I’m still dealing with lingering effects of COVID right now. Mostly fatigue and pain, with more frequent headaches as a bonus. So shortly after dinner last Monday, I dozed off for a bit, and when I woke up I began scrolling through Facebook and was shocked to see a post telling me that a friend…
Tag: orlando
Trauma Strikes, the Fight Continues: Club Q
Deja Vu Six and a half years ago I woke up in the middle of the night to flashing blue lights and news of a shooting at an LGBTQ club here in my adopted hometown of Orlando. A gunman had killed 49 people at Pulse. I felt it as a trauma. Those were my friends;…
Queer Pride and Self-Care
I’ve written a number of pieces for this website about my experiences as a rape survivor. I’ve written about how important it was for me to change my own language about my experience–to use the word “rape” instead of “sexual assault.” And I’ve written about consent and mental health, I’ve written about the way we…
Every Time: A Poem for Pulse
Thank you to Laura Viau for this poem. This is Laura’s first appearance in our magazine. It has been 6 years and a few days, as of this publication, since 49 people were murdered at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Every time the day approaches There is some part of me that knows Way before…
Pride on the Calendar! (Caturday Questions)
Part of what brings us together as humans is that we celebrate anniversaries. Cats, of course, have no patience for keeping a calendar. To this day, Big Cat has no idea why every year on June first (Big Cat does NOT know that it’s June first) his Human-Mom serves up a big platter of rainbow…
Uvalde School Shooting: One Parent’s Perspective
I don’t want to write this piece. And you might be asking: “Why not write something else?” Because I have to write this piece. I’m in such a white-hot rage that I can’t think of anything else to do. So there will be frayed edges and loose ends and subjects I pick up and drop….
Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Law: Outlawing Openness
Conversations we Can’t Avoid There are a lot of conversations we have to have about things that are uncomfortable or difficult to talk about. We try and avoid things like sex, politics or religion–we label them as “out of bounds” and find less controversial things to talk about with people, but there are always going…
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…
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…