When you dress in the
same outfit by mistake, who
is the one to change.

Sometimes you’d rather
watch the U.S. women’s soccer
team than have sex.

Whether this dolphin
documentary is too
triggering to watch.

Your hair is immaculately slicked back, except for a single curl that falls over an eyebrow. Your left eyebrow.

You have an unusually attractive cigarette lighter you cannot stop fingering. It is mother-of-pearl.

You offer a crying woman your handkerchief, but there is no sympathy in your voice.

Why, you'd do anything for your friends.

BROOK SHELLEY: welcome, folks! FRANCES LEE: hi, made it in! MALLORY: hi everybody! BROOK: maybe we should have a little intro section, since I don’t think everyone knows each other. I’m Brook - I am 31, and a white trans lesbian. I live in Portland, OR with my cat Snorri. I work in tech, and write for a few places. I’ve been out for a while.

Matthew Houlbrook's 2005 book Queer London opens with a romantic letter from one man to another. It's a good introduction, it's a very helpful description of queer 1930s culture, but what struck me, more than the story, was the citation.

To understand Petra and Jane, we have to first look at who connects them: Rafael. Or rather, what draws them to Rafael, for often ill-advised romances stem from trying to find in someone else what you yourself struggle to grow in yourself.

I’ve been trying to think of the right metaphor to describe this experience -- the way I can and can’t see real, tangible changes in my body, my mood, my place in the world; the way I have faith in the process and am exasperated by it, because from where I’m standing it will never end. The word transition implies that I started out as one thing and am becoming another, and that at the…

Perfect the art of
leaning on things. Once mastered,
hook thumbs into jeans.

Drink excessively
the whole night. When she’s nearby,
talk a lot louder.

When I came out to myself as trans two years ago, one of the first things I said was that while maybe I preferred men's clothing and haircuts, I (probably) wasn't "trans enough" to want surgeries or to change my pronouns. Two years later and I'm counting down the days until top surgery and telling people they can call me Marco, and that she/her doesn’t really refer to me anymore, if it ever did.

I had never before read anyone who understood the particular kind of fury I felt -- a fury that felt like being a teenaged girl, and being young and queer, and being hated. There was something in everyone in that book that I loved and recognised: Ishmael’s transformation -- his neediness and then “cool collected dive at death”; Queequeg’s skill; Starbuck’s terror. And in Ahab, I found the kind of madness -- almost completely forged of anger…

"My secret love's no secret anymore."

We have all heard at this point that there is going to be a Gilmore Girls revival on Netflix sometime in the next year or so. It may be good or it may not. I do not care. I have modest but specific hopes for it: namely, that Amy Sherman-Palladino make Emily Gilmore a late-in-life lesbian.

Cool for the Summer, she had said. And they – we – were. But all things die, even Summer, and nothing is cool now.

Let me tell you my story.

I first considered the possibility that I might be transgender during a foggy church morning in 2014. Somewhere between the third and sixth time I had to sit down during services, an idea sparked into my head – what if I’m actually a woman? Like most trans women, I grappled with that question at the time. I was slowly distancing myself from my LGBT community, fearing that the movement was incapable of addressing serious questions…

I set out to write about the psycho-geographical valence of Laramie. That term was my coinage and I was proud of it. The emotional weight of coming to this haunted, haunting place to study. Weather-torn fences staggering out into the bleak windswept stretches of the prairie, the contemplative hush of the snowfall, the blue sky, the burning stars. Place myself in that landscape and the reflection of that landscape in me. The landscape of Laramie…

Previously in Femslash Friday: The Devil Wears Prada. I'm not proud of this one, exactly. There's been no rush to write it, in no small part because I cannot possibly encourage you to watch The Big Bang Theory. It isn't a very good show. It hasn't been unfairly overlooked by critics, there are no hidden gems. It's a predictable, unpleasant show and you probably shouldn't watch it. And yet, I do. Not, you know, live,…