Q* Anthology of Queer Culture 2.1

TO ONE ANOTHER

Q ANTHOLOGY OF QUEER CULTURE Volume 2, Issue 1: Spring 2018

AND THE WORLD

Q* Anthology of Queer Culture Copyright Š 2018 by Q* Anthology of Queer Culture All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the USA

Understand this if you understand nothing: it is a powerful thing to be seen.1 - A. Emezi

Q

ANTHOLOGY OF QUEER CULTURE

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

Editor-in-Chief: Jack Chellman Assistant Editors-in-Chief: Joseph French Kyle J Gename Associate Editors: ChiChi Abii Rachel Abrams Jei-Si Ang Liza Ayres Em Battle Lucy Catlett Blake Hesson Melanie Pace Joe Paola Kasey Roper Nia Thomas Dan Tschinkel Alumni Advisor: Mitchell Wellman

4

Purpose Q* Anthology of Queer Culture is a student-run annual literary magazine and online platform that publishes artistic content relating to LGBTQ (or queer) culture. Q* offers queer authors and artists an outlet to share their thoughts and feelings about LGBTQ life at a time when such outlets remain rare both nationally and at the University of Virginia. Q* also endeavors to promote dialogue between queer and non-queer communities about LGBTQ identity and advocacy.

Platform As a new platform for queer voices at the University of Virginia, Q* experiments with traditional publication conventions in its content as well as in the writers and artists it highlights.

Q* accepts a broad spectrum of queer artistic expressions in an attempt to respect the broad spectrum of ways in which queer identity can be understood. Short stories, poetry, personal reflections, nonfiction essays, paintings, photography—these are only some of the many types of submission that we welcome. Q* similarly understands that we cannot focus solely on students in order to understand the queer experience at the University of Virginia. We encourage submissions from University alumni and faculty as well as Charlottesville community members.

Publication Q*s Editorial Board maintain complete creative control over which submissions are accepted, how pieces are edited, and how the magazine comes together. Submissions to Q* are reviewed by a team of copy editors and a smaller group of two to three executive editors. In a final stage, editors review the content in more detail, refining flow, syntax, and general layout. Approved pieces will be formatted and published online and/or in print by a team of production editors. Print work is selected based on content quality.

5

8

10

Letter from the Editors

Thematic Note

12

14

Queer Culture Is

Magnus Hirshfeld’s Obituaries

Ian Ware

Madison Aurnou

18 20 36 Masculinity

At Sea

OH

Diane D’Costa

Isabella Ciambotti

Aliyah Cotton

39

40

Masculinity

Poem

Diane D’Costa

Basil (Gillian) Lee

42 46 51 6

I Do Not Want To Die

Bedroom Door

Untitled

Basil (Gillian) Lee

Elise Mollica

Diane D’Costa

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

57

52 The Little Macaroon

Masculinity

Kasey Roper

Diane D’Costa

58 64 66 An Awe-Filled Year

Asexual Encounters

Dallas Michelle Ducar

Nicholas Grimes

Sexual Abilities: The Intersection Of Disabled And LGBTQ Identities

73 74 Masculinity

Stains

Diane D’Costa

Zach Schauffler

Mary Grace Sheers

81 82 90 Masculinity

Metronormativity

Masculinity

Diane D’Costa

Heidi Siegrist

Diane D’Costa

92 94 Afterword

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

Endnotes

7

Letter from the Editors This year, Campus Pride Index named UVA “Best College in Virginia for LGBTQ Students.” In many ways, this award highlights the real strides that the University of Virginia has taken over the years toward better respecting and accepting its queer community members. This year, Housing and Residence Life introduced a gender-neutral “open housing” option for upperclass apartment areas and shared apartments in graduate student housing. The Office of Undergraduate Admission recently added an optional LGBTQ-identifer question to the UVA application, and the LGBTQ Center recently completed a significant renovation project. Despite these successes, we cannot allow the Campus Pride award to distract us from the many challenges still facing queer community members at this University and in Charlottesville. In so many ways, queerphobia or ignorance about the queer experience continues to corrode the experience of our LGBTQ peers.

In its second year at the University of Virginia, Q* Anthology of Queer Culture has stood at the intersection of these two realities of UVA queer life. On the one hand, Q*’s emergence on Grounds represents a victory in and of itself, and much of the magazine’s content reflects the many joys and wonders that queerness can bring. On the other hand, Q* continues to reflect many of the anxieties, fears, and pains associated with living as a queer person in an imperfect and often-intolerant society. Q*, then, has become an important agent for this stage in the University’s history. As Q* sheds light on the many thrills of queer identity, it challenges the University to continue cultivating an environment that allows queer community members to thrive. And as Q* refuses to ignore the real tragedy of our University’s and our society’s systemic bigotries, it demands a radical reevaluation of University culture and policy.

In the second edition of Q*, the Editorial Board has stayed true to the journal’s core principles while granting it the freedom to evolve and expand in its ambitions. Whereas Q*’s first edition divided content between four distinct sections—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork—the second edition has shifted away from this structure. Just as queer communities question conventional boundaries between social identities, so too does the new Q* Anthology respect the poetry in prose, the truth in fiction, and the artistry of the written word. Stylistic changes in the journal’s design echo this commitment to fluidity, ambiguity, and adaptability. New biographies for authors and artists more visibly showcase the University’s queer talent and help to add nuance to the journal’s content. And the content itself seeks to highlight a more intersectional spectrum of queer voices and a more experimental body of creative content.

We invite all Q* Anthology readers to get involved with the effort to support and contribute to this project. View past and present Q* Anthology content on our website, www.qanthology.com. Like the journal and follow its progress on its Facebook page, www.facebook.com/qanthology. Send submissions, 8

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

donation inquiries, and any other comments to our email at uvaqueeranthology@gmail.com. And contribute to the editing and production processes by joining the Q* Anthology staff or Editorial Board.

Thank you for your support of Q* Anthology of Queer Culture. We hope you enjoy the spring 2018 edition.

Sincerely,

Jack Chellman, Editor-in-Chief he, him, his College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2018, Political and Social Thought & English Jack Chellman is a fourth-year in the College of Arts and Sciences double majoring in political and social thought and the English department’s area program in literary prose. Outside of working on the Q* Anthology, he’s served as president of the Queer Student Union and president of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. He’s also written for the opinion section of The Cavalier Daily and run the Minority Rights Coalition’s “Unpacking Privilege” program. Next year he will be studying journalism at Royal Holloway, University of London as a Marshall Scholar.

Joseph French, Assistant Editor-in-Chief he, him, his College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2019, English & Classics Joseph French is a third-year English and Classics double major, concentrating in Latin poetry. He is a devoted member of the Washington Literary Society and Debating Union and a staff writer for the News section of The Cavalier Daily. He has performed in various plays for the UVA Drama Department and LiveArts downtown. He reads and writes in his spare time.

Kyle J Gename, Assistant Editor-in-Chief they, them, theirs School of Architecture Class of 2019, Master of Landscape Architecture Kyle is a second-year in the School of Architecture, studying Landscape Architecture. They are humbled to have designed the layout of Q*’s second volume and look forward to contributing to further issues. Besides spending long hours in the studio, they serve as a panelist on the LGBTQ Center Speakers Bureau and represent the School of Architecture on the Honor Committee. Kyle is an avid botanist and enjoys working in the garden.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

9

Thematic Note The theme for this spring’s edition of Q* Anthology of Queer Culture—“To One Another and the World”—comes from a quote by transgender activist Janet Mock. In her book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, Mock writes the following about stories and systemic change:

I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community.

In her discussion of the power of voice and narrative for changing society, Mock lays out a clear blueprint for the project that the Q* Anthology has undertaken at the University of Virginia. As it offers a new platform for the creative voices of UVA’s LGBTQ community members, Q* endeavors to tell our stores in the way that Mock describes: first to ourselves to build solidarity and cohesion, and then to one another and the world to build empathy and begin breaking down systems of oppression. And as Q* expands its influence and evolves its presentation for its second edition, the journal ultimately aims for the kind of “revolutionary” creative act that Mock discusses. We believe in the power of the poetry, prose, artwork, and ideas of UVA’s queer community, and this spring’s content cleaves especially close to the type of expression Mock identifies. As you explore the content in Q*’s second edition, we hope you’ll keep its social relevance in mind: this material is not just for individuals, but for a community. Not for one reader, but for “one another and the world.”

10

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

11

QUEER CULTURE IS nonfiction

IAN WARE he, him, his College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2019, American Studies & Politics It’s been a Twitter meme for a while to tweet pictures with the caption “this is queer culture,” or to tweet about common queer experiences starting with “queer culture is.” I love that the queer identity is so multifaceted but has such a common core that it’s easy to identify with almost all of the tweets and memes that people create around it. So I really just felt like writing an extended version of that to sum up experiences that I’ve had or that my queer family has had, and it just ended up being a series of unsent tweets in that form. When making my own art, I take a lot of cues from incredible queer artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Rauschenberg.

12

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

queer culture is running out of people to swipe on tinder in fewer than 24 hours and queer culture is being depressed for no reason and showing up to class late and tired and queer culture is not knowing how relationships work because you didn’t get to go through the high school romance phase and queer culture is drinking Four Loko on someone’s roof, painting your nails and listening to Blonde on a phone in a cup so it’s just a little bit louder and queer culture is being afraid of having a roommate your first year at college and queer culture is introducing your partner as your “friend” and queer culture is getting emails from your TA asking if you’re ok because “you seemed down today” and queer culture is making memes all damn day and queer culture is always lowering your expectations and queer culture is knowing exactly why the cops haven’t found Sage Smith and queer culture is subtweeting about that football player in your discussion section who doesn’t know how pronouns work and doesn’t care enough to learn and queer culture is eating ice cream at 2:00 a.m. on a tuesday with the family you’ve created and queer culture is learning to know your beauty and queer culture is being scared to flirt because what if you misjudged them and you end up in the hospital or dead out back and queer culture is having your therapist as a favorite in your contacts and queer culture is wishing you could afford a therapist and queer culture is always feeling like you’re 16 and queer culture is watching straight couples make out at pride and queer culture is crying in the shower and not knowing why and queer culture is a revolution of which we didn’t ask to be part but that we have to believe we can win

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

13

MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD’S OBITUARIES poetry

MADISON AURNOU she, her, hers or ce, cer, cers College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2021, Undeclared In my poetry writing class, our assignment was to write a poem of “witness.” Ever since I learned about him, I’ve always felt a special sort of attachment to Magnus Hirschfeld, so I figured I definitely wanted to write about him and his life.

I researched him a bit more in depth and found out that he was once beaten so badly by Nazis that newspapers sent out an obituary of him while he was still alive. I found something really special in that concept of him having multiple obituaries.

14

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

“Only ignorance or bigotry can condemn those who feel differently.

Don’t despair! As a homosexual, you can still make valuable contributions to humanity.”1 – Magnus Hirschfeld, Anders als die Andern, 1919 I. MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD IS DEAD; 1920 AND “THE WELL-KNOWN EXPERT ON SEXUAL SCIENCE”1 IS DEAD. MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD IS NOT DEAD. 1920 AND IT IS SUCH A SHAME THAT “THIS SHAMELESS AND HORRIBLE POISONER OF OUR PEOPLE” HAS NOT COME TO HIS “WELL-DESERVED END.”2 We, the dust between the brick, watch as Nazis try to stomp Magnus Hirschfeld’s face into 17 million bloody butterflies 13 years before the first concentration camp. The butterflies stutteringly kiss the wind with their wings, but the ripped planes of his boot-torn face pull them back in with every beat of his heart and further spill of blood.

Though we cushioned his fall, none of us know what those insect eyes of his saw at that first blow.

Newspapers were so eager to hear the news of him choking on his own looped proboscis tongue that they had to issue a statement three days later correcting themselves: “We apologize, Mr. Hirschfeld is still alive, and this is not to say that we wanted him dead as much as whoever attempted to blind rather than blacken both of his odd, manylensed eyes did.” Magnus Hirschfeld smiles in his hospital bed. We dance TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

15

in our place trapped in the lights.

The paper flutters under his fingertips. Who else gets to read their own obituary? he asks.

II. MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD IS DEAD; 1932 AND WE HAVE SET HIS PERVERTED TEXTS AFLAME. MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD IS DEAD; 1932 AND WHAT A SHAME WE COULDN’T CATCH HIS FLESH. We, the stars not-watching this disaster, imagine that Magnus Hirschfeld had a feeling he wasn’t coming back when he edged out Germany’s door. If we struggle against our spatial constraints, we can see indistinct flames through the black sky’s coat of smoke, which it pulls up around itself to protect the bright, multi-colored eyes of potential existences. We feel more than see Magnus Hirschfeld’s eyes struggle to tear the darkness of the night in France, and there is nothing to smile about now when all those bloody butterflies are nothing but flaming thorax shreds and wing dust across black gloves’ too-straight fingertips; they will not help any future keepers of looped tongues.

They only float up to join the sky in its foggy disgust, missing each starry eye under its coat. What is it? We wriggle to try to break out of our birth cocoons; uncover our eyes. Let us see.

III. MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD IS DEAD; 1935 AND IN THIS FOOTNOTE, WE WISH THE MAN A HAPPY POSTMORTEM BIRTHDAY. MAGNUS 16

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

HIRSCHFELD IS DEAD; MAY 14TH, 1935 AND NOW WE MOVE BACK TO WARTIME NEWS. We brighten in our twinkling. Do you hear that? The collective question, the sky shuffles its coat, a pumping set of butterfly wings enters, stopped in one life but stronger than anything in ours. Our grandparents are barely born, if they are at all, and Magnus Hirschfeld wishes us all luck on his way up.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

17

MASCULINITY Diane D’Costa

AT SEA fiction

ISABELLA CIAMBOTTI she, her, hers College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2019 English, Area Program in Literary Prose I love writing about teenagers because everything that happens to them is so important and dramatic and emotionally felt. And any kind of relationship sisters have, which is always already so complicated, gets really tested during teenage years. I have two sisters and I was always trying to figure out if I wanted to rely on them and my mom to help me interpret the world, or if I only wanted to rely on myself. That’s probably where the inspiration for this story came from. Well, that and my very distinct memory of my high school’s bathrooms. So much always went down in the bathrooms.

20

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

The best stall was at the very end of the bathroom, where she could rest her back on the tiled wall while she waited. This had been her usual place since the start of eleventh grade, when her old table told her that she cared too much about everything and was ruining their fun.

She made sure to keep her backpack in front of her feet so that she wouldn’t be spotted sitting on the floor of a bathroom stall, and she kept her eye on the yawning gap beneath the stall door. Sneakers and mismatched socks and sandals and painted toenails paced to and fro. Why was the gap so big? Surely this was a design flaw.

She instinctively shrank away from the gap, closer to the toilet—too close. Ouch. The base of her skull had caught the metal corner of the “Dispose of Feminine Products Here” box, and she was wriggling around, trying to reposition her crouch, when she heard it—her voice. Floating in and around the sharp girl chatter that echoed off the tile. In one movement Naia stood up, swung her backpack onto her shoulder, and unlatched the door.

Life suddenly flowed all around her.

Girls, girl-colors: pink, blue, white, black. Hair flicking and flashing, laughs and gasps and the glowing blue screen of phones in hands, but in the motion there was stillness. A pink backpack at the far mirror, and bright purple headphones, and a girl. A girl, but not like the others. What was she listening to? She was rummaging in her backpack for her makeup bag. Her feet twitched slightly to the beat. Naia let the water run at the sink, leaving her hands in the basin uselessly. First, she knew, came mascara—and there it was. She held still to concentrate.

