Guns, thirst traps, and the Swet Shop Boys
Welcome back to Memoir Monday—a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series, brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Catapult, Granta, Guernica, and Literary Hub. Each essay in this newsletter has been selected by the editors at the above publications as the best of the week, delivered to you all in one place.
My Journey Into the Secret Subculture of Gays With Guns
by Edgar Gomez
My stomach turned. It does every time someone mentions Pulse. I shouldn’t, but I feel possessive of it. Pulse is where I first learned to celebrate my femininity, drink martinis, smile at other boys without fear. Every ear there was the gay ear. After the shooting, my friends and I consoled ourselves by insisting that at least the victims did not die in vain. Surely their deaths would lead to change, to gun reform. No one, we wept, will ever have to experience a loss like this again. We know now that countless other people have.
Work, or the Swet Shop Boys
by Hilary Plum
My work life – like, maybe, yours – is built around another, non-paying vocation. Writing one, two, four hours in the morning. I try to be efficient. I arrive everywhere with my hair wet. My ambitions to have a job – to be, for example, an editor doing important editing, or to be a person who makes more than $18,000 a year – seem to conflict with my ambitions to do this not-job. You can describe these two ways to spend time (writing, working) – to spend or sell time – as if they made up one story, the story of your life. But in your life they have to happen at the same time. At that time you are due at the office. At that time someone is or may be dying. When I wasn’t in my office, I might be at the hospital. I might be at my desk, writing. I might be in Microsoft Word’s Track Changes mode, listening to an EP by the Swet Shop Boys.
Voices on Addiction: Fallen
by Nicole R. Zimmerman
Our father is the one who purchased their two-bedroom home. He pays the property taxes and HOA fees along with their health insurance premiums. He’s even set up college funds for the kids. If he hadn’t moved my brother’s family to this condominium complex north of Washington, DC, near excellent public schools and playgrounds, it’s likely they would have become homeless.
You Have to Suffer
by Vanessa A. Bee
Visibility otherwise demanded a certain exceptionalism. You had to be American, like the cool kid who played Rudy Huxtable on The Cosby Show, or be an out-of-this-world athlete, like the figure skater Surya Bonaly. Girls my complexion didn’t model in clothing catalogues or grow up to present the evening news. Nor were we written into fairy tales. To play princesses, we suspended more reality than our white friends.
Taking Thirst Traps to Preserve Myself—and My Transition—in the Middle of the Pandemic
by A.E. Osworth
In California, it is month two of lockdown and I’m early on testosterone—about four months—so I’m breaking two cardinal rules: We, the trans mascs, don’t talk about early transition because it will be embarrassing for my people and eventually for me; we, the writers, don’t talk about the pandemic because everyone is talking about the pandemic.
Writers’ Resources
If you missed last week’s Memoir Monday reading with Athena Dixon, Sarah Kasbeer, Angela Chen, and Melissa Faliveno, you can watch the video at The Rumpus, here!
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