Essays
-
He Could Be Like Cronus
Three years later, as a freshman in college, I decide to reach out to him again. My email is brief; part of me is afraid maybe my mother lied or was wrong. Perhaps he is not my father. Still, I…
-
On This Father’s Day
My wife and children give me every reason to feel loved, to feel appreciated, to feel needed. Every year, like every day, my family makes me feel like I’m special—that I’m their dad, that I’m her husband. But my wife…
-
Religious Experience
She had a mug collection that spilled out of her cabinets, which stands to reason: When you have children and grandchildren and a 23-year-long career in education, clear out a cabinet or two, because you are about to be lousy…
-
The Pride 30
At The Rumpus we pride ourselves (ha!) on celebrating queer voices year-round. Genuine inclusion has always been a guiding principle for this magazine and Debbie and I are proud to continue publishing in that tradition. In recent years, younger people…
-
Books that Made Me Gay: “The Vampire Lestat” by Anne Rice
Decades before Stephenie Meyer shook up high schools worldwide with her anemic, Mormon vampires and years before Buffy ever kissed Spike, Anne Rice, the spiritual godmother to each beautifully insane individual to ever post horny slash fic on AO3 and…
-
Someone to Swim With
I am fifteen going on sixteen. It is well-past midnight. Reclined on the sofa bed of the beach bungalow, beneath the thin sheet, butterflies swirl in my sunburned stomach as my music teacher, the maestro bends over, his blue eyes…
-
“Famesick”: On the Frackable Self
The extraction she describes is not always malicious; it often emerges from precarity, ambition, hunger, and the longing to be let inside a world that feels inaccessible. Dunham shows that fracking frequently operates without self-recognition. Those asking for access, connection,…
-
Imagining Irmgard
I see her on the sidewalk, voyaging through town. Even in modest-sized Quickborn, she is out of place, a doddering oldster around whom the rest of the world speeds like a time-lapse film. But her progress is steady, and an…
-
Intimate Enemies
What’s important isn’t that El Tricolor wins, but that they give us occasion to revel in the stands. Strictly speaking, the crowd is there to celebrate itself. In emblematic fashion, the chant we use to encourage our own is sí…
-
Pinayrish American
I was obsessed with their costumes; I wanted a sash embroidered with Celtic knots and a flared velvet circle skirt. (This is likely when my lifelong obsessions with highly specific uniforms began.) I wanted a headful of bouncy curls and…
-
Constitutional Remedy
I won’t look right at him, but I will have noted that he’s wearing a sweater over another shirt, like always. That his hairline has receded even farther in the six or so years since I’ve seen him; the depth…