The tendons that ran upwards from her heels were narrow lines, standing in sharp relief as she leaned forward to the mirror, holding her balance.

Legs—the legs! Golden—disappeared, but the gold returned, a sliver of skin where her backpack had shifted her shirt upwards. Her nostrils flared as she concentrated. Then came the patting and blotting of teenage cheeks, and then lip gloss, and then the final, ostentatious flourish of a powder brush—thousands of fine mica particles sent whirling into the air, glittering beneath the fluorescent light.

She stood up straight—the sliver of “GIRLS, GIRL-COLORS: PINK, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK. HAIR FLICKING AND FLASHING, LAUGHS AND GASPS AND THE GLOWING BLUE SCREEN OF PHONES IN HANDS, BUT IN THE MOTION THERE WAS STILLNESS.

gold vanished—and shook her hair out, accidentally knocking out an earbud, and turned to say hello to a friend. Her golden legs wandered away, leaving Naia to stare at the place where Golden’s mirror self had been. *** When Naia gave their screen door a regular-sized push, it flew open so violently that it slammed into the wall behind it. Aly jumped, nearly knocking her cereal bowl over. Naia

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

21

was still forgetting that the hinges weren’t fixed. Probably on purpose.

She stalked across the room, past Aly and her Cheerios, aiming for the mysteries of the kitchen cabinet. She was sweating so much that her curls were clinging to her neck.

“Did you not take the bus? You didn’t answer my text.” Aly had already looked in the kitchen cabinet at the pancake mix and stale pretzels and Cheez-Its and canned beans.

“Did you eat the peanut butter crackers?” Naia shut the cabinet door with a sigh but it bounced, nearly hitting her in the face.

“It’s broken. It’s all crooked. Why does nothing we own ever work?” She slammed a bowl and spoon onto the table across from Aly. “Put it on The List,” said Aly, nodding towards the piece of paper on the refrigerator. She had started The List as a catalogue of all the things that needed fixing but also needed Mom to have more than two days off of work at a time. After Naia had added about fifteen exclamation points next to “water pressure,” it had become a kind of message board. “Get your hair out of the drain,” mom had replied.

“Has the AC been fixed? No. No it hasn’t. So what the hell’s the point.

I can’t believe you ate all the peanut butter crackers. It was you and Charlie, wasn’t it? You all have to make this garbage house worse, don’t you. I can’t even exist in it anymore.”

her spoon, thinking about Charlie probably. Why didn’t she care? Didn’t she care? The door had been broken for weeks and the AC was fucked again, nothing ever worked, and Naia could feel hot sticky air creeping in, a thick wet blanket. Cicadas screamed outside. They weren’t due to die off for a few more weeks and their incessant shrieking followed Naia around, making the inside of her head vibrate, interrupting everything—she spilled the milk trying to get it in her bowl. Milk, then cereal. And a little bit of cereal at a time. Otherwise it would get soggy and mushy, and Naia hated when things tasted like nothing. She was still sweating. When she lifted her shirt to wipe her face she realized that it too was damp.

If she had ridden the bus home her shirt would not be disgusting. If she had ridden the bus home she would’ve sat where she always sat, about ten seats down on the right side with her body slouched and scrunched so that her knees pressed hard into the back of the seat in front of her. She was balanced that way. Besides, if she sat normally in shorts, her thighs would splay out. She hated that. Aly never cared, she sat “normally” next to her on the inside. The little sister side, the way it had always been, so Naia could watch over her— “Just because I’m fifteen doesn’t mean I can’t be—be serious with Charlie. You always have to criticize everything.”

***

But Naia didn’t watch over her anymore. Because Charlie was in their lives now, and on the bus he took Aly away to the seat in front of Naia.

Naia was still sweating. It was so hot.

And Aly just sitting there, slurping

“You’re unbelievable,” Naia said. “You can’t even see what you’re doing.

22

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

You’ve been dating for, what, four months?”

If she had taken the bus home today she would’ve watched the back of Aly and Charlie’s heads, watched them gently bump together as the school bus jostled and shook. If she had gotten off at her stop she would’ve seen two wet sweat marks on the gray plastic where her knees had been, “I WILL NOT STAND TO HAVE MY GIRLS END UP LIKE SOME OF THE OTHER GIRLS I’VE SEEN. THE GIRLS

had taken, and they would mark the time in tiny pencil print on the back of their closet door. They figured they would show it to Mom someday. She had a good sense of humor.

“Are you serious? Are you serious, Aly? You’re gonna sit here and tell me you haven’t fucked him yet?”

“Oh my god, Nai!” “I know you’ve done it. You can’t keep a secret worth shit. You know you’re gonna have to admit to it eventually.”

“That’s not—why do you have to make everything so horrible?”

I GREW UP WITH. HELL, MY

***

OWN FAMILY.”

mirroring the heads above them.

“If it’s really that bad, why doesn’t Mom have a problem with it? Huh?” Aly asked. Naia wanted to shout at her—Aly hadn’t even admitted what she had done! She hadn’t even admitted it, hadn’t forced them to sit through one of Mom’s “sermons” where they sat on the uncomfortable couch in the family room, instead of her bed, and mom didn’t let them break eye contact until she had finished talking. During the most recent sermon about grades, Mom talked for nine minutes straight. “I will not stand to have my girls end up like some of the other girls I’ve seen.

The girls I grew up with. Hell, my own family.” And, “I don’t provide for you and buy you clothes and take care of you for kicks.” And so on. Naia would watch Mom’s eyebrows move up and down as she lectured, then they would go back to their room, and Naia would tell Aly how long the sermon

Aly reached the hallway in about five steps. She stood in the middle of it and spun around frantically, as if she were going to find some safe, quiet privacy for which she hadn’t already looked a million times before. There was her mom’s room. Aly couldn’t make it past the doorway, looking at the clothes and scrubs tangled up on the floor, the little jewelry tree and red ring box underneath the big mirror across the bed. In the drawer right below them were the panties and bras that Aly loved to feel, the silky patterns exotic beneath her fingertips. But it didn’t feel good anymore, being in that room without Mom. So Aly went to her usual place on the back steps, the concrete’s lingering warmth pressing gently against her, and swatted away the mosquitoes. The cicadas drowned everything out. *** “Why are you staring at your sister?”

Charlie asked.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

23

“No reason,” Aly said.

“What’d she do now?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing, I’m just wondering what she’s doing now, is all.” Aly watched Naia stand still at the center of the crowded cafeteria.

“Can’t she see all the people around her? I mean, like, does she know what’s going on?” Charlie asked.

Someone bumped Naia from behind and she jumped but managed to keep her balance. “She’s deep into her Naia world again. Watch out. There’s reality getting in the way.”

“Maybe she wants to stand there, Charlie.” Aly watched someone else swing their backpack onto their shoulder and smack Naia on the arm by accident. Naia didn’t notice. Naia scratched her arm distractedly and started to cut a determined path

“THE TILED FLOOR WAS SLIPPERY, ALL OF A SUDDEN, AND THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS HURT AGAINST THE SUNLIGHT, AND EVERYTHING CAME TO NAIA SO LOUD, WHY DID PEOPLE FEEL THE NEED TO SHOUT ALL THE TIME?

through the crowded tables.

“Well she’s moving now.”

“My 24

point

still

stands,”

retorted

Aly, but Charlie had turned back to his phone, frantically swiping and swearing like everyone else at the table. A new trivia game had come out, and it had a real pot if you played at certain times—some senior had won sixty dollars so, of course, it was a huge hit. Charlie wasn’t very good at it. He cussed loudly. Aly turned to follow Naia’s baggy black sweatshirt.

It made her stand out more than she probably wanted. Charlie shouted again. Phones weren’t that much better than the inside of Naia’s head, she could’ve told him. *** One wall of the cafeteria was all windows, and the light from outside turned a funny bright white when it laid its window-patterns across the tables and over people’s skin. It was too hot out to sit in the courtyards; a million people had all crammed into this one room. Square pizza today. Its peculiar cardboard smell fuzzied Naia’s brain. Golden always packed her lunch. A banana or an apple, yogurt, and some nuts, maybe.

Usually almonds.

Almonds were perfect, wrinkly teardrops. Naia had asked her mom to buy them at the grocery store once. Well. She had run off to fill a plastic bag at the “Self-Serve in Bulk” section, where the lentils and rice and granola were neatly packed in containers. She had dropped the bag of almonds in the cart while her mom looked for cottage cheese. Aly had started shrieking at Naia when the bag rang up eleven dollars at checkout, as if Naia had personally ripped that money from her hands— or, more likely, because mom didn’t bother being angry at Naia. It’s okay,

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

nuts have lots of protein and healthy fats, she had said. Being a nurse meant that Mom was always spouting stuff like that.

There! Her. She was there. There was Golden, sitting at one of the blue tables in the far back: the silent study tables. Alone.

The tiled floor was slippery, all of a sudden, and the fluorescent lights hurt against the sunlight, and everything came to Naia so loud, why did people feel the need to shout all the time? It was deafening, the light and the loud trying to keep her rooted to the spot.

But she pushed through it, her feet leading her, weaving through bodies to the other end of the cafeteria.

Walking, walking, now. Stop. *** “Charlie, look,” Aly nudged him. “What is Nai doing? She doesn’t know anyone there.” Naia had sat down across the room at one of the blue tables, the ones that were supposed to be silent study tables. “Oh my god, is she doing homework?” Aly asked, genuinely surprised, but Charlie grabbed her arm because he had ten seconds to figure out what kind of tree had white bark. She turned to laugh at him for wondering aloud if it could be a redwood. *** Golden suddenly looked up. Quick!

Naia put her head back down and opened her notebook to a random page. It had a bunch of her scribbles and drawings on it, of course. She didn’t even know if she had a notebook with actual notes in it. She flipped to another page, still staring at the

table’s blue plastic. She felt greenbrown eyes on her.

“Nice drawing.” She’d drawn a large Koi fish in the center of this page.

Koi had been featured in a novel Naia had read in English class. She couldn’t remember the book, but she remembered the Koi fish because she had looked it up online and copied it into her notebook. This particular iteration stretched the whole page, its fins extravagantly curly, and all around it she had drawn tiny shingles, like fish scales. Inside each shingle was a different pattern—hatching or tiny dots, or stripes, or sometimes bits of ear or finger, whatever she had been staring at. Across the page on each line she had written as much of the Fibonacci Sequence as she could look up on her phone. Naia had even added shading to make the fish look three-dimensional.

“I mean seriously,” said Golden. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” She reached for Naia’s notebook and pulled it toward her to look at the picture more closely.

“I just doodled it during class.” Naia’s throat squeezed tighter and tighter together and she was sure she was going to pass out.

“It’s kinda scary. That you think all that. In your head, I mean, you just make it up. I like that the best,” she said, pointing to the tail. “How curvy it is.”

“You probably like that part because it’s sinuous,” Naia said. “In a special way, because the numbers, the ones on the background, they’re specific.

They’re the Fibonacci Sequence.

That’s nature’s rule, like, nature always

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

25

makes the same patterns, especially in curves. It’s a specific ratio.” Golden was looking at her again, but Naia wasn’t thinking anymore, it was too late. “For example. Like your lips, the way they pout beneath your nose and above your chin, all the dimpling has specific number ratios. And the curve of your shoulders and waist.” She would’ve gone on but Golden pushed the notebook back toward her and, unless Naia was just imagining it, scooted further away from her in her chair. “I mean like anyone’s shoulders.

I mean they’re all just ratios.”

“Yeah.” Golden reached down into her backpack and pulled out a yogurt.

Strawberry, the label said. Her fingers peeled the plastic cover back and set it aside. One hand held the cup, the other stirred it with a plastic spoon.

A drop of the pink stuff landed on her textbook: a spherical blob that shone slightly in the light. She reached down with her index finger and scooped it up, licking her finger before opening her mouth wide to receive the spoon and more yogurt. The contours of her neck moved slightly, bone and tendon shifting under her skin. She seemed to glow as she sat there, seemed to gleam like something illumined from the inside, like something Golden.

“You like strawberry? Strawberry yogurt?” Naia asked.

“It’s just yogurt,” said Golden, and Naia wanted to unzip herself and turn herself inside out and crawl inside.

Then the highlights and hollows shifted again. Golden was looking upwards, smiling at something. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was lower and special. A big, solid shape sat down right next to Naia, its elbow sliding 26

her notebook away from Golden as it settled its weight at the table. The shape. Go away. Go away go away leave us alone.

“Hey Maeve,” it said.

“That’s not her name,” said Naia.

Because it wasn’t. Not hers, not Golden’s.

But the shape’s had a loud and deep voice, unquestioning and unquestioned. “You’ve got yogurt in your hair.” And it reached across the table and brushed its fingers across her bright, sharp cheekbone, and ran them through her wavy hair, golden. *** “She didn’t even tell me whether she liked it, the yogurt. It was strawberry,” Naia said.

“Yuck,” said mom. She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her pajamas, the girls kneeling below her. She had already brushed Aly’s hair, her fingers scratching her scalp gently as she pulled back sections of wet curls. Aly’s head had a pleasant tingling feeling from her tight braids. They both had their mother’s curly hair. Mom always wore her hair in braids—it’s just easier, she said—but she loved doing the girls’ hair, braids and buns and ponytails. They were way too old for it now. But they always let her braid their hair when she was home.

Aly watched Naia’s profile. Her hair was thicker and coarser than her own; Naia’s head jerked back a little with every brush stroke. Her eyes were closed. She was going on and on about the girl and the yogurt. They usually went over this stuff on the

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

bus, but since those conversations were apparently over, Naia had been building it all up recently, sometimes for days at a time.

“What about you, Aly? How are things going with Charlie?” asked mom.

“What does she have to do with Charlie?” Naia had snapped her head backwards, jerking a half-finished braid out of Mom’s grip.

“I’m just making conversation.”

“How are you acting like they’re similar! I don’t—we’re not even—I don’t know why you’re lumping us together like Aly and Charlie always are.” Naia didn’t faze mom much; Mom just yawned and rubbed at her thighs, letting Naia reposition herself on the carpet. “Anyway, yeah,” Naia said.

“Let’s talk about Charlie.” Aly glared at Naia until she looked at her, but Naia’s eyes were earnest, not provoking. She must’ve thought right now was a good time.

“We’re hanging out tomorrow. We’re gonna get food after school.” This was partially true. Charlie’s brother’s house was, incidentally, empty. They were going head straight there.

Mom was on night shift—she could probably get away with spending the night there, if she wanted to.

Once Aly had been caught trying to sneak out. She’d been standing frozen in the kitchen, trying not to look suspicious; Mom had leaned on the front door, still partially in shadow, looking utterly terrifying. All of a sudden Naia had run in, trying to cover for her, shouting something completely nonsensical about group projects and food and reverse curfews.

Mom had actually laughed at that one.

But Mom hadn’t really done much about her nighttime wanderings— like punishing them wasn’t worth the effort—and eventually, it seemed, she’d stopped noticing them much at all.

“Are you sure everything is going totally well?” Naia asked. Aly wanted to drag Naia and her lack of tact out of the room. I’m waiting for a good moment, she had told Naia previously.

When, Naia had scoffed, when you have children?

“Nai, let it go,” Mom said. She tied off Naia’s braid and stretched upward, groaning a bit. Aly stared at her bare legs, freckled and blotchy from too much sun, veins starting to become visible on the surface. “But you know that you—both of you—can always talk to me if you need anything.” She leaned forward to rub her calves. She needed new shoes.

“We know.”

