I imagine being handed a disabled Barbie as a child, one with a removable leg, a shapeshifting body, a complicated body. Would it have saved me from decades of self-loathing and body hatred? Like many young girls, I played with Barbies. In the mid-’80s, I was the proud owner of the Barbie Dream House with […]
“This is what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” When I tell people that I live in a cooperative house, I imagine that this is what they think of: lots of partying, fighting, and sex. Or they think that I live in a halfway house and I just got out of […]
“Grief was like a seizure that shook me like a storm” – author Patricia Cornwell. When my mom began treatment for end-stage liver cancer, I knew the odds of her survival weren’t good. As she grew thinner and weaker, I employed a slightly twisted mind game to try to steel myself for the unthinkable. Okay, […]
I realized the fact I’ll do anything for the people I love is not a weakness, it’s my biggest strength. I was at a small house party with my best friend recently when he got far too drunk, far too quickly. Soon enough, he was slumped over on the ground, wearing his own vomit, mumbling […]
To my surprise, once I stopped centering my life around romance, I was happy on my own. I’ve always loved Valentine’s Day. When I was married, my then-husband and I spent the holiday at our favorite bed and breakfast, and it was always just a little bit magical. Now that I’m single, I still love […]
This movie about a bunch of gay men with average problems helped a queer teenage girl imagine a place for herself in the world, and that makes it a little bit extraordinary. In my home dimension, the one where The Broken Hearts Club is rightfully and universally revered as a gay classic, every gay bar […]
I am done being good for the sake of being good, for fear of being disliked or unpalatable or alone. “Good girl!” I see 8-year-old me, who, in turn, sees her mom sitting at the end of a bar. She is saying it over the top of a Jose Cuervo margarita, smoldering Marlboro 100 Light dangling […]
The only thing worse than everyone feeling sorry for you when you are suffering, when you are dying, is the horror that no one will really care. Illness, grief and embarrassment have a confusing but symbiotic relationship. There is a reason cancer used to be a thing people kept secret, sometimes even from their children. In […]
