Tag: identity

A full week into Pride Month, but nevertheless…

Transitioning back into writing full-time has also meant getting used to learning how to manage my time — or, I guess, reclaiming it (thank you, Auntie Maxine) — but it also means that as my friend Jennifer has remarked, you realize that “Linear time is a trip.”

h_14472295.jpgAnyway, I worked on this piece for the Village Voice on how erasing black LGBTQ women from Pride almost 50 years after Stonewall defeats the point of what Pride is supposed to mean. I hope you dig it.

While I was working on it, I thought about the piece I reference toward the end, the Questioning Continuum, which I wrote for Bitch back in July 2014. This week, I met someone who said that someone told her that coming out is not really a one time process but something you’re always doing. That, to me, feels kind of exhausting, so I’m not entirely sure about that — and back then, I wasn’t even convinced that I needed to come out at all.

But there are a lot of people who feel, like I do, that they’re not quite heterosexual and they’re not in another category either. And maybe queer doesn’t fit them. But they know that they could fall in love with another kindred spirit and that’s the thing that matters. This blog is for them, or if it’s you, it’s for you. Happy Pride.

For The Motherless or Unmothered

mom and dad
Mom & Dad & Me & Mom

I live at the center of an odd emotional Venn diagram that falls around this time each spring. I learned of my father’s suicide on Earth Day in 2010. My mother died from cervical cancer in early 2012.

It is my mother who I miss most because insofar as I knew either of my parents, I knew her or tried to and she sometimes let me.

I am a word person but I increasingly love numbers as I get older. They are specific and neat. They offer a clarity words can obscure.

It has been five years since I commemorated Mother’s Day without my mother’s physical presence, without her outside voice shouting at me on the phone to wish her a happy mother’s day, or the arrival of a card she’d sent to me as if to say, “This is how you send a Mother’s Day card…see?”

It has been five months since I moved home to the Bronx, the place I left because my mother was here, insistent and ever-present and manic in a way that made it difficult to be close.

Before I returned, it had been 17 years since I had been a New Yorker. Every day that I was away, I missed being here: The noise, the dirt, the crowds. The possibility, the energy the light pollution that shames darkness and makes visible stars seem like survivors.

I left poor and afraid, following pragmatic versions of my dreams to Texas and the West. I came back successful by some measures, with enough experience to give back what the world had given to me, still battling survivor’s guilt and impostor syndrome, writing through it in this new, shiny life of freedom.

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