April 2013 “Youth”

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
We’re now accepting submissions for our July issue.
THE THEME IS SECRETS.
Summer love? Middle school crushes? Accidentally coming
out to your grandmother? We want to hear about it.
DEADLINE: MAY 1ST
See www.tourliterarymagazine.com for details
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EDITOR’S NOTE
Welcome to another issue of T(OUR)! We’re celebrating the spring,
the third issue of this publication, and YOU. As many of you know, this
issue was only made possible because of an incredibly energetic and
successful fundraising campaign earlier this year. Because of YOUR
generosity, we were able to print, distribute, and celebrate the April 2013
issue of T(OUR).
So thank you for your support. Thank you for your kind words.
Thank you for being a part of this LGBTQ publication. We’re all about
community here, about working together and sharing resources and
ideas. And this time? We’re all about YOU. So thanks from all of us
here at T(OUR). Enjoy!
Catherine Smyka
Editor in Chief
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!"#$%&'(&
EMILY TIMBOL
JEFF WALT
8 Excerpt from Leaving
the Religious Lifestyle
18 In the Bathroom Mirror
This Morning
GWENN SEEMEL
PAIGE COHEN
11 Choice
Polly Want A Polly
20 Blue
54 The Kiss
Lady Like Behavior
60 Ram Tough
Happily Ever After
HOLLY ST. JEAN
22 My Father Grew Roses
BRIAN BRITIGAN
MARK RICE
26 Border Crossing
12 The Story of the North
27 Golden
LINDA WILSON
MEL KING
17 Cowboys
28 Scraps
4
&)'*!%*!+
ELI STEFFEN
ROBERTO CARLOS-ORTIZ
31 A Year of Praise
55 I Think, You See
MENG YU
JUSTIN WILSON AND
RUSTY WALTON
33 Mother
35 She Lives
HILARY ZAID
38 Hum
ALICIA BONES
58 Artifact 1
58 Artifact 2
Artifact 3
FABIAN ROMERO AND
NICOLE MASANGKAY
61 Bent Writing Column
42 China
GRAY LYONS
JESSICA LYNCH-JONELY
45 The Worst
64v Sway
Tuck
JESSIE NASH
49 Fifteen
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AWESOME PEOPLE
(A.K.A. SPECIAL THANKS)
Dawn and Joseph
Smyka
Gloria Mayne
Katherine Christian
Devin Moore
Vanessa Peterson
Paige Cohen
Stacy Yamaguchi
Ana Zapata
Voula Margaritis
John van Deinse
Austin Wheat
Teressa Catrambone
Georgina Cohen
Caitlin Kleiboer
Ellen Fitzharris
Kuliakailikea
Vasconcellos
Neva Wilson
Kate Brown
Tyler Wardwell
Leonard Navarro
Lindz Marsh
Carly Koczarski
Lorraine Bardeen
Madeline Stano
Vickie Gukenberger
Sarah Bixler
Catherine Crockett
Andrew Turgeon
Kenna Kettrick
Erin Horvath
Carissa Meier
Peter Kowalski
Melanie Cohen
Jacqueline Schmitt
Nora Taylor
Jessica Lynch-Jonely
Beki Kroll
Mary Collins
Courtney Jones
Ashlie Hauck
Kiley Dancy
Anne Marie Walen
Claire Gonzalez
Harriette Rasmussen
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Julia Nardin
Fiona Nowlin
Bren Ortega-Murphy
Rebecca Spooner
Kelly Lee
Cameron McKnight
Michelle Roman
Laurie Ortega-Murphy
Carmen Parks
Kassy Podvin
Elizabeth Gilletti
Kim Herman
Nana Kori
Carolyn Terranova
Theo Haubner
Aileen McGroddy
Bonnie Rough
Dyan Anunson
Erin Bailey
Brandon Estrella
Nathan Smith
Erin Resso
Mike Force
STAFF LIST
CATHERINE R. SMYKA
Editor in chief
NATHANIA TEN WOLDE
Assistant Staff Photographer
SCOTT HERMAN
Associate Editor, Blogger
STEPHEN ANUNSON
Sponsorship Coordinator
LORAINE KANERVISTO
Chief Copy Editor, Blogger
SADIE ADAMS
Poetry Editor, blogger
HARRIETTE T. RASMUSSEN
Assistant Copy Editor
LAURIE ORTEGA-MURPHY
Editorial Assistant
TIFFANY TA
Publication Designer
ALPHAGRAPHICS
Printer
ERIN MOON
Project Designer
NATHAN SMITH
Merchandise Designer
SCOTT CAPARELLI
Staff Photographer
ANDREW TURGEON
Blogger
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AN EXCERPT FROM LEAVING
THE RELIGIOUS LIFESTYLE
EMILY TIMBOL | JACKSONVILLE, FL
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Photo by Nathania ten Wolde
By the time we set everything up, my heart was pounding and my palms were sweating.
A few people from the planning meetings stopped by the booth to say, “Hi,” and compliment
our set up, which did little to calm my nerves. Soon, festival goers poured in and started
walking around, looking at the booths. The turnout for Pride looked good this year — at least
I assumed it did, since this was my first Pride, ever.
It took about fifteen minutes for someone to cautiously approach us. An attractive,
white, thirty-something man stared up at the cards and looked at us before taking a few steps
forward. His hands were shoved into his pockets and his gaze was planted firmly on the table.
He wore an apprehensive look on his face, perhaps caused by the overtly Christian symbols
we displayed.
“What’s this about?” he asked from a good six feet away.
My parents and boyfriend Ryan looked at me, waiting for my response.
“Well, we’re Christians, uh, straight Christians, who are bothered with the way we
as a group have treated the gay community. So this is our attempt to say sorry and
make amends.”
“Oh.” His brow relaxed and he took a few steps forward. “OK,” he said with a nod and
took his hands out of his pockets. He looked around at the cards for a few moments, politely
declined our offer to make one himself, and left.
I looked over at Mom, “Well that wasn’t so bad, right?”
She grinned, her smile stretching almost to her ears, and gave me that embarrassing
I’m so proud of you look. “This is good, Emily, I’m really glad you’re here.”
Smiling back, I nodded. I was glad to be there, finally doing something about the injustice
all around me. It had taken me far too long to stop just complaining and wishing Christians
would act differently. Wishing doesn’t do anything; action does.
After a few minutes, we noticed most people who approached our booth first passed
by a couple times before coming to talk to us. I underestimated how much damage had
already been done by the people who brandished the same symbols. By hanging postcards
emblazoned with crosses, my intention had been to send a welcome message to everyone.
Instead, the symbol created unease.
The cross: once a tool for capital punishment, meant to strike terror in the hearts of
all who saw it, had at one time been the very symbol of Christ’s love. Now it had clearly
once again become a harbinger of fear. Beware those who brandish the cross — a dark cloud
shadowed the faces of many who passed us by. I didn’t blame them. I blamed myself for
being so naive.
The first person who came right up to our booth without hesitation was a hyperactive
teenage girl, wearing a tank top three sizes too small. Her stomach poked out a bit from
under the bright pink tank. Her pants, covered in zippers and safety pins, made a fashion
statement a decade behind. A thin, meek looking boy wearing all black shadowed her, hiding
behind his long, dark, stringy hair.
“What are all these markers for?” she asked. She bounced a little, her tight brown
curls dancing.
“They’re for anyone who wants to make a card – we’ll bring them back to give the church.
You can say whatever you want.”
“Cool!” She bent down and grabbed a handful of markers. After about ten minutes,
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she handed me two cards, promised that she’d be back later to make some more, then
scampered off. The silent boy with the stringy hair followed.
The first card held a simple drawing, a very good one, of a typical anime style female
superhero. Her giant, marble-shaped eyes stared at me with a coy, girlish expression. The slim,
beautiful character wore tight, miniscule clothing.
In pink marker on the second card the girl had written:
“I went to church until I was 13. When my youth group found out that I was gay, they told
me not to come back. I miss it, but I haven’t been back since.”
With a heart, she signed her name underneath.
The words on the card leapt out at me, grabbed my heart. Pulled me into her world.
My breath caught in my throat, as if someone had doused me with ice water.
This young girl had come up to us without any fear, though she had every right to be
afraid. She opened up to us, to me, people just like those who rejected her. People who told
her not to come back because of something she couldn’t, and shouldn’t change — all because
of who she was.
That moment solidified the reason that I was sitting there, sweating under the Florida
sun. That moment was worth all the angry emails, dirty looks, and tearful nights I’d faced ever
since announcing to the Church my intent to rent a booth at Pride. This young girl, no more
than 16 years old, had endured more rejection, pain, and prejudice than any child should face.
Worse, she received this treatment from the very people who should have loved her the most:
Christians.
No more hurting the youth, I thought. No more standing by while young gay teens are attacked
by people who twist Christ’s words into daggers.
Looking down at the card in my hands, a silent prayer of thanks crossed my lips. A prayer
of thanks for this girl. Her honesty and transparency affected me more than any sermon could.
Change could and would happen.
This moment had given me hope.
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CHOICE
POLLY WANT
A POLLY
GWENN SEEMEL | PORTLAND, OR | DIGITALLY ENHANCED ACRYLIC ON PANEL
These posters combine images, text, and facts about different species whose behaviors do not
fit with traditional notions of gender (several other posters make up a children’s book called
Crimes Against Nature). The punchy little memes are meant to reveal the true diversity of the
natural world while at the same time leading us to wonder why we don’t already know about it.
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THE STORY OF THE NORTH
MARK RICE | SAN FRANCISCO, CA
1.
The best thing to have at a young age in Massachusetts
is an old soul. We are all survivors of the Battle of Bunker Hill,
sloops-of-war, and the devil in Salem peat bog. Curfew
is when the streetlights switch on. Memory
is a nostalgic elegy and a desirable haunting.
Recognition is a wild turkey disappearing
behind each unreasonable gravestone
in the forgotten family cemetery before the reservoir.
He was like one of the mountains, they all seem to say
through the quagmires and marshland. Don’t visit here.
2.
My father moves from house to house
and I follow with boxes
of dark turtle-necks. By flashlight I search
this new place like all the others before
for crawlspaces, barn hideouts. Survey
the rock garden, the glancing dogs.
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Imagine all unaccounted-for spaces
between stairwell and laundry room. Declension
and progress were the dreamed-up echoes
of my young body in those hidden gaps.
3.
For help with the stakes and chicken wire,
call me from the back yard, father,
from the barn’s fallen shadow, from the rock garden.
Mother, I know shortcuts through this old house.
I know potatoes and Narragansetts grow
in the basement’s dirt floor. Hidden chambers and corridors,
a second attic, avenues between un-insulated wall
beams. Structures seemingly disconnected,
the back house, the shed, connect by tunnels of
boobytrapped and collapsing stone.
