It’s been a whirlwind of a week and a roller coaster of emotions. On Monday I learned that the great Transgender warrior Leslie Feinberg had passed away. Hir passing hit me, and the rest of the community very hard. I had the honor of writing a remembrance for Leslie for Lambda Literary: “Losing our Hero, Rest in Power Leslie Feinberg”
“As queer folk, so many of us have been rejected and abandoned that we’ve had to build our own worlds. So many of us have found ourselves so alone when we come out. We grow ourselves up. We build our own families and in a way queer books become our parents, our grandparents, our best friends and families. We curl up with them on cold nights on borrowed couches uncertain of where we will sleep tomorrow, or in bathtubs, our ears ringing with the sound of a lovers footsteps walking out the door a final time. We turn to books to prove that we exist. Books keep us company, raise us up, and give us hope that survival is possible. In a way, through queer books we build a relationship to that book’s author as well. For so many of us, Leslie is more than a beloved author. Zie has been part of our family. Now, as we mourn hir loss, we’re left trying to understand a world that is much darker and colder without hir to fight for us and protect us……” – Read more of my remembrance here
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On a separate note, yesterday I spent my morning in the NPR studio being a guest on the show On Point talking about the Kicked Out anthology and the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness.
<— me in the NPR studio!
The show went really well, though had some very ummm interesting callers (like the one who was proud about having kicked out his 16 year old gay child). I was asked a bit about my own story, and was able to talk about the anthology, but most importantly the need to listen to the voices of homeless LGBTQ youth. You can listen to a recording of the show here on NPR