Here's My Story Essays - The Gay & Lesbian Review

Contents

From the Foreword

OUR READERS were clamoring to tell the world about their lives and times as LGBT people—that much was clear from our submissions box. As we don’t publish first-person narratives in The G&LR, we started posting them on our blog, and “Here’s My Story” was born. Since 2019, we’ve published hundreds of personal vignettes in which writers talk about their coming-out experiences, first loves, political and spiritual journeys, and so much more.

All these stories are available on our website, but we wanted to bring the best of them to a new readership. Our hope is that these accounts of the LGBT experience will reach younger readers and those in the early stages of exploring their gender or sexuality. In this age of censorship in school libraries and in general, we recognize the importance of getting the word out to those most in need of it.

—Richard Schneider Jr., Editor-in-Chief, The G&LR

From the Introduction

AS WEB EDITOR of The G&LR for the past three years, I’ve had the immense privilege of working with writers who put words to experiences they were never encouraged to name in the first place.

We are privileged to celebrate these stories as a testament to lgbtq+ strength and resilience, while recognizing the limitations of this container. With that in mind, I hope you find fellowship in these stories and stand in solidarity with all marginalized people, without whom this collection would not have been possible.

—Allison Armijo, Editor of Here’s My Story

Forward by Richard Schneider Jr.
Introduction by Allison Armijo

Speaking
A Jehovah’s Witness is outed as gay and, standing in a motel shower, has a revelation about himself. A Filipino-American museum professional comes out to his Catholic family. A Jewish boy’s hidden desires are awakened by the art he sees in his synagogue. The following stories explore the negotiation between rules spoken and unspoken, the language we use to reinscribe ourselves and others in the world around us.

My Journey to America | Edafe Okporo
The Unwritten Rules of Silence | Fendy Satria Tulodo
Coming Out Catholic, Without the Drama | Justin Estoque
Aaron Foxman and the Postmodern Torah Holders | Marc Weiner
How My First Online Love Took a Wrong Turn | Robert Kingett
Taking the Secret Out of “Open Secret” | Terry Boyle
All the Life I’ve Known | William McMillan

Moving
A Russian lesbian is stuck in U.S. immigration limbo. A man from rural Montana figures out what it means to be gay and makes his way to California. A Syrian man who was raped for being gay seeks asylum in the U.S. These stories consider what it means to feel grounded in different times, places, and countries simultaneously, and how this friction destabilizes — but also broadens—our understanding of safety, connection, and responsibility.

Pivoting
A butch lesbian at Harvard Divinity School finds freedom by transitioning to manhood. A Black man escapes transphobia in the U.S. while reading James Baldwin off the coast of Africa. A diplomat is kicked out of the U.S. due to HIV stigma in the 1990s. These stories explore the boundaries we cross, and build, to feel connected. We develop strategies for living every day, navigating institutions that jeopardize the ways we live our lives, the children and ancestors we live them for.

Transitioning To (and At) Harvard | Ty Bo Yule
Queer Rain: Reflections on James Baldwin’s “Untitled” | Stacey Nathaniel Jackson
Suddenly Sundered: HIV and the Foreign Service | Michael Varga
Our Marriage Is Transactional, Our Love Is Not | Edward Jackson
How Chat Rooms Helped Me Figure Out I’m Trans | Dev Jannerson
Notes on Queerness in Quarantine | Francesca Capossela
The Cost of Bottom Surgery | Emmitt Barnes

Wanting
An Italian-American traveler in Buenos Aires becomes a stand-in for a deceased boyfriend. A Nigerian man is lured via Grindr into a “kito” ambush. A Moroccan man finds the community in Vietnam that he could not find at home. The stories in this chapter interrogate the luxury of exploration, the shame and beauty of discovery, approaching questions about desire, lack, and how we investigate our curiosities.

Protecting
A sailor in Spain in 1992 survives military witch hunts with a friend’s help. A California mother struggles to protect her trans son. An American trans woman recovering from surgery in Thailand identifies with Frankenstein’s monster. These stories challenge the idea of protection as a strategy to maintain the status quo, focusing instead on the ways in which we protect each other when we are at our most vulnerable, when we don’t know how to protect ourselves.

A Day in Hyderabad’s Flower Market | Patruni Sastry
The Friend Who Stayed | Daniel Hendrick
Our Brush with Italy’s Liberation | George De Stefano
Sympathy for “The Monster” | Leith Angel Johnson
Gay Heroes I Have Known | William Lawrence
Parenting My Genderfluid Child | Caitlin Billings
Hope Can Be Found in the Gayborhood | Lenny Duncan

Celebrating
A professor in 1980s Brooklyn finds that surviving as Black overshadows surviving as queer. A polyamorous throuple in San Diego wins legal recognition as a three parent family. An AIDS survivor pays tribute to those lost to the epidemic in 1980s San Francisco. These stories give us a host of reasons to celebrate, taking us to times that seemed to be the end but turned out to be a very strong beginning.

Acknowledgments by Richard Schneider Jr.