Gay Magazine

Escaping domestic abuse, one determined mother finds a halfway point between her past and her bright future.

“Because I am fearful of messing up our relationship, I have placed our memories in a time capsule, trapped in limbo between past and present. How do I bridge the distance between us and say goodbye to my father while he’s still here?”

At 37, Isaac Fitzgerald reviews his relationship to his hair and his appearance throughout his life. But more than that, he considers the ways in which he’s grown past staying silent when racist barbers —and others who took his Gavin McInnes-inspired cut to mean he was a white supremacist, too — ran their mouths, uncensored, about people of color.

When a native of North Korea returns to the country with her daughter, it is not a homecoming. It is also proof that narrative is a human construct we impose on a disorderly reality.

The world is stuff and nonsense at best and a violent mess at worst, but we still find homes, and connections, and communities.

When Latinx author Wendy C. Ortiz shopped her memoir, Excavation, about the inappropriate sexual relationship her eighth grade English teacher initiated with her, mainstream publishers wouldn’t give her the time of day. She published it with tiny Future Tense Books, and the book gained a strong following. Among her readers was white author Kate Elizabeth Russell, whose forthcoming novel, My Dark Vanessa — for which she received a seven-figure deal and a blurb from Stephen King —  is remarkably similar. In this essay, Ortiz takes the white-dominated publishing industry to task for its longstanding discrimination against, and erasure of, writers of color.

An essay in which Longreads contributor Monica Drake recounts learning that a young, white, male intern at a literary magazine she’d submitted to had publicly humiliated her by taking her story to a party to read aloud and mock a sex scene she had included — a scene in which gender dynamics are upended.

“D’s depression is the weather in our house, except there’s no forecast. Some days we wake to sunny skies, gentle breezes. We talk and laugh. We eat and nap. We watch the baby the way one watches a campfire, not for any particular reason, but because it is there and strangely fascinating in its combination of predictability and surprise… Maelstroms form unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere. And on the days they don’t, even when we’re smiling, listening to music, rubbing lotion onto the baby’s chubby arms, I am watching the sky. That fluffy cloud, is it a bunny? Or a dragon? Or a gathering storm?”

Alison Kinney visits a Stony Brook University laboratory where the physical and emotional effects of social rejection are studied, and becomes a subject herself.

“Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. So many other traumas — Men. Money. Electric fences. — but always, always teeth.”