One version of me dated men. She was visible, legible, congratulated. She fulfilled the expectations placed on a young woman coming of age at the turn of the millennium. She was supposed to be looking for a husband, for a father to her future children, for the life everyone assured me would eventually feel like my own.

The other version loved a woman.

She existed mostly in private, hidden even from myself. The men weren’t so much love interests as decoys. Distractions that bought me time while I tried to understand why the life I was performing never quite fit. I didn’t experience these two selves as a contradiction necessarily. Not at the time. Fragmentation was not a failure of identity. It was a strategy for survival.

Many queer people know this strategy intimately.

In my conversation with poet Julian Randall, I found myself returning again and again to the question of wholeness. We talked about masculinity, vulnerability, race, queerness, poetry, justice — the ways we tend to divide ourselves to become legible to the world. Listening to him describe tenderness not as weakness but as a form of courage, I realized we were circling the same idea from different directions.

We’re often told that coming out is about finally becoming ourselves, as though there were always one authentic self waiting beneath the disguise. But that has never quite captured my experience. There was no singular identity to discover. It was instead the slow, painstaking work of allowing incompatible truths to exist in the same body. In time, I eventually stopped demanding that only one part of me be visible.

Perhaps this is one of queerness’s greatest gifts: challenging categories by exposing the fiction that we were ever meant to fit neatly inside them.

Lately, I’ve watched two friends arrive at this same threshold. Both married men when they were young. Both built lives they believed were their own. Both, in their thirties, encountered an unmistakable, overwhelming desire for another woman. Their stories are otherwise completely different, yet they share something profound. They weren’t suddenly transformed into different people. They became impossible to divide any longer.

Patriarchy, it seems, depends on division and fragmentation.

It divides reason from emotion, strength from tenderness, men from women, public from private, power from creation, desire from belonging, and on and on. It tells boys that vulnerability is weakness and girls that power belongs elsewhere. It teaches us to amputate whatever part of ourselves threatens the order it depends on.

Even motherhood is narrated through this logic. Women grow human beings from two microscopic cells, constructing hearts and lungs and nervous systems organ by miraculous organ inside their own bodies. It is difficult to imagine a more astonishing act of creation. And yet, cultures organized around patriarchy have long insisted that children bear the names of their fathers, as though lineage flows primarily through the one who did not build the body itself. The architecture of power has always depended on redirecting our attention away from where creation actually occurs.

Another gift of queerness is that it interrupts that illusion.

It asks whether the boundaries we’ve inherited are descriptions of reality or just bad habits of thought. That question has followed me into places that seem to have nothing to do with sexuality. But maybe they do.

Like the scientific fact that pain and pleasure activate many of the same regions of the brain. Neuroscientists can distinguish them by the patterns they produce, but their architecture overlaps in surprising ways. Pain and pleasure, it turns out, are close relatives. I often think about that and how it seems to prove that humanity has long misunderstood contradiction itself.

Pain and pleasure. Grief and joy. Fear and desire. Life and death. We treat these as opposing forces, yet anyone who has loved deeply knows how often they arrive into our lives holding hands. The birth of a child is painful. Healing hurts. Longing is exquisite because it is unfinished. Even pleasure contains the shadow of its ending.

Wholeness has never meant eliminating contradiction, but rather, expanding it until it no longer feels like a threat.

I’ve known alcoholics who died devastating deaths after breaking the hearts of everyone who loved them. I could have been one of them. I’ve watched random cruelty and illness fracture lives that deserved gentleness instead. Some nights the universe feels breathtakingly indifferent.

One October evening I drove beneath a massive yellow moon hanging low on the horizon. Ten minutes later it had become small and white, nearly swallowed by clouds. Nothing about the moon had changed. The Earth had simply continued its patient turning, carrying me with it while I mistook movement for stillness.

That image has stayed with me.

We are bodies moving through an immeasurably larger choreography. The Earth spins. The planets orbit. Galaxies drift. Every object casts a shadow because light exists. Time itself emerges because bodies move in relation to other bodies.

Reality seems to speak in pairs.

Light and darkness. Birth and death. Expansion and collapse. Pain and pleasure.

But there is so much space between the poles and the act of living, for me, is pushing them wider and wider. Queer people have been opening that same kind of spaciousness for generations.

We have learned, often because we had no other choice, that identity can hold paradox. That love can rewrite family. That bodies refuse the stories imposed upon them. That contradiction is evidence that reality is more generous than the language we’ve inherited to describe it.

Poetry has always understood paradox this way. That’s one reason Julian Randall’s work feels so necessary to me. His poems refuse to flatten identity into something linear or singular. They give it instead a round shape. Whole. They allow tenderness and rage, joy and grief, vulnerability and resilience to occupy the same space without demanding that one resolve the other. They practice the kind of wholeness I’m trying to describe. They make you feel it in yourself.

Sometimes I wonder whether there is, after all, a vast and meticulous kind of care beneath everything. One that continually urges life toward integration.

When I place my fingertips against my wrist, I feel a pulse. A quiet insistence. Something inside me seeking. Longing?

Perhaps that seeking/longing is what has always been holy. The movement itself. The body forever reaching toward a version of itself spacious enough to hold every contradiction it contains.

What draws me to Julian’s work is its refusal to flatten experience into certainty. His poems are deeply attentive to contradiction — to the ways tenderness and anger, grief and joy, vulnerability and strength can occupy the same body, the same family, the same moment. Rather than resolving those tensions, he invites us to live inside them.

That feels deeply connected to what we explore on this podcast. Queering reality isn’t simply about sexuality or gender — it’s about resisting the pressure to make ourselves legible through binaries. It’s about questioning the stories we’ve inherited about what makes a family, what makes a man, what makes a body, what makes a life. Julian’s work reminds us that identity isn’t something we arrive at once and for all; it’s something we continually negotiate with memory, history, love, and loss.

I’m especially excited to talk with him about poetry as a way of holding complexity without rushing toward resolution, about inheritance and the stories families pass down and leave unsaid, about vulnerability as a creative practice, and about what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be more than one thing at once.

What concerns me is not simply that false information exists. Human beings have always told stories, repeated rumors, and mistaken opinion for fact. The deeper problem is that we now inhabit information ecosystems designed to reward emotional certainty over intellectual humility. The algorithms that shape our daily experience do not distinguish between what is accurate and what is engaging. Outrage travels farther than nuance. Fear is more viral than complexity. Identity often matters more than evidence.

As Dr. Seema Yasmin argues in What the Fact?, misinformation is not primarily a failure of intelligence. Smart people are just as susceptible to falsehoods as anyone else because our beliefs are rarely formed through detached analysis. We absorb information through social relationships, cultural loyalties, and emotional needs. Facts alone do not determine what we believe. Belonging does.