4.
An overgrown marsh path and military haircut.
Eating acorns out of boredom.
In the forgotten alcoves and bays of the farmhouse,
I had found pieces of it: the land of the Generous Cause, the Gospel Train.
Big Dipper and North Star Trail, Path to Freedom and Drinking Gourd.
Harbor cities like wildflowers along a dirt road. Destroyed
cattails and fiddleheads in the corners of my awful mouth. Leaves of
three, let them be. The land of dockworkers, merchants, ship builders.
The land of red sky at night, quiet observers.
The land of frost heaves and sunken lightning rods.
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Photo by Nathania ten Wolde
5.
The land of silk buttons, impressions as blurs of oreweed
and horsetail. Burdock blooms and knotweed stalks.
The land of sunken spades, collecting nightcrawlers
for a Sunday of fishing after church.
A small red tackle box filled with squashed nickels and pennies
polished by the weight of a train,
worms in a shaken bell jar, liquid fuel, rope
wick. All vessels eventually rupture.
Land of eroding coasts, furbearing mammals. Even fruit
flies guide strangers to our hidden shores.
6.
Imagining disappeared and vacant travelers
Their muffled urgency to move moss-north
this well-wishing meant something to me:
the primal power of moral beauty,
mythic progress, a shared longing to escape
the realization of the inevitable vanishing
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of this world. In the grown-dark corners
where I hid myself, invention
of the everyday disguise seemed a covering
for where I was wrong I knew.
7.
Scraped and painted bark marks pathways through the tilting fields
for the great task of floating waist-deep in the bay
like some golden and symmetrical beast
beside the docks without dinghies. Tiptoe
in low tide for a pillage of sand dollars and empty
crab tops. It is almost impossible to correctly sharpen a razor clam
on the rocks embroidered with barnacles and black mussels.
Graze the long and bitter shell across your neck like you’ve been told
the Indians did. Scuff and scrape and clean yourself
with seashells, scouring rocks, and seal oil.
8.
The morning mist rises off the purple stones in the oak land cove
of the reservoir. I will never be free
of this pining I bury inside myself like bones. We close our eyes
without sleeping, we wash our forearms in ice before a lunch
of eating tomatoes like apples with cukes and mayo, we mow
the sedge meadow, prepare bouquets to sell at the farmer’s market
as if pretending we are not all fallen creatures. In the dream, men
take what they want from me. My open fist. My cling-stone fruit.
My need to insulate away. I operosely wash strings of pearls
off my belly under leaks in the tin roof.
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9.
A box of strawberries, fresh and sweet things to eat
is as close as we can get at a young age to sensual desire.
After a day of labor, his neck bruises like hot fruit
while shaking trees drop bits of shadow
around his face and chest. Dashing horseflies. Pulp
trucks and pink hands wet with salt pork and olive oil.
He pushes dozens of bobbing squash under ice water, finds
the abandoned dried skins of thousands of baby snakes.
The way he towel-dries the back of each thigh.
The way I want to not want that.
10.
Here is your inescapable life spread before you
like a casual pack of migratory birds, the un-dimming fog
around milltown buildings, sweater-weather forecasts
or discordant birdsong from the attic. More like the man in the bus window
counting the unread pages of his book. Imagining something
else was easier: the untrue anachronism of curious adventure,
a system of trades and swaps, selfish clouds using the ocean as a mirror.
I wake to find only a mason jar into which I empty ribbons
of urine. Our bodies are covered with oil. And here,
the organ of desire is the quick of the tongue in the throat.
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COWBOYS
LINDA WILSON | SOUTH BEND, IN | SILVER GELATIN PRINT
Cowboys represent the brave, the adventurous, the chivalrous, and the
courageous; they are the heroes: stoic, true, tough, and idealized. In this
photograph, I am exploring my childhood longing for the life and lifestyle
of a cowboy.
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Photo by Scott Caparelli
IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR
THIS MORNING
JEFF WALT | SAN FRANCISCO, CA
new grey hairs in my beard numerous
as scattered headstones, scrutinize my crows feet—
horrified of the day an orderly will lead me
by a fragile arm down a long, white corridor
in a nursing home called Eden or Camelot or Rainbow House
where even the flies are sick and fall dead
in mid-air and plants, desperate for water, hunch
dry and brittle, attendants forget the red emergency
light at their desk, kick back reading People magazine
as I choke on prunes, frantically
press the call button for help. I know I can’t go back. Of course,
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I’ll never be sixteen again, kissing
Robbie Patterson on his single bed, rubbing his erection
through loose sweats, his mom watching Guiding Light
in the next room. Never again the years
I stayed awake all night, red-eyed, drunk, stoned, or both,
slumped over cold coffee in a ripped diner booth
with a man I’d just met on a dance floor
at Stallions, a sudden love that wouldn’t last a week — years fallen
away easily as my hair that clogs this sink. Right now, I want
boyhood, Robbie again, wherever he is, our stupid plans
for happiness, saving coins to run away — all those years
back, not spider veins crawling up my legs, hairs coarse as fir tree
needles growing from my ears, applying moisturizer
and sunscreen and eye gel on my red, middle-age face,
ready for my slow commute through morning fog and darkness
in a dead man’s used suit, tailored, perfectly fit. DJ on the radio
warns an icy storm to batter the coast: blames global warming;
flips on an old pop song so thrilling I remember Moon Dancing —
a world not doomed. Then how I forgot to fill my tank — not certain
I’ve got enough gas to carry me, to forsake the worried world
and love it, and back into another irresistibly damned dawn.
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BLUE
PAIGE COHEN | NEW YORK
Blue’s my soul-mate. (I love her more than salted butter.) Try giving it up,
she says. Sometimes she gives me ugly looks. We sit in her room, make sounds
with our hands. She tries to hit me.
My job is to move fast.
Last night Mom said
Assuming makes your mind small.
I tilt my head towards the sun. The sky is that flat white.
Mom bought white carpet for the floors:
white carpet rooms are for Shabbat
and landmark birthdays. (Blue says for showing off.)
I’m Maybelle. I’m bored
at school even with marijuana. My grades are oh-kay.
Blue laughs at my overalls. Go get a life. We can’t believe
she’s not a virgin. Our boobs are size B this year.
When Blue laughs she looks good.
Blue holds Dad’s gold watch. She holds Mom’s glass egg.
Things don’t make you safe.
We’re high. I sit on top my hands until they’re white tingly things.
I press them together as hard as I can and love the feeling
(none).
Her neighborhood is ugly but the streets shimmer with yellow dust.
I own an entire world. I made it up inside my head.
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Photo by Scott Caparelli
Spring is green
dirt gets coated
in green fuzz
green moss
at Becker Creek.
Blue can taste
the ocean.
We sit down
in oily puddles
hair sticks
against our throats
as boys bike by
in the smooth-milk-kind-of fog.
In my world laws are extinguished:
we hold our arms
above our heads
because we want them there.
I touch Blue’s spine
It’s not a problem
We are not dreaming anymore.
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MY FATHER
GREW ROSES
HOLLY ST. JEAN | WARREN, MA
Illustration by Mike Force
My father grew roses. Not everyone’s did. I’m certain too that not everyone’s father had
a walk-in closet half the size of the master bedroom, with racks of business suits arranged by
color, opposite a wall of shoes, adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling mirror. And, no other dad I knew
baked “petit fours,” embroidered Japanese tapestries, listened every Sunday to the majesty
of Pavarotti, dabbled in cloisonné jewelry design, or mixed martinis on lazy summer evenings
to share over the backyard fence with the lonesome housewife, whose husband worked late.
My father had a restless spirit, with some sort of void that needed filling. And he
tried to fill it with long hours at work and with hobbies: leather-tooling, pottery, winetasting, photography.
In 1976 it was beekeeping, yielding a thirty jar honey harvest. He proudly labeled each
“William’s Bicentennial Best.” His Apiary Association certificate, which hung in our kitchen,
now rests in a shoe box along with an embroidered work of birds, a leather pocketbook he
made me (emblazoned with butterflies), a sepia photo of the two of us sitting on the craggy
rocks of Maine, and a rose encyclopedia, all on a shelf in my own modest closet.
Although he never stuck with one endeavor long, including his wife and family,
we discovered; his quest for beauty was pure.
One sunny Saturday in July, when I was eleven, Dad said, “Let’s go for a ride, Toots.”
Following the stringent clothing and fingernail inspection, I knew he was really going to let
me ride in the cream colored Jag with the air-conditioning and leather seats. The company
car. A ”perk” he’d explained, whatever that was. Sinking into the plush upholstery was
delicious; nostrils and lungs filling with new car air. Heaven.
Miles of country roads later, we turned into a dirt parking lot. Upshot gravel clinked
within the wheel wells. The sign on the ugly building we faced read Feed and Grain. Dust
clots bloomed about us. Dry silt stretched over the windshield.
Dad winked. “We’ll wash her later.”
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The place smelled funny. A fat, toothless man, whose head resembled a ball jar - round
and flat on top - bellowed from behind the register, “Hey, Billy, yur aphid-eaters are in the
cooler out back!”
“Rightie-Oh, Dick!” Dad let go of my hand. “Stay here, Baby.”
I froze with panic. ‘What was going on?’ I thought. What were aphid-eaters? Where was
out back and why couldn’t I go with him? As I watched Dad prance down a cluttered aisle
in his pressed madras shorts, peach-colored polo shirt, and gladiator sandals, that oh-toofamiliar line - “Stay here, Baby” - reverberated through my brain. I should have been used to
him saying it. He said it every time the two of us were together - without Mom. He seemed to
have a silent trust with the universe and with me. As if he knew that the universe would treat
me kindly in his absence, and that I would not try and run after him, but be brave and wait.
He’d said these words to me in shopping malls, subway stations, street festivals and parks,
when after situating me on a bench, he’d disappear into the crowd and return ten, twenty,
thirty minutes later. Always absent long enough for me to conjure several scenarios of his
demise: freak accident on an escalator, electrocution on the third-rail, being swallowed alive by
a magical Chinese dragon, or being mistaken for a snitch and forced into a windowless van by
mafioso thugs. And, just when I began wondering how I’d get home and what I’d say to Mom,
Dad would appear with a magazine under his arm, or a bag from a speciality store containing
a kitchen doo-hickie, a packet of pipe-tobacco, or a small box of gourmet chocolates. Every
time, he returned and things were fine. I guess he never thought that I might worry for him.
Only, I did.
A door opened and closed somewhere. I turned back toward the counter and stared at
the framed dollar bill and the deer head on the wall behind Dick.