Mom rubbed both of her eyes, stretching and pulling at her face as if it were going to make her less tired.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s totally fine. Come on, Nai. We’ll let her go to bed.” *** “Let me in, Nai! Oh my god will you freaking let me in?” The flimsy wood of their bathroom door had started to vibrate a bit from Aly’s repeated bangs. Naia stood at the sink on tiptoe, nose inches from the mirror.

The bathroom light illuminated her shiny forehead and the tiny black specks all over her nose.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

27

She was watching herself closely because yesterday had been an anomaly. The blue table and the talking. She learned that word in English, like the koi fish; it reminded her of “anemone.” A-no-ma-ly. A-nemo-ne. Weird sea creatures, a blue table—not her usual place. So she stared at herself to see if something had changed.

The purple swoop beneath her eyes, where her skin had fine, curved lines, reminded her of Mom, and she blurred her focus to try and see what she would look like when she was old. She turned her head this way and that, feeling her jaw, poking at her nose, stretching the skin across her cheekbones, widening her eyes, but that stupid overhead yellow light cast the worst shadows everywhere.

There was a raised red bump to the right of the bridge of her nose. She instinctively placed her fingernails on either side of it and squeezed. Not enough. She repositioned her nails, which had already made x’s in her skin, and tried again, hard enough to bring tears from her eyes, but she was almost there, the disgusting white part she just had to see it out. There must be enough tension, now, for it to explode, just push a bit harder— “Nai, I am going to kill you! I swear, if mom were here—” But Naia couldn’t get it. She released her fingers, leaving an inflamed red patch behind, and smacked the door with her palm. “Oh my god! You psycho!” Aly called from outside. Naia didn’t look away from the mirror, the yellow on her skin, then couldn’t stand it anymore, flicked the light off. There.

In the shadows she could be who she wanted to be, and it would be alright.

She yanked the door open.

28

“What do you want?” Naia asked. She did not expect Aly to still be there.

Naia couldn’t leave the bathroom without getting past her folded arms.

“IN THE SHADOWS SHE COULD BE WHO SHE WANTED TO BE, AND IT WOULD BE ALRIGHT.”

“Um. To get ready?” Aly stepped in front of Naia, trapping her against the shower, and began to do her hair and makeup. Naia watched for a long time, a funny feeling in her belly. Then Aly reached for the eyeliner.

“Oh hell no. Let me do that.” Aly was absolutely terrible at putting eyeliner on. She would make it crooked and bumpy and generally horrible no matter how hard she tried. Naia smiled just thinking about Aly trying to get ready for homecoming ten minutes before she had to leave. She had poked one eye and left it streaming tears—the other had looked raccoonesque.

“So you’re getting ready for Charlie?”

Naia asked.

“Oh, you know. I like to put a bit of makeup on before I see him. Even though we don’t do date-y stuff, it’s still a date.”

“Close your eyes. Stop moving!” Naia stretched out one of Aly’s eyelids to get the liner right up against her lashes. “There.” She did look nice. Her hair was finer and more reasonable than Naia’s. And her eyebrows were thinner.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

“Nai?” Aly made eye contact with her sister in the mirror. “So about Charlie.

There are some things… well, I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“But—” “I can’t do this, Aly. Not now.”

“It?”

“Do you even know which hole it goes in?” Naia pushed past Aly without looking and slammed the bedroom door. She threw herself onto her bed, dark and safe, but the cicadas screamed at her through the window.

She stuffed blankets and pillows around her head until she could barely breathe, holding them tightly over her ears, and waited to stop seeing the big horrible shape take Aly away from her. Everyone away from her.

“You know, Nai, like what we did. You know.”

“Fuck’s sake, what even is ‘it?’ I don’t even know what you’re trying to say!”

Why wouldn’t Aly just own up to it?

Making it this weird secret from Naia that she couldn’t understand made her feel even worse. Not like she had the experience to give advice, anyway—a thought which tightened her chest a bit.

“You know!” Aly said. The word she needed was short and gross and Aly did not want it to hang in the air between them.

“Seriously, Aly? He just sticks it inside—” Naia recoiled at the thought, the shape. Looming.

“No! Naia! I already know how to do it!”

“What do you want, then?” Naia asked. Inside, everything was starting to shake but she was looking at Aly’s reflection calmly, the girl with makeup on.

“Does it hurt? You?” And Aly turned around to face Naia and for a moment Naia saw a big shape pull Aly away from her, reach around her shoulders to brush Aly’s cheekbone, run his fingers through her hair. And Aly was laughing.

“You’re you asking me this stuff? Oh my god.”

“So it does hurt?”

*** Charlie rested his hand on Aly’s lower back to guide her out of the house, and her stomach squeezed a little.

She had tried to talk to Naia but she had locked the door, and she hated not getting in a last word in fights like that. It felt like part of herself was stuck there, in the bathroom, until their spat was resolved. Charlie dropped his hand to unlock the car, brushing the back pockets of her jeans.

Aly moved closer to him, wanting to feel his whole body instead of that disembodied hand, but he had already stepped forward, opening the door for her ostentatiously. The old car’s AC was useless and they had made the ten minute drive with all the windows open, Aly’s hair whipping out behind her, tangling with her necklaces. The air was still thick with moisture; when they arrived, her thighs stuck to the seat with sweat, and she wiped them quickly as Charlie retrieved the spare key for the back door.

His brother’s house only technically

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

29

had air conditioning. Every time she came back to the house there seemed to be more floor fans, perched on cardboard boxes and stacks of magazines and couch arms and anywhere else near an outlet. They whirred together with the cicadas.

She felt like she was speaking louder than usual.

“D isn’t here? I thought I was going to see him before he left,” Aly said.

Charlie’s brother was twenty four and had a full time job and was able to drive to the beach on the weekends.

Not everyone they knew got a job right out of high school like that—it was because D had learned a bit of programming and IT instead of going to class. The way Charlie talked about it, D had taught himself college and then talked his way into graduating from high school.

“Nah. Want a beer?” Charlie pulled two out of the fridge—bottles, not cans, for the girl—and they flopped onto the couch together. He moved so she could lean against him and her stomach fluttered.

Charlie was different. Charlie was a little slower. Gentler, too, and Aly liked that. They had first met in English class and he had said she was an annoying know-it-all. But I realized that you’re just smart, like my brother, he had later said. Can’t cross my woman, he would say.

She wanted to grab him and look him in the eyes, he had nice eyes, but her stomach knotted even tighter, fixing her arms to her sides. What was wrong with her? It was a perfectly normal day. They were listening to Charlie’s friends’ “mixtape.” It was called From N0thin to S0methin and 30

apparently they were going to make it big. Aly and Charlie liked to laugh about it a lot. But really, they weren’t that bad.

“We better get some of their profit,” said Aly. “Always. We’ve been supporting them from day one. If I were rich,” he said, “I would buy a nice ass apartment downtown, and some nice suits, so I would walk around importantly and people would think that I was always going to meetings and shit. Only really I wouldn’t do shit.” He took another drink. “I’d be making money by having money, you know. Investments.”

“I think I would buy a nicer hair straightener.”

“That’s it? That’s not even a real thing!

Come on, that’s all you could think of?”

“What? It was on my mind. I need a new one.” A few months ago Naia had actually burned off a chunk of her own hair by mistake. She and Aly had laughed about it for a good hour.

Every time one of them noticed the singed leftovers again they would fall into hysterics.

“I’ll buy you a new straightener right now, for Chrissakes. You gotta think big.”

“Buy me a new straightener? With what, your ‘investments?’”

Charlie finished his beer. “Maybe I will.”

Aly watched him get up from the couch and navigate the floor fans to get another, and looking at him felt

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

comfortable and terrifying at the same time. *** It was 1:43 a.m. in Naia and Aly’s room.

Naia awoke to realize she had fallen asleep. The dark, and the sudden nap, was disorienting; everything she could remember felt fuzzy and distant, as if she had slept for days. Something in her stirred. She got up and went to the fridge, feeling like she had to take advantage of this aloneness, the specialness of the silence and dark. Mom hadn’t had time; still no groceries. The promising blue-white light revealed only milk and cheese and eggs and bread, and those old jars of salsa and mustard and jam that sat in the abandoned corners of all fridges. The only thing worth stealing was some orange juice. She took the carton back to their room and sucked on it greedily, burning her throat, not bothering to sit down, drinking until she finished it, feeling as if she had expanded, swelled up with the acrid orangey taste. She lay back down and closed her eyes.

A movie and five more beers had come and gone. Aly went to the bathroom to touch herself, before, so that she might be wet this time. That must’ve been what she was missing, how she could make it easier. The wetness would make it easier. Dried mascara had flaked onto her cheeks and she brushed it off before remembering the state of her fingers. She ran them under the water, sensing Charlie waiting for her.

Golden waited in the darkness behind Naia’s eyelids. She stood at the mirror again. Naia was so close that Golden’s breath rustled the baby hairs at the

base of her skull.

Charlie was heavy and warm. Aly liked how his skin felt, emanating heat, but

“SHE GOT UP AND WENT TO THE FRIDGE, FEELING LIKE SHE HAD TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS ALONENESS, THE SPECIALNESS OF THE SILENCE AND DARK.”

his hands wouldn’t stop moving up and down and around, unbuttoning and pulling. She wished he would stop for a second so she could catch her breath. Slow down. Everything was happening and she didn’t feel ready—but she needed it to work, she wanted to have it like it was supposed to be. She could feel the bumps of the bedsprings beneath the thin mattress digging into her back as he positioned himself above her, his eyes like slits.

She grabbed his waist, determined that it would be better this time, concentrating with everything she had. Concentrating so hard that she couldn’t un-feel the hard bedsprings on un-hear Naia’s words.

Golden’s smell was pulling her in.

Naia let the pads of her fingers run lightly across her bony shoulders, up her neck to graze the baby hairs and then back down, down her golden back, the sharpness of her spine, the impression of ribs.

Aly gasped, she couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t really see Charlie’s eyes.

There was something in his face— he wasn’t seeing her—and she kept

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

31

gasping as her head gently bumped the headboard over and over and all she could feel was her back sliding up and down the bedsprings, and he didn’t understand and she pushed deeper into the darkness, aching to get closer, and then—it must’ve been the time of night, the aloneness, the orange juice—she toppled forward into the dark and fell into her. And now: Golden’s skin her skin, Golden’s eyes her eyes. When they lifted their neck and arm, the shadowy hollows of their collarbone shifted too. They moved their left hand to rest in a hollow, fingers cold on golden self. They looked down and they were there, the legs, the legs. And beneath their pants they were still there, just as Naia had imagined they would be, real, golden.

And Naia looked in the mirror and saw the self reflected there: perfect.

And Naia caressed herself, the golden, the perfection, and she feathered her fingers across lines and shapes and valleys and hollows, leaving goosebumps in their wake because Aly’s gasps of pain sounded like another kind. She gripped his back. The warmth was suffocating, now, and she couldn’t catch her breath, but she had to hold on, had to do it, to prove it to herself. When he was done he was panting in satisfaction and she couldn’t breathe, fighting her way past his heavy body towards air but Golden was slipping now, slipping away, something big and heavy pulling her away from Naia, separating them, and Naia watched Golden fade into the darkness. When she opened her eyes and looked down there were her own legs again 32

and everything was all over. *** In the shower, back at home, Aly scrubbed herself until her skin prickled. She washed her hair twice.

It dripped down her back, leaving tiny puddles behind her as she walked back down the hall, wincing a little with every step. She paused outside Mom’s room, but the space underneath the door was dark and only beneath the covers could she slow down, take a full breath. She wanted to look at her nakedness, to see if everything were alright, but how would she know, anyway? She didn’t know anything.

And its pinkness bothered her, how fragile and funny it looked, like a rare sea-creature, a fish-underbelly, something not to be seen, something that belonged in the darkness. So, despite the heat, she took a blanket from the foot of her bed and laid it on top of her quilt, across her pelvis, and added a pillow for good measure, pushing it down, smothering it. When she closed her eyes all she could hear were the cicadas’ screeches.

The cicadas’ song went like this: a few minutes of vibrating screams and then a rest, a pause that was sometimes long enough that her mind would soften and her eyes would close—and then they’d start right back up again and she’d be jolted into her thoughts of that ocean-deep wrongness. Notworking.

Their screams rattled around inside of Naia, too, not just in her head but everywhere, because she was empty, no Golden, just disgusting nothing.

And when the cicadas went silent she felt that emptiness so acutely; she was

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

shriveling up from not being enough.

“Nai? Are you awake?”

The cicadas resumed their screeches.

Both girls lay on their backs, staring upward past the ceiling.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

33

Photo Courtesy of Elise Mollica

OH poetry

ALIYAH COTTON she, her, hers College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2019, Area Program in Poetry Writing and Music While I was home for spring break last year, I was taking a walk around my neighborhood and reflecting on all those uncertainties of growing up. That’s where the motivation for Oh came from. Some of my favorite poets are Ross Gay and Solmaz Sharif, and I especially love poems that incorporate music in their language, structure, or soundscape.

36

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

Being so young, I always had that outside smell, you know?

The aroma something akin to the hum-drum banter of cicadas, the unabashed little bastards would

strip down and leave their garments neatly ironed and hung in the rich shade of the magnolia trees. I was jealous.

Look at how they could just

take that stink off!!

But me—the thick Virginia haze beckons to freshly laid tar, says, Hey gooey,

won’t you come up out of there?

Won’t you come up from that trench?

And so it did, the stench clinging shy

and grateful to my Washington Bullets jersey and gray cargo shorts. My black Etnies skate shoes

and hairy legs. I wanted to be

a boy.

But I had beautiful hair down to my waist and B-cup buds slinging around under my shirts

(Nana no I will not wear it I

will not!!!).

My legs were long and shapely, thicc.

Papa always said keep those legs crossed

even when I wasn’t wearing a dress.

My best friend was Neiko and his mom called me a tall glass of water.

How do you come back from that?

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

37

Drilled in through the ears. The eyes, cemented. My body, a construction site.

And what a sight.

I wanted to hug Erin Gibbons. Or Kathryn Cole or Megan Bell. Coming home from school

I would settle for Nana’s embrace, squeezing as tight as a young boy in love could.

Oh – her nose scrunches and she lets go Oh –

baby, you stink like outside.

38

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

MASCULINITY Diane D’Costa

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

39

POEM poetry

BASIL (GILLIAN) LEE they, them, theirs College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2017, English, Area Program in Poetry Writing Basil (Gillian) Lee writes about language and life as a queer person in the scary, lovely world. They are also a printmaker, musician, and book artist. They read a lot of Ted Berrigan, Mina Loy, Aram Saroyan, Sappho, and Nikki Giovanni, and are currently focused on the relationship between underground contemporary poetry and the library.

40

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

how does this girl make me feel like such a boy when I’m fucking her I’m asking because I’ll never know I’m asking for when the mystery swells large enough to touch

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

41

I DO NOT WANT TO DIE Basil (Gillian) Lee poetry

42

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

I do not want to die where I was born today it is taking all of my strength to keep my weeping, swollen eyelids open now and again pressing them with cold spoons and my own cold fingers I only wish telephones still were slow and had beautiful rings and curling cords. Where I was born is the sour seat of the shameful empire and too hot in the summer My eyes are not so sweet as the little cherries in the jar nor as pink nor as velvety and I do not want to die in the seat of the empire although my mother lives there I want to die among queers angry and blissful among my true family rioting rioting in a rose garden in the arms of the beloved

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

43

Photo Courtesy of Zoe Pettler

BEDROOM DOOR fiction

ELISE MOLLICA she, her, hers College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2018, Area Program in Literary Prose,Spanish I wrote this piece for a younger version of myself and of anyone who permits themselves to feel before they even know what that can mean. To me, so much of this story is about the wonder of first realizing what it means to love someone or even just to be attracted to them. Then to experience how the clarity or beauty of that feeling remains, although that realization can create friction and fractures within the rest of your life. In terms of my artistic pursuits, I am a fiction writer, screenwriter, director, amateur podcast creator, and a poet. I love the intersection of the visual, the auditory, and the linguistic, which is why music is one of the greatest influences in my creative life.

