October 2021 The sun is out, and Julie’s still in bed at noon, one, three, and still at half-past four. Another bright October day, one more spent walking, writing e-mails, solitude become habitual, there, here. My mood depends on the temperature outdoors, and if the sky is bright or going dour. I take one of two morning walks, once I’ve had mint tea. Coffee, awakening’s elixir, leaves a sour taste in my mouth now, a
I met Jimmy and Troy at a Santa Barbara gay bar on a trip back home for my dad’s eyelid surgery. I had been back the month before, too, trying to score a job on the set of my My So-Called Life—the lesbian therapist who seduced me when I was sixteen arranged a meeting with one of the producers—but had returned to New Mexico when I got the call that the show was cancelled. Now
Priscilla & Elvis Herselvis, San Francisco, 1991. Photo by Phyllis Christopher. AT AGE TWENTY, estranged from my family back in Boston, I ran away to the desert with Kym, my opinionated and authoritative girlfriend who, being like five years older, seemed to know how to live. Kym, like me, had recently gone gay with gusto. I would follow her anywhere: Provincetown, Tucson, back to Provincetown, then back to Tucson, where I flipped a coin to
The original 2001 “Rockin’ Road Map,” a guide for campers, volunteers, and parents, created by Misty McElroy. BETWEEN COVID AND kids, parties had fallen off my must-do list. It was an exotic feat that I, en famille, managed to travel across town this past Christmas Eve to a Hanukkah party where, noshing on smoked fish and sugar cookies, I learned that the original Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls was kaput. I was shocked. Misty
In 1991, a fat teenaged girl with a prosthetic leg named Nomy Lamm wrote and distributed a xeroxed-and-stapled, passport-sized zine called i’m so fucking beautiful. Part manifesto, part personal essay, it offered a nuanced critique of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, the 1978 self-help best-seller that theorized the psychological and political context around women and eating. That book’s glamorous British author, Susie Orbach, the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre, was therapist to none other
AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING feminist in the early-nineties recession, I hit the job-jackpot: Ms. magazine. I’d grown up with the magazine. I’d internalized its references to back- alley abortions, men who “just don’t get it,” and workplace discrimination. The fact that nothing we published was by or about feminists of my generation or younger who’d grown up taking women’s rights for granted was, weirdly, not weird to me. One fateful editorial meeting, Barbara Findlen circulated “Your
Dead at Last Dead at last! Dead at last! Now I can see the world as it is floating indifferent like the gull from the hospital window white with black wingtips feeling the currents of air guiding its flight. Perfectly free from compassion for me. Nirvana I can’t find the can opener and then I do. The electrician shows me my name on his forearm “Linda” in pink magic marker which is how he remembers
Certainly not the Angel Red I might try, Fire and Ice was my mother’s one and only, flaming her lips and smooching my father’s. Faithful to her favorite shade, she lived her creed of right and wrong. She did not convert to a miniskirt or wear pants, except for hiking, and never applied pink by any name. The click when she capped the sleek cylinder was as distinct as the tap, tap of high heels
A singular bleating made it clear that Frances had not saved the lives of her goat’s three kids. She had woken to growling, scrambling, and was that gnawing? Before her thoughts could clarify, she had run barefoot onto the porch, grabbed the axe that sat by the woodpile, and descended into dark so total she relied on her body’s knowledge of the yard’s slope. She shouted, swung, tried to make herself monstrous. But the predator
After Geek Love became a best seller and earned nominations for the National Book Award and the Bram Stoker Prize, and after she had earned the admiration of early 1990s punk icons like Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Gus Van Sant, and Tim Burton, Katherine Dunn wrote for long stretches in the solitude of a large blue house in Portland, Oregon. Before that, in the 1970s, Dunn was recently separated from her first husband and wrote
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