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“Keep your personal life private, that is what I tell all my clients,” my manager would instruct me, while the same clients walked the red carpet with a spouse or came out as heterosexual in an interview.
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. I was punished for being queer while I watched others be protected and celebrated, who gleefully abused people in the wide open. “The system is twisted so that the cruelty looks normative and regular and the desire to address and overturn it looks strange,” Sarah Schulman writes in her
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Not just mismatched physically, but also energetically. Despite always being invited in, I buzzed around the fringes, unable to wholly connect.
“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.”
I love synchronicity, regardless of what it means, I notice it and roll with it.
I wished so badly to be Elliott when I was a little boy. For my first Halloween after I came out as trans, I donned a red hoodie and by chance already had sneakers that looked just like his in the film. I dressed up as Elliott, hit the streets of Manhattan with some pals, and had the best Halloween ever. Wishes can come true.
Taking a moment, we joined as a group to express our gratitude, our appreciation for one another, for the earth, for how lucky we were to sit down and consume life-giving plants and grains and water. It was a moment to breathe, to connect and ground, to remind ourselves. An easy thing to roll your eyes at, but I really liked it. A similar but different way to say grace. I told myself I would keep up the ritual, but it’s unfortunate how easily these types of epiphanies slip away when we are thrust back into society.
I’d get frustrated, feeling disregarded and dispirited by the lack of concern and empathy. The opulence urged entitlement, and the entitlement required ignorance.
No scarcity complex or illusion of constant linear growth. A true way of observing, of caring and relating to the world. Here was a space with dreams beyond self and ideals that truthfully felt no different from what we’d learned in primary school—be kind, collaborate, take care of the Earth, share—concepts that don’t jibe well with our capitalist system, the ones they push us to forget.
We were both in a space of needing not only a respite but also new ways to see things. Seeking comfort, yet leaning into our discomfort as well. A risk-taking through wanting rest and a desire for community that was connected to our queerness, digging through the layers to find it. We craved a paradigm shift from other worlds, and required other eyes that didn’t hold us down to old narratives.
For lack of a better word, it felt spiritual, the music held me while I pranced freely.
What a sublime way to spend time with people. Purposeful and nourishing.
There was video of it at some point, but we have never been able to recover it. How much better, though, it lives in our shared memories, those moments that started it all.
As I aged, it became clearer that I wasn’t going to be a pretty straight girl.
Agony in isolation, the shame and pain that I thought was mine alone. My heart aches for my younger self. A tiny bug running to the rim of an upside-down juice glass. What a difference it would have been to sit with queer and trans pals and have them say, I feel that way, too. I felt that way, too. We don’t have to feel that way. You don’t have to feel that way. Not a magic eraser of shame, but it would have undoubtedly quickened things up.
Perhaps her unconditional love for me has begun to extend to herself.
An unconscious yearning to be caught, to have no choice. Forced through the door.
I should not have to perform, I did not have to make things okay for Linda and for my dad.
The mirror, my face, the tight clothes, I did want to die, but I wasn’t going to do it, not consciously at least.
Jack was just a kid, isolated in grief, with no place to put it.
I had value now. I needed to pull up my bootstraps, grow up, stop being difficult and selfish. Be a young lady, and make my mom proud.
The layers were lighter but the discomfort heavier.
I could win at this game.
I’d throw away myself, but not my songs.
What about my peace demands vitriol, violence, protections?
Love was unwittingly an emotional disguise, and my relationship to it is another muscle to be transformed. I don’t want to disappear. I want to exist in my body, with these new possibilities. Possibilities. Perhaps that is one of the main components of life lost to lack of representation. Options erased from the imagination. Narratives indoctrinated that we spend an eternity attempting to break. The unraveling is painful, but it leads you to you.
Why when hurting do we want to perpetuate the pain? Self-punishment?
Reminders and lessons emerge from our most painful moments, ones I’m sure I will forget and have to remember again. But I would rather remember, I’d rather the hurt than not—at least I got to love you, at least I felt your love for me. Maggie Nelson: That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.
I would throw the feelings aside, worried I’d get in trouble for having them, remaining in situations a lot longer than I should have, hide my truth. Inevitably, this would always lead to more damage and more harm. Like the many ways in which I have been difficult for people—my abrupt shifts, shutting down mixed with the instinct to run, being dishonest because I felt so irrationally frightened.
He didn’t seem capable of taking responsibility for anything I shared.
Regardless of everything before, it’s painful to think that someone who parented you could support those who deny your very existence.
Without words he helped me, I began to offer some of that care for myself and to make the commitment to accept it.
How do people do it? How do they shut off the noise? And I don’t mean “happy,” they may not be happy, but they seem to be able to exist at least.
It is painful the unraveling, but it leads you to you.
He knew it wasn’t me then. Now, he knew it was.
I am patient, we all are endlessly learning and I’ve made the same mistakes, but sometimes patience wears thin. I know these instances and remarks may seem tiny, but when your existence is constantly debated and denied, it sucks you dry. Sprawled out, bare, I crave gentleness.
Let me just exist with you, happier than ever.
Marching home with Mark in the cold I felt the soles of my feet pressing the ground, one foot then the other. I sensed I was heading in the right direction.