When I recorded the unforgettable conversation I had with the brilliant Dr. Seema Yasmin, this was one of a few things I wrote down. Another was her special name for practicing physicians: “meat mechanics.” There is much to love about this, starting with its aptness — we are, by and large, hunks of meat. When your body collides with metal and concrete while moving fast through space and is torn apart like mine was, you find this out in the most visceral, literal way. We are highly intelligent, electrical, intricate and beautifully organized hunks of meat that are autonomous, self-correcting, self-perpetuating, and self-extinguishing (programmed cell death) biological systems. But the part about her astute euphemism that leapt immediately to the surface of that mountain of love was that I once hallucinated a vivid waking dream while performing a physically challenging form of meditation that lasted days and was done at high elevation in the desert. It was one of those downloads from the Universe that blew my mind wide open and delighted me at the time, but that my built-in skeptic knitted her brow at suspiciously the next day, blaming chemicals in the brain that can behave similarly to and be as powerful as opioids. Especially given the conditions. Nevertheless, the vivid waking dream, and another that happened in the same day, holds as two of the most memorable of my downloads, one of which reminds me of Dr. Yasmin’s nickname for physicians, and both of which somehow soothe the fiery existential angst that lick at me pretty much daily. I wrote about it in a way I feel confident about in my recent memoir in essays, Little Deaths All in a Row, Essays on Sex and Death. I’ll paste it below for your enjoyment. And please also listen to the podcast episode with Dr. Yasmin. It’s one of my favorites.

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Their cheeks were too red. The genderless worker in the movie theater in an old timey uniform behind the concession stand in the lobby. I walked up and saw, displayed all in a row on wall-mounted shelves behind their head, objects whose wetness and redness initially perplexed me. But then I knew, and of course! Hunks of raw meat took the place of popcorn and candy.

“I’ll have that one,” I said, pointing. The genderless worker pulled wax paper from a roll and grabbed my hunk of meat, half wrapping it, then handing it to me. A bit of its juice spilled over the edges of the paper and onto my hand. As I walked into the theater to take my seat, I inspected my meat more closely. Maybe it wasn’t completely raw, but it was cooked extra rare. I sat down among others in their seats eating their choice cuts. As I waited for the movie to start, I felt a tickle of anticipation, and I took my first bite. I would sit there and watch the movie while consuming my hunk of meat.

This was the hallucination — the waking dream I had while meditating for three days, eight to ten hours each day, with my arms held up in varying positions for durations of an hour at a time. What had me there doing such nonsense that put me in touch, at least metaphorically, with a world beyond death was death’s counterbalance: sex. Not directly, but I was there with my lover at the time, my tenth love, doing what she wanted to do, what she believed would help us in our relationship. This kind of meditation, she said, created the equivalent healing as thousands of hours of talk therapy. And what we probably needed instead was all thousands of those hours.

I’ve cited this waking dream multiple times to friends with existential anxiety, and each time, I’m endlessly delighted by the symbolism. Our bodies are pieces of meat. This became clear when mine was ripped apart during a motorcycle accident that happened like all such things happen: out of the clear blue. Surprised as I was to find I’m just as subject to the laws of physics as anyone else, the most alarming feature of finding myself there on the hood of that car in terrible pain was the sight of my own right hand hanging off by skin, with splintered bone and blood protruding where it used to be. What this made me painfully aware of is humans are animals. We are pieces of meat. And whatever it is we really are — this soul this ghost this consciousness this witness — it’s literally consuming that piece of meat. It’s using it to take a ride on this planet and to experience itself as individual and relative. We can only know ourselves in relation to other people, places, and things. We can only know anything by its relative nature. We can know pleasure only in contrast to pain. Good in contrast to bad. Love in contrast to hate. Young in contrast to old. Hard in contrast to easy.

During another of those physically challenging, arms up meditations, I saw what it is that we really are, and what happens when we die. In the last five minutes of the sixty-two-minute meditation, my body felt on fire with pain. Every muscle was screaming. That’s when I saw it.

My tenth love turned translucent and inside her I could see tiny lights like flashlights at each chakra. From each emanated fluid-like ripples that came together and expanded out. When we die, the lights collapse into one and eject from the body and it feels like coming out of a sixty-two-minute arms up meditation and lying down. Lightness and relief and ecstasy and bliss.

It’s tremendously liberating because, yes, it’s hard to be in a body. They’re dense and spongy and heavy and painful. They absorb everything around them, which is why it’s so important to move and stretch, to literally wring the body out every day. And sleep is very important—it’s the time where this fluid-like light being we really are can recharge by going back to wherever we came from and gather the strength to be in this body another day. The forces at play on our bodies every moment is so much pressure. To begin to fathom this, imagine the earth spinning as it hurtles through space around the sun. The surface of the planet is moving at approximately 1,000 miles per hour. And underneath, dynamic play between the layers, from the deepest interior to the surface, exchanging angular momentum. That spin, counter spin, velocity, combined with the orbital thrust and the whole solar system moving as a unit—all that speed and motion and force—it’s a lot.

Releasing from that arms-up meditation was like the light-fluid releasing from the body. It’s what I came close to experiencing on the hood of that car. But it’s not the whole story. At first, I thought what I was shown gave me the gift I’ve been waiting for: to understand death. But since that day, I’ve had vivid dreams every night and now I know there’s so much more. What I was shown scratched the surface, yes. But even the surface is deep. And all the rest is beyond fathom.

As a Muslim woman, physician, journalist, and advocate for health equity, she brings a deeply interdisciplinary lens to questions of power, representation, and resistance. Her work invites us to consider how misinformation functions not only as a public health threat, but also as a tool that can reinforce sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of systemic oppression.

I talked with Dr. Yasmin about truth and authority, the politics of expertise, the targeting of marginalized communities through disinformation campaigns, the limits of Western frameworks for understanding justice and health, and what solidarity might look like in an increasingly polarized world. We’ll also explore whether hope is the right framework for this moment—or whether there are other ways of imagining collective action and transformation.

What I haven’t written about are the times I chose the current deliberately. The times I became a boy on purpose.

Maybe it began in absence. My older sister’s near-fatal car accident cleaved the world into before and after. After, she remained, but altered—her body present, her mind refracted. The house reorganized itself around her needs, as it had to. Attention became triage. Love became logistics. And I, the youngest of five, learned the quiet mathematics of disappearance.

At night, unable to sleep, I leafed through the yellow pages until I found an ad for something called The Runaway Hotline. I had run away once already — packed a small bag, disappeared into the woods near that same playground where I had once been mistaken for a boy. I stayed there all day, rehearsing my absence, imagining its echo. At dusk I returned to the playground and sat at the top of the slide, a small sentinel, certain that someone would come looking, that my disappearance would have weight. No one came. Darkness arrived instead, and with it the sounds of things that did not need me. I went home. Everyone was asleep.

So when I dialed the number, I understood something already: that being unseen could be practiced, but so could being invented.

When the woman answered, her voice was warm, alert, ready. I lowered my own voice, shaped it into something steadier, less tremulous. I told her my name was Mike. I told her I had run away from parents who drank, who used drugs, who did not care if I lived or died. I embroidered the story with a precision that now feels like prophecy — detail as a plea, fiction as a form of truth. I don’t remember what she said exactly, only the cadence of her concern, the way it held me. Care, even borrowed, even misdirected, is still care. It landed.

I called again the next night. And the next. Each time becoming Mike more easily, more fluently, as if he were not a fabrication but a key — one that opened a door that had always been closed to me.

I have wondered since about the choice of boyhood. Whether it was as simple as knowing boys won the games on the playground. Or more complicated: that boys were listened to differently, their pain read as urgent rather than excessive, their anger as signal rather than flaw. Or perhaps it was something quieter, more subterranean — the sense that to be a boy was to be legible in a way I was not, that my own need, as a girl, had already begun to feel like too much, like an imposition on a household already saturated with grief.

In the work of Akil Kumarasamy, identity is rarely singular, never stable. Her characters slip between selves, across geographies, through timelines that refuse to behave. There are doubles and echoes, versions of a life that coexist without resolving. Reading her, I feel a recognition that is less about content than structure: the refusal of a single, authoritative narrative. The acceptance that contradiction is not failure but form.