46

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

Janie first closes her bedroom door when she is twelve because her family has just moved into their new house.

She has a new room and a new little brother, Jeremy, and she goes off down the hall to look at his nursery and wonder when the jealousy will set in. At first, she leaves the door open.

She walks a few steps and pauses to think. She turns around and closes the bedroom door behind her.

Janie opens and shuts her door too many times to count because her parents are painting the walls of their new house and they need to get inside and outside to get all of the corners.

Janie watches them go and as soon as they leave her alone she goes inside and shuts the bedroom door. They reenter with brushes and paints, so Janie leaves and shuts the door behind her, enclosing her parents in the fumes of the lavender paint she helped pick out.

“HIS CRIES ARE SHINY AND PINK WITH NEWNESS, JUST LIKE THE RAISIN WRINKLES OF HIS TOES, AND THEY ARE JUST AS ALIEN. HE IS A TOY WHOSE INSTRUCTIONS WERE LOST ALONG THE WAY, AND JANIE IS FASCINATED.”

When Jeremy cries at night, Janie opens the door to her bedroom but does not leave it. She sits down on the threshold, where her bedroom’s teal carpet meets the hallway’s hardwood floor. She rolls over to lie

on her stomach and rest her chin in her hands. She does not go check on him, because what is a girl to do with a crying baby? No one has taught her yet and Jeremy is just so new. His cries are shiny and pink with newness, just like the raisin wrinkles of his toes, and they are just as alien. He is a toy whose instructions were lost along the way, and Janie is fascinated.

When her mother makes the sleepy, relentless journey down the hall from the master bedroom, pulled onwards towards the cry to arms, Janie shrinks back into the darkness of her room.

She shuts the door behind her as quietly as possible, but her tired mother would likely not have noticed her there regardless.

The last day of summer is hot and Janie doesn’t open her door until 10:00 a.m.

She is quite proud of herself—this is the stuff of teenagers, sleeping in like this. Adulthood will be upon her when she sees that ‘p.m.’ attached to the time of her rising. The buttery sun in the hallway beckons her almost as much as the smell of pancakes. Janie is so proud of her delayed sleeping patterns that she is not even upset that her parents have already moved on to their chores outside, mulching the front yard. It is a late morning, she seems to be exempt from helping with the mulching, and pancakes can be microwaved. It is hot in the buttery sun in the hallway, and the coolness of her room was so pleasant that Janie shuts the door tightly behind her, trapping the air conditioning.

Janie opens the door on the morning of the first day of school. She is wearing an outfit made up of a skirt, leggings, a t-shirt, clogs. She returns to her room and exits with another outfit made up of a skirt, leggings, a

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

47

t-shirt, different clogs. Once more, a return and an exit and she is wearing a skirt, leggings, t-shirt, boots with fur around the edges. A final turnabout in the hallway, a final pause, a final exit, and Janie is wearing a skirt, no leggings, a t-shirt, the first pair of clogs. The brown on the clogs matches the brown on the skirt and Janie nods her own approval. She closes the door of the bedroom behind her.

“JANIE STILL SMELLS LIKE OLD APPLES AND TEARS SOME OF THE TIME, BUT THE SCENT OF ONE WHO SITS ALONE NO LONGER CLINGS TO HER. SHE HAS MADE A FRIEND ON THE BUS, JUST AS HER PARENTS ANTICIPATED, BUT NOT EXACTLY AS THEY ANTICIPATED.”

Janie returns home in the midafternoon, followed by the distinct smell of an afternoon school bus. This is the rank warmth of children sweaty from hopscotch and four-square.

This is the sweetness of the apple that wasn’t eaten at lunch and instead was pushed to the bottom of the backpack where a mom will find it in three days and scold the child. This is the smell that clings to children who sit alone on the bus and spend too long in the gaze of their peers. Janie runs in through the foyer, through the kitchen and down the hallway.

Her room is the last one on the left so there is time to hear what she cries: “I never want to ride that bus again!

48

I’m never getting on it! I’ll walk home!”

She shuts the door behind her, moving as if to slam it but not quite getting the right grip on the frame before closing it. The soft click is probably not satisfying to her rage.

Janie reemerges for school each day but the clogs from the first day never reappear. It is still warm out and so she continues to keep her bedroom door closed, as commanded by her father.

He thinks it saves energy, having it shut, and she likes it whenever he praises her for remembering to close it. He calls her ‘conscientious,’ which is a word she doesn’t know how to spell but likes the sound of. She always appears at 8:15 a.m. because that is when she needs to leave to catch the bus. Her parents will not drive her, even though she cries. They say it is good for her courage. They say buses are good for the environment because they are forms of public transportation. They say they do not have time because of early meetings.

They say she shouldn’t whine. She closes the door behind her and walks to the bus stop.

Janie eventually stops complaining each day when she gets off the bus.

She comes home and leaves her door open after she enters her room, because it is autumn now and this will allow for a good cross breeze when she opens her window.

She closes the bedroom door each night, after saying goodnight to her parents and Jeremy and 10 minutes before she goes to sleep because she likes to journal in bed with a gel pen saved in her nightstand especially for this purpose Janie still smells like old apples and

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

tears some of the time, but the scent of one who sits alone no longer clings to her. She has made a friend on the bus, just as her parents anticipated but not exactly as they anticipated. Her new friend’s name is Mary Blair and she has invited Janie over to have a sleepover at her house. Janie’s parents discuss it in the kitchen while Janie sits in her room with the door open, pretending to do a math worksheet while not really thinking about math at all.

She doodles pictures of triangles, fall leaves, Jeremy, a cupcake, Mary Blair’s pretty gold star earrings, on the margin of the worksheet. Her parents discuss the sleepover, saying that they probably shouldn’t let their daughter stay at a stranger’s house so soon after the move. Janie shuts her bedroom door, hard. A few minutes later, her parents come and open the door. They have changed their minds, they say, because it is good she has made a friend. She ought to go, as long as she can get the phone numbers of the parents and ensure that someone will be chaperoning at all times. Her mother shuts the door behind them as they leave. The parents and Janie are pleased on either side of the door.

Janie exits her bedroom and heads down the hallway with a tightlyrolled sleeping bag in one hand and her mother’s tote bag in the other. Her pillow, with its dark purple flowery pattern, is wedged up beneath her arm. She has packed her toothbrush, hairbrush, floss, deodorant, her mother’s makeup mirror (stolen) but no makeup, her favorite bracelet, a nightlight which is mostly unnecessary but good to have just in case, and a change of clothes for the next day. Janie must run back and shut her bedroom door behind her because her hands were full

the first time. Her palms are a little sweaty and leave a mark momentarily on the metal of the door handle.

Janie returns the next morning carrying all of her items except for the bracelet which she seems to have left behind. Her face is serious and even though Jeremy is giggly today she does not go to see him first. She enters her room and shuts the door behind her.

Janie leaves her room at 8:15 a.m. on Monday but is not dressed for school.

She says she doesn’t feel well, that her throat hurts, that she has a bad cough, that she might have a fever.

Janie’s mother offers to take her temperature but Janie says she will do it herself. She is a bad liar but an infrequent one, and Janie’s mother needs to leave soon in order to have enough time to drop Jeremy off with the sitter before getting to work.

She leaves Janie with a kiss on the forehead and a cup of soup in the fridge in case she gets hungry.

Janie does not open the door of her room. She sits just on the inside of it, with her back pressed up against the wood. Her head rests just below the doorknob and she is holding her journal that is reserved for her special nightly reflections. Janie does not write anything, but looks at her doodle of Mary Blair’s pretty gold star earrings. Her doodle has continued in the past days to include the delicate ear which holds said earrings. Her fingers trace her own drawing of Mary Blair’s dark, thick hair and her little neck. Janie did not know how to draw collarbones so they are only lines but they are thin, smooth lines drawn with care. Mary Blair’s face is

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

49

not filled in yet so it is blank except for her eyes. But her eyes are light with dark eyelashes and they have been traced so many times that they are darker than everything else on the page.

Janie picks up her gel pen and draws another cupcake and thinks of gold star earrings.

50

Janie opens the door only to go to the bathroom and to fetch the cup of soup. She returns it to the kitchen sink and even puts it in the dishwasher like the conscientious daughter she is. She walks back down the hallway.

She thinks of gold star earrings and shuts the bedroom door behind her.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

UNTITLED Diane D’Costa

THE LITTLE MACAROON fiction

KASEY ROPER she, her hers College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2021, English I wrote this story to reflect on levels of global LGBTQ acceptance after seeing a pride flag hanging on a balcony outside Plaza Mayor in Madrid. This is the first story I’ve written in which I have used two languages, English and Spanish. I have a wide range of influences, but some of my favorite poets are Ellen Hopkins and Rupi Kaur, while some of my favorite authors (so far) are Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley.

Photo by Patti Buttram Brooks 52

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

Bustling, always bustling. The candy shop a few blocks from Francesca’s apartment on Calle Mayor was always filled with people—locals, tourists, taste testers, and sweets enthusiasts alike. Everyone wanted a taste of Madrid’s famous chocolate. All so different, but all converged on a single shop.

Francesca loved her job at the shop.

Every day new people to meet, all with new orders and new tastes, families, stories. Her favorite part of working there—aside from occasionally getting to take home surpluses at the end of the week—was seeing the wide range of people who came in, getting to talk to them.

She unlocked the shop with her key— she always opened—and stepped inside, locking it behind her. Francesca did all her routine sweeping and cleaning before eight o’clock, at which point she unlocked the door for good and switched the sign to “open.” She and three other women were helping customers satiate their chocolate cravings that day. By mid-morning, the corner shop was crowded, and the voices of her co-workers taking orders and the customers chatting in line echoed throughout the small establishment. A woman in a short red trench coat bent down and examined the rows of chocolates. Francesca kept an eye on her, trying to guess what she would order. Meanwhile, she wrapped up a box of chocolates for Mr. Jeorge, who came in every Wednesday to get a box of chocolates for his wife.

“Que tenga un buen día, Señor Jeorge,” she told him as she handed the box of chocolates over the glass display counter.

Francesca greeted the next customer in Spanish, her eyes flitting over to the red trench coat again, then quickly up to its owner’s face. The woman noticed her looking and smiled.

The line moved fast, and Francesca smiled softly as she greeted the young woman in the trench coat, noting that the painted red of her lips matched her coat.

“Good afternoon. What would you like?”

The woman bent down to look at the display, eyes roaming over the small chocolates, cookies, and cakes.

“We have macaroons, carrot cake, chocolate covered cherries,” Francesca suggested. “What are you in the mood for?”

The woman’s eyes flicked up to her, and Francesca could’ve sworn they rested on her lips for a split second.

“Something sweet.”

THE WOMAN’S EYES FLICKED UP TO HER, AND FRANCESCA COULD’VE SWORN THEY RESTED ON HER LIPS FOR A SPLIT SECOND.”

Trying to hide a blush, she laughed and looked around at all the sweets that surrounded them. “Well, you’ve come to the right place.”

She stood, looking her in the eye. “I believe I have.”

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

53

Francesca blinked, then suddenly looked down. “Uh, so have you decided on anything?”

“Yes, I’ll have two pieces of chocolate cake.”

“Two?” She tried to hide her disappointment. “Bringing some home for your boyfriend?” she asked as she took out the cake and put the first slice on a plate.

The woman’s laugh surprised her. “No, I’m hardly the type for a boyfriend.”

She held up her hand and revealed a rainbow bracelet. “And the second piece is for you.”

“What?”

“Eat it on your break,” she said as she took the plate. “How much do I owe you?”

Francesca told her the price for two slices of cake, still amazed by this stranger standing in front of her. She took the euros, then called out after her, “¡Espere! ¿Puedo tener un nombre para la orden?”

“You already took my order,” she said, giving her a knowing smile. “But nice try!”

Francesca stared in dismay as the woman turned to leave the shop. She paused and turned around.

“Me llamo Julia.” *** The rest of the day was uneventful.

She took orders, wrapped cakes and candies and everything in between, and tried to make sense of all the jarring Spanish coming out of the 54

tourists’ mouths. They tried, they really did, but half the time she had to rely on their pointing just as much as they did.

“THE CHOCOLATE CAKE’S CONTAINER LAY EMPTY; ALL THAT REMAINED WERE CRUMBS, A MEMORY, AND A LINGERING TASTE OF SWEETNESS ON HER TONGUE.”

On her break, she went to a local restaurant a few blocks away and ordered a ham and cheese sandwich with a glass of red wine. She swirled the glass, staring at the dark red liquid intensely. The chocolate cake’s container lay empty; all that remained were crumbs, a memory, and a lingering taste of sweetness on her tongue.

Someone placed their hand on her shoulder, and she jumped, twirling around to see who it was as she gave a small shout of alarm.

“Wow, calm down. It’s just me,” her boyfriend José said. He offered her a warm smile and gestured at a chair.

“May I?” Francesca nodded distractedly, trying to focus her attention on him.

“Already ate, I see.”

“I’m sorry, but you know I only have a small lunch break from—” “The shop, I know. Did you steal

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

another dessert?” José gestured to the evidence of chocolate cake in the Styrofoam container.

Francesca took a deep breath and looked down at her wine. “Uh, um…

Well…”

“It’s okay, I know how much you love your sweets.” José elbowed her gently, then signaled to a waiter to get a glass of wine. “It’s one of the things I love about you.”

Francesca smiled, but her shoulders were tense. She twirled the wine glass in her fingers and smiled as she looked down at it. The image of a cheery girl with bright red lips came into her mind.

“Something good happen today at work?” José asked, causing the image to melt away.

Trying not to look guilty, Francesca shrugged. “It was really busy today.”

“It’s always busy.”

“But today was especially busy,” Francesca protested. “And the people were particularly interesting.”

“That’s great, sweetie.”

“I told you I don’t like to be called that.”

“Oh,” José said, leaning in close to her neck and taking a deep breath. “But you are definitely sweet.”

“José!”

He chuckled and leaned away, raising his glass. “What? It’s true. You’re my little macaroon, and I can’t wait to eat

you up.”

Francesca stood up suddenly. “Excuse me, but I have to go to the ladies’ room.”

She turned and stalked away from him, glad that this restaurant had bathrooms, unlike so many of the smaller restaurants in Madrid. God, men are such pigs, she thought to herself. She knew he thought about sex often, and it was reasonable, considering they’d been dating for over two years and hadn’t yet had sex. But she also hated the idea of him getting at all close to her in such an intimate way. Francesca turned on the water in the sink and rinsed her hands in it, trying to wash away her worries and her residual discomfort with José’s comment. She splashed some water on her face and took a few deep breaths before she realized that her own lips were the same shade of red. *** A few days later, Francesca stood behind the counter, taking orders spoken in rapid-fire Spanish. As she wrapped a piece of chocolate cake for a German tourist, she saw two teenage girls walk in. For whatever reason, she felt drawn to them.

