Issue 58: Summer 2022

Love Letters to Lost Souls

i wish you wouldn’t fear me. if you could come inside my head and/ understand what i feel when i read the words of a cis woman who’s/ terrified that the coming of my liberation means the ending of hers,/ then you’d find your mirror image, trying to break out of the frame.

to jk rowling 

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, youd find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth.”—J.K. Rowling

When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels hes a woman […] then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.”—J.K. Rowling

i wish you wouldn’t fear me. if you could come inside my head and understand what i feel when i read the words of a cis woman who’s terrified that the coming of my liberation means the ending of hers, then you’d find your mirror image, trying to break out of the frame. it does not do to dwell on nightmares and forget to live and let live, dear Joanne. i don’t want to exist in a world where i am afraid of you, where you are afraid of me, where i am afraid of what men will do when you are afraid of me. believe it or not, i know something about being a woman. i know what it’s like to live in a body defined by what men can take from it. i lived in terror too, like you. i know what being a survivor is, i know what being a survivor does, i know about the things we become in the dark, what fear turns us into when we are desperate to live. vol de mort means flight from death, doesn’t it, Joanne? your wicked wizard broke his soul into seven separate pieces, drank the blood of the innocent, started wars and drank snake’s milk all in the name of escaping death. fear makes monsters of us all. you wrote so many monsters, so many magical creatures, and yet you still don’t seem to know what a monster is, Joanne. a monster is a part of ourselves that we don’t want to find in the mirror. a part of ourselves we try to cut out and split off and put inside other people so that they can carry it for us: our fear. our shame. these are Dark Arts of the oldest kind. dear Joanne, what spells are stronger than the Dark Arts? what magic did it take to end hatred, stop a war, break an Unforgivable Curse? not an easy riddle, but i bet between the two of us, we could figure it out. you and me, survivors both. you and me, students of enchantment. you and me, and the army of girls and women between us, all of us monsters and witches, the Ones Who Lived.

Read a childrens book you used to love. Do you still love it?

 

 

to the sidekicks

all we really wanted was to be a superhero’s teen sidekick. Robin was the first to jump into the fray. he started fighting crime at Batman’s side at the tender age of eight, seeking to avenge the death of his parents. bizarrely he battled in wingtip shoes and hotpants while living as Dick Grayson, the teenage ward of billionaire Bruce Wayne, fuelling infinite Freudian nightmares across North America for decades to come. Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Aqualad, Superboy, Batgirl, and five more Robins followed in Dick’s footsteps. psychologists debated whether this was menacing homosexual subtext, but to us nerdy queer kids it was sacred text, and it was all that we yearned for. what lonely misfit child doesn’t long to be uplifted by a powerful outsider, granted the gift of power and mentorship, protection and adventure, a parent and a friend, all at the same time? but most of us were not chosen. our superhero mentors never arrived to rescue us, train us, fight by our sides. yet still we were called to do our part on the front lines in the battle for justice. we did peer support, suicide intervention and harm reduction for other teens, we held schoolyard GSA rallies and campaigns that were attended by a handful of outcasts and a semi-closeted teacher. at night we waited by our bedroom windows, on apartment rooftops, in abandoned playgrounds, sending psychic signals into the sky. waiting for them to find us. no one came. we were a generation of sidekicks with no heroes to guide us—where did they go? so many were killed, murdered, lost to the virus. others were disillusioned, broken-hearted, burned out of the fight. some sold out and went corporate. others fought on, but our numbers were legion, and theirs were too few to get to us all. so we fought by ourselves. side-kicking our way toward the shining light of the Hero Headquarters satellite in the stars. so many of us never made it. we were just kids. what did we know of justice? what happens to a teenager whose identity is grown around a battle for something greater? dear Dick Grayson, what would you have been if you never met Bruce Wayne? would it have been better or worse? i still can’t decide. thirty years of the struggle and i’m still that kid, scanning the skyline for someone to swoop down and teach me to fly. and yet another part of me knows, i’m too old for that kid stuff now. i fly on my own just fine.

Play a song for the child in you.

