Bread and Bread

“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, a book I’m consuming in grateful gulps. Beyond the Absolut Vodka float and bronzed dancing boys in West Hollywood—beyond the bounce house at Dyke Day—this is what Pride is about. I came out slowly and anticlimactically somewhere around 2000; I’d already been following Rent around the Western United States for three years, so I thought I was plenty proud. Proud enough to roll my eyes at the commercialization of it all, proud enough to have sincere conversations about the downside of assimilation. On one level, embracing the rave-hued, raised-fist anthems of Rent was an act of defiance of my conservative (though not homophobic per se) upbringing, but it was also Broadway, and I’d never personally been harassed or shamed. Read this book! I didn’t come out, even to myself, until I was sure it was cool to do so. Not just not-dangerous, bu...

I keep thinking I should post something about gratitude—‘tis the season—but where would I even start? Almost my entire existence is a big scrap bag of other people’s kindness and the good luck of living in the time and place I do. Which is why I’m not a Republican, because it seems so thoroughly self-aggrandizing to proclaim that the self has much to do with the self. Bootstraps are a mythological creature. It’s only because of kindness and luck that I’m alive to be grouchy that our adoption agency isn’t getting us a baby fast enough. It’s because of luck and kindness (and, okay, a certain amount of hard work— that is not a mythological creature) that there is our experience with the agency (financed by my dad), that there is an “our” (because AK has stuck it out through the hard times), that we are allowed to be parents (time and place and civil rights movements), that there is an “I” (Dr. Irina Jasper and her vigilance of my boobs, City of Hope taking it from there). All of...

10/30/13, Wednesday We asked a cab driver to take us to Mosquito Pier, the snorkeling spot recommended by the guy at Blackbeard, where we rented our snorkel gear (everyone had an opinion about which beach was best, but we gave his a little more weight). She dropped us off in the middle of a long needle of land with waves on one side and still water on the other.  I didn't have my camera with me that day, but luckily there is the internet, to remind you your experiences are not unique. We saw a sandy spot, but how to get to it without hacking our way through the jungle? Then a small road appeared out of nowhere, and there was the beach. Snorkeling, it turned out, was easy and fun. You could swim and breathe at the same time! And look at things! The breathing had always been the hardest part of swimming for me to figure out. We finned along a wall of rocks, taking in the tiny tropical worlds inches below the surface. Layers of coral and gray-green grass and dark plu...

I just opened the beat-up little notebook where I write down all the movies I see, to ponder what might make my Best of 2012 list. Instead I flipped to a page where I’d written “ovary removal timeline.” So that tells you most of what you need to know about my 2012. That said, surgery (on the boobs—the ovaries will have to be a New Year’s resolution) went really well. As I’ve been telling anyone who asks how I’m doing, the same genes that gave me cancer and anxiety also gave me flexible pectoral muscles. So while I feared weeks of needing help wiping my ass, the pain was more along the lines of a really rough work-out at the gym, and I found myself saving my Percocet for when I had cramps a few days later. (No more of that once the ovaries are out—woo-hoo?) Also, and more importantly, four different tests to look for lymph node metastasis came back negative. The cancer appears to be confined to one giant-ass tumor—I’m looking for a point of comparison size-wise, but I refuse to...