Stray City Quotes

“The name they gave you belongs to someone else, their invention of you; if you turn out not to be that person, you have to name yourself.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“It's the gays who say, We are everywhere, but straightness really was everywhere. The world was sodden with it. Versions of the relationship I was now in played out in everything ever written, acted, sung, sold, declared. The abundance of representation dizzied me. There was so much written and sold about the love and trouble between men and women that if you lined it all up end to end the whole world would be wrapped as thickly and totally as a rubberband ball.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“I seldom even thought of myself as woman or girl, just person. Just human. I only became girl or woman when men walked into the room or I walked into theirs, when that gaze hit me like a hot breath. As a woman you walked in and we're assessed, ignored, or both.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“All I knew that for all our art, for all our writing, for all our self-defense workshops, for all our banding together in our cities and oases, queer survival was still not guaranteed.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“We all have our coming-out story, or why-we-haven't-come-out story. More precisely, we have two. There's the official version, paragraph-sized for conversation, for when it comes, usually on level-two get-to-know-you with friends and dates and curious coworkers. That one covers the basics; when, where, how, the end. You will tell it again and again over the course of your life, polishing it to a fine sheen, until it's as close to frictionless as you can get it. Then there's the real story, the full version, which you tell only a handful of people ever - even if you're one of the lucky ones with a good family, with loving parents who eventually accept you. Because, as Lawrence once said, when the only time you've seen your dad cry is at a funeral, what does that mean about you?”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“For the first time I understood why queer people changed their names. It was about more than trying to be different or weird, though maybe it was a little bit that, to go by Tiger or Ace or Ponyboy or Dirtbag or whatever, my
future girlfriend Flynn adding the F to her name. The name they gave you belongs
to someone else, their invention of you; if you turn out not to be that person, you have to name yourself.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“I could have told her then, as we walked down Northwest Fifth toward the car. Or on the ride home. But what was the point? There were things even your closest friends didn't need or want to know.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Still, when I went back home I searched my father's face for what I thought was Mexican-ness, something still visible in him but diluted in me. I had his mouth, his brown eyes, but my skin was lighter. My hair was fine and dark brown, while his was thick and silvering at the temples. What was I looking for, though? Who knew how much of his ancestry, and thus mine, was indigenous and how much European? I realized I was seeking a trace of purity, as if such a thing existed - as if one's roots could be a single clean bright plunge like a carrot, instead of the complicated dirty tangle that most of us actually had. Essentialist was an accusation my friends and classmates had flung around liberally in arguments, yet secretly maybe we all wanted it for ourselves in some way or another - to have an essence. To be an identity.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Why should citizenship depend on one exclusive form of a relationship? What about love between friends, community, love of work?”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“But then there was school and work and the doctor and the dentist and the Internet. There she was not a parent but a mom, a species held in somber, near-spirtual regard while for all practical purposes steadily crushed by the forces of public policy, like the American bison.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Of course I'll be fine. I am fine.' Fine was the loneliest place a person could be.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Strange to know a face so closely, so intimately, and how that live, indelible thing could degrade into a fragment of a glance.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Back to all the same people, the same four bars, the same scene, the same weather, the same mediocre burritos, the same local politics and liberals fighting each other on shit they all agree on - nothing ever changes here. Fuck, doesn't the monotony kill you?”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“All these little signifiers seemed to mean so much at the time, when I was twenty-four and everything meant everything. Any space I entered, I looked for people I could feel safe with.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Pink and white cherry blossoms soft as kitten ears carpeted the gutters, smelling like fleshy candy, sweet decay.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“But how could I ever un-know it? You can burn the book, but not the story.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“I seldom even thought of myself as woman or girl, just person. Just human. I only became girl or woman when men walked into the room or I walked into theirs.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Oh, to wake up with a person you like and have coffee, still pajamaed, in your own kitchen. It was a luxury you could not buy.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Always. The extravagance of that word! I sank into it. Always, always, always. And though it later turned false, for the first time I thought I could be okay, and that was enough.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“How disconcerting to see a kind face grow cold.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“I wanted to take the queer subject out of the urban environment, where we always suppose they are. I wanted to represent queer as part of nature, as natural.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“All of us were refugees of the nuclear family and its fallout, and some, like me, still embedded secret agents in our home of origin but full citizens here.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“The town matched something in me, the way a certain kind of guitar dissonance could strike an internal tuning fork that made my bones hum.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Ryan offered me a seat on the nubby sofa, a slim, lightly scratched-up Danish modern with great bones. He’d traded it with a friend for a television.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“The last thing I could afford right now was another mouth to feed. I rubbed the cat's downy cheeks and she rammed her head into my hand with pleasure. She gave my palm a delicate, rough lick. Her mouth was, I reasoned, a small one.

I would just feed her until I could find her a home. Maybe this good deed would make up for my bad behavior. Hail, cat, full of grace, please accept this can of by-products, blessed is your ignorance, forgive us humans for the things you do not know we have done.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“The beauty of a new affair, I thought, is the illusion it affords you that everything you do is great. You each get to invent the other as the person you most want them to be, and yourself as the person they most want.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Portland in the nineties was a lot like me: broke, struggling with employment, mostly white, mostly hopeful even though there was no real change in sight. For all the drive-through espresso stands and downtown restoration, the new paint on aged bungalows and vintage glasses on young women, it was still an old industrial river town in a remote corner of the country. Hard to get to. Hard to leave.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“Maybe Flynn at thirty was still becoming, I realized. Maybe the Flynn I loved was on the way out. Or maybe the Flynn. I loved hadn't been around for some time now. It was easy to mistake proximity for closeness.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“I was used to her type: they tried appealing to me woman to woman, but when I said it wasn't my call and they'd have to talk to the owner, I became just another female obstacle between them and a man who could do something.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City

“The world of shoulders is one I know well. But now I could see clearly, my head level with all the others, an unobstructed view. Behind me the regular-sized girls were patiently, miserably tiptoeing and peering through the gaps between necks and shoulders. This is what it's like to be tall? I had said in wonder and indignation and envy. They just walk around, able to see everything. And they take it for granted.”
― Chelsey Johnson, Stray City