Why I Wear Clown Makeup to Prep School
Val and I met on Tinder in January of 2021. I was at my lowest then—I mean, I was on Tinder in Massachusetts, home of MIT and Harvard students (shudder), crazed Patriots fans, and the Pilgrims. The city is still pretty puritan: no drinking till 21! Gasp! We value modesty, “neighborly concern,”
Painless Consequences: Cisgender Women’s Pain and Why We Ignore It
Women are born with pain built in—it’s our physical destiny … We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t … We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years … and then … the fucking menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world … then
The Unemotional Art of Ballet Schools
The way I talk about my time at ballet school has always been punctuated with an awkward laugh, or an unresponsive face to “oh god” as people try to react to what I have told them. I have never found it shocking, or horrifying, or abnormal in the slightest: it was all I knew from […]
Serious Offerings from the Folk Revival: The Wicker Man at Fifty
Two snails writhe over one another, watched by a lord in a kilt reciting lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. The local sweetshop sells cakes in the shape of naked women. A mother breastfeeds an infant in the ruins of a church—her outstretched palm cradles an egg. An empty rec
It did not happen in my day
You say, as if young soldiers in Bastogne’s trenches were not checking out each other’s bayonets, as if Kamikaze pilots did not plunge to their deaths full of hetero-regrets – the virile vein of the homo-erect gashed by patriarchal etiquette. As if Roma romance died in Marzhan’s chambers, as
