The Letter Q

The Letter Q: Queer Writers' Notes to Their Younger Selves Edited by Sarah Moon
2012
Weight: 1.3 lbs
Method of Disposal: Lending Library

My most exciting discovery from this book was that Bruce Coville self-identified as bisexual and then queer in his essay.  I remember reading his books growing up.  I remember thinking that there was something very wrong with me and being so ashamed.  I remember realizing that I was attracted to women and thinking I might be the only girl to feel that way.  I was so jealous of my brother every step of the way.  Being a boy.  Staying out late.  Dating girls.  All along, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender people were around me, leading the way, making a path, helping me survive, showing me another way, even when hidden behind the words on the pages of books about alien teachers and dragon hatchers in the books I stole from my brother's shelf.

This book is predominantly gay with a capital G.  A few dashes of lesbian.  And maybe a pinch of gender fluidity.  It, ultimately, aims to reassure kids that life will get better for them and that they are not alone.  What would I say to Little Laura?

Dear Laura,

I am proud of you and impressed with you for coming out when you did.  I know it is not always easy, and it will not always be easy.  But you learned to fake confidence when you were not feeling confident, and I think that likely saves you.  You will have your nose shattered, your car keyed, they will put pictures of dead gay people in your locker, say horrible things about you that you still cannot imagine ever saying about another human being, and ultimately they will make your car inoperable.  They will also call you ridiculous names that will make you laugh because they just show you how little they know about sex, pleasure, love, and happiness.  "Leg Licker" will stand out as a particularly ridiculous insult in a stream of insults..  Do not let these things break you.  You will want to let them break you.  You will meet plenty of girls and women that are interested in you.  You will inspire people even when you think no one is paying attention.

People are not at all wrong when they tell you that you will love college.  I know you struggle to believe that because you feel so alone and fit in nowhere, but it is true.  In college, all the things the middle schoolers and high schoolers hated about you will make people respect you and reach out to you.  Some people will want your advice.  You will actually, and I know this is hard to believe, be grateful for all that you went through, at least in some ways, because, while a lot of people are discovering who they are in college and going totally wild, you will feel safe in the security and knowledge that you already know who you are.

The person I most want to speak to is you in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade.  Your mom's friend will tell you that those will be the best years of your life some day and that you will miss them.  You struggle to believe that is true.  Your mom will tell you that she wishes she could tell you that people grow up and are more mature, but it is not true.  The difference, is that you grow up and are more mature.  More able to find your own people and set your own boundaries.  Your mom's friend is 100% wrong (making you 100% right--you are stuck in the worst time of your life), but your mom was right. 

Don't get me wrong, you still have a lot of terrible things to face.  I will warn you now never to drink in that dive bar by the school, or at least to get the fuck out when some random guy you do not know gives you the creeps.  Up until then, there is not much you regret but, if you do not get out of there, you will regret so much for so many years.  Everything else will make you who you are and make you stronger. 

You will never again feel that soul crushing loneliness.  You will never again think that you are so uniquely malformed and maladjusted that you do not deserve to live.  You need to live and you need to meet the woman you will give all of yourself to.  She will not be the woman of your dreams.  It turns out your dreams were extremely limiting and were holding you back.  She is far more amazing than anyone you could have ever thought up, and you spend plenty of wasted time trying to find that imaginary person until the beautiful year you spend finding her.  The good news is that all that trying is what prepares you to be the person she needs when you find her.

Anyway, I do not know what to tell you and what not to tell you that will pull you through those hard years.  I think the most important things are as follows:

1.  One day you will not only be okay with being a lesbian, you will be GRATEFUL for it.  You will not want to change it even if you could!  This part of yourself has sparked in you so much more.  You are caring, empathetic, active, passionate, loving, fighting, worthy, open, interested, intrigued, turned on, compassionate, ever-evolving.

2.  Do not start smoking.  Your mom is so right.  Once you start it IS next to impossible to stop.  And right now, you think you do not have much to live for, but one day you will have so much to live for that, instead of dancing with death, you will start to fear it.  Having been a smoker will not make this any easier.

3.  Get the fuck out of that bar when it starts to feel wrong.  You will be in your senior year of college.

4.  You will one day realize you were and are incredibly lucky.  Your parents are amazing (your dad is not what you think he is), you have friends that love you, and your partner is, as previously stated, incredible.  You have a not so small menagerie of dogs that follow you around and get jealous if you give your attention to anyone else.