Why, just the summer before, Dad had said “Stay here, Baby” to me on a family vacation
in Ogunquit, Maine. He’d gotten me up before sunrise and hustled me down to the far end
of the beach where a narrow walking path twisted alongside the rocky jetties. We turned off
the path and onto the rocks. It was dark, not night dark, but more of a molasses dark. “A sepiatoned morn,” was what he’d called it. (I knew the term because he had developed some of
his own photos in chemicals that turned them the same shade of beige that surrounded us.)
Seconds later, a crescent sliver of egg-yolk orange appeared on the horizon. We ran toward
it. “Think like a mountain goat, Honey. You can do it,” he’d said, as our sneakers negotiated
the rough and ragged surface of the boulders. The waves thundered against each side of the
narrow corridor we traveled, sending up geysers of spray. That’s when he let go of my hand.
“Stay here, Baby,” he’d said. Then he’d checked the big zoom lens on his Nikon, and bounded
away dead-ahead toward the ocean.
“So, gardening with Daddy today, Little Lady?” Dick said, snapping me back to now.
He sopped sweat from his face with a gray cloth and seemed to stifle a chuckle.
Low laughter rumbled behind me. I swiveled around. Two men smiled at me, one who
seemed to have no hands, just odd bulbous tumors trembling in his jean pockets, and the
other man, whose large hairy hands juggled a black fishing rod, a red plastic tackle box, a pack
of fish hooks, and a carton of cigarettes. I turned back to Dick. He continued to sweat.
Finally, after minutes of the four of us standing there breathing, we heard a door open and
close and Dad returned carrying a large burlap sack. I marveled at his strength, Dick and the
two men stared too; burlap sacks weigh a ton – potatoes, ears of corn, sand – yet Dad carried
23
this one as if it contained feathers. He hoisted it on the counter with nary a grunt.
“Let’s see,” said Toothless Dick, pitching a fastball glance at his cronies, “$14.75.”
“Okie-Dokie. And, oh, Richard. If you would, tell Marion the club meets at my house,
end of the month.”
“Rose Club. Billy’s. Gotcha,” Dick said, tapping a sausage link index finger against his
skull. Then his finger pointed toward the entrance. He waddled to the end of the counter and
stood before us in all his inhuman form. I hadn’t liked Dick as he stood behind the counter;
I liked him even less now. Before, I’d noticed the brass clips on his chest that secured the
straps to his denim bib; I’d known he was wearing overalls. What I hadn’t suspected, but now
realized, eye level with his gut, was just how very, very fat Dick was. Untethered by a belt, his
monstrous stomach paunched out before him like a sagging, deflating hot air balloon. It filled
every inch of material, hung and flapped over the tops of his tree stump thighs. I tried looking
away, but couldn’t. He motioned us to follow him. “This way, Sweetie Doll. I’ll get the door
for you and Daddy.” Dick’s behind was in equal proportion to his front, and I worried that if
one stitch should pop, Dad and I might be crushed by a ton of sweaty flab. The floor boards
groaned beneath Dick’s punishing steps, and the strip of sleigh bells nailed to the door, jangled
painfully when he slammed it behind us.
“Billy,” unaffected, strode to the car. But I turned back. Bells shivered still, as I peered
through the smudged glass in one of the small panes. Dick took a few steps and bent before
the two men. He ceremoniously slapped a fat knee. “Rose Club!” Laughter erupted from all
three. Dick wheezed, “My wife is in that Mr. Billy Prissy Pansy’s Rose Club! Can you believe that
faggot? His poor wife.”
Rage seared through me! I ran! “Prissy, Pansy, Faggot, Homo, Lezzy, Queer” - these were
ugly words that had infested our middle-school and ran amok like gremlins. They carved
themselves into desks, scratched themselves into lockers, and inserted themselves into cruel
jokes. (Cruel jokes that had something to do with boys liking boys and girls liking girls in a
romantic way - which everyone knew was sick and gross and totally against God.) Faggot was
the ring-leader. He’d hurl himself from the lips of a bully and land like a wad of gum in a boy’s
hair, only making more of a sticky mess with each attempt at extraction. But why? From stupid
kids - yes, but why was this hurtful word being used by an adult about my father? “His poor
wife?” My father loved my mother.
I beat Dad to the car and got in. Reaching for the door handle in order to slam the door
shut, my hand was halted by his legs.
“Oh no, Kiddo. I need your help.” He put his head in the car, his eyes a calm blue. His trim
beard tickled my face, as he gave me a smooch. My rage melted. “You have to hold this.”
The burlap sack! I feared its weight might break my legs.
“Relax,” he said, as he placed it on my lap.
To my surprise, it was weightless and moving! What in the world? That’s when things
finally clicked. My father was a spy, a government agent. This trip had been yet another
mission; I’d been on others and hadn’t realized. Only this time, he needed my help. And
now, I was holding a top secret scientific breakthrough that would change the world! This bag
was filled with an energy field of atomic particles that unleashed would rid the world of some
horrific problem - disease, mosquitos, mean people! Code name: Aphid-Eaters.
¨Just ladybugs, Kiddo! They’re harmless, much better than using pesticides,” he said.
24
On the drive home, Dad explained that ladybugs ate aphids, the tiny toothy bugs that
would otherwise dine on and devour his American Beauties. He told me that in order to store
ladybugs, they had to be refrigerated. The cold numbed them, put them to sleep. As they
warmed up, they woke up.
Although a little disappointed that the bag wasn’t filled with a world-changing atomic
substance, and that Dad was not a spy, I was a little relieved too. Ladybugs. I thought about
how cute one ladybug was. Super cute. Okay. But how many filled this chilly bag resting on
my lap? It undulated as if a miniature ocean squall was taking place inside. With each wave,
I imagined thousands of shelled bodies waking up, and climbing atop one another within the
darkened confines of this (hopefully) impenetrable fabric. The material scratched and scraped
against my bare legs where my fringed cut-offs ended. The entire idea began to frighten me,
but I held on. For Dad, I would be brave.
Once home, we released the ladybugs over the rows and rows of red, pink, yellow, and
white blooms. I held the wiggling burlap and Dad pulled the string cord. The ladybugs flew
in out in all directions. Sunlight glinted like sparks against their armor. After a few moments
of spectacular chaos, the grateful little beings knew their true purpose and lit upon the roses.
“Beautiful!” Dad said.
“Beautiful!” I echoed.
That Halloween, Dad took my younger sister and me trick o’treating for the last time.
A few days later, after he’d pruned all the roses and cleared up every flower bed, he left.
This time I knew he wouldn’t be back. I knew he didn’t expect me to be brave and wait.
He didn’t need me to do either of these things. He needed only for me to find my own way,
in my own time. That said, and it is true that, oddly, at the green age of eleven, I knew these
things. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t look for him or imagine that he might just appear, or
completely abandon the idea of his being a spy. Until of course, we learned of his death. I
was twenty-two.
And yet, even now, a lone ladybug, spied
warm and comfortable in my own home on a
winter’s afternoon, reminds me of him. Well,
honestly, I pretend the ladybug is him. Here he
is, inside with me. I watch him as he meanders
across the windowsill, then flits to the glass
to get a better view of the falling snow before
taking flight - off fast and from my view. But,
I know he’ll be back all through this year and
every year. There’s no need to worry.
Illustration by Mike Force
25
BORDER CROSSING
BRIAN BRITIGAN | SEATTLE, WA
Much of my work features animals as stand-ins for human subjects,
creating fable-like scenes that explore issues related to gender and sexual
orientation. These images depict the often painful transitions that mark
the loss of one identity and the creation of another.
26
GOLDEN
27
Photo by Scott Caparelli
SCRAPS
MEL KING | BROOKLYN, NY
When I was fourteen, I knew three gay people: my brother’s friend Dennis, my ex-boyfriend
from seventh grade Peter, and my goth friend Robbie who loved lesbian music. Not a single
girl. The only gay girls I knew were Ellen, possibly Xena and Gabrielle from Xena, and Willow
and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I sustained myself on whatever crumbs of representation
I could find in television, movies, and music videos. Anything that could give me a glimpse
of myself in the future. Because, even if I didn’t see another gay person or talk to another gay
person, I knew that somewhere out there, two girls were falling in love on a show about a
vampire slayer.
It was a freezing January Saturday in 2003 and Emma and I had started dating in
December; she had only ever dated cisgender boys before me. A local youth shelter was
scheduled to hold a “GLBT Youth Dance,” and we had been talking about it nonstop. The
idea of other kids – other gay kids – in a room dancing? It was incomprehensible.
Emma and I met at a friend’s birthday party, but we were from different worlds. Her
parents were lawyers; my mom was a letter carrier and my dad worked two retail jobs. Her
parents pushed her and expected her to ace all her classes; I was lucky if my parents were
around to sign a permission slip. Her parents loved each other deeply; my parents were
trying to navigate New York’s no-fault divorce law. I’d been out since I was eleven; she told
her parents that she was bi the previous October. Unconsciously, I decided that I liked her life
better and traded in my friends for hers. We went to different schools, so it made classes lonely.
Going to different schools was of life-altering significance at fourteen. It meant my
girlfriend was a secret mystery girl to all my classmates. It also meant that if we wanted to see
each other, weekends were basically our only option, and one of our parents had to drive us the
seventeen minutes to the other person’s house. It was only because I’d been talking about this
28
dance for a solid week that my parents agreed to drive me to Emma’s in the middle of
a blizzard.
At Emma’s, we locked ourselves in her room. I perched awkwardly on her brass bed –
floating boat-like on a sea of dirty laundry and discarded objects. All of her posters had outlived
the tape behind them, so they hung at odd angles. It was already dark outside and we didn’t
have enough time to fool around, but she turned on the stereo. “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo
Boingo. She rifled through her closet and drawers, tossing me a few shirts. We tried different
outfits, searching for the best combination of rainbow and cool, and relished little kisses.
“Come on, it’s time to go!” Emma’s mom yelled up the stairs. Her dad, Tom, had agreed
to drive us. He was almost a foot taller than I was and I could never think of anything to say
to him. Mostly, he just made me nervous.
We were in the family’s white Ford Taurus (the same car Emma would later learn to
drive) barely five minutes when we got to our first stop. Emma ran to the front door and I sat
awkwardly in the car with her dad, trying to say as little as I could and still be polite. Emma was
back a moment later and opened up the passenger and backseat doors.
Emma claimed that I’d met Julia the summer before at a street festival, but I couldn’t bring
her face to mind. They were good school friends, so Emma had talked about her often. I knew
that she was gay and out. Still, I was surprised to see her in person.
“Mel, this is Julia. Julia, Mel.”
Just over five feet tall, she was curvy and looked strong for her stature. Her short curly dark
hair was gelled up and she had a warm, open smile.
“Hi!”
“Hey.” I hadn’t known her a full minute and I already wanted her to like me and think I was
cool. I wondered if she read “gay” on me the way I could so easily read it on her. I wanted my
‘90s middle part hair – channeling Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World – to be as immediately
visible as her shellacked short hair.
