Finally, feeling that conversations with my parents about my relationship were no longer productive, I sent them a long, emotional email asking them to accept me as I was. They didn’t write back, but after that, they made a concerted effort to ask questions, and listen, and get to know my girlfriend (and girlfriends after that). It was a longer process than I would have liked, but ultimately I’m extremely lucky; within a couple of years, they both came around completely, understanding that it was neither a phase nor a choice. It helped that they weren’t ever actually homophobic, just so deeply surprised that it took them time to adjust to the new reality. I take some responsibility for that: I hadn’t told them about any of my crushes on girls growing up, or about the fact that I hated sex with boys (because, like, why would I tell them that? They’re my parents). They eventually became more supportive than I ever could have imagined, taking it upon themselves to learn about queer culture and to integrate my identity into their understanding of their own. They even watched every season of The L Word.
I felt lucky to have such a supportive best friend, too, especially since a handful of other friends had stopped talking to me altogether—mostly guys. And my friends from Long Island had heard about it before I’d gotten the chance to tell them myself, so I knew I was the subject of gossip, which felt awful. But with Gabby there wasn’t a single second of awkwardness. This new part of my life was an uncomplicated truth. My two sisters were also on board; Miriam was unofficially staying with us in my dorm when all of this went down, and so she got to witness the early stages of romance, which was nice for me—I didn’t have to explain anything to her. Julia was equally supportive, just, as my twin, hurt that I’d never talked to her about it before.
At the end of June, Lucy took me to my first gay pride parade. It was pouring rain, and we both wore dresses, huddled together under a small umbrella. We squeezed our way to the front of the crowd in the West Village, watching as hundreds of people in various states of undress danced by. I had never seen so many queer people in my entire life. I don’t think I had even realized there were that many queer people.
In September, Gabby and I moved into new dorms with randomly assigned roommates, one of whom came out a few weeks after we moved in together, and they became my other closest friend. Within a few months, Lucy and I broke up. I’d realized that just because I’d been physically attracted to her didn’t mean we were actually compatible long-term. That was a new feeling, and it was hard to untangle, but eventually I got there.
Registering for classes the next semester I was stunned to realize that I could study the subject that had suddenly captivated me: women. I enrolled in introductory gender studies courses, and then I dove deep into queer and feminist theory, devouring literature and churning out papers, my mind on fire with ideas. I remember once telling someone what I was studying and she said, “Oh, so you’re majoring in lesbianism!” In hindsight the self-obsession of my course load was hilarious. But it was also the first time I felt motivated to do my schoolwork. I was learning not just the history of people I identified with, but also how to think. Critical theory was turning my world inside out, and I couldn’t get enough. I remember being particularly fascinated, and horrified, by the problems within feminist movements—specifically, the homophobia within the women’s rights movement, the racism within lesbian activism, and the transphobia across all of it.
My junior year, I started interning at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a beautiful old brownstone in Park Slope that’s home to the largest collection of archival lesbian materials in the world. Among rare books, file cabinets of old love letters, dusty combat boots, and carefully preserved protest signs, I felt connected to the ghosts of queer women past, and also made a bunch of new friends, many of whom are still among my closest. When I moved to Brooklyn seven years later, I chose an apartment solely because of its proximity to my friend Mimi, an archivist I’d met when I shadowed her during that internship. Being gay opened up a whole new world beyond what I was studying; for the first time in my life, I was part of a community.
And suddenly I was also dating. A lot. With my short hair, I was very visible to other queer women, which helped. I realized the qualities that had made me feel awkward for my whole life—my low, quiet voice, tendency to blush, and the way I always preferred listening over speaking—were actually kind of endearing to other women. Even though my confidence had been so fragile just a few years prior, for the first time in my life, I felt sexually powerful. Numbers were exchanged on the street, on the subway, in classes, at parties, in dark bars that we snuck into. My crushes were boundless. I was flirting with everyone, making out with just about any girl who paid attention to me. But I also felt unsure how to say no to women I wasn’t attracted to; it was impossible to set boundaries because I was so unused to being desired in that way. A lot of the women who came on to me said they were straight, which at first felt like a fun challenge and then quickly got old; I was sick of feeling like someone’s experiment, especially when claiming my own identity was so new and so important.
At a certain point I suddenly, out of nowhere, fell for a close friend. I had never thought of her as anything other than a pal, but then one day sitting next to each other at some show I was suddenly aware of the warmth from her arm pressing into mine, and my whole body flushed. It was a familiar feeling; I was used to accidentally crushing on friends. Just a few years before, I would have shoved those feelings down. But I was gay now, and so was she, so I went for it. The attraction was mutual, and she spent the night. In the morning, though, she did something that shocked me: she made me promise not to tell anyone. She claimed she didn’t want to cause drama in our friend group. She did, however, want to keep sleeping with me. My feelings were really hurt, and I couldn’t understand where she was coming from.