What if Mike was not a lie but a parallel? Not an escape from myself but an articulation of a self that required different conditions to be heard?

When Kumarasamy spoke of On the Origin of Sex by Lixing Sun, I thought of fungi—organisms with thousands of mating types, a proliferation so vast it renders the word “gender” almost metaphorical. Not two, not even many, but an excess that destabilizes the category itself. Slime molds with hundreds of compatibilities. Fish that change sex as they age, as their environments demand. Life, it turns out, is not invested in binaries. It is invested in continuation, in adaptation, in the constant reworking of form.

And then Botany of Empire by Banu Subramaniam — a reminder that even the language we use to describe life is not neutral. That the naming of parts, the assignment of roles—male, female, active, passive — has been shaped by histories of power, by empire, by the human need to make the world mirror our own hierarchies. The flower becomes a diagram of our assumptions. The natural world, a text we have edited heavily.

I think now about the ways I learned to edit myself. To revise my needs into something more acceptable, more receivable. To split into versions — girl, boy, self, absence — depending on what the moment required. Kumarasamy’s work does not resolve these splits; it lets them hum alongside one another, dissonant and true.

The part of me on the playground, waiting to be found. The part of me on the phone, inventing a boy who could be saved. The part of me that would later seek out care in the bodies of women, mistaking proximity for repair, drinking from their tenderness as if it could retroactively mother me. None of these selves were false. None were sufficient alone.

Kumarasamy writes toward the body as archive, as the site where all our contradictions are stored and metabolized. Her characters map the haunted architectures we build to contain what we cannot reconcile. Between them — in the quiet, fracturing expanses — I find permission to let the story remain plural.

Because the ending I once wanted — a clean emergence, a singular self, healed and whole — is not the ending that feels true. What feels true is this: I have learned to stay.

To sit, now, in the dark without converting myself into someone more deserving of light. To answer my own voice when it calls, in whatever register it arrives. To understand that the care I once outsourced, bartered for, performed into existence, is not something I have to earn through invention.

There are still many of me. The child on the slide. The boy on the phone. The woman writing this, who knows that solitude can be a balm and not a verdict. They do not cancel one another out. They do not resolve into a single shape.

They coexist, like those innumerable fungal forms—touching, exchanging, transforming—an ecology rather than a conclusion.

And for the first time, that feels like enough.

In this conversation, we’ll explore how her writing navigates these shifting terrains—how migration reshapes time, how history lingers in intimate ways, and how her characters negotiate belonging across fractured geographies. We’ll also turn to the intersections of queerness and feminism in her work: how desire, power, and resistance emerge within constrained worlds, and how her stories open up new possibilities for imagining selfhood beyond fixed categories.

Together, these themes invite a deeper look at the porous edges of identity and the creative potential that exists in crossing—and recrossing—them.

Experience doesn’t move in straight lines. It loops, it contradicts, it refuses to resolve. Queer experience exposes how flimsy the demand for consistency really is. What looks like contradiction from the outside can feel, from within, like fidelity to complexity, to truth as it actually unfolds. There is a kind of integrity in allowing the self to remain unsettled.

To queer something is not only to expand it, not only to make room within it. It is to interrogate the structure that required exclusion in the first place. It asks: why do we want things to hold still? Why do we distrust ambiguity? Why do we conflate certainty with righteousness? These are not abstract questions. They shape how we move through the world, how we attach to our identities, how we relate to one another when our narratives begin to diverge.

People change because they are permeable. We take things in like ideas, language, other people’s pain and pleasure, and we are changed by them. Sometimes subtly, sometimes irrevocably. No one arrives fully formed, and no one stays the same. But we live in a moment that treats change with suspicion, as though evolution were evidence of some prior failure. As though admitting uncertainty were a kind of moral weakness.

I’ve felt the impulse to fix myself in place, to defend a former version of my thinking because it once felt necessary, or righteous, or true. But the self that refuses to change becomes brittle. And brittleness is not the same as strength.

Movements are not immune to this. Even those committed to liberation can begin to harden around their own definitions of correctness. What starts as a set of values becomes a set of rules; what begins as a critique of power can replicate its rigidity. There is a subtle shift from alignment to performance, from shared commitment to enforced sameness. And in that shift, something constricts.

It’s a familiar paradox: communities that resist domination can struggle to hold together their own differences. Not because the differences are irreconcilable, but because they are treated as threats rather than as the material of collective life. Fragmentation follows — not always loudly, but persistently. A splintering into smaller and smaller certainties.

But I don’t think the answer is to smooth those differences over, to pretend they don’t matter. I think the question is whether we can learn to stay with them differently. To understand divergence not as a failure, but as a condition of being in relation.

Here, Melisa Lozada Oliva offers a useful, embodied example. Her work, spanning poetry and fiction, does not remain static. In her early poetry, there is a sharpness, a compression, a kind of incantatory insistence on naming: desire, body, diaspora, the inherited and the chosen self. Later, in her fiction, that voice expands. It becomes more narrative, more diffuse, more willing to linger in contradiction and ambiguity. The shift is not a betrayal of her earlier work; it is an evolution of form and attention. She does not abandon her concerns; she refracts them differently. To read her across time is to witness a mind in motion.

The speaker who once demanded to be understood in a particular register begins to explore what happens when understanding itself becomes unstable. Identity is no longer simply asserted; it is questioned, performed, undone, remade. This is not inconsistency. It is growth. It is a refusal to be pinned down by the expectations of a single genre, a single audience, or a single moment in time. What would it mean to extend that generosity to artists, to thinkers, to each other and into our political lives?

Not everyone will speak in the same register. Some voices will be sharp, declarative, urgent. Others will be searching, provisional, unsure. Some will prioritize theory; others will speak from experience that resists easy abstraction. None of these modes are sufficient alone. But together, they begin to approximate something closer to truth.

This requires a different relationship to disagreement. Right now, disagreement often feels like a rupture, a signal that something has gone wrong. And sometimes it has. Harm is real, and it needs to be named. But not every difference is harm. Sometimes it’s simply evidence of where we are — what we’ve lived, what we’ve learned, what we haven’t yet understood.

If we treat every divergence as disqualifying, we foreclose the possibility of transformation. We create conditions where people are rewarded for certainty, for fluency in the “correct” language, rather than for curiosity or growth. We make it harder to admit, I don’t know. Harder to say, I’ve changed.

And yet, without that vulnerability, nothing actually shifts.

There is risk in openness, of course. Without boundaries, accountability can dissolve. But there is also risk in the opposite extreme — in the speed with which we exile, the ease with which we reduce a person to a single position, a single moment. That kind of rigidity doesn’t protect us as much as we think it does. It isolates us. It narrows the field of possible connection.

Meanwhile, the systems we’re trying to dismantle don’t require purity. They require coordination. They persist not because they are ideologically flawless, but because they are organized, because they tolerate internal contradiction when it serves their continuity.

I keep returning to the idea of conversation — not as something polite or superficial, but as something charged, generative. In a story, tension between characters is what creates movement. It reveals what matters. It forces change. A narrative where everyone agrees is static, inert.

Why would we expect anything different from our political lives?

What if we understood our collective thinking as something more like a chorus — discordant at times, uneven, but alive? Not unified in a single voice, but engaged in the difficult work of listening, responding, revising.