She climbed in the backseat next to me. Looking down, she saw my black high top
Converse with yellow flames on the side.
“What does that say?”
I blushed and looked down. The product of many boring classes, I had covered all of the
white rubber in pen and Sharpie. My favorite quotes in my own handwriting. A big ‘L’ and ‘R’
on the left and right toes, because I thought it would help me to put them on without thinking
about it.
“Where?”
She pointed to the inner rubber sidewall. “There.”
I crossed my left foot over my right knee to see it better in the dark backseat of the car and
blushed redder. ‘CAN YOU JUST BE KISSING ME NOW?’ it read. The headlights of a passing
car streamed in through the window and she saw it, too. “It’s from Buffy,” I started to explain.
“Willow and Tara,” she added. I was dumbstruck.
It was a line from the pivotal scene where Willow and Tara reunite after a protracted,
multiple episode long break-up. I had watched that scene so many times that the VHS my
dad had used to tape the episode was warped.
Without missing a beat, she grinned and started, “‘Things fall apart. They fall apart
so hard.1’”
29
I wasn’t sure if I should continue, but the words came falling out of my mouth before
I could stop them. “‘Tara?’”
My stomach rose and fell like I was riding a roller coaster as she sparred with me, line
for line, through the speech. If someone liked the show, they usually liked Buffy and Angel. I’d
never found anyone who was watching for Willow and Tara. I swore she could hear my heart
racing, that Emma could hear the deep connection taking place in the backseat of her dad’s
car. As quickly as it had started, we’d made our way to the end of the speech.
“‘It’s a long and important process...’” Julia made a somber face.
“‘And can we just skip it?’” I was so glad that this was my last line alone; my heart stopped
at the thought of the next one. I waited a moment that felt like an hour looking at her dark eyes
shining in the backseat. She raised her eyebrows, a challenge.
“‘Can you just be kissing me now?’” we finished, laughing, in unison.
“Oh, you two are such nerds!” Emma scolded from the front seat.
But we had just told each other everything we needed to know to be friends. She had been
scavenging for crumbs, just like me. We’d sought out those crumbs like we were mining for
diamonds – dig for days and find nothing until one brief shining moment when we’d catch
a line here, a hint of subtext there, a look that might mean something more. When we finally
had it in our hands, we would hold it up to the light, brush any imperfections away, and hold it
tightly because we knew just how rare those moments were. I knew that she held these scraps
like precious gems the same way I did, because the scraps made it just that much easier to get
through the day.
That’s what Julia called them: scraps. Julia was the first girl I ever met who liked girls with
the same passion that I did. She thought about curves and softness, about ways to woo and
seduce. She, too, allowed herself to dream about some woman she had not yet met who would
be kind and tender to a body that had gotten too used to having thick skin.
Over the next decade, I would learn that Julia – ‘Jules’ as I dubbed her a few weeks into
our friendship – and I had far more in common than a shared love of women. She too, played
guitar and wrote songs. Her parents would also divorce. Her mother and mine would move
from big houses in the suburbs to little apartments in downtown Albany. Her sister and my
mother would both be diagnosed with bipolar disorder and we would both have to navigate
how to not lose ourselves in caretaking.
In that particular moment, however, we were two kids sitting in the backseat of a car
and I felt like I’d won the lottery, because I found someone who knew me to my bones — even
if we’d never met before. The dance that night was cancelled because of the snowstorm, but
I didn’t need to be in a room full of gay kids dancing. I had met one person and that was
enough for now.
Endnotes
1 “Entropy.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. UPN. WYNA, Albany. 30 April 2002. Television.
30
Photo by Scott Caparelli
A YEAR OF PRAISE
ELI STEFFEN | SEATTLE, WA
Last night, you asked me if I was a poet
And I stammered a “yes”
As we drove out over the West Seattle Bridge
Cause I figured if I was a poet
Than you could be too
And as was we sped under those grey, pink washed clouds
I decided to love you, though they warned me not to
They said you must never love a poet
But I understand why you wear those scars like bracelets and
I don’t want that to be the last choice you have
The last chapter in your personal self-help manual
So I loved you and let you love me
And left the details for tomorrow
Last week, I called you three if not four times
You were going through a rough patch
And I wanted to help
I called on the bus, on my walk home, on my bed, sitting alone, listening
While Winter’s melody played against my windows
I just needed you to know
That if you needed me
You could have me
31
Last month, in that cramped school hall
As all the theys streamed past
I saw you as more than gay
More than that word that connected us
And I listened to you ramble on about him for hours
Reciting his statutory rape record like a love poem
But I wanted to be so much more to you
Than your latest
Creepy-old-man
Last summer, I sat on a picnic table watching
Your beautiful body pace in front of me
Absently rubbing its naked belly
Lake Wenatchee stood watch behind you
As shirtless youth stretched out across the beach
You read your poetry of record and remorse
But I couldn’t concentrate with the way the sunlight
Was dancing on your olive-brown rib-cage
You crouched, your eyes level with the wood slats of my table
Searching
And I got down on my knee on the hard concrete
To see what it would look like
And I tried to see past your sun-kissed skin
To the brilliant mind whirling in this world that saw you as less
And I redoubled my efforts when all I saw
were your brown eyes and intoxicating smile
The ones that made me feel electric,
And dangerous
I wanted to walk with you
Through the thousand different perspectives
That came to you so easily
And I tried to be the mad-genius you dreamed of
Birthing fairytales of sand and spit
I tried to share my deepest self with you
When all I really was, was right there where you stood
I tried to live in a world of open book selves
And collaborative potato chip towers
When it was this world
That held that gorgeous, thrilling torso.
Seattle, 2011
32
MOTHER
BY MENG YU | SEATTLE, WA
my mother holds my face in her palms with care
like a glass bowl, lifting it to her lips.
i am a cavern for her requests.
my lips are like her lips
soft like a child’s from too much silence.
my eyes fold the way hers do
we are never fully shut but shuttering.
our mouths talk like a toddler’s walk
like any minute we could topple over
i am my culture stuttering.
Photo by Nathania ten Wolde
she has told me, Swallow a meat ball that is made of
your tongue.
i am finding the blueprints of myself in my mother
her blood carves the vacancies inside
empty rooms that she hoped i would fill.
she looks at me as if her dreams were still-born
i look at her feeling like i’m still being born.
our skulls push against the skin together.
we forget what the other remembers.
she named meࣶ⮆, chinese dream
and that is how i began, as her dream
before i dropped into american flesh.
for nine months i went where she went
i dreamt what she dreamt
our navels braided together
and she fed me until i grew heavy with her hopes.
yesterday’s consolation is tomorrow’s burden.
i lived in her crescent as a nascent bomb.
but our bodies are not just vessels to be transported.
33
how many times do we have to arrive
before we are no longer deported?
for protection, she gave me inheritances
shame for my body
shoes filled with love-dread
collarbones collecting sorrow.
how can i be my body’s owner
when my mother was my organ donor?
her heirlooms expand like tumors.
so i morphed to lose my ancestry
spun away from the maternal spine
wrestling memory from time.
the disgrace of our histories still tender
delivering the third gender.
but there is no sacrifice greater than metamorphosis.
i am the bowl that breaks the potter’s hands
my name no longer claims me.
i am the trickle condensation of love’s overflow
and the desolate loss of its evaporation.
i swallow oceans in my depths.
my body is not the forms that fit
not the arts and crafts of desire.
no incisions will posses my open heart.
but one day
we will all be the mother to our mothers
and the surgeon to our surgeries.
its as if we forget
the intimacy of distance
when we were sealed into existence
the first wound
was the womb
we carved inside of a woman.
34
Photo by Nathania ten Wolde
SHE LIVES
Meng Yu | Seattle, WA
To all my students who have had to kill their woman to survive. SHE has many lives.
there’s a woman inside you and she’s dying.
she’s knows you can’t ever truly love yourself
if you keep silencing her
if you keep bruising her
if you keep forgetting her.
there’s a woman inside you and she’s weeping.
i’m speaking to the male bodies
that have had to kill their woman to be a man.
who have only known openings as weaknesses
so have sealed, stopped, shut up the womb
forgetting that openings are where they began.
but i’m also speaking to the womyn
who in order to feel power
have had to dress up in patriarchy
wearing aggression like armor.
what fears do my baggy pants harbor?
we keep blaming victims for being raped
like, Woman, don’t wear those heels if you wanna escape.
but i worked too damn hard to be a woman
to have her be taken away.
so each moment is my judgment day.
35
wondering, does being gender queer make me a draftee
to the wrong side of battle? cuz they’ve gagged and mutated my pleas.
just hear these words: skirt, skeet, skank, skeez
that’s the sound of not letting your woman breathe.
so i’m no stranger to the dangers of dressing too sweet.
i am sorry, woman
that i have had to kill you just to feel safe walking down the street.
there’s a woman inside me and she is bleeding.
her body is my mind’s scar.
she bleeds blazing stars from her lumbar
shattered by crowbars, burnt by cigars.
she bleeds because she’s been told
she can’t exist.
but she knows compassion informs wisdom
she forgives.
she knows vulnerability is our greatest strength
she is opening, she gives.
and every time we’re taught the opposite
she bleeds just to live.
she’s a survivor.
she bleeds because she is growing and shedding.
she follows time in cycles of the moon
she is emergence, she is spreading.
but we pollute her like all that gave us birth.
she is our mothers, she is the earth.
she holds us even as we violate and desecrate
her body, we sell her for cheap.
she rocks us even as we suck her blood in our sleep.
present your woman with flowers
and she’ll harvest the seeds.
grow a forest in your stomach
play harmonies on your teeth.
till your eyes weep with weather
and your lungs blow debris.
know that she was the first emcee.
she spat in your mouth so you could speak.
she’ll carve genesis on your tongue
so you’ll remember what your name is.
she’ll burn windpipe to blow smoke
flex larynx to float.
in outer space, bend time through your anus.
she’s got new meanings for deep throat.
36
cuz she doesn’t believe in plugging up
she believes in letting flow.
so when she cries in the rain
shed off your skin for a coat.
when her tears become groundwater
remember to build her a boat
cuz she lives in middle passage
between crux and crucifixion
of what can and can’t be known.
so summon your woman.
know that in trans.formation she has a home.
37
HUM (LOS ANGELES, 1986)
BY HILARY ZAID
Photo by Scott Caparelli
“Lilah?” I swing the door open myself. Lilah’s not one to bother with a lock, which I have
told her will get her killed or worse when that Younes guy from the varsity doubles team eases
his black Beamer up the hill from Mulholland Drive in his tennis whites.
Seventeen and self-possessed enough to handle the sultry looks she has come into like
a secret inheritance, Lilah won’t be so easily scared off of boys.