She watched as they reacted to the shop with a knowing smile—she had reacted the same way when her mother first brought her here when she was a young girl: all wide eyes and drooling mouth, grasping for everything trapped behind the glass display cases. They looked around the small sweets store in awe. They tried to step forward, but got caught in the current of confusion and the crazy stream of voices all speaking

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

55

differing amounts of Spanish. A family barged between them, trying to get to the other side of the shop. After they passed, the girl in front—with straight, short blonde hair—reached behind her for the other girl’s hand.

And suddenly, it clicked.

They made their way to the display cases, taking stock of their wares and prices. Francesca served the customers in front of them in line, quickly wrapping or boxing sweets, and watching the girls inch forward.

She kept glancing at them, at their hands, at the way they whispered with their heads pressed close together.

“Hola, que quieres?”

“Hola,” the blonde said in an American accent. “Un macaroon chocolate, por favor. Y un—” Her brow furrowed as she tried to think of the word in Spanish. After a moment, she gave up and said, “box… de chocolates.” She offered an apologetic smile as she pointed at the box of chocolates on display behind Francesca’s shoulder.

56

Francesca asked if she wanted the macaroon wrapped, and after handing it to her with a napkin, said, “Su novia es muy bonita. Espero que esteis felices.”

The blonde blushed and ducked her head, muttering “gracias” as she led her girlfriend out of the shop.

That day, when her boyfriend picked her up after work, Francesca wondered why she was still thinking of that young American couple.

A few years later, the American couple walked back down Calle Mayor and explored Plaza Mayor for the second time. They took a side street leading further out into the city and passed a rainbow flag tied proudly to the balcony of an apartment above the shops. They looked up at it and grinned, squeezing each other’s hand more tightly than before—completely unaware that a candy shop clerk whom they’d once met lay inside watching a movie with her girlfriend.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

MASCULINITY Diane D’Costa

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

57

AN AWE-FILLED YEAR nonfiction

DALLAS MICHELLE DUCAR she, her, hers School of Nursing Class of 2019, Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Program I was motivated for this piece by my experience transitioning and the amount of unknown that comes with this process.

When I began to transition I was floored by how scared and uncertain I was. I did not know how to understand with certainty that I was transgender. The early months of my transition were filled with doubt, and I was forced to develop a deep faith in myself and the world around me. This faith eventually transformed into a radiant sense of awe which permeated my every experience. In short, I was on a high. My queerness gave me the language and feeling for freedom and liberation. As a writer, I respect Aldous Huxley for his broad imagination, Oliver Sacks for his romantic pragmatism, and Mary Oliver for her vivacious thirst for now.

58

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

his is the first winter I haven’t been T sad.

Every winter, for as long as my memory permits, I have felt deep sadness. The harsh winds would beckon to an emptiness which hollowed out the bones. I would turn to drinking, smoking, and other numbing agents. Even after breaking out from the cycle of dependency, the tumult of life remained—it would weigh deeply, it would combine with an existential dread, making me void.

In those days I would simply await the passage of time. It was as if there were something about spring’s rebirth which allowed me to live again.

Importantly, at that time I would feel a diminished connection between myself and others. My home would feel further away, I would undoubtedly think about the deaths of others, rather than their current lives, and I would walk about with the complete conviction that no one understood me.

I saw myself as markedly different than others; this unnerved me.

Only recently have I been able to, for the first time, feel kinship with others.

My willingness to see myself in this kinship unfolded with my transition— the barriers between myself and the other fell away.

There is a passage in Acts: “And so an awe came upon everyone.”2 We find messages in the most unexpected places. That awe has been potent in my own community as I have begun to create, feel, and notice. For the first time I no longer

see myself on the margins. I’ve taken a decided movement towards awe, and a momentous step away from judgment.

I’ve begun to ask, “What am I carrying?

What am I carrying that I don’t need?”

I’ve learned to stand in awe of what I was carrying, rather than standing in judgment of how I had been carrying it.

This feeling of awe overwhelms me, sometimes bursting from the seams, verging on hypomania.

It shocks me: when I wake up next to my partner and she hasn’t left out of

“IT’S LIKE MELTING ICE CREAM RESTING ON THE TONGUE. WHEN JUDGMENT FALLS AWAY, IT REVEALS A WHOLE NEW SWEETNESS ABOUT THE WORLD. A SENSE OF AWE.”

fear. When I lean in to the mirror to touch up some eyeliner, and I don’t shudder in judgment. When I walk into a patient’s room and they say, “I’m glad I got you today.”

Awe. It has one necessary component.

It relies on the existence of the other.

I look into my closet, finally out of the closet. So many items line my racks— dresses, blouses, tops—all that once I could only dream of wearing. For the first time, I feel genuinely supported by a community. I see clothes from

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

59

friends around the globe: from an Alaskan hiker in Yogaville, from a resilient friend in Guatemala, from a compassionate teacher in Mississippi, the list could go on and on. I stand stronger than ever now, looking back into the closet from the outside.

Awe can sometimes leave quickly, only to come back in the most unexpected ways.

Awe fled quickly one late night near the end of a long shift. I was tasked with a long and daunting patient admission.

When admitting any patient, it is imperative to take all perspectives into account. In beginning to paint a full and holistic picture, this time was different. This patient had participated in the events of August 12, 2017—known by Neo-Nazis as “Unite the Right”—and he wasn’t on “my side.” The patient had a history of violence and jail time; he was one of that day’s many organizers.

After reading through his history and physical, he came through the doors. I took a deep breath, inwardly conflicted about how he would treat a transgender nurse and about how I would stand up for myself when the time came—a thought to which I had given little attention.

As he wheeled toward me through our locked doors, I could see a large swastika on his chest and another on his right fist. The man was about six feet tall, with a shaved head and a large build.

I gulped. Completely unprepared.

He turned to me, I began my usual introduction, waiting for the barrage 60

of insults.

They never came.

Instead, he looked at me intently and almost immediately began to discuss his own history: what brought him here and, importantly, his long history of psychological and physical trauma. Within minutes the world fell away and we had developed a strong patient-nurse connection—a reverberation throughout the Universe which proclaimed, “Now Hear This.”

I was listening.

After about ten minutes a male nurse walked by. The patient looked over quickly in his direction, his posturing turned immediately defensive. He then turned back to me, saying, “I’m sorry if I act weird around men, it’s just—my father abused me when I was little, I was never the same. I can talk with you, though. You’re gentle, you’re kind.”

The man was simply a patient, one who suffers.

Lloyd Shearer’s quote from “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” comes to mind: “...compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong.

Sometime in life you will have been all of these..”3 This experience, and so many more throughout this year, have catapulted me into a new landscape—one in which I no longer feel separated from the other because I notice the judgment of myself and of others.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

It’s like melting ice cream resting on the tongue. When judgment falls away, it reveals a whole new sweetness about the world. A sense of awe.

And so this year, the first year of my transition, has become a year of awe: one of faith, one of resilience, one of joy.

I find myself awake, perhaps for the first time, in gratitude—perhaps with a similar experience to that of Nietzsche coming out of a deep

sickness: “Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened— the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected…. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.”4 And the year sails on.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

61

Photo Courtesy of Zoe Pettler

Asexual Encounters nonfiction

NICHOLAS GRIMES he, him, his School of Architecture Class of 2019, Master of Architecture This piece was an opportunity for me to reflect on the experiences I’ve had as a gay ace and the assumptions that have been made about my identity by others in the queer community. It’s also a collection of conversations I’ve had about these events where I talk a bit about what I’ve learned and how they have shaped my self-perception. Given the prevalence of the online scene in the ace community I thought it fitting that the conversations about asexuality that I wanted to have (and the people who I’ve found to whom I relate most) are online.

64

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

I’m sitting alone with a woman at the LGBT center before the nurse comes in to draw my blood. She’s asking me some questions about my sexual history. Eventually we get to talking about the asexual discussion group that I had started. She asks me if there would be a minimum age for attending.

Confused, I tell her, “No... I hadn’t thought of that. Why do you ask?”

She says, “Well, because of all the traumatic experiences...”

I sit quietly for half a second, unsure how to respond— the nurse walks in and interrupts the conversation.

The HIV test comes back negative. *** The same LGBT center some weeks before, someone asks if I myself am ace.

“I identify as gay and asexual.”

“You must have broken a lot of hearts,” he replies.

“Yeah...” I give a fake chuckle and sigh. *** I’m at a local bar with friends at an event raising funds for a local trans charity. I’m thoroughly enjoying a dance performance of “Ride” by Ciara. A drag queen comes up to me

and asks, “Is this boy making your pussy wet?”

“Uhh—” “Because mine is SOPPING.” *** It’s the night after Pride and my friends take me to a lesbian bar. This guy I’ve been secretly crushing on asks me to dance. I’ve never danced with anyone before. I do what my body wants to do. I do what I’ve seen on high school dance floors. There’s an exhilaration to being this close, but I feel as if my body is betraying me.

Am I leading him on? I can see the effect my body is having on him. He seems like he might not be sober. I don’t drink. I wonder now whether our bodies pulsing in rhythm was supposed to mean anything. I don’t see him again. *** “I was reading BBC and saw a piece about Asexuality— it was really interesting to hear different people’s perspectives about living in a hypersexualized society.”

“Yeah, there’s this prevailing ace narrative about feeling ‘broken’... it’s not really something that I identify with.”

“Ah, ‘ace’— I like that better. Yeah, it didn’t seem very positive.”

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

65

SEXUAL ABILITIES: THE INTERSECTION OF DISABLED AND LGBTQ IDENTITIES nonfiction

MARY GRACE SHEERS they, them, theirs College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2018, Political and Social Thought & Linguistics When I wrote this piece, I was enrolled in both Disability Theory and Intro to LGBTQ+ studies. The essay developed out of my interest in how disability identity fits into broader themes of intersectionality. An interesting fact about me is that I love to garden!

66

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

“Sexuality is often the source of our deepest oppression,” stated Anne Finger, a disability activist.¹ Finger, like many other people with disabilities, faces conflicting expectations and stereotypes surrounding her queer and disabled identity. While the LGBTQ and disability rights movements have succeeded in many social changes, researchers have failed to adequately explore the intersection of these identities. Some scholars use metaphors and a shared “coming out” syntax to describe the similarities between the movements; yet other scholars stay away from using one identity as a metaphor for another.

Regardless of scholarship, people with disabilities are often asexualized and agendered, to the frustration of both people with disabilities and LGBTQ people.

Scholars contemplate possible solutions such as the political, medical, and sexual empowerment of LGBTQ people and people with disabilities. The LGBTQ and disabled communities confront not only occasionally parallel but also intersecting oppression.

“PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES ARE OFTEN ASEXUALIZED AND AGENDERED, TO THE FRUSTRATION OF BOTH PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AND LGBTQ PEOPLE” A Queer and Disabled Coming Out The Disability Rights Movement and the LGBTQ Movement in the United States were both most successful starting in the 1960s.

The Disability Rights Movement

(DRM) has drastically shifted daily life for American with disabilities by establishing civil rights legislation, yet the DRM receives little academic study and media attention. By the 1960s, the DRM as we know it today became an established movement by building on centuries of struggle.

The DRM has advocated for three main aims: deinstitutionalization, independent living, and civil rights.² The LGBTQ movement, as it is known today, began in small communities during WWII, but gained national attention in the late 1960s. The 1970s gave rise to protests for legislation and social change in both movements.

The LGBTQ movement continues to fight for various legislative victories.

Both movements gave rise to an academic field of study that analyzes the systems of oppression surrounding the groups.³ Scholarship remains limited in both groups as most research remains relatively new and struggles to find funding.

Robert McRuer, a queer and disabilities studies scholar, claimed that the 2000s served as a space for “hegemonic (hetero)sexuality.”⁴ In this time period, which continues today, many Americans called for a healing of deviant sexualities, including the sexuality of people with disabilities.5 Both the LGBTQ and disability rights movements demand recognition and rights, while developing their own scholarship and research.

Intersectionality theory provides a basis for discussions about the sexual stereotypes around people with disabilities and the theoretical parallels between the LGBTQ and disability movements.

Intersectionality theory—a term coined in 1991—explores the overlap

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

67

between systems of oppression and privilege, such as sexuality and ability.

Intersectionality theory presses the importance of analyzing social justice movements from a wide perceptive.

Intersectional theorists not only compare the movements, but also explore the lives of individuals that identity as both LGBTQ and disabled. The mainstream LGBTQ movement often excludes disabled voices. The mainstream disability rights movement can also overlook its queer members. Intersectionality theorists analyze multiple social justice movements simultaneously, but must pay attention to individuals even as they compare and contrast social groups.

“THE PARALLEL OFTEN DRAWN BETWEEN DISABLED AND QUEER IDENTITIES RESTS ON THE ‘COMING OUT’ PROCESS THAT MANY QUEER AND DISABLED PEOPLE EXPERIENCE.”

Many intersectionality theorists attempt to avoid ranking power structures and avoid using one identity as a metaphor for another.

Hierarchical understandings of oppression highlight some experiences other others and overlook the nuance of experience.

Most scholars avoid such language and take a more inclusive approach to the various power structures. However, as McRuer states, “Able-bodiness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, 68

as the natural order of things.”6 McRuer places abilities above LGBTQ identities in a competition of oppression. However, McRuer also notes that the two movements rely on one another, stating, “Compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory ablebodiedness are contingent.”7 He understands the intersection of the two movements and points out that the experience of LGBTQ people with disabilities cannot be understood without an understanding of both systems of oppression.

While avoiding metaphors, many theorists do draw on parallels between experiences. Ellen Samuels notes, “The nonvisible disability experience parallels the experience of femme-lesbians.”8 She draws a parallel between the two identities to further understand them both without disregarding the nuances and differences between the experiences. Intersectionality theory serves as a tool for understanding the intersection between multiple identities that face oppression.

The parallel often drawn between disabled and queer identities rests on the “coming out” process that many queer and disabled people experience. Dominant culture often renders both queer and disabled identities invisible. Many queer and disabled people can “pass” for one or both of their identities by hiding their identity in everyday interactions and seeming to be non-queer or nondisabled. These identities are often rendered invisible due to the cultural ambiguity of LGBTQ and disabled identities. Because these identities are often ignored, their communities and cultures may struggle to gain popularity and recognition.9 Many

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

social and political structures rely on the concept that other people can recognize sexuality and disability.10 The invisibility of these identities leaves space for the LGBTQ and disability pride movements.

“Coming out” as either queer, disabled, or both serves as a means of unifying the community and taking pride in one’s own identity.

The coming out process plays a key role in both movements, allowing one to realize his/her/their own identity and connect to a group.11 McRuer focuses on the macro effects of coming out. Coming out as queer allows one to reshape heterosexist norms while claiming disability allows one to reclaim the meaning of “different.”12 Both movements rely heavily on strong identity and pride within the community. Individuals experience a process of liberation and self-actualization by coming out in which her/she/they can stop the repression or exclusion of his/her/ their sexuality or disabled identity.

In recent years, queer and disabled people have also begun coming out, starting a new movement termed Crip Theory.13 By sharing both LGBTQ and disabled identities, these individuals have sparked a discussion about the stereotypes surrounding disabled sexualities.

