Dear Reader,
I took the title of this letter from a Greg Brown song, Sleeper, with no deeper significance intended beyond being a reference to April, and also I happened to recently be giving that album a re-listen. (If there was a way to read exposure to song lyrics via brain scan, I bet my results would reveal a brain pretty substantially shaped by 80s and 90s Greg Brown.)
I started this newsletter a little over a year ago. The last year was kind of a trip for me. I went through various job-related changes, including the big one of leaving my last position in the fall. More recently I sort of stumbled into some freelance opportunities that I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about in this space but which I’m pretty happy about, and that has been another shift.
I also went through some big relationship changes, with a long marital separation ending in divorce. I moved to a new city and started dating again, which has given me an opportunity to start exploring polyamory and what it means for me. In the midst of moving to my new city, I found a connection with a new partner, JD, that helped me recover a sense of delight and possibility in a really challenging transitional time. And now I’m on a new journey of nourishing a developing partnership with M. (who is the one who happened to introduce me to said freelance opportunities), with whom I share a really unexpectedly lovely nexus of professional and philosophical interests, and a deep investment in living with enthusiasm and compassion and wonder, and that has been … well, pretty magical.
Over the last year, this love letter has been a place for me to pour out a bunch of interests and express a bunch of feelings that just needed to go somewhere. And I remain interested in exploring the same sorts of things — culture and sex and queerness, and excavating little interesting tidbits from my own lived experience, and the ongoing meditation of what it means to be alive in the world.
But in all the change of the last few months, one that has so far persisted is that I still haven’t picked back up with reading fiction. I’ve read a couple nonfiction books, but even I would be hard-pressed to come up with a queer reading of SQL in 10 Minutes a Day or Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel.
It has been true throughout my life that I tend to read things in waves. High fantasy, urban fantasy, sci fi, dystopian apocalypse, romantic suspense, classic whodunit mystery, cozy mystery, cozy international spy thriller (is that a genre? How would you classify The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax?), and on the nonfiction side, nutrition and health, psychology and neurology, behavioral economics, negotiation and influence and decision-making. Some years ago I read a run of books on parenting, even though I don’t have kids and had no immediate intention of having kids. I just get interested in things, you know?
So I think maybe it’s time to update my “About” statement. I set out with this vision:
This newsletter seeks to explore the intersection of romance writing and queerness and sex and culture, and to really indulge in waaaay overthinking the shit out of all if it, with joyful abandon.
And I think I have pretty much the same vision going forward, but I’m going to swap out “romance writing” for the more broad umbrella of “creativity.” Let’s explore the intersection of creativity and queerness and sex and culture. Which may continue to involve books, but also could involve other types of creative expression and engagement. There’s a whole wide world out there, baby.
Also, happy belated Trans Day of Visibility. Erin In The Morning had a great roundup of some of the events and victories to celebrate:
The queer community as a whole owes a lot to the trans folks who have had to fight tooth and nail for every square inch of their right to exist. Personally, as I have come to understand myself better as genderqueer, one of the funny things I have experienced is being more comfortable leaning into femme gender expression, particularly wearing dresses. I think maybe it’s because I used to feel like, if all someone sees is the dress, then they’re not really seeing me, and that idea makes me uncomfortable. But embracing the complexity of my gender identity lets me feel less like I’m “dressing up like a girl” and more like I’m just expressing an aspect of who I am, which is no more or less meaningful than any other aspect. And I don’t know how I ever could have gotten to that discovery about myself if it weren’t for the language that has evolved around marginalized gender identities and the sharing of those experiences — that is, if it weren’t for the visibility of trans people.
It seems like there’s always a little rumbling around whether “visibility” is the right word, and that’s not a semantic debate that I feel I’ve got any skin in. But I do believe there’s social value in affirming: Trans people exist. Trans people come in all shapes and sizes, and have all sorts of different life experiences, just like every other sort of people. They work jobs and play board games. They get popcorn at the movies and laugh at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts. They text their friends about the ridiculous encounter they just had at the grocery store, or the insane thing their boss just said. Trans people exist, with lives and experiences every bit as complex and beautiful and mundane and silly and heartbreaking and wonderful as anyone else.
One trans non-binary artist whose work I have been following for a while is Mx. Frank Duffy. Their art is great, plus I just like crows. I’d like to recommend their shop if you need a sweet skeleton sweatshirt or an awesome crow coffee mug, except the catch is that you have to be in the UK. (I managed to score a queer owl t-shirt via PrintSocial campaign some weeks back, but alas, that window has since closed.)
That’s about all I’ve got for today. Hope this finds you safe and well.
Love,
Beas
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