. Kalinda pulls out two manila folders—one marked MAYBE and one YES. She doesn’t need the NO file anymore, except for posterity and to cover the school’s ass if any of the candidates complain.

Peeking in through her doorway is Terry.

“Ready for this afternoon,” he asks, reading over her shoulder.

“Just about,” she says. She tucks a small handful of red curls behind her ear so she doesn’t have to look through her hair to see him.

“Great, great. Let me know if you need anything.” His head bobs back from the threshold and she hears him trot back down the corridor toward his office. Maybe she should have stuck with her job at the chemical plant in New Jersey. Most of her colleagues were slowly coming around to her transition, but at the time, it felt like an uncomfortable place to work. Too many eyes watching for more changes every day she walked in for work as a chemist. What woman wanted to have 300 men staring at their chest for forty hours a week? The allure of an alternative high school for LGBT kids, on the other hand, run by an intersex man, well that had been hard to turn down. And now here she is, thrilled at the possibilities for her and the students who would very soon be filling the classrooms.

If only Terry weren’t so strange.

Diamond knocks on the door frame and greeted Kalinda.

“Morning Diamond. Everything working out upstairs?”

“Yes, well, mostly. I’m having computer problems.” Diamond makes a sheepish look that Kalinda suspects pops up frequently for him.

“I think we’re all having network issues right now. Laura is working on it.”

“Oh, okay, terrific.” Diamond’s slicked back hair and vintage plaid shirt reminds Kalinda of the one time she’d seen hir perform in DC. Ze notices K’s raised eyebrow.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing, I was just remembering when you did that big routine at the Black Cat—what was it, something about Fleet Week and a huge Navy ship. I bet you could still put on an act, couldn’t you?”

“Girlfriend, those days are over,” says Diamond, waving for emphasis.

“When was your last drag king act, just wondering.”

“1997, December.” Ze pretends he doesn’t feel a pang thinking back to those days.

“Seems like yesterday,” says Kalinda.

“Not to me,” says Diamond, “and I’m glad for that.”

#

Present Day, Washington, DC

Eve looks up when the bell over her shop door tinkles, seeing that it’s Iris. Only Iris doesn’t return her smile.

“Honey, your nails can’t be that bad,” says Eve, looking at Iris’s hands as she crosses the room to Eve.

“My nails are fine. I mean, I could use a manicure. But you, dear, you’ve been less than honest with me.”

Uh-oh.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes you do. You knew that party I was going to was for your parents, and you didn’t say anything to me.”

Eve drops her arms and exhales louder than she means to.

“I didn’t know what to say.” Still no response from Eve, so Iris tries again.

“Did you think I wouldn’t support you?”

“I don’t know. I figured it wasn’t any of your business.” She pushes at a jar of Q-Tips. “How did you find out?”

“They had a wall of photos in a corner of the room, and there were two of you, one from when you were little, and one from after you changed.”

Eve’s eyes widen.

“Really?”

“One of your sisters put it up,” she says, her voice softening. “I think they miss you, honey.”

“Well, they had many years to tell me that,” says Eve. She walks behind her register and fiddles with a green plastic bin holds held paper and pens.

“I talked to your parents about not having you in their lives. I mean, I didn’t tell them I knew where you were.”

“That’s good.”

“Your father told me that he realized one day that Jesus loves all his children, so he should, too.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I think you should contact them.”

“You don’t know my family. You don’t know how they’ve treated me. To them I’m a non-person. I’m less than human to them.”

“I just think regret how they handled your changes.”

“I didn’t change. I just became who I really was. They’re the ones who changed by deciding not to love me anymore.”

“I’m sorry they hurt you so much, Eve.”

“I’m sorry, too. No offense, but could you go now? I’m closing the store.”

Iris takes a moment, considering whether she should argue with Eve or not. Maybe later they can talk about this again.

Iris pulls at her jacket, bowing her head and taking small steps to the front door. She puts one hand on the glass.

