Hello, Friends. If you celebrated Christmas yesterday, I hope it was festive and fortifying. Unless Santa brought you the Ethel Merman Disco Album, too, it probably wasn’t as fabulous and rhythm-driven as ours was, but take heart — if you feel your holiday lacked luster for want of an incredibly gay media project, I have just the digital chapbook for you:
A Jar of Queer Feelings was electronically published yesterday, with plans for print copies to take the world by storm in January. As project director/founder/publisher Sarah Magdalena Love will tell you, “36 artists and writers have contributed to the first edition of this book series resulting in a collage of queer life that touches on various dimensions like family, sexuality, politics, gender and liberation through various art forms, personal essays and poetry.” I mixed it up a little bit for this project and submitted a photo rather than a piece of writing, and one that captures life in this house at its gender-bending queerest, at that. As you know (or can learn here), I had my own set of struggles around my husband’s entrée into his glam and glittery Drag Career, most of which stemmed from gender norms and expectations, both mine and my fears around “theirs.” (And subsequently from my shame and irritation at letting what “they” think impact my home life and my relationship here in my forties.) I still don’t really kiss him when he’s got lipstick on, and I definitely don’t understand why anyone would volunteer to squeeze into pantyhose, but my fears and my shame have been wrestled to the ground, and I embrace each opportunity to celebrate new, feather-strewn layers of my husband’s fabulousness, and of our Big Queer Life together. And so I’m especially pleased to be a part of a project that will donate all proceeds to Gendered Intelligence, a charity that believes, as my husband and I do, that “the arts are an amazing tool for sharing our stories, platforming our voices and building awareness around the ways in which heteronormativity regulates and restricts everyone.”
You can be like The Merm, who’s always doing something for the boys, and get your very own copy for US$3.30 here.
