Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

I was fifteen, I remember watching Dan Savage and Terry Miller on the internet telling me that it gets better. They told me that they knew what I was going through, that they knew me. How so, I thought? You don’t know me. You know lattes and condominiums—you don’t know what it’s like being a brown gay boy on the rez.

All their profiles said “looking to chat” and “please be respectable” and I wondered, what does respect have to do with hooking up?

We are both two queer bodies moving around in spaces that look less like a home and more like desperate lodgings; both trying to make our beds with other people’s garbage. Maybe we are both dreaming of utopia, thinking that these places once used to house celebrities and other important people, and that it will imbue us with a similar vivacity?

I never had to tell him, that was how I knew I loved him—I never had to tell him.

Before I knew it my ponytail was on the floor, sad and static as a dragonfly whose wings had been plucked off.

I never actually told them I was Native because I didn’t want to have to out myself once again. If I did, they’d have started up a round of invasive questions, like a game of Guess Who, and I would sit there, never having been more violated than being the prize during a round of I Spy. You have to perform in any situation, so you may as well pick your battles. Hell, I played straight on the rez in order to be NDN and here I played white in order to be queer.

I wondered if we were like that, two mutant boys shielding one another from all the things that wanted to martyr us—how long could we hold out? Of

every time I knead bannock, I’m reminded of how strong the women in my family are.

But water was always a shameful thing for me: to piss, to sweat, to spit, to ejaculate, to bleed, to cry. How in the hell do we humble ourselves to water when we’re so damn humiliated by it?

It turns out that tradition is an NDN’s saving grace, but it’s a medicine reserved only for certain members of the reservation, and not for self-ordained Injun glitter princesses like me.

There are times when you have to scare yourself to find yourself.

He wasn’t wearing deodorant, but I kind of liked his stink, it was one of his sexiest attributes. I

“To love me, Momma, Kokum had to love you, too,”

It was then I decided that love sounded more like a full stop than a semi-colon, and I moved too much like water.

It felt like such a foreign language to call her anything but Kokum.