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Archive | Queer Matters

The Black and Blue Swans of Spring

May 16, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Queer Matters, Weather Matters

Lately every time I want to write you I find myself writing my book instead. I need to finish it eventually, and why not now? is my basic thinking, and it’s solid, you can’t deny that. Especially since I feel like everyone and their sister is now involved in this process–that is, ever since I revealed my broke and broken underbelly and almost all of you were awfully nice about it.

Time is money, don’t you know. And more than that: money is time. Meaning when I have free time it doesn’t feel free at all. Now I really feel that I should be working.

When it was raining all the time and we New Yorkers felt like we were on some sort of dystopian Noah’s Ark–which, I’m sorry, the jury’s not out yet on whether we aren’t–it was easy to just keep working and working. But now that spring is actually behaving like spring again, I have to devise all sorts of tricks to keep myself on the straight and narrow.

Not that my book is especially narrow. Or straight. Continue Reading →

Cat Lady Speaks: A Word on Neighbors

May 9, 2019 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Etiquette Matters, Queer Matters, Style Matters

I’m sitting down for a morning writing session but am going to get this out so I can actually focus on my book. Consider it a mini-edict on behalf of those of us who don’t treat Brooklyn living as a two-year post-college course. A celebration of NYC’s twin gifts of loneliness and privacy.

Which is to say that somehow along the line I became that woman. Continue Reading →

The Russian Dolls We Carry

February 20, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Queer Matters, Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, TV Matters

I broke up with the Legend–or, really, my relationship with the Legend ended–because he ignored me in front of his ex-wife’s current wife and her infant son. If that sounds complicated, it’s actually a lot more complicated, but the bottom line is he clung to the sense of family that his ex and her clan provided him, and played uncle to her son as well as her sister’s kid. I’d always empathized with his desire to do so. But this meant that he was ignoring me in front of his people, and the sting was profound. It was hardly the first time he’d thrown me under a bus, but I suddenly saw how little he’d ever rally for me, how little I meant to him, and that only one path extended from that moment on my personal timeline.

And that path was Legend-free.

That’s exactly how I saw it. Even as I blew up at him later, even as I railed to friends, even as I masturbated with a violent grief, some part of me already was watching dispassionately from a future I now knew existed. A future in which this man I loved had no place.

That’s how I explained the breakup to people as soon as I was sure it would stick. With concern and maybe a little ennui knitting their features, they’d say, “How are you doing?” And I’d say, “I’m in the future now.”

I knew it was true even though I didn’t yet understand what I was saying. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy