More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We all experience gender joyfully and oppressively in different ways.
queerness is intrinsically nonlinear,
Lebanese!
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,”
Why do we lose that ability? To create a whole world? A bunk bed was a kingdom, I was a boy.
A new feeling, a flutter in my lower back, how did a little piece of paper with a few sentences alter me this way?
The blast was so extreme it was studied during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb, a fact kept secret for decades.
Something clicked, and we started to run. This wasn’t going to be just words.
imagine the carnage, the snow bloodred, an apocalyptic slaughter. Where did all that trauma go?
The perfect heroine’s journey preemptively and unknowingly written for me.
If I had to conform, why shouldn’t you have to?
Outraged because I had the audacity to communicate with an older man on the internet when I was a minor. If I didn’t deserve care in that moment, if I didn’t deserve safety and love, when would I ever?
puberty transmuted me into a character I had no interest in playing,
Turning eighteen further frayed my boundaries, an unspoken permission slip I didn’t consent to.
threatening but casual. Flaunting his power.
It’s as if there is a need to trivialize such endeavors, unwilling to acknowledge experiences that are not their own, unwilling to listen. Throwing around power but refusing to admit they have any.
can be the hardest thing, because loving other people starts with loving ourselves and accepting ourselves.
How deeply freeing to have someone love fucking my dick and my pussy and permitting myself to enjoy it.
I think about that moment a lot—the anger that man felt entitled to display and my response to it. In our society anger and masculinity are so intertwined—I hope to redefine that in my own life.
“The public health authorities never mention the main reason
many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”
Loneliness had always been a staple for me, an inherent disconnect from my surroundings, a foundational dissociation. Lured away from my existence, I thought those around me wanted me to disappear—that I was preferred as an illusion.
Juno was emblematic of what could be possible, a space beyond the binary.
“What’s the hardest part of Rollerblading?” “Telling your parents you are gay.”
Traveling extensively for short visits only ever seemed to increase my loneliness, stress, and sadness.
Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back. Hollywood doesn’t lead the way, it responds, it follows, slowly and far behind. The depth of that closet, the trove of secrets buried, indifferent to the consequences.
“The system is twisted so that the cruelty looks normative and regular and the desire to address and overturn it looks strange,”
“My keys are always in my pocket, that is what I tell myself,” explained Drew. “If I’m not sure, if I’m hesitant and scared, I simply remind myself that I have my keys in my pocket and I can leave at any point. You can just leave.”
It was a moment to breathe, to connect and ground, to remind ourselves.
The opulence urged entitlement, and the entitlement required ignorance.
But my self-righteousness and judgment were means to alleviate my own guilt, my own life of unnecessary consumption in Los Angeles.
I wanted my ignorance to be revealed, for new perspectives to take the place of the dominant narratives I’d grown up with, rooted in bigotry and white supremacy.
The freaks, the artists … let’s be real, the queers.
I was not and had never been a part of a queer community, how to access such a thing was not just a mystery but an impossibility.
“How can I possibly feel this way?” I bawled to my therapist. Again. “Why won’t this emptiness ever go away?”
We do not realize the extent of the energy we are losing until we find where it is seeping from. Invisible until it is not. A thought just out of reach.
This has grown quieter, softer, with at least self-reflection, a readjustment, a knowing that she is worth it. As the old constructs continue to crumble, it lets my mother build something new, too. Perhaps her unconditional love for me has begun to extend to herself.
I felt the quiet pain that comes with being in love, the risk of it all.
I didn’t transform into me—the me I knew I was—like the other boys did.
You blur the boundaries enough, you get lost in between.
I suppose my aversion to “coolness” and “popularity” related to the degree to which I was already masking myself, fully aware of it or not, and popularity is the ultimate mask.
Our relationship has been about helping each other find the truth, to push through our fears, our egos, and meaningless expectations.
Her enthusiasm spread like bong smoke getting you secondhand high.
Ugh, I was too hyper. She probably thinks I’m annoying. Be more chill next time. Be. More. Chill.
I try to rid myself of my “queer walk,” the way my arms dangle and bend, how my hands move, that way I sit, “not ladylike,” as my father used to say.
How does it hurt anyone else? What about my peace demands vitriol, violence, protections?
I often wonder if I have actually experienced deep love. I feel as though I have, but is it real if you were never there? When you have numbed yourself to the truth?
I can hold that and also understand just how good I have it, and knowing just how good should only enlighten the need for action, for care, to make the right choices, the uncomfortable choices.
But a genuine connection, like the one we had, is rare and difficult to walk away from.
Alone you thrive, secret and safe, but separate you feel invisible. It’s there and then it is gone, not even a second thought, but an afterthought.