“I think you’re very brave,” she says, almost at a whisper.

“I ain’t brave,” says Eve. “I’m just me.”

The door shuts and Eve locks it with all the calm she can muster. And once the bolt clicks into place, she feels the tears come.

#

If the books on the first floor are new releases with crisp, bright covers, the volumes upstairs mark an older epoch in LGBT literature, with the scent of old paper hovering over them. Here there are faded books with illustrations from Tom of Finland, calls to action by former leaders of the gay civil rights movement, handmade books that retell children’s fairy tales from a lesbian perspective. Alex marvels at the bygone books, surprised at how much sex they contain, and excited that they are a quarter of the price of anything in the main room.

Under his arm he collects a small stack, holding on to the shaking railing with his other hand as he makes his way back to the checkout counter. The white-haired clerk grins at the number of purchases Alex deposits between them.

“Excellent choices,” he says, punching numbers into the register.

“Oh, could I get a rainbow sticker, too,” asks Alex, plucking one off of a short pile and putting it on his stack. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a teenager in a dirty windbreaker watching him. The kid is overly nervous, or twitchy, maybe a meth head, not so popular in these parts. He turns to face her full on.

“How’s it going,” he asks.

The teen stares back at him blankly.

“I only ask because—”

“Nobody wants to talk to you, creep,” says the kid, dropping the porn magazine she’s holding and marching out the door.

“Wait, no!” Alex stands with one foot on the sidewalk, a good four inches lower than the floor inside. “I’m not a creep!” The teen is halfway to Delancey Park, so Alex sighs and heads back to the counter.

“I’m not a creep,” he declares again.

“Too bad,” says the cashier.

“Aren’t you hilarious? Look, you know about the new queer high school? I work there.”

“Oh, that’s a great project. I really hope you guys get it off the ground.”

“What do you mean?” Alex hasn’t heard any gossip—not that he’s tried.

“Well, renovation projects always cost more than you think they will. And you know, the school board isn’t really into it. Bunch of homophobic bastards, if you ask me. That’ll be $19.53.”

Alex fishes in his wallet and pulls out twenty dollars in small bills.

“Say, does that kid come in a lot?”

“Sure, what else does she have to do? I used to chase those kids out of here, but then I figured they get into less trouble if they’re here than at that flop house.”

“What flop house?”

“There’s an abandoned building over on uh, Forest Place. Little street, one block long.” He gives Alex a long look as if he’s seeing him for the first time. “You shouldn’t go over there, you know.”

“Well, maybe we can do a bit better for her than letting her read On Our Backs every afternoon.”

“What am I, a social worker? Get out of here with your righteous ass.”

Alex waves to the old man and smiles, because he’s nailed it, after all.

And then he wonders what he’ll be walking into.

#

Nebraska, 1989

Terry turned onto the rutted dirt road that served as the farm’s driveway, and tired clouds of tan dust exploded before falling back to the ground, coating the strip of yellow-green grass that ran down the middle of the path. He popped open an orange pill bottle and tipped it toward his lips, catching one tablet and swallowing it without water. The doctors all agreed that he’d turned a corner and just needed to finish his course of medication. Great. That didn’t mean they’d cleared him to leave, but Terry insisted on signing the discharge papers. Spending four years on a hospital ward had learned him a few lessons on his patient rights.

He looked for Mary’s car but the space was empty. He had to hang onto the car door for a second until he felt steady enough to walk. Terry’s frame had shed 20 pounds since his check-in two weeks earlier. He kicked off the clods of dirt from his boots as he had all those years before moving to the big city. Familiarity didn’t spark a smile, however, and he walked through the front door without announcing himself.

Harold now had a monitor hooked up next to his bed, with blood pressure, oxygenation, and other vital signs in bold numbers and graphs blaring from the screen.

“Well, look who’s back,” said Terry’s father.

“I’m feeling better, thanks for asking.” Terry pulled a wooden chair—one from the dining room set—up to the bed. “Where’s Mary?”

