One week out

Technically, a day less than a week--the conference starts on the 6th. Woo-hoo!
Sorry for having been absent. It was a combination of being extremely busy (just not used to a 9-5 job), extremely tired (and a job for extroverts at that), and not actually having anything to write about--I've been focusing on the books I actually need to read for the conference and saving the others for if I have time, and one of the books assigned took me forever to get through out of sheer boredom. As it's not queer art, I'm not giving it a formal review, but finally finishing it felt like a good place to update.


A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel
This is a book about the illusion of safety and how the long-ago past still affects our present. It jumps back and forth between present day, where Ralph manages a social work trust and his wife, Anna, manages the house and their four children; and different aspects of the past, twenty years ago and more, including Ralph's childhood and adolescence, his and Anna's mission trip to South Africa, where they get caught in a political scandal and deported to Botswana, where tragedy strikes.

A review on the front claims the book has "the tension of a first-rate thriller" (Literary Review), and one on a back says the reviewer was "enthralled to the very end" (Anita Brookner, The Spectator). Not for me. It took more than half the book for any acute tension to develop--neither Botswana nor the troubles in the present occur until the last 150 pages out of 320. Until then, I spent a lot of time wondering why we cared about their past in Africa, much of which is described in a daily-life sort of way. I did appreciate the plotting; it's obvious how Ralph's childhood drives them to Africa, and visible how Africa drives them to their present-day lives. I also liked the wording in places. Interestingly, I actually spent some time in Norwich, England, which is where the bits not in Africa are set, last year, so I recognized the vast majority of the place names.
3/5

Reading checklist:
Actually assigned:

• A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel
• City of Refuge by Tom Piazza
• 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B. Tobias
• "The Progress of Love" by Alice Munro

Not actually assigned:

• Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora by Lawrence La-Fountain-Stokes
• Sirena Selena vestida de pena by Mayra Santos-Febres and Debra Ann Castillo
• Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men by Lori B. Girshick and Jamison Green
• Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man by Chaz Bono
• The Lives of Transgender People by Brett Genny Beemyn and Susan R. Rankin

I can't wait to take you all on the conference journey with me!

Words

Follows some words and various definitions or usages I have heard or inferred from books for them.

Transgender

1. Umbrella term meaning 'cross gender' and referring definitely to anyone whose gender identity does not match up with their assigned sex, whether their gender identity is male, female, or something else. May also include intersex people and/or cross-dressers, or may not.
2. People who were a. assigned female at birth and identify as male or b. assigned male at birth and identify as female. No one else.

Trans*

1. Umbrella term referring definitely to anyone whose gender identity does not match up with their assigned sex, whether their gender identity is male, female, or something else. May also include intersex people and/or cross-dressers, or may not.

Transgendered

1. Umbrella term referring definitely to anyone whose gender identity does not match up with their assigned sex, whether their gender identity is male, female, or something else. May also include intersex people and/or cross-dressers, or may not.  
2. A pejorative, outdated term for transgender.

Transsexual

1. People who were a. assigned female at birth and identify as male or b. assigned male at birth and identify as female. No one else.
2. People who have undergone physical transition, possibly including genital surgery, to match the sex opposite from the one they were assigned at birth.
3. A pejorative, outdated term for transgender.

Transvestite

1. Someone who, usually, identifies as male but dresses up as a woman for a multitude of purposes. Less commonly, the other way around.
2. A pejorative, outdated term for cross-dresser.

Cross-dresser

1. Someone who, usually, identifies as male but dresses up as a woman for a multitude of purposes. Less commonly, the other way around. 

Drag queen/king

1. Someone who identifies as male but dresses up as a woman (drag queen) or identifies as female but dresses up as a man (drag king), specifically for performance.
2. New definition I think I'll be using: The use of a gender expression distinctly different from one's own for purposes of performance, or the performance of a gender identity different from one's own. Somehow this has got to be differentiable from ordinary theatre, but I haven't thought of a way to word it.

Sex (ignoring certain uses, here)

1. The biological makeup of a person as either male or female as determined by organs, hormone makeup, chromosomes, and secondary sex characteristics.
2. An assignment at birth by a medical professional based on that medical professional's perception of the above.
3. The unique biological makeup of any distinct person, free of determination into categories.

Gender

1. The social construction which tells us that people are divided into men and women, usually correlated with sex.
2. The personal identity of male, female, or something else that is inherent to the individual.