To me it was a simple equation: good friends + good sex = great relationship. But she didn’t want that and I was under some sort of spell, so we hooked up in secret for months while she dated other girls, bringing them around in front of me but then following me home when they left. I felt raw all the time. Finally, one night over Facebook Messenger she asked if she could come over, and I said no. I knew she’d never want what I wanted, and continuing to see each other in secret was only stretching out my humiliation. Enough was enough. And in saying no, I finally gave myself permission to participate in my own dating life, rather than passively going along with whatever came my way.
So, I joined OkCupid to try to meet girls who were (a) actually gay and (b) actually wanted a relationship. I ended up with a string of much older girlfriends, most of whom treated me like a pet (which was just fine with me—I loved being the object of female affection, so much so that I could overlook how condescending it was).
Meanwhile, in school, I wound up in a small class called Feminist Oral History taught by Bettina Aptheker, a visiting professor and well-known feminist and political activist. For my final project I wrote a long-form poem documenting a pattern I had noticed: that all of the queer women I’d dated—which by then was quite a few—had experienced some sort of trauma, and that trauma echoed into their romantic relationships, informing their ability to love and trust. Keeping to the oral history form, I used bits of anecdotes they’d told me about the violence they’d experienced, combined with my own experiences of trying to love them while they pushed me away.
The poem was bad. It was definitely at the very least painfully cheesy. But when I finished reading it, my classmates had tears in their eyes (at that age we were all, I suppose, prone to overwrought emotions). The real validation came from Jonathan Ned Katz, a famous gay historian, who was auditing the class. After that final presentation, he followed me out and said, “What are you going to do about the fact that you’re a writer?”
I blushed and said, “Thank you,” and he said, “No, I’m asking you a question. What are you going to do to make sure you can keep writing?”
I wasn’t sure. I’d always loved writing but had absolutel
y no idea how to make it into a career, or even what I wanted to write about besides my own love life. So I started taking journalism classes, and creative writing workshops, and courses about poetry and activism. I did an independent study with a professor I loved about lesbian poetry. I interned at amNewYork, a free daily paper, and wrote a little column on music. The next semester, I interned at the Feminist Press, learning how to copy edit, and filling my brain up with dreams of being an author. It was, again, another situation where I’d make lifelong friends.
A friend at the Lesbian Herstory Archives helped me get a job at the feminist, sex-positive sex toy store Babeland. There was a lot of overlap between the staffs at those two places in those days; most dykes I met either worked at one or both, or had a partner who did. Largely inspired by social justice language, the training to be a sex educator at Babeland involved a week of workshops regarding body parts, pronouns, consent, and boundaries. Mostly the job was talking to nervous young people about their first vibrator and explaining different types of lube.
Through this same crowd of people, I also got involved with the New York City Dyke March, and I learned about community organizing. I was trained to be a protest marshal, learning how to keep protestors safe and what to do if someone got arrested. For years, I designed the posters for the march and painted the banners. One year at the Dyke March the cops showed up on scooters, driving so aggressively close to the marchers that they were hitting into their legs, so we held hands and formed a human shield between us and them. Another year while we were holding hands to block off traffic, an angry cop instructed a vehicle to drive right through us, and we held hands until the very last second, the car hitting our arms as it zoomed through. I was surprised to find that when it came to protecting women from men, I could be brave (and maybe a little stupid). Between my job, internship, volunteer work, and group of wonderful queer friends, I felt as though I had found my personal heaven. A decade later, when people would ask me about my background, it was this period of time that I pictured: surrounded by asymmetrical haircuts and all kinds of beautiful bodies, sleeping with each other and gossiping about it, organizing protest actions, caravaning to Riis Beach every weekend before social media made it too crowded to enjoy, rallying around the idea that what made us different and vulnerable could also make us, maybe, cool.
I graduated in 2011, on the heels of the Great Recession. I dreamed of working at a prestigious newspaper, but based on the economy and what was happening in media, there was truly no reason why I should have been able to get a journalism job upon graduating. I had gotten lucky, though. One of the Feminist Press authors was a millionaire who’d made her money running abortion clinics. I’d helped copy edit her memoir and when I was graduating, she needed an assistant to help her with the feminist journal that was published out of one of her health centers in Queens. My intern supervisor recommended me and after an extremely brief, extremely stressful interview with the author herself, the job was mine. It turned out to be a combination of very basic editorial work for the journal and marketing work for the health center. There was one other editor on staff, who worked remotely; I liked her a lot but we rarely saw each other in person. I got to write a few articles, covering things like sex trafficking and abortion rights. My office, in fact, was in the basement of the abortion clinic. I was bored most of the time and so stressed out the rest of the time that I got an ulcer. My boss was prone to yelling at her employees, and while her aggression was rarely directed at me, I lived in fear of the moment it might be.