This isn’t a call to abandon conviction. Convictions matter. They shape how we act, what we refuse, what we protect. But when conviction calcifies into certainty without inquiry, it stops being a guide and becomes a constraint.

On my altar, I have a photo of myself at age one and a photo of myself at age twenty-six. The person I am sitting before those images is composed of entirely distinct cells than either of the people depicted in those images, and each of them entirely distinct from the other. Yet, the face is clearly one face.

To allow for that process — to make space for it in ourselves and in each other — is not just personal. It’s collective. It asks us to build structures that can hold change without discarding the people undergoing it. To stay in relationship across difference, without collapsing that difference into sameness.

It asks us, in other words, to queer not just identity, but the way we practice politics: to let it be unstable, adaptive, responsive. To trust that multiplicity is not a weakness, but a form of intelligence.

In this podcast episode, we explore how she navigates the space between realism and dream logic, what it means to rewrite cultural archetypes as a Latina writer, and how performance has shaped her understanding of voice and truth. We also dive into her nuanced approach to the body, fragmented identity, and queerness as a creative practice. At its core, this conversation asks what it means to write toward complexity — even when it’s messy, uncomfortable, or refuses easy definition.

Roots don’t ask for permission.
They arrive like a whisper in the bloodstream,
then bloom into a command.

I used to live like a loose thread—
unraveling on purpose.
Years slipped past me like open windows,
and I slipped right through them—
unheld,
unpromised,
a suitcase always half-packed in my chest.

I called it freedom.
Called it oxygen.
Called it the art of leaving before the leaving could touch me.

I loved like weather—
passing through,
touching down,
never staying long enough to learn the language of permanence.

One foot in the door,
one already ghosting the hallway.

Then something ancient
rose up in my body
and said:
No.

Not loudly—
not cruelly—
just with the gravity of tides
that do not care what the moon thinks of them.

Stay.

Grow.

Become a place something can belong.

I laughed at first—
like you do when the truth sounds too much like a trap.
But you can’t outwit your own blood.
You can’t outrun the drum that built your bones.

Something deeper than thought
began planting itself in me—
threading roots through marrow,
through breath,
through the quiet spaces I used to keep empty on purpose.

And then—
I was no longer just a body moving through the world.
I was a world.

A whole universe forming
in the dark cathedral of my belly.

Month by month,
I grew heavy with it—
not just weight,
but meaning.

Roots curling through every organ,
every rib,
down my legs,
into the soft surrender of my feet,
like the earth itself had chosen me
as its temporary sky.

Until the day came—
because it always comes—

when something larger than fear
wrapped its hands around the life inside me,
the life that had rooted me
as much as I had rooted it,

and pulled.

And pulled.

And pulled.

Until I broke open—
not into pieces,
but into truth—

everything I had been
spilling forward
into everything I was becoming.

Drawing from the themes of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, we consider the ways language can both harm and liberate, asking how it constructs, distorts, and reimagines queer realities. Our discussion traces poetry not only as a form of documentation, but as a space for transformation and possibility — where new ways of being can emerge.

We also turn to the question of what it means to queer language itself, and how reworking religious imagery can become an act of resistance, survival, and re-enchantment. At its heart, this episode asks: if queerness is a way of seeing differently, how can poetry help us remake reality in its image?

This desire to transmit not just meaning but sensation has always felt in tension with the inherited architectures of story. Or perhaps not in tension, but in refusal. When I first encountered Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality by Sarah Barmak, what held me was not the subtitle, though it promised inquiry I craved, but the image of a crocheted vulva on the cover. Soft, handmade, unapologetically literal. It felt like a thesis before I even opened the book: that we have been given the wrong textures for talking about the body, especially the erotic body, especially the female one.

Inside, Barmak writes that language itself has failed to capture women’s erotic interiority, that it requires new structures, new vocabularies. I felt a recognition that was almost grief. Not only because I believed her, but because I had already been circling this absence without naming it.

Years earlier, in my MFA program, I had been tasked with teaching a craft seminar. I chose the Hero’s Journey, that enduring map of narrative made famous by Joseph Campbell: the departure, the initiation, the return. A young man leaves home, encounters trials, achieves a singular climax, and returns transformed, bearing a prize. It is elegant, persuasive, and everywhere.

I remember standing before a room of writers, arguing both for and against it. Yes, story is in our DNA, I said. Yes, we are pattern-seeking creatures, hungry for arcs that resolve. But must the arc always crest once? Must the transformation hinge on a single, decisive victory? Must the protagonist always leave, conquer, and come back?

What if a story swells instead of peaks? What if it moves like a body rather than a blade — circling, returning, building, dissolving, building again? What if it is not about conquest but about contact? Not a climax but many, not an ending but a continuation that alters the terms of beginning?

Even then, I sensed I was not just talking about narrative, but about desire. About the ways we have been taught to move through experience: linearly, efficiently, toward a goal that can be named and displayed. And the ways that other modes — slower, recursive, diffuse — are dismissed as indulgent or incoherent, when in fact they might be truer to certain kinds of lives.

What I did not say, because I did not yet know how, was that my own life was already resisting the single-arc story. It was, in fact, becoming something messier, more plural, more alive.

There was a woman in that seminar. Beautiful is too simple a word, though it was the first that came to mind. She disrupted the air around her. When she spoke — an Australian accent that seemed to carry both distance and intimacy — I felt myself lean in, not just intellectually but physically. Desire, I was learning, begins in attention.

She wore a necklace with a small vial. Later, she told me it held the ashes of her childhood best friend, a boy she had loved, a boy the world knew as Heath Ledger. The intimacy of that object — the way she carried death so close to her throat — felt like a kind of permission. To love, to lose, to refuse to tidy either.

She moved through the world with a kind of narrative excess: stories of New York and Los Angeles, of lovers and collaborators, of proximity to fame. She spoke of sleeping with Lenny Kravitz, with Lady Gaga, as if these were both ordinary and mythic encounters. I found myself amused by the absurd calculus of proximity. That through her, I was one degree removed from icons I had never expected to touch. It felt like a joke I was in on, and also not.

But what drew me was not the names she carried, but the language she used for me. Not beautiful, but radiant. Luminous. Words that suggested not surface but emission, a kind of internal light. I had been seen, before, but not like that. Or perhaps I had not allowed myself to register it.

We came together first in the compressed, heightened space of the residency, where time folds and intensifies. And then again, later, in New York, for a weekend that felt both curated and unruly. I met her friends: actors, artists, people orbiting the same glittering, unstable world. There was a looseness to the boundaries, an assumption that everything might be shared, seen, transformed.

One woman, upon meeting me, asked if she could see my vagina. The question landed somewhere between absurdity and sincerity. I laughed, instinctively deflecting, scanning the room for cues. The others did not flinch. They smiled, as if this were a known script, one I had yet to learn.

“No,” I said finally, attempting humor, “but you can ask her what it looks like,” gesturing toward my lover. It was a small act of refusal, but also of displacement — handing the question back into the network of intimacy that had already formed around me.

Later, I learned that this woman was a painter, that she spent her time looking at, photographing, rendering women’s genitals. That she identified as straight, that she was married to a man. I found myself trying to place her within a framework that would make sense of her desire, or her curiosity, or whatever lived at the intersection of the two.

But the more I sat with it, the more that framework felt insufficient. Why did I need her to declare herself to understand her interest? Why did I assume that looking must correspond to a latent identity, rather than an active, shifting engagement with the erotic?