Gender identity

1. The personal identity of male, female, or something else that is inherent to the individual.

Gender expression

1. An individual's use of mannerisms, clothing, hairstyle, makeup or lack thereof, and other attributes that tend to be associated with either masculinity or femininity.

Whenever I mention a definition as being pejorative and outdated, I include it at all because I have heard someone use it to self-identify.
These definitions come from memoirs of trans people, from surveys of trans people, from scientific studies on trans people, not from lay cis people. Is it any wonder no one can get the words right when we can't even agree on what they mean? Not enough time has gone by for the language to catch up. I'm not saying we should just let people get away with not bothering, but maybe give people a little slack for not using the exact wording we like.

A few less debated terms, for those just here for info:

MTF/FTM

1. Male to female/female to male. Respectively, people who were assigned male at birth and identify as female, and people who were assigned female at birth and identify as male. An imperfect term, as it implies there is some sort of change from one to the other. Many people always identified as the same gender, and the changes trans people make to their bodies vary widely in scope (from nothing to extensive, multiple surgeries). However, it's still in wide use, and important to know.

AMAB/AFAB/MAB/FAB/MaaB/FaaB

1. Various permutations of Assigned Male at Birth and Assigned Female at Birth. These encompass cis and trans people, and refer specifically to the sex assigned by a medical professional and marked on the birth certificate, without implying correlating gender identity or, in some cases, perfectly correlating biological makeup. These words are much more politically correct, as they avoid problematic ideas like gender and sex being binary, among others.

Genderqueer

1. (I think) An umbrella term to encompass people who do not identify as either male or female.
2. More commonly, a specific gender identity somewhere between the poles of male and female, as opposed to off this spectrum entirely.

Agender

1. A gender identity meaning without gender. 

Bi-gender

1. Someone who identifies as both male and female, not (I believe) at the same time, but who is in a fluid state that moves from one pole to the other.

Genderfluid

1. Someone whose gender identity is fluid and moves along the spectrum.

Cisgender

1. Not trans. Sex assigned at birth and gender identity match up just fine.

While we're at it, a few words for sexual orientations that still get confusing.

Bisexual

1. Someone attracted to men and to women.
2. Someone attracted to multiple genders.

Pansexual

1. Someone attracted to people of all genders.
2. Someone who experiences attraction as to people rather than to their gender. 

The difference is still hotly argued over, and the safest thing to do is ask people which word they use.

Asexual (Ace)

1. Someone who does not experience sexual attraction to anyone. Does not directly correlate with no sex drive or unwillingness to have sex--everyone's different.

Greysexual

1. Someone with sexual attraction between completely asexual and completely not asexual.

Demisexual

1. Someone who only experiences sexual attraction to people with whom they already have a close bond.

Asexual spectrum (A-spectrum)

1. Just what it sounds like, the spectrum of sexual attraction including asexual, greysexual, demisexual, and anything in between.

Allosexual

1. I think this one means not asexual in the same way cisgender means not trans.

And let's not forget romantic orientation! This is the ability to be romantically attracted toward people. It often, but not always, lines up with the sexual orientation. I've heard people use aromantic (not romantically attracted toward anyone) and panromantic (capable of being romantically attracted to anyone) most frequently, but I see no reason why people can't keep on combining prefixes with suffixes and use homoromantic, heteroromantic, and biromantic.

I often think of graphing the interactions of all of these--sexual orientation, romantic orientation, a-spectrum, gender identity, biological makeup, gender expression--and quickly realize I'm out of axes. Especially if I want to allow for change over time. The most axes I've ever seen is five over on www.gapminder.org, but one of them kind of has to be time. Not that I can actually use the software--though with enough time, it doesn't look hard to recreate.

Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels

by Justin Vivian Bond

Justin Vivian Bond's memoir, set before V's discovery of words like transgender, genderqueer, or agender, chronicles a young child's discoveries of lipstick, sex, transphobia, bullying, femininity, religion and friendship.