“I know it’s you,” she shrugs these days instead of laughing, instead of the frown in the
corner of her mouth that Younes and I both know is a smile, the shrug that shows the bra strap
on her shoulder. Like: there’s no point her getting up. Like: I of all people will always come to
her. Like: Who else would it be?
Inside, under the rafters, the faded heat of cumin and onion hangs in the empty halls,
faintly warms the marble floors, cool against a little neap tide of afternoon lavender lapping
through the French doors.
The house is empty.
“Hey.”
Lilah looks up without opening her eyes. I can see the huge spheres flick under their lids;
sweat beads up in the dusky channel between her breasts.
Sixteen, bony-hipped and hiding awkward facts about what I did last night with a girl
named Anna, whom Lilah already hates enough just for taking up my time, I straddle the
other chaise with a familiarity I have to fake more and more these days.
Out in the garden where Lilah drinks the sun, her mother, Mrs. Melamed, has planted
lupine and poppy. Between river rocks and tufted hairgrass, wet wedges of Irish moss are
tucked into the shady clefts between the stones and look like something that boy Younes
shouldn’t have his hands on.
38
Lilah blinks tiger-colored eyes.
Mosses plugged between the thick-thighed stones by boys like Younes Nazarian and his
friends; boys too rich to work for money – not like the Mexicans the gardener replaces every six
weeks or so – boys who help out with a flat or two of flax to show they are not too good to dirty
their hands for Mrs. Melamed, if Lilah has oiled her legs out on the back deck, ignoring them.
Even if she is out there dangling her legs in the water, talking to me.
When we were twelve, she let me weave strings of silver bells through the black streams
of her hair. Back then, when we were young enough that holding hands between two girls
meant nothing more than innocence.
I follow Lilah’s eyes past the mounds of horsetail and shouldering stone into the dense
beard of the palms; she closes her eyes again. Everything looks alien to me, and as far away
as it makes me feel from her, I am grateful for all that Lilah doesn’t know.
I perch on the chaise next to Lilah’s, but I don’t close my eyes. Lilah and I have been
friends all of our lives, twin fawns, her mother used to say. Though it was only Mrs. Melamed’s
kindness and our love that made us so.
In the corner of the yard, a concrete slab scabs over the place where the shed used to
stand, the shed where we would drop our skates. “Girls, I am going to break-a my neck!” Mr.
Melamed was in the movie business, he thought fake Italian was funny. Mr. Melamed liked to
think he could still make us laugh. Break-a-my back! He used to hang upside down from
a special bar he ordered to stretch his spine, dangling from anti-gravity boots.
Now the house is empty, except for the two of us. Mr. Melamed doesn’t live here anymore,
and Lilah’s already half gone. She doesn’t know it yet, but I’m half gone, too.
Lilah and I stopped speaking publicly at school the very first day a pale blue note slipped
through my locker slats from, as Lilah started calling her, “that girl Anna.” I hadn’t told her.
That girl Anna and I had skated down the path that threads through Santa Monica and Venice
Beach; dark rivers crossed the skin on the inside of her wrist, our hands swinging side by side,
almost close enough to touch.
Loyalty was always big with the Melameds. Even though they left Iran. Especially
because they left Iran.
What could I say, then, about Anna’s hot breath on my ear last night that Lilah
would understand?
I fix my eyes on the garden and its faded scars, breathing deeply. I need to
memorize everything.
Silence wafts off Lilah’s body with the hot breath of Opium and onion, ironed linen and
sweat. Lilah’s smooth knees have gone round. My bony legs fall at odd angles off the chair.
When I pull one up, my foot juts up like a sundial.
This whole yard used to be paved white as wedding cake. We skated around and around
until Mrs. Melamed brought in jackhammers and Mexicans, took a subscription to Sunset
magazine. Once, a bee dizzy from French lavender stung me by the side of the new blackbottomed swimming pool, and my throat swelled shut. I spent almost my whole life in this
garden and I almost died here. But this silence we have grown into feels almost worse.
39
Lilah keeps her eyes sealed shut; the sun adores her.
My face feels too hot, my pants hemmed too short.
Lilah wears an anklet of silver bells around one foot, like a person puts around the neck
of a cat to warn off birds.
“So,” her mouth barely moves, like a person who has so far to go, they must conserve
every motion, “who are you going to prom with?” Lilah asks even though she knows I won’t
give that tennis partner of Younes Nazarian the time of day. Younes, who Lilah has told not just
me but everyone she means to get a hotel room with and go everywhere but all the way.
Lilah is not easy, but boys come easy to her, cocky, dark-eyed boys Lilah subjects to her
mother’s tests. The Melameds may be exiles, but Lilah has found her true place in this world.
(Ten years from now, it will be the memory of Lilah – not Anna with her plain, American
freckled face reaching underneath my shirt in the dark – but Lilah posing in her mother’s
garden on prom night, shimmering in green silk, red-brown as spice, pressed with fresh white
blossoms from her mother’s garden, who will become my damasked jewel. I cannot know at
sixteen, hot with lust, that it will be my first friend and not my first lover I will miss; my memory
of Lilah something warm and old I will take out to show someone in the winter of a dark
Northeastern city, someone I’ll want to tell all my silent stories.)
Prom? No. I shake my head. It seems I can’t quite open my mouth.
“Seriously? That’s so gay,” Lilah shrugs without opening her eyes.
When Lilah’s hair was long and smooth black and mine long and stringy and green-tippedblonde, the old Persian uncles at Congregation Or Nessah pinched their little plastic cups of
kosher wine between fingers and thumb, tsitsit straying out from under their vests, thick gold
chains peeking out from their cuffs, they laughed and called us twins. Rachel and Leah? The
uncles who had first tasted Torah with a drop of honey on their tongues, their lips glistened
through the thicket of beards: No! Jacob and Esau! Their laughing teeth leaping flocks of sheep.
Even then, something in me knew that, pale and fair and uninterested in the boys who
chased me and Lilah up and down the shul’s long marble steps, I had no chance of stealing
the world’s blessing from girls like Lilah, dark and wild, girls who ran to urge them on.
I turn toward my friend, her hair black as goats winding down the slopes, her forehead
a three-thousand year tower pointing toward a distant past, a distant future, a distant life.
Like a statue, I think, a round, stone Ishtar. Goddess of fertility. The frown in the corner of her
mouth, the flair of the nostril she no longer makes for me.
Lilah who grew up in steamy clouds of onion and of cardamom, who forked up my
mother’s Stouffer’s mac and cheese from the orange box like it was exotic, foreign food, Lilah
came from somewhere in the world that still exists. Lilah had no idea, then or now, how alien
I was. I didn’t want her to.
(Ten years from this day in Mrs. Melamed’s prize-winning garden, I’ll rise and search my
memory, through the streets and squares of my own forsaking. I’ll ask the watchmen, ask the
guards, Have you seen her? Lilah Melamed of Isfahan, Iran, of Los Angeles, of Encino; Lilah
Melamed from her mother’s home, from the place where I was born. Where has she gone?
Even then, as I search for her, I will not understand that I was the one who lost her.)
My mouth tastes ash. Soft gray clumps clog the stone fire pit, ready to break apart,
remnants gone cold from nights with boys like Younes and his friends, barbeques Lilah doesn’t
40
invite me to anymore, evenings we have agreed without speaking not to mention.
We were twins once, I think. Until I fed among the lilies.
“Well,” I start. My legs drop. At the end of the summer, Lilah will go to Hebrew University,
Jerusalem. I will go to Smith. I try to memorize every tuft in the rough beard of the palm, the
place where the shed has left a dark square on the boards of the fence, like a shadow, even
though the shed is gone. What does the distance matter? Inside, I tell myself, both of us have
already moved apart.
There’s no point her getting up. I can let myself leave the way I let myself in.
We sit.
The golden light Mrs. Melamed can’t order from a garden catalog, from Sunset magazine,
the light Mr. Melamed pays the studio engineer more than the gardener’s whole crew for just
one clean take, the late afternoon Valley light breaks over the side of the house, pours like
clover honey through the palm, through the fingers of the sawgrass, over river rocks, across
Lilah’s sharp nose. Little beads of sweat glow in the small dark hairs between her brows. She
feels me staring – or maybe just the light – and her eyes blink open. At her ankle, two or three
small bells chime.
We both see it first: a tiny torpedo, its throat flashes blood. Lilah’s fingers twitch. Our old,
dumb joke becomes a reflex she hasn’t quite suppressed. (Blue eyes. Lilah used to warn me
against the small and hovering hummingbirds with their hypodermic beaks. Did she believe it
herself? Cover your blue eyes. They think your eyes are flowers.)
Lilah sees me catch her wrist flick. Her eyes catch mine.
A crash quick as cymbals: we laugh, the far away clatter of bells, of stillness broken.
Her hand flings out—fingers square, painted but bitten down, Lilah grabs my wrist.
“Dodi,” she sighs. Beloved. The wings of the hummingbird flash blue-green in the
flowering quince, disappear in pomegranate boughs. A ruby-throated bird, the kind they call
Anna’s hummingbirds. “If she breaks your heart, I’ll kill that little bitch.” Lilah falls back into
her chair. All settled, then. She cradles my hand like a turtle dove between hers, seems to forget
about it, lets her eyes fall shut against the glowing day. Here in her mother’s garden, in our
own shared City, in our own young days before we part. Under the cedars. Under the juniper
eaves. Lilah’s eyes, like nested doves.
Like: there’s no point my getting up.
Like: this is where I belong.
41
Illustration by Mike Force
CHINA
ALICIA BONES | IOWA CITY, IA
Jen lathers with a green ooze the Chinese shop girl told her was shampoo. The liquid
smells like Lysol doused with perfume, like an America locker room, like home. From the
aroma floats an apparition from her past: a friend, cheeks flushed, milk-pale legs in baggy
volleyball shorts. The girl’s mouth is saying something Jen can’t remember. Then, Jen—too
awkward, too big, too quivery around girls in their sports bras—is made alive by the girl’s
knee pads, her guttural yells of “mine, mine, MINE!” When they were seventeen, the girl was
electrified.
Maybe it was just the fluorescent lights of the gym.
Ankle-high in soapy water pooled from a slow-slurping drain, Jen can only electrocute
herself. This apartment, part of the salary package for her English tutoring job in Shanghai, is
barely adequate for a westerner: a small bathroom stuffed with sink, toilet, shower and washing
machine, a kitchen with an industrial sink and rice cooker, a living room with a single couch
slouched with years of transitory residents. In the cramped shower, she bumps her wet elbow
into a cord plugged in way too close to the shower curtain, the socket halfheartedly protected
with industrial-strength tape. “Shit,” Jen mutters as the electrical current zaps her skin, then
42
remembers: That girl’s sweet peach-fuzz mustache had turned brown around the corners of her
mouth by senior year.