 
 


to the animorphs

Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.”—K.A. Applegate, “Letter to Animorphs Fans”

you couldn’t tell us who you were or where you lived. it was too risky. you had to be careful, really careful. so did i. so did we, all of us queer kids growing up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. like you, we were children at war with an enemy that invaded our loved ones from within. like you, we kept secrets to protect ourselves, never knowing what might happen if the truth should fall into the hands of enemies who might be anyone—anywhere—anytime. a child who keeps secrets to survive becomes a soldier in their soul. we acquired new shapes to disguise our true forms, shifted flesh and moulded bone to afford ourselves power and protection: some of us chose the dull camouflage of forest insects, others the fangs and claws of beasts too terrifying to get close to. some of us grew wings that could carry us up and away, riding the thermals to escape the pain of our bodies down below. but of course, there was danger in that. what happens when you spend too long in a morph? well, you get stuck there, as Tobias discovered all those years ago. you get trapped in one shape and run the risk of forgetting what you used to be. every queer child chooses their own way to fight the war to survive. like Jake, some of us became leaders. like Rachel, some of us became fighters. like Marco, strategists. like Cassie, pacifists. like Ax, orphans. and like you, we won our war, or so they tell us now. hooray for gay marriage! faggots and trannies can get jobs and have babies and pay taxes just like everybody else. but who did we leave behind? what did we lose on the way here? one war just leads right to the next. dear animorphs, i loved you because you never pretended that winning a battle doesn’t come with a price. and still you believed in the beauty and mystery hidden deep within the bodies of all that changes and all that lives. i too still believe. that transformation is possible. that what we do here matters. that in the midst of all this monstrosity and sacrifice and terror and loss, there is still something worth fighting for.

Learn some facts about one animal that inspires you. Spend a few minutes pretending to be that animal.




to the outlaws

We become outlaws one at a time. It is a lonely and terrifying experience. What we do offends explicit or implicit rules of belonging that regulate the ordinary world. Who we are contradicts the roles […] Under the laws of the Roman Empire, an outlaw lost rights as a citizen and became a homo sacer” (sacred man). Theirs was a consecrated life, intended for special purpose, set apart and forbidden.”—Caffyn Jesse, “Ethics for Outlaws”

once there was a village called Love. its denizens named it after an ancient goddess whose body was torn apart by the God of the Sun, who feared that her power and beauty would be his undoing. and that village once contained a library full of poetry and a temple full of songs, but those were long since burned down by the citizens of Love, who had come to bitter disagreement about the best way to honour Love’s memory. so they destroyed the library of Love and the temple of Love, they wrote terrible laws and made terrible wars, they policed and punished one another, all in Love’s name.

when we left the village, we left one at a time. the only way to leave Love was alone. when you broke Love’s laws, you lost all you had: your belongings, your belonging, your family, your name. the people of Love threw stones at us; they wrote their secrets and their shame on the stones and drew our blood with them so they could be free of the weight they kept in their souls. it did not work. our blood fell like rain, but their souls remained heavy. they made monsters of our bodies, but they did not become beautiful. there was always a new monster to drive out of Love.

so we fled to the woods, we monsters, law-breakers, dwellers in darkness, fearsome freaks and sacred homos. beyond the circle of village fires, we discovered the magic of the trees. we relearned the taste of the sacred herbs. we shed our scars and discovered new skins. in the outlaw space, we made new homes, places full of poetry and song. and yes, we hurt one another too, because the woods made us no less dangerous. we were still monsters, there. but we were no longer alone.

the village was discontent. the denizens of Love could not stop its children from breaking its laws. the children left to find what was missing, and so in their anger and fear, the denizens of Love blamed us. they took to the woods with torches and dogs, with weapons and cages. they cut down the trees and set fire to our homes, they caught us and killed us in Love’s name. but the woods were deep and the shadows were long, and children kept breaking the laws and leaving the village, and so the story of the outlaws lives on.

you come to us now with scars on your skin. your blood is freshly spilled and your name so recently taken. dear outlaw, the time has come to choose your journey. dear monster, it’s time to choose your new shape. dear fearsome freak, dear sacred homo, dear magic-maker and law-breaker, what will you choose? to return to the village or dwell in the woods? there is no safety in the circle of village fires, but i can promise you no safety here either, in the shadows of the trees. i can promise you wonder. i can promise you freedom. i can promise you kinship, and heartbreak, and the ancient rituals of grief and repair. the village is poisoning itself from the inside out. the woods are being cut down around us. and yet i still believe in the ancient one, in the poems and the songs, in the beauty of monsters and the power of story, in the ghosts between us, in the outlaw realm, in the magic that still lives in me and my kindred—and in you, my love, in you.

Decide whats more important to you: safety or freedom. Discuss with a friend.