A QUEER C H R O N O LO GY
Elena Lee An d e r s on
NONFICTION
Seven up as a Home Depot Worker for Halloween. Baggy jeans with Ia dress hammer slung through the loop on my thigh, a backwards cap, a bright orange apron. In the photographs, I’m grinning a gap-toothed full moon smile, looking like every stereotypical lesbian you’ve ever heard of. Maybe everyone should have figured it out then. Maybe they did.
Nine They think I’m contemplating astronomy—what this expansive universe looks like through the keyhole of my father’s telescope— but on the tip top of Honeywell Hill, I have something else on my mind. My Girl Scout troop is working toward another badge, but I’ve checked out, only able to eavesdrop on my dad’s conversation with another parent. “That used bookshop on University, Biermeier Books, you know it? My uncle and his partner own it.” My mind is speckled with light, small openings to hope like the stars poking through the solid black night, but I can’t explain why yet. My great uncles, David and Bill, are like my second parents. I know they live together, travel together, and love each other, like my parents do. But (per what I’ll later learn was their request), my parents always called them “roommates,” until now.
Ten
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