Jen towels off and walks to her bedroom to dress, the accumulated dust from the floor
clinging to the bottoms of her feet. As she pulls on her underwear, she hears a knock at the
door. Jen ignores it, holding her jeans in her hand, looking at her body in the mirror. I’d be
a lothario if my thighs weren’t so fat, she decides. She pinches one thigh near the cut of the
underwear, drops it, watches it flop. In the ‘60’s, her mother married young.
The knock repeats louder and louder, insistently against the wood. “I brought Skittles,”
a voice yells. “I hear you in there.”
After college, Jen wanted to do little, dream a lot, meet a select few, so she came to China.
The woman probably can’t hear her, but the possibility of Canuck X-ray vision makes Jen go to
the door. It’s another teacher from her school, the blonde, fifty-something bird-boned woman
with the flared jeans who lives next door. She doesn’t respect the paper thin walls between their
apartments and sometimes she hears the woman’s hair bands late into the night.
“Thanks,” Jen says, reaching for the package without opening the door wide enough for
the woman’s small body to slip through. Jen is too full of remembering seventeen to notice the
woman’s face, so stuck between never and nowhere on this Thursday afternoon. The woman
has no children.
But Jen will, twenty-five years from now. Her pink flush-faced boy, seventeen, so brave and free
and bloated with possibility will anticipate girls and boys and red nights and flashes of black wildness
as he walks across that graduation stage. It is not there, it is not there: she, his mother, will tell him
with her eyes again, as she has before and after.
“No, I’ve eaten too many. The rest are for you,” the woman pushes the door open, butting
its edge into Jen’s chest, and moves into the living room. “Can I stay?” She asks and sits.
Without a word, Jen goes into the kitchen and mixes her visitor a drink, pouring gin
straight from the bottle into a plastic glass, adding a half-bottle of nearly-flat Sprite, two halves
of a small key lime, a single ice cube. She makes another for herself, adding more gin this time.
It’s hard to come by, this booze – she needs to think of herself. She walks back into the living
room and hands the woman the cocktail.
“It’s official. I’m going to move in with the old man in Toronto. We might sleep together
sometimes, but mostly he likes my stories. He’s got a big house, an extra room.” The woman
sips. Her teaching contract in China is almost up. The air is moist in the late afternoon,
smoggy and still even inside, but the stink of fermented tofu cooking across the hall ruins
the peace. The woman pauses for a second, looking chiseled onto the couch like a figurine,
permanent there like timelessness. “But shit, I can do whatever the hell I want in China, right?”
She forces a grin.
“Right.” Jen gulps down the rest of the drink, draining as much of it as she can until she
gasps with a burning throat. She stares with the first wobble of alcohol at the woman, curling
a humidified strand of her hair behind her ear. Perhaps I should love her and her loud knocks—
she’s here, now. The woman looks back, smiling, almost elderly with her small, etched-round
eyes and gulleted neck, searching for a solidly-etched moor, a mother with thick thighs, a light
from the ceiling of a gym or anywhere really. Jen pulls her hand back, tears open the Skittles
package. This timelessness isn’t permanent, after all.
43
Jen spills the candies on the table in front of them. She passes her hands over the
candies—feeling their smooth and slippery bodies underneath her palms—so they all lay flat
on the table. She picks one, tasting its crunching, shell-coated sugar. The woman swigs the last
of her cocktail, and burps softly. Out of all the days she’s had in China, Jen thinks, maybe she
will remember this one.
44
Photo by Scott Caparelli
THE WORST
JESSICA LYNCH-JONELY | PORTLAND, OR
It was 2007, that fateful year when the first iPhone hit the shelves, when Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hollows was released, and (who could forget!) the year Bob Barker aired his final
episode of The Price is Right. That man is a treasure.
There I was at a party for my brother’s college radio station, in the basement of a dumpy
little rental house in Tacoma. I love my brother, but he did have a few pretentious friends
in college. (Not the ones who might be reading this, though. You all are tight as hell.) The
music was obscure, the movie posters on the wall were vintage, and the thrift store furniture
was maybe just there for decoration. I wasn’t going to be the one to test it. And there wasn’t
enough ice. I should have just brought my own fucking ice.
At the time I was just about to move to Boise with my boyfriend, and my sister and I
figured it would be a good time to hang out with our brother Aaron before I left. He’d been
away at school for a few years and we hadn’t had much time to visit until now. So we decided
to come and be awkward at a college party. We are great at that.
My sister, boyfriend, and I had been shuffling aimlessly around the kitchen with SOLO
cups in our hands for awhile because we didn’t know anyone there besides my brother and
a couple of his friends we had just met that afternoon. I was falling back on my habit of
shameless people-watching in lieu of actual conversation. From what I could tell, most people
at the party were trying to be offhandedly cool as they moved along the spectrum from sober
to drunk. I noticed that one of Aaron’s friends, Wes, a flamboyant guy with a catty streak a mile
long, had gotten obnoxiously drunk already. He was having a hard time standing by that point,
45
but that didn’t stop him from hitting on Aaron for over an hour. My brother was starting to look
really embarrassed.
I casually sidled up to Aaron and asked, “Hey, what’s up with Wes?” My brother just kind
of shrugged it off and said that Wes wasn’t really hitting on him; he just gets huggy and kissy
when he is drunk. Then he mumbled something that I didn’t catch, and his eyes darted around
the room like a cornered raccoon. For a moment it looked like he might try to make a break
for it.
Then my sister asked, “Wait, are you…?” There was a weird pause.
Aaron gave a small sigh, seemingly resigning himself to the fact, and gave a half chuckle.
Or maybe he was thinking about throwing up. The moment passed quickly.
“Ummm…yeah.” He looked at the wall as he said it, not at us.
And that was how my brother came out to us. A mumble and an awkward smile. There
was no speech, no formal announcement. I don’t think he had planned to tell us that night.
Thanks to the too-warm drinks I’d been sipping, the next few minutes of my memory
have been reduced to a strangely choppy blur. I do remember my sister and I hugging our
brother tightly and grinning like idiots. I remember that the carpet was, like, hideous. I also
remember the record-scratch sound going off in my head: My brother is gay. My brother is
gay. WHY DIDN’T I ALREADY KNOW THIS? I’m the worst sister in the world. It’s official.
I’ll admit that I have pretty bad “gaydar,” but when I looked back on our childhood, I
probably could have caught on sooner. There were clues: Aaron had semi-regularly played
princess-dress-up-time with my sister and I; he had played Barbies with us when we would let
him; for a while he had wanted an American Girl Doll; his favorite Disney movie was Cinderella.
Then again, if Aaron was straight, all of these “clues” could be dismissed as stereotyping
gender normatively. So tricky!
One of the biggest clues I missed was during Aaron’s participation in some of the high
school plays – he was still in elementary school at the time. Being in theater was not the clue;
it was the fact that when some of his friends told him that being in plays meant you were gay,
he abruptly quit. I would consider myself a fiercely protective older sister, and, despite my
numerous screaming matches with my brother, I would have killed for him. I still would. But
when I heard he had quit theatre at the tender age of ten because he didn’t want to appear gay,
I didn’t think anything of it. Looking gay was a bad idea. It was social suicide.
At that time I was in middle school, the worst of all possible worlds, and I had just started
having occasional dreams about kissing other girls. I would wake up with the horrible feeling in
the pit of my stomach that I was a lesbian, and that meant my life was over. After having one of
“the dreams,” I would walk around school and wonder if people could tell there was something
different about me by the way I acted or looked. Of course I didn’t dare tell anyone about the
dreams. Maybe the dreams meant nothing, but it was too risky to find out.
If I had thought about the situation rationally, I would have realized that I’d been
passionately falling in love with boys since I was in the second grade, so I was probably not a
lesbian. But it was a terrible lonely mess inside my head in middle school, as I suspect it was
for everyone.
The point remained throughout these years: being mistaken for gay was bad. During my
two year stint in Catholic school I had a friend who stopped wearing anything with rainbows
46
on it, lest someone mistake it for gay pride. A new girl, one who liked to draw pictures of
beautifully dressed women, was labeled as an obvious lesbian, never mind that she just wanted
to be a fashion designer. The boys would throw out the word gay to any male who didn’t fit in.
No one ever said what was wrong about being gay, but I sensed, as any anxious child would
have, that it was a black cloud that followed its victims. This kind of Neo-Homo-McCarthyism
was rampant and it didn’t actually matter if you were gay or not. Sad to say, I probably joined
in the teasing. I was in a class of only twenty kids, I was also a new girl, and I wasn’t even
Catholic. I just didn’t want to be thrown under the bus. Yeah, okay, that’s not a good excuse.
Let’s just say I wasn’t the person I wanted to be in the eighth grade.
What would that part of my life been like if I was actually gay? I’ve thought about this,
to try and understand my brother’s experience better. Sure, he didn’t have to deal with
homophobic Catholic school kids, but he did have to deal with our high school, which was
not exactly gay-friendly. When I went to that school, I knew many supposed gay students, but
no one was ready to accept it or publicly admit it. Some came from conservative families who
wouldn’t have been okay with it; some were of such a conservative bent themselves that they
actually weren’t okay with it, and the others? I think they were just worried about how people
would react. They didn’t want to be treated differently.
When I got to college, I finally had the chance to meet people who publicly identified
as LGBT, which was refreshing, and also daunting. I didn’t know what was and wasn’t okay
to say. What terms were politically correct, and which jokes crossed the line? I felt ill at ease
when trying to find something relevant that wouldn’t offend people. Eventually I began to
suffer from straight person’s guilt. I was an ally, sure, but I also seemed to be experiencing
more than my share of self-loathing because of my “straight-privilege” (I’m still not even sure
what that means). An example: upon learning that Measure 36 had passed in Oregon in the
2004 election, effectively banning gay marriage, I (drunkenly) sobbed out a string of jumbled
apologies to my gay friend. He, after hearing that voters in Oregon apparently did not think
he was worthy of marriage, was stuck trying to comfort me.
Yeah. Way to go, Jess.
After my brother came out to me, and after I spent several weeks thinking I was the worst
sister in the world for not figuring it out sooner, I came to a realization: I didn’t know my
brother was gay because he didn’t wanted me to know yet. This wasn’t a matter of missed
signals. He had dated in high school, and had always been such a hit with the girls; we were
sure he was a born lady’s man. He had thrown people off the idea that he could be gay. He had
been dead set against letting even those closest to him in on the secret until the time was right.
And I was glad that that time came. Really glad. I was thrilled to be a part of my brother’s
life in that way. It always felt like he was holding something back, not letting us get too close
to him. Then the floodgates opened and his full self was standing there. Since that night at the
party, Aaron and I have experienced a much closer relationship, a relationship I love.
