At a time when many queers have signaled their desire for mainstream acceptability, it has been trans people who have carried forth the mantle of radical queerness, both personally and politically.
This Is How Queer People In Orlando Are Mourning After The Pulse Shooting
In the days after the Pulse massacre, performers in Orlando’s LGBT club scene were recovering from trauma and mourning their friends. But because people have flocked to Orlando’s other gay bars, and because the rent needs to get paid, LGBT nightlife staffers have had to work through their pain in public — not to mention the emotional labor involved in being the face of a national tragedy. Here’s how they’re coping: in stolen, private moments among the queer families that love them.
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Mourning My Manhood
I woke up today missing my manhood, not in the sense of body parts but in the sense of the man I was before I became a woman. Not in a regretful way, but more that I don't think I spent enough time thinking about the things I liked about being a queer, feminine man. Part of it was that I found this footage of me at a kiss-in demonstration I did when Ralph Reed spoke at Harvard in 1996, where I ended up kissing a man dressed up as a nun.
Some things I miss about being a feminine, queer man:
- I miss challenging people when I walk hand in hand with another man.
- I miss not caring what other people think.
- I miss people not paying attention to me on the street.
- I miss needing to be brave when people do pay attention to me, call me a sissy or a faggot, and how I defy their words by refusing to look down.
- I miss not being bound to the expectations of my gender, already unable to conform to them by sleeping with men and not behaving in a masculine way.
- I miss challenging people when I wear feminine clothes.
- I miss being perceived by other people as a minority.
- I miss not feeling guilty about having casual sex.
- I miss not feeling a little threatened or afraid whenever I sleep with someone new.
- I miss not crying nearly as much as I do now.
- I miss loving a man as a man.
The New Girl in French: Summer Love in a Romance Language
“I had a boyfriend and ended up liking a girl for the first time, even though I wasn’t supposed to. The thing that made it more complicated was that I hadn’t always been a girl myself—I was raised as a boy then changed genders eight years before—and struggled with my attraction to other girls. And all this liking and falling, this aime-ing and tombe-ing, it was happening fast in French, a language I spoke at a third of the speed and ease of English.”