Harold spit into a tissue and then inhaled.

“She went into town to get some lunch. I think she’s sick of canned tomato soup.”

How insightful of him to consider someone else’s needs, thought Terry.

“Where’s Joseph?”

“We had a fight,” said Terry, gazing at the monitor.

“It’s just as well. You should grow up and find a good woman.”

“Don’t start.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up, I know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen first hand that those homosexuals are a den of sin and sickness.”

Terry stood up. “You’re just a bigot.”

He slammed the door behind him to muffle his father’s hoarse shouts.

Back in the library, his fists clenched, he looked for where he’d left off in going through his father’s titles. Several stacks were not where Terry and Joseph had left them, so he went in search of the pile of nineteenth century first editions. So many books filled the room, maybe he was just looking too quickly to notice the dull blue and gray hardbacks. After fifteen minutes he decided they weren’t in the room, period.

“Father,” he said, walking back into Harold’s room, “where is the Tom Sawyer?”

Harold pushed himself into a sitting position in his bed, still groggy from what had been a nap.

“I knew it—the books are all you care about, not me.” His skin was dry, as dusty-looking as the driveway.

“Of course I care about you. You’re the one who asked me to go through your library.”

“That was before you abandoned me.”

“I was in the hospital, Dad. I didn’t abandon you. Who told you that?”

Harold blinked.

“What where you in the hospital for?”

“For TB.”

“That’s not what Mary said.”

Terry wiped the look of shock off of his face.

“Mary? What does Mary have to do with anything? What did she say?”

“She uh…she said you’d stormed off.”

A horrible idea clicked in Terry’s head. He sat on the side of the bed and leaned in toward his father.

“Dad, where are those books?”

“I don’t know, wherever you and Joseph left them.” To emphasize his point he waved his arms toward the general direction of the library.

“She didn’t tell you I was sick?”

“No. No, Terry. I’d tell you if she had.”

“She’s the one who tested me for tuberculosis and made the referral for me to go to the doctor in Lincoln.”

“Well, shit.”

“When did she leave for town?”

Harold sighed again, the remnants of color he’d had leaving his face.

“I guess about two hours ago. You think she made off with those books?”

“Yeah Dad, I do.”

Harold looked out the window, flanked by green curtains, and Terry stared at the monitor, neither of them finding any words for each other.

Unexpected Fitness

It’s time for a little come to Xena—I’m going back to the gym. I’m not suddenly becoming my own health troll, or giving up my individual-sized mantle against fat phobia, far from it. I don’t have a weight goal in mind or a plan to count calories, or a tape measure to chart how big I can make my biceps. And I still think that the plethora of posts I see on my Facebook and Twitter feeds about how many miles someone ran, and how shitty the weather was when they did it, and how long it took them are, in aggregate, kind of annoying. (But I’m proud of you, too, for being so uh, disciplined or something. Really. Mostly.)

Five years almost to the day when I blew out my left ACL and meniscus, and 4.5 years since I crunched something in my right knee while I waited for surgery to fix the first joint problem, I am still not one hundred percent. My child now weighs 30 pounds, a good 50th percentile status for his age—go little boy!—so holding him in the crook of my arm and climbing one, two flights of stairs is something more of a challenge for me. I’m sick of it. But the list of what I’m sick of when it comes to my body is alarmingly long:

I’m sick of people gently suggesting I think about stomach surgery (and hello, the data just aren’t there to show it’s a good idea for most people who option it)
I’m sick of sweating while walking quickly or up a hill
I’m sick of feeling my knees crunch
I’m sick of swollen ankles at the end of the day
I’m sick of wearing 3XL and looking like a stupid version of James Gandolfini
I’m sick of feeling sluggish and easily tired
I’m sick of my blood pressure medicine

