2017 Editorial Team: Abilene Donegan, Colleen Gundersen, Kelli Farrington, Nya McNeil, Nhawndie Smith, Skye Warren (Greensboro, NC) This year’s theme came from the need to celebrate those that have been criminalized or erased altogether by the established order. Our aim…
Essays
The ABC’s of Life: Authority, Borders & Constructs
Nhawndie Smith (Greensboro, NC) I denounce the state for its continued violence on the oppressed. I denounce capitalism, the ways it exploits labor, consumes bodies and lays waste globally. I denounce colonization in all forms, specifically the false ownership of…
Sunday Outing
Brettany Renee Blatchley (Asheville, NC) “Yes, these women’s hands” she said… A cisgender woman I befriended at church a few months ago noticed I am unusual, but assumed that I was simply a tall woman of Scandinavian stock (which is…
Growing Out of the Closet
Brianna Leahy (Trinity, NC) When I was four, my cousin and I would play house. She was always the wife, and I was the husband. I didn’t want to be the wife, because I thought I’d have to wear a…
Write the Unwritten, Become an Enforcer
Michael G. Williams (Durham, NC) The very first time I had sex with a man, we were breaking multiple laws. We were trespassing. It was in an old, abandoned quarry in the town where I grew up. We met via…
Interview with Playwright MJ Kaufman
Bailey Roper (Dallas, TX) MJ Kaufman is a queer playwright and devised theatre artist working in New York City and Philadelphia. Their work has been seen at the Huntington Theatre, New York Theater Workshop, the New Museum, Clubbed Thumb, New…
Will “Better” Ever be Good Enough?
Guido Villalba Portel (Greensboro, NC) Toward the end of my senior year of high school, my guidance counselor approached me and tried to get me involved in a video which passed on the famous “It Gets Better” message to inspire…
Masc 4 Masc: The Denial of Femininity in the Gay Community
Nathan Cornell (Greensboro, NC) Since years before the enforcing of the Hays Code ‒ a set of movie production guidelines which forbade “any inference of sexual perversion” (i.e homosexuality) in film‒ feminine men or “sissies” have been an on-screen euphemism…
A Southern Lineage Retraced: Excerpt from An AutoEthnography
Hooper Schultz (New York, NY) My great-uncle Charles never attended college. He was a harbor pilot, and attended an abbreviated pilot-ship course in New York City before returning to his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. A story I often heard growing…
Meditations on Queerness and “Coming Out”
Benjamin Fisher (Greensboro, NC) Everyone seems to have an opinion about what “Empire” actor Jussie Smollet’s appearance on Ellen’s show means or does not mean for the visibility of queer people. I just finished re-watching a segment on writer Janet…
NAKED
Leila Jinnah (New York, NY) The building of an identity is fundamentally internal, but in order to express this it becomes a practice of external presentation. A person’s relationship to how they present themselves is a visual cultivation of both…
Are You in a Slump?
Christopher Kennedy (Brooklyn, NY) I spend a lot of time thinking about how my body takes up space. On my way to work, on the subway, when I’m in line ordering a burrito. From the way I stand and the…
Digital Dating (In a Small Town)
Peter Pendergrass (Greensboro, NC) Meeting people online is one of those things that everyone hates to acknowledge, but many (if not most) of us have done. There are many ways to connect with new people online, and some of them…