I feel like every year, things get so chaotic at the end for the membership department that my plans for the 13 Days of A+ always go a little off the rails. This year, you might have noticed that we had to abandon the idea that we’d be able to do 13 consecutive days of A+ (now AF+) content. Chalk it up to Mercury Retrograde, working with a newly merged team to launch an app reader, all of us being burnt out by the end of whatever the heck 2023 was — but whatever it is, I don’t want to dwell on it, because we did in fact have some lovely things happen.

First of all, to those who came out to the pop-up Discord server — including all the wonderful people who joined Drew Burnett Gregory for the Carol watch-a-long that opened the server — it was phenomenal to see you all, to connect, to hang and share. Thank you if you joined us!

Near and dear to my heart is the revamped Anonymous Sex Diaries series, and we had two touching and sexy, melancholy and gorgeously written entries during the 13 Days. In “She Wants More” this Buenos Aires-based author takes us through a sensual meetup with a long distance girlfriend that leads to choppier relationship waters all within the span of a week. In “Tenderness Lingers,” the author leads us between an encounter in an adult video store’s upstairs arcade, back into her long-term, infrastructural relationship, to a gay dive with naked dancers, back into the relationship but with a third person invited into the bedroom, and then back into coziness and care in the safety of her and her partner’s home. I think they’re both well worth a read.

We published AF+ advice and we published crosswords AND Sally gave us the trivia quiz of the year!

And then there was the SHAME series of personal essays. What you probably know is that I asked queer people to pitch essays to me about SHAME, with the following prompt:

Queer people aren’t strangers to shame, or to reclaiming one of the darkest feelings a person can carry deep in their gut. Shame is distinct from guilt in that shame is about doing something nonnormative, whereas guilt implies a breach of morality. Still, the consequences of shame can be profound — isolation, stress, secrets. Shame is relative to our surroundings, to the people who have power over us or to the communities we try to find homes in. For this A+ personal essay series, pitch about things you can barely whisper aloud, things you thought was once a blemish that you’ve turned into a crown, things that make you feel like a “bad queer”, or the ways that other peoples’ shame has woven itself into your life and existence. Answers to nagging questions, positive conclusions from difficult times and happy endings are not necessary.

What you might NOT know is that every essay in this series, except the two written by Autostraddle team writers and one by a full-time staff member, was selected from the round of pitches sent in by AF+ members after I put the call in the Saturday AF+ newsletter. There were so many fascinating pitches, it was difficult to choose, but I’m so proud of every writer who poured themself into their essay for this series. And I’m so proud of you all! You also showed up in the comments to support these writers who put themselves out there in super vulnerable ways, and don’t think that doesn’t make a difference because it really, truly does.

We started with a writer who you might have noticed around the site — Motti! Motti heads up communications with For Them and is a comedian and a writer. They also wrote the brave and honestly seriously challenging piece, “What If It’s a Woman?” about navigating being assaulted by a queer cis woman as a trans person. Autostraddle team writer Katie Reilly deepened her exploration of her high school experiences with a reflection on the shame she accumulated after being bullied by her ableist gym teacher — who was herself a closeted queer woman. In “Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area,” Irene Keliher took us through the shame she associated with poverty and then the freedom and guilt of shoplifting, all while navigating ideas of presentability and assimilation politics, generational trauma, and class. While editing “Too Queer Too Smart for Abuse” by Holly Genovese, I would find myself getting up from the computer and wandering into another room to stare at the ceiling until I remembered what I was supposed to be doing. It’s not an easy read, but much like any discussion of abuse within queer relationships, it’s an important one. Gia Jones’ “Apparently, Shame Tastes Like My Cunt” is a smart, historically grounded look at the ways in which shame impacts the lives of queer sex workers. She writes about how sex-worker exclusion among queers contributes to division in our LGBTQ community as well as just plain shitty experiences for queer sex workers who deserve respect, and she offers some learning and possible solutions, too. “Shame as a Black, Autistic Queer Elder” takes us through the lifelone journey that the writer, Gloria Jackson-Nefertiti, has undertaken when it comes to navigating shame, and, conversely, coming to own her identity as her Black, autistic, queer, sex-positive, polyamorous self. She actually now speaks publicly and runs workshops on shame! And today, we closed the series with Autostraddle writer Em Win’s essay that follows her relationship to Taylor Swift as well as her relationship to her own labels for herself, her queerness and her bisexuality. As an editor of this series, there was something in each essay that I found related to me on a deep personal level, and I think that the same just might be true for you. And if not — it never hurts to expand our perspectives, to know that there is always more to ponder and learn as we continue to work on being in community with our queer peers.

Thank you for your part in making Autostraddle a space like no other, where we can have this multiplicity of queer voices and writers published in a welcoming space. Happy New Queer everyone. Whatever 2024 brings, I’m glad you’re here.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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