“There is no love of life without despair of life”—Albert Camus
It's been two weeks since Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary teenager, died after a hateful attack at their Oklahoma school.
I keep trying to write this newsletter—ostensibly about joy and creativity and queerness and books—and I can’t seem to.
When I was a repressed queer teenager in Arizona, every story I heard about queer people involved violence. There was Matthew Shepherd, of course, and Brandon Teena. But there was also the closeted gay couple in the Air Force, whose house we rented after they died under mysterious circumstances. (Later my mother told me it was a murder-suicide.) There was Lucas, my cis, straight friend who got beat up for merely looking queer—that is, carrying his girlfriend’s pink sweater to the car. There was the closeted butch “roommate” of my friend’s mom, rumored to be abusing her. There was the gay bar on 4th Avenue with the windows covered in thick black paint.
The takeaway to my young queer self was obvious: Certain stories should not be told. Certain lives should be buried, or hidden away, out of view. Queerness is not only shameful and obscene, but could very well get you beaten up or killed.
I internalized this message, even as I came out and started learning different, better stories, and meeting queer people who lived their lives authentically and beautifully and freely, regardless of threats and violence and those seeking to obliterate their beauty and freedom.
But the message persisted—you’re not safe. It’s one of the reasons I present the way that I do. My femininity, my long hair and unobtrusiveness, these are not aesthetic choices. Or not only, at least. They’re weapons, shields. Masks worn so as to not draw attention to myself. I pass. I’m ignored. I live. I hope. I despair.
I’m sickened and horrified by Nex’s unnecessary and tragic death, which is a stark, painful reminder of the escalating violence against trans and nonbinary people in this country and beyond.
This heinous act and everyone who’s complicit in it—from the girls who attacked Nex to the Oklahoma laws that ban people from using bathrooms that don’t align with their “assigned sex at birth” to the school district that looked the other way to the superintendent promoting bigotry over the safety of his students to the state legislator who called LGBTQ+ people “filth”—not only robbed the world of Nex's potential but also underscored the urgent, ongoing struggle for acceptance and safety for trans communities.
When things like this happen I struggle to make sense of them, even as I know they will never make sense. The only way out is to live and to love and to “mourn the dead but fight like hell for the living,” to quote Mother Jones.
And maybe maybe eventually enough light will be cast on the ugliness that needs to be confronted in order to be overcome.
I don’t know. Some days it all feels impossible.
“We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us."—Maira Kalman
Quote Wall
“The present rearranges the past. We will never tell the whole story because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”—Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Advice
“Am I queer enough?” is a question that plagues just about every LGBTQ+ person at some point in their lives—often multiple times. It’s an insidious thing—to feel not enough, to feel as if one’s desires or identity don’t live up to some arbitrary, imaginary standard of “queerness.”
I’m not immune to the anti-seed of such doubts, even though I’ve been out for 20 years, and married a woman. This week’s letter-writer has similar anxieties—she’s in a committed queer relationship but feels pulled toward experiences she’s never had.
Dear Anna,
I’m seeking advice about my sexuality and relationship. I’m in a sapphic relationship and while I love my girlfriend deeply and envision a future with her, I can’t shake this lingering curiosity about being with men—despite not actually wanting to act on it due to my commitment to my current relationship. As I’ve only been with women, will I always feel unsatisfied or worry that I’m not queer enough? How can I fully embrace my queer relationship without this consistently plaguing my mind? I’ve been given advice to explore while I’m young, but I don’t want to end things with my girlfriend. Am I destined to feel unfulfilled in queer relationships just because I haven’t experienced being with a man?
Read my answer on the Chicago Tribune or my website.
Bookin’ Good
Sultry and Scintillating Stories
I’m reading
TJ Alexander’s Second Chances in New Port Stephen is a rom-com starring a trans man and his (ostensibly) straight former high school boyfriend. It’s fun and makes great use of the Florida Man Does… meme.
Linkspiration
People probably like you more than you think (Harvard Business Review)
The transformative power of pilgrimage (Further) - I’ve wanted to do the Camino de Santiago for yeaaaaars. Alas, not yet.
How to succeed at failing, part 1 (Freakonomics - audio + transcript for those who are deaf/hh)
Give yourself a break - your brain can only take so much focus (HBR again)
How to turn a wasted day into a successful one (Big Think)
Speaking of learning ^, this newsletter offers bite-sized (5-minute) lessons on art, science, and history (Curious Peoples)
on quieting down negative self-talk wonders if you’re overthinking authenticity on making magic from the mundane, i.e., making time for creativity while child-rearing, laundry folding, lunch-making, etc. on finding more joy and romance in the everyday on the history of paperbacks works with on treating self-publishing as experiments finds some humor in one-star reviewsHot Box
(Click and scroll)
Yours,
Anna
P.S. Last month I posted my grandfather’s posole recipe and I left a lot out of the story and decided to share a little bit more on social media (accidentally) and this is it.
My mother has dementia. For years, she’s been quietly slipping into some faraway place where I can’t follow and as she goes so does a part of myself, the Native part, the Mexican part, the parts erased by whiteness and passing and colonialism and time itself.
This recipe is her father’s. She didn’t remember it, though she’s made it 10,000 times.
Details vanish. We know this, even when we don’t quite believe it. Whole cultures, too, entire tribes, 2,500 languages obliterated. Bullets scatter us like birds and time takes care of the rest.
And here I am, some gringa, attempting to write it down, attempting to remember on my mother’s behalf, to pin down a small part of her history, our history, in order to capture an ounce of its small, pure, obliterating light.
P.P.S. The “great rampage of becoming” is a line from Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. Solnit always writes beautifully, and this book is no exception, even as she dovetails around her mother’s dementia, and the painful relationship they had which, paradoxically, the dementia helped erase. I could relate to a lot of it, even as my own relationship with my mother has taken the opposite trajectory, in some ways.
I share your admiration for Rebecca Solnit. The world is heavy right now, and we all need to find hope in the darkness. Thank you for continuing to shine a light with your words.
Thanks for this newsletter, Anna. So wide-reaching, some enticing essays to read and important issues to internalise. Nex’s story and the broader attacks on LGBTQI rights is heartbreaking and an essential reminder of the fights for justice that continue.