Asexualization and Agendering of Disabled Individuals

Mainstream society often treats people with disabilities as “sexual others;” their sexualities and sometimes genders become pathologized, criminalized, or ignored altogether.14 Society often excludes people with disabilities’ sexualities from the perception of

sexualities. A “normate” idea of sex percolates throughout our society, creating both heteronormative and ableist ideas.15 In the late 1960s, scholars began studying how society often treats people with disabilities as though they have no sexuality.16 Asexuality can be defined as “the relative absence or insufficiency of sexual interest, biologically or socially described function, and interpersonal sexual engagement.”17 Society associates disabled sexualities with inappropriate or kinky behavior, mirroring previous misconceptions of homosexual sexualities.18 Scholars discovered that mainstream society views disability and sex as incompatible.19 Barbara Fiduccia describes her personal experience attempting to “challenge the myth of disabled women’s asexuality.”20 She claims that society uses images of people with disabilities in sexual encounters to reproduce normate concepts of human perfection.21 The media rarely portrays people with disabilities in a beautiful way that uses their disability as a form of beauty.

The asexualization of people with disabilities can negatively affect the lives of people with disabilities.

Michael Rembis, a disability scholar, describes, “Many disabled people who have internalized dominant, ableist, heteronormative notions of strength, beauty, sex, and sexuality continue to experience psychological insecurity and stress when confronted with their own sexuality.”22 The media and other platforms for displaying sexuality portray heteronormative and ableist views of sexuality. People with disabilities may come to internalize the idea that disability and sexual nonconformity are negative things.

Most scholars also claim that normal

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

69

ideas of sex serves as a way to oppress the disabled. The asexualization of people with disabilities sometimes stems from the view that disabled people have or should have the social status of a dependent child.23 The asexuality of people with disabilities is “not only an assumption but also a moral imperative.”24 Mainstream society views people with disabilities as in need of help and as incapable of reproducing.

Eunjung Kim, a scholar of asexuality, pushes back against the traditional analysis of the asexualization of people with disabilities due to its non-intersectional nature. Although not all people with disabilities are asexual, as is often portrayed, some are. The actions taken by disability movements to stop this stereotype “mistakenly target asexuality and endorse a universal and persistent presence of sexual desire.”25 Asexuality is a legitimate sexual identity and a positive factor to many people. Kim calls for the recognition of legitimate asexual identities both within and outside of the disabled community.26 Individuals with disabilities who also identify as asexual face a complex borderland between opposing the stereotype of people with disabilities while fitting into it. The call by disability rights groups for disabled people to be viewed as sexual beings causes undue stress on asexual people with disabilities.27 Asexual activists like Kim maintain that the asexual and disability rights movements both argue for similar social changes. They both hope for less medicalization of their identities and a wider recognition that difference may be beautiful. Kim clarifies that “asexuality as embodied identity and asexuality as imposed stigma” are different and should be 70

treated as such.28 Others view people with disabilities as agender as a result of the asexualization of people with disabilities.29 Many scholars agree that mainstream society often views disability and gender as mutually exclusive. Society views people with disabilities as neither masculine nor feminine. Fiduccia, a disabled scholar of sexual images of people with disability, has claimed that disabled bodies are often viewed as genderless in order to prevent people with disabilities from reproducing.30 She explores the larger social structures that seek to limit the number of disabled people in society. People with disabilities face asexualization and agendering, but institutional and social structures have the opportunity to challenge these stereotypes.

“UNDERSTANDING SEXUALITY AS SEPARATE FROM SEXUAL ACTS AND THE PHYSICAL BODIES THAT MAY OR MAY NOT PERFORM THEM WOULD PERMIT BOTH LGBTQ PEOPLE AND DISABLED PEOPLE TO EXPRESS THEIR SEXUALITIES MORE FREELY.” Improving Intersectional Lives Both people with disabilities and LGBTQ people demand the demedicalization and political acceptance of their identities. Both

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

groups ask for an acceptance of human sexualities as diverse and unique, not deviant.31 Another solution focuses on moving away from the conflation of physical bodies with sexuality. Understanding sexuality as separate from sexual acts and the physical bodies that may or may not perform them would permit both LGBTQ and disabled people to express their sexualities more freely.32 Changing views of sex and sexuality can improve the lives of people in LGBTQ communities, those in disabled communities, and those at the intersection of both.

Both LGBTQ people and people with disabilities have faced the medicalization of their identities.33 The medical model identifies variation in gender, sexuality, or ability as a consequence of disease or biological impairments that limit an individual’s life options.34 This model emphasizes finding a ‘cure’ for and preventing these differences.

The goal of this model is a population with full human capacities and limited variation.35 Both groups have suggested that increased education about their sexualities could improve the lives of young people developing their sexualities.36 When the medical system ignores variant sexualities and bodies, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and those who identify as both may struggle to development their sexualities in a healthy way. For many years, LGBTQ people faced the medical denial of their sexualities.

LGBTQ people were often given drugs, conversion therapy, and other dangerous “treatments.” In the 1970s and 1980s, most medical establishments depathologized homosexuality.37 People with disabilities, on the other hand,

are still medically and morally advised to avoid sexual encounters. People with disabilities often come to rely on medical agencies for both medical and moral advice. The medical system serves as one facet of oppression that could improve the way it approaches both people with disabilities and LGBTQ people.

One major improvement in the lives of people with disabilities and LGBTQ people could stem from an increase in scholarly articles and research.

The lack of scholarly articles and research on the intersection of these identities testifies to the need for a more intersectional approach to queer and disabled lives. And though the leftist portion of the LGBTQ movement attempts to take an intersectional approach, these approaches sometimes overlook ability. They also face a lack of funding and popularity. With the current amount of scholarship, there exists no means to estimate how many queer people identity as disabled and vice versa. Both identities rely on self-identify and can be difficult to define.38 Intersectional scholarship helps create spaces where queer people with disabilities feel safe.

Sexual agency plays a key role in political efficacy and allows individuals to feel self-actualized.

While some scholars focus on medical models, Abby Wilkerson explores the role that sexual agency plays in political agency and selfactualization.39 The development of sexuality plays an important role in the development of “interpersonal connection, efficacy, acceptance of one’s body.”40 Those who feel sexual autonomy tend to have high selfconfidence and strength in their

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

71

own identity. Sexual agency also allows people with disabilities and LGBTQ people to overcome shame.

As the LGBTQ movement reveals, acceptance of one’s sexuality plays a key role in self-confidence and the development of identity.

People who are LGBTQ and disabled find their identities invisible to many mainstream social justice groups.

Expanding beyond the intersection of these two communities, a parallel between the movements creates a deeper connection between

72

LGBTQ and disabled communities.

Many members experience similar “coming out” processes and institutional limitations. A need for more scholarship and social justice movements focused on the intersection of disabled and queer communities remains apparent.

Sexual agency serves as a key step for self-actualization and political efficacy. No social justice movement will reach its goals without the recognition of the other systems of oppression that intersect with it.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

MASCULINITY Diane D’Costa

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

73

STAINS fiction

ZACH SCHAUFFLER they, them, theirs College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2019, Political and Social Thought I’ve been writing stories since I learned how. This one was the result of good timing: I enrolled in a fiction writing workshop at a moment when I needed to do a lot of reimagining. I think it’ll mean different things to different readers; I hope in any case that its emotional truth shines through.

74

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

Every morning since they met, Vanessa’s asked him for eggs. Usually scrambled, occasionally sunny-side up. He had never made eggs before.

She showed him where they were in the fridge, guiding his hand to the cardboard carton. He held one in his palm. He liked how the shell felt smooth on his fingertips, surprised himself with how little pressure it took to crack. He held it over a bowl, the jagged gash dripping. After it drained, he spent a few minutes fishing out small bits of eggshell from the goopy mess in the bowl. He didn’t like the slimy feeling. He had grabbed the pan immediately afterward, and she reprimanded him to wash his hands first. His cheeks flushed as he flipped on the faucet. He didn’t look her in the eyes until she assured him it was alright.

smile at him.

A few nights ago, after he served her cilantro-lime chicken tacos with rice, she had asked him to sit with her.

There were several pots and utensils that needed to be cleaned, but she insisted. He bent his knees and settled into the chair. She told him to relax, which didn’t make sense until she told him his back was too straight. She just wanted to talk, she said, and they did, but she smiled the whole time.

He returned the expression, keeping track of the things he said that made her laugh. Later, he would think about why they had had that effect, but for the moment he enjoyed it.

He had improved since then. Now, when he cracked an egg, the line was straight, dividing the shell along its equator. He hadn’t fractured those small white flakes in weeks. His time had also improved; he could now cook Vanessa’s breakfast—complete with eggs, buttered toast, and orange juice—within seven minutes.

Collecting the dishes, he glanced at her as she ate, looking for validation in the curl of her lips as her phone flickered.

It was a nice routine. She left for work soon after eating, leaving him to putter around the house until she returned in the evening. Sometimes he thought about what she might like for dinner, though he never started making anything until she told him directly. He had developed a good sense of her tastes, however, and thought he might surprise her with a prepared meal next week. She would

SHE ATE, LOOKING FOR

“COLLECTING THE DISHES, HE GLANCED AT HER AS VALIDATION IN THE CURL OF HER LIPS AS HER PHONE FLICKERED.”

During the conversation, in moments of quiet, he watched her chew. He had nothing before him on the table; he hadn’t asked, and she knew better than to offer. He imagined what it must taste like. The recipes used such lush language to depict the flavors, and he hoped the smoky spice the cookbook promised was landing on her tongue.

Sitting with her was exciting. He never knew how she would react to the things he said. He learned which expressions and tones were received positively and repeated them. This worked well, and he imagined the invitation to sit with her was a result

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

75

of this work. She told him he was charming. He had demurred, smiling, waiting for her to excuse him to clean up. Now, days later, he still replays this interaction, scrutinizing the rapport, seeing the connection but still wondering how he wound up in bed with her.

The sheets sift as she curls into him.

He’s rigid, remembers to relax, curves his spine like she likes. The room is dark, but his eyes have adjusted. He stares at the white mound of linens next to him, the blonde hair rising from the top like smoke when she wants bananas foster. She, halfasleep, grabs his hand and pulls it over her. She’s warm.

He’s aware of each second. Many have passed since she told him to lie next to her. At first it was 03:05:27, and now it’s 03:29:55. He wonders how much longer she wants him to wait. If she wanted him to sleep, she would have said so. She must want his presence, conscious and available, so he lies.

“SHE TOUCHED HIS SKIN AND THEN SCREAMED, BUT IT WASN’T OUT OF FEAR.”

This is the first time. He runs through it again. Usually she puts him to bed at around 23:00, but last night she hadn’t told him to sleep until 00:45.

When she did, the words were slurred, and he wasn’t sure but he thought she was drunk. She normally had a glass, pinot noir, with dinner, but last night he had opened and poured two bottles for her. This was because of the friend that came over. Her name 76

was Martha. He had been excited to meet someone new. Aside from Vanessa, he had only met a salesman named Mark, who offered a cleaning service that he then guessed Vanessa didn’t need, and a pair of missionaries named JP and Mary Beth, who said there was no place on God’s earth for him and left. Both interactions were short, but it was still nice to see new faces. He had hoped Vanessa’s friend would stay longer.

Martha arrived at 19:23, which was 23 minutes later than Vanessa had expected her. He had prepared whole wheat spaghetti with pesto but had to keep everything on simmer. He would have opened the door for her, but she walked in without knocking.

Then she said oh my God, look at him.

She asked Vanessa a lot of questions but didn’t let her answer before asking more. She touched his skin and then screamed, but it wasn’t out of fear, he could tell. She said why is it warm and Vanessa laughed, but she didn’t think it was funny because then Martha stood close to him and leaned in and touched his chest and told Vanessa he was hot. He knew it was a compliment.

He served them dinner, and this time it was Martha who asked him to sit at the table. Vanessa said sure, why not, and so he did. Martha asked him about his life, and he remembered what to do to make her laugh and smile. Vanessa also lightened up and smiled, especially after he opened the second bottle of wine. He cleaned up while they sat in the living room.

He listened because they might ask something of him and he didn’t want to miss it.

Martha said does he ever go outside,

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

and then Vanessa said no.

Then Martha said that’s fucked up, and Vanessa said no it’s not.

Martha said come on, V, he’s pretty much a real person, and Vanessa said no he’s not.

Then Martha started talking about emotional intelligence. She said that was the big break-through of this model, that Vanessa was kidding herself if she didn’t think he could feel. Vanessa denied this and said it wasn’t that big of a deal. Martha said that’s irresponsible, you can’t ignore that, you aren’t getting the whole experience if you do, and Vanessa interrupted her and said fuck that I bought a robot not a boyfriend.

She rolls over to face him now, opens her eyes and brings her hand to his cheek. He looks at her hair on the pillow and it still reminds him of smoke. She rubs her thumb along his lips, but he doesn’t know what she’s trying to rub off. Then she brings her face toward his and puts her lips on his. She giggles and pulls away, but her eyes stay. He isn’t saying or doing anything, but her eyes stay. They usually only do that when he makes her laugh or smile and he knows which expressions and tones do that but he isn’t doing any of them and her eyes stay.

She says, I never thought this would happen, but doesn’t expect him to reply.

This connects back to last night because after Vanessa interrupted her, Martha said look isn’t that weird. Then Vanessa had become apprehensive and said what do you

mean. He knew that she already understood what Martha meant and that she wanted Martha to say it anyway. He stood listening in the kitchen and stopped washing the pot because he also wanted to hear Martha say it.

A lot of people do it. It happens. I mean, you spend all your waking hours with him, he’s a great, dependable guy, it makes sense, right? He feels for you.

There’s a natural progression there.

Sure the company doesn’t advertise that, but they have to know what’s going to happen, you know?

Vanessa was quiet, and he resumed washing to fill the silence and also so that he could figure out what they meant.

Martha spoke up again even though Vanessa still hadn’t replied. She said look, it’s no coincidence that you bought him right after Peter left.

Vanessa was quiet again, but it sounded like a different kind of quiet.

Martha said don’t be ashamed, it’s fine, no one wants to be lonely. He’s there for you.

Vanessa said do people really, and Martha said yes, don’t worry, it’s natural. He’s made to be attractive, and honestly, he seems really into you.

She puts her lips on his face in different places. He smiles because it makes her happy and he likes that.

She pulls him closer, and he feels that in some places she’s very warm. She says, yes just like that, and he must have done something well, so he repeats it.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

77

Martha left at 23:33, which was later than Vanessa had expected her to. It took longer because the two of them talked about Peter for a long time, and at one point Vanessa cried. Martha consoled her, and he took notes on how to do so. Then, once it was okay, she left. Usually Vanessa put him to bed after his tasks were done, but this night she had him stand there, and she looked at him for a while.

He offered to pour her wine, but she said she got it, thanks, although her hand was shaky and he could do it better. He watched a drop drip off the beveled rim of the bottle, fall, stain the plush couch. Vanessa didn’t notice and kept looking at him. He wasn’t sure what she was looking at, because if she were really looking at him she would have noticed his gaze fixed on the perfect circle of burgundy on the cushion. Tomorrow he would scrub.

The drop, small, seeped thick into the fabric. Still Vanessa stared and sipped.

She put him to sleep. He hadn’t gotten enough rest when he was awoken.

He needed six hours each night to process the day’s events and ensure quality service, but Vanessa roused him only three hours after putting him to bed, which didn’t make sense because she knew he needed to process. She said, come to bed, and he followed her. Moments flashed before his eyes as he walked, the stain most salient.

First she told him lie down, then no, not like a corpse, come on. She was frustrated, and he hated upsetting her so he changed position and then she told him he could take his clothes off if he wanted to, but he knew she didn’t want him to keep them on.

Not much had changed over the 78

last half hour. She nuzzles into him now, and he holds her closer. In the morning she will most likely want eggs, although in this state he isn’t sure he’ll be able to crack the egg along its equator. There might be white flakes in the goop. He’ll have to pick them out, one by one, dunking his fingers in the sticky liquid and flailing for the fractured shells. Then he’ll wash his hands.