5.  Stop with the suicidal whatever whatever.  You will one day realize that you are not just the oppressed but the oppressor.  You've had too much privilege to take it all and throw it away without unpacking it, examining it, and dedicating your life to making change.  You do not get to give up.  There is too much to fight for.

6. Masturbation is normal and wonderful.  I know it does not take you long to realize this, but just in case you need some help.

7.  Dana Scully really is that cool.  You will always think so. 

8.  If you can set your life up to where you and your family can hide away for the year 2020 and have enough food, supplies, money, etc.  Please God, do it.

I need you to be strong for me.  Hold tight.  There is so much more in you and in the world than you know.

Take care of you.

Laura

Dear Martin

Dear Martin by Nic Stone
2018
Weight: 6. 4 oz
Method of Disposal: Leaving in Lending Library

Harriet bought me Dear Martin as a surprise, and I am glad she did.  It is a young adult book about racism, being a teenager, being a black teenager among white teenagers, and police shootings.  It is important that we have books like these for young adults.  Young people are seeing young black men being killed by police in the news.  Black teenagers are in between being kids and adults, but they are so often seen as adults by authority figures and not just adults, but also as a threat just by being in a random place (their home/the sidewalk/the train station/the car/etc) at the wrong time (a time where someone with power is feeling scared or angry). 

Today, I watched "When They See Us."  I think I have written about the Central Park Five here before.  It is a story that never gets less heartbreaking and, honestly, just gets worse the more you know.  The people who made this series did a great job.  For any white people who cannot see black teenagers as children, you should watch this and do not look away.  I do not even have children but, if you do, can we please all just open our hearts to what it would feel like to be the parents of these boys?  For everyone else, the siblings, friends, girlfriends.  Whiteness has been constructed.  There is no going back.  We can only go forward. We do not want to keep ruining lives and embracing an embarrassing and incredibly cruel history or acting like it did not happen.  That helps no one.  We have got to do the hard work.

Cherry

Cherry by Mary Karr
2000
Weight: 12 oz
Method of Disposal: Lending Library

Coming of Age stories, like the previously written about coming out story, are hard because they are done by so many people in so many different ways.  It can feel like you have read them over and over again.  The time this is written is also important for context.  18 years ago. 

I was enjoying it but not overly blown away by it.  I totally appreciated the young narrator reveling in her sexual power, but I felt like I was watching her fall into low self-esteem, drugs, bad situations with little consequence and not a lot of insight into the reasons she was spiraling out.  We did get the impression that it was due to her parents not being overly concerned with her life, though they were there for her in very important and big ways when it counted.  Her dad is painted as having some anger issues, and her mom does at one point attempt to kill herself with both daughters begging her not to.

 It was not until the author, or maybe it was the letter at the front, someone anyway, pointed out that it was a sexual coming of age story written from a girl's perspective that I felt that old familiar rallying cry of pro-sex feminism rise up within me.  I had forgotten that we have for so long not been able to read young girl characters as sexual agents in their own story.  That we've had coming of ages stories for boys out the wazoo but not for girls.  So, I can respect it for that.  I don't know when life started ti improve enough that I forgot that, but I remember being a young girl now and hating Holden Caulfield and feeling like I could not relate to any coming of age story ever written.  Given, as a super lesbian teen, I probably would not have related so much to this one either, but I can appreciate it's importance.  I was busting with sexuality back then, but it was in a very different way, I think.

One complaint I did have was that I did not feel like there was a real ending, and I felt like the writing there was kind of rushed.  I wished for something more, but I am not sure what it was.  There was just this hippie, drug-induced, whatever whatever that ended in jail and then Mary's mom came to the rescue in a way that still made Mary feel angry and isolated.  I guess with it being a memoir, maybe that is just real life?  I don't know.

Yearbooks 1997-2006

Assorted Yearbooks
Weight: 20.2 lbs
Method of Disposal: recycling

I am not lugging these yearbooks around again.  I have looked through them again briefly as a 32 year old, and I have learned some things.  Here they are:

• My first grade yearbook is adorable.  We hardly knew how to write and so it wasn't quite the popularity contest it became later.  My teachers loved me.
• My middle school yearbook is sad.  I clearly hated myself and everyone else.  I was constantly battling off bullies and couldn't see who my real friends were and, while I was nice to them most of the time. I would sometimes blow them off and frequently slam them in my yearbook for being almost as unpopular as me.

