“That’s why her hair is so big. Because it’s full of secrets.” -Damian, Mean GIrls “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) -Walt Whitman, Song of Myself A hundred and fifty-ish years apart, and we queers are still talking about secrets and contradictions and the things that we’re…
Author: Erika Grumet, MSW
Your Love is better than Ice Cream
By Erika Grumet (A note about the term “bisexuality”: some people find the term ‘bisexuality’ restrictive or uncomfortable because of its focus on the idea of “binary” or an either/or dichotomy. My personal interpretation, the way I use it, describes the idea of “a gender identity similar to mine” and “a gender identity unlike mine”…
We Dance to the Pulse of 49 Hearts
The Pulse Massacre 5 Years Later Shielding vs. Teaching In December of 2012, the day after my youngest child turned 3, on what had begun as a typical Friday (with a little extra crankiness because there had been an extended evening of celebrations the night before) the Facebook News Network broke a story about a…
#ActLoveGive-A Request from Erika
by Erika Grumet This weekend will mark the fifth anniversary of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an unimaginable and heartbreaking tragedy targeting our LGBTQ+ family, and in particular BIPOC members of our LGBTQ+ family. We’ll bring you a longer piece about that over the weekend, but I have a request this week,…
The AIDS Epidemic: Fortieth Anniversary
Forty years ago today, the first reports of the “pneumonia” that we would eventually know was AIDS broke. I felt so strongly that I couldn’t just let this anniversary pass without acknowleging it in some way. HIV has cast shadows in my life for so long, as a Gen Xer, as a queer person. And…
Antivax Racists are Trying to Repurpose the Yellow Star of David
By Erika Grumet When I was a kid, I would occasionally encounter people with numbers tattooed on their arms. I don’t remember a time when Nazis and what they had done to Jews (and by extension, my own family) weren’t a part of my consciousness. I heard the stories first hand from the survivors, in…
You Don’t Look a Day Over 200
By Erika Grumet It’s birthday time here. Mine is this week, although I am nowhere near 200, but we’ll also be celebrating Walt Whitman’s 202nd birthday with this weekend’s episode of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room. I think it’s hard to grow up where I did on Long Island and not have at least a …
Erika’s Big Think #1:
Coming out of the Poetry Closet By Erika Grumet It’s a little ironic, I was the one who proposed that the topic for this month’s Big Think… should be “writing about ourselves as writers.” Of all the members of the Ivory Tower team, I’m the one who really struggles to self-identify as “a writer” and…