I also have to say, for once in a public space—or more accurately, outside of my own head—that unlike the progress I’ve made in many other areas of my life, like identifying and communicating about my feelings, getting a handle on my finances, doing the whole gender transition thing, finding my confidence as a writer, my ballooning weight has not budged one bit. And since I’m being honest, I think a big part of it has to do with a trauma history in which I learned to cope with stress from an assault with food, and then serendipitously figured out that more weight might make me less of a target (big lesson: it didn’t). It’s also been a counter-intuitive suit of armor around body dysphoria issues, because I have pretty wide hips, so a cushiony stomach and generous glutinous [sic] maximus help me feel like my pelvis is somehow masked. But living in this body this long, some things like those fragile lower joints, are starting to break down. Claiming to be pro-fat at 43 just comes with some new territory that the 27-year-old me didn’t have to face.

So, I am venturing back to the gym for walks on the treadmill and bouts with weights. I also plan to flop about with some slow laps in the pool. I recognize that these activities are undertaken by fat people all of the time, myself included. But I need to eke out some kind of progression toward better health for the sake of myself and my oh so sweet family. I’ll still laugh when people use my nickname of “Everest” instead of my actual name, but maybe it’ll come with a tablespoon less sadness on my part because I’ll be trying to look at my future without an indefinite sense of hopelessness about my fitness level. I’m certainly not telling anybody to go on a diet or start working out, and I’ll cheer on my friends who have already taken up some kind of physical regimen, but mostly this is just where I’m at right now.

The first person to tell me I’m throwing fat people under the bus. . . well, just don’t do that, okay?

Five Other Legal Things SCOTUS Should Strike Down

Last week the Supreme Court of the United States voided Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, saying that the law no longer applied to the current state of election laws in the country. This suggested that there was some kind of divorce between the mandate of the law—that problematic voting districts with a history of racist vote engineering should be subject any changes in their election law to the Department of Justice for approval—and the “current conditions” in those (and all) voting districts. Apparently it’s not that the presence of Section 4 of VRA stymied racist vote filtering or disenfranchisement, it’s that the country has moved on from its racist past. So if that’s the case, I (tongue in cheek, of course) hereby propose other laws that SCOTUS should feel free to void or strike down because we just don’t need them anymore:

1. The Fair Labor Standards Act—Passed in 1938, this law prohibited child labor and gasp! established a minimum wage as well as hours limits on work. We employ so few children in the United States anymore, it clearly isn’t a problem and SCOTUS should just strike down all of the child labor-related statues.

2. The Clean Air Act—This was such an overblown problem in the US, come on. So we had a few coal plants here and there and no filters on our cars to contain whatever waste they emitted in to the atmosphere. Regulations on air pollution might have been a slight, very not bad problem in 1973 but like, they’re almost nonexistent now. So let’s get rid of this capitalist albatross, SCOTUS. Title 1? Vamos.

3. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972—More touchy feely 1970s nonsense! Look at all of the women’s sports teams thriving now, with major leagues in soccer and basketball. Women don’t need these cumbersome Title IX requirements anymore (even if they extend well beyond sports for women). Colleges and universities would totally keep up with women’s sports even without Title IX’s existence. It just plain isn’t necessary in these current conditions. Let’s strike this one, too. We’re post-feminist these days. Just like we’re post-racist.

4. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—Just because banks closed up in the Great Depression along with everybody’s savings, with no promise that they would ever see their money again doesn’t mean we need to worry anymore! We all got through that 2008 global crash just fine. The government shouldn’t be running corporations, anyway. We should trust our banks. Life is full of risk, right?

5. The Second Amendment—Is it just me, or does anyone else notice that we don’t have militias anymore? Also, we have more guns than any other country on the planet. We don’t really need this protection around guns anymore, right? For certainly, if Chief Justice Roberts is going to claim that “current conditions” are different than they were only 50 years ago, can he claim that nothing has significantly changed in the world of guns or our need for guns since 1789? Or maybe we should  just not pay attention to that little gap in Roberts’s logic.