By Opa Hysea Wise
It’s been decades since I came out as a queer, mixed-race brown woman. And still the last bastions of feeling like an “other” nip at my heels. Perhaps, it is my shaved head and my brown skin that covers the faint remnant of a muscular build from years of weight training that gives people pause.
By Edwin Light
What I had dreaded for decades had happened.
…
In 1991 I met Jack, and my life started over again.
By Brian Gleason
Steven was five feet nine inches tall and about one hundred forty pounds, just having crossed into his thirties when I met him at the Gauntlet Bar back in 1980s Los Angeles. He smacked my ass when I leaned in for a pool shot, which I missed, but I made the crossing glance to see his trickster smile…
by Isabella de Carrington
It is July 2016, and I am heading off to a ball. “Sparkle Ball” is part of a transgender festival called Sparkle Weekend, where trans people gather to celebrate our transness…
by Andrew Sarewitz
I had no gay role models growing up—not in life or literature, on TV or in movies, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to do…
by Jon King
Over the summer, I found a group of friends. None of them seemed to like each other much, but they were united in sleeping with me. I was a sure thing. If they asked me to sleep with them, the word no would not leave my mouth. This was my summer life: days as a cobbler, nights as a clubber…
By Chenoa Rai
A Black boy feeling like a woman and wanting to live as one: where was this acceptable? Definitely not in my world, and I didn’t have the language to properly express who I was. The only trans representation I had came from Jerry Springer, who did more to exploit trans women than to humanize them.
by Ty Bo Yule
I hadn’t planned on transitioning at Harvard. No one would choose to invite puberty to graduate school, but I probably wouldn’t have finished my degree if I hadn’t…
by Phil Tarley
In 1970, I met Michael Feigh in San Francisco and he quickly became my pimp. My English boyfriend introduced us when we were hippies living near Haight-Ashbury. I was nineteen…
by Terry Wolverton
It’s been said that a thing does not exist until you have a name for it. When I was growing up in Detroit in the ’60s, no one I knew was talking about lesbians…