There's an endorsement on the back that says this book should be in the hands of every child and every adult that cares about that child. (I knew I should have written this review before I gave it back to the library. I can't properly quote. Please don't sue.) I'm not sure I'd go that far--I think I'm conservative enough to think that giving a book that describes having sex--lots of sex--as an eleven-year-old to children everywhere isn't the best of decisions. Adults that care about children, yes--Bond's desire to simply be accepted, struggles with the gender binary, and harassment are universal themes that adults who care for children need to understand. It's a good read, fast, gripping, and a little shocking--don't give this one to Grandma. It shows the reader how Bond's gender identity was present from early childhood, and not compromised by the fact that all Bond knew of queer culture was that boys who had sex with boys were faggots. As Real Man Adventures describes post-transition life, Tango describes pre-transition life, a welcome diversion from the many peri-transition narratives, if that is a word.
This is an open apology to Bond if I have used the wrong pronoun above--there are no pronouns in the book itself, except for the he/him ascribed to Bond by society, and I am getting my pronoun knowledge from the introduction, which confusingly uses V's, Mx's, and his somewhat interchangeably as the possessive pronoun, and left me extremely confused. Not that Bond owes me pronouns, but let it stand that it's hard to give a review of a book without the pronouns of the main character, and I'm sorry if I'm wrong!

Overall rating: 3/5

Project upshot: I appreciate the look at childhood life and also how dysphoria for a non-binary person can be similar and different from dysphoria for a binary person.

Real Man Adventures

by T Cooper

Real Man Adventures is a collection of interviews, essays, lists, and other bits of snarkiness that T Cooper has assembled into what he calls "a mostly non-fiction book on the subject of masculinity with some biographical elements" (260). It discusses Cooper's experience of manhood and masculinity as a trans man, including his interactions with his parents, his brother, his wife, his kids, government officials, other trans people, and more.

Cooper is honest to a fault, owning up to his insecurities, his fears, his resentments, and his anger. And I do mean 'to a fault'. I seem to remember saying in a previous review to a previous book that a character's faults are most easily forgiven if the character owns up to and dislikes them. It doesn't work here. While I acknowledge Cooper's right to be angry when the passport office won't change his passport sex to M without genital surgery, I also think taking it out on the person on the other end of the phone (who, in all likelihood, neither makes the rules nor has the power to change them, and simply doesn't want to lose their job) wasn't the kindest or most useful thing to do. While I empathize with his insecurity concerning his wife's ample opportunities to find a cis man, he mentioned it enough times that I got frustrated and wanted to respond, "What more does she have to prove to you? She clearly adores you. You've adopted her children. She's transparent about what she's doing when she's out with other men (part of her job as a reporter). She's supportive and thoughtful about all the problems you come to her with, and she shoots you down the second you mention that she might prefer a cis man." I know these things aren't ruled by logic but by fear. I still wished he'd mention it less. His is a unique perspective--unlike many trans men, Cooper doesn't identify with 'born in the wrong body', nor does he have any single life-changing moment where he realized he was a man. He doesn't talk about his transition, he talks about his life after his transition, the parts of his life still affected by being trans even afterward. It's a good read if you've experienced similar frustrations and fears and need to know someone shares them, but not the sort of book you want to hand your mom to say, "Look! This is why you need to try harder to use the right pronouns!" There are some really good arguments about why you should try harder to use the right pronouns, but I recommend reading it yourself and rephrasing rather than just handing it over. The angry tone of it will likely put her on the defensive and you won't get anywhere. Much of it is amusing, some of it is confusing but stubbornly not elaborated upon. (In the chapter titled Ten Things People Assume I Must Understand About Women but Actually Don't, #1 is "The physical pain involved in menstruation" (59). There is no explanation as to why.) Not all of it is directly related to being trans, even though the experiences are necessarily colored by it.

Overall rating: 2.5/5

Project upshot: This one'll go back to the library. I feel duly warned against certain cliches, but that's it.

Sexuality Flag Jewelry

 You've seen rainbow bracelets. I make those. I figured out I can make two basic patterns with the six-string flag, stripe and diamond, the latter of which can make decent zipper pulls as well.

 But why stick to rainbows? I made the trans flag (blue, pink, white, pink, blue).



I made the pansexual flag. This one only has the three colors--pink, yellow, and blue--so it doesn't make the stripe pattern unless I use two of each color. But it does make an interesting knot pattern, and the diamond works just fine. That thing at the diagonal is actually an earring.

 The genderqueer flag (purple white and green in some order) is much the same. The bisexual flag I've only made so far with boondoggle (plastic), but it would make the same patterns (pink, purple, blue).
 

 The asexual flag (black, grey, white, purple) was interesting. Unlike the others, I could only get the correct grey in satin thread (no 50 shades jokes). So, to be texturally even, I got all the other colors in satin, too. Now, satin is a $!#% to do macrame with because it doesn't stay knotted. I had to use alligator clips to hold all eight working strings and the piece itself down throughout the entirely of making this thing.

 That's right, stare at it. Make it feel shame. So I decided not to make those apart from special people/occasions anymore, nor the stripe pattern, which still requires four strings and doesn't look very good. Instead, I turned half of the rest of my stock into a Viking Weave, which involves hanging four threads from the ceiling, tying weights to the bottom, and then playing catch with a parner, with the weights, in a specific pattern. Solves my alligator clip problem, and makes a thread nearly as high as a doorway, which I can then cut into smaller bracelets, either single- or multi-loop.

 Pretty, yes? (Yes.) And guess what? I can't, without adding in extra colors, do this with any of the other flags I've come across, because this is the only one with exactly four colors. Viking weave can only be done with exactly four colors.
Anyway. Admire the pretty things. Be excited that I have new books through inter-library loan.

Characters I forgot

These ones were on the next page, so I forgot to type them up! And they're complicated anyway, so.

I got this description off a piece of native copper: Davy. Doesn't look like much, but those hands, that brain, this quiet kid knows rocket science and is gonna save the world someday, and he doesn't even care, he just loves engineering.
Davy split up into two people sort of by accident.
Gary has a mischevious smile with glaringly white teeth that stand out against his black skin/eyes/hair/clothes/glasses--the only other spots of color on him are his scleras (whites of the eyes) and the writing on his shirt proclaiming his team the winner of a robotics competition in his senior year. He's a reasonably open-minded fellow, prone to quizzing Leandra for the 'girl's' perspective and actually listening to what s/he says. He does have a teenage boy's dirty mind.
Ryan, Gary's roommate, is also into robotics, but rather less striking--brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin. He's less inclined to be talked into new perspectives, but it can be done.
They're going to be the best of friends, complementary, and really efficient when working together. They live next door to Leandra. It's going to be fun.

Universe Research

In all of my transgender studies research, I've been neglecting the other kinds. Now that I've actually started writing, I needed a college to set it at, and I decided on Haverford College.
I could just make up how Haverford works.
One of these days I'll convince myself of that. No, this'll amuse you, I have actually spent the last couple of days researching the academic calendar, dorm setup, Spanish major plan, core curriculum, and class schedule of Haverford. I have just now double-checked that Leandra doesn't have any overlapping classes and discovered a fairly plausible reason to send him/her to Bryn Mawr for biology (important to the plot).
I've also been populating the 'verse with characters. I stared at the screen for a while waiting for them to walk in before giving up on that. Instead, I pulled out our rock collection and went through slightly less than half of it, one rock at a time, and wrote a sentence to a paragraph personifying each rock. I found it was a mistake to notate which rock it was in the paragraph, because those people got stuck with the names of rocks...and not names like Opal either that people actually have. Then I picked the ones that fit the plot nicely, added some background characters for scenery and we're off!

Antigony: The only one not at least partly based off of a rock. Pale skin, so white she's probably never been out in the sun, with straight brown hair with bangs and eyes to match. She's bony, all angles. Leandra wonders if she eats. She's a militant radical feminist, but the sort that gives feminism a bad name--she rags on Leandra and Leandra's trans friends who identify as either female or male for 'subscribing to the gender binary'. Antagonist to a minor theme about what feminism is, I think. Opinionated as all getout.
Ella (Eloise): She's something of an airhead at first glance. She's tiny, exuberant, and still obsessed with the Jonas Brothers, with platinum blonde hair up in pigtails. But she really does care about people and the environment and you want her in your corner. She's Leandra's bio lab partner. (Ammonium Magnesium Sulfate, aka Boussingaultite)
Unnamed: They're slippery, always ready with a fake smile and a grin, fast, smart, and deeply suspicious. Nobody's good enough for them, until they are. Bleached hair kind of everywhere. They pronouns on purpose. (Selenite)
Henriette: She's delicate in a way that makes everyone want to protect her, even though whether she needs it or not is yet untested. Asexual, pagan, and a bit of a hippie, she goes barefoot much of the time but wears body glitter. She has a tangled mess of dirty blonde curls and a ginger's complexion. She's in Leandra's Advanced Intermediate Spanish Class and also the robotics club. (Moonstone)
Chrysacolla: Flashy and great at parties, Chrys wears leather, sequins, an expanse of makeup, and streaks in hir hair. Genderfluid and a scientist. (Chrysacolla)
Whitney: So gay. Like, really. Trans, too, but so stereotypically gay that the trans-ness turns gets totally overshadowed. He's got the hands, the 'oh honey' the 'OMG', he wears a feather boa and turquoise glasses. His blonde hair is slicked back and he might be secretly a ginger. (Unakite)