While talking to my brother about coming out and everything surrounding it, he told me
that he actually thought I already knew. Apparently, years back, I had once asked him point
blank, “Aaron, are you gay?” He had denied it at the time, but had been harboring the idea
that, deep down, I knew all along. The truth is I don’t even remember asking. It’s sad to think
47
I caused that much anxiety about something that shouldn’t have mattered. At that point, I
don’t know if I was accusing or asking about his sexuality, but the one thing I do know is that
I love my brother, and I never would have turned my back on him. In fact, if I had known back
in middle school what I know now, I might even have had the courage to stand up to all those
people who treated the words “lesbian” and “gay” like those were the dirtiest words in the
world. Maybe I would have stood up for the sake of my brother. Because it’s funny what we’ll
do for our family and friends that we wouldn’t even have done for ourselves.
48
FIFTEEN
Jessie Nash | Chelmsford, UK
Illustration by Mike Force
The boy with the fairy wings and the Toy Story backpack waves his wand over my head
and declares that tonight will be a special night for me. It’s 1998, in a town in the south east
of England that in fifteen years will be a city. It’s November, cold. In fifteen years the boy with
the fairy wings and the Toy Story backpack will be a nurse. His pink glitter eyeshadow sparkles
under the blinking strip lights of the youth club coffee bar. Which isn’t a coffee bar really, just
a tuck shop – sweets and soda, cups of tea, coffee – but no one here drinks coffee.
The girl who serves behind the counter is Jo. She’s older than me, eight thousand times
cooler. She’s wearing a Korn t-shirt complemented by a necklace that spells out ‘Tranny’ in
Scrabble tiles – I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to explain – that beats my Nirvana hoodie
and silver cross by light years. Genderqueer and reappropriation don’t exist for me yet, so I
gaze curiously at her necklace for weeks and months to come. I have no idea I’ll find a way to
describe how I feel finally, much later on. I wonder what her undercut feels like, if it’s rough and
stubbly or soft. I’d love to run my fingers over it, stroke her for hours. The hair she has on top,
clipped down and ponytailed, is green this week. Last week it was blue.
In five years I will sleep with Jo and she’ll tell me she liked me from the moment I cut my
hair off, dyed it pink, and started saying ‘fuck you’ to the world. But right now my hair is long,
in blonde bunches, and our only exchanges have been over cans of Coke. I assume she doesn’t
even know my name. My make-up is cheap, lurid. My trainers are plain running shoes, a brand
and style that is cool with the friends I came with. I’m fifteen.
49
Illustration by Mike Force
Here in the downstairs there
is karaoke, PC computer games, a
pool table, board games, places to
sit, pop music. Sweeties. No drugs.
Healthy activities to keep us kids out
of trouble on a Friday night.
Downstairs is safe and polite.
It’s where the people I came with
like to hang out. They’re sensible girls
and they’ve warned me away from the
upstairs crowd. The upstairs crowd
drink and take drugs in the park
before they arrive; upstairs the boys
are kissing boys and the girls are
kissing girls. When kids come down
from upstairs sometimes they’re
concussed or bloody, sometimes
they have to go and sit in the sickbay
room which is always full. Upstairs
is the under-eighteens alternative
music night.
I am dying to go upstairs.
Every week I watch the kids in huge baggy skater jeans and chains, Marilyn Manson
t-shirts, black lipstick and eyeshadow, and spiked dog collars run up the stairs, towards the
pulse of the music, darkness. They sign in at the door with fake names, fake emergency
contact numbers. The smell of weed soaks into the NO DRUGS NO ALCOHOL sign. I’ve been
watching them, trying to emulate the look but I’m still not brave enough. In a few months I’ll
look just like them. I’ll be covered in cuts and scars as I start to explore my feelings more than
the small scratches I’ve made and hidden so far. My arms at this point could still pass for
normal. In fifteen years I’ll be scarred for life on the outside, and not mind one bit. But at this
point I have no idea.
The boy with the fairy wings and the Toy Story backpack asks me if I’m coming upstairs.
Tells me that I really should this week, I’ll love it. I say I might, but I feel bad about leaving my
group of friends. They’re my best friends, but I’m the wrong shape, I don’t fit. They urge me to
go and speak to a boy in a green Ben Sherman shirt with a gold earring, who is flanked by his
mates, making fart noises. Lisa informs me he’s cute. I know that if I even said hello to that boy
he’d probably laugh in my face.
In fifteen years the boy in the green Ben Sherman shirt with the gold hoop earring is
married to Lisa.
A blast of nu-metal comes tumbling, fighting, falling down and lands where we are as the
door at the top of the stairs opens, just a brief second as someone, a body, no set gender, flies
out with a great smack against the wall. The boy with the fairy wings loves this song and he’s
gone, racing up the stairs. Down here we’re sucking on fizzy cola bottle sweets and a girl from
school called Marlene gets up to sing at the karaoke machine.
50
Upstairs boys are sucking on other boys in the bathroom.
As the first notes of My Heart Will Go On plays on the karaoke machine, I know
I must escape.
You’re going on your own? You won’t know anyone. Stay here and play pool! They giggle.
They are happy. Or they seem happy. In fifteen years only some of them are happy.
Yes, on my own. Some of the upstairs crowd have spoken to me before, mistaking me for
one of them. Maybe it was the Nirvana hoodie, or some vibe I didn’t know I gave off yet. Other
people know me better than I know myself. Like the boy with the fairy wings, who made the
rounds downstairs first to say hello to everyone and then flew fabulously away.
Upstairs.
At first I can’t see anything as I pushed open the door; it is as dark as it can possibly be.
Someone shouts right in my ear to close the fucking door, making my stomach lurch with the
surprise, the feeling I’ve already made a tragic error. I push it closed and sidestep away from it,
slamming my back against the wall. My eyes haven’t adjusted and I don’t know my way around.
I am acutely aware that I can be seen, they could be sizing me up, laughing at me right now
and I wouldn’t know. I have entered blind. The music fills every inch of the room. You Don’t
Care About Us by Placebo, so loud, it takes me a few seconds to adjust to the noise, the throb.
I start to see, light seeping into small patches of my vision, fizzing lines and patterns in
my eyes spreading in different directions. Shapes in the center of the room, thrashing figures
lurching forwards, backwards, jumping up and down. The shadows of long thick chains on
jeans dance wildly in a patch of pink neon light shining on the floor.
The chains are thumping each other in shadow and for real, metal twisting in the air
as people bounce and the chains smash down brutally on legs, arms, the head of someone
trying to right themselves and not splatter on the floor. Faces and hairstyles fill in the picture
now, boys with long hair, girls with huge spikes, all the colours of the rainbow, shaved, gelled,
abused, twisted, tied. A boy with huge red knots of hair, fat silver lip rings, wearing a floral
dress and army boots smiles in my direction, but not really at me, because he’s buzzed up.
In fifteen years he’s a maths teacher.
We’re all metal-heads in here, even if it’s just in our mouths. Train-track braces link
our pain.
I stand stiff and stupid, watching, waiting, but I don’t know what for. Can I just jump in
there on my own? In fifteen years I will have been in so many mosh pits I couldn’t count them
if I tried, felt like my toes were broken when men twice my size stomped on me, feared for my
life among flailing fists and trampled bodies. Before this the most dancing I had done was to
the Spice Girls in my bedroom.
The song finishes, everyone is hot, sweating, panting. A few peel off quickly before they
get trapped in the next song, needing a break, a swig of something in a dingy corner, a grope
somewhere. The staff, or rather the one guy who pops in and out to check on us, seems not
to notice anything at all. The space isn’t big, maybe just a little bigger than a classroom. Thirty
or so kids stand in the middle of the room, the DJ, a huge sweaty guy with long black hair and
a dog collar that looks literally lethal, is scrabbling with his kit to get the next track on. Other
loners line the walls. In fifteen years the DJ runs his own record label, but right now
he’s dropping CDs on the floor and his eyeliner has run and smudged across his cheeks.
The boy with the fairy wings rushes over and grabs my wrist, pulling me into the center
51
of the floor as Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People starts. He pogos wildly, his wings now
in tatters, shirt off. He’s skinny but well-defined with a bar in his right nipple dangerously
exposed in the mosh. He’s smiling a huge gorgeous smile, his eyes are alive and his short
brown hair is stuck down with sweat. I hold on to him as we jump up and down, we don’t even
know each other’s names yet, but here we are smacking into each other, touching, pulling,
shoving, dancing.
Smiling.
My boobs slam against his bare pecs, but it’s not sexual. Well, only a little bit; both of us
have our eyes on our own sex, looking for our kind but feeling satisfied to at least have found
a sibling, a kindred, in each other.
That girl over there likes you, she told me earlier. Her name’s Sarah. I told her yours was Linda
but I know that’s not right! Haha, but you look like a Linda. Lovely Linda! he shouts in my ear
as he pulls me closer, but that can’t be real. No one likes me. But I’m excited, flattered, and
hopeful anyway. He points. She’s in a German army shirt at least eight sizes too large, what
is probably the skirt of her school uniform with fishnet tights underneath, and shiny purple
Doc Marten boots with the names of bands written all over them in marker pen. Red hair, but
naturally red rather than a punky dye job in a sort of bob that flicks dramatically outwards at
the ends. Tall, awkward, pretty. Great boobs which I’m trying not to stare at.
And of course when she smiles shyly at us there’s a flash of train-track braces. A pikachu
stuffed toy hangs from a chain attached to somewhere on her skirt. A lot of foundation and
black mascara. He goes to her, holding up a finger to me in a gesture of stay here, one minute,
leaving me standing on my own, my power to pogo suddenly vanishing without my winged
saviour. They shout into each others ears. I never even said I liked her, but he knew as soon
as I looked at her that I did. Two songs in and I was in love.
He waves me over, seeming to wind me in with his hand as though we were connected
by one of those crazy metal key chains. He shouts in my ear She’s never kissed a girl. She wants
to kiss you! She asked me to set you up. She’s sixteen! His nipple piercing looks tender now,
sore. What was left of his wings hang lopsided. Whooping and yelling, he flies back into the
pit, bashing into boys and seeming to be here with no one in particular, but knowing and
seeing everybody.
I don’t know what to do, so I just look at her stupidly, smiling. My cheeks feel ripped inside
as my own train-tracks dig into me and stop my smile at a painful grimace. I can’t kiss her right
there in front of everyone, even though no one was looking at us at all. My heart is racing, I
feel shaky. When she takes my hand and drags me into the girls’ loos, locking us into a heavily
graffitied cubicle, I don’t protest. Green paint flakes off the walls, the light dim, the whole place
grimy. There’s the usual stuff about sex written on the walls, the door, the cistern, as well as
band names, phone numbers, lyrics and lines of poems. Sarah takes out a square bottle of
vodka from somewhere under her shirt, a master smuggler. She has some, I have some. No
one says anything. Nothing left to do except it.
