The great rampage of becoming

“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 …