On Pride and Books and the Unknowability of Myself
My God it's hot. Isn't it just miserably, brutally, unbearably hot? Don't you just want to lie very still in a very cold room and refuse to move or think or feel or do literally anything until it's fall?
Maybe you don't, because a lot of people have a mysterious fondness for summer and revel in this oppressive, humid heat. If you're one of them, I'm so glad for you that you get to have several months of this hell, but I'm not glad for me. Every part of my being despises this time of year. I've always resented it to some extent, but it's gotten worse as my lupus symptoms have increased in severity, and this year I want to cease to exist until it's over. I have two window AC units and two reasonably powerful fans and I still don't want to do anything or go anywhere.
I'm saying all of this simply to tell you that writing this newsletter has been a struggle. I'm writing it the evening before it's due to go out, and I seriously considered skipping this week and begging for your forgiveness. If you're reading it, I guess I managed to get it done. Good for me. I didn't know what I was even going to write about until yesterday, and even now, I'm not convinced that this is something I want to write about.
It's Pride month, and that's wonderful, right? LGBTQ+ people deserve this month and all the pride they can squeeze from it. In a world where far too many people still want us dead, or at least out of sight and therefore out of mind, celebrating ourselves and our sexuality is a radical act. But for me, I don't know what I'm actually celebrating anymore, and I don't think I really care. My sexuality is whatever it is, and I'm not proud of it as much as I'm baffled by it. It's a giant cosmic shrug. It's a path through the woods except I've wandered off the path and gotten lost in the trees and I have no idea where I am. And more than that, I don't need to know where I am.
I'm attracted to people so rarely, regardless of gender, that it no longer feels urgent to understand the nuances when it does happen. Why this person and not that person? Why this gender or that gender? Why now? Who cares? I can't picture a time when it will matter, when I'm not hopelessly in love with someone who is not in love with me, when I have the energy or desire to build up a meaningful connection with someone else who is. I don't know the language for this part of myself and it feels like too much effort to learn for too little payoff.
I've also become very disenchanted with the concept and process of coming out. I know it holds a lot of power for a lot of people and it can be very liberating, but I've done it so many times now and I've gotten it wrong so many times, or maybe not gotten it wrong but come to understand more about myself that shifts what I thought I knew, and I think it's enough now to say that I'm not straight. I love women and I occasionally love men and I've experienced genuine unforced attraction to exactly one person, and I've been with a lot of people as a desperate attempt to be normal and forced myself to do a lot of things because it's just what you do, and all of this adds up to...something. Whatever. Who knows? It adds up to me, whoever I am, whatever I am.
Last year I read Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli and I cried so hard, so unexpectedly. I didn't think it would hit me the way it did because I didn't think it applied to me, and none of her previous books had gotten under my skin that way. This is the part that did it:
I’ve always had such a pliable center. I like being who people expect me to be. It’s not that I’m trying to change who I am. I just want who I am to make sense. In every context. Without any uncertainty or contradiction. Which means pinning down who I’m supposed to be in any given situation and adjusting my feelings accordingly.
Here’s a fun riddle: a people pleaser walks into a diner with five other people, and every single one of them wants her to be someone different.
Is that what's happening?
I've said the same thing, word for word, in therapy on multiple occasions. I want to know the objective truth of things with no room for confusion or ambiguity, including my identity, and it's impossible, and it makes me want to scream. I want to be a version of myself that's palatable to everyone, one that causes as little friction as possible, one that is just the right amount of everything and not too much or not enough. As soon as I read this passage, I burst into tears, and I sobbed on and off for the rest of the book. It was bizarre. I related so strongly to Imogen and all of her attempts to gaslight herself out of her own feelings and convince herself that she didn't know what she knew, and her need to make everyone else happy before considering herself.
Now I'm at a much healthier place where I recognize that I can only be who I am, and it doesn't matter who I love or who I'm attracted to. What matters is that I know I'm capable of attraction and I love so big, so intensely, that it overshadows everything else. No one is capable of being for everyone, and I would be a much more boring, bland person if I tried. I guess if I'm proud of anything, it's less my sexuality and more my ability to keep evolving and keep finding ways to love the new facets of myself that I uncover. That's not nothing.
There are so many LGBTQ+ books now. Isn't it amazing? I couldn't have dreamed of such a wealth of them when I was growing up, and now there are release lists every month, sometimes multiple times a month, that still don't manage to contain them all. I'm so glad for kids coming up today to get to see themselves represented in so many contexts. Since I can't be a children's librarian and help connect people with books they'll love, I do it on the internet instead, and since I need women in my stories in order to be interested, sapphic books are the ones I recommend. To round out this newsletter, here are some of my favorite ones.
Her Name in the Sky by Kelly Quindlen was the first sapphic book I truly fell in love with. It's hard to reread it because it's so painful and devastating, but I stand by it as a work of art. I'll read literally anything by Tess Sharpe or Ciara Smyth and you should to. Dare Me by Megan Abbott is absolutely gorgeous and has such a breathless, stressful quality to it that I love, and the queerness is very hidden and coded but it's there. They Never Learn by Layne Fargo, To Break a Covenant by Alison Ames, most things by Kate Alice Marshall, People Like Us by Dana Mele, and All the Best Liars by Amelia Kahaney are wonderful horror/thriller novels with sapphic characters. The Summer of Jordi Perez by Amy Spalding is my ultimate comfort read, sunshine in a book that never fails to make me happy. The Scapegracers by H.A. Clarke is one of my all-time favorite books, not just in the sapphic young adult genre, and the writing is beautiful and the core group in it is friendship goals. I would lay down my life for every character in If You Still Recognize Me by Cynthia So, a book that reads like fanfiction in the best way. I was obsessed with the titular character in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a woman many readers consider unlikable even though that does a disservice to her and reduces her to a single trait when both she and the book were more complicated than that.
There are countless others and I would love to keep going, but this is long enough. Happy Pride month. Happy June. Happy hell season. I hope you're all surviving the heat, and I hope I survive it, and then it will be fall and Halloween and everything that's good in the world. There are always things to look forward to, even when life is sadness and heartache and pain, even when getting through each day is a struggle. We're all going to be okay, and even when we feel like we aren't, there are always books.