I was, as far as I could tell, the only lesbian who worked there. One would think that a women’s health center would be a safe haven for queer women, but eventually I learned just how wrong that assumption was. One day I overheard a group of my coworkers outside my office talking about a trans woman who had sought care without first notifying the practitioner that she was trans; the nurse discovered it when she went to give her a gynecological exam. Horrified and repulsed by what she saw, the nurse refused to treat her—and then bragged to her coworkers about it, in earshot of me.
I took my complaints up the management chain to the big boss, who agreed that it was unacceptable and let me hire someone to hold sensitivity trainings. I brought in a friend from Babeland who had gone on to work at a health center for queer teenagers, and together we led small teams of people through very basic exercises. Most people had no problem with it. But a few said things like, “I don’t care what someone does in their personal life; I just don’t want to know about it.” From a healthcare professional, that was jarring to hear. It was wild to suddenly know which of my otherwise friendly coworkers were actually transphobic and homophobic.
I gave it exactly one year total, and then I quit. I couldn’t stand the pressure of being the sole person fighting for change. Plus, I really didn’t see a future for myself there; there was so little work to be done that it was hard to picture what growth might look like, and no one discussed anything of the sort with me. I also was assuming I could easily find another assistant job.
That was wildly naive. I could not get another full-time job. I was newly twenty-three, and I had one year of professional experience, while the rest of my work history wasn’t exactly resume appropriate (2010–2011: slinging dildos at Babeland). With nothing left to lose, and money running out, I started pitching editors my writing. Someone who wanted to hire me to write for a gay news website but didn’t end up having the budget had put me in touch with the editor of AfterEllen (a lesbian gossip website that, at that point, was still pretty great—years later it would change owners and become a hotbed of transphobia). The first story I ever got paid to write as a freelancer was a recap of the soapy vampire television show True Blood for them. My recap style (which reflected my honest love/hate feelings about the show) went over well with the readers, so they asked me to start doing it every week. I’d watch the episode on HBO a couple of times and then stay up all night writing the recap, turning it in by dawn, and then sleeping until noon. After all, I had nowhere to be.
Eventually Autostraddle, the world’s largest online publishing platform for queer women, put out an open call for contributing editors, and I breathlessly applied. I loved Autostraddle. The writing was always interesting, and the people running it were smart and hot—maybe also, at the time, cliquey, but in an aspirational way. I desperately wanted to be part of it, and one of them. I applied with a reported story about the history of a 1973 poster I’d found at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. It was an image of two women, one topless, with the caption I’LL ALWAYS LOVE MY MAMA. I’d left it out on the table at the archives where it was spotted by someone who’d been friends with one of the women in the poster. I was put in touch with her and dug up the whole story, turning it into an essay about visibility across time. I wrote it like a reported feature, but it was extremely emotionally charged, and I felt so excited at the idea that maybe I would get to write more stories like it. When I hit Send, I had goose bumps.
A few weeks later, I got an email saying that I, and a dozen others, had gotten the gig. It was unpaid, with the promise that maybe soon they’d have money. I remember flushing with pride at my laptop. Because it was a remote office, everything happened through email, and I became glued to my screen (and subsequently, my couch). We rotated days of the week to cover breaking news and were encouraged to write columns. Eventually I developed one about queer style called How to Own It, which evolved into a work-focused fashion column called Lez Get Dressed for Work, finding my footing by writing in a service-driven way.
To supplement my income, I got another freelance gig helping a filmmaker do PR for a documentary about women’s sex lives. I bounced between writing jobs with that as my main source of income for about a year, until I started interviewing for a production assistant job at Refinery29 that a friend from college had told me about. I finally had more than a couple of things to put on my resume, so I felt like I had a chance. I was also exhausted from cobbling together an income, and I crave
d the security of a regular paycheck. I had become somewhat of a couch potato, staying inside for weeks at a time if work didn’t require me to go anywhere. The rare times that I was required to venture out, I’d get very dressed up. When I told the filmmaker I was applying for that job, I explained, “I secretly love fashion.” She laughed, gesturing at my outfit, and said, “It’s not a secret.”
After my initial phone call with HR, I was asked to come to the office and meet with the beauty director, a woman named Annie Tomlin. I was terrified for my interview, but my fears were unfounded: to my pleasant surprise, Annie, who rounded the corner of desks grinning, with long blonde hair, oversize glasses, and a bright-red jumpsuit, put me at ease immediately. And most surprising of all, one of the first things she said to me was that she loved my writing from Autostraddle. We talked about the problem women’s media had with queer representation. I said, “I mean, magazines pretend lesbians don’t exist.” She clapped her hands and said, “Exactly.” At the end of the interview she said, “I love you,” and I laughed, delighted, saying, “I love you, too.” I got the job.
Annie was an incredible boss, as was Megan McIntyre, who was the senior beauty editor. There was also an associate beauty editor named Tara Rasmus, and she quickly became my work wife, giddily Gchatting with me all day while we giggled and gossiped and complained. They encouraged me to write, and they let me follow my heart in terms of what I wanted to write about, which tended to be stories on identity through a beauty lens.
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