Issue 16

Issue 16

The Travel Issue

Our summer theme is about all of the bizarre, beautiful, and life-changing things that can only happen because of travel.

The Travel Issue: Letter From The Editor

These are stories of risk and growth, building connections and realizing when they’re ending — all the places we think are worth moving toward and the things worth returning to.

By

How to Care for an Air Plant

I suppose the truth is my home, then, is in transition — in the in-between of leaving home, and finding another, in that bittersweet knowledge that nothing is forever.

By

Long Distance

We wanted to learn all there was to learn about each other, as crushes do — but the distance meant we actually did!

By

Austin City Limits

When my wife walked out on me, we’d had a trip to Austin booked for months. We decided to take it anyway, and this is how I remember it — and us.

By

Bites

“I ate lemon-filled doughnuts with a woman who made my head spin. I decided that it was her commitment to eating good food, like me, that drew me to her. Every bite was sour-sweet.”

By

Being Queer in My Mother Tongue

I keep looking for labels. When I first read about nonbinary identities, I think of my family, and whether there might exist a word in Polish that means the same thing.

By

When Your Face Reflects the Mirror

Traveling to see family in Taiwan, the sudden change in beauty standards forced me to contemplate my own. The same features that made me so ordinary at home made me extraordinary in Taiwan. The things that pushed me away from the American feminine ideal brought me closer to the “perfect” Taiwanese woman.

By

The Worst Weekend

One time my ex took us on a weekend getaway to a notorious suicide hotspot so that I could take a video of them breaking rocks on the beach with a very small hammer.

By

Where Road Trips Meet Rituals

Once the itinerary is printed and your bag is packed, travel forces us out of our own limitations, the boundaries we create in our heads.

By
Road Trip rituals

An Invisible Stranger in My Home

You’ve probably seen billboards advertising an exotic trip to the country where I was born. In those pictures, the sea is always a clear turquoise – like glass – and the sand is always blinding white, and the sky is always a clear stretch of blue that takes your breath away.

By

Like a House on Fire

Everything looks better when you’re in love, and Nevada City was no exception.

By

Who Do You Meet On the Greyhound?

A teen dyke wanders around the country in the early 2000’s, armed with an Ameripass and a journal.

By

Militantly Optimistic on the 5

A road trip with my introverted wife and extroverted baby through the reddest part of California made me question my relationship with strangers (and my obsession with Rick Steves).

By

Tourist in the Homeland

I traveled to West and North Africa to find myself, my family, my people. Gender dysphoria met the diaspora and my idea of Blackness, home, and identity were not as tidy as I thought.

By

Looking for Love in the Wrong Place

“We were talking about all the places we wanted to visit, all the people we wanted to be. When she asked to kiss me, I said yes.”

By

Six Tips for Navigating Chicago as a (Baby) Black Queer

Tip #2 – “Don’t Trust the Internet.”

By

Romantic Getaway Anxiety

Romantic getaways help form bonds, memories, and connections. The regular stress of traveling as a couple is amplified when traveling as a gay couple.

By

When I Was 16 I Won a Drag Show in Florence

I spent my adolescence trying to be a boy. I wasn’t very good at it, but I tried really, really hard. I didn’t wear bright colors, I didn’t listen to pop music, I didn’t even style my hair until I was 17. I certainly wasn’t the kind of person to dress in drag. And yet I was. And yet I did. Because when I was 16 I won a drag show in Florence.

By

Lady Madonna: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kitsch

Being in places that took pride in their weirdness made it feel natural to take pride in my own.

By

The Bus to Bantayan

There’s nothing like a beach date to the Northernmost tip of your home island of Cebu, Philippines to make you ponder the meaning of love and life, as part of the Filipino diaspora!

By

Please Don’t Touch: A Trans Lesbian Does India

In the span of a few hours, in two different Indian airports I experienced a spectrum of responses to my gay trans self that would serve as a microcosm of not only my trip, but of my entire queer experience. There are no guarantees, so I’m learning to be my own safe space.

By

Cracked Apart

In the middle of a winter night in 1973, while the residents of a small island fishing town in Iceland slept peacefully in their beds, a crack opened up in a flat patch of farmland and began spewing fire.

By

Salvadorans Under The Moonlight

I didn’t expect us to create a Blood Moon Healing Circle Ceremony. It wasn’t on the emailed itinerary. Why did we even feel the need to create it? Two words: intergenerational trauma.

By

Finding My Innate Rage, Inner Peace and Worship in Osun

Somewhere at the back of my mind, I’d convinced myself that attempting to pull my slightly overweight and totally out of shape ass across the seven levels that made up the gigantic waterfall was an impossible dream…

By

Rolling My Way Through Europe

The entire time I was waiting for Tanja I was trying not to panic, but couldn’t help thinking: If we can’t find this screw, then how will I make it to the airport?

By

Fear & Freedom: Traveling While Trans

Considering the discomfort my friends and loved ones experience when we travel together, or when I share what I think are unremarkable experiences of microaggressions or discrimination, has helped me understand the degree to which I’ve normalized things that are not normal.

By

Asbury Park’s Queer Community, Post Ruins

When I do hear Springsteen’s “4th of July, Asbury Park,” I won’t long for something I never had because I was born too late. I’ll let the song wash over me gently, wistful for all the people I knew who made the best of bad luck down the shore.

By

Are You My Home?

The tears came only after I thought about how cowardly I felt for denying my sexuality in order to fit in better, for how hurt and betrayed I felt that a group of marginalized people that I connected with so well would so easily marginalize me in return.

By