Also, class schedule!
MWF: 10 am, Intro Bio. W: 1 pm, bio lab.
TTh: 10 am, Intro to Syntax. 11:30 am, Advanced Intermediate Spanish. 2:30 pm, Intro to Anthropology.

I am so very proud of this class schedule. I am such a dork.

Paragraph

Here is my pitch for the books I want to use as a touchstone during the conference.

My two fiction books will be Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kirstin Cronn-Mills and I Am J by Cris Beam. Both of these are coming-of-age stories about transgender teens, which is also true of my novel. Both are believably structured and plotted, with well-rounded characters and a compelling plot. Beautiful Music is particularly captivating, with plot elements that keep the reader riveted to the page, and I Am J has complex characters with equally complex reactions, stemming from events in their own lives not directly related to the plot, and yet identifiable ones. All of these are tricky qualities to create, and ones I hope to emulate. My craft book will be 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B. Tobias. Plot and structure is one of my weaknesses as a writer, and the book contains both six chapters on plots in general, how they work, and how to work with them, and a specific chapter on the Maturation plot, which fairly closely follows my story. Amazon reviews assure me that this is not a cut-and-paste type of book, but rather a set of guidelines on how to bring out the best in any given plot, and also that the book acknowledges the existence of books that mix these plots. Since I will be working in ******’s course to look at the overall plot of the book before I’ve written it all, I thought it would be important to study plot first.

I looked at all of the books next to each other, and it was an easy decision. I Know Very Well How I Got My Name and Refuse are just a little too far off the path, and The Best Boy Ever Made had a few too many plot holes, although I'm glad I read them and I still think having done so will be helpful in the process.
Still in progress/yet to read:

• Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (Cultural Studies of the Americas) (online)
• Sirena Selena vestida de pena (in Spanish)
• Real Man Adventures (not at our local library)
• Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels (not at our local library)
• The Lives of Transgender People (not at our local library)
• Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man (audiobook)
• Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men (online)

As you can see, all of these are a little harder to just zip through for one reason or another--it's just harder for me to read online or listen to an audiobook. I get bored much faster, even if the book is fascinating--it's about being able to curl up with a book in my hands. I'm also not sure I'm going to get anything out of a book written in Spanish--although I'm good enough to read the newspaper, there's a significant difference in vocabulary size in literature. So these reviews aren't going to come as quickly as you might hope. Hope you'll keep reading--the fact that some people are actually interested in this is helping me stay motivated.

I Am J

by Cris Beam

J hides his feminine body under two bras and four shirts. He hides from being photographed by being the one behind the camera. He hides from the slew of dyke and suspicion by keeping to himself, only interacting with his parents and his best friend, Melissa. Then an ill-fated kiss and some poorly chosen words catapult him on a whirlwind adventure to drop all that, stop hiding, and become who he really is. A fascinating painter named Blue, a friendly hotel worker, a poet with boy troubles, and a successful trans activist all help to guide J into a deeper understanding of not only himself, but Melissa and his parents as well. Triggers for self-harm.

J's experiences are varied, and the plot believable. Some of the devices were a little less so--are there really queer youth shelters that come with fully functional, queer-only schools? And where I come from, college applications need to be done by the end of winter break, and J was talking about it getting warm outside (in, presumably, Pennsylvania). But the actual motivations were clear and well-supported, which I consider to be much more important. The characters had surprising depth. J's father is Jewish and his mother Puerto Rican Catholic, and on the surface, her reaction seems strangely accepting, but when you really take a look at their actions as a whole, I think it worked. Melissa, too, allows us glimpses of problems that help explain why she doesn't always act with perfect understanding. J was a little bit overly perceptive for me--it felt like this was for the benefit of the reader, to understand why everyone else acts the way they do. For this reason, he is a shell character, allowing the reader to slip in, view the world through his eyes, and not feel entirely out of place. However, many protagonists are like this, including Harry Potter, so I forgive I Am J. It also touches on self-harm, believably, if only briefly.

