By Erika Grumet A few weeks ago, a thirteen year old I know showed up at my house wearing a t-shirt that read:“Bisexual Trash Panda.” Even before I was a parent, I knew adolescent sexuality pretty well–years of teaching about HIV and STIs, contraception and LGBTQ101 gave me a lens into that topic long…
Tag: Pride
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…
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…
Blog-posts Lead to Discussion…
By Adam Katz One of my favorite new activities is writing a blog post and having someone I care about bring it up in conversation. I like doing the reverse, as well, not surprisingly. My recent Big Think, about trying to shed the homophobic bias I was invisibly raised with, led to an amazing conversation…
Performing at the Cringe Festival: Becoming an Ally
Early on in my relationship with my very first girlfriend, she told me about how she broke the exciting news to her friends that she was dating someone new: this guy who has all these interests: he likes to knit and listen to opera and draw and play piano, and… To which her friends responded:…
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…