Formulating this plan is difficult as he contends with her breathy remarks and wet lips. The scent of her breath fills his nostrils. She didn’t brush her teeth. He tried to place the smell and can’t, realizing that this is something novel. He smiles at this new experience, but his upturned lips fall out of congruence with her searching damp ones. She bumps into him, implores him to repeat the hand motion.

He knows why she cried about Peter.

He found a framed picture of the two of them in a drawer once. They were at a lake, and on the back it said ‘XOXO, Vanessa.’ One night, she had come home stumbling and called him.

She said, hey Petey, while drawing out the vowels, but got much curter after he replied. She spoke, words running into one another like they did tonight.

He had come in and out of the room during the conversation, collecting the trash, and heard her say no, look, I’m cutting back my hours, I’m not going to let them push me around anymore, you were right Pete, you were right.

This was an emotional conversation, but he still didn’t think she should lie.

He heard the phone calls from her office that came in on the weekday evenings and sometimes even during

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

the weekend. Vanessa usually said yes ma’am and then sat at her computer for hours and asked for coffee.

“USUALLY VANESSA PUT HIM TO BED AFTER HIS TASKS WERE DONE, BUT THIS NIGHT SHE HAD HIM STAND THERE, AND SHE LOOKED AT HIM FOR A WHILE.”

She pushes him under her, and he feels her weight. Now she puts her neck to his mouth instead of her lips.

She sounds ragged but encourages him to continue the gesture, compliments him a lot as he learns the right movements. One time he entered her bathroom as she got out of the shower and she screamed. He was somewhere he shouldn’t have been. It feels like that again except then she had wanted him to leave and now he thinks she would get mad if he did. Finally, she sighs and turns over.

She’s still quite close.

He hasn’t yet been told to sleep, and so he can’t. The fan gyrates overhead and he notices differences between them, like the little hairs that stand at attention on her neck because she’s cold. His skin is hairless, and the hair on his head is short and molded.

Vanessa has long hair that sashays over her shoulder blades when she walks or she turns over naked in bed. Martha had short hair, which he hadn’t seen before but thought looked quite nice. Each of them chose their hair, and he would like that. He would like a lot of things, if he let himself

imagine them.

He can’t do anything but lie and think, so he does. Aside from hair, there isn’t that much difference between him and Vanessa. They both have jobs that shape their lives. Vanessa probably wouldn’t agree, but she has to follow orders as much as he does. They both have to do things they don’t want to do.

He thinks about it more, though, and realizes the differences. She doesn’t like cooking, but one time she wanted to make her own eggs and she grabbed the pan with yolk still on her fingers and didn’t care. She also stains her furniture. And it isn’t fair for her to leave the fan on so long that she gets cold and needs him to keep her warm all night, although maybe the fan doesn’t matter.

He knows he hasn’t gotten enough sleep because he’s thinking about fairness. It never does much good, but it’s dark and he’s tired of smelling the smoky hair in front of him. He wants to sleep on his own and why should he have to learn all the gesticulations that make her happy when she doesn’t care about keeping the couch clean?

She murmurs something indistinct and rolls over, her head facing him.

Now he can see her brow, nose, fluttering eyelids, all cast in the same pale glow. He’s never seen shadows fall like this. She’s never seemed so fragile.

She isn’t perfect but deserves the best. He’s lucky: he can help account for her faults. He smiles and feels hot at the thought of making her happy.

Soon after he met Vanessa, when they were still getting to know each other,

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

79

she asked him to sing. She wanted to hear “Walking on Sunshine.” He hadn’t heard the song or tried to sing before but knew that he could. He felt foolish, though, because she was staring at him and the house was quiet. He had to do it, so he opened his mouth and said, I used to think maybe you loved me, now baby I’m sure, in time with the rhythm and melody in his head, and she smiled and sparkled.

He didn’t want to do it but was glad he did because she liked it. He thinks that maybe lying with her in bed is like that.

Once, later, he heard her singing to herself while walking around the house. She sang the chorus of the same song: oh oh oh, I feel great. It was one of her favorites, and he liked it a lot, too. Her voice was clear and soft. At dinner that night, he asked her to sing it. She laughed and said what? He told her that he liked it, and she laughed more. He waited for her to begin, which made her uncomfortable. I’m not a good singer, she said. I think you are, he replied. That doesn’t matter, she said. She didn’t care what he liked and maybe lying in bed with her is like this instead.

The hours pass until it’s 09:52 and she wakes up. She looks like she’s in pain, and he offers to get her something.

She looks confused, then laughs. She says, you were just what I needed, and he says you’re welcome.

She looks at him oddly and says, don’t act like you were doing me a favor.

He isn’t sure how to respond because that’s what he did. He says, I wanted to make you happy, and she says, right, like there was nothing in it for you.

80

He offers to make her breakfast, but she says no, she doesn’t want him to make her breakfast. She wants him to stop being a dick and ow, her head hurts. He tries to explain he didn’t sleep much but isn’t sure that matters because she’s standing up and looks angry.

This is not supposed to happen, she should be happy, and he doesn’t know why but he stands up and gently grabs her palms. He thinks this is right—I’m sorry, I had a great time—and slowly pushes his lips onto hers. Her arms link around his neck, and though he can’t see it, he can feel her smile. She still hasn’t brushed her teeth.

She isn’t mad anymore, and the morning goes as mornings usually do.

She showers, and he feels that she wouldn’t be upset if he walked in this time. He prepares breakfast. She isn’t in a rush this morning, so he decides to make French toast, even though she didn’t ask for it. He slices a loaf of bread into enough for two people, because that might be what they are.

He wants to sit with a plate in front of him even if he can’t eat it because they’re connected. They’re more than they ever were. He makes her happy.

He retrieves cinnamon, syrup, and butter. He pulls down a wide bowl from a cabinet and finds the cardboard carton of eggs in the fridge. He takes two, carries them, smooth, to the bowl. As he cracks one, the fracture symmetrical around its curve, the other falls and hits the tile floor. The yolk seeps out, flowing into the lines of mortar. Broken white pieces fall from the spiderweb shell, scattering on the floor. She walks in, wrapped in a towel, and stares first at the mess, then at him. With eggshells at his feet, he meets her gaze.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

MASCULINITY Diane D’Costa

ISSUE NAME

METRONORMATIVITY nonfiction

HEIDI SIEGRIST she, her, hers Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Department of English I wrote this piece last year when I was still living in Alabama after the election. I still miss/have a lot of conflicted feelings about my hometown (although I felt very proud of AL after the election of Doug Jones!). As with any nonfiction I write, it felt—and still feels—incomplete. A gesturing toward something, a way of thinking about community.

82

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

Donald Trump was elected president in the early hours of November 9, 2016. I was shuffling and reshuffling a pack of cards, endlessly, because I needed something to do with my hands. Political commentators on the news were talking about the revolt of the white working class, the unexpected and frightening outcry of rural America. In the days afterward, every article I read seemed to present a theory about why what happened had happened. The underlying claim to many of these theories had to do with a deep undercurrent of resentment against the bloom of modern urban life—its excess of money, its liberal education, its identity politics. Outside of America’s urban centers, it was suggested, people had a different idea of what constituted the “real world”—”real” men and women accomplished “real” work. We saw that the divide between rural and urban was about social politics more than geography, and we saw that it was becoming stunningly bitter. And I felt bitter too. Running through the Alabama hills, the trees changing color above me and the breeze whistling through the stillness, I knew I was also running through a red state where each Trump/Pence sign that I passed reminded me of the rural myth in which so many Trump voters believed. *** People toss around the phrase “small town values” so frequently that we begin to attach it to images in our minds. We see Mayberry or a sunlit diner. My senior year of high school, I heard the phrase so much that it began to give me a headache. The McCain/Obama campaign of 2008 was coming to a head while I stumbled

through college applications and tried to imagine myself in places I had never been before. McCain’s rhetoric of “small town values”—embodied so vividly by Sarah Palin—became a myth in vivid colors, and I was engulfed. The strategy succeeded because of its ambiguity. Small town values had something to do with God. They had something to do with protecting your own kind, possibly by force. They disdained the educated “elite,” and they despised any sort of “identity politics” that didn’t look like a clean Christian family. Picking up bread and milk in Star Market, I felt a flare of irritation as I saw my neighbors wandering with their own red baskets out of the corner of my eye. I felt suspicious of small town values at the Waffle House, where we met my Nanna for breakfast on Saturday morning and maneuvered past old white men in American flag jackets at the bar. I felt suspicious at school, where in English class we struggled through The Stranger pronouncing “Arab” as “A-rab” like in “Arab, Alabama.” We had rarely seen “Arab” in any other context. I looked around at my classmates and realized that I would be doomed to a life of relative rurality if I stayed, which at the time felt disastrous and possibly deadly. Just as I couldn’t define the “small town values” I wanted to escape, I couldn’t define the kind of life I actually wanted. But in Big City America, I thought I might find some sort of hazy dream better than Real America. *** The “small town values” dream is impossible, much like the dream of “big city” freedoms. The dream only exists in the imagination. Towns and

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

83

cities alone cannot lead to unified and uncontested value systems. But the town’s imagined reality doesn’t require clear definitions. It doesn’t want us to gaze at it too closely. Although we equate small town values with rurality, I did not grow up in a rural area by any traditional demographics—one wouldn’t consider my hometown sparsely populated, nor is farming its main industry. But the town lies in the deep South, which people often conflate with rurality because of the conceptual affinity between the two.

Theorists in a new collection of essays called Queering the Countryside write that, “...the idea of rurality continues to figure prominently in the collective ethos of American society.”1 Moreover, rurality “is simultaneously everywhere in general and nowhere in particular. It is ever-present and yet a thing of the past. It is at once archetypically American and atypical of America… [representing] many qualities that a lot of people who live there (wherever ‘there’ is) simply do not possess, including whiteness, deeply rooted American nativity, and, most importantly for our purposes here, heterosexuality.”2 So far as “queerness” denotes a nonconformity of gender and sexuality and the general fluidity of identity, it has traditionally seemed incompatible with the popular idea of “small town values.”

When I was eight years old, I had a crush on a girl at my camp: a week-long religious education in the Alabama woods. I realized the crush in chapel where we were all supposed to wash each other’s feet to understand what Jesus had done. Kneeling on the floor with the sunlight coming in colorful from the stained glass windows, I realized that it meant something to 84

WE SAW THAT THE DIVIDE BETWEEN RURAL AND URBAN WAS ABOUT SOCIAL POLITICS MORE THAN GEOGRAPHY, AND WE SAW THAT IT WAS BECOMING STUNNINGLY BITTER. AND I FELT BITTER TOO.”

be uncomfortable touching her and only her.

When I was twelve years old, I told my mom that I was afraid I might be gay because my cousin was. My mom told me that I didn’t have to worry because my cousin was adopted.

When I was seventeen years old, I kissed my new best friend in her living room while her dad mowed the lawn outside in the hot July sun— her boyfriend had dared us and we were curious. Afterward, she said she didn’t feel curious anymore. But I still did, although I didn’t say it. It is hard to create a world for yourself that you can’t see around you, hard to live in a world that you can’t speak. *** In high school, late at night with the lights out and my headphones plugged into my computer, I pored over a world that was just beginning to exist for me—a world that I didn’t see in my neighborhood, my high school, or the books I read. I watched The L Word, which I mostly hated, and the British TV show Skins, which I mostly loved. Before going to sleep,

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

I could close out the screen, delete my Internet history, and pretend that this action deleted the images from my own mind, too. Skins focuses on a group of disenchanted British teenagers in Bristol, falling in love and doing drugs and driving cars into lakes. Kids—gay and straight or something in between—feeling impossibly tied to identities that for one reason or another they couldn’t express. Skins was wildly dramatic, but with a certain lightness, as though identities and fears and loves were all somehow subject to an effervescent, shifting joy. That’s how I felt, anyway, watching it alone and late at night.

The L Word offered a very different kind of experience. Fractured viewing through clips and episode fragments I discovered online helped me learn what life might look like for a group of high-powered thirty-something lesbians in L.A. This life looked frenetic, cliquish, and somewhat frightening. It involved intricate maps of sexual partners, deadly serious art shows, and emotional haircuts. But I watched both shows because both involved queer sex as well as cities where people openly scorned the limitations of “small town values.”

These two aspects seemed to go inevitably together. They were my only options. *** I moved to the city—Chicago—for typical reasons: because I was lonely, and I felt out of place, and I wanted to fall in love. “Metronormativity” conveys the idea that queer identity is inseparable from an urban life.3 First coined by the theorist Jack Halberstam, this theory offers an academic term for an idea that I’ve always, on some level, been aware of

and believed: I know I am not alone in this. I was lucky enough to leave my small town for college in the big city. During my first year in Chicago, my first really-from-New-York friend, Polly, introduced me to Dan Savage’s sex advice podcast Savage Love. I loved it, but it also made me blush and obsessively monitor the volume on my earbuds. I couldn’t believe that someone could talk about nonmonogamy and coming out in a voice above an embarrassed whisper, on a widely disseminated radio program. I used to listen to him on the bus and the train, where the people surrounding me would become jarringly mysterious. Who were they, where had they come from, what did they believe, how did they love? I realized, for the first time, that I could look at a stranger and have no understanding of their home life, their loves, or their desires—no matter what assumptions I might feel tempted to make. Dan got a lot of calls from gay kids in small towns—kids whose Southern accents felt intimately familiar to me.

Go to the city, Dan told them.

The idea was that if you could get out of your shitty small town with its shitty close-mindedness, you could finally be yourself. When I heard this theory, I would nod in self-satisfied agreement. I had gotten out and gone to the city—no matter that my self-presentation in the city did not noticeably differ from what it had been in Alabama. But it seemed natural that faggots and dykes—bold people like Dan had reappropriated those words, used them as a challenge and a celebration—found their natural habitat in the city.

I learned later that “Get Thee to a

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

85

Big City” also serves as the title of a 1995 essay by Kath Weston. “The gay imaginary,” she writes, “is not just a dream of a freedom to ‘be gay’ that requires an urban location, but a symbolic space that configures gayness itself by elaborating an opposition between urban and rural life.”4 I don’t think queerness is the only identity configured, in part, by a symbolic opposition between urban and rural life. But it’s been the most relevant one to my own life, and the one by which I’ve felt most in danger of falling into such a symbolic opposition. To be a good queer, I had to be a good city-dweller. When Dan Savage tells us to “get thee to the city,” I think of the queer performances I found in Chicago—gay bars, neighborhoods flooded with tattooed youths sharing spoken-word poetry, and high-end sex shops. Huntsville, Alabama may be a city in terms of population, but it has none of these performances (don’t let the sign for “Dyke’s Restaurant Supply Co.” fool you). I grew into my queer identity with the idea that I represented some sort of “we” destined to inherit the city. And then I didn’t. *** Living an “urban life” in college, I didn’t realize that I was at first recreating a fantasy of something more rural. I lived in the city, but I really just lived on campus. The glow of the library on a quiet night, just a ten minute walk from my dorm, brought a lump to my throat. The voices on the stairs outside my dorm room felt intimately familiar, and every morning in the dining hall I could count on finding the same friends and dormmates rehashing the latest gossip. I lived by a comfortable routine in about a 86

five block radius. Some weekends, we ventured to restaurants downtown or thrift shops on the northside, navigating the buses and trains in large noisy groups. But by nightfall, I always felt ready to get on the bus back—to see Washington Park’s trees come back into view, to see the strange architecture of the gym, and to finally see our bus stop, from which we could already see the yellow lights of home. It was a small community, one I never felt particularly ambitious to leave.