This is where Barmak’s assertion returns to me: that our language fails us, not only in describing what we feel, but in allowing for what we might feel. If the available narratives of sexuality are narrow, then any deviation appears as confusion, repression, or transgression, rather than as possibility.

In that New York weekend, I began to sense how much of my own desire had been shaped by stories that did not belong to me. The linearity of the Hero’s Journey had taught me to look for a singular turning point, a decisive declaration. But what I was experiencing was not a turn so much as an expansion. Not a revelation that replaced what came before, but an accumulation that made previous understandings feel partial.

Desire, I was discovering, could be iterative. It could return to the same body, the same question, and find something new each time. It could hold contradiction without resolving it. It could be both specific and diffuse, directed and ambient.

And writing, if it were to be honest, would have to learn from this. It would have to abandon the demand for a single climax, a clean arc, a final meaning. It would have to risk incoherence to approach truth.

When I think now about that crocheted vulva on the cover of Closer, I see it not just as an image but as a method. Handmade, textured, slightly irregular. A refusal of sleekness in favor of something you can feel with your hands. A reminder that the body is not an abstraction, and neither is the language we use to approach it.

The essay I am always trying to write — the book, the life — is one that can hold this texture. That can move between research and experience without hierarchy. That can admit the absurdity of proximity to fame alongside the intimacy of carrying someone’s ashes. That can hold a question like “Can I see your vagina?” not as a punchline or a threat, but as an opening into the complexities of looking, wanting, making art of the body.

I want a language that can do all of this without flattening it. A structure that can accommodate multiple climaxes, or none at all. A narrative that does not resolve desire but sustains it, lets it proliferate.

Because the truth is, the most compelling stories I have lived, and the ones I most want to tell, do not end with a return home bearing a prize. They end, if they end at all, in a deepening. In a widening of what can be felt, what can be known, what can be said.

And perhaps that is the real frontier: not orgasm as an endpoint, but as a mode of attention. A way of being inside experience that is attuned to sensation, to rhythm, to the possibility that meaning is not delivered in a single, triumphant moment, but built, again and again, in the body’s ongoing conversation with the world.

Because for so many women and queer people, desire isn’t just about attraction. It’s shaped by power, by culture, by trauma, by the quiet and loud ways we’ve been taught to disconnect from our bodies or perform them for someone else. So what does it mean to come back to ourselves? To reclaim desire not as something we owe, but something we author?

I’m joined today by Sarah Barmak, a journalist and author who has spent years exploring the science, psychology, and lived experience of female sexuality. Together, we’re queering the idea that desire is fixed, linear, or even fully knowable. We talk about the myths we’ve internalized, the realities we rarely name, and the radical potential of redefining pleasure on our own terms.

This conversation is about curiosity over certainty, embodiment over performance, and the courage it takes to ask: what do I actually want when no one else is watching?

Resisting certainty is a feminist act.

Certainty is so often the costume power wears. It buttons itself into a lab coat, a clerical collar, a judicial robe. It speaks in footnotes and diagnostic codes. It drafts legislation. It publishes op-eds. It builds categories and calls them natural. It names something normal and, with a sleight of hand, calls everything else deviant.

Certainty does not announce itself as violence. It calls itself order.

But true, flesh-and-warm-blooded people resist neat categories. When known fully — when listened to past the first sentence and the first impression — they defy containment. They contradict themselves. They grow. They betray the boxes built to hold them.

In First Love, Lilly Dancyger refuses not only certainty but genre itself. The book slips between criticism and memoir, between cultural analysis and confession. It writes about first love as romance, yes — but also as addiction, ambition, art, self-destruction. It refuses to stabilize the term. The essays circle rather than march. They contradict. They implicate the narrator even as they critique the culture. In doing so, they enact a radical claim: lived experience is not ancillary to knowledge. It is knowledge.

Genre, like gender, is an authority structure. It tells us what belongs where. Memoir here. Criticism there. Objectivity above. Subjectivity below. Dancyger collapses those hierarchies. She writes criticism as someone with complicity. She writes memoir with the rigor of inquiry. Proximity does not invalidate perception — it sharpens it.

What if we understood queerness the same way? Not as deviation from the norm but as refusal of false binaries. Not as confusion but as complexity.

My oldest and dearest friend — the woman I credit with saving my life twenty-five years ago — is the child of two Holocaust survivors. Both of her parents are gone now, but I had the privilege of knowing them while they were alive.

Her father, Lesley, had the numbers tattooed on his forearm. The identity they gave him. Stripped of his name, his glasses, his clothes, even most of his bodily tissue so that all that remained were haunted eyes in hollowed sockets and skin wrapped tight around bone, the numbers were once the only proof he existed.

When I met him, he was strong again. Older. Filled back in with muscle and fat and fluid — everything organs need to stay vital. He wore button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up. The numbers visible. He touched them often. Gently. Thoughtfully. Almost reverently.

At twenty-three, I never understood that gesture. I thought survival meant leaving horror behind. I thought healing meant erasure.

Now, with a deep diagonal scar slashing across my own forearm, where my hand was torn off and later reattached, I understand.

My body is haunted by the trauma visited upon it in a near-fatal motorcycle accident 8 years ago. I still wince at the memory of the sight of my hand hanging off by skin and veins. The splintered bone jutting up in its place. I can never unsee that. My pelvis, too, the strong bowl of bones protecting the tender and miracle making organs within, the erotic organs, the orgasm-giving organs — it was crushed. My femoral nerve and artery, one giving vital feeling to my genitals and the other giving life to my whole organism — they were severed. Severed by a sharp fragment of my crushed pubic bone. And perhaps because these are miracle making organs, what followed was nothing shy of a series of miracles that repaired both vital lines named femoral, repaired my sacred bowl of bones, repaired all my injuries, including those not mentioned in this writing.

I was so repaired and so healed, in fact, that most people would never notice, by looking at me, that anything so horrific ever happened to me. And yet. These unseeable things I saw, I can never unsee them. These unspeakable levels of pain I experienced, I will always remember them. They haunt me like demons. Because of them, I fear even the smallest of physical pains. You would think my tolerance for pain would be made greater by such a torment. Not so. The opposite, in fact. This side of surviving that ordeal, I am the biggest baby about pain. And I believe it’s because of the haunting. It’s because I walk around with the ghost severed limb and the ghost dead vagina and the ghost crushed miracle-making organs and the ghost broken bowl tethered to my body. While simultaneously having a healed and stronger-than-before body that I can no more take for granted than make sprout wings and fly. Inside this paradox lies another profoundly uncomfortable and deeply feminist reality. A queer reality.

I am both broken and restored. Terrified and grateful. Haunted and healed.

I reveal my scar often. I touch it often. It stands in bold testimony: I survived something unspeakable.

One Thanksgiving half a lifetime ago with Lesley present, seated around a long table heavy with food and ritual, I made the earnest declaration of someone who still believed in singular truths.

“Love is the most powerful force in the world,” I said.

Lesley looked at me with a mix of shock and indignation.

“That’s not true,” he said evenly. “Hate is by far the most powerful force in the world.”

He punctuated the claim by touching the numbers.

Silence fell like ash. No one reached for their fork.

Chilled, I worried he was right.

Here were two realities colliding at a dinner table: mine, shaped by longing and recovery; his, shaped by genocide. Both of us were speaking from lived experience. Both of us had scars. But the worst of mine were yet to come.