Overall rating: 4/5

Project upshot: This was actually the inspiring book for the whole search--in order to find trans coming of age books, I looked up this book (which I already owned) on Amazon, looked under the 'other people bought' list, opened up all of those, looked at the 'other people bought' list for each of those, and repeated until I got out of relevant territory. I decided to reread it, to see if I wanted to put it in the paragraph. I'm considering it.

Refuse

by Elliott DeLine

Dean is an angry college-age kid that sometimes identifies as FTM transgender and sometimes decides he hates labels altogether. When his (female) roommate complains about their placement, the housing department places him with Colin, the only other out FTM on campus. Colin will go on to define much of the next years for Dean. In some ways they are similar--both love The Smiths and music in general, and Colin agrees with things Dean says. But mostly they are opposites. Colin is social, generally likeable, the poster boy transgender artist torn between being out to serve as a role model and going stealth (allowing others to believe he is a cisgender male) to be treated as a normal guy. Dean is sullen, bad at social interaction, full of unpalatable opinions, and otherwise extremely reminiscent of Holden Caulfield. Together they experience a trans support group with a troubled woman named Teddy, the sudden coming out of Dean's best friend Vivian's sister, Colin's on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend, and Colin's band, Owl Eyes, whose lead singer is both not quite good enough and Colin's best friend. Deep inside, though, Dean is honest with himself while Colin is not, and Dean has principles which he will not cross, but Colin will. These combined with a brutally honest first-person narration set after graduation interspersed with third-person narration set during college attach the reader to Dean. His inability to find something he wants to do after college and unwillingness to settle for something practical are offset to the reader by his real anathema of the social construct forcing him to do so and his self-awareness of the problem. We do not necessarily agree with Dean, but we understand why he does what he does. Triggers for mental illness and suicide.

Refuse is almost unrecognizable as the same story we left in the prequel, I Know Very Well How I Got My Name. Remaining are Dean's not-quite-fitting-in personality, his name, the shocking climax of the last book, and his best friend Vivian. Suddenly appearing are a snarky first-person narration, a love of The Smiths, writing, and music; and an attraction to guys. I'm also fairly sure Dean's parents were divorced before. These can't really be called flaws in this book so much as the last one, since this one (I think) was written first, and I've already written the review for the last one, so let this complaint stand on its own.
Dean was artfully handled to be sympathetic without being nice, and Colin, too, to be nice without being sympathetic. If there's any sure way to get an audience to accept or reject flaws, it's whether or not the character acknowledges and dislikes them. The plot tugged me ever onwards, and the organization didn't jar, oddly arranged in terms of time as it was. Definitely more engaging than the prequel.

Overall rating: 4.5/5

Project upshot: Not sure whether this book works as a touchstone. I like it better than the other, but it's so different from the book I want to write. Dean's personality colors everything in this book, and Leandra isn't like that at all. I'm glad I read it for its own sake, in any case.

Closets and Skeletons

Being in the closet has the detrimental effect of making people feel like strangers to those closest to them. Like liars. Like imposters.
I remember being at my own birthday party, laughing with my friends, and suddenly wondering how many of my friends would be there if they knew the truth.
After all, there are scary things like skeletons in closets.
I'm out to most people now as gay--certain conservative family and friends no longer within my closest circle remain. (There are also a few people with whom it simply hasn't come up.)
And then I found myself back in the closet, once again restructuring sentences, and I discovered a new pain to the closet.
When you have a partner you haven't told anyone about, you can't share the joys of a new relationship, the learning process of its progression, or the sorrow at its ending.
I broke up with a lovely woman today, and cried alone.
Only now, as the relationship is ending, am I finding the courage to say I dated two wonderful women at the same time, they knew about and cared about each other, and I have been doing one of them the occasionally necessary disservice of not telling anyone about her.
Well, hardly anyone. By my count, seven people besides us three knew. (This is the scientist and the poet in me clashing.)
And so I made her things. I can't take any credit for technical ability--you too can make these on weavesilk.com, but they do mean things, and this is, after all, a blog for art.


So I'm taking a moment off from research to mourn a romantic relationship and celebrate a friendship and make things and be a little pissed off that I can feel safe as a lesbian now and fear being seen as poly. There's a rant to be had there, but I don't have it yet.