She pushes herself against me. She’s taller, heavier, and I like that. We’re kissing, my back
to the locked door, and it’s sloppy, her lip gloss slippery and tasting fruity, better than fizzy cola
bottles. Better than playing pool. Has it been one minute, or five? We’re all tongues and caught
braces, bumping teeth, rhythmic, hardly able to breathe but not stopping. Her right leg is
between mine and I can hear the thump, thump of the music, she moves against me shyly. I’m
52
Illustration by Mike Force
aware of voices in the next cubicle, people talking about
drugs, but it’s distant, it’s not solid like this kiss. My
hands hold her firmly at the waist. I want it to last forever,
I want her to like me, to want to see me again, to—
There’s a beeping sound, not the music, closer. Oh
shit! she says, pulling away and looking at her watch. It’s
ten, I’m getting picked up, I gotta go or they’ll be totally
pissed off waiting. Will you be here next week? I nod. I’m
covered in lip gloss, dazed.
There was never a next week.
You’re a great kisser, I tell her. I can’t even look her
in the eye. It’s the first and only thing I say to her. Her
voice is posh, husky, grammar school. She gives me
one more quick kiss on the mouth, smiles a huge smile,
then fumbles with the lock and shoots out, leaving me
standing there grinning like an idiot. Bye!
In fifteen years I’ve never seen Sarah again. But I
hope she sometimes thinks fondly of the girl she knew
as Linda, who loved her for about fifteen minutes in 1998,
in a youth club, in a town in the south east of England.
53
LADYLIKE
BEHAVIOR
THE KISS
GWENN SEEMEL | PORTLAND, OR | DIGITALLY ENHANCED ACRYLIC ON PANEL
54
I THINK, YOU SEE
ROBERTO CARLOS ORTIZ | NEW ORLEANS, LA
There’s really no need for explanations, but I’ll rely on the usual one: I did it to further
my research. It’s one of the few perks of the academic mind frame; you never procrastinate,
you always research. Therefore it was for study purposes that I strayed from revising my
overdue manuscript to focus on the young man who’d been checking me out in the library’s
reading room.
He wasn’t really that cute, but with a nice face, a bit on the heavy side. He reminded me
of a shorter, leaner and more handsome version of Laird Cregar, a very talented but forgotten
character actor from the 1940s. Cregar was a Hollywood closet case with body image issues
who died from a heart attack at thirty-one, following a crash diet through which he’d hoped
to improve his looks and his chances at playing romantic roles. He was 6’3”, weighed between
250 and 300 pounds for most of his career, and once called himself “a grotesque,” “too big,
too tall, too heavy.” Cregar embodied the archetype of the tortured soul anguished by his
sexuality, and his best-known films (The Lodger and Hangover Square) have been re-read as
portrayals of a tormented homosexual.
The young man checking me out at the library, however, didn’t show any traces of sexual
anguish. He shamelessly stared at me in the open, in a very crowded university library full
of Asians (clichéd, but true), med school students and—apparently it was their study hour—
a surprisingly large number of frat boys and sorority girls. Nobody paid any attention to us,
however; all the students in the room had at least two screens to keep their eyes busy. Still,
it dawned on me that, even though I was only one generation older, I never would’ve dared
to check out another man so brazenly during my undergraduate years. Not in such a public
space, surrounded by guys who looked like they casually used the word faggot as part of
their jokes.
As flattering as it was, the young man’s attention made me feel foolish, especially after
I started spending more and more time going back and forth, looking at him as much as my
laptop screen. Like most young people nowadays, he texted and scrolled on his phone while
I attempted to keep clicking and typing, pretending to work on my paper. I’m too old for this,
1I thought.
Contrary to what my friends think, my sole purpose for going to the library is to work
on my manuscript, not to cruise or be cruised by anyone, certainly not by kids probably
born during my teen years. That night I’d been struggling to write what would become a
groundbreaking scholarly analysis of 1950s and 60s teen star Annette Funicello, supported
by the latest theories on queer performance and ethnic representation. Despite not being
regarded as a gay icon (a concept that, based on what I’d been reading, was contested by
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Photo by Scott Caparelli
the younger generation as somehow outdated), I was determined to show that Annette’s
chaste image was somehow queer.
The idea came to me after I heard Bob Rafelson, who directed her in the 1968 movie Head,
starring The Monkees, describe her and the film’s other cameo players as “losers.” I had very
fond memories of Annette from my childhood. I’d seen some of her early films during a brief
period in which my family subscribed to the Disney Channel, but what I remembered most
were her 1960s beach party movies, which for some bizarre reason were played repeatedly
(dubbed into Spanish) by a local TV station and whose slapstick humor perfectly suited a
lower-class Puerto Rican kid.
I realize now that must have been one of my first impressions of what young Americans
were like: bikini babes and shirtless surfers dancing and romancing over sunny California
beaches. Due to those memories, and to the fact that I’d also been often called a loser,
I decided I’d put my academic training to good use and write in her defense. Annette wasn’t
a loser, I decided. Annette was queer.
I intended to argue that she was queer in the basic sense of odd. With her Italian name
and ethnic looks, Annette stood out when she made her TV debut in 1955 as a member of the
Mickey Mouse Club. She also looked very different from the other bikini babes in her 1960s
teen movies and yet, in spite of her unusual looks and limited acting and singing abilities,
Annette became a star in TV, music, and films. Her charm and love of performance overcame
her limitations and odd looks.
“You won’t get much respect by becoming an Annette Funicello specialist,” my advisor
warned me.
True, but that didn’t worry me. On the contrary, it fueled me, strengthening our loser
bond. However, I still hadn’t figured out a way to transform my ideas into a persuasive paper.
Watching her movies again, I soon found that the silly jokes, so amusing as a child, were mindnumbingly dull as an adult, though I still liked the catchy pop songs. I had to concentrate and
find a solution, but how could I with that young guy around?
As I casually moved my eyes away from my laptop screen to make sure the not-so-cute
guy, lying down on a sofa to my left, was still checking me out, I became aware that writing
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about Annette wouldn’t make much of an impression on my twenty-one-year-old admirer.
I actually didn’t know his age, but I guessed. He was a college student. He couldn’t be
younger than eighteen, so at least he was over the age of consent, and I wasn’t twice as old.
He seemed too brazen to be a freshman, so he had to be at least a sophomore, which brought
him up to nineteen, calming my fears that I might be his parents’ age. I hoped he wasn’t
twenty, because that reminded me of how foolishly old I’d felt back when I realized I was no
longer a teenager.
I was certain Annette and her films would mean nothing to a gay guy his age. He hadn’t
even been conceived when she starred in her last movie in the late 1980s, and he was probably
still in grade school when they released the film adaptation of Charles Busch’s queer parody of
the beach party movies. Would he take pleasure if I showed him clips of my favorite Annette
songs (“The Monkey’s Uncle” and “Pajama Party”)? Would he appreciate the corny charms
of Frankie and Annette’s best duets (“Beach Blanket Bingo” and “I Think, You Think”)?
I checked online and found out Annette was twenty when she starred in the first Beach
Party movie. Coincidentally, the plot was about a professor studying the “wild mating habits”
of the young, though he was at a beach and not a library reading room. It gave me an odd
sense of relief to find out that Robert Cummings, who played the professor, was thirty-two
years older than Annette. By comparison, the young man now giving me insinuatingly coy
glances as he walked to the library stacks—and I were practically the same age, at least
in appearance.
My friends would’ve laughed at that suggestion. They would’ve argued that any youthful
illusion was caused by the fact that I was sitting far away, that the lighting was flattering, that
the cold weather favored my skin. They would’ve reasoned he wasn’t very cute, so he probably
had lower standards than other guys his age. They’d also point out that none of the hunky frat
boys were checking me out and quickly dismiss any fantasy I’d built while exchanging glances.
“Don’t get mad,” they would’ve said. “We’re being honest. You don’t want to act like
a fool, do you?”
Luckily, none of my friends were around to spoil any delusions. Plus I was smart enough
not to risk following an undergraduate student to the library stacks. Would I have done it,
though, if I were ten or fifteen years younger? Would I have felt comfortable enough to express
my desires in public?
He walked back slowly, still looking at me. I couldn’t recall any other man ever staring
that way outside a gay bar or club. I suppose the way he looked at me proved that times had
changed. The young think and act differently, though I don’t qualify as old, especially given that
I’m a writer. (Didn’t I read an article where a 48-year-old was introduced as a young author?)
Shouldn’t I act young, then? Isn’t that what being queer is all about? While everyone else is
busy staring at their laptop and phone screens, two men desire each other openly, imagining
future possibilities.
He started to pack his laptop while I took one more look at the document I should’ve been
finishing. I had the strong suspicion that Annette wouldn’t approve of our behavior. In her
movies, you see a lot of flesh, but there’s no sex. Clean virginal fun prevails. How, then, did
I intend to argue she was queer?
I’d have to figure that later. The cute young guy stopped briefly on his way out of the
reading room. His last look came with a knowing smile; clearly it was time to stop. But I
wasn’t procrastinating, just furthering my research.
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ARTIFICAT 1
JUSTIN WILSON AND RUSTY WALTON | SEATTLE, WA
Rusty and I collaborated to create images that appear to be documentation of an
imaginary culture where we could satire things within our culture from a safe distance. The bird
characters developed from working as a substitute teacher in my old high school. I returned to
find the place unchanged — the same lesson plans, the same clichés and the same fear I saw
in the eyes of closeted gay youth. All the good and bad things I remembered from high school
were regurgitated mindlessly by the next generation the way a baby bird eats straight from its
parent’s mouth. The birds are a coming-of-age story where the offspring grow up to value the
same things as the parent.
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ARTIFICAT 2
ARTIFICAT 3
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POLLY WANT
A POLLY
RAM TOUGH
GWENN SEEMEL | PORTLAND, OR | DIGITALLY ENHANCED ACRYLIC ON PANEL
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THE BENT CORNER
Bent is the nation’s first and (to our knowledge) only queer writing school
located in Seattle. Our learning model redefines the study of writing based on the
radical notion that queer stories and voices must be heard. We practice a positive
feedback model, prioritizing discussions of what works in a piece and why.
We provide affordable writing classes for queers of all types and encourage
underrepresented voices within our communities by incorporating social justice
and anti-oppression values into our curricula and organizational policies.
The Bent Corner is our new quarterly column where teachers can share tips,
notes, and advice for writers.
To learn more or to see our class selection, go to bentwriting.com.
Title of the poem:
“My Gender is for Mothers”
Poem by Nicole Masangkay
Feedback by Bent’s Fabian Romero
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SWAY
TUCK
GRAY LYONS | SOUTH BEND, IN | SILVER GELATIN PRINTS
These images reflect a balance between the tentative uncertainty
and exploratory excitement of early adolescent relationships.
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