Lesley’s claim about hate was not philosophical. It was empirical. He had seen the machinery of hate industrialized. He had watched institutions decide which lives counted and which did not. He had seen expertise mobilized toward extermination — doctors measuring skulls, lawyers drafting racial codes, theologians blessing the state.

Institutional knowledge has never been neutral.

The Holocaust was not an eruption of chaos; it was an organized project executed by educated men. Authority can be lethal.

And yet. I still believe in love.

Not as a sentimental force, but as a resistant and feminist one. Love is not naïve; it is insurgent. It refuses the categories that hate requires. It sees the person where the system sees a number.

But here is where paradox insists on its place at the table: hate may indeed be more efficient. More scalable. More easily weaponized. Love requires proximity, vulnerability, slowness. Hate can be standardized.

Both truths can coexist.

Queering authority means we do not rush to resolve that tension.

I am both broken and restored. Terrified and grateful. Haunted and healed.

Certainty would demand I choose one narrative. Survivor or victim. Miracle or tragedy. Strong or fragile.

But the truth is both. And neither. And shifting.

If hate is the most powerful force in the world, as Lesley claimed, then what is the role of love? If love is the most powerful force, as I once insisted, how do we account for history’s horrors? And currently unfolding ones?

Maybe the more radical move is not to choose.

Paradox is not a problem to be solved but a state of being to be inhabited.

To queer reality is to widen the circle of who gets to speak it into existence. It asks institutions to loosen their grip on certainty. It asks expertise to bow to embodiment. It asks each of us (especially those closest to power) to interrogate the pleasure we derive from being right.

Because certainty feels good. It feels stabilizing. It feels like safety. But safety built on exclusion is not safety at all.

At that Thanksgiving table, suspended between love and hate, I learned something no classroom had taught me: reality is contested terrain. It is shaped by trauma and by hope. It is inscribed on bodies. It is argued over mashed potatoes. It is revised across generations.

Who gets to know?

The one with the degree.
The one with the pulpit.
The one with the platform.

Yes.

But also the one with the scar.
The one with the tattoo.
The one whose body has been named impossible and who lives anyway.

To resist certainty is not to abandon truth. It is to refuse its monopolization.

It is to say that knowledge does not live only in journals or courtrooms or sanctuaries. It lives in forearms marked by history. In pelvises rebuilt by miracle. In queer desire that refuses correction. In scars.

People, when known fully, will always exceed the categories built to contain them.

And that excess — that unruly, embodied, contradictory excess — is not a threat to reality.

It is reality.

To queer it is simply to tell the truth about how vast it has always been.

This is a painting of Lesley. The title of the painting is “Survivors Remember” and it was painted by his daughter, Iudita Harlan. It’s part of her collection, Tracing Home.

We explore how queering reality means resisting the cultural pressure to simplify our stories, how embracing ambiguity disrupts patriarchal certainty, and why paradox might be the most honest place to begin.

Only much later — only in retrospect — could I recognize what the practice had quietly given me back then. Subtler things. A different orientation to discomfort. A way of listening. That recognition was enough to draw me back. Returning to meditation felt like returning home, though to a home I no longer moved through in the same way. I’ve never been able to sit as long as I did in my twenties — twenty minutes is usually my ceiling, if that — and silence is no longer an easy refuge. Sometimes there is rest, especially when I’ve been consistent for a while. But if I miss a few days, or sometimes even one, what greets me when I sit still and face myself is not peace but discomfort.

A few years ago, I attended a writing retreat with Corporeal Writing, where Janice Lee led a guided meditation. I don’t remember the specifics of her language or structure, but I remember going deep — dropping below thought and into something older — and coming up against uncomfortable truths embedded in my ancestral history.

In a previous essay, I wrote about my maternal grandparents, including the fact that my grandfather, Charles, who was profoundly deaf from birth, died by suicide while my mother was pregnant with me. During that meditation with Janice, I returned to that moment. Or perhaps it returned to me. I imagined it with an intimacy that startled me. It was as though I were in his body, but with a perspective only possible beyond death — like he was saying, This is what it was like, held inside a wider understanding he couldn’t access while alive. The experience was disturbing. Part of me wanted to reject it outright, to dismiss it as dark invention and move on. Instead, I felt compelled to write it down.

When I later interviewed Janice Lee for Queering Reality, we spoke at length about death and what happens after. This did not surprise me. Her thinking moves in layers far too deep to contain in a single podcast conversation, but one small pearl of her wisdom lodged itself in me. I came away believing — again — that what I experienced during that meditation was real. That the moment I imagined was not merely mine. That my grandfather was, in some way, communicating with me. That he is still with me.

Recently, my son showed me a series of sketches he’s been working on, and I was struck by a nascent, unmistakable talent. Not long before that, while cleaning out storage, I came across three drawings my grandfather had made — delicate, intricate renderings of flowers. I showed them to my son.

Years ago, I had been researching my grandfather’s life and death while navigating my son’s first audiology appointment after he failed a hearing test at school. When the audiologist asked if there was any deafness in our family, I said yes — my maternal grandfather was congenitally, profoundly deaf. The doctor told me my son’s newly discovered, mild hearing loss was most likely congenital as well. That he was probably born with it.

And just like that, in the midst of my research, Charles reached effortlessly across three generations to remind me that he is not gone. That he is here. Alive inside my son.

I had only just learned that the etymology of epigenetics means: at, on, upon, over, or beside. I thought about how he exists there and here and everywhere — how I do, too. How we all do. Each of us walking around overfull, spilling into the next.

The piece of writing that emerged from that meditation with Janice Lee — the one that follows — is something I am particularly proud of. I’ve been trying to write about my grandparents for decades, and I will keep trying. But whatever book eventually comes of that effort, I believe it will begin here. Or at least, it will contain this.

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The circular saw whirred to life, and he heard nothing of the violence in that white, vibrating sound. He looked at the blurred blade made smooth by illusion — the illusory nature of all spinning objects in perpetual motion — and it occurred to him that this was the pattern of everything. Every single thing churned eternally around and around and round and round in a dizzying promise that one day, one moment, any moment, this pattern will abruptly halt, and death will claim everyone as sure as the sharp teeth of that circular saw spun. With reverence, he brought it slowly to his neck. Closer now, he turned his face to the cracked ceiling glutted with spiderwebs and shadows and closed his eyes. And in that final moment before the blade opened his neck and released the clean, bright blood, he regretted having as his last image in life that bleak ceiling. Just in time, he conjured a better image, crisp and full from a ready and worn memory that he had spent no less than a third of his life studying in his mind’s eye — Elouise, the subtle motion of her jaw and curious shapes her mouth made when she stood over the crib and sang to the baby, and the visceral way it felt when his silence filled with her song.

The sound current vibrating and rippling and rattling through his blood even as it left his body, inside of which he sensed the weight of the so many generations unfolding before him, starting with that baby whose able ears drank in Elouise’s song — and it didn’t concern him because it wasn’t his to carry. That colossal load would be passed along to her offspring and her offspring to bear, and they would heal all the wounds wept into the water, into the vital fluid, into the wet life, into the blood of all their veins. With curiosity he watched as this certain eventuality revealed itself to him in some phenomenon of psychic knowing available only in the moment just before death.