• In high school everyone thought I was weird and a lot of people hated it, but it turns out a lot more people admired that I had come out and was so open than I realized.  At the end of the years I may not have had 600 signatures, but I had letters in my yearbook and it was a good feeling to know that I was more true to myself and less of an asshole than I was in middle school. Most of my teachers liked me again and the ones that didn't must have been assholes...kidding kidding.
• More people than I realized knew I was having a terrible time in school and was really struggling.  I think a lot of them tried to fix it in ways that should have been obvious to me, but they really weren't.  I would like to thank them.  They may have saved my life.

• A lot of my most important friends and people did not go to school with me.  I met many of them at work.
• People took college yearbooks far less seriously than middle and high school ones.  People like myself would not even show up for the photograph and therefore have almost erased themselves from the school's history and do not have to be ashamed anymore. 

• I apparently went to school with Ron Weasley.
  
  
  

Cringe

Cringe: Teenage Diaries, Journals, Notes, Letters, Poems, and Abandoned Rock Operas
Ed Sarah Brown
2008
Weight: 1.4 lbs
Method of Disposal: Donating

So much fun!  I loved reading Cringe.  It was hilarious.  I really appreciated the adult responses to the teenage love, angst, excitement.  Some of the authors had me laughing quite loudly, while all alone in my bedroom. 

I could, of course, and unfortunately, relate.  I wrote out wills and testaments.  I wrote love letters and fan letters trying to proclaim how not weird I was being to Gillian Anderson.  Things like, "I just really love you.  Not in a creepy way.  But I have to meet you.  Not to be weird."  So so scary.  SO glad Gillian probably never had to read them, but I feel bad for whoever did.  Or not.  I think I want THAT job.  I could read and respond to fan mail.  Totes!  Imagine the stories you could tell at the bar.

I also quoted Ani Difranco ALL. THE. TIME.  And turned in bizarre, worrisome, self-important bullshit to my teachers.  These pictures all show parts of an autobiography I wrote for class in high school.  Note the psychology appointments, the make-up down my eyes, the huge pants, hair colors, the walls of my bedroom, and the sad/absurd pictures of me dressed for a friend's funeral and me crying over breaking up with my "spiritual affinity."  Who thinks these are good picture taking times?  Who?

 

 

I, of course, am the hunched over girl in the Nine Inch Nails shirt.  I was not at all obsessed with the girl on the left...

Thank God for nice, patient teachers that do not write notes to students that say "Get over yourself!  You have hardly lived yet!"  I thought this teacher was MEAN but, after this note, and a few good book suggestions, I secretly loved her.  I am sure I showed her my appreciation by staring at her like I am looking at the camera in the picture with my dad, stepmother, and brother above.



 

How The Grinch Stole Christmas!

How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  Dr. Suess
Year: Unknown
Weight: 1 1b
Method of Disposal: Left at Joe's Coffee Shop in EAV

 

I am a huge fan of Dr. Suess.  I hate to get rid of any of his books, but I have most of them memorized so, at this point in my life, I suppose I should let them go.  This one is amusing because I bought it for a girl I dated in high school.  We were together for maybe a month--if that.  We actually broke up before I could give her the book.  Despite our super brief relationship, we packed in the drama.  Her parents found out and, in fury, called my mother to inform her at 2am one morning.  My mom was pissed!  At them.  She already knew about my sexuality, of course.  Things spiraled out of control from there.  We had a lot of obstacles in our path, and we did not actually care a lot about each other.  I remember telling her that I was not over my ex, Heather, and was unsure is I would be a good girlfriend.  She said she understood and then two days later said to me on the phone, "What would you say if I asked you to marry me?"  I said, "I would say no."
P.S. She was NOT an adult.  She was a child.  As was I. 

The Second City

The Second City: Backstage at the World's Greatest Theater  by Sheldon Patinkin
2000
Weight: 3.4 lbs
Method of Disposal: Donating

In high school I was smitten with the theater teacher.  Its true.  I never had a class with her, though I had one with her brother years before (does that count?!).  I really have no idea how it started or where/when I first saw her.  It was kinda a joke and kinda serious.  Sometimes, I would skip class and go to hers.  I do not think she ever noticed that I was not suppose to be there and, if she did, she never said anything. 

