“Howling to No One in Particular” is about a break up. Mostly it’s about losing perceived individuality in couples, hook-up culture, loving someone until you stop seeing them, and an MTV reality show. […]
After a potential lover rejects him for being trans, Kieran DeMelfi is faced with the powerful contradiction between begrudging the man’s callousness, and the attraction he still feels for him. […]
Referencing some chimeric composition of fish, eczema, and weight, “Scales” is a personal essay exploring the swimming pool as a liminal space where the water’s distortions allow its pubescent narrator to linger outside heteronormative perceptions she doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to understand. […]
Tyler Dalzell writes a letter to his younger self, the one who’s about to undergo hormone therapy treatments. In it, he tells himself to be gentle, as he will, during his transition, find a shifting sense of Self, uncertainties about his changing body and, in the most unexpected times, slices of joy and unconditional love. […]
In “A Study In Plants”, “The Image Surprises”, and “When I Was A Boy”, yearning takes center-stage as Sarah Sala comes to terms with loving and/or losing the women in her life: this includes deceased great-grandmothers, estranged sisters, the woman she loves and marries, and herself. […]
“Unlade,” a braided essay, unpacks the legal ruling allowing same-sex marriages to be recognized throughout the United States in the midst of Cie moving into a new apartment. There, unknown and without a center, Cie uses music and Pixy Liao’s Experimental Relationship photography collection to reflect on and explore sexuality. […]
The narrator struggles with coming to terms with his identity as he grows up in a sheltered village in rural France. The story takes the format of a mock-scientific theory presenting evidences before reaching a conclusion, through the metaphor of the universe and space. […]
“Love Letters” is a story about Atash Yaghmaian’s life as a queer teenager in post-Revolution Iran and a funny but painful love triangle. […]
“The Audacity to Live” is a personal essay that centers around Alondra Adame’s experience as a daughter of immigrants and as a queer woman of color wrestling with her parents’ expectations while learning to become independent and navigating higher education. […]
A story of a young dyke in the early 1970s, in Tampa, FL, whose mother’s religious beliefs have led to her being disowned. Making a life and new family for herself, the protagonist desperately tries to live with the monumental loss and the events endured over her sexuality. Her efforts to find peace are overshadowed with her own debilitating issues with alcoholism, drugs and mental health. Issues, resulting from a childhood lost to her mother’s madness and religiosity. The story focuses on a particular night at the local gay bar when said mother arrives unannounced and demands an audience with her child, in a last-ditch effort to save her soul. A furious, yet heartbreaking. exchange, grown from all that’s been done, occurs in the bar’s parking lot. […]
Jenny Ferguson discusses what it means to crush as a demi-sexual adult, and takes readers with her to a black-tie wedding in Malibu, CA, days before wildfires burned 96,949 acres. […]
Aristotle’s views on pleasure and pain correlate distinctly with his concept of health—a necessary component for individual cultivation of goodness. A trans body complicates, but ultimately and surprisingly triumphs alongside, this Aristotelian framework like the careful crafting of an infinite number of ever-changing objects. […]
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