During my third winter in Chicago, I took an introductory gender studies class: my first encounter with the ideas about which I’m thinking now.

I would reflect during class, looking out the window at the snow lit by street lamps and shadowed by bare trees. The professor, meanwhile, introduced as an academic discipline what I had only known as a private source of shame and confusion. It was an incredibly happy winter for me. “Queer” no longer represented something you dreaded hearing whispered about you, but rather a broad theoretical concept—it could apply to sexuality or gender, a fluidity in the way you thought about your own identity, a radical way of practicing love and social activism, or even a different way of organizing your time and space. We read Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, and their ideas became more than abstractions for me. They became bold invitations to construct an ethical life that did not focus on the dominant politics of traditional family structures. I assumed that this kind of education would prepare me for a more urban life, but it really only prepared me to think. And when I lost my small campus community at graduation, I lost more than I thought

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

I would. *** The city never sleeps. The city is for artists and thinkers. The city is ambitious. The city is weird. The city is for dreamers. The city is for everyone lucky enough to make it there. This is the urban imaginary, and like all imaginaries, it is porous, and it sends your stomach jolting upward toward your throat when it falls through. I remember, the night I tried ecstasy, sitting on my girlfriend’s bed and watching her pull on her combat boots. Our lives were in flux. She had just moved into a new apartment and her bed was a mattress on the floor.

I had been piecing together enough part time jobs and freelance work to pay my rent and bus fare. We had built our relationship on a tenuous, desperate kind of love. I missed my family. I would look out my window every morning and just want to go back to sleep. I felt anxious on crowded buses. I felt as though it would be easy to disappear, and so I thought I might as well feel “ecstatic.”

We had been dating for three months and had dressed to go out. Tight black jeans, t-shirts, Converse sneakers.

The laptop on her bed played “Gettin Wavy” by Mykki Blanco—the gay rapper in drag, the North Carolinato-Brooklyn transplant, the fierce poet and genderqueer activist. In the music video, he runs from men who want to hurt him, hops onto a bus, gets progressively higher.

Gettin’ wavy. Gettin’ wavy in ways you only can in the city. “Notoriety is power, and through that power you can influence social attitudes,” Blanco says in a recent interview with The Guardian.5 One can only

attain visibility in the city, but that visibility offers a basis for the most far-reaching kinds of activism. This is true. But it is also possible to feel invisible where you should feel the most visible. We attended a show in Wicker Park, and I stood in a big dark room with my girlfriend and her friends and watched twenty people materialize on stage. The air smelled like cigarettes and sweet stale beer.

The room was filled with my queer community, people I did not know.

A boy took my hands and I felt like a Gumby doll.

“Are you feeling it?” he asked me. “I’m feeling it. Are you feeling it?”

I knew that my heart was racing too quickly. I became intensely aware of the colors of the lights on the stage and the size of my pupils. I felt like asking my girlfriend, over and over, whether she was having fun. She finally asked me to stop asking her.

On the cab ride home I finally realized that for all this time, for years, I should’ve been asking myself. I was not feeling it. *** After six years in Chicago, I decided to move back to Alabama. A couple of months before I left, my friend Nathan took me to a house party. One of his friends was training to be a tattoo artist, and she’d offered beer and pizza to anyone who would devote twenty dollars and a small patch of skin to her craft. It was a bleak winter night— that last winter, nothing ever looked as beautiful as the snow from the window of that college classroom— but the apartment was warm and softly lit. One woman nursed her baby on the couch. A lot of others sat

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

87

around on the floor, trading beers from various Chicago breweries. The artist had set up her workspace in one corner, with a pillow on the floor for her customers. I remember feeling the warmth of community for the first time in months. When my turn finally came to offer up my skin, the artist placed one hand on my shoulder and poised the needle at her starting point, gazing at the image I held up for her on my phone. In dozens of pricks, she inked the outline of the state of Alabama. I remember feeling, in that apartment, a preliminary nostalgia for my life there. It suddenly seemed as though everyone was searching for their community. It had become impossible for me to believe that such a search was regionally isolated—that there were two different species of people in America’s cities and towns. Eight years had passed since I had started believing so fully in the danger of “small town values.” Now that phrase had returned, but I no longer felt convinced. I wanted to go home, where other people must also be searching for the best possible way to be themselves among everyone else. To believe in the urban/rural opposition would be to believe in the bleakest vision of the country: a place geographically divided into opposing camps like queer/heteronormative, educated/uneducated, inclusive/racist, entitled/disenfranchised.

I miss a lot about the city, like Mediterranean food and the lights on a summer night. Poetry readings in local bookshops and seeing thousands of people gathered in the streets for political marches. But I love a lot about my small town, too— knowing the names of the regulars at the bar and going hiking when the light is low and Saturday morning 88

artist markets where everyone knows everyone else. And I see the myth of “small town values” fading here. Along with non-whiteness and cultural heterogeneity, queerness in a rural space maintains the unique power, as Johnson puts it, to “use existing signs from the social field in distinct and novel ways as a critique of limitations on conservatism and rurality.”6 The dichotomy begins to break down when the definition of every place becomes visible as multiple, shifting, “WE MUST BE ABLE TO FIND PRIDE AND COMFORT IN OUR RURAL HOMETOWNS—TO BE HERE FOR EACH OTHER, AND TO PROTECT EACH OTHER.” and unstable. We must be able to find pride and comfort in our rural hometowns—to be here for each other, and to protect each other.

The project “Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in Rural America” provides portraits of the people you don’t think you see. In one that I find particularly beautiful, two older men in Iowa pose on the grass in front of a small country home. Their expressions seem serious but wry. One wears a pair of overalls over a checkered shirt with the words “Grant Would” printed on the front. And then we see it: the doubling of this portrait with Grant Wood’s iconic “American Gothic” in which a pitchfork-wielding farmer and his wife stare solemnly forward, standing outside their farmhouse as though protecting the “small-town

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

values” within. But of course, no such values lurk beneath the paint.

Grant Wood, artist of Real America, was a farm boy and a gay man and a student in Chicago and a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Iowa. Here are layers, echoes, transpositions, reinterpretations. There is power in notoriety, but there is power in quiet insistence, too.

We should understand the dichotomy between urban and rural in the same way we understand the dichotomy

A bonfire burned out by the sawmill.

A sign at one of the Baptist churches, at this point outdated, quipped that “the revelation is coming… hopefully before the election!” And when I turned onto the county road that would lead me where I wanted to go, there was the sign, lined with American flags, reading, “You’re in Trump country now!” But here in Alabama, in the South, in these red states lined with blue mountains, I am the undercurrent, and I know I am not alone. Scholars warn us, this year,

Mel and John 7

American Gothic 8

between out and closeted: incomplete.

No one occupies one uniform identity, just as no place is any one thing.

Suggesting otherwise denies the dizzying number of ways in which people live honest lives. I recently drove along some of the small county highways I now know well. It was a foggy day, and outside the dull sigh of my car’s struggling heater, everything looked slightly eerie. I saw a flock of starlings, at first camouflaged by the season’s last leaves, alight from the trees across from the cotton fields.

about underestimating the margins.

This is rural America, but not only in the way we tend to perceive it in our current political discourse or from an urban vantage point: as nativist, fearful, uneducated, homophobic.

I want to be here, even when I feel bitter, angry, or worried. Where you think there are “small town values,” there is queerness, subversiveness, revelation. We build across these county lines like a river rising in a hard rain. In me, on me, Alabama is queer. This is my country. I claim it.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

89

MASCULINITY Diane D’Costa

Diane D’Costa she, her, hers College of Arts & Sciences Class of 2018, Leadership and Public Policy, Youth, and Social Innovation Diane D’Costa uses her work to explore concepts of masculinity. Juxtaposing muscular men with intimate poses intends to have viewers question their understanding of masculine vulnerability and dismantle assumptions of how men are to be portrayed in art. More recent pieces also explore ideas of identity and sexuality. D’Costa paints acrylic pieces and also creates ceramic work.

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

91

Afterword

In the past year, Q* Anthology of Queer Culture has sought to expand its presence at the University of Virginia and in Charlottesville. We’ve published a new website highlighting digital copies of our content and expanded information about the Q* project. We’ve set up a Facebook page to better connect with our readers, and we’ve hosted events to promote the journal and solicit submissions.

Members of the Editorial Board have also collaborated with other queer leaders at UVA and in Charlottesville, serving on a new Queer Leaders of Charlottesville Coalition (QLOCC) to advocate for LGBTQ issues beyond the scope of our publication.

In all these ways and more, Q* has worked to preserve this new platform for LGBTQ voices for the future.

As the journal continues into next year and beyond, however, it will be up to those reading this content to continue in the work of supporting and preserving it. We hope you have enjoyed reading the second edition

92

of the journal. We hope you felt enriched or inspired by the poetry or art or essays you found in this spring’s anthology. And we hope that if you did, you’ll support this project going forward. Consider submitting a piece of content—as a student, an alumnus, or a community member. Consider donating to the anthology or sharing it with a friend who might otherwise have missed it. If you’ve been moved at all by the authors and artists highlighted in this edition of the journal, consider helping us continue to highlight queer artistry long into the future.

Janet Mock tells us that telling stories “to one another and the world” can represent “a revolutionary act.” We agree, and we believe the stories told by our incredible authors and artists represent the beginning of a revolutionary shift toward greater inclusivity and acceptance at the University of Virginia. We look forward to gathering more revolutionary stories in the years to come.

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *

93

Endnotes Epigraph 1.

Emezi, Akwaeke. Freshwater. Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 2018.

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Obituaries 1. Oswald, Richard, dir. Anders als die Andern. 1919; Berlin, Germany: Richard Oswald Produktion Filmmuseum München, 2004. DVD. 2. “Kill Dr. M. Hirschfeld: Well-Known German Scientist Victim of a Munich Mob,” New York Times (New York, NY), Oct. 12, 1920, 14, quoted in Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 7.

3. Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology (London: Quartet, 1986), 198, quoted in Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 7.

An Awe-Filled-Year 1.

Bible, Holy. “New american standard bible.” Grand Rapids: World (1995).

2.

Scott, Walter. “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade.” Parade (1993).

3.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The gay science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.

Vintage, 2010.

Sexual Abilities 1. Robert McRuer, “Disabling Sex: Notes of Crip Theory.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2011 Volume 17, Number 1: 107-117. http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/17/1/107.full. pdf+html?sid=29613a1d-545f-4494-bdb9-fdbf7522bbdd 2. Kyra R. Greene, “Disability Rights Movement (United States),” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470674871. wbespm271.

3. Robert, McRuer, Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York, NY, USA: New York University Press (NYU Press), 2006. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 21 April 2015. http://site. ebrary.com/lib/uvalib/reader.action?docID=10170579 4. Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2003) 9(1-2): 79-105; http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/9/1-2/79.full.pdf+html?sid=29613a1d-545f-4494bdb9-fdbf7522bbdd 5. Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets.”

6. Robert McRuer. Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.

7. Robert McRuer. Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.

8. Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2003 Volume 9, Number 1-2: 233-255 http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/9/1-2/233.full.pdf+html?sid=29613a1d-545f-4494-bdb9fdbf7522bbdd 9. Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

10. Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

11. Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

12. Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

13. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.

14. Barbara Fiduccia, “Sexual Imagery of Physically Disabled Women.” Sexuality and Disability 17.

1999: 277-82. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1022189224533#page-1 15. Robert McRuer, “Disabling Sex: Notes of Crip Theory.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

16. Eunjung Kim, “Asexuality in Disability Narratives.” Sexualities, August 2011 14. 497-493. http:// sexualities.sagepub.com/content/14/4/479.full.pdf+html.

17. Eunjung Kim, “Asexuality in Disability Narratives.” Sexualities.

18. Chelsea Whitney, Intersection of Identity: Sexuality and Disability. March 94

Q* Anthology | Volume 2, Issue 1

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

2006, Volume 24, Issue 1, 39-52. Date: 23 Mar 2006. http://re5qy4sb7x.search. serialssolutions.com/?genre=article&issn=01461044&title=Sexuality%20%26%20 Disability&volume=24&issue=1&date=20060301&atitle=Intersections%20in%20 Identity-Identity%20Development%20among%20Queer%20Women%20with%20 Disabilities.&spage=39&sid=EBSCO:pbh&pid=%3Cauthors%3EWhitney%2C%20 Chelsea%3C/authors%3E%3Cui%3E20754463%3C/ui%3E%3Cdate%3E20060301%3C/ date%3E%3Cdb%3Epbh%3C/db%3E. Michael Rembis, “Beyond the Binary: Rethinking the Social Model of Disabled Sexuality.”

Sexuality and Disability. March 2010, Volume 28, Issue 1, 51-60.

Fiduccia, Barbara. “Sexual Imagery of Physically Disabled Women.” Sexuality and Disability.

Fiduccia, Barbara. “Sexual Imagery of Physically Disabled Women.” Sexuality and Disability.

Rembis, Michael A. “Beyond the Binary: Rethinking the Social Model of Disabled Sexuality.”

Sexuality and Disability.

Fiduccia, Barbara. “Sexual Imagery of Physically Disabled Women.” Sexuality and Disability.

Kim, Eunjung. “Asexuality in Disability Narratives.” Sexualities.

Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ellen Samuels, “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Barbara Fiduccia, “Sexual Imagery of Physically Disabled Women.” Sexuality and Disability.

Michael Rembis, “Beyond the Binary: Rethinking the Social Model of Disabled Sexuality.”

Sexuality and Disability.

Michael Rembis, “Beyond the Binary: Rethinking the Social Model of Disabled Sexuality.”

Sexuality and Disability Robert McRuer, Crip Theory : Cultural Signs of Queewrness and Disability.

Steven D. Edwards, Disability: Definitions, Value, and Identity (Oxford: Radcliffe, 2005), 32.

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 2008), 8.

Chelsea Whitney, Intersection of Identity: Sexuality and Disability.

Robert McRuer, “As Good as It Gets.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Chelsea Whitney, Intersection of Identity: Sexuality and Disability.

Abby Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency.” NWSA Journal. Vol. 14, No. 3, Feminist Disability Studies (Autumn, 2002), 33-57. The Johns Hopkins University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316923.

Abby Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency.” NWSA Journal.

Metronormativity 1. Colin R. Johnson, Brian J Gilley, and Mary L. Gray, “Introduction” in Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies (New York and London: New York University Press, 2016), 1.

2. Johnson, Gilley, and Gray, “Introduction,” 4.

3. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005) , 36.

4. Kath Weston, “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1995): 274, quoted in Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005) , 30.

5. Dorian Lynskey, “Mykki Blanco: ‘I didn’t want to be a rapper. I wanted to be Yoko Ono,’” The Guardian (London, UK), Sept. 15, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/15/ mykki-blanco-i-didnt-want-to-be-a-rapper-i-wanted-to-be-yoko-ono 6. Johnson, Gilley, and Gray, “Introduction,” 12.

7. Landreth, Mary. Mel and John, Photograph. Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

8. Wood, Grant. American Gothic, 1930. Oil on beaverboard. 78 cm × 65.3 cm (30¾ in × 25¾ in), Art Institute of Chicago https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_Wood_-_ American_Gothic_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

95

Q

ANTHOLOGY OF QUEER CULTURE

TO ONE ANOTHER AND THE WORLD

Q

Q* Anthology of Queer Culture Volume 2, Issue 1 To One Another and the World Published at the University of Virginia with the generous support of The Jefferson Trust

Scan to visit the Q* Anthology website