At one point, I did semi-date-ish someone in her class, and I would watch them acting on stage, as I hid in the shadows of the back row of the theater.  I would have been all over the place then, hormones raging, I am sure. 

I would vie to be the one to give her a back rub some days and, other days, I would just go to french class.  Obviously, I never convinced her, and I mostly hid from her when I was not rubbing her shoulders.  I do not think we were ever properly introduced, and I sure as hell never told her my name.  Thinking back on it, I feel sorry for her.  How disturbing to have someone so young intrested in you and, believe me, I was not the only one, haha.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby  by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1995
Weight: 8 oz
Method of Disposal: Leaving in Joe's Coffee Shop in EAV

This is the copy I bought and read in high school, and I really enjoyed it at the time, as I did most of my required reading.  We learned a lot about F. Scott Fitzgerald's life in class, though not much about Zelda, who really intrigued me.  We were caught up in the theme of the Roaring 20's, and I even wore a flapper dress to school at some point.   That will NEVER happen again.  You can hardly get me in a dress at this point, except for a funeral.

It has been some time since I read the "Great American Novel," but I do not believe I will be re-reading it soon and, as my dear friend Tracy always reminds me, it will be easy to find in a library.  So, here goes!

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo  by Alexandre Dumas

1984

Weight: 8.8 oz

Method of Disposal: Leaving Somewhere

I bought and read this book when I was in high school, and I loved it.  I remember that I picked it up and did not put it down until it was over.  I felt like I was in prison with Edmond Dantes  and rejoiced in his escape.  Shit was good.  

I opened it up one last time, to smell it, skim it, say goodbye to it and three items fell out.  One was a business card for Natural Wonders, a store that use to be in Gwinnett Place Mall that I loved as a child.  It was completely animal focused and you could “adopt” tigers, whales, and wolves.  The money went to the WWF, and you received photographs of your new animal.  They had rain sticks and shiny stones.  

The next thing to come out was a picture of a girl I never liked.  Why did I have it?  Why is it in my book?  We imagine we are both totally different people now, but I still had an aversion after all this time.  The last thing was a picture of myself, Noelle, and a guy named Jeff hanging out in my bedroom.  Noelle is hanging off my shoulder, I am spitting on myself (?), and Jeff is wearing my bra and acting like he is going to lick my cheek.  There are Garbage posters in the background, along with numerous photos of a scantily clad Gillian Anderson and a shooting silhouette from the range.  I think I will keep the last picture, but the other items are going to remain with the book until it finds its new owner.

Enchanté

Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale
by Catherine Orenstein
2002
Weight: 1 lb
Method of Disposal: Giving away to anyone who wants it. Just let me know.



I wrote a paper on the sexual connotations of Little Red Riding Hood when I was in high school. It was the most important paper of the year for that English class, and thus the most important paper to me overall. This book became my dictionary, my encyclopedia, my bible for that semester. I read many others about sex and adult themes in fairy tales, but I did not enjoy them like I did this one. I recognize now that it was probably because it was not as “heavy” or “scholarly” as some of the others.

I was able to use the paper as an excuse to watch ridiculous movies like FREEWAY and talk about sex in class-- my favorite topic but not that of the public school system. For years afterwards I was drawn to an odd assortment of Little Red Riding Hood paraphernalia, though I really do not own too much. My favorite Hood possession is a scantily clad action figure, which I kept in the box until 1-2 years ago. She still lingers, somewhere hidden, on my bookshelves. She may be tacky and or nerdy, but I like her and she fits in with all the literature. She was given to me by a very good friend. My most prized object is a hideous and old doll that is both Little Red and The Big Bad Wolf. You flip up Red’s dress and there he is. It was almost thrown out when I was a kid, but I found and salvaged it. I was drawn in by its sheer creepiness and now it almost seems like a relic. It presents to me the strange transition in understanding from childhood to adulthood, and the natural intuition of children.

I cannot tell you what I would think of the book if I read it now, but then it was the perfect mix of literature, fairy tale, media, sex, and feminism to hold my attention. I did fairly well on my paper, and I think I might even have that somewhere in the depths of my closet. I am finally ready to let this book go even though every time I see it I smile with the memory of having the most interesting topic of anyone in my class, at least it was to me.