Also in that infinite last moment of life, he remembered reading about holocaust survivors who ended their own lives decades after suffering the severe trauma of watching their loved ones be tortured and murdered, a delayed reaction following a mostly functional and normal life lived with the expected sequence of events from building a career to falling in love and having children, only to retreat abruptly from such normalcy to this dimension where he can only respond to the trauma in his body with self-inflicted, fatal violence. And it was with that understanding that he stepped effortlessly out of the border town of space and time and glimpsed his now thirty-two-year-old daughter pregnant with a daughter crumpled in grief on her back porch holding a fifth of dry whiskey and sloshing this poisoned water into her belly where the unborn girl will use it to begin to transmute the wounds into forgiveness and healing.

His delicate skin opened just as easily as the veil parted, welcoming him home.

Beyond the roar and swell and spit of pain, which was a well-practiced ritual for him by then, the first thing he remembered just that side of life’s exit was something that doused him with relief so crisp and cold, it was like the slap of ice water down a parched throat — it’s not at all about surviving. The whole point was to surrender. To heal. And he relaxed, off the hook as he was with infinite chances to get it right. There was no getting it wrong, only a slow and sure evolving, a wearing away and shaping, a shedding and letting go of destructive energies in favor of creative energies like the old skin of a snake, molted. Each injury, from the superficial to the mortal, would heal with the same miraculous totality as the round and song-filled silence.

We also dive into form as a political choice: silence, gaps, and the unsayable; the tension between language as a limit and language as a portal; and how feminist consciousness can resist the commodification of mindfulness and productivity culture.

Ultimately, this conversation asks: If we are always narrating reality, how might we tell stories that make more room for difference, care, and collective liberation? And what are we each still unlearning?

I’m so grateful to share this expansive, challenging, and deeply generative conversation with Janice Lee.

When I spoke with Michelle Duster — the author, historian, and educator who is also a descendant of Ida B. Wells — I was reminded of these stories I carry in my very cells. Histories like spiral staircases winding through time, through epigenetics, through water. Some inheritances arrive as names etched into textbooks. Others arrive as scars, silences, and instincts you don’t remember learning. Most are both.

Listening to her speak about pride and pressure coexisting inside a single lineage clarified something for me: I am not only trying to remember my grandparents. I am trying to understand what it means to live inside a legacy shaped by violence disguised as care, by urgency mistaken for love, by institutions that promised salvation while extracting bodies.

My grandmother, Eloise, did not inherit deafness. It was imposed on her — first by fever, then by everyone who refused to let her remain as she was. When her mother realized Eloise could not hear, she flung her into a frenzy of cures: doctors and specialists, spiritual healers, preachers, even magicians. Her parents were not religious or superstitious, but desperation has a way of flattening belief systems into a single question: what if this works?

They took her to a slaughterhouse first. A neighbor’s preacher’s wife swore a child had once been cured by the scream of a calf echoing off warehouse walls as it was butchered. Eloise remembered only the smell. She closed her eyes through the entire thing. She could not hear the animals, but she felt them — their terror vibrating through her body until she nearly fainted. Her father collapsed before she did, his hand slipping from hers as he fell onto the blood-slick floor. Her mother, buoyant with hope, called Eloise’s name again and again on the drive home, convinced sound might arrive later, delayed but triumphant.

The next day, Eloise was taken into the sky. A small propeller plane climbed higher than she’d ever imagined possible. Pressure built in her head; fear and wonder tangled together. She was certain this would restore her hearing. As the earth fell away beneath her, something else fell away too — unease, gravity, obligation. Suspended in air, she felt curiosity bloom into vast emptiness, a quiet so expansive it felt holy. She realized, then, that what she wanted was not sound but escape.

The pilot pitched the plane into sudden drops, again and again, plunging them toward the earth before pulling back at the last moment. Her ears burned. Her jaw throbbed. Vomit bags filled. The smell drove even the pilot to land early. The sharp falls were supposed to fix her. They did not.

What followed were months of experiments that read like folklore gone feral: twigs lodged in her ears day and night, catheters forced inside, gasoline and lemon juice poured into canals already raw. Her urine was boiled and distilled, dripped back into her head as medicine. Peach pits were fried in hog lard, the oil poured in while still hot, burning her skin and leaving scars that never faded. A mystic gave her a powder she drank dissolved in water. She lost thirty-six hours of memory and returned still deaf.

Eloise’s story is one of relentless intervention — of a body treated as a site of failure to be corrected at any cost. There was no rest. No acceptance. No room for her to become herself. Deafness, for her, was not culture. It was catastrophe.

My grandfather, Charles, came from the opposite world. Deaf from birth, he belonged to a lineage that signed without apology, that understood silence not as absence but as environment. Deafness was not something to cure; it was something to live inside. But even that inheritance could not protect him from the violence of medicine.

At seventeen, Charles entered the Hopemont Sanitarium. It was presented as opportunity. Cutting-edge care. Free treatment. A small stipend. What it was, in reality, was a laboratory. Wealthy families paid to experiment on their sons. Poor families were offered survival in exchange for consent. Charles signed the contract because his family needed the money. His older brother, Lawrence, had already signed. Refusal was not an option that existed.

The surgeries came first — lungs cut, inflated, collapsed. Then gases, injections, restraints. Deaf men and boys disappeared behind doors and did not come back out the same, if at all. Charles began to understand what was happening when patients stopped returning from procedures and nurses stopped using their names.

By the time Charles woke during surgery, ether failing him, his lung exposed and bleeding, he already knew they were not trying to heal him. When the scalpel slipped and pain tore through him so violently that he split from his body, he understood something else as well: if he stayed, he would die there. Lawrence would die there. They all would.

Lawrence did die there. So did every other deaf patient at Hopemont.

Charles survived because he escaped.

This part of the story is not metaphor. He tore himself from the operating table, open-backed and half-conscious, and ran. He climbed through a window. He vanished into the night. He did not look back. He never returned.

Survival, in this lineage, is not noble. It is brutal. It is lonely. It is something you carry like a debt.

Charles lived with the knowledge that he was the only one who made it out. That his brother did not. That entire rooms of men who signed with their hands and laughed with their bodies were erased. There is no monument for them. No archive. Just this story, handed down imperfectly, like a warning.

Later — much later — Charles met Eloise. He taught her sign language, not as therapy but as belonging. He showed her a world where silence was shared, where communication did not require pain. They fell in love. They married. They had two children. One of them was my mother.

For a time, this feels like the redemptive arc history loves to tell. Trauma overcome. Love as cure. But legacy is never that clean.

Charles carried Hopemont inside him for the rest of his life. He carried Lawrence. He carried the dead. And eventually, when my mother was pregnant with me, he chose to die by suicide.

I was not meant to know him. That is how it has always felt — not as abandonment, exactly, but as design. As if survival had limits, and he had reached his.

When Michelle Duster spoke about the divide between public history and private truth, I thought of this. Of how easily stories become flattened into inspiration or tragedy, and how much is lost when we do that. My grandfather is not a cautionary tale. My grandmother is not a symbol of perseverance. They were people shaped by forces that offered no gentleness.

Eloise, at seven, sitting in a storm after running away with torn pages of fairy tales, realized she would never hear again. In rain colored red and blue and orange, she understood she could not give up the world as she saw it. She chose color. She chose presence. She chose to stop being fixed.

That choice echoes forward. It asks me what parts of this inheritance I will carry and which I will refuse. Urgency nearly destroyed them both. The insistence on cure. The belief that rest was a luxury they could not afford.

