My younger kid has always been a big fan of Snoopy. When she was six months old, my sister gave her a stuffed Snoopy puppet, who became known as Puppy, and became her lovie. Puppy is Real to us, just like the Velveteen Rabbit is Real to his boy. Asking Puppy to help do things…
Tag: Erika
The View from the Wheelchair
In college, one of my friends used to say “dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” We would go dancing at least once a week, almost every Saturday night was reserved for going to Tracks, a big gay dance club in Washington DC. Some weeks, when money was tighter, we’d go early, when…
Erika’s Big Think #3
“I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free.“ I don’t usually think of myself as a teacher. I love teaching, but I also knew there was no way I could handle classroom politics, and so, in spite of encouragement from my parents to consider teaching as a career,…
Finding Myself on the Shelf: Uncovering My Own Identity through Queer Literature
“We dance around in a ring and suppose But the Secret sits in the middle and knows” -Robert Frost Fear of being Found Out No one knows what you’re thinking when you’re wandering the library shelves. For me, they were a safe space when I had the kind of questions that no one could answer…
Concluding Reflections on Stonewall
By Erika Grumet One Sunday in June, I was folding laundry with my mother. The television was on, tuned into evening news, which was reporting on “gay pride festivities” in New York City. I was a teenager, and as teenagers often do, I held opinions about many things that conflicted with my parents. I…
The Orange on the Seder Plate
“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…
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…