gratitude to be seen.

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Note: This was supposed to go out this morning, but I was down to the wire and had to get on the road to get to Springfield. Sending now, late, from central Ohio!

solstice sunet.

Dear ones, 

This past week we celebrated Solstice (summer in our hemisphere), which marks the shortening of days, the midpoint of summer, and the halfway point of the year. You can’t talk to a witch worth their salt and not be reminded that these wheel of the year pauses are always, somewhere, about death. Or really about cycles, of which death, in some form, is always a part. I wrote here about honoring death cycles in a moment when I am very personally impacted by a thing that has come to signify the possibility of death. (I’m glad to say the evening P and I shared after I wrote that was nothing short of life-giving.) 

I am headed now to Springfield, Ohio where I’ll be giving a book talk about Rust Belt Femme as part of their library’s Pride month series. Many of my RBR talks have been at universities where my presentations tend to focus on the more scholarly aspect of the books — it’s attempt at autotheory, the roots of personal narrative in feminist scholarship, the importance of nuance in class analysis, and so on. But this time I’ll focus on the more explicit queer elements of the book, which happens to be much more about queer gender than queer sexuality. Queerness — the way I feel connected to gay liberation ancestors, the way I intentionally perform femininity, my attractions, my sense of humor, my politics — is deeply woven into the fabric of my being. But I still have some internalized shame around bisexuality, still feel a little imposter syndrome when I am recognized for gay things while also rarely enduring the impact of heterosexism. Even when I was with a queer trans person for eight years, we were still read as straight by the outside world, and although I get clocked (to my delight) by some queer people as clearly femme, I also tend to pass, in my day-to-day, as a cis hetero-seeming woman. (The most stigma and discrimination I’ve felt has been in the regard to sex work and non-monogamy, which some consider queer and some do not). So I feel a tiny bit of sheepishness being featured, but I also feel a lot of gratitude to be seen. 

Illness and seasons and queerness have so much in common, all of them reminders of fluidity, of the importance of community and celebration and pain. I love the synchronicity, don’t you? 

love & solidarity,

raechel 

Reading.