To honor them is not to mythologize their suffering or sanctify their survival. It is to tell the truth: that love can coexist with harm, that escape does not guarantee peace, that inheritance is as much about what we lay down as what we carry forward.

What I hope to leave behind is not a story of endurance alone, but one of discernment — the knowledge of when to fight and when to stop, when to remember and when to rest. My grandparents were not given that choice. I am. And that, too, is legacy.

Photo of my grandmother, Eloise (left), with a friend (right).

Photos of my grandfather, Charles, younger on the left with his brother, Lawrence (1929), and older on the right.

For a long while after, I attempted to turn lovers into letter writers like her, wanting desperately to regain that particular magic. I would buy my partners stationery and fancy pens. I would start by writing the first letter and imploring her to reply. It never worked. Blithe indifference was typical, but once, a girlfriend was bitterly angry and felt unfairly pressured to perform this service for me. That was the incident that stopped me, made me accept it was a magic I shared only with my first love.

What I was trying to reproduce wasn’t epistolary romance so much as ontological permission. Those letters had said: this exists. They had made space for a version of myself that felt otherwise unrecognizable in the dominant world. The ache that followed me from relationship to relationship was not about paper and ink, but the feeling of being mirrored into reality. What I regret to this day — and it may be my only true life’s regret — is that I took the rather large box of letters I carried around in my closets as a young adult and gave it back to her in a big retaliatory gesture, a symbolic middle finger of sorts, when she married the young man I knew she didn’t really love.

At the time, I told myself it was an act of dignity. I told myself I was releasing us both from the weight of the past. I told myself I didn’t want to be the kind of person who hoarded relics from a lover who had chosen heterosexual legitimacy over me. But this was a lie or at least an incomplete truth. What I was really doing was destroying evidence. I was erasing the paper trail of a reality that had once existed and then been declared — by the world and eventually by her as well — to be inadmissible.

When I read the novel Beings by Ilana Masad, my regret came roaring back with unexpected force. One of the three main narrative threads in the novel is an archive of letters written by a lesbian science fiction writer from the 1960s named Phyllis. She is writing to her first love, Rosa, who also married a man she didn’t really love. Phyllis signs those letters with that same intense yet iconic promise: yours forever.

But Beings is not simply a novel about queer letters or lost loves. It is also a novel about UFOs, with abduction narratives, people who claim to have been taken — bodily, psychically, temporally — by beings that do not belong to this world. The book refuses to resolve whether these encounters are literal or metaphorical, pathological or revelatory. Instead, it asks a different question: what does it mean to feel that your experience cannot be accounted for by the dominant story of reality?

The figure of the alien in Beings operates as a parallel language for queer estrangement. To be abducted is to be removed from the normative flow of time. To be returned is not to be restored. You come back changed, marked, carrying knowledge that no one else recognizes as legitimate. Your testimony is doubted. Your body becomes suspect. Your memory is treated as fantasy.

Reading this, I felt a familiar click of recognition. Queerness, especially before it has social validation, often feels less like identity and more like visitation. Something arrives in you uninvited, undeniable, and disruptive to the life you were supposed to have. You don’t choose it. You survive it. You try to explain it to others and watch their faces close, polite and unconvinced.

This brought feelings of such bittersweet nostalgia that I had to put the book down. My body responded before my intellect could catch up: a tightening in the chest, a heat behind the eyes, the unmistakable ache of recognition. It was not just the letters themselves that moved me, but the fact of their survival. Someone had kept them. Someone had decided they mattered enough to be preserved, even when the world they described had refused to make space for them.

Queer reality, so often, is constituted by what almost didn’t happen and what did happen but wasn’t allowed to count. We live amid ghost narratives — relationships that were formative but unofficial, love affairs that shaped us but were later minimized, denied, or rewritten as phases. Like UFO abductees, we are often told that our experiences were misinterpretations, hormones, imagination, trauma. The archive becomes a site of resistance not because it is nostalgic, but because it insists on the factuality of queer feeling. We were here. This happened. It mattered.

Now I remember the reason for our nicknames, Porky and Choppy. It was because we watched the movie Groundhog Day together and there was a line in it where Phil Connors (Bill Murray) yells, “Don’t mess with me, pork chop!” at a bewildered man in a hallway after realizing it’s February 2nd again. He slams the man against the wall, shouting the insult before demanding to know the date. We laughed so hard at this and reenacted it so many times, each of us throwing the other against the wall playfully in a similar way but with erotic energy behind it. Out of that game fell our secret pet names for each other.

What strikes me is not just the tenderness of this memory, but its structure. Time looping. Repetition with difference. Desire emerging through play and violence softened into consent. Groundhog Day is itself a story about being trapped in time, about learning through repetition how to live differently inside a rigid structure. We were two girls playing at rupture inside a world that insisted on inevitability.

This is how queerness often announces itself: sideways, disguised, laughing too hard at something that cracks open a hidden door. We didn’t know yet that what we were doing had a history. That other women had pressed women against other walls and then written about it in letters signed yours forever. We thought we were inventing something entirely new, which is both the great pleasure and the great vulnerability of being young and queer in a culture that withholds its lineage from you.

In Beings, this lineage is guarded not by an omniscient narrator but by an Archivist — a figure who gathers fragments, testimonies, letters, transcripts, and arranges them without pretending to master them. The Archivist does not claim objectivity. They do not resolve contradictions. Instead, they offer a counter to traditional historical authority, which so often demands coherence, proof, and linear causality.

Queer history, like UFO history, does not behave linearly. It loops, disappears, resurfaces. It is full of gaps, redactions, and disputed claims. The Archivist’s power lies not in adjudicating truth, but in refusing erasure. In saying: this was said. This was felt. This was recorded.

In the end, just like the fictional Rosa believed it wrong and bad to be romantically intimate with Phyllis thirty years before we were, my first love believed this too and stopped seeing me, stopped speaking to me. My heart was more broken by the loss of her than it has been by any other romantic loss since. My heart bears this scar still.

There is a particular devastation that comes from being someone’s first love when they do not — or cannot — be yours in public. You are asked to hold the intensity without the recognition, the forever without the future. You become a formative secret, which is a beautiful thing until it becomes unbearable. When she married him, it felt less like rejection than annulment, as though the world had retroactively declared our love null and void.

And those letters — oh, how I wish I would have kept them or committed them to a queer archive somewhere. I imagine them now, yellowing slightly, still fragrant with the faintest trace of her perfume. I imagine a future researcher opening the box and feeling that familiar thrill: here is proof. Not of tragedy, but of devotion. Of a teenage girl writing yours forever and meaning it with her whole body. Of another girl — me — learning, line by line, how desire could be articulated, how language could carry longing across time and space.

Perhaps this is what it means to queer reality: to insist that these moments were not rehearsals for something else, not detours on the way to adulthood, but the thing itself. The letters were not juvenile. They were not excessive. They were accurate. They told the truth as we knew it then, which is the only truth anyone ever has access to.

I can’t get them back. But I can write this. I can add my testimony to this living archive, fragile but persistent, of queer love that was real even when it was unsanctioned, even when it was abandoned, even when it was returned in a box out of spite and grief.

I write for Phyllis and Rosa, for Porky and Choppy, for every abducted feeling that could not be explained away, for every promise made forever and broken not by lack of love but by the gravity of the dominant world. I understand now that yours forever is not a contract. It is a declaration of intensity.

It means: time will not undo this.

It means: what we had marked me.

It means: I am still here, remembering.